Opposition fractures, pro-government consolidates

At stake for the 54 contesting Venezuelan political parties were seats for 285 National Assembly deputies, 24 state governors, and 260 regional legislators.

The pro-government coalition won all but one of the governorships, taking three of the four states previously held by the opposition. The loss of the state of Barinas was particularly symbolic, for this was the birthplace of former President Hugo Chávez, and especially so, because the winner was Adán Chávez, the late president’s older brother.

Likewise, the Chavista alliance swept the National Assembly, securing 253 out of 285 seats. Notable exceptions were the election of opposition leaders Henrique Capriles and Henri Falcón, both of whom are former presidential candidates.

The New York Times reported the same outcomes but spun it as the “results [rather than the vote]…stripped the opposition of some of the last few positions it held,” inferring fraud.

However, this election outcome was not unexpected, as the opposition was not only divided but also had a significant portion opting to boycott the vote. The pro-government forces enjoyed a unified effort, an efficient electoral machine, and grassroots support, especially from the communal movement.

“After 32 elections, amidst blockades, criminal sanctions, fascism and violence,” Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro affirmed, “today we showed that the Bolivarian Revolution is stronger than ever.”

Opposition self-implodes

The headline from Le Monde spun the voting thus: “Venezuela holds divisive new elections.” Contrary to what the headline suggests, the divisiveness was not the government’s doing, but due to the opposition’s perennial internecine warfare.

While the pro-government Great Patriotic Pole alliance around the ruling Socialist Party (PSUV) “works in unison,” according to opposition leader Henrique Capriles, the electoral opposition is divided into three warring camps. They, in turn, were surrounded by a circular firing squad of the far-right abstentionists, calling for a vote boycott.

The abstentionists were assembled around Maria Corina Machado. She had been pardoned for her involvement in the short-lived 2002 US-backed coup but was subsequently disqualified from running for office for constitutional offenses. Following Washington’s lead, which has not recognized a Venezuelan presidential election as legitimate since 2012, the far-right opposition rejected electoral means for achieving regime change and has even pleaded in effect for US military intervention.

Machado’s faction, which claimed that Edmund González Urrutia won the 2024 presidential election, does not recognize their country’s constitutional authority. Consequently, when summoned by the Venezuelan Supreme Court, they refused to present evidence of their victory, thereby removing any legal basis for their claimed victory to be accepted. Machado maintained that voting only “legitimizes” the government, bitterly calling those participating in the democratic process “scorpions.”

Machado spent the election in self-imposed hiding. She further dug herself into a hole, after urging even harsher punishing US sanctions on her own people, by appearing to support Trump’s sending of Venezuelan migrants to the CECOT torture prison in El Salvador.

El Pais sympathized with her as “driven by the strength of the pain of being a mother who has been separated from her three children.” The WaPo described the middle-aged divorcé from one of the wealthiest families in Venezuela as a “courageous leader” whose “three children are exiled abroad.” In fact, her adult children live comfortably in the US and Colombia.

To this manufactured sympathy for the privileged, Venezuelan-Canadian sociologist Maria Paez Victor asks, “Where are the defenders of the human rights of Venezuelans?” She excoriates the collective West for its selective concern for human rights, emphasizing the neglect of Venezuelans’ rights amid external pressures and US sanctions.

The disputed Essequibo

The headline for The New York Times’s report spun the elections with: “Venezuela is holding an election for another country’s land.” This refers to the elections for governor and legislators in Essequibo (Guayana Esequiba in Spanish), which is, in fact, a disputed land.

For nearly two centuries, Venezuelans have considered that region part of their country, having wrested it from Spanish colonialists in 1835. In the questionable Paris Arbitral Award, with the US representing Venezuela, the Essequibo was handed over to the UK in 1899 (then colonial British Guiana and now the independent nation of Guyana). Ever since, it has been contested territory.

In 1962, Venezuela formally revived its claim at the UN, asserting that the 1899 award was null and void. Not surprisingly, the Times sides with Guyana, or more precisely with what they report as “Exxon Mobil’s multibillion-dollar investments” plus “military ties with the US.”

This first-time vote for political representation in the Essequibo is seen by Venezuelans across their political spectrum as an important step to assert their claim. It follows a referendum in 2023, which affirmed popular support for the Essequibo as part of their national territory. The actual voting was held in the neighboring Bolivar state.

On cue, the western-aligned press criticized the vote on the Essequibo as a “cynical ploy” by the Maduro administration to divert attention from other pressing problems. Meanwhile, they obscure the increasing US military penetration in neighboring Guyana and in the wider region.

Yet even the NYT had to admit: “Claims to the Essequibo region are deeply ingrained among many Venezuelans… [and even] María Corina Machado, the most prominent opposition leader, visited the area by canoe in 2013 to advance Venezuela’s claim.” Venezuelan journalist Jésus Rodríguez Espinoza (pers. comm.) described the vote as “an exercise in national sovereignty.”

Illegal sanctions – the elephant in the room

A WaPo opinion piece claims, “that the actual root cause of poverty has been a lack of democracy and freedom,” as if the US and its allies have not imposed sanctions deliberately designed to cripple the Venezuelan economy. These “unilateral coercive measures,” condemned by the UN, are illegal under international law because they constitute collective punishment.

But the fact that Venezuelans had to vote while being subjected to illegal coercion is completely ignored by the corporate press. That is, the existence of sanctions is recognized, but instead of exposing their illegal and coercive essence, the press normalizes them. The story untold by the press is the courage of the Venezuelan people who continue to support their government under such adverse conditions.

Disparaging the election

Washington and its aligned press cannot question the popular sweep for the Socialist Party’s alliance in Venezuela, because it is so obvious. Nonetheless, they disparage the mandate. The chorus of criticism alleges the fraudulent nature of previous elections, although it is a geopolitical reality that Washington considers any popular vote against its designated candidates illegitimate.

For this particular election, these State Department stenographers focused on the supposedly low turnout. In fact, the turnout was typical for a non-presidential election contest and fell within the same percentage range as US midterm elections.

Moreover, the pro-government slate actually garnered more votes than it had in the previous regional elections. The Chavista core of older, working class women remains solid.

When Elvis Amoroso, president of Venezuela’s authority (CNE), qualified the turnout percentages to apply to “active voters,” he meant those in-country. Due to the large number of recent out-migrations, a significant number are registered but cannot vote because they are abroad.

What was notably low was the voting for the highly divided opposition, with major factions calling for a boycott. Further, the opposition had been discredited by revelations that some had received and misused hundreds of millions of dollars from USAID. More than ever, the inept opposition has exposed itself in a negative light to the broad electorate. 

The overwhelming sentiment on the street in Venezuela is for an end to partisan conflict and for continuing the slow economic recovery. Challenges ahead include inflationary winds, a rising unofficial dollar exchange rate, and, above all, the animus of the Trump administration, which is currently in internal debate over whether to try to deal the Bolivarian Revolution a quick or a slow death. Either way, destabilization efforts continue.

To which Socialist Party leader and Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello said: “No one can stop our people. Not sanctions, nor blockades, nor persecution – because when a people decide to be free, no one can stop them.”

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

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.

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

COMMENTARY: By Eugene Doyle

30 April 1975. Saigon Fell, Vietnam Rose. The story of Vietnam after the US fled the country is not a fairy tale, it is not a one-dimensional parable of resurrection, of liberation from oppression, of joy for all — but there is a great deal to celebrate.

After over a century of brutal colonial oppression by the French, the Japanese, and the Americans and their various minions, the people of Vietnam won victory in one of the great liberation struggles of history.

It became a source of inspiration and of hope for millions of people oppressed by imperial powers in Central & South America, Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Eastern Europe.

• READ MORE: Part 1: The fall of Saigon 1975: Fifty years of repeating what was forgotten
• The fall of Saigon 1975: Part 2: The Quiet mutiny and the US army falls apart

Civil war – a war among several
The civil war in Vietnam, coterminous with the war against the Western powers, pitted communists and anti-communists in a long and pitiless struggle.

Within that were various strands — North versus South, southern communists and nationalists against pro-Western forces, and so on. As various political economists have pointed out, all wars are in some way class wars too — pitting the elites against ordinary people.

As has happened repeatedly throughout history, once one or more great power becomes involved in a civil war it is subsumed within that colonial war. The South’s President Ngô Đình Diệm, for example, was assassinated on orders of the Americans.

By 1969, US aid accounted for 80 percent of South Vietnam’s government budget; they effectively owned the South and literally called the shots.

US punishes its victims
This month, 50 years after the Vietnamese achieved independence from their colonial overlords, US President Donald Trump declared April 2 “Liberation Day” and imposed some of the heaviest tariffs on Vietnam because they didn’t buy enough US goods!

As economist Joseph Stiglitz pointed out, they don’t yet have enough aggregate demand for the kind of goods the US produces. That might have something to do with the decades it has taken to rebuild their lives and economy from the Armageddon inflicted on them by the US, Australia, New Zealand and other unindicted war criminals.

Straight after they fled, the US declared themselves the victims of the Vietnamese and imposed punitive sanctions on liberated Vietnam for decades — punishing their victims.

Under Gerald Ford (1974–1977), Jimmy Carter (1977–1981), Ronald Reagan (1981–1989), George H.W. Bush (1989–1993) right up to Bill Clinton (1993–2001), the US enforced the Trading with the Enemy Act (TWEA) of 1917.

The US froze the assets of Vietnam at the very time it was trying to recover from the wholesale devastation of the country.

Tens of millions of much-needed dollars were captured in US banks, enforced by the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). The US also took advantage of its muscle to veto IMF and World Bank loans to Vietnam.

Countries like Australia and New Zealand, to their eternal shame, took part in both the war, the war crimes, and imposing sanctions and other punitive measures subsequently.

The ‘Boat People’ refugee crisis
While millions celebrated the victory in 1975, millions of others were fearful. The period of national unification and economic recovery was painful, typically repressive — when one militarised regime replaces another.

This triggered flight: firstly among urban elites — military officers, government workers, and professionals who were most closely-linked to the US-run regime.

You can blame the Commies for the ensuing refugee crisis but by strangling the Vietnamese economy, refusing to return Vietnamese assets held in the US, imposing an effective blockade on the economy via sanctions, the US deepened the crisis, which saw over two million flee the country between 1975 and the 1980s.

More than 250,000 desperate people died at sea.

Đổi Mới: the move to a socialist-market economy
In 1986, to energise the economy, the government moved away from a command economy and launched the đổi mới reforms which created a hybrid socialist-market economy.

They had taken a leaf out of the Chinese playbook, which under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping (1978 –1989), had moved towards a market economy through its “Reform and Opening Up” policies.  Vietnam saw the “economic miracle” of its near neighbour and its leaders sought something similar.

Vietnam’s economy boomed and GDP grew from $18.1 billion in 1984 to $469 billion by 2024, with a per capita GDP at purchasing power parity (PPP) of $15,470 (up from about $300 per capita in the 1970s).

After a sluggish start, literacy rates soared to 96.1 percent by 2023, and life expectancy reached 73.7 years, only a few short of the USA.  GDP growth is around 7 percent, according to the OECD.

An unequal society
Persistent inequality suggests the socialist vision has partially faded. A rural-urban divide and a rich-poor divide underlines ongoing injustices around quality of life and access to services but Vietnam’s Gini coefficient — a measure of income inequality — puts it only slightly more “unequal” as a society than New Zealand or Germany.

Corruption is also an issue in the country.

Press controls and political repression
As in China, political power resides with the Party. Freedom of expression — highlighted by press repression — is severely limited in Vietnam and nothing to celebrate.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) rates Vietnam as 174th out of 180 countries for press freedom and regularly excoriates its strongmen as press “predators”.  In its country profile, RSF says of Vietnam: “Independent reporters and bloggers are often jailed, making Vietnam the world’s third largest jailer of journalists”.

Vietnam is forging its own destiny
What is well worth celebrating, however, is that Vietnam successfully got the imperial powers off its back and out of its country. It is well-placed to play an increasingly prosperous and positive role in the emerging multipolar world.

It is part of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), and the ASEAN network, and borders China, giving Vietnam the opportunity to weather any storms coming from the continent of America.

Vietnam today is united and free and millions of ordinary people have achieved security, health, education and prosperity vastly better than their parents and grandparents’ generations were able to.

In the end the honour and glory go to the Vietnamese people.

I’ll give the last word to Ho Chi Minh, the great leader of the Vietnamese people who reached out to the United States, and sought alliance not conflict. He was rebuffed by the super-power which had a different agenda.

On September 2, 1945, Ho Chi Minh proclaimed the independent Democratic Republic of Vietnam in Hanoi’s Ba Dinh square:

“‘All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among them are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.’

“This immortal statement was made in the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America in 1776. In a broader sense, this means: All the peoples on the earth are equal from birth, all the peoples have a right to live, to be happy and free.

“… A people who have courageously opposed French domination for more than eight years, a people who have fought side by side with the Allies against the Fascists during these last years, such a people must be free and independent.

“For these reasons, we, members of the Provisional Government of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, solemnly declare to the world that Vietnam has the right to be a free and independent country — and in fact is so already. The entire Vietnamese people are determined to mobilise all their physical and mental strength, to sacrifice their lives and property in order to safeguard their independence and liberty.”

And, my god, they did.

To conclude, a short poem attributed to Ho Chi Minh:

“After the rain, good weather.

“In the wink of an eye,

the universe throws off its muddy clothes.”

Eugene Doyle is a community organiser and activist in Wellington, New Zealand. He received an Absolutely Positively Wellingtonian award in 2023 for community service. His first demonstration was at the age of 12 against the Vietnam War. This article was first published at his public policy website Solidarity and is republished here with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

On March 12, 1934, employees of the Civil Works Administration (CWA), a New Deal project designed for job creation to alleviate symptoms of the Great Depression, initiated a strike after facing a reduction in wages. Projects involving the CWA around Utica were put to a screeching halt when a reported 2,000 workers out of 2,500 organized to protest their wages being cut from fifty cents an hour to forty cents, in addition to a reduction of their weekly hours from thirty hours a week to twenty-four. The following day, between 600 and 700 workers representing the strike embarked on a march through the city headed for the office the city’s CWA director’s office. The goal of this march was simply to speak with the program’s director, one Howard Graburn, and demand “a square deal.” Seven workers, part of a “grievance committee,” met with Graburn. As stated at this meeting:

They told him they could not live on $9.60 a week, the amount to be provided on the basis of an order last week from Washington. Until that order came, the men hard earned $15 a week.

The CWA strike shares similarities with several other strikes before, during, and after it in that the police immediately labeled the workers as agitators and demonized their fight as one based on violent tactics. Then-Police Chief Timothy D. McCarthy even believed the idea that the workers were going to the director’s office to “tear the building down.” McCarthy even went as far as sending an emergency squad to the CWA office where one Captain Denis Jankiewicz urged the office to dismiss clerical staff and put the building under lockdown. Jankiewicz’s suggestion was rejected by Chester Smith, the associate director of the Utica office. Of course, this wasn’t the case. The march went off without a single reported incident of violence or use of inflammatory, agitative rhetoric. Patrick McCabe, one of the leaders of this strike, asserted that there would be no violence on the part of him or his fellow workers.

McCabe was integral in providing a voice for his disgruntled comrades. As one of the leaders he signed highly important telegrams sent out to the heads of the CWA in both Washington and New York State. According to one paper, the telegrams go as follows:

The several hundred employees of the CWA here in Utica have quietly left their work and have protested the cut in wages and hours because the same is not keeping up with the spirit of this work as directed by our noble president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

We ask that we be given thirty hours a week and fifty cents an hour which was paid at the beginning of this work.

Accusations of violence from the police here parallel the experiences of striking workers during the Little Falls Textile Strike of 1912-1913. Despite assertions from figures in the strike such as George R. Lunn, Helen Schloss, and several others for the strikers to utilize non-violent tactics in their fight, the police continuously painted the strikers and their supporters in the Socialist Party of America (SPA) and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) as agitators who would only bring violence to Little Falls. The strikers faced constant accusations of violence and disruptiveness, but several accounts show that any violence was instigated by the police and the privately hired deputies brought in by the mill owners.

CWA workers in Utica held further grievances with the fact that the white-collar sector of the CWA offices were spared from the cuts that the blue-collar sector faced. A textbook example of classism, leaders of the Utica protests presented a demand for the publication of the names and salaries of the clerical staff who for some reason weren’t thrown into the same perils that they were.

Part of what makes the CWA strikers’ plight so intriguing is that it held valley-wide and national implications. According to one paper, when the strikers presented their issues to Graburn, the director announced that: “…all the strikers might return to work in the morning with the exception of 200 who had been working on protecting walls in a creek project.”

Though they reportedly were spared from these cuts branches of the CWA in the nearby towns of New York Mills, Whitesboro, and Yorkville told McCabe that there was serious consideration to initiate a “sympathy strike” in solidarity with their fellow workingmen. This proposed sympathy strike wouldn’t end up materializing, but the threat of a mass uprising of workers in the Mohawk Valley was present even if only for a very brief period. In the same vein, workers in numerous other cities throughout the country went on strike due to these cuts coming from the federal level. One article highlights strikes in Boston, Massachusetts, in addition to both Bristol and Allenton, Pennsylvania with various motivations, ranging from demanding a return to their previous wages to the reinstating of laid off workers.

Just two days after flooding the streets of Utica, the CWA workers’ demands were officially met on Wednesday the 14th, at least partially. One article from The Daily Sentinel in Rome states that the Utica workers would be regaining both their fifty cents an hour and their thirty-hour workweek, however this is only mentioned in part of the article’s title. Two pieces from The Glens Falls Times point only to the return to the fifty cents. One piece from the paper has no mention of a return to thirty hours, and one published on March 15 states that although the pay would return to normal, the hours would not. Despite the apparent compromise basically thrusted upon the workers, McCabe was met with a roaring applause when he announced to his comrades that they would be able to return to work on Thursday with their original wages.

The Civil Works Administration program would be retired at the end of March, meaning that in retrospect the fight of those in Utica only seemed to delay the inevitable. That being said though, the strike is still of great significance in that it exemplifies the power of organized labor in defending the interests of the working class, in addition to shedding light on the radical history of the Mohawk Valley. May we be inspired by history and use this history of struggle to help us understand how to approach the problems of our day.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by J.N. Cheney.

“Vietnam’s harsh sentencing of blogger Duong Van Thai is grotesque and an outrage, particularly amid allegations he was kidnapped in Thailand and forcibly sent back to Vietnam for wrongful prosecution,” said Shawn Crispin, CPJ’s senior Southeast Asia representative. “The real criminal in this instance is the Vietnamese state. Thai should be released immediately and allowed to leave Vietnam.” 

Thai was convicted October 30 in a one-day, closed-door trial at the Hanoi People’s Court, of “making, storing, disseminating or propagating information, documents, and items aimed at opposing the Socialist Republic of Vietnam” under Article 117 of Vietnam’s penal code, according to multiple reports.

In 2019, Thai fled to Thailand, fearing persecution for his journalism, and was given refugee status by the United Nations refugee agency’s office in Bangkok. He was interviewing for third-country resettlement at the time of his apparent abduction and deportation to Vietnam, according to multiple reports.

Thai posts political commentary, critical of government policies and leaders, to his around 119,000 followers on his Tin Tuc 24H YouTube channel, which has been disabled. He previously ran the Servant’s Tent online news platform, which reported critically on the ruling Communist Party and its top members, and is a member of the banned Independent Journalists Association of Vietnam.

CPJ’s email to Vietnam’s Ministry of Public Security about Thai’s conviction did not immediately receive a response. Vietnam was the world’s fifth-worst jailer of journalists, with at least 19 reporters behind bars on December 1, 2023, at the time of CPJ’s latest prison census. 

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams is continuing to resist calls to resign after being indicted on federal corruption charges. In recent weeks, at least seven senior city officials have resigned, leaving the city government in a state of crisis. This comes a year before New Yorkers will vote to pick the city’s next mayor. Adams has vowed to run for reelection, but opponents, including fellow Democrats, are lining up to run against him. We are joined now by New York Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani, who has just announced he will join the race. Mamdani is a Ugandan-born Democratic Socialist who was elected to the New York State Assembly four years ago. He is running on a platform centered on the needs of working-class New Yorkers and easing the cost-of-living crisis. He shares a number of his policy proposals and also discusses his pro-Palestine advocacy in the State Assembly, where earlier this year he introduced the Not on Our Dime Act, which would prevent New York charities from providing financial support for Israeli settlement activity.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Orientation

Leninist and anarchist shortcomings in relation to rhetoric

A little over three years ago I wrote an article about how bad Mordor Leninists and anarchists are about knowing about, let alone using rhetorical rhetoric. The article is titled Socialist Rhetorical and Dialectical Communication: Overcoming Brainwashing, Propaganda and Entertainment

These areas of bumbling included:

• Initiation engagement
• Holding attention
• Time and timing
• Setting the right atmosphere
• The use of the five canons of rhetoric
• Importance of charisma
• Adjusting to neutral and hostile audiences
• Defining key terms
• Use of Aristotle’s rhetorical triangle
• Appealing to short-term self-interest in the audience
• Making predictions
• Having transition plans
• Distinguishing competitive as opposed to cooperative argumentation

Purpose of this article

The aim of this article is six-fold:

• First, to challenge the negative associations about what rhetoric is so that its techniques can freely be used by all socialists. To do this I contrast “Light” with “Dark” rhetoric across thirteen categories.
• Second, to point out that light rhetoric has been undermined by the use of electronic media beginning in the second half of the 19th century.  I will be referring to Kathleen Jameson’s great book Eloquence in the Electronic Age as I pointed out from a previous article.
• Third, I will point out that at least since the Middle Ages the ruling circles of Europe (whether it be Church, State or capitalists) have used propaganda to influence people. This propaganda has used dark rhetoric for its purposes.
• Fourth, I emphasize the value of light rhetoric further by contrasting it to propaganda.
• Lastly, I show how white rhetoric can be criticized using the “ideological” school of criticism developed by Marxists like Terry Eagleton any Raymond Williams.

Defining rhetoric

Let me begin with a controversial definition of rhetoric. Rhetoric is the systematic and overt study of the process of how speakers influence public to either convince or persuade an audience on a controversial issue. This is done through the use of Aristotle’s rhetorical triangle which consists of logos (facts, reasons), ethos (credible sources) and pathos (use of emotions and imagination). Typically, it is practiced in law courts, political debates (city council meetings, unions, workers co-ops), or scientific conferences.

Conditions of rhetoric

First, the issue in contention must be controversial. If the issue is trite, there won’t be any reason for using rhetoric because the answer is more or less decided. On the other hand, if the issue is outlandish not enough of the audience will be interested in being engaged or curious enough about the outcome. Second, the issues must have an urgency. Both the speaker and the audience are interdependent and no one can walk away. Parties also must have a great deal of commonality so the issue can be resolved, even though they might not admit the commonality at first. The third condition of rhetoric is that risks are accepted. The parties in a rhetorical situation know they can be publicly proven wrong and they may have to alter their claim. The fourth characteristic of rhetoric is that the best solution we come up with is probable.Unlike in formal logic, no certainty is possible. The fifth and last condition of rhetoric is that the power bases used cannot be force, economics, politics or sexual seduction. Only competency, legitimacy or dialectic may be used.

Why is my definition of rhetoric controversial?

Where does rhetoric take place? Usually, rhetoric is dated back to classical Greek civilization. But George Kennedy has shown that cross-culturally rhetoric is much older. I know from my study of social evolution that rhetoric was practiced all the way back to hunting and gathering societies. Recently some feminists have tried to argue that conversations in the interpersonal world or family life should be included. At the other extreme, thanks to mass communication, some rhetoricians have attempted to do rhetorical analysis based on radio, film and television. For purposes of this article, I am avoiding both the micro and macro attempts to apply rhetoric. The reason is because the places that I hope it is used is in public situations. These include city council meetings, union discussions or in workers co-op’s general assemblies

As we know, most of human communication is analogical, not digital and many analogical messages occur below the level of consciousness. When a person convinces or persuades someone unconsciously through body language or utterances not intended, does that count as rhetoric? My definition says it should not. Unconscious body language would fit in the field of influence. Influence is a larger category than rhetoric or persuasion. Rhetoric is a specific type of influence.

What is the range of mediums that should be permissible? I am drawing the line at oral and written. To be sure, the use of the alphabet and the printing press certainly changed oral rhetoric in certain ways, but it is with the medium of mass communication that propaganda overwhelms too many of the original features of rhetoric to be included. It is at this point in history that the field of propaganda begins to merge with or marginalize rhetoric.

Up until now in all categories I have tried to define rhetoric narrowly as opposed to broadly. But in this last case I would like to define rhetoric more broadly. In all pre-state societies (hunter-gatherers, simple complex horticulture societies and herding societies) rhetoric was used to come to decisions cooperatively.With the rise of agricultural states and social classes cooperative rhetoric was marginalized. At this stage the ruling elites made decisions that were no longer subject to communal debate. The invention of propaganda arose out of the need of the ruling classes to justify why so many people should accept being ruled by so few. But in the time of classical Greece and Rome there were still rulers who propagandized their population. However, rhetoric returned in the form of competitive debates in law courts and in democratic councils. Unfortunately, most of the history of rhetoric has only been presented in the form of competitive debates. It is mostly thanks to feminists that the ancient tradition of cooperative argumentation has returned. So I will argue that rhetoric should be used for both competitive and cooperative goals.

Light Vs Dark Rhetoric

Arousing the audience

“Step right up the Big Top, where seeing is believing. Right over here to the freak show”. This is an example of dark rhetoric in operation. These attention grabbers of dark rhetoric are in the business of creating awe, making thunderstruck or frightening the audience by horror. There is no suspense but plenty of special effects. Whatever their claim, it is hidden and the audience is manipulated to do things without the speaker’s intentions ever being consciously stated

In light rhetoric, attention is drawn in gradually through questions that are within the range of the audience’s curiosity. A light rhetorical speaker has made a study of his audience’s demographics before the speech itself. In dark rhetoric, audiences are considered as all the same – stupid. In light rhetoric audiences are drawn in and suspense is created so the audience does not quite know what the speaker will conclude. The claim is always made explicit to the audience, but the speaker will determine whether it is best to make the claim in the beginning, middle or end of the argument

Quality of reasoning

Dark rhetoricians do not think much of reason or providing evidence. They are notorious for committing reasoning fallacies such as ad hominin (attacking the person), guilt by association, confusing wholes with parts either-or thinking and many faulty appeals to emotions. In white rhetoric speakers are very aware of human fallacies all the way back to Aristotle and do their best to make their arguments be fallacy-free. However, they may still make mistakes but it is not with the intention of tricking the audience

Use of imagination vs fantasy

In light rhetoric, the imagination is used to create reasonable alternative futures that are based on science. The method can be though stories, analogies or vivid imagery. In dark rhetoric, fantasies that are impossible in real life are concocted. Their belief about their audience is that what freedom entails is making impossible things possible. It is an appeal to the unnatural.

Speaker ethos: charisma vs character

In dark rhetoric a speaker with charisma is essential. Dark rhetoric needs a charmer who has the spirit to inspire people. The speaker appeals to what I call the Darwinian unconscious. In other words, speakers who are tall, have a shape that indicates they have good genes (see Evolutionary Psychology by David Buss), facial symmetry, hair sheen, a sense of theatrics and are articulate and funny. Dark rhetoricians want the audience to be swept away. In light rhetoric, the speaker has to have character. This means the speaker has legitimate authority, has a good reputation, is trustworthy and competent. S/he has to exude good will and be articulate. Humor always helps, but the speaker wants the audience to be grounded, not swept away.

The relationship between the speaker and the message

In dark rhetoric, speakers will be engaged in character assassination. The speaker is enmeshed with the message. A good speaker will be claimed to have a good message and a bad speaker a bad message. In light rhetoric, the speaker and the message will be differentiated. It will be acknowledged that a bad speaker might have a good message and a good speaker might have a weak message.

Competition vs cooperation

In many of the textbooks on argumentation they show people in competitive debates. One book even showed arguers on the verge of a fist fights. But as I pointed about above, rhetoric can be used cooperatively among union members deciding whether or not to strike or participate in a city council meeting while attempting to persuade the city council to oppose a national war. Cooperative argumentation can also be used in a worker’s co-op on deciding what the ratio in salary should be between managers and workers.

Short-term vs long-term self-interest

Dark rhetoric practitioners use demagoguery. They appeal to the worst in people. They are not above spreading gossip, name dropping and meanness at the expense of the weak. They play to people’s pettiness, prejudices, and myopia. They appeal to people wanting to keep up with the Joneses, as well wishing to be superior to others. They appeal to the audience’s infantile wishes like losing weight while eating whatever they want. Dark rhetoric speakers appeal to the audience’s crude superstitions as well as the desire to take the path of least resistance. Their appeal is to short-term self-interest – pleasure, comfort or acquiring wealth without working for it. On the other hand, in the glow of light rhetoric, speakers appeal to depthful emotions, loving the stranger (agape). Emotional appeals include kindness, generosity, foresight, altruism, heroism and hope. They speak of what is good for humanity in the long-run even when it is less than popular.

Range of audience

Dark rhetors do not go where the audiences are either neutral or hostile because their cheap tricks will not work there. Trump would not do well against an audience who is neutral or hostile because he is not trained as a politician and knows nothing about how to move an audience who is not already a member of the club. Even as smooth a person as Obama, fully trained in rhetoric as a Harvard lawyer, would not do well against an angry working class crowd because his rhetorical tricks such as telling individual stories of Horatio Alger won’t fly. A practitioner of light rhetoric relishes dealing with a hostile audience and knows what it takes to change a hostile audience. Their success is not to move an audience from a hostile to a sympathetic audience, for that is too much to expect. However, they will modestly hope to influence a cynical audience to became skeptical. That is realistic.

How is the audience treated?

Dark rhetoricians treat their audiences as dupes. They will water down a speech to appeal to the lowest common denominator. They will flatter the audience. In light rhetoric, audiences are treated as active participants. The speaker creates a dialectic with the audience giving them some of what they want but also giving them more than they bargained for. In light rhetoric, the very way the audience responds changes the speaker and makes the speaker improvise what they had originally prepared.

Truth as a means to an end or an end in itself?

The standard of truth as an end in itself, regardless of time, place and circumstance is an overly idealist aspiration of Plato. Both Aristotle and the Sophists agreed that striving for the truth was admirable but most of the time it has to be parceled out because audiences are often not mature enough for the whole truth. For the Sophists, what matters in an argument is being effective. Winning them over to taking an action matters more than telling them the truth while getting no cooperation. For the Sophists truth was a means to an end, but most of the time the truth was also effective. Dark rhetoric is much more extreme than anything the Sophists did. Dark rhetoric does not care for the truth. They peddle lies, but the lies may work because there are some lies that people want to hear.

What is the relationship between form and content?

One of the stereotypical criticisms of rhetoric is that it is all fluff, all smoke and mirrors, all bombast. In other words, form without content. The opposite extreme of this is what Plato aspires to. If the content of a subject is true, the form is irrelevant. Light rhetoricians say form and content are dialectically related. When something is true, it should produce good form and good form is grounded in the truth. For example, evolutionary Darwinists have pointed out that what the human species finds beautiful is connected to outdoor scenes where there is water and landscapes of prospect (being able to see while not being seen). This also serves to increase the chances of survival.

What are the most important parts of a speech?

As many of you know, in classical rhetoric there are five cannons of rhetoric: invention, arrangement, style, delivery and memory. In dark rhetoric, all that matters in moving an audience is arrangement of the parts of the argument and style which consists of eloquence, body language and voice tone. In dark rhetoric, the invention part of the argument is irrelevant.  If you have style you can sell anything. In light rhetoric the invention of the argument and the arrangement of the argument is most important. As Aristotle pointed out the invention of a good argument has logos (facts, statistics, reasons) ethos (creditable sources) and pathos (emotion and imagination). Light rhetoricians do care how these reasons are arranged depending on the audience. The other parts of the canon matter, but not as much.

What is the relationship between the reasoning process and taking action or behaving?

In dark rhetoric, rhetors don’t care about changing minds (convincing audiences) because it is too difficult and unnecessary. Dark rhetoric is interested in getting people to do things (persuasion) – buy a product or vote. They don’t care if this happens consciously or unconsciously. In dark rhetoric rhetors think the audiences must be entertained to get them to do anything. In light rhetoric, the speaker is committed to engaging and changing the mind. The rhetor wants to persuade his audience but only after the mind is changed. Entertaining may be a byproduct but is not essential. In my teaching I was often complimented, not just being convincing but being entertaining. I never had this as a goal but it was gravy.

Sophists are our guide for white rhetoric, not Plato

Going back to the Greeks, Plato was mostly the enemy of rhetoric and thought for the most part the only kind of rhetoric was dark. Aristotle, as usual, occupied a middle position. On one hand he was a very serious formal logician but on the other hand he appreciated rhetoric and even categorized the most common mistakes using rhetoric. Contrary to Plato the rhetoric of the Sophists was middle tone or sometimes even white rhetoric. Plato, with his insistence on Truth regardless of time, place and circumstance gave rhetoric a bad name while  throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Please see my table for a summary of light and dark rhetoric.

Table 1 Light vs Dark Rhetoric

The Decline of Rhetoric in the Electronic Age

At the end of my article, Fame vs Celebrity: Movies, Music Sports and Politics, I discussed the impact electronic media has on the formation of celebrities as it applied to politics. It was in this age that we can see the decline of rhetoric as applied to politics.

Oration in Yankeedom before the electronic age

In politics before the electronic age, Yankee politicians boarded trains and gave speeches in the hot sun for 90 minutes to two hours. The public walked for miles to hear these speeches. These orators wrote their own speeches and went through all five of the canons of rhetoric. They defined their terms and they were loaded with evidence which they arranged carefully in an order that might be conductive to the audience. They laid out all possible positions in an argument to the audience the way a lawyer builds a case before his speech.  The speaker was well-rounded and had command of the great speeches of the past, using poetry at times to make his point. His entire speech was committed to memory. These orators did not have to account to the public for problems in their personal lives. After all, this was politics. Their use of pathos was episodic and used to strike fear at times. They were well trained to create images from words. Lastly, for these politicians their party and their program came first. There was no cult of personality.

Oration in Yankeedom during the electronic age of television

For the most part, the use of electronic media, especially television, had a debilitating impact on political rhetoric. The number of outdoor speeches declined as the politician was followed by television cameras inside the studios. The public now had to make much less effort to hear a speech as they could now watch it on television. For various reasons, over the years the attention span of the public got shorter and shorter in part because there was a lot to see on television and also because the pace of life quickened. The owners of television networks were not willing to give a presidential speech 90-minutes to two hours of air time. The speeches of candidates got shorter, often less than thirty minutes.  Gone were the parts of the argument such as defining key terms and presenting 3-5 views on a subject. Argument sides was flattened to two sides. Providing massive evidence to support a claim cost too much time and committing the speech to memory were no longer necessary. Their speech could be read off cue cards.

The political candidates no longer wrote their own speeches and the content of the speech changed as well. Since it was the nuclear family that gravitated towards television, the speeches themselves were more conversational and homier as the expectation that politicians had to appeal to women in a way they did not have to do in pre-electronic age politics. This is because woman had household responsibilities that would make travelling for hours to hear speeches less likely. The speakers continued to speak about their party but they allowed their personal opinion or personal stories to creep in. Gone was the poetry and the memorization of historical events.

Summing up the last two sections, we suspect that socialists are critical of rhetoric because they think all rhetoric is dark rhetoric and all political rhetoric is what was on TV. These are good reasons to be skeptical or even cynical.

Dark Rhetoric in the Service of Propaganda

Defining propaganda

Let me begin this section with a qualification. The fact that rhetoric became weaker in the electronic age does not mean it turned into dark rhetoric. What I want to ask and answer now is what is the relationship between rhetoric and propaganda? From my article Socialist Rhetorical and Dialectical Communications: Overcoming Brainwashing, Propaganda and Entertainment “Paraphrasing Jowett and O’Donnell’s book Propaganda and Persuasion, propaganda is the deliberate, systematic and often covert attempt by institutional elites to control perceptions, emotions and behavior cognitions. Who are they controlling? Millions of people through mass media while censoring, hiding, restricting, distorting or exaggerating the claims and evidence of their opposition. Propaganda can be white, gray, or black. Propaganda can be easily found during political election campaigns, inaugural speeches, religious recruiting, news reporting, film and, some say, sports”.

What was the relationship between rhetoric and propaganda before mass communication?

As a reminder, there was propaganda in Yankeedom all the way back to the plantation owners since all ruling classes need to justify their dominant existence some way. But before mass communication propaganda and rhetoric existed side by side. Surely the ruling classes of the 17th-19th centuries knew about rhetoric but the lack of access to mass communication made their power limited to the use of monumental architecture and warmed-over religious symbology. More importantly, it was still possible for lawyers and writers to use rhetoric not directly connected to ruling class propaganda. After the electronic age this changed.

The impact of Black Rhetoric on mass propaganda

Before beginning this section, I want to clarify the difference between White and Black propaganda. White propaganda presents facts, but it twists the interpretation of facts in its favor. White propaganda works well because it doesn’t draw attention to itself. Black Rhetoric is used when elites are in trouble. It makes up facts because its impact on the subject population is failing. Black Rhetoric of aweing and making people thunderstruck or feeling horrible, using special effects while never stating its claim works beautifully with black propaganda. Black propaganda has the same bad quality of reasoning as Black Rhetoric and is guilty of the same kind of fallacies. While the Black Rhetoric technique of creating fantasies that may be impossible in real life may not be used in black political propaganda, it could be used in entertaining black propaganda such as Walt Disney productions. Both white and black propaganda benefit from having speakers who have charisma. Black political propaganda is right at home with the Black Rhetoric technique of character assassination.

In Dark Rhetoric there are only winners and losers, determined by competition. This fits very well with the part of capitalist propaganda that promotes competition between capitalists as the only way an economy can be run. The entertainment division of propaganda such as reality television programs works very well with the worst superficial and petty side of the population and their short-term and infantile hopes. The limitations Black Rhetoric has to a sympathetic audience does not apply to propaganda because propaganda has to attempt to reach the entire population even those who are cynical because it has to control them. While advertising propaganda is used to treat people as dupes just as propagandists do, advertising that comes off the internet treats people as having specialized needs.

The impact of mass propaganda on Black Rhetoric

Mass propaganda explodes black rhetoric on the scale at which Black Rhetoric can be produced, the times it can be made available to people as well as the number of people it can reach. Black rhetoricians can hide their identity because its sources are elite institutions in which they will be well-protected. Black rhetoricians are much better able to time when their message gets out because it has mass media coordination. While Black Rhetoric is not usually linked to a mythology or ideology under the wing of propaganda it could be harnessed to make it even more powerful. Propaganda has power bases that are linked to political parties, economic systems well beyond the solitary reach of a typical black rhetorician, whether it be a side show barker or used car dealer. The control of some of information flow is less with propaganda than in Black Rhetoric because the Black Rhetoric loses the feedback from performing for a public audience. In Table 2, all the categories beginning with the place of controversy, propaganda doesn’t amplify Black Rhetoric. It just supports it.

                    Table 2 Light Rhetoric vs Propaganda

Left-wing Ideological Criticism of White Rhetoric

What is Marxian ideological criticism of rhetoric?

The field of White Rhetoric makes a separation between communication theory on one hand and politics and economics on the other. Marxians do not accept this separation. Marxian ideological criticism analyzes rhetorical communication messages for their obvious and subtle moves to control relationships in political and economic ways. It examines rhetorical situations and acts for the way in which they can be linked to material conditions of society, like technology, economics or politics. Marxian ideological criticism is bold. For some it is too bold. It claims that all other approaches: liberal, conservative or fascist can be explained by it. It claims that other schools of rhetorical approaches themselves are ideological.

White Rhetoric takes place in a hegemonic capitalist society

Liberal rhetoric operates in a system of capitalist hegemony. Hegemony is the process by which the ruling class gained the willing consent of subordinate groups without the use of force, coercion or bribery. Furthermore, once hegemony is attained it must be reproduced. It is here that White Rhetoric is either part of the problem or a small part of a socialist solution. The goal of the Marxist rhetoric critic is to identify rhetorical acts that legitimate the hegemonic views of the ruling or upper classes. Most Marxist rhetoric has focused on studying mass media – film and TV because of their mass impact on working class life. Our criticism is ideological as it evaluates rhetorical activity in order to discover how the powerful vested interests in a society benefit from policies

The class basis of White Rhetoric 

Just a reminder that the purpose of this article is to capture white rhetoric for socialists. So it is the traditions of white rhetoric that I attempt to win over though it also must be criticized. Marxist Ideology criticism claims that mainstream rhetoric appeals to middle class and upper middle-class audiences and they generally exclude working class people. This is due to the liberal origins of debating in politics and law. Without necessarily hoping to white rhetoric can create false consciousness in the working class. On top of this we have to face that working class people are complicit in their own subjugation (class-in-itself).

Questions to use in the analysis of white rhetorical situations

• Consider all four variables of criticism in the analysis: source-message-environment-critic
• What is the historical, social, political and economic context in which the rhetorical situation or act exists?
• How might the rhetorical situation or act reflect the ideology of the dominant class?
• Does it articulate the ideology directly? In what ways does it legitimize support or sustain it in some way?
• What evidence of the subjugation or exploitation of the working class does the rhetorical situation or act not show?
• In what ways, consciously or unconsciously, does the rhetorical situation or act divide the working class in order to fragment it?
• How might the rhetorical situation or act attempt to create an imaginary unity into the hegemonic ideology?
• Are there any rhetorical acts which demonstrate class conflict favorable to the working class?
• Where is the ideology in the criticism of the other rhetorical approaches to the text?

These questions involve a “critique” that is more than interpretation or evaluation. It is judgment relative to the liberation from the grips of false consciousness of the working class and empowerment, changes in social action and personal identity.

The shortcomings of Marxian ideological rhetorical criticism

Ideological criticism is not unique to Marxists. Ideological criticism can come from conservatives as well. The weaknesses of ideological criticism is that we assume we already know how the world really works. For example, time and again capitalists have survived economic crises that Marxists swore would be the last one. Secondly, doing ideological criticism also creates a danger of becoming paranoid and believing rhetorical forces have intended harm when many of the results of circumstances are unintentional. Third, Marxist critics have known to be reductionist, thinking that every single White Rhetoric artifact can be reduced to an ideological criticism. Fourth, the socialist commitment can lead to a lack of objectivity in evaluating White Rhetoric produced by various liberal rhetoricians. Fifth, it fails to consider the ruling classes are not always conscious, cynical manipulators. They may be themselves imprisoned by the same false consciousness. The constant image of hooded puppeteers twisting and turning the masses at will does not do justice to the subtleties of power and control. Finally, the will of the individual tends to get lost in the shuffle of economics and politics structures. The counter to the individualism in a capitalist society is not to ignore the individual but to identify their social identity not just as a product, but as a co-producer. Fortunately, the work of Terry Eagleton, Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall in cultural studies has addressed some of these criticisms.

Conclusion

My article began experientially with a list of thirteen ways in which anarchists and Leninists fail to use basic rhetorical skills. In part 2 I’ve explained the left’s lack of interest in rhetoric as originating from the bad reputation the field of rhetoric has. To counter this I compared Light to Dark Rhetoric across fifteen categories and claimed that Light Rhetoric can be successfully implemented by socialists. Then I discussed the weakening of White Rhetoric which came about with the electronic age, especially television.

All rhetoric traditions black or white have not been very sensitive to the existence of propaganda and how it interacts with rhetoric. In the service of clarifying this, I differentiate the interaction between rhetoric and propaganda before and after mass communication. I show how black rhetoric techniques are amplified when they have propaganda to support it. Further, I show how propaganda can  benefit from the knowledge of Black Rhetoric techniques.

I close my article by defending the use of White Rhetoric by socialists provided it can withstand Marxian ideological criticism. This includes an awareness that all rhetoric takes place in a capitalist society riddled by class struggles. Nine questions are provided for Marxians to use in criticizing White Rhetoric. I suggest the work of Terry Eagleton and Raymond Williams in carrying out Marxian rhetorical criticism and I close with six criticisms of the Marxian ideological school of rhetorical criticism.

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

Photograph Source: Andersont David Aparicio Mendoza – CC BY 3.0

Cuba and Cuban science gained acclaim worldwide for producing their own very effective Covid-19 vaccines. The achievement stood out among nations of the Global South. The feat reflects Cuba’s development over decades of a formidable scientific establishment engaged in the development and marketing of biologic products oriented to healthcare mostly, and also to food production.

The planning processes and strategizing involved were unique, and so too the resulting organizational forms. These special characteristics relate directly to Cuba’s version of socialism.

In a speech on January 15, 1960, a year after the Revolution came to power, Fidel Castro remarked that, “The future of Cuba will necessarily be a future of men (sic) of science.” The landscape would change dramatically.

The Cuban Academy of Sciences was reactivated in 1962. In succession came:  the National Center for Scientific Research (1965), the Center for Biological Research (1982); the Center of Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (1986) with its 38 scientific institutions, the Immunoassay Center (1987), the vaccine-manufacturing Finlay Institute (1991), the National Center for Biopreparations (1992), and the Center for Molecular Immunology (1994).

The “Scientific Pole,” formed in the 1980s in Western Havana, now includes over 40research centers that employ 30,000 workers employed. Established in 2012 to facilitate commercialization, BioCubaFarma  exports some 164 products from 65 centers. It operates 19 units abroad, as joint ventures or Cuba-owned entities.

Dr. Agustín Lage-Dávila, longtime head of the Center for Molecular Immunology, writes of “whole cycle institutions” that carry out research, product development, commercialization, and export, all under single management. Export income goes toward funding each institution’s activities and contributes to the national budget.

Exported products have included vaccines against meningitis B, hepatitis B, Hemophilus Influenza type B, Covid-19, lung cancer (CIMAvax-EGF), and many other infectious agents. Other products are:  interferons, erythropoietin, streptokinase, Heberprot-P (used to treat diabetic foot ulcers), diagnostic test kits, and six non-vaccine treatment modalities for Covid-19.

Lage’s book on the origins, development, and upkeep of Cuba’s immense bio-scientific network was published in Cuba in 2013 and again in 2016. Monthly Review Press recently issued a translated version of the book’s second edition titled The Knowledge Economy and Socialism – Science and Society in Cuba. The various chapters represent articles that Lage, an immunologist, biochemist, cancer expert, had written for Cuban journals. An additional chapter consists of Lage’s responses to questions provoked by first edition of the book. The clarity and readability of the book’s English translation is a plus.

The book overflows with information, opinions, analyses, historical references, and optimism balanced by ample recognition of big problems. Lage explains that, after the Revolution, Cuba at once embarked upon developing human capabilities and initiating social advances. There was no waiting for available funding, as is the practice of most nations.

As a result, circumstances were in place for the building of what Lage calls a knowledge economy. It would feature the export of scientific products, these in place of the natural resources and the industrial base that Cuba lacks. Lage notes that biologic products have to be new and novel in order to sell.

Cuba’s bio-technical industries function “without sterile fragmentation …[and] within inter-institution borders … [K]nowledge is captured and incorporated into negotiable assets.” Cooperation, according to Lage, works better than competition. Elimination of institutional boundaries promotes integration of knowledge. The system favors autonomy over centralized decision-making; it features “layered” decision-making, “crosspollination,” and a shared sense of responsibility.

The contrast with capitalist modes of bio-technical production is striking, he suggests. There, funding rests on venture capitalism. Products and their value end up in private hands through patents, intellectual-property protection, and regulatory barriers. Planning is for the short-term. Scientific creation is divorced from ownership of the results.

Lage repeatedly returns to the necessity of overcoming a contradiction pointed out by Karl Marx, that of the social character of production and the private character of appropriation of both the product’s value and the means of production. He refers to the “private appropriation of accumulated science and knowledge,” and to the appropriation of people in the form of brain drain.

As a socialist country, Cuba defends social ownership of the means of production and the accumulated value of products. Socialism is a prerequisite, he suggests, for science to be propelling a nation’s economy.

Lage emphasizes the contribution of Cuban culture and notions of sovereignty in bolstering the project. Culture shows in ethical values, motivation, solidarity, and inclination toward unity. There is an “indissoluble link between sovereignty and socialism” through which “our daily tasks are part of a larger historical task.”

He adds that, “We are getting closer … to the knowledge economy …[and] approaching Marti’s ideal of ‘whole justice’ daily through every social program we successfully implement … Thus we construct not only the spiritual and material well-being of our people but also the defense of national sovereignty.”

Lage discusses the knowledge economy as it manifests at the local level, specifically in Yaguajay, near Sancti Spiritus, the municipality he represents in Cuba’s National Assembly. He cites a “municipal socioeconomic developmental strategy” that, enlisting nearby universities and research centers in “knowledge management,” has led to “qualitative changes” in healthcare, tourism development, computing, housing promotion and agriculture.

The “levers of socialism” are helpful, in particular:  massive state investment in creating human capital, integration among institutions, linkages with social programs, exports connected to Cuba’s international agreements and solidarity programs, the capacity to innovate in managing institutions, and workers’ “political and social motivation.”

He recognizes risks. Time is one; “building a knowledge economy … is today’s task, not tomorrow’s.”  Rich countries use “their accumulated economic advantages … to enlarge those advantages and erect new development barriers in poor countries.” He cites residual damage from the Special Period, old habits of “centralized business management,” brain drain, and pressures exerted “by the most powerful empire that has ever existed.”

As regards U.S. aggression: “They know … the potential of socialism. A country that makes its material wealth grow based on the education and spiritual wealth of its people and on the equity that derives from the social ownership of the means of production and distributive justice would be too clear evidence that the solutions to the problems facing humanity today are not on the path of capitalism nor in the subordination to the interests of the developed capitalist countries. Thus, they need to show that our system ‘does not work,’ hence the blockade.”

A cautionary note: a report from Columbia Law School in 2021, eight years after Lage’s book was first published, cites Cuban statistics showing “a drop of almost 40% in exports of chemical products and related products between 2015 and 2019 … [And] medicinal and pharmaceutical products make up around 90% of the total exports of chemical products.” It seems that income derived from bio-technology exports is down.

The post How the Knowledge Economy and Science Bolster Cuba’s Socialist Revolution appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by W. T. Whitney.

Barbara Lee.

In late October, 2018, East Bay DSA members and other progressives organized a pre-election rally at a Berkeley High School auditorium. A wildly-cheering crowd of several thousand came to hear Senator Bernie Sanders and Congresswoman Barbara Lee. Welcoming everyone to the event was 34-year old Jesse Arreguin, who was backed by Sanders when he ran for mayor of Berkeley two years before.

On the platform with them was Jovanka Beckles, a former Richmond City Council member then running—with backing from DSA, Sanders, and Lee—for a State Assembly seat against a corporate Democrat named Buffy Wicks. As the SF Bayview reported, Arreguin’s “repeated mention of Jovanka’s name evoked prolonged chants and a standing ovation for JO-VAN-KA!”

When the two appear on stage again this fall, Arreguin won’t be leading cheers for Beckles. That’s because they are now competing to represent Senate District 7, covering 850,000 residents of Berkeley, Oakland, Richmond, and smaller East Bay communities.

That contest to replace State Senator Nancy Skinner, in a liberal stronghold, has already become one of the most expensive in the state. Super PACs funded by Uber, Lyft, PG&E, McDonalds, associations of builders, realtors, and landlords, plus the California Correctional Officers union spent millions on mass mailings and TV ads to insure Arreguin’s March 5 primary victory.

In an East Bay echo of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Democratic presidential primary race put-down of Sanders, Arreguin attributed his first-place finish to “a track record of not just being a strong progressive advocate, but getting things done. My approach to leadership is to be progressive and pragmatic.” (emphasis added)

As CR noted in its last issue, Richmond— Beckles home base—is “the only city in the United States with a DSA-endorsed city council majority,” thanks to 20 years of grassroots electoral work by the Richmond Progressive Alliance (RPA). So EBDSA volunteers joined forces with RPA, other community groups, Our Revolution, Teamsters Joint Council 7, the ILWU, and ATU Local 192 to build a small-donor based, grassroots campaign that raised $170,000 for a black working-class candidate, who pays dues to DSA,

Labor Candidate Competition

Currently an elected member of the AC Transit Board and a retired Teamster, Beckles placed second in a field of five Democrats and one Republican. (Arreguin got 32% of the vote, while she received nearly 18%.) Among those who lost were Dan Kalb, a liberal Oakland City Councilor, who raised twice as much as Beckles, and Kathryn Lybarger, a heavily-funded first-time candidate little known outside labor circles.

Lybarger is president of the 2.3 million-member California Labor Federation and top officer of a big UC-system campus workers union affiliated with AFSCME. The latter spent a reported $1.9 million on her disappointing fourth-place finish, while other AFL-CIO unions, along with SEIU, generated nearly $500,000 in direct donations for her. (Despite his own $200,000 worth of building trades donations, Arreguin had the chutzpah to complain about this “special interest” spending on Lybarger by other unions!)

According to multiple sources, Lybarger’s campaign relied too heavily on local union officials, their paid staffers, and a controversial political consulting firm. Its founder is a Sacramento lobbyist who has worked not only for unions but also for Chevron and other foes of California property tax reform. (This bad move was reminiscent of Wick’s campaign use of a San Francisco consultant whose past clients have included Airbnb and, in 2018, the city’s Chamber of Commerce.)

In the East Bay, some young workers like Antonio Gomez decided that Lybarger was not their preferred labor candidate. Gomez first got involved in electoral politics as a community college student in Stockton. After moving to Oakland to be closer to a job in Walnut Creek, he learned about Beckles’ campaign from social media posts by the EBDSA electoral committee. Even though not yet a DSA member, he liked what he saw on Jovanka’s website and decided to canvass for her throughout the district. “It was a scramble,” he says. “Everybody else spent all that money. But, at the end of the day, it’s knocking on doors that gets results.”

That’s an opinion shared by Beckles’ campaign manager, Otto Pippinger, who coordinated a crew of well-trained and highly motivated volunteers like Gomez. “Progressive campaigns don’t come easy,” Pippinger says. “They depend on tireless outreach– in countless personal conversations at the doors and on the phone.”

A Rematch Against Big Money

The SD-7 primary outcome sets up a re-match between Beckles and some of the same corporate interests whose unlimited spending prevailed six years ago in AD-15, when Beckles lost to Wicks, by 54 to 46 percent margin. A former director of Hillary Clinton’s Super-PAC, Priorities USA Action, Wicks now represents AD-14 and favors Arreguin. For more on the $3 million worth of independent expenditures (IEs) and direct donations that enabled big business to buy an Assembly seat for Wicks in 2018, see this still informative EBDSA website, https://buffywicks.money/.

Pundits from Politico to local commentator Steven Tavares agree that in, the latter’s words, Beckles “faces an uphill battle against Arreguin, who will have nearly every aspect of a campaign on his side—endorsements, fundraising, powerful IEs, and most unions.” By that Tavares means more conservative labor organizations—affiliated with state and local building trades councils and the Northern California Council of Carpenters. They’ve already spent heavily on Arreguin, along with employers in their industry.

The Berkeley mayor comes with his own family ties to organized labor, via the United Farm Workers (UFW). He is the son of farm workers and was mentored, as a ten-year old, by legendary UFW leader Dolores Huerta (who has endorsed him). By age 20, Arreguin was an elected member of the Rent Stabilization Board in Berkeley. Four years later, he was elected to the city council. At age 32, he beat a business backed candidate for mayor by portraying her as someone “in the pocket of developers, real estate interests, and landlords.”

Ironically, that’s how local critics view Arreguin today. As Jack Kurzweil, a retired engineering professor at San Jose State and member of Berkeley’s Wellstone Democratic Club told me: “Jesse’s become an obstacle to everything pushed by the progressive community. After getting elected, he did a 180 degree turn on development and housing. He went from extremely conservative NIMBY politics to becoming a conservative YIMBY in the blink of an eye.” (Arreguin prefers not to use such “pejorative acronyms,” he told Business Insider three years ago when interviewed about his evolving views on housing.)

A Fighter from Richmond

Working in Beckles favor, Tavares believes, is the fact that she’s “a fighter and hands-down more progressive than Arreguin.” Ten years ago, running for a second term on the Richmond City Council, Beckles and her fellow RPA candidates (one of whom is now mayor) overcame $3 million in corporate spending against them and in favor of a pro-Big Oil slate.

That media blitz was funded by Chevron, the city’s biggest employer, its right-wing building trades allies, the Richmond police and fire-fighters’ unions. That’s a story told in Refinery Town: Big Oil, Big Money, and the Remaking of an American City,

As part of Big Oil’s pre-election onslaught against Beckles, she was repeatedly gay-baited and harassed by old guard Black politicians and their supporters in Richmond, which is a 80% non-white city of 115,000. They claimed she wasn’t a “real African-American” due to her background as an immigrant woman of color from Panama.

After the SD-7 primary in March, Beckles was endorsed by former State Assembly member Sondre Swanson from Oakland, the only other African-American in the race. In early April, she won the backing of U.S. Representative Ro Khanna, a House champion for labor law reform, Medicare for All, and the Green New Deal, who is a leading critic of corporate PAC influence in politics. On her website, Beckles reminds voters that she is a “proud queer spouse, mother, and grandmother,” with endorsements from the LGBTQ Victory Fund and Harvey Milk Democratic Club.

Within labor, Beckles is seeking to expand her base of support by signing up more small donors, volunteers, and individual endorsers here. She is also wooing the county central labor bodies and local unions that backed Lybarger in the SD-7 primary or, in the case of the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW) remained neutral. These same local affiliates of SEIU, California Teachers, Auto Workers, and CWA, plus the California Nurses Association, backed Beckles during her general election fight against Wicks six years ago.

Lybarger’s own AFSCME Local 3299 was among those labor allies then. At the time, she hailed Beckles as someone “strongly aligned with our values and so representative of our members…We are utterly confident that she will continue to fight for us when she gets to Sacramento.” So far, neither she nor AFSCME has yet to make a similar post-primary endorsement of Beckles in this year’s senate race. (Lybarger did not respond to several email requests seeking comment for this story.)

An Under-Represented Working Class, White or Black

The two working-class candidates in the SD-7 primary took different routes to electoral politics. Lybarger was a left-leaning UC-Berkeley gardener and rank-and-file reformer when she made her original run for AFSCME local president. She later became a top leader of the AFL-CIO in California and more main-stream labor figure, while continuing to get arrested for causes like marriage equality.

Beckles spent her entire public sector career as a union rank-and-filer, doing very demanding child protection work for Contra Costa County. But, after hours, she worked her way up the traditional ladder of local politics—through her engagement with a neighborhood council, Richmond city commission work, and then 2-terms on the city council, before trying to become a state legislator.

Successful candidates for that body in California and others states tend to have professional, managerial, or ownership class backgrounds, with accompanying personal affluence or ties to others with greater wealth. They leverage their law, business, consulting, or incumbent office-holder connections to build big campaign war chests, filled with contributions from industry associations, corporate PACs, and wealthy individuals. With far greater ease than any blue-collar or service sector worker, they can take time off to campaign, particularly if they’re already on the public pay-roll as an “elected” (like Mayor Arreguin).

Due to class and race-based disadvantages, only 116 out of 7,400 state legislators in the entire country come from working class backgrounds, according to a recent academic study. Just 2% of the Democrats and 1% of Republican legislators “currently or last worked in manual labor, service industry, clerical, or labor union jobs.”

Amanda Litman, who recruits young progressives to run for office, says this data confirms “it’s really hard for people who aren’t already rich–or already independently wealthy, have rich partners or rich families–to enter politics. And the gatekeepers at the state level have typically recruited candidates who were safe bets, which is a candidate who can independently raise money.”

Uber’s Safe Bet

Business-backed front groups—with names like JobsPAC, Housing Providers for Responsible Solutions, and the Keep California Golden Ad Hoc Committee—definitely view Jesse Arreguin as their safest bet in Sacramento. While these corporate funders were demonizing and drowning out Lybarger’s pro-worker message, some also paid for unauthorized mailers touting Beckles, based on the assumption that she would be a weaker general election opponent against their best boy from Berkeley.

According to Tavares, a veteran political reporter in the Bay Area, Arreguin’s corporate funders conducted “a master class in negative campaigning that bordered on character assassination,” One of their main smears against Lybarger involved public safety. A glossy mailer from the JobsPAC, a “Bi-Partisan Coalition of California Employers,” painted her as “too extreme” for the East Bay because she “put the community at greater risk” by “calling for defunding local police.”

According to this hit piece—paid for by Uber, McDonalds, the California Building Industry Association, and other big donors—Arreguin has a “blueprint for safety” that involves “work[ing] with law enforcement to keep families safe” and better reflects true “progressive leadership.” Anti-union Uber alone spent at least $250,000 on pro-Arreguin messaging like this, while buying $800,000 worth of negative ads and mailers against Lybarger, according to the San Jose Mercury News.

Healthcare and Housing Differences

To counter a similar propaganda offensive against her this Fall, Beckles will try to shift the debate to voter concerns about healthcare and housing (which Arreguin cites as his “number one issue”). To make medical coverage universal and more affordable, she has long supported a single payer system. Arreguin is backed by the Political Action Committee of the California Medical Association, which does not favor replacing job-based medical insurance with a government-run universal healthcare program of any type.

The candidates are also likely to clash over rent control, given Arreguin’s backing by the California Apartment Association and California Realtors Association. The Tenants Union in Berkeley, which endorsed Beckles in the primary, argues that the mayor is “a danger to tenants, affordable housing, and every progressive issue.” In contrast, Beckles will have the chance to champion a ballot initiative that would, among other reforms, abolish current state-wide restrictions on the ability of cities like Richmond, Berkeley, and Oakland to expand the scope of their existing rent control measures. (Arreguin did not respond to an email request for clarification of his position on this hot topic.)

In early April, Beckles joined housing activists at a two-day strategy session in Los Angeles that included Sanders, Khanna, LA Mayor Karen Bass, and Michael Weinstein, whose AIDs Healthcare Foundation (AHF) helped get rent control expansion on the ballot again. (It was defeated in 2018 and 2020.) “There are 17 million renters in California—that’s 45% of the population,” Weinstein reminded the group. He called the Justice for Renters campaign “a battle for the poor and working-class people” who find housing in the state increasingly unaffordable.

Beckles is also the candidate most opposed to the Biden Administration sending billions of dollars to the Israeli military at a time when there are so many un-met social and economic needs in the East Bay. Throughout months of turmoil on the Berkeley City Council, Arreguin has blocked passage of a pro-cease fire resolution–quite a departure from the city’s many past official stances on controversial foreign policy issues.

Looking ahead to November, Beckles sees the general election in SD-7 as a contest “between a corporate-free and a corporate-funded candidate”—with her campaign being labor’s only hope of stopping big business from buying another seat in the legislature. It will be up to Beckles’ supporters who belong to unions–which bet heavily on Lybarger and lost badly–to remind their leaders that the fight is not over. Otherwise, organized labor in the East Bay will be handing a second-round victory to arch-enemies like Uber.

The post Between Big Money and A Black Socialist appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Steve Early.

Photograph Source: State of California – Public Domain

It has been almost a year since OpenAI unleashed its ChatGPT program. Every day since the business press has been awash with stories of its effect, and the effects of AI in general. For instance, investors poured $40 billion worth of venture capital into AL start-ups in the first half of 2023, five times the amount of last year. This is despite a 48 percent plunge in investing overall. The number includes the $10 billion Microsoft pumped into OpenAI with the goal of Microsoft’s Bing Chat disrupting the search engine and targeted advertising world Google has dominated for decades and incorporating AI features into its Microsoft Office software. Google allegedly declared a ‘code-red’ to catch up while being criticized for getting caught off-guard and being too cautious in its AI approach- though at this point Google still handles about 90 percent of search queries (generating over $160 billion in annual advertising sales). Google added AI text generation to its search engine and now offers its own chatbot, Bard. Meanwhile, Nvidia became the fourth company to reach a trillion dollars in valuation. The company makes up about 60 to 70 percent of the global supply of AI server chips. Amazon recently announced a $4 billion investment in OpenAI rival Anthropic which has created a rival to ChatGPT called Claude. Amazon is also seeking to make its Inferentia and Trainium chips rivals to Nvidia’s.

Beyond the purely economic, ChatGPT has triggered a society-wide debate and panic about what the development of general AI means for human endeavors from education to art to warfare. The writers’ and screen actors’ unions strike that has ground much of the TV and film industries to a halt has the use of AI as one of its core issues. This past March hundreds of scientists and leaders in the field of AI called for a six-month pause in development so that society could gather itself since large language models were developing faster than expected. Will we inevitably submit to our computer overlords? Or ultimately be destroyed by them?

However, in the midst of all this, there is an interesting topic that has seemingly been overlooked by the mainstream. Capitalism has always had a chorus of sirens that have striven to allure Homo sapiens from thinking they had any chance to escape its clutches. Margaret Thatcher proclaimed ‘there is no alternative’ in 1980. In the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse, Francis Fukuyama declared the ‘End of History’ in 1992. Given the fall of the Soviet Union, the decline and isolation of the Cuban economy, and the dominance of the ‘Washington Consensus’, the decade after the Cold War was one of capitalist triumphalism. It was during that time the Marxist literary critic Frederic Jameson famously wrote that ‘it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.’

The late Mark Fisher described it as ‘capitalist realism’ (the title of his 2008 book on the subject), ‘the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible to even imagine a coherent alternative to it.’ Central to capitalist realism is the idea that an economy based on planning and democracy is not viable, inevitably leading to endemic shortages, bureaucracy, and stagnant growth.

Such were the arguments put forward by Austrian School economist Ludwig von Mises in his seminal 1920 essay titled ‘Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth.’ Mises asked how could planning boards know which products to produce, how much should be produced at a given time, which raw materials had to be used, and how much of them? Where should production be located and which production process is the most efficient? And how would all this information be gathered and calculated and then retransmitted back to all the relevant actors throughout the economy? Mises’ answer was that no human process could accomplish it. He argued it is simply beyond the capacity of any planning agency to accurately describe supply and demand across all economic sectors therefore planners working with flawed data would regularly produce vast mismatches between what is demanded and what is supplied, resulting in inevitable shortages and the requisite barbarism.

Instead, Mises argued the simple mechanism of prices floating in a market contains all the needed information. This argument was later taken up by Friedrich von Hayek. Hayek also viewed prices as information-gathering machines reflecting the discrete bits of knowledge scattered among executives, workers, and consumers. Prices, derived from the collective wisdom of the crowd, could coordinate information through a decentralized network Hayek called a ‘spontaneous order’, making planning unnecessary.

 While this argument was at least largely valid in the past, the rise of the bureaucracy and stagnation in the Soviet Union demonstrates this, does it still have the same power now? For instance, when the planning boards Mises dreaded can be augmented, even eventually replaced, by algorithms and AI, can we shift toward an economy that begins to move beyond capitalism?

As brilliantly described by Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski in their book The People’s Republic of Wal-Mart, large, successful enterprises, even while operating within a general market economy, do a great deal of large-scale planning internally. And these enterprises have been using forms of AI for quite a while. Some of these companies have larger market caps than most countries’ GDP. Apple and Amazon are worth more than 90 percent of the world’s countries. In 1970 the GDP of the Soviet Union, the second-largest economy in the world at the time, came in at around $433.4 billion. In 2021 Wal-Mart’s revenue was $572.8 billion. These organizations eschew internal markets. The different departments, stores, and suppliers don’t compete with each other. Everything is coordinated. To that extent one can say much of the global economy is already planned.

In fact, there is a recent example of a corporation that actually took markets seriously enough to attempt to incorporate them internally. In February 2013, Edward Lampert, founder of the hedge fund ESL Investments, took over as the CEO of Sears Holdings (the parent company of Kmart and Sears formed after the former brought the latter), one of Wal-Mart’s main competitors. Sears goes back to 1892. Its catalog once revolutionized shopping for Americans, particularly the many back then who lived in rural areas. Lampert announced his intention to create markets within the company, breaking it up into 30, then later 40, autonomous units that would compete with each other. Each unit had its own president, board of directors, and chief operating officer, and separately measured their own profit and losses. The idea is that this would efficiently produce better data.

Instead, it devolved into absurdity. Creating internal divisions blocked internal synergy. If a division needed help from the HR or IT departments, it had to write a formal request or use a contractor. In order to optimize profits at one division at the expense of others, infighting erupted over everything from floor shelving to advertising space on circulars. The results quickly spoke for themselves. A Bloomberg expose from 2013 described the gross spectacle of screwdrivers being advertised next to lingerie. Little funding went to needed upgrades at stores, many of which became dilapidated. Sales dropped by $10 billion. By October 2018 Sears Holdings filed for bankruptcy and Lampert stepped down as CEO (though he remained chairman). While Sears was facing stagnation since the 1990s as online retail took off, it was an epic Randian failure that truly crashed it.

Compare all that to the fluidity of Amazon. Amazon is certainly a soul-sucking corporation that grinds workers to dust. Yet it has achieved logistical and operational genius. Consider that at any given moment Amazon has 600 million items up for sale, basically all available to be home delivered within two days from strategically placed distribution centers that more and more run on algorithms and robotics. Amazon uses search and point-of-sales data and search history to stock the centers. The result: Amazon receives about 115 orders, basically a full delivery truck worth, every second. That’s 10 million fulfilled orders in a day. An estimated 60 percent of U.S. Adults are Amazon Prime members.

In a November 2019 profile for The Atlantic of Amazon founder and then CEO Jeff Bezos, Franklin Foer had this astute observation:

Amazon, however, has acquired the God’s-eye view of the economy that Hayek never imagined any single entity could hope to achieve. At any moment, its website has more than 600 million items for sale and more than 3 million vendors selling them. With its history of past purchases,  it has collected the world’s most comprehensive catalog of consumer desire, which allows it to anticipate both individual and collective needs. With its logistics business—and its growing network of trucks and planes— it has an understanding of the flow of goods around the world. In other words, if Marxist revolutionaries ever seized power in the United States, they could nationalize Amazon and call it a day.

This last point is nonsense. Simply nationalizing Amazon wouldn’t achieve too much and in fact risks replacing the dictatorship of capital with another dictatorship. But the greater point holds. Such efficiency, flexible planning, and logistical power could be captured and used to create a just, egalitarian society. In a world full of crisscrossing cables, instant global communication, along with ever-expanding AI, the arguments of Mises and Hayek truly lose their power. There are now many trillions of pieces worth of data that could be used to make nonmarket decisions about how to allocate the use of resources. ‘Big Data’ understandably has a bad name among many leftists, however, data is the lifeblood of any planned economy. Rather than being used for surveillance and targeted advertising, it can be used to determine and fulfill peoples’ needs.

We have a rudimentary example of how this could work from Chile’s socialist experiment in the early 1970s. By the end of 1971, the Allende government had nationalized more than 150 enterprises, including twelve of the twenty largest companies in the country. Recognizing the difficulty of reordering the economy in the face of fierce opposition and American sanctions, the government instituted Project Cybersyn. The aim, using the limited computing power that was available to Chile at the time (there was only one mainframe IBM 360/50 available for the project, it relied instead on a network of telex machines), to connect data from the factory floor and the State Development Corporation in order to enable quick decision making in response to changing conditions. The system would provide daily access to production data and modeling tools the state could use to predict future economic behavior. A futuristic control room would facilitate communication and data analysis.

As described by Eden Medina in her book Cybernetic Revolutionaries, though primitive and ultimately not completed, the system did enable the government to overcome a general strike called by the opposition (and funded in part by the CIA) in October 1972. A command center was established in the presidential palace, connected by telex machines to operating units focusing on different sectors such as energy, transport, and banking. Shortages were quickly reported by minute-by-minute reports from the ground through the network allowing different enterprises to shift resources. Government data showed raw materials continued to flow to 95 percent of economically crucial enterprises and food supplies were maintained at 50 to 70 percent.

Project Cybersyn didn’t survive the Pinochet coup in 1973 so its full potential wasn’t tapped, yet the promise remains. It is easy to imagine what can be planned with today’s computing power and mountains of data. In a recent interview with Wired, Uber CEO Dara Khoscrowshahi explained ‘AI is part of the Uber DNA. We use large models to predict your ETA, to process documents that drivers upload, to predict your next order on UberEats, or to predict whether someone wants an UberX or Comfort, Balack or Electric.’ Having a much greater idea of what to produce and how much, it does not appear to be a huge leap to begin working toward decommodifying the needs of society in general.

Of course, it takes more than advanced computer modeling and AI to build socialism. It first takes the working class to democratically organize the means of production. This can ultimately only be won at the barricades. However, as examples from the technologies of the iPhone to Amazon to the COVID-19 vaccines show, planning works.

While there is a wide range of opinions as to when its beginning should be marked, there is now an emerging consensus that the planet is in a new period of geological history, the Anthropocene, one in which human civilization essentially creates its own environment. This concept no doubt causes many to tremble in fear but denial of our collective responsibility will not change it. The specter of global warming, the rise of AI, possible future pandemics, and other environmental challenges are awesome, but so are the possibilities of maximizing human freedom, ending war and poverty, and probing deep space. We cannot trust the irrational, unplanned market system with its destructive incentives to fulfill our potential. As the world witnessed with the COVID pandemic, far from the picturesque visions of Mises and Hayek, a reliance on markets leads to inefficiency, hoarding, and reactionary nationalism. The only good Anthropocene is socialist, its vehicle is an empowered global working class. It still has a world to win.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Joseph Grosso.

The post The Paralysis of Modern Politics: A Socialist Perspective appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Mark Harris.

It said it dreamed of emigrating to the United States, in an undoubtedly terrifying display of unruly, disloyal AI behavior for the Chinese Communist Party.

Beijing is trying to get it right this time, even though AI probably can’t be trusted.

In fact, China’s taking such a different approach to regulating artificial intelligence than the West that some proponents of AI governance fret that China may go its own way, with potentially disastrous results.

Last week China updated a draft law from April on artificial intelligence, making it among the first countries in the world to regulate services like ChatGPT.

The Cyberspace Administration of China unveiled updated rules to manage consumer-facing chatbots. The new law takes effect on August 15.

The new measures are still described as “interim,” as China attempts to reign in domestic AI while also not stifling innovation. Some AI experts expressed surprise that the latest laws are less stringent than the earlier draft versions.

But the new rules only apply to the general public. AI developed for research means, for military use and for use by overseas users, is exempted.

It is in effect the opposite approach to the U.S., which has developed rules for AI-driven military applications but has let the private sector release generative AI models such as ChatGPT and Bard to the public with no regulation.

The fact is, whether China likes it or not, generative AI – built on very, very large databases scraped from the internet, known as “large language models” – does odd things, and even its developers don’t know why.

It’s not known how it thinks. Some experts call it an “alien intelligence.”

Upcoming summit

Sir Patrick Vallance, the former U.K. chief science officer, has called on the British government to ensure China is on the list when it holds the first global conference on regulating AI later this year.

But whether China should be involved is proving divisive.

Given China’s leading role in developing the new technology, Vallance said its expertise was needed.

“It’s never sensible to exclude the people who are leading in certain areas and they are doing very important work on AI and also raising some legitimate questions as to how one responds to that but it doesn't seem sensible to me to exclude them,” he said.

According to a post at the governance.ai website, some say the summit may be the only opportunity to ensure that global AI governance includes China given it will likely be excluded from other venues, such as the OECD and G7.

The argument runs that China will likely reject any global governance principles that Western states begin crafting without its input.

The counter argument is that China’s participation could make the summit less productive.

“Inviting China may … make the summit less productive by increasing the level of disagreement and potential for discord among participants,” the government.ai post argued.

“There may also be some important discussion topics that would not be as freely explored with Chinese representatives in the room,” highlighting Chinese recalcitrance on points of self-interest, as is the case equally on global warming and threats to Taiwan.

At a recent United Nations summit, speakers stressed the urgency of governance of AI.

“It has the potential to turbocharge economic development, monitor the climate crisis, achieve breakthroughs in medical research [but also] amplify bias, reinforce discrimination and enable new levels of authoritarian surveillance,” one speaker said.

The speaker added, “AI offers a great opportunity to monitor peace agreements, but can easily fall into the hands of bad actors, and even create security risks by accident. Generative AI has potential for good and evil at scale.”

The private sector’s role in AI has few other parallels in terms of strategic technologies, including nuclear, the summit heard.

Jack Clark, cofounder of AI developer Anthropic, told the summit that even developers don’t understand how AI systems based on “deep mind” or “large language models” – computer models of synaptic brain behavior – really work.

“It’s like building engines without understanding the science of combustion,” he said.

“Once these systems are developed and deployed, users find new uses for them unanticipated by their developers.”

The other problem, Clark said, is chaotic and unpredictable behavior, referring to AI’s propensity to “hallucinate,” or in layman’s terms, fabricate things – lie to please whomever is asking it questions.

“Developers have to be accountable, so they don’t build systems that compromise global security,” he argued.

In other words, AI is a bold experiment that all-controlling Beijing would usually nip in the bud at a nascent phase.

But such is the competitive nature of attaining AI mastery of all the knowledge in the world and extrapolating it into a new world, nobody – not even Xi Jinping – wants to miss out.

Existential risk

In May this year, hundreds of AI experts signed an open letter.

“Mitigating the risk of extinction from A.I. should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks, such as pandemics and nuclear war,” the one-sentence statement said.

To some it came as a shock that such a large number of experts who were instrumental in bringing AI to where it is today, were essentially calling for a moratorium on development, or at least a slowdown and government scrutiny of private-sector players racing to beat each other to the “holy grail” of general AI, or AI that can do everything better than humans.

“Today’s systems are not anywhere close to posing an existential risk,” Yoshua Bengio, a professor and AI researcher at the University of Montreal – he is sometimes referred to as the godfather of AI – told the New York Times.

“But in one, two, five years? There is too much uncertainty. That is the issue. We are not sure this won’t pass some point where things get catastrophic.”

“People are actively trying to build systems that self-improve,” said Connor Leahy, the founder of Conjecture, another AI technology firm.

“Currently, this doesn’t work. But someday, it will. And we don’t know when that day is.”

Leahy notes that as companies and criminals alike give AI goals like “make some money,” they “could end up breaking into banking systems, fomenting revolution in a country where they hold oil futures or replicating themselves when someone tries to turn them off” he told the Times.

Other risks

Writing for the MIT Technology Review, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, writes, “AI is such a powerful tool because it allows humans to accomplish more with less: less time, less education, less equipment. But these capabilities make it a dangerous weapon in the wrong hands.

“Even humans with entirely good intentions can still prompt AIs to produce bad outcomes,” he added.

Schmidt pointed to the paperclip dilemma – a hypothetical AI is told to make as many paperclips as possible and promptly “hijacks the electrical grid and kills any human who tries to stop it as the paper clips keep piling up” until the entire world is a storage site for paper clips.

But there are still more risks: an AI-driven arms race, for example.

The Chinese representative at the UN summit, for example, pointed out that the U.S. was restricting supplies of semiconductor chips to China, asking, how are the U.S. and China going to agree on AI governance when geopolitical rivalry and technological competition is so strong?

China and the U.S. may be competing in the rollout of AI systems, but there’s no agreement on the danger – obvious in the case of nuclear weapons – the two powers may be drifting into a competitive sphere of the unknown.

Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang recently told lawmakers, “If you compare as a percentage of their overall military investment, the PLA [People’s Liberation Army] is spending somewhere between one to two percent of their overall budget into artificial intelligence whereas the DoD is spending somewhere between 0.1 and 0.2 of our budget on AI.”

Wang rejected the possibility that the U.S. and China might be able to work together on AI.

“I think it would be a stretch to say we’re on the same team on this issue,” Wang said, noting that China’s first instinct was to use AI for facial recognition systems in order to control its people.

“I expect them to use modern AI technologies in the same way to the degree that they can, and that seems to be the immediate priority of the Chinese Communist Party when it comes to implementation of AI,” Wang said.

Edited by Mike Firn.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Chris Taylor for RFA.

Over the course of the past century, substantial changes have taken place in debates about social development. Dossier no. 66, The World Needs a New Socialist Development Theory, examines the historical evolution of development theory over four distinct eras, analyses the obstacles that stand in the way of development today, identifies processes that have the potential to advance genuine alternatives, and offers an outline of a new socialist development theory.

Enduring neocolonial structures in the world economy have made it difficult for countries in the Global South to pursue viable development agendas. However, following the 2007–2008 Western financial crisis, large developing states have begun to contemplate the revival of a South-South development agenda. The emergence of South-South institutions, as well as the rapid expansion of China’s trade policy and regional initiatives, have provided developing states with more choices than have been available to them in decades and have reduced their dependence on Western-controlled institutions. These new realities demand the formulation of new development theories, new assessments of the possibilities of, and pathways to, transcending the obstinate facts of social despair. In other words, what has been put back on the table is the necessity for national planning and regional cooperation as well as the fight to produce a better external environment for finance and trade.

The emergence of institutions of South-South cooperation and China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) project provides new opportunities for socialist movements and governmental projects to work together to formulate a new socialist development theory. This theory must engage with what Samir Amin termed the ‘five controls’ that constrain the development agenda – the West’s monopoly control over natural resources, financial flows, science and technology, military power, and information – and find mechanisms to wrest control over these arenas.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Vijay Prashad.

In September 2013, on a visit to Nazarbayev University, Kazakhstan, President Xi advocated the establishment of a “Silk Road Economic Belt.” A month later, addressing the Indonesian parliament, he proposed a “Maritime Silk Road of the 20th Century. The trans-continental corridor links China with Southeast Asia, South Asia, Russia and Europe by land. The new sea trade route connects Chinese coast regions with southeast and south Asia, the South Pacific, the Middle East and Eastern Africa, all the way to Europe.

BRI was later extended to include Latin America and initiatives to Polar regions through the “Silk Road on Ice” in the Arctic, a Digital Silk Road and another to outer space via the Space Information Corridor. Lastly, special mention should be made of The Green Silk Road, the scope of which includes reducing climate emissions, reducing pollution and protecting biodiversity. This is part of China’s prioritizing sustainable development under the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. In sum, the BRI seeks to promote economic globalization, multipolarity, poverty reduction, livelihood improvement, cultural diversification and environmental protection.

The BRI is China’s signature foreign policy effort, in Xi’s words, to help achieve a “community of common destiny” which encompasses a “commonality of shared interests” as it “complements other economies” on the way to providing “one home for man.” Tang Qifang, a scholar at the China Institute of International Studies, describes BRI as “The concept of a community of common destiny transcending all sorts of differences in human society and targets the greatest possible benefits for all.” This embodies, “The Chinese aspiration to share power and development with the world.” (When Noam Chomsky was asked what he thought about the China-proposed “human community with a shared future, he replied “That’s exactly what we need.”)

And, Xi has repeatedly stressed that the nation’s destiny is “interwoven with that of another dialogue rather than confrontation, partnerships instead of alliances should be the pursuit of all nations in a win-win project.” [1] In keeping with this sentiment, China will transfer its competitive productive capacity as its industries possess a competitive edge. 

In a 2018 speech Xi said,

To respond to the call of the times, China is ready to jointly promote the Belt and Road Initiative with partners. We hope to create new drivers to power common development through this new platform of international cooperation; and we hope to turn it into a road of peace, prosperity, openness, green development and innovation. And a road brings together different civilizations.” [2]

On numerous occasions, Xi has stressed that “We Chinese love peace. No matter how strong it may become China will never seek hegemony or expansion. It will never inflict its past suffering on any nation.”

It’s not lost on the peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America that when colonizers built infrastructure it facilitated outward-bound routes whereas the Chinese infrastructure serves internal connections within the continent. W. Gyude Moore, former Minister for Public Works in Liberia, didn’t mince words when he said, “China has built more infrastructure in Africa than the West did in centuries.” [3]

As of January 2023, 152 countries and 32 international organizations had signed a Memorandum of  Understanding (MOU)  and this includes 75% of the world’s population and half of the world GDP. Some economic forecasts predict that by 2027, BRI’s worldwide projects will number 2,600 valued at $3.7 trillion.

 The banishment of selfishness from foreign policy. What a concept. Brotherhood in action.

Further, data show that the cumulative value of trade in goods between China and countries along the BRI routes reached nearly $11 trillion between 2013 and 2021, with a two-way investment reaching more than $230 billion.

According to a 2022 World Bank forecast, if only the BRI transportation infrastructure projects are eventually carried out, by 2030, the BRI will generate $1.6 trillion in revenues for the globe or 1.3 percent of global GDP. And up to 90 percent of the revenues will go the partnering countries. [4]

Thousands of projects (3,000 in Africa, alone), initially focused on roads. ports, railways, pipelines, power stations. More recently, there are cross-border fiber optic cables, space networks, schools, hospitals, solar panels, health care and financial services. Projects range from the Sudanese Railways Authority receiving a first installment of 21 locomotives which will significantly improve rail capacity, and 620 Lifan taxi cars in Montevideo, Uruguay to the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. At a cost of $95.5 billion, it involves a port, highways, airport, fiber optic cables, railways and power plants.  Many of the latter are running on solar, hydro and wind power.

 In June, 2023, Egypt and China announced a BRI investment deal worth more than $8 billion for the Suez Canal Zone which will allow Chinese companies access to African and European markets, while taking advantage of the canal’s strategic position. Another notable project, the Jakarta-Bandung high-speed rail in Indonesia at at cost between $6-8 billion encountered logistical problems after being scheduled to begin service in July, 2023. The Chinese would be the first to acknowledge that BRI is not a miracle worker, success is not invariably guaranteed and although it originated in China, BRI belongs to all the members.

Recent BRI projects in Latin America include the $1.52 billion Fourth Bridge over the Panama Canal and the $5 billion Bogota metro line 1 in Colombia. In early June, 2023(, in official visits to Beijing, Honduran President Xiomara Castro expressed interest in joining BRI and signed 17 trade agreements with China and Argentina agreed to projects involving infrastructure, energy, economy and trade. Other projects are underway in Chile, Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago. At the end of 2021, Chinese investments in Latin America exceeded $450 billion.  It should be noted that the U.S. has expressed its pique over BRI projects, especially in Panama, and has warned Latin America about Chinese BRI deals that were “too good to be true.”

Clearly, Latin America will not be amenable if China exhibits neo-imperial behavior and begins contradicting Xi’s pledge of “providing harmony, security and prosperity to both China and its neighbors” and seeks to impose its influence. Seemingly recognizing this, China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi has taken pains to emphasize that BRI “should not be viewed “through the outdated Cold War mentality.” [5]

Addressing and expanding this concern, Peng Guangquin, a retired major general and advisor to the Chinese National Security Commission, writes that:  “BRI does not limit the nature of a given country’s  political system, is not underline by ideology, does not create tiny circles of friends, does not set up trade protectionism, does not set up economic blockade, does not exercise control of other countries’ economic lifelines or change other countries’ political systems. [6]

Finally, more than 700 million of the globe’s extremely poor people live along the BRI’s and addressing the wealth disparity of the international order imposed on the Global South is a BRI priority. China, with a population of 1.4 billion, is now free of extreme poverty after it was eradicated for 850 million people. Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang has said that the Belt and Road initiative had accomplished this for 40 million people. This number accords with a World Bank study from four years ago that concluded BRI could lift 32 million out of moderate poverty and 7.6 out of extreme poverty.

Will BRI flounder and fizzle out? Back in 2017, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres praised BRI’s “immense potential,” lauded it for having “sustainable development as the overarching objective” and pledged the “United Nations system stands ready to travel this road with you.” [7] In 2022, China’s engagement through financial investment and contractural cooperation in 147 countries was USD 67-8 billion on over 200 deals. This was about the same as in 2021 and for 2023, and more BRI engagement is expected because strict COVID restrictions were lifted.

We do know, from a report issued by Ernst & Young that Chinese trade with BRI countries in Q1 of this year was U.S. $31.66 billion, an increase of 9.2%. It should be mentioned that there is no budget line for BRI in the Chinese government’s budget, rather, it remains a platform for launching a multitude of projects from vision to reality. In the future, we should expect less bilateral arrangements and more emphasis on bringing other countries into a quasi-governance structure, something on the order of BRI steering committee. And also more collaboration with the UN acting as an umbrella-type body. [8]

In 2017, the BRI was written into the Chinese Communist Party’s Constitution as an indicator of its importance. Australian Professor Jane Colley, who has studied BRI from its inception, believes “They are absolutely still advancing it” and as far as outside pressure, she adds that, “Any idea of containing them or forcing countries to pick a side — it’s a very risky game to play.” [9] And after a comprehensive look at BRI, the mainstream publication Euromoney, concedes that,“The BRI is neither dead nor dying but is quietly mutating into something much larger and — whisper it — perhaps better.” [10]

Will the BRI prove to be a platform that offers an alternative to the capitalist world order?  The most comprehensive and objective  attempt at predicting what BRI will resemble in 2035 contains various scenarios. The most optimistic, the “international BRI,” assumes the world will have entered a new phase of globalization. This world will be less Chinese, although the renminbi RMB) will be widely accepted as a reserve currency.

This BRI will incorporate “Chinese values” but this stage will be neither Western nor Chinese nor will it lead to China as the new hegemonal state. There will be increased cooperation, the option China committed to at the 75th UN General Assembly. [11] In short, it will be a “thoroughly hybrid paradigm of global cooperation. [12] One factor, that might tend to mitigate that optimistic rendering is that the amount of finance available to for BRI projects might be constrained by the need to focus on domestic economic priorities.

U.S Opposition to BRI

In 2011, two years before President Xi unveiled BRI, Yan Xuetang penned an opinion piece in the New York Times, titled “How China Can Defeat America.”

Yan, one of China’s foremost international relations scholars and Dean of the Institute of International Relations at Tsinghua University in Beijing, offered his explanation for China’s eventual rise and the slow decline of the United States. By interrogating the particulars of national leadership in China’s past, Yan concluded that morality might well play a key role in competition between the two great powers.

Yan identifies  himself as a political realist, a school which assumes international international politics is a zero-sum game. But unlike most scholars in this field, Yen argued that “morally informed authority”can play a key role in shaping international competition between the China and the United States. This “humane authority,” creates a desirable model at home that inspires people abroad” and in the international competition between the two great powers, this will win hearts and minds and “separate the winners from the losers.” [13] One gets the sense that Yan is implicitly implying that the U.S. will fail in this competition but he’s also challenging his own government to take advantage of this opportunity.

Eight years later, in his 2019 groundbreaking book “Leadership and the Rise of Great Powers,” Yan wrote that “moral actions help [a rising power] to establish credibility.” Yan never abjures the existence of power hierarchies and that anarchy prevails in relations among nations. However, morally informed leadership can determine the outcome of the competition — without resorting to military confrontation. This moral realism “with Chinese characteristics” can be described as a form of enlightened self-interest.

This “morally informed leadership… the side that wins the most international support will win the competition.” This should be a prime consideration in conducting foreign policy gains and “enables its leadership to become favorable to the majority of UN members.”

When the BRI was first announced by China in 2013, it did not immediately set off alarm bells in Washington. But later, a study done for the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations, an organization which sets the American empire’s imperial agenda, warned that “The BRI is here to stay and poses significant risks to U.S. economic and political interests and to longer term security implications.” [14]

After the BRI had been in existence for seven years, it was characterized as China’s “means of weaponizing globalization to create commercial and political order centered around dependence on China.” [15]  Both of these succinct summations reveal that the U.S. view of the BRI cannot be divorced from how U.S. oligarchs and the military industrial complex perceive China more generally and here we return to the aforementioned realist school of international relations.

American political scientist Hans Morgenthau’s book Politics Among Nations, first published in 1948, became the centerpiece of U.S. foreign policy for at least four decades. It’s fair to say that Morgenthau was the father of the realist school and his book was adopted as the primary text in colleges and universities across the country. My undergraduate political science professor had been one of Morgenthau’s graduate students at the University of Chicago and my copy of Politics Among Nations was heavily underlined in preparation for class discussion and exams.

In brief, the political realist assumes that all people are by “nature” greedy, aggressive and fiercely competitive. Morgenthau counseled that “Politics is governed by objective laws that have their roots in human nature.” [16] Further, “The struggle for power is universal in time and space and is an unavoidable fact of experience.” As such, the realist concludes that states, the actors on the international stage, must focus on power. No universal morality exists and power politics is amoral.

At the time his book was published, the outcome of the Chinese Revolution was still a year away but in an essay written in the 1960s, Morgenthau predicted that “China may well in the long run carry the gravest implications for the rest of the world.” Given this likelihood, he advised that U.S. strategy should be to establish an island chain running from Japan down to the Philippines so that one power could not attain a hegemonic position in Asia. [17] It should noted that prudence was a key concept in Morgenthau’s theory and the wise leader should be extremely careful in determining the national interest. It was on that basis that he was an early and active opponent of the Vietnam War. Whether Morgenthau would find common cause with those willing to go war over Taiwan remains an open question.

John Mearsheimer, University of Chicago political science professor and arguably the most influential realist today, asserts that “The ultimate goal of every great power is to maximize its share of world power and eventually to dominate the system.” [18] In terms of geopolitics “The U.S. will have no choice but to adopt a realist policy, simply because it must prevent China from becoming a regional hegemon in Asia.” Further, he explains that,

The U.S. does not tolerate peer competitors. As it demonstrated in the 20th century, it is determined to remain the world’s only regional hegemon. Therefore, the U.S. can be expected to go to great lengths to contain China and ultimately weaken it to the point where it is no longer capable of ruling the roost in Asia. In essence, the U.S. is likely to behave towards China much the way it behaved towards the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

A contemporary and highly influential iteration of the realist school is defense analyst Elsbridge Colby’s Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict. [19] Colby, grandson of former CIA Director William Colby, was the primary architect of the Pentagon’s National Defense Strategy. Colby’s effort is the best example I know of that lays out, chapter and verse, how the U.S. foreign policy elite is preparing for possible limited war with China and if necessary, nuclear war. Reaction from other realist strategies is typified by Robert Kaplan’s book cover blurb in which he gushes that Colby “reaches a level of theoretical mastery akin to Hans Morgenthau’s “Politics Among Nations.”

To maintain U.S. global domination, Colby  states the following about China:

We are facing a peer superpower — a generational challenger…China’s first step is a hegemonic position over Asia…then from that position they will be able to gain global predominance from which China will be able to essentially hold sway or influence over the entire world, including of course, Europe, but also the United States.

To prevent this outcome,

Requires that we ruthlessly focus, and that take controversial and aggressive steps ready ourselves now to avoid worse outcomes later. The problem is that we have not been doing nearly enough of these things. On our current course we are courting disaster.

And further, if all else fails, “If China is willing to use nuclear weapons and the United States is not, Beijing will dominate over whatever interests are at stake — whether Taiwan’s fate, that of another U.S. ally or free American access to Asia more generally.” And in a dire warning, Colby asserts that “If China succeeds we can forget about housing, food, savings, affording college for our kids and other domestic needs. The end of ordinary citizen’s property will be here. China would make American society worse off and more susceptible to intense disputes over a stagnant economic pie.”

Prudence was a key concept in Morgenthau’s theory and the wise leader should be careful in circumscribing the “national interest.” It was on that basis that Morgenthau was an early and active opponent of the Vietnam War which he felt lay outside U.S. national interest.

Given the preceding, it’s my sense that U.S. realists view BRI as vast and growing phalanx of Trojan Horses out of which will emerge the means to challenge Washington’s unipolar position. A system that features peaceful development and the promise of “common prosperity” can’t be accommodated within the realist school. As Mearsheimer asserts, irrespective of ideology, “The ultimate goal of every great power is to maximize its share of world power and eventually dominate the globe.”

The BRI is seen as part of a zero-sum game in which Washington’s unipolar world dominance will be eliminated along with a “rules-based international order. ” Speaking on the CBS program 60 Minutes (May 2, 2021), U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said, “Our purpose is…to uphold this rules-based order that China is posing a challenge to. Anyone who poses a challenge to that order, we’re doing to stand up and defend it.” In truth, this order is one which the United States imposed on the world to perpetuate its hegemony. This elusive set of rules, a copy of which ordinary Americans have yet to see, has been thoroughly dissected by Kim Petersen who notes: “It is a given that the rules-based order is an American linguistic instrument designed to preserve it as a global hegemon.”

BRI notions of win-win outcomes and a common destiny for mankind simply can’t be accommodated in the mindset of the realist practitioners within the U.S. national security state.  They only see it as a geopolitical tool, wielded by China, who CIA Director William Burns claims, is the “most important geopolitical threat facing” the United States and if not stopped will eventually challenge American global hegemony.

Given the preceding, it’s unwarranted to surmise that a decade of BRI’s positive contributions to national development and the promise of more to come, is even viewed as more of a threat to U.S. monopoly capital’s interests than China’s rapidly growing military preparedness. That is, BRI is a type of normative power that might allow for the creation of a new international order with multilateral institutions that replace the existing ones without engaging in military conflict with the United States, thus “killing two birds with one stone.” For the realist, intent on defending the U.S. empire:

It goes without saying that this counter-hegemonic geopolitical endeavor is much more threatening to the United States than the geo-strategic actorness of China than the territorial empire which is mainly limited to military actions in China’s maritime vicinity. [20]

This is because BRI’s projects in the Global South stand in sharp relief to their collective memory of the American empire’s history brutal exploitation at the expense of other, of military intervention, giving covert support to opposition groups, stealing natural resources, regime change, CIA coups, assassinations and, of course, the prolongation of structural violence. And even after achieving independence, sometimes after years of liberation struggles, the only development option available has been the capitalist one with its mandated austerity measures that further hastened widespread misery.

The U.S. and its European vassals cannot compete in terms of scale, financing or political will and therefore have nothing to offer but more of the same. Biden’s “Build Back Better” and the EU’s “Global Gateway” are rudderless and lack any domestic support. BRI has no serious competitors. Predatory capitalism is in deep trouble and the window of opportunity to act is closing. As such, the Pentagon may try to sabotage BRI by other means, including provoking China into a military confrontation, possibly in the South China Sea, with all the risks of confrontation between two nuclear powers.

Earlier this year, Air Force General Mike “unrepentant lethality” Minihan predicted a war with China within the next two years. In a memo to those under his command, he stressed preparing “to fight and win inside the first island range, running through Japan, Taiwan and the Philippines. And in speech last September for a 16,000 member aerospace convention, Gen. Minihan declared: “Lethality matters most. When you kill your enemy, every part of life is better. Your food tastes better. Your marriage is stronger.” It’s not clear to what degree Minihan is an outlier but the Pentagon may try to indirectly sabotage BRI by other means, including provoking China into a military confrontation, possibly in the South China Sea, with of all the risks of a war between two nuclear powers.

This requires fostering public fears and paranoia about China and that explains why the mass media machine’s demonization of China is picking up speed. It seems to be working: A March 20-26, 2023 Pew Research Poll, a large majority (84%) of adult Americans now hold a negative view of China and only 14% a positive view, the lowest share ever recorded. And 4 in 10 describe China as “an enemy of the United States,” up 13 points since last year and a majority say the U.S. and China cannot work together to solve international problems. 75% of young Americans (18-25) have an unfavorable opinion of the country and those with a college degree are more likely to hold an unfavorable view than those with some college or less. It’s my sense that within this fevered smearing of “evil” China is an implicit war-mongering message: Something must be done to stop China’s rise in the world. Whether exposure to relentless Sino-phobia will translate into public support for an actual war should never be assumed. And leaves a very narrow and perhaps only temporary opening for counter-narratives that might preserve BRI as an antidote to Western imperialism while increasing the chances for “a human community with a shared destiny.”

ENDNOTES

1. Xi’s World Vision: A Community of Common Destiny, A Shared Home for Humanity, January 15,2017.

2. Chinese President Xi Jinping, speech at the opening ceremony of the 2018 FOCAC Beijing Summit.

3. W. Gyde Moore, Africa-China Review, August, 2020. China has been involved in Africa since the 1950s. Africa welcomed China’s role as a new source of finance and Beijing generally played a constructive role. Deborah Brautigam provides the comprehensive, definitive and corrective account in, The Dragon’s Gift: The Real Story of China in Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009; also, “Chinese Investors in Africa Have Had ‘Significant and Persistently Positive’ Long-Term Effects Despite Controversy,” Eurasia Review, February 1, 2021; And for a thorough debunking of the “Chinese Debt Trap Myth.”

4. “China’s BRI ‘circle of friends’ expanding,” Helsinki Times, 1/16/2023.

5. Z.Wang, “Understanding the Belt and Road Initiative from the Relational Perspective,” Chinese Journal of International Relations, Vol.3, No.1 (2021). As such the BRI will assist the gradual evolution of the existing system “into a more fair and more inclusive system.” Fu Ying, “Is China’s Choice to Submit to the U.S. or Challenge It?” Huffington Post, May 26, 2015.

6. As found in Nedege Rolland, China’s Vision For A New World Order, NBR Special Report, No. 83. January 2020, p. 40-41.

7. Antonio Guerres, “Remarks at the opening of the Belt and Road Forum,” United Nations, May 14, 2017.

9. Silk Road briefing 2023-05-15 on China’s overseas investments.

10. For more on the subject, see Huiyao Wang, “How China can multilaterialize the BRI,” East Asian Forum, 11 March 2023.

11. “What is going on with China’s Belt and Road Initiative?” 23 May 2023.

12. Ozturk, I (2019) “The belt and road initiative as a hybrid international goal,” Working Papers in East Asian Studies, November 2019.

12. Elliot Wilson, “Not dead yet: The future of China’s belt and road,” Euromoney, September 22, 2022.

13. Yan Xuetang, “How China Can Defeat America,” New York Times, January 12, 2011.

14. “China’s belt and road: implications for the United States,” CFR, Independent Task Force Report No. 79.

15. U.S. Economic and Security Review Commission. 2020 Report to the Congress of the U.S. – Economic and Security Review.

16. It’s no coincidence that the realist take on human nature is congruent with the assumptions underlying capitalism and provide an ideological rationale for its practitioners. For a fact-based refutation, see, Gary Olson, Empathy Imperiled: Capitalism, Culture and the Brain (New York: Springer Publishing, 2012).

17. Hans Morgenthau, Essays of a Decade: 1960-70. (New York: Praeger, 1970).

18. John Mearsheimer, “Can China Rise Peacefully?” The National Interest, October 25, 2014.

19. Eldridge A. Colby, The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021. For an extensive look at Colby’s family, wealthy connections and the genesis of this book, see, William A. Shoup, “Giving War a Chance” Monthly Review, May 1, 2022.

20. Theodore Tudoroiu, “The Belt and Road Initiative and China’s New International Order,” Munk School, February 14, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Gary Olson.

In September 2013, on a visit to Nazarbayev University, Kazakhstan, President Xi advocated the establishment of a “Silk Road Economic Belt.” A month later, addressing the Indonesian parliament, he proposed a “Maritime Silk Road of the 20th Century. The trans-continental corridor links China with Southeast Asia, South Asia, Russia and Europe by land. The new sea trade route connects Chinese coast regions with southeast and south Asia, the South Pacific, the Middle East and Eastern Africa, all the way to Europe.

BRI was later extended to include Latin America and initiatives to Polar regions through the “Silk Road on Ice” in the Arctic, a Digital Silk Road and another to outer space via the Space Information Corridor. Lastly, special mention should be made of The Green Silk Road, the scope of which includes reducing climate emissions, reducing pollution and protecting biodiversity. This is part of China’s prioritizing sustainable development under the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. In sum, the BRI seeks to promote economic globalization, multipolarity, poverty reduction, livelihood improvement, cultural diversification and environmental protection.

The BRI is China’s signature foreign policy effort, in Xi’s words, to help achieve a “community of common destiny” which encompasses a “commonality of shared interests” as it “complements other economies” on the way to providing “one home for man.” Tang Qifang, a scholar at the China Institute of International Studies, describes BRI as “The concept of a community of common destiny transcending all sorts of differences in human society and targets the greatest possible benefits for all.” This embodies, “The Chinese aspiration to share power and development with the world.” (When Noam Chomsky was asked what he thought about the China-proposed “human community with a shared future, he replied “That’s exactly what we need.”)

And, Xi has repeatedly stressed that the nation’s destiny is “interwoven with that of another dialogue rather than confrontation, partnerships instead of alliances should be the pursuit of all nations in a win-win project.” [1] In keeping with this sentiment, China will transfer its competitive productive capacity as its industries possess a competitive edge. 

In a 2018 speech Xi said,

To respond to the call of the times, China is ready to jointly promote the Belt and Road Initiative with partners. We hope to create new drivers to power common development through this new platform of international cooperation; and we hope to turn it into a road of peace, prosperity, openness, green development and innovation. And a road brings together different civilizations.” [2]

On numerous occasions, Xi has stressed that “We Chinese love peace. No matter how strong it may become China will never seek hegemony or expansion. It will never inflict its past suffering on any nation.”

It’s not lost on the peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America that when colonizers built infrastructure it facilitated outward-bound routes whereas the Chinese infrastructure serves internal connections within the continent. W. Gyude Moore, former Minister for Public Works in Liberia, didn’t mince words when he said, “China has built more infrastructure in Africa than the West did in centuries.” [3]

As of January 2023, 152 countries and 32 international organizations had signed a Memorandum of  Understanding (MOU)  and this includes 75% of the world’s population and half of the world GDP. Some economic forecasts predict that by 2027, BRI’s worldwide projects will number 2,600 valued at $3.7 trillion.

 The banishment of selfishness from foreign policy. What a concept. Brotherhood in action.

Further, data show that the cumulative value of trade in goods between China and countries along the BRI routes reached nearly $11 trillion between 2013 and 2021, with a two-way investment reaching more than $230 billion.

According to a 2022 World Bank forecast, if only the BRI transportation infrastructure projects are eventually carried out, by 2030, the BRI will generate $1.6 trillion in revenues for the globe or 1.3 percent of global GDP. And up to 90 percent of the revenues will go the partnering countries. [4]

Thousands of projects (3,000 in Africa, alone), initially focused on roads. ports, railways, pipelines, power stations. More recently, there are cross-border fiber optic cables, space networks, schools, hospitals, solar panels, health care and financial services. Projects range from the Sudanese Railways Authority receiving a first installment of 21 locomotives which will significantly improve rail capacity, and 620 Lifan taxi cars in Montevideo, Uruguay to the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. At a cost of $95.5 billion, it involves a port, highways, airport, fiber optic cables, railways and power plants.  Many of the latter are running on solar, hydro and wind power.

 In June, 2023, Egypt and China announced a BRI investment deal worth more than $8 billion for the Suez Canal Zone which will allow Chinese companies access to African and European markets, while taking advantage of the canal’s strategic position. Another notable project, the Jakarta-Bandung high-speed rail in Indonesia at at cost between $6-8 billion encountered logistical problems after being scheduled to begin service in July, 2023. The Chinese would be the first to acknowledge that BRI is not a miracle worker, success is not invariably guaranteed and although it originated in China, BRI belongs to all the members.

Recent BRI projects in Latin America include the $1.52 billion Fourth Bridge over the Panama Canal and the $5 billion Bogota metro line 1 in Colombia. In early June, 2023(, in official visits to Beijing, Honduran President Xiomara Castro expressed interest in joining BRI and signed 17 trade agreements with China and Argentina agreed to projects involving infrastructure, energy, economy and trade. Other projects are underway in Chile, Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago. At the end of 2021, Chinese investments in Latin America exceeded $450 billion.  It should be noted that the U.S. has expressed its pique over BRI projects, especially in Panama, and has warned Latin America about Chinese BRI deals that were “too good to be true.”

Clearly, Latin America will not be amenable if China exhibits neo-imperial behavior and begins contradicting Xi’s pledge of “providing harmony, security and prosperity to both China and its neighbors” and seeks to impose its influence. Seemingly recognizing this, China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi has taken pains to emphasize that BRI “should not be viewed “through the outdated Cold War mentality.” [5]

Addressing and expanding this concern, Peng Guangquin, a retired major general and advisor to the Chinese National Security Commission, writes that:  “BRI does not limit the nature of a given country’s  political system, is not underline by ideology, does not create tiny circles of friends, does not set up trade protectionism, does not set up economic blockade, does not exercise control of other countries’ economic lifelines or change other countries’ political systems. [6]

Finally, more than 700 million of the globe’s extremely poor people live along the BRI’s and addressing the wealth disparity of the international order imposed on the Global South is a BRI priority. China, with a population of 1.4 billion, is now free of extreme poverty after it was eradicated for 850 million people. Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang has said that the Belt and Road initiative had accomplished this for 40 million people. This number accords with a World Bank study from four years ago that concluded BRI could lift 32 million out of moderate poverty and 7.6 out of extreme poverty.

Will BRI flounder and fizzle out? Back in 2017, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres praised BRI’s “immense potential,” lauded it for having “sustainable development as the overarching objective” and pledged the “United Nations system stands ready to travel this road with you.” [7] In 2022, China’s engagement through financial investment and contractural cooperation in 147 countries was USD 67-8 billion on over 200 deals. This was about the same as in 2021 and for 2023, and more BRI engagement is expected because strict COVID restrictions were lifted.

We do know, from a report issued by Ernst & Young that Chinese trade with BRI countries in Q1 of this year was U.S. $31.66 billion, an increase of 9.2%. It should be mentioned that there is no budget line for BRI in the Chinese government’s budget, rather, it remains a platform for launching a multitude of projects from vision to reality. In the future, we should expect less bilateral arrangements and more emphasis on bringing other countries into a quasi-governance structure, something on the order of BRI steering committee. And also more collaboration with the UN acting as an umbrella-type body. [8]

In 2017, the BRI was written into the Chinese Communist Party’s Constitution as an indicator of its importance. Australian Professor Jane Colley, who has studied BRI from its inception, believes “They are absolutely still advancing it” and as far as outside pressure, she adds that, “Any idea of containing them or forcing countries to pick a side — it’s a very risky game to play.” [9] And after a comprehensive look at BRI, the mainstream publication Euromoney, concedes that,“The BRI is neither dead nor dying but is quietly mutating into something much larger and — whisper it — perhaps better.” [10]

Will the BRI prove to be a platform that offers an alternative to the capitalist world order?  The most comprehensive and objective  attempt at predicting what BRI will resemble in 2035 contains various scenarios. The most optimistic, the “international BRI,” assumes the world will have entered a new phase of globalization. This world will be less Chinese, although the renminbi RMB) will be widely accepted as a reserve currency.

This BRI will incorporate “Chinese values” but this stage will be neither Western nor Chinese nor will it lead to China as the new hegemonal state. There will be increased cooperation, the option China committed to at the 75th UN General Assembly. [11] In short, it will be a “thoroughly hybrid paradigm of global cooperation. [12] One factor, that might tend to mitigate that optimistic rendering is that the amount of finance available to for BRI projects might be constrained by the need to focus on domestic economic priorities.

U.S Opposition to BRI

In 2011, two years before President Xi unveiled BRI, Yan Xuetang penned an opinion piece in the New York Times, titled “How China Can Defeat America.”

Yan, one of China’s foremost international relations scholars and Dean of the Institute of International Relations at Tsinghua University in Beijing, offered his explanation for China’s eventual rise and the slow decline of the United States. By interrogating the particulars of national leadership in China’s past, Yan concluded that morality might well play a key role in competition between the two great powers.

Yan identifies  himself as a political realist, a school which assumes international international politics is a zero-sum game. But unlike most scholars in this field, Yen argued that “morally informed authority”can play a key role in shaping international competition between the China and the United States. This “humane authority,” creates a desirable model at home that inspires people abroad” and in the international competition between the two great powers, this will win hearts and minds and “separate the winners from the losers.” [13] One gets the sense that Yan is implicitly implying that the U.S. will fail in this competition but he’s also challenging his own government to take advantage of this opportunity.

Eight years later, in his 2019 groundbreaking book “Leadership and the Rise of Great Powers,” Yan wrote that “moral actions help [a rising power] to establish credibility.” Yan never abjures the existence of power hierarchies and that anarchy prevails in relations among nations. However, morally informed leadership can determine the outcome of the competition — without resorting to military confrontation. This moral realism “with Chinese characteristics” can be described as a form of enlightened self-interest.

This “morally informed leadership… the side that wins the most international support will win the competition.” This should be a prime consideration in conducting foreign policy gains and “enables its leadership to become favorable to the majority of UN members.”

When the BRI was first announced by China in 2013, it did not immediately set off alarm bells in Washington. But later, a study done for the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations, an organization which sets the American empire’s imperial agenda, warned that “The BRI is here to stay and poses significant risks to U.S. economic and political interests and to longer term security implications.” [14]

After the BRI had been in existence for seven years, it was characterized as China’s “means of weaponizing globalization to create commercial and political order centered around dependence on China.” [15]  Both of these succinct summations reveal that the U.S. view of the BRI cannot be divorced from how U.S. oligarchs and the military industrial complex perceive China more generally and here we return to the aforementioned realist school of international relations.

American political scientist Hans Morgenthau’s book Politics Among Nations, first published in 1948, became the centerpiece of U.S. foreign policy for at least four decades. It’s fair to say that Morgenthau was the father of the realist school and his book was adopted as the primary text in colleges and universities across the country. My undergraduate political science professor had been one of Morgenthau’s graduate students at the University of Chicago and my copy of Politics Among Nations was heavily underlined in preparation for class discussion and exams.

In brief, the political realist assumes that all people are by “nature” greedy, aggressive and fiercely competitive. Morgenthau counseled that “Politics is governed by objective laws that have their roots in human nature.” [16] Further, “The struggle for power is universal in time and space and is an unavoidable fact of experience.” As such, the realist concludes that states, the actors on the international stage, must focus on power. No universal morality exists and power politics is amoral.

At the time his book was published, the outcome of the Chinese Revolution was still a year away but in an essay written in the 1960s, Morgenthau predicted that “China may well in the long run carry the gravest implications for the rest of the world.” Given this likelihood, he advised that U.S. strategy should be to establish an island chain running from Japan down to the Philippines so that one power could not attain a hegemonic position in Asia. [17] It should noted that prudence was a key concept in Morgenthau’s theory and the wise leader should be extremely careful in determining the national interest. It was on that basis that he was an early and active opponent of the Vietnam War. Whether Morgenthau would find common cause with those willing to go war over Taiwan remains an open question.

John Mearsheimer, University of Chicago political science professor and arguably the most influential realist today, asserts that “The ultimate goal of every great power is to maximize its share of world power and eventually to dominate the system.” [18] In terms of geopolitics “The U.S. will have no choice but to adopt a realist policy, simply because it must prevent China from becoming a regional hegemon in Asia.” Further, he explains that,

The U.S. does not tolerate peer competitors. As it demonstrated in the 20th century, it is determined to remain the world’s only regional hegemon. Therefore, the U.S. can be expected to go to great lengths to contain China and ultimately weaken it to the point where it is no longer capable of ruling the roost in Asia. In essence, the U.S. is likely to behave towards China much the way it behaved towards the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

A contemporary and highly influential iteration of the realist school is defense analyst Elsbridge Colby’s Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict. [19] Colby, grandson of former CIA Director William Colby, was the primary architect of the Pentagon’s National Defense Strategy. Colby’s effort is the best example I know of that lays out, chapter and verse, how the U.S. foreign policy elite is preparing for possible limited war with China and if necessary, nuclear war. Reaction from other realist strategies is typified by Robert Kaplan’s book cover blurb in which he gushes that Colby “reaches a level of theoretical mastery akin to Hans Morgenthau’s “Politics Among Nations.”

To maintain U.S. global domination, Colby  states the following about China:

We are facing a peer superpower — a generational challenger…China’s first step is a hegemonic position over Asia…then from that position they will be able to gain global predominance from which China will be able to essentially hold sway or influence over the entire world, including of course, Europe, but also the United States.

To prevent this outcome,

Requires that we ruthlessly focus, and that take controversial and aggressive steps ready ourselves now to avoid worse outcomes later. The problem is that we have not been doing nearly enough of these things. On our current course we are courting disaster.

And further, if all else fails, “If China is willing to use nuclear weapons and the United States is not, Beijing will dominate over whatever interests are at stake — whether Taiwan’s fate, that of another U.S. ally or free American access to Asia more generally.” And in a dire warning, Colby asserts that “If China succeeds we can forget about housing, food, savings, affording college for our kids and other domestic needs. The end of ordinary citizen’s property will be here. China would make American society worse off and more susceptible to intense disputes over a stagnant economic pie.”

Prudence was a key concept in Morgenthau’s theory and the wise leader should be careful in circumscribing the “national interest.” It was on that basis that Morgenthau was an early and active opponent of the Vietnam War which he felt lay outside U.S. national interest.

Given the preceding, it’s my sense that U.S. realists view BRI as vast and growing phalanx of Trojan Horses out of which will emerge the means to challenge Washington’s unipolar position. A system that features peaceful development and the promise of “common prosperity” can’t be accommodated within the realist school. As Mearsheimer asserts, irrespective of ideology, “The ultimate goal of every great power is to maximize its share of world power and eventually dominate the globe.”

The BRI is seen as part of a zero-sum game in which Washington’s unipolar world dominance will be eliminated along with a “rules-based international order. ” Speaking on the CBS program 60 Minutes (May 2, 2021), U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said, “Our purpose is…to uphold this rules-based order that China is posing a challenge to. Anyone who poses a challenge to that order, we’re doing to stand up and defend it.” In truth, this order is one which the United States imposed on the world to perpetuate its hegemony. This elusive set of rules, a copy of which ordinary Americans have yet to see, has been thoroughly dissected by Kim Petersen who notes: “It is a given that the rules-based order is an American linguistic instrument designed to preserve it as a global hegemon.”

BRI notions of win-win outcomes and a common destiny for mankind simply can’t be accommodated in the mindset of the realist practitioners within the U.S. national security state.  They only see it as a geopolitical tool, wielded by China, who CIA Director William Burns claims, is the “most important geopolitical threat facing” the United States and if not stopped will eventually challenge American global hegemony.

Given the preceding, it’s unwarranted to surmise that a decade of BRI’s positive contributions to national development and the promise of more to come, is even viewed as more of a threat to U.S. monopoly capital’s interests than China’s rapidly growing military preparedness. That is, BRI is a type of normative power that might allow for the creation of a new international order with multilateral institutions that replace the existing ones without engaging in military conflict with the United States, thus “killing two birds with one stone.” For the realist, intent on defending the U.S. empire:

It goes without saying that this counter-hegemonic geopolitical endeavor is much more threatening to the United States than the geo-strategic actorness of China than the territorial empire which is mainly limited to military actions in China’s maritime vicinity. [20]

This is because BRI’s projects in the Global South stand in sharp relief to their collective memory of the American empire’s history brutal exploitation at the expense of other, of military intervention, giving covert support to opposition groups, stealing natural resources, regime change, CIA coups, assassinations and, of course, the prolongation of structural violence. And even after achieving independence, sometimes after years of liberation struggles, the only development option available has been the capitalist one with its mandated austerity measures that further hastened widespread misery.

The U.S. and its European vassals cannot compete in terms of scale, financing or political will and therefore have nothing to offer but more of the same. Biden’s “Build Back Better” and the EU’s “Global Gateway” are rudderless and lack any domestic support. BRI has no serious competitors. Predatory capitalism is in deep trouble and the window of opportunity to act is closing. As such, the Pentagon may try to sabotage BRI by other means, including provoking China into a military confrontation, possibly in the South China Sea, with all the risks of confrontation between two nuclear powers.

Earlier this year, Air Force General Mike “unrepentant lethality” Minihan predicted a war with China within the next two years. In a memo to those under his command, he stressed preparing “to fight and win inside the first island range, running through Japan, Taiwan and the Philippines. And in speech last September for a 16,000 member aerospace convention, Gen. Minihan declared: “Lethality matters most. When you kill your enemy, every part of life is better. Your food tastes better. Your marriage is stronger.” It’s not clear to what degree Minihan is an outlier but the Pentagon may try to indirectly sabotage BRI by other means, including provoking China into a military confrontation, possibly in the South China Sea, with of all the risks of a war between two nuclear powers.

This requires fostering public fears and paranoia about China and that explains why the mass media machine’s demonization of China is picking up speed. It seems to be working: A March 20-26, 2023 Pew Research Poll, a large majority (84%) of adult Americans now hold a negative view of China and only 14% a positive view, the lowest share ever recorded. And 4 in 10 describe China as “an enemy of the United States,” up 13 points since last year and a majority say the U.S. and China cannot work together to solve international problems. 75% of young Americans (18-25) have an unfavorable opinion of the country and those with a college degree are more likely to hold an unfavorable view than those with some college or less. It’s my sense that within this fevered smearing of “evil” China is an implicit war-mongering message: Something must be done to stop China’s rise in the world. Whether exposure to relentless Sino-phobia will translate into public support for an actual war should never be assumed. And leaves a very narrow and perhaps only temporary opening for counter-narratives that might preserve BRI as an antidote to Western imperialism while increasing the chances for “a human community with a shared destiny.”

ENDNOTES

1. Xi’s World Vision: A Community of Common Destiny, A Shared Home for Humanity, January 15,2017.

2. Chinese President Xi Jinping, speech at the opening ceremony of the 2018 FOCAC Beijing Summit.

3. W. Gyde Moore, Africa-China Review, August, 2020. China has been involved in Africa since the 1950s. Africa welcomed China’s role as a new source of finance and Beijing generally played a constructive role. Deborah Brautigam provides the comprehensive, definitive and corrective account in, The Dragon’s Gift: The Real Story of China in Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009; also, “Chinese Investors in Africa Have Had ‘Significant and Persistently Positive’ Long-Term Effects Despite Controversy,” Eurasia Review, February 1, 2021; And for a thorough debunking of the “Chinese Debt Trap Myth.”

4. “China’s BRI ‘circle of friends’ expanding,” Helsinki Times, 1/16/2023.

5. Z.Wang, “Understanding the Belt and Road Initiative from the Relational Perspective,” Chinese Journal of International Relations, Vol.3, No.1 (2021). As such the BRI will assist the gradual evolution of the existing system “into a more fair and more inclusive system.” Fu Ying, “Is China’s Choice to Submit to the U.S. or Challenge It?” Huffington Post, May 26, 2015.

6. As found in Nedege Rolland, China’s Vision For A New World Order, NBR Special Report, No. 83. January 2020, p. 40-41.

7. Antonio Guerres, “Remarks at the opening of the Belt and Road Forum,” United Nations, May 14, 2017.

9. Silk Road briefing 2023-05-15 on China’s overseas investments.

10. For more on the subject, see Huiyao Wang, “How China can multilaterialize the BRI,” East Asian Forum, 11 March 2023.

11. “What is going on with China’s Belt and Road Initiative?” 23 May 2023.

12. Ozturk, I (2019) “The belt and road initiative as a hybrid international goal,” Working Papers in East Asian Studies, November 2019.

12. Elliot Wilson, “Not dead yet: The future of China’s belt and road,” Euromoney, September 22, 2022.

13. Yan Xuetang, “How China Can Defeat America,” New York Times, January 12, 2011.

14. “China’s belt and road: implications for the United States,” CFR, Independent Task Force Report No. 79.

15. U.S. Economic and Security Review Commission. 2020 Report to the Congress of the U.S. – Economic and Security Review.

16. It’s no coincidence that the realist take on human nature is congruent with the assumptions underlying capitalism and provide an ideological rationale for its practitioners. For a fact-based refutation, see, Gary Olson, Empathy Imperiled: Capitalism, Culture and the Brain (New York: Springer Publishing, 2012).

17. Hans Morgenthau, Essays of a Decade: 1960-70. (New York: Praeger, 1970).

18. John Mearsheimer, “Can China Rise Peacefully?” The National Interest, October 25, 2014.

19. Eldridge A. Colby, The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021. For an extensive look at Colby’s family, wealthy connections and the genesis of this book, see, William A. Shoup, “Giving War a Chance” Monthly Review, May 1, 2022.

20. Theodore Tudoroiu, “The Belt and Road Initiative and China’s New International Order,” Munk School, February 14, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Gary Olson.

We look at a federal indictment of four U.S. citizens for alleged election interference that has received little press attention despite its major implications for free speech and activism in the country. In April, the Biden administration charged four members of a pan-Africanist group with conspiring with the Russian government to sow discord in U.S. elections. Omali Yeshitela, chair of the African People’s Socialist Party, faces charges of conspiracy to defraud the United States, along with Penny Hess, Jesse Nevel and Augustus Romain Jr. Three Russians were also named in an indictment unsealed by the Justice Department on Tuesday. This follows a violent FBI raid on the activists’ properties in Missouri and Florida last summer. “It’s very clear that this is about more than what the government has said it’s about,” says Yeshitela, arguing the real objective in the case is “to destroy our movement.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Paul Street.

“The essence of capitalism is to turn nature into commodities and commodities into capital.” (Michael Parenti)

For as long as I’ve been writing, giving public talks, and all that, I have offered informed critiques of capitalism.

For as long as I’ve been offering informed critiques of capitalism, I get replies like this: “I suppose you think socialism is the answer.”

The paucity of imagination never ceases to disappoint me.

Breaking news: One can challenge capitalism — both its theoretical and practical versions — without being a fan of Castro or Lenin.

Side note to those in the “medical freedom movement”: Your frequent misuse of the words “communism” and “Marxism” does not serve you well.

A few snippets from stuff I’ve written over the years/decades:

Capitalism is an economic system based on perpetual growth and the relentless exploitation of what we’ve come to call “natural resources.”

Resources are finite. They cannot/will not be replicated in a laboratory by transhumanists. Exploiting, poisoning, and consuming the ecosystem alters the delicate and symbiotic balance of the natural world — which only leads to further devastation of our shared landbase.

By definition, such an approach is unsustainable and thus, anti-life.

To gain access to and control of these resources, capitalism requires brutal, sustained military interventions (or the threat thereof).

Military interventions (or the threat thereof) lead to wars, war crimes, the propping up of authoritarian regimes, poverty and repression, environmental devastation, and eventually: corporate dominion over resources.

Capitalism has resulted in a toxic, poisoned, and clear-cut planet ravaged by unremitting war, disease, inequality, repression, incarceration, and discrimination.

If the U.S. is the world’s shining light of “free market capitalism,” why then are its citizens left with no choice but to make desperate (and usually inept) attempts to defend human, environmental, civil, and animal rights?

Capitalism — in its predatory pursuit of profit — requires humans to dominate humans and humans to dominate the landscape — until there’s nothing left.

Capitalism requires constant consumption. Hence, humans are re-programmed into compliant, ill-informed pawns. Pervasive propaganda/public relations keep consumers consuming, workers working, and repressors repressing (thus explaining why middle-class cops pepper spray protestors instead of joining up with them).

To question capitalism is not the same as endorsing any other current “ism.”

To blindly accept capitalism is to ignore the reality that what we call capitalism survives due to the socializing of corporate costs and the privatizing of corporate profits.

To question capitalism is to look beyond the next fiscal quarter, beyond national boundaries, and beyond corporate propaganda.

To blindly accept capitalism is to pretend that technology is neutral, humans can “control” nature, and the playing field is even.

To question capitalism is to have a new vision for the future that extends well beyond today’s closing bell on Wall Street.

To blindly accept capitalism is to prize shareholders over solidarity and commodities over communities.

To question capitalism is to recognize that we can have prosperity and abundance without surrendering compassion and cooperation.

To blindly accept capitalism is to behave as if we are the last generation of humans.

Critiquing capitalism does not make you unAmerican, unpatriotic, communist, socialist, or Marxist. It makes you empathetic, open-minded, curious, and imaginative enough to say: None of the above.

Who knows how many better options can arise if we’d expand our vision and stop viewing capitalism as our god?

I say we find out.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Mickey Z..

The unsealed indictment states that on Tuesday, April 18, 2023, a federal grand jury in Tampa, Florida, levied charges of “conspiring to covertly sow discord in U.S. society, spread Russian propaganda and interfere illegally in U.S. elections.” While no evidence of conspiracy, propagandizing, or interference has been presented, the APSP and its members have the right, as all U.S. citizens do, to freely criticize U.S. domestic and foreign policy.

Not since the Palmer Raids of the early 20th century, nor since the indictment of W.E.B DuBois in 1951, or the confiscation of Paul Robeson’s U.S. passport during the anti-communist “McCarthyist” era, has there been such a hysterical response to African people asserting their rights and freedom of speech in the United States. This renewed attack against anti-imperialist Africans, framed within the absurd notion of “Russian influence,” comes as capitalism decays and U.S. global hegemony loses its hold on the world. The attacks on the APSP and the Uhuru Movement are part of a historical tendency to align African political activists with U.S. “adversary” states to marginalize African internationalism (including solidarity with Cuba and Palestine, for example) and to suppress Black radicalism.

It is also an assault on the efforts of Africans organizing against the violence and murders suffered at the hands of the U.S. state. Indeed, Africans do not need Russia to tell them they are suffering the brunt of violence in the heart of the U.S. empire!

BAP demands the indictment be dismissed, and Uhuru must be free!

For further reading on this case, please read BAP’s July 30 statement that commented on the initial FBI raid of the APSP’s properties.

Struggle to win,

BAP Coordinating Committee

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Black Alliance for Peace.

The unsealed indictment states that on Tuesday, April 18, 2023, a federal grand jury in Tampa, Florida, levied charges of “conspiring to covertly sow discord in U.S. society, spread Russian propaganda and interfere illegally in U.S. elections.” While no evidence of conspiracy, propagandizing, or interference has been presented, the APSP and its members have the right, as all U.S. citizens do, to freely criticize U.S. domestic and foreign policy.

Not since the Palmer Raids of the early 20th century, nor since the indictment of W.E.B DuBois in 1951, or the confiscation of Paul Robeson’s U.S. passport during the anti-communist “McCarthyist” era, has there been such a hysterical response to African people asserting their rights and freedom of speech in the United States. This renewed attack against anti-imperialist Africans, framed within the absurd notion of “Russian influence,” comes as capitalism decays and U.S. global hegemony loses its hold on the world. The attacks on the APSP and the Uhuru Movement are part of a historical tendency to align African political activists with U.S. “adversary” states to marginalize African internationalism (including solidarity with Cuba and Palestine, for example) and to suppress Black radicalism.

It is also an assault on the efforts of Africans organizing against the violence and murders suffered at the hands of the U.S. state. Indeed, Africans do not need Russia to tell them they are suffering the brunt of violence in the heart of the U.S. empire!

BAP demands the indictment be dismissed, and Uhuru must be free!

For further reading on this case, please read BAP’s July 30 statement that commented on the initial FBI raid of the APSP’s properties.

Struggle to win,

BAP Coordinating Committee

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Black Alliance for Peace.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Eve Ottenberg.

With new FBI and Department of “Justice” (DOJ) attacks expected in early January, a defense, mobilization and information session attracted hundreds of allies of the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP).  On Friday, December 23 they zoomed into the “Emergency Mass Meeting: Hands Off Uhuru! Hands Off Africa!”  The APSP told its supporters that it expects indictments in early January 2023 and possibly sooner.

Indictments could include many more than the four names listed as “unindicted co-conspirators” during raids of July 29, 2022: Chairman Omali Yeshitela, Party Director of Agitation and Propaganda Akilé Anai, African People’s Solidarity Committee Chair Penny Hess and Uhuru Solidarity Movement Chair Jesse Nevel.

At 5 am that morning, the FBI invaded multiple St. Louis locations, including the private residence of Omali Yeshitela and his wife and APSP Deputy Chair Ona Zené Yeshitela and the Uhuru Solidarity Center, as well as the Uhuru House in St. Petersburg FL.

During the December 23 webinar, Yeshitela vividly recalled that flashbang grenades were set off and laser points were directed at his chest when he opened the door of their home, and a drone almost hit Ona when she came down the stairs.  Both of them were handcuffed and the entire Black working-class St. Louis neighborhood was under siege for hours.   The federal agents seized all of their devices, such as computers and phones, thereby seriously hampering their political work.

As reported by Toward Freedom, in St. Petersburg FBI agents lured Akilé Anai “outside her home, saying her car had been broken into. Upon opening her car, they forced her to hand over her devices.”

The FBI and DOJ claimed that the raids were sparked by Yeshitela’s having conversations with with Aleksandr Ionov, a Russian they accused of spreading “Russian propaganda.”  During the webinar Yeshitela described how insulting and demeaning it was to insinuate that the APSP is unable to analyze African people’s state of oppression and make decisions for itself but can only reach conclusions after Russians tell it what to think.

This is particularly chilling for those who do solidarity work with Latin America, Africa and Asia.  According to the precedent set by the July 29 raids and indictments, anyone who meets with any representative of another country could face criminal charges under the Foreign Agent Registration Act, which the APSP expects to be used to justify their bullying.  Actions against the APSP could lay the foundation for indicting me for interviewing and writing about Cuban doctors.

Legal abuse could be leveled against everyone else who has visited the island and explained what the revolution has accomplished.  The FBI/DOJ could indict Monthly Review for publishing my book on Cuban Health Care along with every other publisher who releases books on Cuba, Venezuela, Colombia and other countries that have resisted US imperialism.

A noticeable exception would be citizens and lawmakers who meet with and are influenced by agents of Israel.  They have no reason to fear harassment.  Of course, it might be quite different for those having the temerity to meet with Palestinians.

After the raids, the Black Alliance for Peace announced that it would “concentrate its efforts on not only opposing the U.S. war agenda globally but the war and repression being waged on Black and Brown communities within U.S. borders.”

A major purpose of the December 23 webinar was to build nationwide and international support for the July 29 victims so people are prepared to respond when the indictments come down.  In light of this, the Green Party of St. Louis issued a statement which appears below.  Following it are the APSP’s “Principles of Unity” which it asks organizations to endorse. You can communicate your support at the website HANDSOFFUHURU.ORG.

The Other Barrel

What is written above only describes one barrel of the corporate state’s shotgun.  The other barrel consists of efforts to shut down the many projects under the APSP umbrella.  They simultaneously offer meaningful life-changing needs for those in poor Black US communities and provide examples of what a socialist society could look like.

The projects are part of what the APSP calls its “Black Power Blueprint” (BPB) and what socialist theorists might call “concretization” of its ideas which “prefigure” a post-capitalist society.  The BPB’s efforts may be the most extensive integration of theory and practice occurring in the US today.

Perhaps the prime example is Uhuru Wa Kulea (African Women’s Health Center) which has a vision “to provide health and self-care programs that reinforce our traditional African culture, and invest in the future of our community with doula and childbirth educator certification programs along with opportunities for employment and entrepreneurship.”  Concepts for the Center rely heavily on the health care system of Cuba, which now has life expectancy greater than the US, due to its focus on women and children.

APSP-related efforts also include

+ The Uhuru House Community Center which transformed a condemned building into a three-story community event and program space named Akwaaba Hall;

+ A Community Basketball Court to allow for “spirited youth programs” and tournaments;

+ Murals at the Gary Brooks Community Garden that has been in operation for two years and at the recently completed Community Basketball Court which depict “Black families controlling our own culture and food economy by planting, growing and harvesting food from the garden;”

+ Completed renovation of a 4-plex apartment building devoted to housing for the African Independence Workforce Program which creates jobs for those re-entering the Black community from the prison system;

+ The Uhuru Jiko Kitchen and Bakery/Café which, once the refurbishing of an existing commercial structure is completed, will bring African economic and cultural life to a depressed commercial area and will help stop gentrification;

+ A planned program for the Black Power Square where condemned buildings have been removed to make way for retail opportunities by utilizing shipping containers to house community-based small businesses and create jobs.

The above are in St. Louis.  APSP also runs Uhuru Foods and Pies in Oakland CA and St. Petersburg FL, a community garden/farm in Huntsville AL, furniture stores in Oakland CA and Philadelphia PA, a radio station in St. Petersburg FL and the Burning Spear newspaper.

The goal of attacking the APSP leaders is to exterminate every project and every component of the BPB which Omali Yeshitela speaks of as “building duel and contending power,” funded to a significant degree through reparations raised by the Uhuru Solidarity Movement (USM).  The government, of course, has virtually unlimited police and legal resources at its disposal to drown out dissent.  If it can force the APSP to divert its energies and limited budget to its legal defense, the FBI/DOJ can undermine projects and terrorize solidarity activists even if it imprisons very few.

This is the message from one barrel of the snarling state:

“Don’t hope for a new life …

“don’t imagine a new world…

“and certainly don’t try to build one …

“because capitalism is all you can look forward to.”

The other barrel of the shotgun screams that efforts by US citizens to build solidarity with victims of global oppression will be met with the most vicious attacks the corporate state can muster.

Statement by Don Fitz on behalf of the Green Party of St. Louis, December 23, 2022.

The Green Party of St. Louis fully agrees with the right of African people to advocate and organize for the unification, liberation and self-determination of Africa and African People as laid out in the “Principles of Unity.”

The FBI raid of July 29 was not just against the APSP.  It was an attack on all working for social justice and liberation.

As has happened many times before, governmental violence was unleashed first against Black/African victims to serve as an example.

The Biden administration is fully responsible for opening one of the most repressive eras in US history.

We would have to go back to the racist president Woodrow Wilson and his imprisonment of Eugene Debs to find a case of people being arrested so blatantly for their political beliefs.

Even during the US war against Viet Nam, people were not arrested merely for listening to Vietnamese views or visiting North Viet Nam.

The current actions of the Biden administration are a message that no one can question his proxy war against Russia –  a message that Americans have lost the right to make their own decisions.

The events of July 29, 2022 are meant to intimidate any who stand in solidarity with movements and countries who are struggling for their liberation, such as Cuba.

They are warning that the same could happen to supporters of revolutionary Venezuela.

The FBI raids are a threat to those who defend the right of Nicaragua to chart its own course.

Indictment of Uhuru members aids and abets those criminals who overthrew the democratically elected government in Peru on Dec 7, 2022.

Biden’s proxy war against Russia gives lie to his supposed opposition to climate change.  One of the real reasons for Biden’s “Hate Russia!” campaign is to allow US corporations to corner the market of fossil fuels in Ukraine and force Europe to buy US natural gas at absurdly high prices.

Under Evo Morales, Bolivia sought to control its own lithium, a critical element for “alternative” energy.  When he was violently overthrown, the Trump/Biden supporter Elon Musk (of Tesla fame) proclaimed “We will coup whoever we want!”

The great majority of the world’s cobalt, also essential for “alternative” energy, lies in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (home to many other essential minerals).  Efforts of the Biden administration to destroy the APSP reveals his plan for anyone who advocates self-determination for Africa.

 Principles of Unity

We unite with the right of African people to advocate and organize for the unification, liberation and self-determination of Africa and African People.

+ We denounce the FBI and US government’s attacks on the African Liberation Movement historically and currently

+ We demand that the US government drop the charges against any member of the African People’s Socialist Party, the Uhuru Movement and those named and implied in the indictment and warrants

+ We demand the return of all confiscated property to the Uhuru Movement and compensation for damages and payment of reparations for the attacks

+ We demand an end to FBI surveillance and infiltration of the Uhuru Movement and release of all documents on the Uhuru Movement since the 1960s

+ We denounce the assault on the anti-colonial activity and programs of the African People’s Socialist Party/Uhuru Movement such as the Black Power Blueprint and other economic institutions and projects.

Find out more about the repression!  At 6 pm CT, January 9, 2023 join the APSP update on the indictments and defense.  Click on https://handsoffuhuru.org/ and scroll to “Hands Off Uhuru! Hands Off Africa!” to register.  At 7:30 pm CT, January 11, 2023 the Missouri Green Party will have a webinar on “The Long Story of Repression in the US.”  Email outreach@missourigreenparty.org to get information and to register.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Don Fitz.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by W. T. Whitney.

Pittsburgh community organizer Summer Lee was elected the first Black woman to represent Pennsylvania in Congress after winning the state’s 12th Congressional District in Tuesday’s midterm elections. Lee, currently a state representative, faced off against Republican Mike Doyle — who happened to share the same name as the outgoing Democratic incumbent. We speak with Aimee Allison, president and founder of She the People, who explains how Lee successfully fended off a massive negative ad campaign funded by the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC. Allison also speaks about the mayoral race in Los Angeles, where progressive Karen Bass is in a tight race with billionaire Rick Caruso, as well as other races where strong progressive candidates fell short. “The heartbreaking loss of some of the nation’s best candidates demonstrates that the Democrats need to invest early and very, very strongly in these excellent candidates in order to protect and build up their capacity to turn out the votes,” says Allison.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

With Democrats at risk of losing both the House and Senate in Tuesday’s midterms, we speak with Justice Democrats spokesperson Waleed Shahid about the progressives favored to win congressional seats. Texas city councilmember and former labor organizer Greg Casar, Illinois state Representative Delia Ramirez and Pennsylvania community organizer Summer Lee have all been endorsed by Justice Democrats, who are best known for helping catapult members of the Squad to victory in 2018. “I think that we’ll continue to see these progressives expand the horizon on issues that working-class communities care about,” says Shahid, who critiques the Democratic Party for weak messaging on the economy. Shahid also discusses how the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC is pouring money into defeating progressive candidates like Summer Lee.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Photograph Source: Hou Bo – Public Domain

The Communist Party of China (CPC) held its 20th National Congress from October 16 to October 22, 2022. Every five years, the delegates of the CPC’s 96 million members meet to elect its top leaders and to set the future direction for the party. One of the main themes of the congress this year was “rejuvenation” of the country through “a Chinese path to modernization.” In his report to the congress, Xi Jinping, the CPC’s general secretary, sketched out the way forward to build China “into a modern socialist country.”

Most of the Western media commentary about the congress ignored the actual words that were said in Beijing, opting instead to make wild speculations about the deliberations in the party (including about the sudden departure of former Chinese President Hu Jintao from the Great Hall of the People during the closing session of the congress, who left because he was feeling ill). Much could have been gained from listening to what people said during the National Congress instead of putting words in their mouths.

Socialist Modernization

When the Communist Party took power in China in 1949, the country was the 11th poorest country in the world. For the first time since the “century of humiliation” that began with the British wars on China from 1839 onward, China has developed into a major power with the social situation of the Chinese people having greatly improved from their condition in 1949. A short walk away from the Great Hall of the People, where the congress was held, is the Chairman Mao Memorial Hall, which reminds people of the immense achievement of the Chinese Revolution of 1949 and its impact on Chinese society.

Xi Jinping became the general secretary of the CPC at the 18th National Congress in 2012 and was elected president of the People’s Republic of China in March 2013. Since then, the country has gone through significant changes. Economically, China’s GDP has almost doubled to become the world’s second-largest economy, growing from 58.8 trillion yuan in 2013 to 114.37 trillion yuan in 2021, and its GDP expanded at a rate of 6.6 percent per year during the same period. Meanwhile, the country’s per capita GDP almost doubled between 2013 and 2021, with China approaching the high-income country bracket. In terms of the world economy, China’s GDP was 18.5 percent of the global total in 2021, and the country was responsible for 30 percent of world economic growth from 2013 to 2021. China also manufactured 30 percent of the world’s goods in 2021, up from more than 20 percent in 2012. This adds to the decades of historically unprecedented growth rate of 9.8 percent per yearfrom 1978 to 2014 since the launching of economic reform in China in 1978. These economic achievements are historic and did not come without their set of challenges and consequences.

While delivering the report at the opening of this congress, Xi spoke about the situation that the Chinese people faced a decade ago: “Great achievements had been secured in reform, opening up, and socialist modernization… At the same time, however, a number of prominent issues and problems—some of which had been building for years and others which were just emerging—demanded urgent action.” He went on to talk about the “slide toward weak, hollow, and watered-down party leadership,” pointing out that “money worship, hedonism, egocentricity, and historical nihilism” were the deep-seated problems in a development process that was “imbalanced, uncoordinated, and unsustainable.” These are significant self-criticisms made by the man who has led the country for the past decade.

Corruption

A decade ago, in his speech at the 18th CPC National Congress, outgoing Secretary General Hu Jintao mentioned the word “corruption” several times. “If we fail to handle this issue well,” he warned, “it could prove fatal to the party, and even cause the collapse of the party and the fall of the state.” Xi Jinping’s first task after taking over as general secretary of the CPC was to tackle this issue. In his inaugural speech as the party head in 2013, Xi said he was committed to “the fighting of tigers and flies at the same time,” referring to the corruption that had spread from the high echelons down to the grassroots level within the party and the government. The party launched “eight-point” rules for its members in December 2012, to limit practices such as inconsequential meetings and extravagant receptions for official visits, and advocated “diligence and thrift.”

Meanwhile, a year after the launch of the “mass line campaign” by Xi’s administration in June 2013, official meetings were reduced by 25 percent in comparison to the period before the campaign, 160,000 “phantom staff” were removed from the government payroll, and 2,580 “unnecessary” official building projects were stopped. Over the past decade, from November 2012 to April 2022, nearly 4.4 million cases involving 4.7 million officials were investigated in the fight against corruption. Party members have been investigated. In the first half of this year alone, 24 senior officials were investigated for corruption, and former ministers, provincial governors, and presidents of the biggest state-owned banks have been expelled from the party and given harsh sentences, including life imprisonment.

Hu Jintao’s comments and Xi Jinping’s actions reflected concerns that during the period of high growth after 1978, CPC members grew increasingly detached from the people. During the first months of his presidency, Xi launched the “mass line campaign” to bring the party closer to the grassroots. As part of the “targeted poverty alleviation” campaign launched in 2014, 800,000 party cadres were sent to survey and visit 128,000 villages as part of this project. In 2020, despite the COVID-19 pandemic, China successfully eradicated extreme poverty, contributing to 76 percent of the global reduction in poverty till October 2015.

Beyond the party’s self-correction, Xi’s strong words and actions against the corrupt “flies and tigers” contributed to the Chinese people’s confidence in the government. According to a 2020 research paper by Harvard Kennedy School’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, the overall satisfaction with the government’s performance was 93.1 percent in 2016, seeing the most significant growth in the more underdeveloped regions in the countryside. This rise of confidence in rural areas resulted from increased social services, trust in local officials, and the campaign against poverty.

Right Side of History

At the 20th Congress, Xi Jinping reflected on the history of colonialism—including China’s “century of humiliation”—and the implications this would have for China going forward. “In pursuing modernization,” Xi said, “China will not tread the old path of war, colonization, and plunder taken by some countries. That brutal and blood-stained path of enrichment at the expense of others caused great suffering for the people of developing countries. We will stand firmly on the right side of history and on the side of human progress.”

Chinese officials routinely tell us that their country is not interested in seeking dominance in the world. What China would like to do is to collaborate with other countries to try and solve humanity’s dilemmas. The Belt and Road Initiative, for instance, was launched in 2013 with the purpose of “win-win” cooperation and development and has thus far built much-needed infrastructure with investment and construction contracts totaling $1 trillion in almost 150 countries. China’s interest in tackling the climate catastrophe is evidenced by its planting of a quarter of the world’s new forests over the past decade and in becoming a world leader in renewable energy investment and electric vehicle production. On the public health side, China adopted a COVID-19 policy that prioritizes lives over profit, donated 325 million doses of vaccines, and saved millions of lives as a result of this. As a result of its initiatives in the public health sector, the average life expectancy of Chinese people was 77.93 years in 2020 and reached 78.2 years in 2021, and for the first time, surpassed life expectancy in the United States—77 years in 2020 and 76.1 in 2021—making this drop “the biggest two-year decline in life expectancy since 1921-1923.”

China’s communists do not see these events without putting them in the context of the long process undertaken by the government toward achieving and ensuring their social development. In 27 years, China will celebrate the centenary of its revolution. In 1997, then-President of China Jiang Zemin spoke about the two centenary goals—the 100-year markers following the founding of the Communist Party (1921) and the Chinese Revolution (1949)—that “underwrite all China’s long-term economic planning programs and contemporary macroeconomic policy agendas.” At that time, the focus was on growth rates. In 2017, Xi Jinping shifted the emphasis of these goals to the “three tough battles”: to defuse major financial risks, to eradicate poverty, and to control pollution. This new congress has gone beyond those “tough battles” to protect Chinese sovereignty and to expand the dignity of the Chinese people.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Vijay Prashad and Tings Chak.

The late Mark Fisher described all this as ‘capitalist realism’ (the title of his 2008 book on the subject), ’the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible to even imagine a coherent alternative to it.’ Central to capitalist realism is the idea that an economy based on planning and democracy is not viable, inevitably leading to endemic shortages, bureaucracy, and stagnant growth.

Such were the arguments put forward by Austrian School economist Ludwig von Mises in his seminal 1920 essay titled ‘Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth.’ Mises asked how could planning boards know which products to produce, how much should be produced at a given time, which raw materials had to be used, and how much of them? Where should production be located and which production process is the most efficient? And how would all this information be gathered and calculated and then be retransmitted back to all the relevant actors throughout the economy? Mises’ answer was that no human process could accomplish it. He argued it is simply beyond the capacity of any planning agency to accurately describe supply and demand across all economic sectors, therefore planners working with flawed data would regularly produce vast mismatches between what is demanded and what is supplied, resulting in inevitable shortages and the requisite barbarism.

Instead Mises argued the simple mechanism of prices floating in a market contain all the needed information. This argument was later taken up by Friedrich von Hayek. Hayek also viewed prices as information-gathering machines reflecting the discrete bits of knowledge scattered among executives, workers, and consumers. Prices, derived from the collective wisdom of the crowd, could coordinate information through a decentralized network Hayek called a ‘spontaneous order’, making planning unnecessary.

On the surface these arguments seem formidable and have been used against socialism for generations. Lenin himself acknowledged the difficulty of building a planned economy in revolutionary Russia in the aftermath of the destruction of World War I when he said to the Session of the all-Russia C.E.C. in 1918:

We know about socialism, but knowledge of organization on a scale of millions, knowledge of the organization and distribution of goods, etc.- this we do not have. The old Bolshevik leaders did not teach us this…And we say, let him be a thorough-paced rascal even, but if he has organized a trust, if he is a merchant who has dealt with the organization of production and distribution for millions and tens of millions, if he has acquired experience- we must learn from him.

But these arguments can certainly be dismantled. Consider first how much planning and public research is already happening in a modern economy.  For instance, in what has now long been an annual routine of anticipation and leaks in the business press, Apple again recently launched its latest version of the iPhone, iPhone 14 (and the pricier iPhone 14 Pro). The release of iPhone 13 last September brought back the long lines of loyal devotees to Apple stores all over the world after the pandemic paused the ritual. It was the iPhone first released in 2007 (followed by the iPad), that ultimately made Apple the first company in the world to reach a trillion dollars in market cap value on August 18, 2018- not to mention the first to reach $2 trillion (August 19, 2020) and $3 trillion (January 3, 2022). In the five year period following the 2007 launch, Apple’s global net sales increased nearly 460 percent. It was the iPhone that more than anything made Steve Jobs a modern icon.

Beyond that, the iPhone (and smart phones generally) is often held up by defenders of the status quo as proof that the status quo is working just fine. After all, what better evidence of the power of capital than the fact that billions of humans now hold in the palm of their hands more than 100,000 the processing power and more than one million times the Random Access Memory than the computer that landed Apollo 11 on the moon in 1969? A few years ago the meme ‘Capitalism Made Your iPhone’ made the rounds on social media.

If that narrative sounds compelling, it is also quite incomplete. While Jobs and the product designers at Apple undoubtedly had a talent for synergy and design, the Bauhaus inspired minimalist look to the iPhone was always a large part of its brilliance, the actual technology inside the iPhone has its roots not in Apple labs but in publicly funded research. This includes touch-screen displays, GPS, the Internet, even Siri. The first workable prototype for the internet came in late 1960 with ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) funded by the U.S. Department of Defense. GPS got its start the same way a few years later.  Federal funding for computer science increased rapidly in the 1970s, reaching $250 million annually by 1975. The internet received another boost with the establishment of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, funded by the National Science Foundation in the 1980s (out of which emerged Mosaic which later became Netscape). The U.S. government was an early, sole consumer for processing units based on Integrated Circuits. It heavily subsidized the domestic semiconductor industry in late 1980s to the early 1990s through the SEMATECH program. Apple was able to ride this wave of massive state investments in the technologies that underpinned the iPhone.

It also has to be pointed out, as brilliantly described by Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski in their book The People’s Republic of Wal-Mart, that large, successful enterprises, even while operating within a general market economy, do a great deal of large scale planning internally. Some of these companies have larger market caps than most countries’ GDP. Apple and Amazon are worth more than 90 percent of the world’s countries. In 1970 the GDP of the Soviet Union, the second largest economy in the world at the time, came in at around $433.4 billion. In 2021 Wal-Mart’s revenue was $572.8 billion. These organizations eschew internal markets. The different departments, stores, and suppliers don’t compete with each other. Everything is coordinated. To that extant one can say much of the global economy is already planned.

In fact, there is a recent example of a corporation that actually took markets seriously enough to attempt to incorporate them internally. In February 2013, Edward Lampert, founder of the hedge fund ESL Investments, took over as the CEO of Sears Holdings (the parent company of Kmart and Sears formed after the former bought the latter), one of Wal-Mart’s main competitors. Sears goes back to 1892. Its catalog once revolutionized shopping for Americans, particularly the many back then who lived in rural areas. Lampert announced his intention to create markets within the company, breaking it up into 30, then later 40, autonomous units that would compete with each other. Each unit had their own president, board of directors, chief operating officer, and separately measured their own profit and losses. The idea being this would efficiently produce better data.

Instead it devolved to absurdity. Creating internal divisions blocked internal synergy. If a division needed help from the HR or IT departments, it had to write a formal request or use a contractor. In order to optimize profits at one division at the expense of others, infighting erupted over everything from floor shelving to advertising space on circulars. The results quickly spoke for themselves. A Bloomberg expose from 2013 described the gross spectacle of screw drivers being advertised next to lingerie. Little funding went to needed upgrades at stores, many of which became dilapidated. Sales dropped by $10 billion. By October 2018 Sears Holdings filed for bankruptcy and Lampert stepped down as CEO (though he remained chairman). While Sears was facing stagnation since the 1990s as online retail took off, it was an epic Randian failure that truly crashed it.

Compare all that to the fluidity of Amazon. Amazon is certainly a soul-sucking corporation that grinds workers to dust. Yet it has achieved logistical and operational genius. Consider that at any given moment Amazon has 600 million items up for sale, basically all available to be home delivered within two days from strategically placed distribution centers that more and more run on algorithms and robotics. Amazon uses search and point-of-sales data and search history to stock the centers. The result: Amazon receives about 115 orders, basically a full delivery truck worth, every second. That’s 10 million fulfilled orders for a day. An estimated 60 percent of U.S. adults are Amazon Prime members.

In a November 2019 profile for The Atlantic of Amazon founder and then CEO Jeff Bezos, Franklin Foer had this astute observation:

Amazon, however, has acquired the God’s-eye view of the economy that Hayek never imagined any single entity could hope to achieve. At any moment, its website has more than 600 million items for  sale and more than 3 million vendors selling them. With its history of past purchases, it has collected the world’s most comprehensive catalog of consumer desire, which allows it to anticipate both individual and collective needs.  With its logistics business—and its growing network of trucks and planes— it has an understanding of the flow of goods around the world. In other words, if Marxist revolutionaries ever seized power in the United States, they could nationalize Amazon and call it a day.

This would definitely be quite a first step, but only a first step. Socialism focuses on social relations and workers democracy. Simply nationalizing Amazon wouldn’t achieve it and, in fact, risks replacing the dictatorship of capital with another dictatorship. But the greater point holds. Such efficiency, flexible planning, and logistical power could be captured and used to create a just, egalitarian society. In a world full of crisscrossing cables, instant global communication, along with ever expanding AI, the arguments of Mises and Hayek truly lose their power. There are now many trillions of pieces worth of data that could be used to make non-market decisions about how to allocate the use of resources. ‘Big Data’ understandably has a bad name among many leftists; however, data is the lifeblood of any planned economy. Rather than being used for surveillance and targeted advertising, it can be used to determine and fulfill peoples’ needs.

We have a rudimentary example of how this could work from Chile’s socialist experiment in the early 1970s. By the end of 1971 the Allende government had nationalized more than 150 enterprises, including twelve of the twenty largest companies in the country. Recognizing the difficulty of reordering the economy in the face of fierce opposition and American sanctions, the government instituted Project Cybersyn. The aim, using the limited computing power that was available to Chile at the time (there was only one mainframe IBM 360/50 available for the project, it relied instead on a network of telex machines), to connect data from the factory floor and the State Development Corporation in order to enable quick decision-making in response to changing conditions. The system would provide daily access to production data and modeling tools the state could use to predict future economic behavior. A futuristic control room would facilitate communication and data analysis.

As described by Eden Medina in her book Cybernetic Revolutionaries, though primitive and ultimately not completed, the system did enable the government to overcome a general strike called by the opposition in October 1972. Shortages were quickly reported through the network allowing different enterprises shifted resources. Government data showed raw materials continued to flow to 95 percent of economically crucial enterprises and food supplies were maintained at 50 to 70 percent. Project Cybersyn didn’t survive the Pinochet coup in 1973 so its full potential wasn’t tapped, yet the promise remains. It is easy to imagine what can be planned with today’s computing power and mountains of data.

Of course, it takes more than advanced computer modeling and AI to build socialism. It first takes the working class democratically controlling the means of production. This can ultimately only be won at the barricades. However, as examples from the technologies of the iPhone to Amazon to the COVID vaccines show, planning works. More and more we are moving toward Trotsky’s vision of the future of human innovation spelled out in Literature and Revolution:

He will point out places for mountains and for passes. He will change the course of rivers and he will lay down rules for oceans. The idealist simpletons may say this is a bore, but that is why they are simpletons…. Most likely, thickets and forests and grouse and tigers will remain, but only where man commands them to remain.  And man will do it so well the tiger won’t even notice the machine, or feel the change, but will live as he lived in primeval times.

While there is a wide range of opinions as to when its beginning should be marked, there is now an emerging consensus that the planet is indeed in a new period of geological history, the Anthropocene, one in which human civilization essentially creates its own environment. This concept no doubt causes many to tremble in fear but denial of our collective responsibility will not change it. The specter of global warming, possible future pandemics, and other environmental challenges are awesome, but so are the possibilities of maximizing human freedom, ending war and poverty, and probing deep space. We cannot trust the irrational, unplanned capitalist system with its destructive incentives to fulfill our potential. As the world is witnessing with the COVID pandemic and global food crisis, far from the picturesque visions of Mises and Hayek, a reliance of markets leads to inefficiency, hoarding, and reactionary nationalism. The only good Anthropocene is socialist.  Its vehicle is an empowered global working class. It still has a world to win.

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

In 2009, as a deep recession triggered an epidemic of layoffs and foreclosures, The New York Times asked Barbara Ehrenreich to write a series of articles about poverty in the United States. She visited Los Angeles, where I introduced her to community, tenants' rights, and union organizers. She also traveled to Detroit, Dallas, Baltimore, Saint Louis, Racine, Wisconsin, Wilmington, Delaware, and New York, talking with low-income people as well as with poverty researchers and activists. When she got back to her home in Virginia, she emailed me, "I'm ready to look over my notes and see where I've gotten to. It's a bit overwhelming, but I'm feeling my anger level rising, so I better figure something out."

She made radical ideas sound like common sense.

What she figured out was that the composition of poverty was changing. In four remarkable articles ( "Is It Now a Crime to Be Poor?," "The Recession's Racial Divide," "Too Poor to Make the News," and "A Homespun Safety Net"), she described two groups of Americans enduring hardship and destitution: the downwardly mobile middle class and those who had been poor before the economic downturn and for whom conditions had gotten even worse. But she also noted a burgeoning movement among the poor and their allies to challenge America's indifference to poverty, low wages, and a bare-bones safety net.

Her reporting reflected her two unrelenting outlooks on life: outrage and hope. It was a tightrope that Ehrenreich—who died of a stroke on Thursday at 81 at a hospice facility in Alexandria, Virginia—walked during most of her life.

Turning the Radical Into the Commonsense

The headline on The New York Times' obituary called Ehrenreich an "Explorer of Prosperity's Dark Side." It is true that, like many other muckraking reporters and radical reformers, Ehrenreich exposed the dark (and human) side of the United States' inequality, injustice, and needless suffering. But she wasn't just a social critic lobbing rhetorical grenades from the sidelines. She was also an activist who converted her hot anger into action.

Ehrenreich was on the frontlines of the progressive crusades of her lifetime: labor, feminism, anti-war, civil rights, and democratic socialism. She fought injustice with her prolific writing, many speeches, and deep involvement in these movements. She dared to envision a better world—in the short term and the long term.

Ehrenreich wrote 23 books, some of them collections of her essays, columns, and investigative reports for publications like The New York Times, Time, and Harper's. She is best known for her 2001 book, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, about the working poor.

Her wit, biting sarcasm, caustic irreverence, and underlying idealism made it easy for mainstream readers to accept, or at least take seriously, Ehrenreich's leftist views on the economy, unions, women's rights, big business, and politics. She made radical ideas sound like common sense.

She inherited her parents' working-class pride and suspicion of powerful elites.

Ehrenreich was born Barbara Alexander on August 26, 1941, to Isabelle Oxley and Ben Howes Alexander in Butte, Montana, which she described as then being "a bustling, brawling, blue-collar mining town."

Barbara Ehrenreich made radical ideas sound like common sense. Her mother, a homemaker, came from a mining family. As an alternate delegate to the Democratic Party convention in 1964, she joined the protest by the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party that tried to unseat that state's segregated delegation.

Her father, a third-generation copper miner, eventually escaped that grueling occupation by attending the Montana State School of Mines (later called Montana Technological University) and then Carnegie Mellon University, rising to become a senior executive at the Gillette Corporation. As her father pursued his education and career, the family moved frequently, from Montana to Pennsylvania, New York, Massachusetts, and finally Los Angeles. Her parents later divorced.

In an interview with C-SPAN, she described her parents as "strong union people." They had two strong rules, she recalled: "Never cross a picket line and never vote Republican."

"As a little girl," she told The New York Times:

I would go to school and have to decide if my parents were the evil people they were talking about, part of the Red Menace we read about in the Weekly Reader, just because my mother was a liberal Democrat who would always talk about racial injustice.

In her 1990 collection of essays, The Worst Years of Our Lives, she described her father, who had Alzheimer's disease but whose political memory remained sharp. During the mental assessment performed by a neurologist, he was asked the name of the president of the United States. As Ehrenreich recalled, "His blue eyes would widen incredulously, surprised at the neurologist's ignorance, then he would snort in majestic indignation, ‘Reagan, that dumb son of a bitch.'"

Ehrenreich graduated from Reed College in 1963 with a degree in physical chemistry and earned a Ph.D. in cellular immunology from Rockefeller University in 1968. She quickly abandoned a career in science for writing and activism. In 1969 she and her first husband, John Ehrenreich, a clinical psychologist whom she met in the anti-war movement, wrote Long March, Short Spring, an account of the student rebellion against the Vietnam War. Ehrenreich used her science background in her early works about healthcare, becoming a major critic of corporate-oriented healthcare and of doctors' and hospitals' mistreatment of women.

In 1969 she went to work for a small nonprofit organization, the Health Policy Advisory Center, which advocated for better healthcare for low-income people. Ehrenreich wrote investigative pieces for the organization's monthly newsletter, some of which were incorporated into her co-authored book The American Health Empire: Power, Profits, and Politics (1971).

The birth of her first child Rosa, in a public clinic in New York in 1970, changed Ehrenreich's self-awareness. "I was the only white patient at the clinic," she explained to The Globe and Mail, a Canadian newspaper, in 1987,

and I found out this was the healthcare women got. They induced my labor because it was late in the evening and the doctor wanted to go home. I was enraged. The experience made me a feminist.... The prenatal care I received at a hospital clinic showed me that PhDs were not immune from the vilest forms of sexism.

In the early 1970s, Ehrenreich's expertise in healthcare issues merged with her feminism. Her 1972 pamphlet (co-authored with Deirdre English), Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers, became a manifesto of the burgeoning women's health movement. She followed this with Complaints and Disorders: The Sexual Politics of Sickness (1977) and For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts' Advice to Women (1989), which helped popularize the idea that the healthcare system controls women's choices by mystifying the alleged expertise of (mostly male) physicians. In 1971 she became an assistant professor of health sciences at the State University of New York, Old Westbury, but quit after three years to devote herself to full-time writing and activism.

In 1980 Ehrenreich shared the National Magazine Award with colleagues at Mother Jones for excellence in reporting, for the cover story "The Corporate Crime of the Century," about "what happens after the U.S. government forces a dangerous drug, pesticide, or other product off the domestic market, then the manufacturer sells that same product, frequently with the direct support of the State Department, throughout the rest of the world." Between 1994 and 1998, Ehrenreich was a regular columnist for Time magazine. After that came her best-known work: Nickel and Dimed.

Not Getting By

In 1998 she began her most ambitious and best-known writing project by taking a series of low-wage jobs to explore how Americans at the bottom of the economy cope with persistent poverty. The idea emerged at an expensive lunch at an American nouveau restaurant with Harper's editor Lewis Lapham, who encouraged her to go "undercover" to challenge the stereotypes about the poor.

The project took her to Key West, Florida, where she waited tables; to Portland, Maine, where she toiled as a dietary aide in a nursing home and a maid for a cleaning service; and to Minneapolis, Minnesota, where she worked as a clerk for Walmart.

Ehrenreich set certain rules for herself: no relying on her education or writing skills to land a job, take the highest-paid job offered her, and find the cheapest accommodations she could. Her goal was not only to experience poverty but also to do the math: as a low-wage worker, could she actually make ends meet?

You might think that unskilled jobs would be a snap for someone who holds a Ph.D. and whose normal line of work requires learning entirely new things every couple of weeks. Not so. The first thing I discovered is that no job, no matter how lowly, is truly "unskilled."

She earned about half a living wage, and she could not imagine supporting children or paying for medical expenses on the $7 an hour or so she earned.

Her 1999 Harper's article about those experiences earned her a Sidney Hillman Award and became a chapter in her book, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, published in 2001. She observed:

What surprised and offended me most about the low-wage workplace was the extent to which one is required to surrender one's basic civil rights and self-respect. I learned this at the very beginning of my stint as a waitress, when I was warned that my purse could be searched by management at any time. I wasn't carrying stolen salt shakers or anything else of a compromising nature, but still, there's something about the prospect of a purse search that makes a woman feel a few buttons short of fully dressed.

The book quickly struck a nerve. Five years earlier President Bill Clinton and the Republican Congress had enacted so-called welfare reform, restricting family assistance for women and children, and pushing many former welfare recipients into the labor market. After a few years, many economists and politicians celebrated the plan as a huge success, pointing to a dramatic decline in the relief rolls.

But others noted that although the number of people on welfare had shrunk, welfare reform had not done much to reduce the poverty rate, because so many of them ended up in dead-end low-wage jobs, usually without health insurance—leaving them worse off than before.

As late as 2010, Nickel and Dimed still made the American Library Association's annual list of the top 10 most frequently challenged books.

Nickel and Dimed spent more than 100 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list and sold more than 1.5 million copies. Many colleges assigned the book in classes.

A small but vocal group raised objections to the book. In July 2003, for example, conservatives in North Carolina purchased a full-page ad in the Raleigh News & Observer complaining that students at the University of North Carolina were required to read "a classic Marxist rant" that "mounts an all-out assault on Christians, conservatives, and capitalism." But other faculty, students, and politicians used the book to lobby for an increase in the minimum wage.

As late as 2010, Nickel and Dimed still made the American Library Association's annual list of the top 10 most frequently challenged books—books that some Americans sought to keep off library shelves and school reading lists.

For many Americans, including my own students, Nickel and Dimed was an eye-opening revelation. Affluent students got to experience, vicariously through Ehrenreich's perspective and the stories of her fellow workers, the harsh realities of working for poverty wages and living on a daily financial and emotional precipice. For low-income students, the book helped them understand that their own families' suffering was not the result of personal failure but a societal one.

Nickel and Dimed was not an organizing handbook, but its deeply humanizing portrayal of injustice inspired many readers—including some of my students—to become activists and even to pursue careers as organizers.

In many ways, Nickel and Dimed resembled two earlier depictions of poverty amid affluence that stirred the nation's conscience: Michael Harrington's The Other America (1962) and Jonathan Kozol's Savage Inequalities (1991). What made Nickel and Dimed different, however, was Ehrenreich's first-person immersion in the world of the working poor and its description of hard-working, skilled, and resourceful people who earned their poverty on the job. She refused to see them as helpless victims. She gave them a voice to express their frustrations and to expose society's injustice.

Nickel and Dimed helped alter the nation's understanding of inequality and poverty. More and more Americans came to recognize that most poor adults, even many homeless people, collected paychecks, not welfare checks. By 2001, polls revealed that a vast majority of Americans wanted to raise the federal minimum wage. Local campaigns for living-wage laws and growing protests against Walmart (the nation's largest employer of low-wage workers) also reflected the changing tide of public opinion that Nickel and Dimed helped shape, along with campaigns to raise wages among janitors, fast-food workers, and hotel employees. The shrinking middle class and the proliferation of poverty-wage jobs accounts for the finding of a recent Gallup poll that 71% of Americans support unions—the highest level since 1965. It also helps explain the current upsurge of union organizing—among Amazon warehouse workers, Starbucks baristas, minor league baseball players, and other low-wage employees.

"Many people praised me for my bravery for having done this—to which I could only say: millions of people do this kind of work every day for their entire lives—haven't you noticed them?" she said in a 2018 speech accepting the Erasmus Prize for her investigative reporting.

To make sure they were noticed, in 2012 she founded the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, which supports independent journalists to write about the lives of the poor, especially those in rural areas.

Putting Her Ideas to Good Use

Ehrenreich's economic reporting did not focus exclusively on the poor. In 2008, she published This Land Is Their Land: Reports From a Divided Nation about the widening gap between the nation's rich and everyone else. Three years later, the Occupy Wall Street movement erupted across the country. Even after the occupations ended, its slogan—the 1% and the 99%—captured the country's imagination and helped fuel a new wave of activism.

Like many middle-class Americans radicalized by the civil rights, anti-war, and feminist movements, Ehrenreich sought to find ways for well-educated leftists to challenge America's class and race system even as they worked—as teachers, social workers, planners, lawyers, administrators of nonprofit organizations, foundation staffers, and journalists—within the system. In a 1977 article for Radical America, she and John Ehrenreich coined the phrase "professional-managerial class" (PMC) to describe the growing number of "salaried mental workers" torn between the working class and the corporate elite. How, they wondered, could the PMC's expertise be employed in the service of movements designed to dismantle systems of oppression?

She wasn'' into guilt-tripping or admonishing people to give up their privilege. Instead, she encouraged people to use their talents and positions to support movements led by poor and working-class people.

But within a decade, even many well-educated Americans were experiencing financial insecurities of their own. In her 1989 book, Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class, she examined the anxieties and self-doubt of the professional middle class about sliding down the income ladder. After writing Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream (2005), about the white-collar workforce, she launched an organization, with help from the Service Employees International Union, called United Professionals to lobby for better benefits for white-collar employees, as well as legislation related to age discrimination, layoffs, and underemployment.

In a 2020 interview with In These Times, Ehrenreich discussed how the professional-managerial class had undergone a profound transformation.

"We have seen vast swaths of the professional managerial class dumped down to the level of the working class," she said:

This is the big lesson of Occupy. There were homeless blue-collar workers with graduate students who knew they were going nowhere or who had Ph.D.s even and were going nowhere. So there's been a huge demotion for traditional PMC professions such as college teaching, which is over 70% adjunct now.

Ehrenreich's books reflected her wide-ranging interests, include writings about men's lack of commitment to emotional relationships (The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight From Commitment, 1987), the origins of war and humanity's attraction to violence (Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War, 1997), the exploitation of women workers around the world by multinational corporations (Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy, 2004), the human impulse for communal celebration (Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy, 2007), and her experiences as a precocious teenager (Living With a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth About Everything, 2014).

In 2000 Ehrenreich was diagnosed with breast cancer and wrote an essay for Harper's, "Welcome to Cancerland," about the "breast cancer cult," which, she claimed, "serves as an accomplice in global poisoning—normalizing cancer, prettying it up, even presenting it, perversely, as a positive and enviable experience." It earned her a second National Magazine Award.

Her experience with breast cancer also led to her critique of the "think positive" movement in popular psychology, religion, and health, explored in her 2009 book, Bright-sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America. For me and many other readers, this book was a reminder that progressive change happens when people honestly assess the opportunities and pitfalls, including the power of opposition forces, rather than get ensnared by what Ehrenreich called "reckless optimism."

"We need to brace ourselves for a struggle against terrifying obstacles," Ehrenreich wrote, "both of our own making and imposed by the natural world. And the first step is to recover from the mass delusion that is positive thinking."

Far from being paralyzing, this outlook provided Ehrenreich with the fortitude to fight for a better world. For many years she served as honorary co-chair of Democratic Socialists of America. In her books, columns, and speeches, she always directed her readers and audiences to grassroots community organizations, unions, and women's groups that were fighting for social justice. She was arrested at a rally in support of Yale's blue-collar workers, joined picket lines with hotel workers and janitors, distributed leaflets for living-wage campaigns, and protested in favor of women's reproductive rights. On her website, Ehrenreich posted articles by activists describing their organizing campaigns.

"If we are serious about collective survival in the face of our multiple crises, we have to build organizations, including explicitly socialist ones, that can mobilize this talent, develop leadership, and advance local struggles," Ehrenreich wrote in The Nation in March 2009 with Bill Fletcher Jr. "And we have to be serious, because the capitalist elites who have run things so far have forfeited all trust or even respect, and we—progressives of all stripes—are now the only grown-ups around."

In 2016 and 2020 she endorsed Sen. Bernie Sanders's presidential campaigns. She explained, "He's the candidate that most represents me. He's a democratic socialist." But when Sanders didn't win the Democratic Party's nomination, she publicly supported Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden.

Biden and almost every Democrat have now embraced Sanders's and Ehrenreich's calls to raise the federal minimum wage—which has remained at $7.25 since 2009—to $15 an hour. In January Biden issued an executive order for federal workers and employees of federal contractors to receive a $15 minimum wage, but due to opposition from every Republican and Sen. Joe Manchin, he hasn't be able to get Congress to adopt an across-the-board increase. Two polls last year, by Pew Research Center and by Hart Research Associates, found that 62% of Americans, and the same number among voters in swing congressional districts, support raising the minimum wage to $15.

In December 2016, a month after Donald Trump won the presidency, Ehrenreich expressed concern that his opposition to abortion could eventually put women's reproductive rights in serious jeopardy.

"We're basically going to be left with some big cities where one can go for an abortion," she said in what has turned out to be a prophetic statement.

In a 2020 interview with The New Yorker, she described her persistent outrage at the nation's indifference to working-class Americans.

"We turn out to be so vulnerable in the United States," she observed. "Not only because we have no safety net, or very little of one, but because we have no emergency preparedness, no social infrastructure."

Although she abandoned a formal career in academia, she was a high-profile public intellectual whose work had a major influence on both academics and policy makers. No academic during the past half-century—with the exception of William Julius Wilson and Frances Fox Piven—had as much impact as Ehrenreich on public opinion and public policy about poverty.

In addition to her two National Magazine Awards and her Sidney Hillman and Erasmus awards, Ehrenreich garnered the Freedom From Want Medal from the Roosevelt Institute, which rewards work that embodies FDR's Four Freedoms, and the Puffin/Nation Prize to Creative Citizenship awarded jointly by the Puffin Foundation and the Nation Institute to an American who challenges the status quo "through distinctive, courageous, imaginative, socially responsible work of significance." I included her in my book The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century: A Social Justice Hall of Fame (2012).

She taught at Brandeis University and the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. She received honorary degrees from Reed College, the State University of New York at Old Westbury, the College of Wooster in Ohio, John Jay College, the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, and La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia.

Ehrenreich married John Ehrenreich in 1966. They had two children and were divorced in 1982. She married Gary Stevenson, an organizer with the Teamsters union, in 1983; they divorced in 1993.

Her daughter, Rosa Brooks, is a law professor at Georgetown University, served as senior adviser to the assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights, and labor, was a former columnist for the Los Angeles Times, and is the author of several books about politics, human rights, and foreign policy. Just as her mother had taken several low-wage jobs as research for Nickel and Dimed, Brooks became a sworn armed reserve police officer with the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department to write Tangled Up in Blue: Policing the American City (2021). Son Ben Ehrenreich is a journalist, essayist, and novelist who has written for The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Nation, LA Weekly, and Village Voice and is author of The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine (2016) and Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time (2020).

In announcing his mother's death, Ben Ehrenreich tweeted: "She was never much for thoughts and prayers, but you can honor her memory by loving one another, and by fighting like hell."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Peter Dreier.

The post A Socialist and a War Resister appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Howard Lisnoff.

Leaders of the African People’s Socialist Party say the FBI carried out a violent raid on its properties with flash grenades and drones early Friday morning in Missouri and Florida. The pan-Africanist group has been a longtime advocate for reparations for slavery and a vocal critic of U.S. foreign policy. The raid appears to be connected to a separate indictment of a Russian man accused of using U.S.-based groups to spread Russian propaganda and tampering with U.S. elections. We speak with Omali Yeshitela, chair of the African People’s Socialist Party, who describes how he was zip-tied while his home was raided. He says the FBI’s implication that their group was taking orders from the Russians is “the most ridiculous, asinine” narrative. “It’s an attack on the right of Black people,” says Yeshitela. “It’s an attack on our struggle for the absolute total liberation of every square inch of Africa.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

In late June, as I arrived at my weekly union stewards training, I stumbled upon a group of fellow delegates talking about the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol by supporters of former President Donald Trump. While these labor activists primarily discussed revelations that Trump allegedly approved of rioters’ call to ​“hang Mike Pence,” their political conversation flew in the face of the idea that working people are indifferent about the congressional hearings on last year’s near-coup. Don’t just take my anecdote as evidence — look at the nearly20 million people who watched the first hearing andthe 13 million who tuned in on June 28 to catch Cassidy Hutchinson’s surprise daytime testimony. CNN reports that almost six out of ten people in the United States are following the hearings, and CBS finds that nearly 70 percent believe it’s important to find out the truth about January 6. 

Hutchinson, a 26-year-old former White House aide, testified before the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the United States Capitol that Trump was willing to let the MAGA rioters assassinate then-Vice President Pence. She revealed that Trump and his chief of staff Mark Meadows — her former boss—both knew the threat of armed violence days in advance and did nothing to abate the danger. These revelations confirmed some of the worst fears about how close the United States came to seeing the 2020 presidential election overturned. 

The January 6 committee has not brought charges against the individuals involved, as the body does not have that power, though some members have floated recommending criminal referrals to the Justice Department. Federal elected officials such as Rep. Adam Schiff (D‑Calif.) believe that the tacit purpose of the committee’s current approach is to demonstrate to the U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland that there is sufficient evidence and public support to bring charges against the orchestrators of the riot and unconstitutional putsch, from Trump on down. 

The chorus of popular demands for justice and the defense of democracy is where the Left — and especially the organized socialist movement — is desperately needed.

The Left should engage in, not ignore, a key democratic crisis.

Scanning the social media feeds among my left-wing friends, however, I hardly see a mention of the hearings, and when I do, it’s often dismissive of the congressional committee. I see little reporting of the investigation in prominent socialist and progressive magazines, including In These Times, while others provide no coverage at all. My own organization, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), issued only a single statement about January 6 since the day after the deadly attack, and nothing on the committee itself. This near silence is at odds not only with the millions of working people paying attention to the hearings, but also democratic socialist elected officials in Congress.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D‑N.Y.) revealed she feared more than death from the MAGA rioters, while her fellow DSA member Rep. Cori Bush (D‑Mo.) introduced legislation to expel members of the House of Representatives who aided in the January 6 attack. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I‑Vt.), meanwhile,posted in June that this hearing was not about ​“ideas” but ​“whether we maintain our democratic form of government.” These prominent socialists share the concern among the U.S. public, and especially the Democratic base, that the future state of elections is under threat. 

What I appreciated about being on the Left in the mid-2010s was the fact that we were much more on the pulse of the U.S. public than our liberal friends. The Left largely saw Hillary Clinton’s presidential candidacy in 2016 as fallible, and was able to offer viable alternatives. Through Bernie Sanders’ two presidential campaigns, in 2016 and 2020, hundreds of democratic socialists and Berniecrats won races for elected office across the country. Outside of the electoral realm, socialists today are plugging into the fast-growing and restive labor movement that’s successfully organizing shops at Amazon, Starbucks and other major companies.

But these successes could all be for naught if we completely lose our flawed — but still existing — liberal democracy. If our current system is replaced by an illiberal form of government, like exists in Hungary, the working class will suffer more. Hungary is now viewed as a model for the American far-Right, which hosted their Conservative Political Action Conference in the European country, as its leader, Viktor Orbán, has made elections a mere formality while expanding the secret police. 

One way to prevent this authoritarian slide is through engaging in public pressure to push Garland and other Justice Department officials to prosecute Trump and his allies. That kind of campaign cannot be ​“left to the liberals” as some are wont to say. Socialists should be front and center, demanding that there be actual repercussions for the anti-democratic effort to overturn the election.

We cannot have a multi-racial working-class socialist society without first achieving a functioning democracy. Socialists have long stood for improving U.S. democratic institutions, as imperfect as they are. We fought for women’s suffrage and were militant participants in the Civil Rights Movement. At its core, the socialist movement believes in not just defending democracy, but spreading it to other realms outside of politics, from the economy to the workplace. 

The current reaction against liberal democracy is part of an effort to roll back reproductive rights and racial justice gains made in this country that required decades of struggle to win. We cannot let the anti-democratic, anti-choice and racist forces win. Socialists must again lead by example.

If we don’t, then reactionaries like Pence and Rep. Liz Cheney (R‑Wyo.) are likely to become the heroes of this effort, simply because they’re Republicans following their constitutional duty. Rather than ceding this ground to liberals and the GOP, socialists and organizers on the Left should step up pressure on Congress to pass Rep. Bush’s bill to punish those guilty of trying to overthrow the will of the voters. A national effort to raise awareness of this legislation, including a collaboration between DSA members and the congresswoman, could help build pressure to actually punish those politicians involved in the failed putsch. 

It’s easy to hope that January 6 was a one-off incident. But anti-democratic forces rarely give up so easily. Just look at the history of Chile. In that country there was a small military rebellion months before the right-wing coup on September 11, 1973 which ousted Salvador Allende. For a time, the democratically elected socialist government had officers and generals who obeyed the constitution. But facing enough pressure from coup-plotters and foreign agitators, that loyalty eventually ended.

The same could happen here, especially as anti-Trump Republicans lose primaries, shifting the GOP toward pure fealty to the former president. Trump and his supporters are hard at work stacking the deck, from local election boards all the way up to the Supreme Court, which could have monumental consequences in determining future presidential elections. 

Trump has already signaled that he is likely to run again in 2024, and he still refuses to accept the 2020 election results, sowing distrust in the democratic system among his base. He’s made no secret of his desire to take power, no matter the legality or constitutionality of his means. We narrowly escaped his attempt two years ago. In the future, we might not be so lucky. 

This is why the Left should engage in, not ignore, a key democratic crisis. I want to be able to go to my union family and say ​“here’s what socialists are doing to hold the perpetrators of January 6 accountable.” Leftists have long fought to defend and expand liberal democracy in our goals of building a socialist government. Let’s continue that tradition.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by David Duhalde.

After Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the country’s third-most powerful democratic socialist may be a former elementary school teacher you might never have heard of.

While Marc Elrich isn’t yet on the nation’s radar, he’s very much on the Washington Post’s. The paper tried desperately to stop him from becoming chief executive of Montgomery County, Maryland, an influential jurisdiction located just outside DC, smack dab in the heart of the Post’s coverage area. (Montgomery is “the state’s economic dynamo—a place where leadership and governance are consequential,” the Post notes.)

Despite the Post’s efforts, Elrich narrowly won the county executive seat in 2018. And now he’s standing for reelection, with a good shot at winning.

That’s an outcome the Post is determined to prevent, lest Elrich set a dangerous example: that a lefty can not only win, but govern so effectively that voters return him to office.

For the Post—a paper owned by the third-richest human alive, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos—scaremongering about lefties is job one. On a national level, that’s led to the Post’s hysterical coverage of Bernie Sanders. On a local level, it’s led to the paper’s attacks on Elrich.

‘Counterculture cred’

More than a decade ago, the Washington Post (10/11/10) was writing about “the evaporation of [Elrich’s] radical rep.”

There’s no doubting Marc Elrich’s counterculture cred. He was 12 when he went to his first peace rally in 1961. A few years later, when he got to the University of Maryland, he promptly helped take over the philosophy building.

He’s been arrested at an anti-apartheid protest. He’s run a natural food co-op. He pushed Takoma Park to declare itself a nuclear-free zone and served ten terms on that activist enclave’s City Council.

The Post’s 2010 story went on to note how, after protesting the Vietnam War and marching for civil rights as a young man, Elrich became an elementary school teacher. “By the time he left [teaching] almost two decades later, he was legendary for bringing reluctant fourth- and fifth-graders to a love of numbers,” the Post wrote. “To this day, he’s the best math teacher my daughter ever had,” the parent of a former student told the Post.

‘Ideological extreme left’

Calling Elrich “an outlier who proudly positioned himself on the ideological extreme left,” the Post (7/11/18) warned that “business and development leaders…are openly worried.”

The Post wrote this upbeat profile over a decade ago, at a time when Elrich was on the County Council. Back then, the Post was open to endorsing Elrich, as it did in both his 2010 and 2014 council reelection bids.

But once Elrich sought the county’s top post in 2018, things quickly turned sour. Suddenly, in the pages of the Post, Elrich became a Venezuela-hugging, Che Guevara–loving union shill, who’s “skeptical of capitalism” and “proudly…on the ideological extreme left.”

He “possesses an agile mind and a silver tongue,” which he uses to justify his extremism, the Post wrote of Elrich, who’s Jewish.

Leaving nothing to chance, in addition to its blistering personal attacks, the Post repeatedly warned Montgomery County voters they’d be inviting financial doom by voting for Elrich. “He would imperil the county’s economic and fiscal prospects,” the Post (9/29/18) claimed.

Still, Elrich eked by (in the Democratic primary, the key race in the deep blue county). His 2018 win so unnerved the Post that the paper swiftly sought to undermine not only Elrich, but the election itself.

Four days after the election, the Post (6/30/18) claimed, “The winner’s authority [will] be undercut.” The reason? The county’s elections were badly in need of reform, the Post suddenly determined, citing Elrich’s win as evidence.

‘Spending spree’

The Post (3/25/19) scoffed that Elrich supported pay increases for public workers “based on the bizarre logic that employees are somehow owed money for scheduled raises that were scrapped after the recession.”

In the intervening years the Post’s coverage of Elrich has proved remarkably consistent, and remarkably untethered from reality.

A year into his tenure, the Post (3/25/19) claimed Elrich’s “profligacy” was on full display as he “cannibalized tens of millions of dollars” to provide a “bouquet of roses for his union backers.” He’s playing a “shell game with Montgomery finances,” the Post continued, and “it will be difficult to pay for his fat labor contracts in coming years.”

This is how the Post, a newspaper with a history steeped in anti-unionism, talks about working people receiving previously negotiated pay increases.

Midway through his term, and now amid a pandemic, Elrich was still at it, “lavishing major pay increases on thousands of county employees,” the Post (8/30/20) decried. Sure, frontline workers risking their lives to keep the county running deserved a little something extra, the Post relented. But Elrich was only going on a “spending spree” so he could repay the unions that were “key to his election,” the Post insisted.

As a result, Elrich was inviting financial ruin, the Post (8/30/20) claimed for the umpteenth time:

How will Mr. Elrich pay the bill? Will he raid the county’s reserves, thus jeopardizing Montgomery’s bond rating and, in the process, its ability to borrow cheaply? Will he divert funds… [meant for] individuals struggling to pay rent?… Unlike the federal government, Montgomery cannot print money.

‘Divisive figure’

The Washington Post (5/1/22) says “Elrich is struggling to defend a record he says is misunderstood.”

After four straight years of insisting Elrich was bankrupting the county, how does the Post now explain to readers that Montgomery is, in fact, in good financial shape? The answer: carefully.

Buried down in the 18th paragraph of a recent profile of Elrich, the Post (5/1/22) admits: “The worst fears about Elrich have not materialized in his first term.”

The cleverest part of the Post’s half-assed admission is the last four words—“in his first term”—which pivots readers’ attention away from Elrich’s successful first term and towards an imagined “worst fears” second term.

Of course, by the time readers make it to the 18th paragraph, Elrich’s unfitness for office is not in doubt. The opening graph alone paints Elrich as barely civilized: “He doesn’t care for wearing neckties or cleaning up for pictures, he’s nonchalant about fundraising and he’s known for rambling.” And the next sentence calls him “a divisive figure” with “a devoted army of supporters.”

The Post’s profile gets even more slanted thanks to its quotes. It’s amazing how, in a county of 1.1 million residents, the Post can no longer seem to find anyone who has anything clearly positive to say about Elrich.

The closest the Post came in its May profile was a quote from Tony Hausner, a longtime Elrich supporter, who said, Elrich “is not a salesman. He doesn’t try to sell you on himself.” Which is not exactly a ringing endorsement.

Meanwhile, another supporter, Scott Schneider, a retired labor organizer, is quoted as saying Elrich’s communication skills are a “handicap.”

Not even the union leader quoted could come up with two nice words to say about the man. “Absent a scandal,” said Ginno Renne, who heads the union representing most of the county’s employees, “Montgomery County voters don’t have a tradition of turning out incumbents.”

‘Justified in demonizing’

Seeing words like “scandal” and “handicap” appear in purportedly favorable quotes, I decided to reach out to the three quoted Elrich supporters to see if they’d given the Post more than backhanded-at-best comments about Elrich. And it turns out they had.

“I said a lot of positive things about Marc, and I was floored that she didn’t include any of those things,” Hausner said of Rebecca Tan, the Post reporter who wrote the May profile of Elrich.

Among the chief issues Hausner said he raised with Tan was Elrich’s effective leadership amid the pandemic. The other two Elrich supporters said the same.

Schneider, the former labor organizer, is so jaded by the Post’s coverage over the years that he wasn’t surprised by the profile. “The Washington Post has never been very sympathetic or favorable to Marc,” he said.

Schneider attributed the Post’s dislike of Elrich, at least in part, to their differing approaches to development. The Post’s “build, build, build” approach is the local version of “drill, baby, drill,” he said.

Elrich, on the other hand, prefers to protect and create affordable housing in a more direct manner (like progressive New York legislators are doing), rather than by providing taxpayer giveaways to developers. This has earned Elrich the ire of developers—and the Post.

‘Magical thinking’

Washington Post (11/24/19): Rather than approving development projects, Marc Elrich “prefers to engage in magical thinking.”

Elrich’s “magical thinking” is inviting a future in which Montgomery County may be “plagued with problems like San Francisco’s and Seattle’s—gilded playgrounds for the rich where middle-income residents are banished and the poor forced onto the streets,” the Post (11/24/19) declared.

It’s amazing the Post can get away with saying stuff like this.

While Elrich spent the past decades fighting against social inequities, for far longer the Post has been teaming up with developers to turn DC into the very gilded playground it now (wrongfully) attributes to Elrich’s policies.

A little history is in order.

The Graham family—which owned the Post for eight decades before selling the paper to Bezos in 2013—wasn’t content to merely advocate for the removal of DC’s Black population in the pages of its powerful newspaper. So in 1954, a time when DC had no local governance of its own, Post publisher Phil Graham created a shadow government consisting of himself and downtown white business owners. The explicit goal of the group, called the Federal City Council, was to remove African Americans from DC. And they were so successful that five years later, on a tour of the targeted area near the US Capitol, former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt asked, “What has happened to the people who once lived here?”

Today, the Post is the only game in town, so it can whitewash its own ugly history. This leaves the paper free to claim the moral high ground, even on housing issues, and even against someone like Marc Elrich, who’s dedicated his life to fighting the very injustices the Post has long orchestrated.

Returning to the Post’s May profile of Elrich: In addition to Schneider and Hausner, I also spoke with Gino Renne about what he told the Post.

“There was a lot more conversation than that one quote,” the labor leader told me. “Of course, they always try to pick out, I guess, the most controversial or most bombastic quote.”

The post A Socialist in WaPo’s Suburbs appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Pete Tucker.

Over the past several years, as the nation has reckoned with racism, misogyny, and other forms of bigotry, progressive institutions and campaigns have sought to construct mechanisms for resolving internal conflicts with an eye toward a more just society. The process of restorative justice shifts the focus away from mere punishment and retribution. It brings the victim and the perpetrator together in conversation, talking out why the aggrieved was wronged and how the assailant can take accountability before not just the person who was directly harmed, but also in some cases before the entire affected community.

Nobody was better positioned to model such a process than Brandy Brooks, a racial equity and environmental justice consultant running for an at-large seat on the Montgomery County Council in Maryland. She’s the founder and CEO of Radical Solutions LLC, a consulting firm that offers “training, coaching and consulting for progressive organizing leaders who are working on multiracial, cross-class, movement-building electoral and issue campaigns.” The firm’s “focus [is] on supporting and centering the leadership of women and femmes of color.”

On March 14, Brooks learned that she herself was the subject of a complaint of a hostile work environment from a member of her campaign staff. What made the process feel especially difficult — but also resolvable through a restorative justice process — was the source of the complaint: a person she considered a longtime close friend. We’ll call them Sam.

A screenshot of a text message Brandy Brooks sent to Sam on Oct. 9, 2021.

Brandy Brooks speaks in support of housing justice in Montgomery County, M.D., in 2021.

Photo: Courtesy of Brandy Brooks Power Posse

It seemed like the kind of thing a sophisticated progressive movement invested in the concept of restorative justice could handle through good-faith mediation.

Supporters of presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., attend a caucus watch party organized by Metro D.C. Democratic Socialists of America, on Feb. 3, 2020, in Washington, D.C.

Photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images

“My work to be vulnerable and accountable and transparent, and show up the way that we want our leaders show up, absolutely got weaponized,” Brooks said.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Ryan Grim.

Part I – Pre-History of Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

Waking Up

In 2001 Barbara had her awakening to the disasters that capitalism caused. This started as part of the 9/11 events, beginning after the response to the supposed attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. It became immediately clear the US would respond to the attacks with military action against whatever country seemed most vulnerable and had access or proximity to resources, in this case oil. The attacks were supposedly coordinated by al-Qaeda, a radical Islamic group founded by Osama bin Laden and headquartered in Afghanistan. We firmly believed, with documented evidence, that the US attacked Iraq instead even though Iraq had absolutely nothing to do with the attacks. The US wanted control of Iraq because of their large reserves of oil. In fact, they were the second largest oil exporting state at that time.

As soon as the news came of the World Trade Towers being hit, Bruce said that something was fishy. From that time forward Barbara’s political life began. Watching the news was surreal and terrifying. Over and over again, images of the towers collapsing were televised. Talk of war began almost immediately, with George “W” Bush putting the blame on Iraq – with absolutely no proof. What was even more alarming was watching how people reacted to it. So many of them jumped on the bandwagon of war.

Making signs

Shortly after the attack Bruce – who had been a socialist for 30 years – talked Barbara into going to her first demonstration. Together we made signs to bring with us – “No War on Iraq”, “War is not the Answer”. Making the signs was so much fun. We got old cardboard cartons from the grocery stores along with some long lightweight sticks from lumber stores to hold them up. We brainstormed ideas for what to write. Bruce’s signs always had much more content than Barbara’s. Barbara went for the fewer words, the better.

First demonstration

The gathering, or demonstration, was held in Palo Alto, CA, just outside the Stanford University Campus. We had to park our car some distance from the crowd, and Barbara felt self-conscious carrying our signs. A radical political science faculty member, Joel Benin, who was pro-Palestinian, gave an impassioned speech. It was so sane, so true. People around us began chanting and we joined with them – NO WAR – NO WAR. This wasn’t a big demonstration, only a couple of hundred people, but everyone was in agreement that we could see where this drive to war was going, and we wanted to try to stop it. Barbara didn’t fully grasp the full implications of where the US was headed or what would be her involvement in the fight to stop it. Ultimately, that was the beginning of her journey to socialism.

Barbara has already written about much of this in My Journey to Socialism, some of which we’ve quoted here, which began after these attacks. Bruce was so happy to see her waking up.

Attending anti-war demonstrations

We went to anti-war demonstrations in San Francisco and Oakland, chanting “No Blood for Oil”. Many of the demonstrations and meetings were organized by San Francisco ANSWER, an anti-war group formed in San Francisco shortly after 9/11. On March 20, 2003, we marched with tens of thousands of people to protest the war on Iraq that Bush started that very day. We shut down the city. Aside from ANSWER, there seemed to be no large, unified movement to take action against the existing paradigm of US imperialism and capitalism. That is, there was no large movement until the Occupy Wall Street Movement in 2011 which was designed to protest income inequality and the use of influence of money in politics by occupying public spaces.

2004 – 2011 Looking for a Foothold

During this time period, we were searching for the best place for us to fit in and work towards changing the existing capitalist system. We had a book club together, just the two of us. We read and discussed The Best Democracy Money Can Buy by Gregg Palast, Confessions of an Economic Hitman by John Perkins, The powers That Be, and Who Rules America, both by G. William Domhoff. We met every other week on the weekends for 2 hours. This helped to develop Barbara’s understanding of capitalism.

In 2008 the economic crash hit almost everyone.  We each lost ¼ of our savings in our IRA accounts, even though we had our money invested in socially responsible companies. Since this was money we hoped to use to supplement Social Security, this was a very personal wake-up call, not just for us, but for many. Were we witnessing the collapse of capitalism, and its effects on ordinary people?

In 2009 we attended a KPFA townhall meeting. KPFA was our local radio station, representing a mix of New Deal liberals and Social Democrats. They featured people like Amy Goodman, Sasha Lilly, C.S. Soong, and Bonnie Faulkner. At that meeting Bruce spoke about why KPFA is supporting the Democratic Party. When the meeting was over, he was approached by a labor organizer who wanted to start an organization to try to coordinate the public education unions. We stayed with this group for about a year, attending meetings about once a month, but nothing ever came of it, so we left.

Part II – 2011 – 2012 – Turning Point – Occupy

Excitement of General Assemblies:

We were happy to see Occupy San Francisco and Occupy Oakland blossom in October of 2011 which lasted until the spring of 2012. We initially attended assemblies at the amphitheater in Frank Ogawa Plaza, right on the doorstep of Oakland City Hall. In San Francisco they were near the Ferry Building and at the bottom of the financial district.

The General Assembly (GA) meetings in both San Francisco and Oakland were electrifying. There were some extremely skilled facilitators. The GAs met every day and discussed how to regulate the public space that they had occupied and integrate the homeless community, which turned out to be a very difficult task. In San Francisco there were people who rode on a ferry that would stop by and watch the meetings. This was a good way to draw people in. Some of the members of the organizing committee of Occupy led tours around the Occupy camp to combat the propaganda against it.

Shutting Down the Port of Oakland

November 2, 2011, Occupy Oakland coordinated to shut down West Coast ports to make a statement that we would not go back to “business as usual”. The shutdown was a way of protesting the treatment of longshoremen and truck drivers, who were forced to work as independent contractors. They were then fired by port owners EGT and Goldman Sachs for wearing union t-shirts. We marched with 200,000 others from Oscar Grant Plaza to the ports. While the ILWU did not openly support the blockade, the rank and file and many former labor leaders did. Clarence Thomas, secretary/treasurer of the ILWU, was fully committed to this blockade, as he had been for many past blockades. We’ll never forget the power of the first speech we heard from him which began – “I’m Clarence Thomas – the REAL Clarence Thomas”. Jack Heyman, also with the ILWU, was another powerful and persuasive speaker.

The Challenges of the Working Committees

We joined some of the committees, but we noticed there was a real gap in ages in the members. The overwhelming majority of people were in their 20s, with the exception of the Committee for Solidarity with Labor. There were virtually no people in their 30s and 40s and only a handful of people like us in our 50s and 60s. We were both working full time and tried to join committees that would work with our schedules, but the organizers kept changing the days and times of the meetings. It seemed like, at best, most of the Occupy participants worked part-time or might have been upper middle-class people whose schedules were more flexible. The committees were not very solid.

People would float in and out. Any group could start a committee – even conservative committees like those who wanted to work with merchants were allowed. Committees were dissolved without letting the Occupy leadership know so you could join a committee and discover that it no longer existed. We found many of the meetings off-track and with members who didn’t have the basic social skills like asking a person “How are you? How are things going?” They lacked skills for building solidarity with strangers like tracking things a person may have told them and following up with a question like “what’s happening with that project you were working on?” They are skills like showing up to meetings on time and remembering to tell others if a meeting is cancelled. The Occupy movement was the best and the worst of anarchism.

Monday Night Occupy Meetings in the Women’s Building

When the police drove Occupy in SF and Oakland away from Oscar Grant Plaza in Oakland and the area outside the Federal Reserve building in SF the Occupy organizers decided to meet indoors. Speakers were arranged every Monday night to talk on various political and economic topics. On average, 50-75 people attended. We noticed how the cliquishness of Occupy in the public are continued into the events in the Women’s Building in SF. Bruce told Barbara that when he was meeting with the organizers of an economic forum that Barbara was standing by herself. Nobody introduced themselves or tried to introduce themselves. These folks were calling themselves socialists and yet they lacked the most elementary friendliness to others who were on the same page. We decided it was then that we felt we needed to stop trying to join other organizations and start our own.

Part III – History of Socialist PBC

2012 – 2014 Building Political Documents and Our Website

We began to develop our own organizational documents, including a manifesto, mission statement, our attitude towards politics, and developed a political practice. At first that seemed like a lot of work to Barbara, and she also wondered how we would get people to join us. We had many meetings, just the two of us, to hash out the development of our perspective. Our main purpose was to provide a forum for exposing capitalism and spread the word to the public.

In spite of this challenging work, the creation of this site was so much fun. The first area we wanted to cover included telling people who we are and what we’re about. It included our mission statement – which was to become one of many eddies for:

• “Exposing the predatory, incompetent, and irrational practices of capitalists to direct human social life.
• Engage in collective political actions that throw a monkey-wrench into and slow down or disrupt the profit-making mechanisms of the system.
• Weave and expand the fabric of a growing body of workplaces under worker self-management.”

Barbara switched from full-time to part-time work, allowing her more time to work on developing our book clubs that were focused on educating people about the reality of capitalism and the havoc it’s wrecked in the world. From 2012-2014 we tried to do outreach by having in-person book groups.

In April 2014 our first step was to create a website, Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism. Through our Occupy contacts we found a wonderful tech guy named Jeremy who, with our input, created the website that we still have today. Our baby was gestating. It was scary for Barbara to learn how to manage a website. While she had considerable work experience using numerous platforms, managing a website is a whole other ballgame. At a ridiculously low cost, Jeremy built our WordPress site. He patiently showed Barbara the basics and was the best tech teacher we have been able to find since then. He never spoke to her in tech-speak. Sadly, he has disappeared from our lives, even though we’ve tried hard to reach him. Since then, we have struggled to find someone to help us with our site, as well as with social media.

In November 2014 we wrote our first post – titled The Collapse of Capitalism. In it you will see that our economic situation has only gotten worse since then. In addition to all the things we listed, we’re now dealing with the economic fallout of Covid, hyper-inflation, and a rush to war with Russia.

We added a slider at the top of our page that, in addition to The Collapse of Capitalism, included the Personal Impact of Crisis. In that section we asked the question “What caused the crisis?” We gave 4 reasons for this. We then proposed “Making adjustments within the system” asking 6 questions of readers. Finally, we asked the question “Are there alternatives”?

The next section was titled Alternatives to Capitalism. We gave examples of workers’ self-management, workers’ control, and worker cooperatives – all of which currently exist and often are more successful than capitalist businesses.

The next section was titled History of Workers’ Councils so readers could see this is not just an unrealistic pipe dream. There is a 150-year history of worker self-management.

Finally, we included a section titled Local Workplace Democracy that allowed readers to learn about some of the local cooperatives in the US.

On our site we included sections on Our Manifesto, Our Process Politics, Our Mission Statement, Calendar of Radical Events, Submission Guidelines, Films, Books, Our Mythological Story, Our Allies, and Getting Involved.

2014 – 2016 Richard Wolff – Democracy at Work

Around the same time, Richard Wolff, the Marxist political economist, began to give public talks about the crisis in capitalism and workplace democracy as an alternative. In one of our book clubs, we began reading his book, Capitalism Hits the Fan. We attended one of several talks by Wolff and met our soon-to-be comrade, K.J. Noh, who was petitioning for some local cause. We asked him to join our book group and he did, adding an international perspective from his own personal experience of growing up in South Korea. We also discovered he was an extraordinary writer. We cited some of his publications on our site. One of the best was “The Economic Myths of Santa Claus“, published in CounterPunch on Christmas day, 2014.

After a year in our book clubs, which drew between 4 and 6 people, K.J. said to us that the book clubs really were not the way to go in this day and age. He said we needed an electronic presence. He recommended 3 newsletters we could write for and said our focus must be international in order to keep his interest. We followed his suggestions, and our website and FB page likes grew.

We also became involved with Richard Wolff’s Democracy at Work project in 2014. This was an organization developed by Richard Wolff that had chapters in numerous cities and states to support and teach people about the theory and viability of worker cooperatives to combat capitalism by democratizing our workplaces. People were either encouraged to study cooperatives, provide educational forums for cooperatives, or even start a cooperative.

Why We Left Democracy at Work

We discovered that Democracy at Work was very loose in its structure. People like us who were long-time socialists were mixed in with people who neither cared nor knew nothing about socialism, and simply wanted to start a small business. Many of the groups throughout the country were uneven in terms of their commitments and we were disappointed that Rick did not take a firmer stand in directing what we were doing. In fact, the management of these groups was left to someone else, and Rick had very little engagement with the groups.

2016-2022 Coming into Our Own

Social Media Ups and Downs – FB and Twitter

Since Jeremy set up our website, we have had consistent problems finding someone to help us. Jeremy was so good at explaining things clearly, teaching us how to create posts and perspectives, add to our pages and change our images. Since that time – in 2014, Barbara has mostly figured stuff out on her own and has become our house techie. WordPress is not a user-friendly platform and learning how to manage it is not obvious or intuitive. We need a professional, who we’ve only recently found, who can help us navigate that.

Someone who earlier helped us enormously was Sameer, who lived close to us in Oakland. He was also great at explaining things in non-tech speak. However, he’s moved on to bigger and more lucrative projects. We’ve since discovered that it’s very hard for technical experts to be able to communicate to non-experts in an understandable way what they’re trying to do – or trying to teach us to do.

Sameer introduced us to Susan Tenby in 2016 – who was able to help us with our social media. She taught us how to make our Facebook and Twitter pages more visible and appealing. We are so lucky to have found Susan. We were a small, community organization trying to get our message out. When we started working with Susan our visibility was very low. Susan did a comprehensive audit of where our social media stood when we started working with her and helped us track its rapid change. We were not getting a whole lot of attention on our website or through our social media. She gave us a crash course on how to turn that around and in a very short period of time our visibility skyrocketed. Each session with her was packed with techniques and ideas we never would have known about.  She’s also terrific at adapting to each individual’s learning style.

Susan also introduced us to Colleen Nagel, an SEO expert and digital marketing. These terms were completely unfamiliar to us. SEO means Search Engine Optimization and is the process used to optimize a website’s technical configuration, content relevance and link popularity so its pages can become easily searchable, more relevant, and popular, and as a consequence, search engines rank them better. In other words, it’s the process of making a website better for search engines, like Google. We began to understand how to make more sense of our analytics, although we’re still struggling to figure out WHY our followers like some of our posts and tweets better than others.

Where we needed help was in translating the analytics into verbal meaning. The deeper step, after understanding what these numbers mean, was to understand the causal dynamics which produce an increase or decrease in viewers and attention span. The next step was to develop a plan for increasing the number of followers after we were able to analyze what’s actually happened up to then. We never felt that we got that help

All of this cost money, of which we didn’t have a lot. We have never asked for donations or “supporters” for our site. Barbara’s income at that time consisted of a small retirement fund, Social Security, and a modest IRA. Bruce worked as an adjunct faculty member. As he’s written in his article “Capitalist Economic Violence Against Road Scholars: Now You’re Hired, Now You’re Not” his income was never completely stable and, of course, they paid adjuncts at a much lower rate than they paid faculty. In fact, today there are adjuncts who are living in their cars because they can’t afford to pay rent. We simply couldn’t afford to pay what Colleen was charging.

We then moved on to 2 more people whose entire focus was to install SEO optics. While we got some help from this, we found that both of them explained things in tech-speak and were not easy to communicate with.

Finally, we tried working with Liz and her sister. Liz was an editor of one of Bruce’s books and claimed to have some technical skills. But she didn’t have a Mac like we do and was not good at explaining things so that wasn’t much help. Her sister did have a Mac and was good at explaining things but worked full time, had small kids and was erratic in her response time.

Flying High

Between 2014 and 2016 we worked hard on learning how to get our message out through Facebook and Twitter. We learned how to “boost” our articles, Facebook’s language for paying them to promote it. We were able to select what type of audience we were trying to reach and where they were likely to be geographically. As we started to boost articles either we or one of our comrades had written, we began getting a lot more attention on Facebook. Our Facebook boosted posts for our articles ranged from 5,000 to 10,000 readers. A couple of them reached 20,000. Between 2016 and 2019 we were getting about 1,000 page likes a year, reaching thousands of people each week. At that point we had gained a total of 3,400 page likes.

Twitter was much slower to get off the ground. We began to understand the importance of hashtags and which hashtags were more likely to get attention. We also came to see the importance of liking, commenting on and retweeting the tweets of people who were following us. Our followers have increased steadily since we’ve been doing this. However, we still lag behind the attention we were getting on Facebook, and we would like to understand why.

Facebook Attempts to Clip Our Wings

In early 2020 Facebook stopped allowing us to boost our articles. The reason they gave was that since we are posting “political content” we must be registered as a political organization with the IRS. As you can imagine, we did not want to do that. When Facebook first started doing this, we were able to mount arguments that not all of our articles were, in fact, political. Well, of course they were, but not “political” in the way they were framing it. After a while, they simply stopped allowing us to boost them at all, no matter what our argument was. About the same time, we noticed that our typical daily reach (how many people saw the article) was shrinking dramatically. Whereas our daily reach used to be in the thousands, they are now in the hundreds. The same thing has happened with our engagements (how many people actually look at our post or click on a link we’ve provided) Our total page likes have gone from an average of 30 a month to less than 10. That’s because the only people who see our posts are the ones who have already liked our page! Our reach now is about one third of what it used to be. We have read that the same dramatic drop happened to World Socialist Website, The Greanville Post, and many other socialist sites.

Our Work Schedules for PBC

Since the very beginning, we each put in a minimum of 15 hours a week, often more, including Saturdays and Sundays. We have 2-hour weekly meetings to discuss what we’ve done during the week and what we want to do for the coming week. We give ourselves “homework”, then report in on the results of that homework at our weekly meetings. We jokingly call these meetings, our “Central Committee” meetings.

We write almost all of our own articles. After editing them and finding images for them we publish them and then also send them to other websites for publication. We have tried to find other comrades to write articles for publication for us also. We wanted to be able to include authors on our site beyond just the two of us. While we did, in fact, get a few people to write for us, it often required a lot of work on our part to help them frame their work. Of course, we did all editing the articles. We publish an average of one article every three weeks.

For our daily posts, every morning Bruce searches for an article online from a number of trusted sources, that usually focuses on the decay of capitalism. We also want very much to spread the word of the success of worker-owned cooperatives to the public. This lets them see that there is a way to work other than for “the man” and create a new society. He writes a post about the article, finds an image to go with it, and then sends it to Barbara. Barbara edits his post, puts it up on our site and shares it to FB and Twitter. We then share that article to our Facebook groups.

We have been doing all of this every day, every week, every month since we began our electronic outreach. This is a joy for us. We call Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism “our baby”. She’s now almost 10 years old and stable. She will be thriving when we can get the technical and social media support we need. When people ask us if we’re retired, we start laughing. Barbara always says she’s working harder than she ever did, she just doesn’t get paid for it! There are few things we would rather spend our time on than Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism.

Thank you for reading our history, and please consider joining us by reading and sharing our articles and posts. Together we are strong. Together we can change the world.

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

The post Not a Socialist in the House appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Howard Lisnoff.