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The Cuba breakthrough and U.S. Latin America policy

Emile Schepers — Tue, 30 Dec 2014 19:02:00 +0000

The wonderful breakthrough in Cuba-US relations on December 17 requires that the left in the United States give some thought about how to deal with the relationship of the United States with the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean.

There are some on the left who are expressing unwarranted worries about the new relationship between the United States and Cuba. To some extent, given the history of imperial interventions, this is understandable, but it also betrays a certain lack of confidence in the Cuban leadership, which has dealt with far worse situations than this with both flexibility and firmness.

Worry about whether Cuba would extradite Assata Shakur to the United States evaporated when Josefina Vidal, the head of the Cuban Foreign Ministry's North America section, stated immediately that Cuba has no intention of returning to the United States any of the people to whom Cuba has granted asylum over the years https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/12/23/fbis-desperate-pursuit-assata-shakur-continues-u-s-cuba-talks/ Nor is the presence in Cuba of U.S. products, investments and tourists going to bring down the revolution. Cuban beaches are full of European and Asian tourists, and Cuba has numerous economic arrangements with capitalist countries and companies from around the world, and the Revolution has not fallen. Nor is there any chance that U.S. citizens whose properties were nationalized after the Cuban revolution, including Cuban born people who have since become U.S. citizens, are going to get that property restored to them. At the time Cuba offered a plan of compensation which the United States rejected. Since then, the United States has run up a bill in Cuba to the tune of billions of dollars in counter claims, not only because of the damage done by the economic blockade but also because of terroristic attacks against Cuba which did vast property damage as well as killing thousands of innocent Cuban citizens.

In short, Cuba has won this round. In the agreement reached between U.S. President Barack Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro, Cuba did not have to give up anything that was a matter of principle, and won, either immediately or potentially, everything it has been asking and fighting for over the last 54 years: Freedom for the Cuban Five, restored diplomatic relations, increased trade, an implied promise to remove Cuba from the State Sponsors of Terrorism list and the promotion of legislation to end the economic blockade and travel sanctions.

This victory for Cuban solidarity comes in part because of a massive international movement to free the Cuban Five and end the blockade. For the past 23 consecutive years, there have been lopsided votes in the United Nations General Assembly condemning U.S. Cuba policy. In November 2014, the vote was 188 for condemning the blockade and only 2 (the United States and Israel) opposed. http://peoplesworld.org/again-un-general-assembly-rejects-u-s-anti-cuban-blockade/ Public opinion in the United States has been turning against the blockade, and the New York Times published a series of very useful articles calling for the blockade to end and for the remaining members of the Cuban Five to be freed.

To understand why the Obama administration has decided to radically change its Cuba policy just at this point (or rather, about a year and a half ago when negotiations began in Canada, and helped by Pope Francis, that brought us to this breakthrough), we have to look at developments in the whole Latin America-Caribbean area.

From the election of Hugo Chavez as president of Venezuela in 1998 until now, Latin America has been slipping away from the grasp of the United States, and has become the site of a new development of mass based socialist politics.

This leftward movement of the Latin American and Caribbean states, which some call the "pink tide", is called "Bolivarian" by its supporters, because it emphasizes two dreams of the Venezuelan and South American independence hero Simon Bolivar: That the peoples of the area be truly independent of outside imperial powers, including not only Spain and other European monarchies, but also the United States, and that they be integrated into one powerful and united people. Before Bolivar's death in 1830, it appeared to Bolivar, despondent, betrayed by associates and dying, that this was a losing fight: "He who serves the revolution plows in the sea" http://es.wikisource.org/wiki/Carta_de_Bol%C3%ADvar_al_general_Juan_Jos%C3%A9_Flores_%281830%29

At the center of the new Bolivarianism is ALBA, the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of our America. This was started by Cuba and Venezuela in 2004 and today includes eleven sovereign states with a total population of 70 million. At the ALBA summit meeting in Havana this past week, two states were added (Greneda and St. Kitts and Nevis) http://www.caribjournal.com/2014/12/15/grenada-st-kitts-and-nevis-join-alba/ The others are Antigua and Barbuda, Bolivia, Cuba, Dominica, Ecuador, Nicaragua, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and Venezuela.

A second ring of states with leftist or left-centrist governments is integrated through the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) and the South American Common Market (MERCOSUR). Not all the states in these organizations have left wing governments, but the Bolivarian influence is predominant.

After a series of electoral successes this past year, the states in the region which now are governed by left or left-center leaders include Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Grenada, Guyana, Nicaragua, St Kitts, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, Uruguay and Venezuela. So the total population of countries in the "pink tide" is now about 350 million. In one country, Panama, the last elections ousted a right wing, anti-communist government. The Panamanian Peoples Party, which is the communist party there, sees the movement as generally positive. http://www.solidnet.org/panama-party-of-the-people/16-imcwp-contribution-of-party-of-people-panama-es

To a greater or lesser extent, these governments oppose neo-liberal policies, work together on improving mutual trade and aid, and resist the traditional U.S. economic, political and military domination of the region. They are trying to create developmental aid mechanisms that are totally unlike the "structural adjustment" deals forced on poor countries by the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and developed capitalist countries. Rather than punishing states which invest money in meeting the needs of their people, the Bolivarian governments help each other to achieve improvements in living conditions. The Bank of the South (Bancosur) is being developed as an alternate development financing agency for the region.

A big part of this strategy includes increasing worldwide trade options, and naturally China looms large in those considerations.

But it is not just the governments that are different; large mass movements of workers, small farmers, the poor, indigenous and afro-descendent people and others constitute the social base for Bolivarianism. These are the guarantees of its future also.

Two countries that had governments aligned with Bolivarianism were overthrown with US support: Honduras and Paraguay. Living standards and especially personal security have declined sharply, and there is widespread opposition to the right wing governments in both countries. http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Hondurans-Protest-Over-Presidents-Plan-for-Illegal-Re-Election-20141219-0040.html http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Paraguay-Halted-by-Rural-Workers-Highway-Shutdown-20141208-0029.html

The pinnacle of the Western Hemisphere integration process is CELAC, the Community of Latin American and Caribbean Countries, which includes every single Western Hemisphere country except the United States and Canada. This is threatening to displace the Organization of American States (O.A.S.), which is seen by many as an instrument of U.S. imperial control. The exclusion of Cuba from the O.A.S. is now viewed negatively even by right wing governments who perceive that the United States is being isolated in the hemisphere and don't want to be isolated with it. Colombian President, Juan Manuel Santos told the United States that if Cuba were excluded from O.A.S. sponsored Summit of the Americas in Panama in April of 2015, other governments would not participate. So now the Obama administration has dropped its objection to Cuba's inclusion. http://www.firstpost.com/fwire/us-softens-opposition-to-cuba-attending-summit-of-the-americas-1836891.html

To counter this leftward movement, the U.S. has been supporting the "Pacific Alliance", which bases itself on a neo-liberal trade and economic model. The Pacific Alliance now includes Mexico, Colombia, Peru and Chile, with a total of about 206 million inhabitants. Early in 2014, the right wing governments of Costa Rica and Panama had signed agreements to become part of the Pacific Alliance, but these governments were defeated in subsequent elections, so the future of those pacts is yet to be seen. Guatemala and Honduras may also join. Chile became part of the Pacific Alliance under right wing president Sebastian Piñera, before the election of socialist Michelle Bachelet in March of 2014. Chile, Costa Rica and Panama all are friendly to socialist Cuba, so within the Pacific Alliance (if they stay in it) they would be strong opponents of using of the group for anti-Cuba and other right wing purposes.

With the exception of Cuba, all the Bolivarian governments could be characterized as social democratic, often with an admixture of nationalism and populism. In almost all cases where a communist party exists, it is allied with the Bolivarian government, sometimes with legislative representation and even seats in the cabinet. And in all countries in the region, Cuba is a hero nation and an inspiration.

The Bolivarian governments can all point to improvements in the lives of workers, small farmers, indigenous people, women and youth. Advances in health care and education are significant. Also, the Bolivarian movement has destroyed the prospects of a neo-liberal "Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA)" in which previous U.S. administrations invested such efforts.

The non-Bolivarian countries can boast of no such record. Mexico's economy is underperforming and there is a shocking level of corruption and violence. In Peru, although most of the left had supported the election of President Ollanta Humala in 2012, there is now bitter disappointment at the continuation of neo-liberal policies, and much conflict between the government and the large indigenous population, over issues of mining and land rights. Colombia continues to have a very high rate of violence, although center-right president Juan Manuel Santos is credited with sincerely trying to reach a peaceful settlement with the FARC (Armed Forces of the Colombian Revolution), with negotiations going on in Havana mediated by the Cuban and Norwegian governments. In Guatemala, the continued influence of right wing military figures (such as current President Otto Perez Molina), big landowners and foreign based monopolies have kept both workers and small farmers suppressed and controlled, often by bloody violence. http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Guatemala-Police-Threaten-Journalists-Reporting-on-Repression--20140910-0085.html

The Bolivarian states have their problems. The current drastic worldwide drop in oil prices is having a negative effect in oil producing Venezuela, which has also been plagued by inflation, scarcity and violence this year. As many of the Bolivarian countries are tied into PETROCARIBE, a system whereby they can access Venezuelan oil on very favorable credit terms, they are also likely to be affected too. Some other Bolivarian countries are also suffering from inflation and other ills. Internally, a number of countries have to figure out a way to balance the needs of urban workers for development and jobs, with the need to protect the environment and the land rights of indigenous populations.

But for now, the Bolivarian "pink tide" is here to stay. It is likely that popular pressure will lead some or all of the countries who have not yet done so to move with the tide.

U.S. political leaders and government agents have not yet let this lesson sink in. There are still efforts to use government funds, often channeled through USAID via non governmental organizations, to destabilize countries of the Bolivarian group. The US Congress has just passed, and president Obama signed, legislation imposing sanctions on officials of the Venezuelan government. http://peoplesworld.org/sanctions-against-venezuela-colossal-hypocrisy/ How this will be implemented by the Obama administration is yet to be seen.

Most of the left, worldwide and regionally, sees the advance of Bolivarianism as hugely positive. While only Cuba can be considered a socialist state at this point, it seems clear to most leftists that Bolivarianism is improving the lives of workers, farmers and the poor and at the same time building a platform from which further left advances, including socialism itself, can be achieved.

A very small number of left wing parties do not agree with this and see no difference between Bolivarian ruled states and states ruled by right wing parties.

What is the task of the left in the United States at this point?

First, we have to educate the U.S. population that the growth of the Bolivarian movement is not a threat to working people in the United States. On the contrary, as the wages and living standards of people in the Bolivarian countries improve, it becomes more difficult for capital to play off workers in the poorer countries against U.S. workers.

Secondly, we need to convince the U.S. government that efforts to destabilize and undermine the left wing Bolivarian governments are doomed to fail; that U.S. corporations and politicians are going to have to learn to live with the existence of this large bloc of left and left-center ruled countries who have to be treated as equals and sovereign states, not as puppets or people to be bullied into submission.

Thirdly, the worst elements of our corporate "one percent" increase their power by exploiting people in the poorer countries. A defeat for them in Latin America is a victory for workers in the United States.

U.S. capitalists, whose interests the anti-Cuba policy was supposed to benefit, have ended up lobbying for a change in that policy because they are losing out on the opportunity to trade with Cuba: to China, to Europe and everybody. But the people of the United States also won, because their economic interests are served by the new policy and because their right to travel to Cuba is being restored. Working people in the United States can take inspiration from the Latin American developments to help guide our own struggles, including the struggle for socialism.

If the Obama administration will follow up with a rapprochement with Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and the other Bolivarian states, it will come out a winner too, and the only losers will be right wingers everywhere. Imperialism will not disappear, but the people will have won an important victory for internationalist solidarity.

Photo: Raul Castro with then President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of Brazil January 2008 Agencia Brazil/Creative Commons 3.0

A Communist activist looks at Piketty's "Capital": part 2 The radicalism of Thomas Piketty

Art Perlo — Sat, 20 Dec 2014 11:42:00 +0000

Part 1 of this article - Piketty for Activists - summarizes some of the most important data presented and conclusions drawn by Piketty as they relate to ordinary people in the labor and other movements for economic justice. In Part 2, I argue that Piketty's work has implications far more radical than his mainstream economic framework, and is thus an important contribution to those movements.

Progressive, Left and Marxist Comments on Piketty's Capital

Paul Krugman gives a wildly enthusiastic review - http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/may/08/thomas-piketty-new-gilded-age/ "Piketty has written a truly superb book. It's a work that melds grand historical sweep-when was the last time you heard an economist invoke Jane Austen and Balzac?-with painstaking data analysis... his discussion is a tour de force of economic modeling, an approach that integrates the analysis of economic growth with that of the distribution of income and wealth. This is a book that will change both the way we think about society and the way we do economics."

Many heterodox (non-mainstream economists) are more critical. Some of the problematic areas include:

Piketty's definition of capital as equal to all forms of wealth, with value equal to its open market price at any point in time, is problematic not only for Marxists but for many economists. David Harvey explains [http://davidharvey.org/2014/05/afterthoughts-pikettys-capital/], "Capital is a process not a thing. It is a process of circulation in which money is used to make more money often, but not exclusively through the exploitation of labor power." -
How does capital produce a certain rate of return? Piketty doesn't address this question - he simply provides data on how much that rate of return is. Marx built on the labor theory of value as developed by Adam Smith, David Ricardo and other classical economists to explain that the exploitation of labor is inherent in the capitalist production process and the root of all capitalist profit. In Part 1 I quoted Marx on the origins of wealth (https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch31.htm) - dripping with the blood of the enslaved and the exploited. Today, the 4%, 5%, or 10% return on capital enjoyed by the Walmart heirs, hedge fund managers, and elite universities' endowments - are ultimately derived from the work of the $8/hr fast food worker, the dispossessed peasant sewing clothing in El Salvador or assembling cell phones in China, and the newly-hired auto worker in Ohio whose wage is half what his father earned a generation ago.
This brings us to the class struggle. Although it is occasionally implicit in sections of Piketty's Capital, its role in social change is almost completely absent from the text. But it was sharp class struggles, led by strong Communist and Socialist parties throughout Europe after World War II, that forced the ruling elite to make major concessions in order to resist the broad appeal of Communism and the Soviet Union. That is the origin of the social state which Piketty praises. And it was and is class war, waged by the 1% against the rest of us, that partially dismantled and continually threatens the social state today.
Picketty has nothing to say about inequalities of race, gender, nationality. The experience in the US is that racism has been the most effective tool used by the 1% to perpetuate their wealth and power by keeping the rest of us divided. No examination of capitalism in the US can be complete without an examination of the economic and the political role played by these inequalities.
Piketty shares with Keynsians and social democrats what I believe is an illusion - that with proper policies and regulation, capitalism can become largely harmonious and crisis free. Marxists have argued that the exploitation inherent in capitalist relations and the anarchy of capitalist production produce a tendency toward crisis that cannot be eliminated from capitalist societies. The historical record - crises and recessions afflicting most capitalist countries at least every decade - seems to confirm the Marxist view.
Piketty has no real recognition of imperialism today, and assumes that most of the rest of world will naturally catch up with developed countries. Not even a mention that along with the social state in developed capitalist countries, huge resources are devoted to wasteful military spending.
Piketty's proposals are fine as far as they go. But how will they come about? He mostly ignores the class structure of state power and public policy. The real ruling class is not even the 1%, but the 1/10 or 1/100 percent. At times, they have been forced to make concessions, even major concessions. But, as Frederick Douglass said, "power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and never will."

These shortcomings, and more, are important if you look at Piketty's Capital as a complete analysis of the capitalist system, or a guide to action for economic justice. But this book is not, and does not pretend to be, a political manifesto or an organizing guide.

A Communist and activist looks at Piketty

Piketty has not produced a comprehensive analysis of capitalism, implicitly accepting a rather conservative economic model. He doesn't acknowledge, and may be largely unfamiliar with the work of progressive/left economists who have done similar, if less exhaustive, work. Picketty's model, based on problematic definitions of wealth and rate of return, can be questioned.

Like most academic economists, Piketty's policy proposals seem out of touch with political reality, and the real movements and organizations of the working class and the 99%.

His program ignores the immediate crisis faced by much of humanity. He is unlikely to lead or even affiliate with a working class movement or even a less well-defined movement of the 99%.

However, Capital is an important contribution to the theory and the discussion of inequality today. Picketty gives important historical data. His conclusion of the tendency toward concentration of wealth is not inconsistent with Marxist or other analyses that reach similar conclusions. And Piketty makes it clear that public policy makes a difference. What more could a Marxist ask of a non-Marxist? What more could an activist for economic justice ask of an academic?

The book (and Piketty's web site) is a valuable resource for data, and Piketty's analysis raises a number of interesting and potentially valuable points. But I would not recommend Capital as a first resource for someone who wants a fundamental understanding of how capitalism works, or even an understanding of the reasons for growing inequality and possible solutions.

Piketty is not a Marxist, and he approaches things differently. But different ways of describing a phenomenon (e.g., tendency for wealth to concentrate) can be valid in different ways and for different purposes.

Piketty wants to save capitalism from itself - not for the purposes of maintaining exploitation (he doesn't think in those terms) but both to prevent cataclysmic crises, and to provide a much greater degree of democracy, equality, and social justice - particularly to maintain and expand public health, education and other social policies. These are not inherently radical goals, although they go against the dominant policies being enacted in leading capitalist countries today.

Piketty's radicalism

Piketty's framework has been called, conservative, conventional. Nonetheless, the implications of Piketty's work are far more radical than his conventional framework and some critics on the left would suggest.

We can disagree with aspects of his framework, while respecting his data and engaging with millions who are influenced by his writing - especially in the US, where there is fierce struggle to block imposition of further ultra-right pro-corporate pro-1% policies.

Thomas Piketty was born in France in 1971, grew up there, and except for a brief period has worked there. His adolescence coincided with the triumph of neoliberalism - Reagan in the US, Thatcher in Britain, and in France the surrender of the Socialist, Mitterand, to the demands of capital. This was the beginning of a global offensive against organized labor, of the triumph of the IMF and structural adjustment policies that came down most heavily in less developed countries, but also saw the start of the long stagnation and rollback of gains the US, British and other working classes had made since the 1930s.

"I... came of age listening to news of the collapse of the Communist dictatorships ... I was vaccinated for life against the conventional but lazy rhetoric of anticapitalism... I have no interest in denouncing inequality or capitalism per se..." (p. 31) And in many ways, Piketty's framework is very conventional.

Coming from this background at this time, it is not remarkable that Piketty rejected Marxism, although I disagree with him on that. What is remarkable is that he quickly saw through the "end of history" "best of all possible worlds" triumphalism that pervaded his profession in his formative years, and dared to look at capitalism with fresh and critical eyes.

Early on, Piketty rejected aspects of mainstream economics. After two years (1993-95) at MIT, he returned to Paris because the economics profession "continued to churn out purely theoretical results without even knowing what facts needed to be explained. And it expected me to do the same. When I returned to France, I set out to collect the missing data."

Piketty's insistence that theory must be based on data, that economic models must be tested by reality, is not inherently radical, and is not unique to Marxists. But it has radical implications in an era when the economic equivalents of climate denial pass as conventional wisdom and are defended by leading political and economic authorities. For example, policies of austerity (whose popular version is - "when average families tighten their belts, government must also tighten its belt,") have repeatedly been shown in theory and in practice to be wrong and destructive, yet they are still being advocated by many major economists and followed by those in power.

It is radical to focus on real data in the US, where political discourse is often dominated by personal anecdote and economic myths. Piketty's data explicitly undermines one of our most enduring myths - he shows that the economic insecurity of the middle class is not due to generous handouts to the undeserving poor, but to the ever-increasing share taken by the rich, the very rich, and the super rich. He poses a radical challenge, from the mainstream, to the way mainstream economics is practiced in the U.S.

Picketty draws connections among economics, politics, and history. He has an almost Marxist description of class struggle over the distribution of wealth (p.39), although without Marx' analysis of exploitation.

A radical view of wealth

Piketty says that capital reflects social relations, i.e. the wealth that the 1% regard as their own is actually an artificial social construct. It is society and its laws that grants ownership and control to an individual or corporation. "Capital is not an immutable concept: it reflects the state of development and prevailing social relations of each society." (p. 47).

(One example is the role of trade agreements such as the TPP currently being negotiated, which make knowledge in the form of patents and copyrights into commodities owned by giant global conglomerates, with the power to extract tribute from the world's population for use of that knowledge, beyond the ability of local or even national governments to intervene.)

Piketty speaks of "the atmosphere, the sea, mountains, historical monuments, and knowledge," as forms of wealth and says, "Certain private interests would like to own these things, and sometimes they justify this desire on grounds of efficiency rather than mere self-interest. But there is no guarantee that this desire coincides with the general interest."

Piketty's view is in sharp contrast to the expression commonly heard in the U.S. regarding the fortunes of billionaires: "It's their money, they can do what they want with it." In essence, Piketty challenges this. If wealth is a social construct, then society, acting through democratic decision making, should have a voice in the use of that wealth. Piketty's proposal for a global tax on wealth is explicitly designed to reassert public control over the global billionaires that have the decisive economic power in the world today. Even a small tax, he says, will produce reliable information on the extent and distribution of wealth - information necessary for democratic decision-making (p. 518). "Everyone would be required to report ownership of capital assets to the world's financial authorities in order to be recognized as the legal owner." (p. 519). This statement undoubtedly horrifies the libertarian streak in U.S. capitalism, but reaffirms Piketty's contention that wealth exists only as a creation of society, and should be subject to society's democratic control.

It might be a leap too far to compare this with the Marxist position that a principle contradiction of capitalism is between the increasing social nature of the production and distribution of goods and services, and their ever more concentrated private ownership and control. And that socializing the ownership and control through working class power is the only way to resolve that contradiction and the evils of poverty, inequality and crisis that stem from it.

That is not Piketty's view, and is not even implicit in his writing. But his view on the social nature of wealth does not contradict the Marxist view.

Tax the Rich

Piketty emphasizes that the growing dominance of rentier (unearned) income - income from interest, dividends, and rent, - is not socially justified, and he challenges the supersalaries of top executives which he shows play an important role in increasing inequality. I disagree with his classification of these supersalaries as "income from labor" - for both economic and political clarity, it is more realistic to regard million-dollar-plus salaries and bonuses as profits, derived from the exploitation of those who perform the real work. But that does not detract from the implications of Piketty's data and analysis.

He directly challenges one of the basic tenets of dominant mainstream economics - that incomes tend to reflect the value of work performed, and that inequality reflects the high value of work performed by the super-rich and the low value of work performed by, or the unwillingness to work of, the poor.

Piketty says that marginal tax rates above 80% on the portion of incomes over $500,000 or $1 million per year are "the only way to stem the observed increase in very high salaries" (p. 512), and such a tax "would not reduce the growth of the US economy but would in fact distribute the fruits of growth more widely while imposing reasonable limits on economically useless (or even harmful) behavior." (p. 513 emphasis added).

This means doubling the taxes on the 1% in the U.S. (although merely returning to the rates in effect from the 1940s to the 1970s). The radical implications lie in the way the issue is framed. He wants to tax the rich, not only or primarily to raise funds, but to end super-high salaries. He is not only challenging the idea that supersalaries are economically justified - he is saying that they are harmful. He says that gross inequality produces economically useless or even harmful behavior.

Piketty's formulation certainly supports the proposition that it is not only morally, but economically justified for the people to lay claim (through taxes) to a larger share of the nation's wealth - wealth that is socially created in the first place. With even more radical implications, there should be at least a measure of public control over economic activity. If we the people can impose "reasonable limits on economically useless (or even harmful) behavior," why should we not provide positive direction for economically and environmentally constructive purposes?

Wealth, Public Debt, and the social state

Conservatives who dominate public economics and policy say the absolute priority is to reduce the public debt by slashing government spending (on most things) while cutting taxes on the 1% and raising taxes on the 99%. Keynesian economists, a category which includes most progressives, are gaining ground in academia if not in the media and political spheres. They say the biggest danger comes from unemployment and the depressed economy, and that increased government spending on social programs and infrastructure is good in itself and good for the economy, even at the expense of increased public debt.

Piketty's position is potentially more radical. He is favorable toward what he calls the social state - government spending on programs like universal health care, child care, and pensions (Social Security). But government debt, he says, is mainly held by rich people, and the service of that debt represents a continual transfer of wealth from the public to the 1%. So it is better to take part of multi-millionaires' wealth with a tax on capital than to borrow from them in the first place. Existing government debt should be reduced rapidly, he says, by a temporary, progressive wealth tax, which is how France dealt with its huge public debt after World War II (pp 540-541). This really strikes at the heart of the conservative worldview, which views the private property of the billionaire to be sacred.

Piketty is hardly alone in his support of the social state. But his framing of the discussion is interesting. Key components of the social state - education, health and pensions - are "built around a logic of rights and a principle of equal access" that are fundamental (p. 479). He traces these rights to the 1776 US Declaration of Independence and the 1789 French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (1789). Under the latter, he says, "inequality is acceptable only if it is based on 'common utility'" and "social inequalities are acceptable only if they are in the interest of all and in particular the most disadvantaged social groups" (p. 480). Exactly what inequalities are acceptable and in what directions equality can be extended, he says, must be answered through "democratic debate and political confrontation."

I would answer that such questions are ultimately decided, in a capitalist society, through class struggle. But when Piketty says it is up to society as a whole to determine democratically how wealth, including "private" wealth, is to be used, this is a radical break from the very concept of private ownership of great wealth. And while Piketty employs these concepts in a capitalist framework, they can be seen as consistent with or even favoring socialism, whose essence is democratic control of the nation's wealth and its employment for the benefit of all.

Conclusion

Piketty's Capital is a significant contribution to economics: in its mass of data; its insistence on a historical view; its analysis of capitalism's tendency to inequality. It also contains assumptions, definitions, analyses, and omissions which are questionable. These have been discussed extensively in the year since Capital's publication. Piketty has contributed greatly to making the study of inequality an important part of economic discourse today.

As Marx famously said, "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it." Will Piketty's work be relegated to a topic for graduate economic seminars? That's really not up to Picketty. It's up to us. But by stimulating a broad public discussion of the nature and causes of inequality, and by the radical implications of his analysis, I believe that Piketty's Capital can contribute to building a movement for an economy that works for working people, for building a society that puts people and nature before profits.

Additional resources:

Piketty's Capital has generated far too much interesting discussion for me to attempt a bibliography. I will mention two that have recently caught my attention.

An article in Monthly Review demonstrates Piketty's challenge to mainstream economics even while pointing out his limitations, which are based on the very mainstream framework that he adopts. http://monthlyreview.org/2014/11/01/piketty-and-the-crisis-of-neoclassical-economics/

A collection of articles by heterodox (non-mainstream) economists analyzing various aspects of Piketty's work was published recently in a special issue of Real World Economic Review [http://p.feedblitz.com/t3.asp?/332386/21620547/4833237/www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue69/whole69.pdf].

Photo: Philadelphia, sign at Occupy Philly November 2011 Ben Sears/PA

A Communist activist looks at Piketty's "Capital in the 21st Century": part 1 Piketty for activists

Art Perlo — Mon, 15 Dec 2014 20:47:00 +0000

Part 1 - Piketty for Activists

This article is based on a talk I gave at the New Haven Free Public Library last August. That talk and this article are not aimed at economists, and do not discuss in any depth the economic arguments in the book, nor the debates surrounding them. Rather, in this article (Part 1 - Piketty for Activists), I summarize some of the most important data presented and conclusions drawn by Piketty as they relate to ordinary people in the labor and other movements for economic justice. In Part 2 - The radicalism of Thomas Piketty, I argue that Piketty's work has implications far more radical than his mainstream economic framework, and is thus an important contribution to those movements.

Throughout this article, numbers in parentheses refer to the relevant page numbers in the 2014 Harvard University Press edition of Capital in the 21^st Century, which will be referred to as "Piketty's Capital" (or simply, Capital), as distinguished from the work by Karl Marx, which will be referred to as "Marx's Capital."

Why are we talking about this book?

The title is "Capital in the 21^st Century," and it is the rare example of a weighty economics book that spent months on best-seller lists, and has become a cornerstone in the discussion of inequality.

Unlike Karl Marx's Capital (1867), Thomas Piketty's book is not and does not try to be a complete description of the political economy of capitalism. Rather, Piketty's Capital focuses on the concentration of wealth at the top, and the resultant growth of inequality.

Why is it a best seller? Ten years ago, Capital may have received little notice. But as Piketty states in his opening paragraph, "The distribution of wealth is one of today's most widely discussed and controversial issues..."

Start perhaps in 1999 in Seattle, with the massive protests against the way capitalist trade agreements are forcing workers into a global race to the bottom, continuing through the Occupy movement in 2011, the national movement to raise the minimum wage, and the growing movement of fast food and other low-wage workers to organize unions. These developments in the US have been paralleled around the world, and have pushed the issue of inequality onto center stage. That's why Piketty's Capital is a best seller and, in turn, the book has helped to place the issue and solutions on the table, with public figures from the Pope to President Obama speaking out.

The millions of people in the US and billions globally who are fed up, don't need Piketty's book to know that something is rotten - that their own living conditions and prospects have deteriorated while the 1% are richer than ever. And Piketty is hardly the first economist to provide data and analysis to give substance to this gut feeling.

But Piketty's Capital stands out because of its careful compilation of centuries of data from many countries, combined with a theoretical framework to explain the dynamics of inequality and its rise in the last 3 decades. Piketty (at the Paris School of Economics), and his U.S. collaborator Emanuel Saez at UC-Berkely are widely recognized for their work in tracking the distribution of income and wealth. Piketty is well within mainstream economics, so his work is hard to ignore.

What does the book say?

The book says a lot - 600 pages worth, plus extensive notes. Piketty's own summary is given in his 35-page introduction and in his 100-page concluding section.

Page 1 tells us what the book is about. "Do dynamics of private capital accumulation inevitably lead to the concentration of wealth in fewer hands, or do the balancing forces of growth, competition and technological progress lead in later stages of development to reduced concentration and greater class harmony, These are the questions I attempt to answer." (p. 1).

Piketty's research spans several millenia, and focuses on several centuries of data. It covers many countries, but focuses on France, Britain and the U.S. The historical research is impressive, often interesting, exhaustive, and often exhausting.

His conclusion: There is a strong tendency for increasing divergence, i.e., for growing concentration of wealth at the very top. This tendency exists within every country, and also globally. If unchecked, this tendency can lead to a polarization that threatens social and political stability, with potentially catastrophic consequences.

He emphasizes that this is a tendency, not an absolute law. Inequality is shaped by economic, political and social forces and policies. It is a tendency that can be halted and reversed by public policy, although he is not optimistic that this will happen. And he emphasizes that without policy intervention, there is no automatic economic mechanism that will act to stop the growth of destabilizing concentration of wealth in capitalist economies. Picketty develops a mathematical model, but does not rely exclusively or even primarily on abstract models: he constantly goes back and forth between his model and historical data, showing how they interact.

Rentier Society

Piketty shows the growing inequality and concentration of wealth in Europe that peaked just before World War I. In the UK, the most unequal country, the richest 10% owned "almost everything." During this period the very rich could live luxuriously on a portion of the income from their inherited wealth, leaving a substantial amount left over for reinvestment. Thus, the family fortune would grow faster than the national economy. He concludes, "For strictly mathematical reasons, the conditions are ideal for an 'inheritance society'... characterized by both a very high concentration of wealth and a significant persistence of large fortunes from generation to generation." (p. 351).

This was a rentier society in which the incomes of the wealthy were almost entirely derived from property (rent) and investments (as opposed to wages and salaries from working). Piketty enriches and enlivens this discussion with references from 18^th and 19^th century novels. But outside of these narratives, Piketty's analysis is particularly clinical. The accumulation of great wealth appears as an almost automatic process, governed by natural law.

Contrast this with the origins of wealth as described in Marx's Capital: "The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production... capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt." (Marx, Capital, Vol 1, Chapter 31 - https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch31.htm] )

I would add that it was the incredibly brutal plunder, repression and exploitation of their own people, along with the looting of much of the rest of the world, that provided the steady 5%+ return on government bonds and private investments by which the rentiers of British and French society were able to live a genteel life. While Piketty alludes to this - a character he describes in one of Balzac's novel travels to the West Indies to superintend the family's slave-powered plantation - national oppression and class exploitation are incidental to his analysis, while for Marx they are central.

Inequality trends since World War II

In the 20^th century, the steady concentration of wealth was upset by the shocks of World War I, the great depression, World War II and its aftermath (p. 368+). But since the 1970s, inequality has been growing again, although it has not reached pre-World War I levels. (p. 294)

It is noteworthy that in 1910, Europe had significantly greater concentration of wealth than the US. Since World War II, the positions are reversed, with the US having greater concentration of wealth at the very top. And the bottom half of the population in the US today, together, owned only 2% of the nation's wealth. (p. 257)

In the U.S., income inequality is even greater today than it was in 1929. Over the last 3 decades the top 1% doubled their share of total income from 10% to 20% (p. 292), and even this is probably an underestimate due to the use of tax havens to hide income. (p. 295).

Piketty explains the increase in income at the top by the rise of what he terms supermanagers - incredibly high salaries of top corporate executives. But his data show that at the very top - the top 0.1% - income from capital - rentier income - still dominates.

Even granted the role of supersalaries, Piketty says, "regardless of whether the wealth a person holds is... inherited or earned... the fact remains that beyond a certain threshold, capital tends to accumulate exponentially... the entrepreneur always tends to turn into a rentier." (p. 395) (emphasis added). As an example, Piketty describes Bill Gates' fortune as entrepreneurial - earned (at least implicitly) through hard work, innovation, and management skill. Piketty compares Gates with cosmetics heiress Liliane Bettencourt, who has never worked and whose fortune is based entirely on inherited wealth. Both fortunes - those of the hard-working Gates and the idle Bettencourt, increased at the same rate. And even after he has officially stopped "working," Gates wealth has continued to grow (p. 440).

(Marxists and other skeptics would say that exploitation and monopoly profiteering, as opposed to productive work, account for most of the Gates billions, but that doesn't affect the point Piketty makes here).

Piketty goes on to show that in France, the only country for which good data are available, inherited wealth is rapidly regaining its pre-World War I importance. (pp. 404,425).

Piketty discusses the unequal returns on wealth: the greater your wealth, the higher the rate of return on your capital. (p. 447+). The 1% enjoy higher average returns than the economy as a whole, and the very top may well have returns double those of other investors. I think Piketty should have emphasized this point more, as it greatly supports his contention that, unchecked, wealth tends to concentrate at the top.

The question is: will wealth concentration continue to grow until it reaches the levels of 1910? (pp. 368+, 375+). Piketty's says, "Nothing is certain; inequality can move in either direction... One conclusion is already quite clear, however: it is an illusion to think that something about the nature of modern growth or the laws of the market economy ensures that inequality of wealth will decrease and harmonious stability will be achieved." If the post-World War II policies, such as taxes on capital and income, continue to be destroyed, he says, inequalities as bad as 1910 or even more extreme could emerge.

Piketty gives extensive attention to the "shocks" which, in the mid-20^th century, greatly reduced the concentration of wealth at the top and the inequality of income. The physical destruction of war, and post-war inflation in some countries, wiped out much of the wealth of the upper classes. Social policies enacted in response to these shocks - progressive taxes, wealth taxes, and "welfare state" policies that in the U.S. include programs like Social Security, unemployment insurance and Medicare/Medicaid - were even more important in reducing inequality, according to Piketty. He largely ignores the role of working class struggle in forcing those concessions from a reluctant ruling class, and completely ignores the role of the Soviet Union and allied countries whose example pressured the ruling classes of Western Europe, and even the United States, to grant concessions to their own working classes and those of their dependencies.

Piketty's program

The last section of Piketty's book is subtitled, Regulating capital in the 21^st Century,

In chapter 13, he argues that the social democratic practices that developed in Europe (and to a lesser extent in the US) in the 20^th century redistribute wealth - not by taking from the rich to give to the poor, but by taking from the rich to finance public policies that are more or less equal for everyone, "especially in the area of health, eduction and pensions" (p. 481). He traces the justification for this approach to the American and French revolutions, which "both affirmed equality of rights as an absolute principle... But in practice, during the nineteenth century, the political systems that grew out of those revolutions concentrated mainly on the protection of property rights."

Progressive taxation was the 20^th century innovation, pioneered in America and Britain, which made the social state possible. But since 1980, the progressive income and estate taxes have been undermined by a race to the bottom. The very rich pay a smaller share of their income in total taxes than the moderately rich and the middle class. (Remember Mitt Romney admitting a federal tax rate of 14%, less than many middle class Americans.)

Piketty says the only way to control runaway executive pay and the inequality it produces is returning to confiscatory tax rates of before 1980 (pp. 511-512), and advocates a marginal rate of 80% on incomes above $500,000 or $1 million.

But this is unlikely to happen, he says, and asks, "Has US politics been captured by the 1%?... I am inclined to grant more influence to ideas and intellectual debate." (p. 513). His answer perhaps shows a certain naivete, especially in light of the domination of big money in the 2014 U.S. elections. But on the next page, in apparent self-rebuttal, he says, "...the drift toward oligarchy is real and gives little reason for optimism about where the United states is headed.... no hypocrisy is too great when economic and financial elites are obliged to defend their interests - and that includes economists, who currently occupy an enviable place in the US income hierarchy... the New World may be on the verge of becoming the Old Europe of the 21^st century's globalized economy" (p. 514).

Finally, in chapter 15, we get to the main programmatic point. Yes, we need to update 20^th century fiscal programs (like progressive taxes) and social state programs (like education and pensions) but in the 21^st century "If democracy is to regain control over globalized financial capitalism... it must also invent new tools." (p. 515)

The tool proposed by Piketty is a progressive global tax on capital (GTC) with international financial transparency. The primary purpose is not to finance the state but to regulate capitalism (p. 518), although the revenue generated would not be trivial. A tax on capital stops the indefinite increase of inequality and also imposes effective regulation on the financial sector. It would provide information on the distribution of wealth - information which is necessary (and currently lacking) for democratic public policy.

While unrealistic on a global scale at this time, such a tax would be technically simple to implement on an EU-wide basis (p. 522+). With cooperation amongst the EU countries, it should be possible to have uniform banking rules and force tax havens to comply, so that wealth could no longer be hidden (p. 527+). Tax levels at the top should be set so that rentier wealth does not continually increase.

Of special interest in the U.S., Piketty's very modest tax on all capital would replace the separate property tax, which hits middle class hardest (p. 528). In France, Piketty says, property tax is usually 0.5%-1%. In my city of New Haven, it is probably 3%-5%. Property tax, imposed in the United States on a local level, is our only form of wealth tax. Originally, property was the main form of wealth, and the tax was mildly progressive. Today, financial wealth is not taxed, and the property tax in the U.S. even more than in France hits middle income households hard, and lower income, through their rent, possibly harder. So a tax on all wealth could reduce the property tax in a way that would benefit most of the 99%.

Piketty then makes the case that his tax on capital - wealth - complements a progressive income tax and estate tax, and is essential to stop the uncontrolled growth of inequality.

In my opinion, that of most reviewers, and probably Picketty himself, his proposal for a global tax on capital, or even a regional EU tax, is politically unrealistic today.

But so are the proposals of climate scientists, who warn that it is essential to practically eliminate new carbon emissions right now. That doesn't mean the climate scientists are wrong, or that Picketty is wrong.

Critics from the right.

Of course, Piketty has been attacked from the right. Most of those attacks are laughable, and have been effectively refuted many times. Of course, this does not stop them from being repeated endlessly, and being used by mainstream media. A few representative examples:

Piketty is wrong - The Financial Times (FT) published a front-page exposé by Chris Giles [http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/capital21c/en/media/FT23052014c.pdf] alleging that Piketty's data are wrong, a charge picked up and repeated in The Wall Street Journal [http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/why-pikettys-wealth-data-are-worthless] and elsewhere. The FT article has been refuted widely [ http://equitablegrowth.org/2014/05/30/daily-piketty-may-30-2014/] including by Piketty himself [http://www.voxeu.org/article/factual-response-ft-s-fact-checking]). I find Piketty's response convincing, as did many economists. Most of the "inconsistencies" Giles found were explained by his failure to read the technical appendices and so misinterpreted the data. But few readers, and probably fewer financial reporters, have the time or expertise to delve into the competing claims. The result is that the FT article can produce "he said - she said" reporting, casting doubt on Piketty's data.

A rising tide lifts all boats - A typical example of this argument comes from an article circulated by Bloomberg News [http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-05-13/why-worry-about-inequality] which asks, in effect, what's wrong with growing inequality, as long as "almost everyone is growing richer, and that poverty is disappearing." The author, a Harvard Law professor, apparently has not noticed that the majority of working class Americans are getting poorer, not richer, and that poverty is in no danger of disappearing.

Greed is Good - The New York Times printed an article by Gregory Mankiw, Professor of Economics at Harvard, Chair of George W. Bush's Council of Economic Advisers, and economic adviser to Mitt Romney's presidential bid. [http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/22/upshot/how-inherited-wealth-helps-the-economy.htm]. He praises inherited wealth (as showing the concern billionaires have for their children) and claims we all benefit, because these great fortunes are invested in new and expanding businesses that provide jobs and wages for the rest of us. Jared Bernstein points out [http://jaredbernsteinblog.com/mankiw-piketty-and-wealth-taxes/] that this is just a restating of the supply-side justification of throwing money at the rich, claiming that some will trickle down to the rest of us. This is, of course, refuted by the experience of the past 40 years, when tax cuts for the 1% and other feed-the-rich policies have contributed to stagnation and actual decline for most working class families, a loss of productive and good-paying jobs, and a rapid growth in low-wage, no-benefit jobs.

Conclusion

I have tried to convey what I think are some of the most important points in Capital, although in 600 pages, Picketty ventures into many areas deserving of an entire review on their own. In part 2 of this article, I will briefly review some aspects of Picketty's work which I view as problematic, and why despite that, Capital can be a significant contribution to building a movement for an economy that works for working people, for building a society that puts people and nature before profits.

Photo: Thomas Piketty commons.wikipedia.org

The dirty hand of the National Endowment for Democracy in Venezuela

Eva Golinger — Mon, 12 May 2014 14:44:00 +0000

Author and journalist Eva Golinger details recent U.S. funding of the Venezuelan opposition, concluding that, "What is clear is that the US government continues to feed efforts to destabilize Venezuela".

Anti-government protests in Venezuela that seek regime change have been led by several individuals and organizations with close ties to the US government. Leopoldo Lopez and Maria Corina Machado- two of the public leaders behind the violent protests that started in February - have long histories as collaborators, grantees and agents of Washington. The National Endowment for Democracy "NED" and the US Agency for International Development (USAID) have channeled multi-million dollar funding to Lopez's political parties Primero Justicia and Voluntad Popular, and Machado's NGO Sumate and her electoral campaigns.

These Washington agencies have also filtered more than $14 million to opposition groups in Venezuela between 2013 and 2014, including funding for their political campaigns in 2013 and for the current anti-government protests in 2014. This continues the pattern of financing from the US government to anti-Chavez groups in Venezuela since 2001, when millions of dollars were given to organizations from so-called "civil society" to execute a coup d'etat against President Chavez in April 2002. After their failure days later, USAID opened an Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI) in Caracas to, together with the NED, inject more than $100 million in efforts to undermine the Chavez government and reinforce the opposition during the following 8 years.

At the beginning of 2011, after being publically exposed for its grave violations of Venezuelan law and sovereignty, the OTI closed its doors inVenezuela and USAID operations were transferred to its offices in the US. The flow of money to anti-government groups didn't stop, despite the enactment by Venezuela's National Assembly of the Law of Political Sovereignty and NationalSelf-Determination at the end of 2010, which outright prohibits foreign funding of political groups in the country. US agencies and the Venezuelan groups that receive their money continue to violate the law with impunity. In the Obama Administration's Foreign Operations Budgets, between $5-6 million have been included to fund opposition groups in Venezuela through USAID since 2012.

The NED, a "foundation" created by Congress in 1983 to essentially do the CIA's work overtly, has been one of the principal financiers of destabilization in Venezuela throughout the Chavez administration and now against President Maduro. According to NED's 2013 annual report, the agency channeled more than $2.3 million to Venezuelan opposition groups and projects. Within that figure, $1,787,300 went directly to anti-government groups within Venezuela, while another $590,000 was distributed to regional organizations that work with and fund the Venezuelan opposition. More than $300,000 was directed towards efforts to develop a new generation of youth leaders to oppose Maduro's government politically.

One of the groups funded by NED to specifically work with youth is FORMA (http://www.forma.org.ve), an organization led by Cesar Briceño and tied to Venezuelan banker Oscar Garcia Mendoza. Garcia Mendoza runs the Banco Venezolano de Credito, a Venezuelan bank that has served as the filter for the flow of dollars from NED and USAID to opposition groups in Venezuela, including Sumate, CEDICE, Sin Mordaza, Observatorio Venezolano de Prisiones and FORMA, amongst others.

Another significant part of NED funds in Venezuela from 2013-2014 was given to groups and initiatives that work in media and run the campaign to discredit the government of President Maduro. Some of the more active media organizations outwardly opposed to Maduro and receiving NED funds include Espacio Publico, Instituto Prensa y Sociedad (IPYS), Sin Mordaza and GALI. Throughout the past year, an unprecedented media war has been waged against the Venezuelan government and President Maduro directly, which has intensified during the past few months of protests.

In direct violation of Venezuelan law, NED also funded the opposition coalition, the Democratic Unity Table (MUD), via the US International Republican Institute (IRI), with $100,000 to "share lessons learned with [anti-government groups] in Nicaragua, Argentina and Bolivia...and allow for the adaption of the Venezuelan experience in these countries". Regarding this initiative, the NED 2013 annual report specifically states its aim: "To develop the ability of political and civil society actors from Nicaragua, Argentina and Bolivia to work on national, issue-based agendas for their respective countries using lessons learned and best practices from successful Venezuelan counterparts. The Institute will facilitate an exchange of experiences between the Venezuelan Democratic Unity Roundtable and counterparts in Bolivia, Nicaragua and Argentina. IRI will bring these actors together through a series of tailored activities that will allow for the adaptation of the Venezuelan experience in these countries."

IRI has helped to build right-wing opposition parties Primero Justicia and Voluntad Popular, and has worked with the anti-government coaltion in Venezuela since before the 2002 coup d'etat against Chavez. In fact, IRI's president at that time, George Folsom, outwardly applauded the coup and celebrated IRI's role in apressrelease claiming, "The Institute has served as a bridge between the nation's political parties and all civil society groups to help Venezuelans forge a new democratic future..."

Detailed in a report published by the Spanish institute FRIDE in 2010, international agencies that fund the Venezuelan opposition violate currency control laws in order to get their dollars to the recipients. Also confirmed in the FRIDE report was the fact that the majority of international agencies, with the exception of the European Commission, are bringing in foreign money and changing it on the black market, in clear violation of Venezuelan law. In some cases, as the FRIDE analysis reports, the agencies open bank accounts abroad for the Venezuelan groups or they bring them the money in hard cash. The US Embassy in Caracas could also use the diplomatic pouch to bring large quantities of unaccounted dollars and euros into the country that are later handed over illegally to anti-government groups in Venezuela.

What is clear is that the US government continues to feed efforts to destabilize Venezuela in clear violation of law. Stronger legal measures and enforcement may be necessary to ensure the sovereignty and defense of Venezuela's democracy.

Eva Golinger is a Venezuelan-American journalist and an attorney specializing in international human rights and immigration law. Her website is Postcards from the Revolution. This article was posted at Venezuelanalysis.com.

Photo Brazilian President Dilma Rouseff receiving a picture of Hugo Chavez from Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. Agencia Brazil/Creative Commons 3.0

The crisis that confronts us: an inquiry in preparation for the CPUSA National Convention

Greg Rose — Thu, 23 Jan 2014 20:06:00 +0000

Crises of overproduction/underproduction arise from the anarchic nature of capitalism, and are often called crises of the business cycle. Overproduction results in unsold inventory; this results in disruption of production, unemployment, and ultimately deflation. Crises of overproduction have been mitigated to some degree by capital planning by major banks through controlling credit and by countercyclical fiscal policy (increasing aggregate demand).[i] That such crises continue to arise regularly are a result of the underlying anarchic structure of capitalism. However, the evidence since the collapse of the housing bubble in 2008 suggests that countercyclical policy's stimulus spending has been considerably less effective in increasing employment and easing the suffering of working people, even controlling for the fact that the portion of stimulus allocated to tax reductions notoriously lags behind direct transfers in stimulating demand. The likely reason for this troubling phenomenon is that the nature of capitalist crisis has changed as monopoly capitalism has become increasingly hyperfinancialized.[ii]

It is reasonably certain that what capitalism faces today is not, as some academic Marxists claim, a crisis of overaccumulation[iii] (Kliman, 2012: 48ff), although a longterm overaccumulation problem almost certainly explains the phenomenon of hyperfinancialization: the financial sector provided a profitable area of investment, providing opportunities to obtain reasonable rates of return on the reinvestment of capital which were otherwise in short supply. That the problem is not overaccumulation is suggested by the fact that there appears to be a falling rather than a rising organic composition of capital[iv] in the current period - in the ten years prior to the collapse, as Table 1 shows, the proportion of capitalist investment in constant capital tended to decline, while investment in variable capital tended to increase. Since 2009 investment in both constant and variable capital in the U.S. has tended to decline. These data suggest that intervening variables have reversed the organic composition predicted by Marx's law of the tendential fall in the rate of profit[v] for nearly fifteen years.

Table 1

Organic Composition of U.S. Capital, 1998-2012

_______________________________________________________________________

1998_______1999_______2000______2001______2002____

Ratio of Constant Capital

to Variable Capital (c/v) 0.3677______0.3736______0.3713____0.3990____0.3317____

Percent Change (c/v) ____ 1.6-% _____ -0.61%____ -8.69% -2.17%____

_______________________________________________________________________

2003_______2004_______2005______2006______2007____

Ratio of Constant Capital

to Variable Capital (c/v) 0.3351______0.3364______0.3800____0.3838____0.3595___

Percent Change (c/v) ___1.03%______ 8.63% _____ 4.41% ___-0.99% -6.34%__

________________________________________________________________________

2009_______2010_______ 2011______2012_____________

Ratio of Constant Capital

to Variable Capital (c/v) 0.3091______0.3179______0.2998____0.3102___________

Percent Change (c/v) ___ -6.31% _____2.85% _____ -5.69% ____3.47%

There are several things which could, at least in part, account for this reversal of the predicted organic composition of capital. For example, since 2000 service industries account for 80% of American employment; traditional manufacturing accounts for less than 20% (AFL-CIO 2002). It could be argued that the service sector represents unproductive production and should not be counted in measuring the organic composition of capital. There are, however, excellent theoretical and empirical reasons for regarding this as nonsense (viz. Poynter 2000). Furthermore, even if fast-food restaurants or Starbucks coffeeshops don't manufacture commodities of precisely the same sort and in the same way that industrial manufacturing does, they still have constant and variable capital costs and patently labor adds value to the commodities they produce. Enterprises which do not produce surplus-value generally do not survive under capitalism. The offshoring of industrial production for retail giants like Walmart simply transfers the problem to the national accounts of the Peoples Republic of China. However, closer examination of the data suggests that the reversal of the predicted organic composition does not result from these factors: for example, when industrial manufacturing is segregated from other sectors, the same general constant capital-to-variable capital ratios still obtain which occur in the national aggregate data. This suggests that a deeper structural explanation is at work here.

There is evidence for the dominance of a rentier[vi] sector in contemporary monopoly capitalism. Economic rent is the ability to extract money by virtue of owning a property right. Land rent and interest are the principal forms of rents today; we frequently see them instantiated in such things as property rent, mortgages, monopoly rights, patent rights, credit card debt, student debt, bonds and other interest-bearing instruments (interest is also called "debt service").

Both Marx and Lenin assumed that banking and finance capital would evolve from usurious concentration on fictitious capital as German banking did in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, producing efficiencies and a certain degree of economic planning of productive investment based on central banks and major banking interests. They believed that the long-term profitability of commodity production would temper the role of rent seeking in banking and focus wealth into productive investment. However, the German model did not prevail in the wake of two lost world wars. The Anglo-American model of banking with its emphasis on short-term profit-taking and rent seeking has become dominant: the usurer's capital model of compound interest. Note also that U.S. public policy favors no tax on interest, so that more of the economy is available to pay interest; this is also accomplished by shifting the tax burden off of real property and onto consumers - recall the bank-driven property-tax rebellions of the Reagan era and the continuing mania of the Republican Party and the right wing of the Democrats for tax cuts, even at the price of losing vital infrastructure and necessary state-provided services: every cent shifted from taxes becomes available to pay interest to the financial sector.

Marx identified the basis for the problem in the third volume of Capital:

Capital appears as a mysterious and self-creating source of interest, of its own increase. The thing (money, commodity value) is now already capital simply as a thing; the result of the overall reduction process appears as a property devolving on a thing in itself.... In interest-bearing capital, therefore, this automatic fetish is elaborated into its pure form, self-valorizing value, money breeding money, and in its form it no longer bears any marks of its origin. The social relationship is consummated in the relationship of a thing, money, to itself.... There is still a further distortion. While interest is simply one part of profit... it now appears conversely as if interest is the specific fruit of capital, the original thing, while profit now transformed into the form of profit of enterprise, appears as a mere accessory and trimming added in the reproduction process. The fetish character of capital and the representation of this capital fetish is now complete. In M - M' we have the irrational form of capital, the misrepresentation and objectification of the relations of production, in its highest power; the interest-bearing form, the simpler form of capital, in which it is taken as logically anterior to its own reproduction process; the ability of money or a commodity to valorize its own value independent of reproduction - the capital mystification in the most flagrant form [emphasis added] (Marx 1998: 255-56).

Fictitious capital, a phenomenon Marx characterizes as "usurer's capital" elsewhere, comes to predominate as what is merely a stage of capital reproduction becomes fetishized into money creating its own value independent of production. This fetishization[vii] can happen because of the dual nature of money. On the one hand, money is transformed into capital when it is directly spent in acquiring the means of production and the labor power necessary to produce commodities (M-C-M'); on the other hand, money is capital in the form of credit, transformed into a special kind of commodity with a price, interest, on financial markets, and from the perspective of interest-yielding capital, appears to create it own value (M-M'). Marx describes this phenomenon in the following way:

The characteristic movement of capital in general, the return of the money to the capitalist, i.e., the return of capital to its point of departure, assumes in the case of interest-bearing capital a wholly external appearance, separated from the actual movement, of which it is a form. A gives away his money not as money, but as capital. No transformation occurs in the capital. It merely changes hands. Its real transformation into capital does not take place until it is in the hands of B. But for A it becomes capital as soon as he gives it to B. The actual reflux of capital from the processes of production and circulation takes place only for B. But for A the reflux assumes the same form as the alienation. The capital returns from B to A. Giving away, i.e., loaning money for a certain time and receiving it back with interest (surplus-value) is the complete form of the movement peculiar to interest-bearing capital as such. The actual movement of loaned money as capital is an operation lying outside the transactions between lender and borrower. In these the intermediate act is obliterated, invisible, not directly included. A special sort of commodity, capital has its own peculiar mode of alienation. Neither does its return, therefore, express itself as the consequence and result, of some definite series of economic processes, but as the effect of a specific legal agreement between buyer and seller (Marx 1998: 228).

While one cannot reject the patent absurdity of money without commodities or of money as a commodity, one can understand the fetishized misunderstanding of money as the capital which produces interest, which makes money out of nothing.

The profitability of such fictitious capital rests on what Marx called the "magic" of compound interest. An eighteenth century political economist, Richard Price, identified the fundamental problem with compound interest: "A shilling put out at 6% interest at our Saviour's birth would... have increased [by 1769] to a greater sum [than a solid gold sphere]... equal in diameter to the diameter of Saturn's orbit" (Price, 1769). Of course, there are no gold spheres the diameter of Saturn's orbit. The reason for this is that for most of the period between the eighteenth century and now there has been a roughly fifteen-year cycle during which debt is accumulated until debt service on the aggregate debt exhausts the resources of debtors and the bubble collapses; creditors are forced to write off uncollectible debts and insolvent debtors find protection in the bankruptcy laws. However, at least since the second Reagan administration it has been the policy of the U.S. government to prevent such bubbles from collapsing - a policy which has been pursued with only intermittent success, albeit with profound structural consequences for international capital and extremely high costs for the international working class.

Returning to Marx's analysis of fictitious capital, he identifies this rent-seeking as intrinsically destructive of capital formation:

Interest-bearing capital, or, as we may call it in its antiquated form, usurer's capital, belongs together with its twin brother, merchant's capital, to the antediluvian forms of capital, which long precede the capitalist mode of production and are to be found in the most diverse economic formations of society.... [T]his usurer's capital impoverishes the mode of production, paralyses the productive forces instead of developing them, and at the same time perpetuates the miserable conditions in which the social productivity of labour is not developed at the expense of labour itself, as in the capitalist mode of production (Marx 1998: 424-425).

It is for these reasons, as well as others, that Marx believed that usurer's capital would be transformed into modern interest-capital and that banking would evolve from rent-seeking debt financing to directing investment into making industrial production increasingly dominant and technologically sophisticated with national banks and major banking houses nascently fulfilling economic planning functions which would eventually be fully realized in the triumph of socialism. To a large degree German banking developed significantly in that direction, but the German model was not the direction taken by Anglo-American banking. As the financial sector has grown in importance, so also has the rent-seeking behavior on which it is focused.

The financial sector has grown massively in the past few decades. While there is evidence that this phenomenon began as early as the late 1970s, in 2000 it was dramatically displayed as profits of the finance, insurance, and real estate (FIRE) sector substantially exceeded those of the manufacturing sector. This trend has widened in every succeeding year since with the exception of 2008. FIRE profits now encroach on the service sector. Mortgage debt, credit card debt, and student debt provide a mammoth income flow for monopoly finance capital. This has been accompanied by the weighting down of major American corporations with huge amounts of leveraged debt. Since the Reagan administration the pattern for investment has been to finance corporate acquisitions, taking on debt to leverage control of the firm, spinning off less than optimally profitable divisions, and extracting as much liquid wealth as quickly as possible by borrowing against inflated assets, using surplus-value and outside investment income to pay debt service on the loans. The strategy for corporations which want to avoid hostile takeovers has been to take on as much debt as possible so that further debt leveraging cannot produce an income flow which will service the additional debt necessary to acquire the firm, the so-called "poison pill" strategy. By 2007 FIRE sector-related debt accounted for 83.05% of private debt in the U.S.; real sector-related debt accounted for only 16.95%. Since 1952 in absolute terms FIRE sector-related debt has soared by approximately 400.9%, while real sector-related debt has remained almost constant (U.S. Federal Reserve System, 2013). This has been enormously profitable for the FIRE sector and disastrous for the American people: it focuses management's attention almost entirely on the next quarter and meeting the debt service obligations of outstanding debt, and it has forced lay-offs, wage reductions, and failure to refurbish constant capital even in the absence of crisis. The push for austerity at the level of the firm has much predated the current crisis.

As the level of debt rose, bankers and investors scrambled to find new and old ways of supposedly reducing the risk associated with dizzying levels of debt. On the one hand, between 1994 and 2004 insurance premiums for companies increased internationally to $3.3 trillion, an increase of 50% - $1.2 trillion of it in the U.S. alone. Hedge funds emerged to spread risk more widely and, thus, reduce the level of risk of any single investor. Collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) were created originally to secure lending against excessive risk. But as banks began to roll their toxic debts into CDOs to avoid regulatory scrutiny and market loss of confidence, and hedge funds acted to protect their investors rather than cushioning risk for the banking system as a whole in 2008, the U.S. housing bubble collapsed and a related debt bubble threatened. Here the U.S. decision that the banks were "too big to fail" (a euphemism for a policy to avoid the consequences of a collapse of a debt bubble no longer sustainable by creditor resources) collided with economic reality. Political cover had been created by democratization of the investment pool (i.e., commercial depositors' deposits were available for speculative investment, protected by government insurance, because of abolition of the wall between commercial and investment banking with the repeal of Glass-Steagall) which necessitated protecting finance capital from the costs of excessive debt. However, such protection came at the price of trillions of dollars in TARP,[viii] bail-outs, and Federal Reserve credit extensions. Millions of Americans were foreclosed on, unemployment soared, austerity was imposed on the country by stealthy sequestration, but the banks, the hedge funds, the insurance companies - basically the entire FIRE sector - were indemnified for all their losses. There was no asset deflation, no cancellation of uncollectable debt, no pain for the investing class.

Interestingly, Marx envisioned something eerily like TARP in the context of credit-induced crises of capital in volume iii of Capital:

In a system of production where the entire continuity of the reproduction process rests upon credit, a crisis must obviously occur - a tremendous rush for means of payment - when credit suddenly ceases and only cash payments have validity. At first glance, therefore, the whole crisis seems to be merely a credit and money crisis. And in fact it is only a question of the convertibility of bills of exchange into money. But the majority of these bills represent actual sales and purchases, whose extension far beyond the needs of society is, after all, the basis of the whole crisis. At the same time, an enormous quantity of these bills of exchange represents plain swindle, which now reaches the light of day and collapses; furthermore, unsuccessful speculation with the capital of other people; finally, commodity-capital which has depreciated or is completely unsaleable, or returns that can never more be realised again. The entire artificial system of forced expansion of the reproduction process cannot, of course, be remedied by having some bank, like the Bank of England, give to all the swindlers the deficient capital by means of its paper and having it buy up all the depreciated commodities at their old nominal values [emphasis added] (Marx 1998: 335-336).

He dismissed such a course of action as economically imbecilic and thought that capitalists could not be so stupid as to embark on such a strategy. In retrospect, he appears to have given the capitalist class too much credit for acumen. He does, however, recognize that English banking as it had evolved in the mid-nineteenth century was capable of doing extraordinary damage to industrial capitalism, and thought that this capability for damage would militate industrial capital disciplining finance capital in a more production-facilitating direction:

The credit system, which has its focus in the so-called national banks and the big money-lenders and usurers surrounding them, constitutes enormous centralisation, and gives to this class of parasites the fabulous power, not only to periodically despoil industrial capitalists, but also to interfere in actual production in a most dangerous manner - and this gang knows nothing about production and has nothing to do with it. The Acts of 1844 and 1845 are proof of the growing power of these bandits, who are augmented by financiers and stock-jobbers (Marx, 1998: 382).

In this respect in criticizing nineteenth-century English banks he was more right about contemporary finance capital than he knew.

Hyperfinancialization has had extraordinary microeconomic and macroeconomic consequences for monopoly finance capital and the international system. On the microeconomic front it has radically changed how economic actors - owners and managers of capitalist enterprises, investors, workers and their families - view themselves, their goals and objectives, and the constraints under which they operate. For example, the Occupy movement's somewhat simplistic, but powerfully evocative, division of society into the 1% and the 99% arises directly from the crisis of 2008 and struggles against the depredations of finance capital in foreclosures, unemployment, and the austerity-driven shifting of the costs of the crisis onto working families. Awareness of finance capital's role in saddling students and working Americans with an incommensurate burden of debt has risen strikingly with the crisis. Equally important is the way short-sighted concern with next-quarter performance, the single-minded pursuit of asset inflation through leveraged financing, fetishization of investor profit maximization, and the pervasive influence of finance-based models of operation have influenced capitalist self-image, goals, and constraints. On the other hand, the macroeconomic consequences have been equally far-reaching: economies are significantly driven by price fluctuations in financial and real estate assets, as well as the overwhelming need to service the financial obligations of debt, which increasingly crowds out all other expenditures of capital. Financial instruments remain a very important area of investment. The size and fragility of the FIRE sector have been significantly increased. Financial deregulation remains the norm, even after the collapse of the mortgage and financial instrument bubbles. One of the major consequences of hyperfinancialization has been the changed nature of the underlying crisis.

By huge transfers from the government to finance capital, the ongoing problem of underaccumulation was pushed into an actual crisis of underaccumulation.[ix] As early as 2004, even neoclassical economists were pointing to strong evidence of financialization limiting capital accumulation (Stockhammer 2004) and this trend does not appear to be abating. The nature of the problem is highlighted in Table 2:

Table 2

Mean Change in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and Fixed

__________________Nonresidential Investment (FNI), 1930-2013__________________

Years___________Mean Percent Change in GDP __Mean Percent Change in FNI____

1930-1934 -7.63% -12.76%

1935-1939 7.16% 7.01%

1940-1944 19.21% 7.98%

1945-1949 4.10% 25.13%

1950-1954 7.44% 0.38%

1955-1959 5.93% 0.35%

1960-1964 5.56% 0.72%

1965-1969 8.22% 2.41%

1970-1974 8.80% 1.29%

1975-1979 10.90% 3.04%

1980-1984 8.97% -0.75%

1985-1989 6.88% -2.26%

1990-1994 5.27% -1.33%

1995-1999 5.71% 3.65%

2000-2004 4.86% -3.38%

2005-2009 3.40% -0.96%

2010-2013 4.08% -0.24%

This table presents side-by-side the mean rate of change in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and the mean rate of change in Fixed Nonresidential Investment (FNI) in five-year cohorts since 1930. FNI is a measure of investment in constant capital. Note that mean negative growth in FNI is characteristic of two periods: (1) the first five-year cohort of the Great Depression and (2) the period from 1980 to the present (with the exception of the 1995-1999 cohort, which is probably an artifact of the dot.com bubble). What is particularly alarming is that mean growth in GDP ranged from 8.97% to 3.4% in the second period, so as GDP was steadily growing, mean growth of FNI was largely negative. This must be seen in the context of the shift of firm profits and investment income away from reinvestment in plant and equipment to servicing leveraged debt which also occurred in this period. If this trend continues, U.S. capitalism will be systematically deprived of necessary reinvestment in constant capital. This will set very stark constraints on employment possibilities, and likely accounts today - together with American austerity policies - for the lack of a real employment recovery. Furthermore, opportunities to bring on-line technological innovation, particularly investment in new, sustainable production technologies will simply cease to exist.

In addition to the longer-term structural causes the problem is exacerbated by the incentives provided by finance capital: if rent-seeking at compound interest is more short-term profitable, implied by the dominance if fictitious capital, than investment in constant and variable capital, where will investment go? Several recent metrics indicate the greater attractiveness of financial sector stocks over other sectors; these serve as estimators of the greater profitability of the financial sector. On the basis of yearly dividend yield in 2012 financial sector stocks averaged 4.31%, manufacturing and basic materials sectors stocks averaged 3.55%, and service sector stocks trailed with an average of 1.93% on the New York Stock Exchange. Comparing the ten best performing NYSE stocks in each sector between Q4 2012 and Q3 2013, financial sector stocks increased in price by 30.87%, manufacturing and basic materials sectors stocks by 23.18%, and service sector stocks by 24.10%. Furthermore, debt and equity securities, usually not publicly traded on capital markets, had reached more than $2 trillion by the end of Q1 2012. Similarly, U.S. corporate bond issues in 2013 had annual yields comparable to manufacturing and basic materials sectors stocks and superior to service sector stocks -- 3.22% -- with significantly fewer risks. In short, investments in firms and instruments associated with debt service remain on balance more profitable than traditional investments in constant and variable capital.

If this analysis is correct, and the weight of the evidence supports it, the crisis of underaccumulation will be with us for the foreseeable future, compounding the impoverishment of working people, impeding real increases in employment, forestalling technological innovations in production, dooming mankind to an unsustainable future. This has immediate implications for our tactics in struggle. Two will become increasingly important.

First, the burden of debt - mortgages, credit car debt, student debt - plays an increasingly onerous role in the lives of working families, extracting more and more wealth through debt service, foreclosing educational and employment opportunities, making clearer to everyone involved the way wage slavery is careening toward debt peonage. Struggles focused on debt, particularly demanding repudiation of debt or resisting the collecting of principal and debt service by financial institutions - debt strikes, demonstrations, actions against banks and other financial institutions, agitation against the political clout of finance capital, organizing campaigns for re-regulation of the banking and financial sector (e.g., full readoption of Glass-Steagall), playing on factional differences within capital, and building popular and united fronts around debt struggles. These will offer almost limitless opportunities for popular mobilization and a vehicle for the transition to building a popular front against monopoly finance capital. Intermediate struggles are important for building class consciousness, but struggles against the burdens of debt will allow us to focus popular attention directly on the primary contradiction of capitalism and the need for revolutionary, systemic change by concentrating on central aspects of monopoly finance capital.

Second, the crisis of underaccumulation intersects the impact of global climate change and peak oil in a particularly vicious way. The underaccumulation of capital means a systematic failure to invest in constant capital which makes it impossible in principle to build sustainable production and ensure a transition from fossil fuels which can increase living standards here and in the developing world. As Marxist-Leninists, we must avoid casting the solution in terms of a choice between productionism and a neo-Luddite demand to cut the standard of living of the working class to "save the planet." What we need is a smarter, sustainable productionism which focuses on recyclable materials, viable alternatives to fossil fuels, and increased efficiency and sustainability through the implementation of higher orders of technology, and which holds the promise of delivering a high standard of living to the world at large: this is a real program for saving the planet and mankind. The crisis of underaccumulation dooms us to starting years behind where we need to be on achieving state power. It represents a significant cannibalization of productive capacity to feed finance capital's need for constant rising profits. It also presents us with an opportunity to mobilize popular and united fronts to demand reinvestment in plant and equipment, to fund a green revolution in production and technology, and to begin a real jobs program focused on upgrading plant and equipment with sustainable technology and rebuilding vital national infrastructure. The demand for real jobs is directly tied to increasing productive capacity. With a well-funded national program to invest in employment building sustainable technologies the supposed contradiction between the interest of workers and green sustainability dissolves. However, this will involve pressuring capital today with demands for increases in investment in constant and variable capital, demands which, in turn, will increasingly mobilize and radicalize workers to understand the relationship between meeting the challenges of global climate change and peak oil and thwarting structural changes in capitalism brought on by monopoly finance capital. The fight for jobs and a green New Deal puts us directly in the fight against underaccumulation.

REFERENCES

AFL-CIO (2002) The Service Sector: Vital Statistics. Department of Professional Employees Research Department. Fact Sheet 2002, 5. Washington: AFL-CIO. http://www.dpeaflcio.org/programs/factsheets/archived/fs_service.pdf.

Cogoy, Mario (1972). "Les theories néo-Marxistes: Marx et l'accumulation du capital." Les Temps Modernes (September-October), 396-426.

___________ (1973a). "A Reply to Paul Sweezy's 'Some Problems in the Theory of Capital Accumulation." Bulletin of the Conference of Socialist Economists (Winter), 52-67.

___________ (1973b). "The fall in the Rate of Profit and the Theory of Accumulation." Bulletin of the Conference of Socialist Economists (Winter).

Harvey, David (1999). The Limits to Capital. London: Verso.

____________ (2013). A Companion to Marx's Capital, Volume 2. London: Verso.

Hudson, Michael, and Dirk Bezemer (2012). "Incorporating the Rentier Sectors in a Financial Model." World Economic Review (1), 6.

Itoh, Makato (1980). Value and Crisis. London: Pluto.

__________ (1988). The Basic Theory of Capitalism. London: Macmillan.

Kliman, Andrew (2012). The Failure of Capitalist Production: Underlying Causes of the Great Recession. London: Pluto Press.

Mattick, Paul (1969). Marx and Keynes. Boston: Porter Sargent.

Marx, Karl (1996). Capital, volume i. New York: International Publishers.

_________ (1997). Capital, volume ii. New York: International Publishers.

_________ (1998). Capital, volume iii. New York: International Publishers.

Mill, John Stuart (1909). Principles of political economy with Some of Their Applications to Social Philosophy. London: Longmans, Green and Co. (http://oll.libertyfund.org/index.php?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=101ltemid=27).

Poynter, Gavin (2000) Restructuring in the Service Industries. London: Mansell.

Stockhammer, Engelbert (2004). "Financialisation and the slowdown of accumulation." Cambridge Journal of Economics, 28(5), pp. 719-741.

U.S. Federal Reserve System (2013). "'Z.1 Financial Accounts of the United States: Flow of Funds, Balance Sheets, and Integrated Macroeconomic Accounts." December 9, 2013.

Yaffe, David (1972). "The Marxian Theory of Crisis, Capital and the State." Bulletin of the Conference of Socialist Economists (Winter), 5-58.

ENDNOTES

[i] Since the 1970s Keynesian countercyclical fiscal policies have been decreasingly effective in stimulating aggregate demand and employment during the downswing of the business cycle. Keynesianism, and its Neo-Keynesian and New Keynesian developments basically prioritizes restoring firm incomes and cash flows over increases in employment and household income, essentially treating the latter two as if the trickle-down effects from restoration of firm income and ash flows are genuine mediators of aggregate demand. Prior to the 1970s they were to a significant degree effective, but that has to do with the structure of capitalism in the post-1932 world. Upward-redistributive tendencies in income and the much greater role of finance capital in setting investment and fund flow priorities have significantly reduced both the amount of aggregate demand countercyclical policy can mobilize and the amount of employment that demand can potentiate. Creation of aggregate demand and employment with Keynesian policies required maintaining what John Kenneth Galbraith once called "the truce on equality," maintaining the labor and social welfare goods associated with the New Deal, even if their importance was diminished and contained (I am grateful to Norman Markowitz for pointing this out to me). Income inequality which has structurally affected capitalism, has increased markedly. From to 1947 mean income grew by $5,708 and all gains in income were captured by the lower 90% of the income distribution. In the period 1999-2010 average income grew $3,918 and 100% was captured by the top 10% of the income distribution. The difference between the official unemployment rate and the U-6 rate since 2009 has averaged 7%-7.4%; historically it has been 3-4%. The growing gap between the official unemployment rate and the U-6 rate is an indicator of the decreased effectiveness of Keynesian measures at creating employment. Austerity policies, particularly those pursued at the state level (and later the national sequestration), have certainly contributed to this ineffectiveness, but the trend was visible even before those policies were adopted and is consistent with evidence from the mid-1970s where such policies were not an intervening variable. The attempt to use monetary policy to aid Keynesian fiscal policy embodied in the Federal Reserve's QE2 program revealed the huge change finance capital has introduced into American banking: the entire $700 billion QE2 credit creation was used entirely by banks for foreign currency arbitrage and other international speculation, not loans to the real economy.

[ii] Hyperfinancialization refers to the increasingly commanding role of finance capital (the so-called FIRE sector - finance insurance and real estate) in the international economy, creating demands and constraints on capital which privilege the needs of finance capital over other forms of capital.

[iii] A crisis of overaccumulation is one in which the tendency of the rate of profit to fall creates a surplus of capital relative to the opportunities which exist for that capital to be productively employed. Capital is, thus, overaccumulated, and production stagnates. There have been a variety of Marxist elaborations of the idea of a crisis of overaccumulation, which are suggested by Marx's own somewhat cursory treatment: Mattick 1969; Cogoy 1972, 1973a, 1973b, Yaffe 1972; Itoh 1980, 1988; Harvey 1999; and Kliman 2012.

[iv] The organic composition of capital is the ratio of constant capital to variable capital (viz., http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/o/r.htm). One implication of the law of the tendential fall of the rate of profit is that this ratio will increase as constant capital grows relative to variable because of the costs of prematurely amortizing plant and equipment made obsolete by technological innovation.

[v] The law of the tendential fall of the rate of profit was stated by Marx in the third volume of Capital: "...the gradual growth of constant capital in relation to variable capital must necessarily lead to a gradual fall of the general rate of profit, so long as the rate of surplus-value, or the intensity of exploitation of labour by capital, remains the same... It is likewise just another expression for the progressive development of the social productivity of labour, which is demonstrated precisely by the fact that the same number of labourers, in the same time, i.e., with less labour, convert an ever-increasing quantity of raw and auxiliary materials into products, thanks to the growing application of machinery and fixed capital" (Marx, 1998: 148). It essentially argues that the rate of profit tends to fall, holding the rate of surplus-value constant, because, as labor becomes more productive because of technological innovation, that innovation causes the costs of constant capital to increase. If the rate of surplus value held constant and the costs of constant capital increase, profit must necessarily fall. This is, however, only a general tendency and Marx identifies a number of factors which can for short periods of time interfere with this tendency.

[vi] Hudson and Bezemer (2012: 6) provide a succinct definition of the rentier sector: "Rentiers are those who benefit from control over assets that the economy needs to function, and who, therefore, grow disproportionately rich as the economy develops. These proceeds are rent -- revenues from ownership 'without working, risking, or economizing,' as John Stuart Mill (1909) wrote of the landlords of his day, explaining that 'they grow richer, as it were in their sleep'.... Just as landlords were the archetypical rentiers of their agricultural societies, so investors, financier, and bankers are in the largest rentier sector of today's financialized economies: finance controls the economy's engine of growth, which is credit in all its forms."

[vii] Marx uses the term fetishization to mean the confusion of a mystifying appearance for an underlying reality. The classic example of this is commodity fetishism, where a relation between objects is confused for a social relation between people: "There is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men's hands. This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour, as soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities" (Marx, 1996: 47). In the third volume of Capital Marx likewise argues that, in the reproduction circuit of capital, money can be confused for the productive activity of labor which alone creates value.

[viii] The Troubled Asset Relief Program, administered by the U.S. Department of the Treasury.

[ix] I particularly want to differentiate the model of a crisis of underaccumulation I adopt here from the model put forward by Henryk Grossman (1929). Grossman argues that accumulation will be ultimately stymied by the expenditure to raise the living standards of workers and to expand capitalist consumption with the inability to permanently thwart the law of the tendential fall in the rate of profit. The model I am putting forward centers on the role of fictitious capital in luring capital away from investment in constant and variable capital.

Photo image: Karl Marx Creative Commons 3.0

Book Review: Martin Luther King and the struggle for economic justice

Norman Markowitz — Sun, 12 Jan 2014 10:41:00 +0000

This review by Political Affairs board member Norman Markowitz originally was posted on H-Net in 2007.

We posted it last January in honor of Dr. KIng's birthday. It received a number of interesting comments at the time, and we repost it this year in the hope of generating more discussion and comment.

Thomas F. Jackson. _From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Martin Luther
King, Jr. and the Struggle for Economic Justice_. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press: 2007. 459pp. Illustrations, notes,
index. $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-8122-3969-5.

Reviewed for H-1960s by Norman Markowitz, Department of History,
Rutgers University/New Brunswick

A Vital New Look at Martin Luther King Jr. and His Place in History

Martin Luther King Jr. is perhaps the most revered American of the
second half of the twentieth century, an American who, like Abraham
Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, symbolized for people
throughout the world "another America" committed to the struggle for
social progress and social justice. This image stood in sharp
contrast to the way that many abroad have come to see the U.S, that
is, a nation whose cavalry at home and gun boats abroad cleared the
way for the "manifest destiny" or "American dream" of limitless
wealth and power without social responsibility.

King has also been honored in recent years in the United States, even
by those who fought against the civil rights movement that he led and
today "spin" his teaching to attack affirmative action as "reverse
racism" and abandonment of his "dream." In public schools and
through mass media, King is regularly praised as a "great man" who
preached and practiced non-violence--the "good" black leader,
because he was non-violent, measured against "bad" black leaders,
such as Malcolm X, the Black Panther Party, and others who are
associated with violence. The danger exists that King will become,
in the twenty-first century, what novelist Sinclair Lewis cynically
called Abraham Lincoln in the 1920s, "the Patron Saint of America," a
symbol to be honored and forgotten. Earlier generations of Americans
believed that once slavery had ended nothing more needed to be done
to promote racial justice; similarly, will later generations remember
King for helping to end _de jure_ segregation and
conclude that nothing more has to be done?

In _From Civil Rights to Human Rights_, Thomas Jackson deals with
King's economic social philosophy and the relationship of that
philosophy to ideas, ideals, and movements that have been called
socialism since the mid-nineteenth century. Unlike most other works
(with the exception of Manning Marable's treatment of King's
socialist leanings in his cogent and brilliant short history of
African Americans after the Second World War, _Race, Reform, and
Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction and Beyond in Black America,
1945-2006_ [2007]), Jackson suggests that both a socialist
analysis of the African American condition and socialist solutions to
the larger problem of racism in U.S. society are central to an
understanding of King. Jackson's work, if it is read widely and its
insights and evidence "trickles down" into public education, will
help students understand King and both the American and global
context of events that both influenced him and that he helped to change.

In analyzing holistically King's economic social philosophy, Jackson
helps scholars and students see a much more fully rounded and
developed Martin Luther King. Like most successful leaders who
challenged powerful establishment forces, he
understood that successful political action is centered on
strategies and tactics to both win over and change the political
center; that successful actions are worth much more than emancipation
proclamations or revolutionary manifestoes; and that successful
"pragmatic" politics is always about maintaining both principals and
long-term strategies while shifting and adapting tactics to changing
conditions. Although the ideas of Mohandas K. Gandhi and the
influence of the tactics and strategies of the Indian National
Independence movement on King are widely and sometimes
ritualistically cited, Jackson connects both the international anti-
colonial context of the 1950s and King's application of
internationalism to U.S. institutional racism in a way that others
have not

Most biographers of King and historians of the Civil Rights movement
have portrayed him as a mass leader, but Jackson shows specifically
how King developed a socialist and internationalist oriented ideology
and applied it to American conditions. In effect, King became for
the mass movement something like a great "center" in basketball (to
use a sports metaphor), through which both offensive and defensive
action flowed. Others were the practical organizers, the playmakers
or point guards. But, without the center, without his ability to
absorb punishment and keep the action around him moving,
particularly the players without the ball (the masses of African
American people and their civil rights movement allies), and the team
would fail.

Although some historians have stressed the limitations of the
Southern based civil rights movement, especially its lack of any
program beyond the elimination of _de jure_ segregation and the
establishment of elemental citizenship rights that northern blacks
already enjoyed, Jackson shows clearly that King always viewed
economic and social rights as essential components of civil rights.
For King, the defeat and destruction of segregation in the South was
a necessary condition to the establishment of broad
economic and social rights for Northern blacks, other minorities, and
the white poor. King's larger socialist orientation, Jackson shows,
led him to understand that racism directed against African Americans
both obscured and intensified class oppression. While he always saw
himself as a southerner, he pointed to the poverty of the white South
which segregation and institutional racism had buttressed. Against
those who, in the 1950s and afterwards, saw poverty and public
assistance as a "Negro problem," King answered that it was a much
larger social problem, because the great majority of those on public
assistance were white.

Jackson portrays King both maneuvering politically and broadening his
philosophy of economic and social justice into the necessary
foundation of both domestic and international peace from the
mid-1950s to his murder in 1968. In the process, he examines King's
relationships with a wide variety of activists and allies, from
Bayard Rustin and Stanley Levison to John Lewis and James Foreman, in
a fresh way. Unlike Taylor Branch and other King
scholars, Jackson transcends the Cold War framework of the time which
portrayed J. Edgar Hoover's FBI as an anti-Civil Rights police force
(which the evidence supports massively) and Communists and former
Communists as either marginal or self-seekers. Jackson shows King as
a mass leader who developed bonds with people of the broad left whose
experiences in the Communist Party, USA, and other socialist groups
and organizations had made them not only skilled and experienced
organizers, but coworkers and friends whom he could
trust because his larger vision and theirs had much in common, even
if their earlier social background, work, and political associations
had been very different. Jackson's framework, as he applies it to
the larger political narrative of King's life and work, helps
scholars and students to understand the worldview that King developed
as he led the most significant American mass movement in the second
half of the twentieth century. This movement whose achievements,
however however incomplete, continues is the subject of debate and
controversy today on such issues as the enforcement of civil rights
legislation, affirmative action, and equal justice under the criminal
justice system.
Let me conclude with some interpretive differences with Jackson,
which in no way should be seen as negative criticism of this major
work. Jackson mentions that King used anti-Communist "cold war
liberal" rhetoric to advance the movement, particularly in the early
years. As someone whose writing has been associated with the use of
that concept, I would not apply it to King, as I and others have to
politicians Harry Truman and Hubert Humphrey; labor leaders like
Walter Reuther; postwar organizations like the Americans for
Democratic Action; and influential intellectuals like Arthur
Schlesinger Jr. King certainly maneuvered in a political landscape
where the support of the Cold War influenced a wing of the Democratic
party; labor leaders like Reuther, who by the late 1950s represented
the left of a purged AFL-CIO; and, at crucial times, the Kennedy and
Johnson administrations; but his vision and even his use of the
Soviet Union and the Communist movement as a negative reference group
in his rhetoric was very different from theirs. Cold War liberal
politicians and labor leaders in the 1950s and 1960s often paid lip
service to the New Deal heritage, while they fought the cold war,
managed "economic growth" centered on military spending, and saw
bargaining among the representatives of various interest groups as
the basis of an "open democratic society." In contrast, King used a
version of Cold War liberal ideology against its leading
practitioners in the Democratic Party. These practitioners said the
United States was a "free," rather than a "totalitarian," society.
King turned their rhetoric against them by insisting that if this
were Russia or China he might understand the brutal denial of basic
Civil Rights in the South; but in the image of the United States that
Cold War liberals claimed to believe in, all of that was
intolerable. When they emphasized the need to end segregation to win
over the people of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, King said over
and over again that we had to end economic and social injustice to be
true to our best selves, not as a political ploy to defeat
revolutionaries in
the Congo. Jackson also uses the term "democratic socialist" to
explain King's economic social philosophy in a way that no one else
has in a larger monograph. The analysis of King's egalitarian,
socialist, and internationalist orientation makes the use of this
term understandable and an advance over previous work, but it brings
with it some baggage when used in the American context. In the 1950s
and 1960s, those who called themselves members of a "democratic left"
or "democratic socialists" were in effect the left-wing of the Cold
War coalition, whom activists in groups like SNCC and SDS rebelled
against while they continued to respect King. These were the sort of
people who were captured brilliantly in the 1960s satirical song,
"Love me, Love me, I'm a liberal." They wrote for _Dissent_ magazine
and other publications that criticized U.S. mass society for its
consumption and conformity, rather than relating theory to practical
politics. Those who defined themselves as "democratic socialists" in
the 1950s and 1960s were overwhelmingly white and middle class. They
were also ambivalent to the sort of mass action that the civil rights
movement revived in the United States.

I would call King, like many of the people (black and white) who saw
him as both a great man and their most important leader, a "socialist
of the heart," a term used by the distinguished U.S. historian
William Appleman Williams. King believed in and sought
to live by the values and ethics of socialism, where personal
relations and political ends are merged in the attempt to achieve and
live social equality and social justice. Like King and the masses of
people who were the civil rights movement, "socialists of the heart"
are not sectarian preachers of one position, theory, or party that
the call the exclusion of all others. King saw socialism in both
egalitarian mass movements and in specific and focused commitments to
achieve economic social justice through policy.

Jackson's work gives scholars and students new insight into the
importance of Martin Luther King Jr. to U.S. history and his place in
the larger global context. No doubt some will challenge Jackson's
use of his broad definition of socialism as a central factor in
understanding King, but the author has made a strong and compelling
case. Many have speculated what the postwar world would have been
like if Franklin Roosevelt had not died in 1945; similarly, _From
Civil Rights to Human Rights_ should encourage
many readers to think what the United States might have been like if
King had not been assassinated in 1968. Were there possibilities
(with King continuing to play a leading role to end the cold war with
the Vietnam War and fight seriously the war on
poverty) to implement policies to eliminate, in deeds rather than
words, institutional and ideological racism and sexism, and lead the
American people toward a new politics in which egalitarianism, a much
higher level of economic and social security, and a
democracy based on popular participation, would become realities? Of
course no one can answer such questions. But Thomas Jackson has
shown that this was the course which King was on when he was
assassinated, one very different than the tragic hero using non-
violence to fight against all forms of prejudice in a polarizing
society which had already largely rejected him. The more widely
_From Civil Rights to Human Rights_ is read, the more students of
U.S. history will both understand Martin Luther King's philosophy and
work to keep his legacy alive.

Copyright (c) 2007 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the
redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational
purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web
location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net:
Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For other uses contact the
Reviews editorial staff:
hbooks@mail.h-net.msu.edu.

Photo: Dr. Martin Luther King at the 1963 March on Washington. USIA

Uzbek Girl

Majid Naficy — Tue, 12 Nov 2013 15:12:00 +0000

No! We will not continue

Our fathers' war.
Tamerlane* has died centuries ago
And the bard of Shiraz* too
Who gave Samarkand and Bukhara
For the sake of a beauty mark.

This Uzbek girl in California
Has no mark on her forehead
And she speaks Uzbek with a Russian accent.
But there is a scent in her words
Which brings us together
From many ages ago
Because in her own language
She uses Persian words
For "flower", "greens" and "spring"
And celebrates Noruz*
As I do.

I tell her that my ancestor Nafis
Went from Kerman to Samarkand
To become the physician of Ulugh Beg*.
She removes the empty bowl of borsch from the table
And puts a rich colored tea near my hand
With a piece of rock candy,
And I don't know if in return
I should give her Los Angeles
Or San Francisco.

August 30, 2013
Majid Naficy

- Tamerlane was a Turko-Mongol conqueror of Iran and other countries in the fourteenth century. Today he is considered the national hero of Uzbekistan.
- Hafez of Shiraz was a great Persian poet in the fourteenth century. In one of his lyrics he says: "If a Turk of Shiraz gains my heart / I will give her Samarkand and Bukhara for the sake of her Hindu mole." It is said that when Tamerlane conquered Shiraz he summoned Hafez and asked him: "Why did you give my capital Samarkand for a mole?" Hafez answered: "I showed such generosity that I became so poor!" The conqueror laughed and rewarded the poet lavishly.
- Noruz or Persian New year is celebrated by Iranians and many other peoples in the beginning of spring.
- Ulugh Beg was the grandson of Tamerlane.

Majid Naficy was born in the ancient Iranian city of Isfahan and studied at UCLA and Tehran University. He lives in California.

Photo: Creative Commons 3.0

What militarists don't want you to know about the labor movement

George Lakey — Wed, 06 Nov 2013 21:34:00 +0000

I was brought up by a mom who was the secretary of her union local and a factory-worker dad whose lifelong regret was that he never got to be a union member. My parents knew that a strong labor movement was their only buffer between rapacious corporations and themselves. Middle-class Christians might talk a good game, but the reality was that their churches couldn't or wouldn't protect workers and poor people from attacks by the 1 percent.

As my politics became more radical I went through a period of disappointment that the labor movement wasn't always reliably on the progressive edge. Some unions were front and center in the great civil rights march of 1963 when Martin Luther King, Jr., shared his dream. Other unions, however, lagged behind, still caught by racism.

Because I was a strong peace activist I was especially disheartened if some union leaders beat the drums on behalf of one war or another. Part of my disappointment came from my outsiders' ignorance of what was going on within the working class, which over the years I'd become distanced from. Inside my graduate-school bubble in the 1960s I didn't know, for example, that the demographic most opposed to the war in Vietnam was that of people who hadn't graduated from high school. When 1972 rolled around, I didn't know that peace candidate George McGovern's largest share of votes in the presidential election came from the working class. That year most middle class voters, with a pathetic learning curve, still supported the war in Vietnam.

Sometimes someone asks me why some working class people vote against their interests, and I ask them to explain why so many middle class people vote against their own interests!

In the 1980s, when I joined the resistance against the Reagan Revolution full-time, I worked with unions and began to see the internal dynamics of the labor movement and peace. I organized the Pennsylvania chapter of the national Jobs with Peace Campaign, meant to slow President Reagan's wholesale transfers of the federal budget from human needs to Pentagon spending. I encountered very strong support from labor in our cross-class coalition.

The national level of the AFL-CIO, however, was in alliance with the Democratic Party, which was then (and still is) owned by the 1 percent, which has a great affection for military spending. When the partnership of Jobs with Peace to the state president of the AFL-CIO became too close, the national organization forced the state subsidiary to withdraw from our coalition.

In my role as a Training for Change trainer in the 1990s, I became still closer to the grassroots level of the labor movement and gained glimpses of the very high cost of decades of class war for workers largely unsupported by middle class people. The cost presented itself in a variety of ways. At the end of a long day's training for steel workers planning to occupy their plant, I facilitated a go-round in which the workers shared what the workshop meant to them. One said, "We talk in the union about brotherhood this and brotherhood that, but I have to say honestly that this workshop is the first time I've actually experienced it."

Class war and antiwar

I rarely meet middle class people who direct their empathy toward the experience of working class families that have been in the trenches for generations. The one time the federal government used Air Force bombers against a U.S. social movement, for instance, was in West Virginia in 1921 - against labor.

The decades of attacks on the labor movement and the resulting experience of scarcity left little space in the 1970s for the liberatory culture that middle class activists were exploring through feminism, gay liberation, anti-racism and so on. The 1 percent's hugely different responses to working class and middle class campaigns increased the cultural gap between the two classes and left most middle class activists even more clueless about what was going on for labor. Many don't know that, after a century of class war, U.S. labor remains the largest and most organized movement that supports progressive issues like peace.

I wish I had a dollar for every middle class peace person who doesn't know that it was the AFL-CIO that became, in 2005, the first mass representative organization in the United States to come out against George W. Bush's war in Iraq. Again in 2011, under a Democratic president, the AFL-CIO was the first to call for rapid U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan. In both cases the movement reflected the overwhelming opposition of working class people to war even though the military remains a source of jobs in a job-hungry nation. Labor's stance contrasted each time with the lingering support for the wars among so many middle class ("educated") people.

How Swedish labor stopped a war

Whatever our background, our political sense of what's possible needs to catch up with the global legacy of working class struggles for peace. To take one dramatic example, the labor movement stopped the Swedish 1 percent from waging war on neighboring Norway.

For nearly a century Norwegians were, against their will, under the Swedish king. By 1905 they were fed up and determined to declare independence. Sweden's 1 percent didn't agree and was prepared to use its much larger army to invade Norway and continue the status quo.

Young Swedish worker Zeth Höglund of the Young Social Democrats wrote Down Weapons!, a manifesto for the Swedish working class. The labor movement printed the manifesto in newspapers and printed 100,000 leaflets to hand out to supporters. In the manifesto, Höglund declared that his class would not go to war against Norway and called on young workers to protest their military duty.

If Sweden went to war it would need to call up the reserves, just as the United States has done with its National Guard reservists in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Swedish labor movement used that fact strategically, and organized members of the reserves to refuse if the call came.

The next step was to announce that if Swedish troops already stationed at Norway's border crossed the line the Swedish working class would go on strike. The government took the threat seriously because only three years before the movement waged a general strike for suffrage.

Encouraged by the Norwegian labor movement, the Norwegian parliament in June officially declared its intention to dissolve the union with Sweden. Swedish Social Democrats took to the streets to oppose Swedish military action, and two weeks later King Oscar II declared that Sweden would not use force against Norway.

It's time to reclaim all of our lost stories of successful nonviolent struggle as we strategize to meet tomorrow's challenges. As social scientist Kenneth E. Boulding liked to say, "Whatever's happened is possible." The empire's educational system has taken care to forget most of the stories of past struggles, but none of us needs to accept any longer the 1 percent's self-serving narrative of social movement defeat.

George Lakey is visiting professor at Swarthmore College.

from Waging Non Violence November 4, 2013

Photo: Labor participated in anti-war demonstration in Washington, DC January 2007 Ben Sears

The budget crisis and the real world

Art Perlo — Sun, 27 Oct 2013 11:03:00 +0000

Introduction

Narratives of the recent, and temporarily suspended budget crisis have tended to emphasize government dysfunction, partisan intransigence and political maneuvering. By placing the blame on generic Washington politicians, media coverage obscured the real issues. This article examines the real economic distress faced by the majority of the U.S. working class as reflecting the ongoing class struggle. Since 1980, this struggle has increasingly taken the form of class war waged by the most powerful employers and their political representatives, aimed at rolling back every gain made by workers - unions, Social Security, unemployment insurance and other safety net programs, and regulations protecting consumers, workers and the environment.

As a result, the majority of the working people face a prospect of less security for themselves, and a bleak future for the next generation. The political battles around the federal budget reflect this reality, with the outcome still to be determined.

The planet of the one percent

The stock market, corporate profits, incomes at the very top - all have regained and surpassed the records they set before the deep economic crisis that began in 2008. In this corporate recovery, firms have been able to expand production (and profits) without hiring more workers. The New York Times reported last Spring, "Right now, C.E.O.'s are saying, 'I don't really need to hire because of the productivity gains of the last few years,' said Robert E. Moritz, chairman of the accounting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers." The article cites United Technologies, which increased its revenue by 20% over seven years without increasing its workforce.

It is no surprise if, in their gated communities, CEOs and other one-percenters think everything is just fine - or would be if the government would stop wasting money on things like food stamps and unemployment for people who should go out and get a second or third job to make ends meet.

Unemployment

Meanwhile, On the planet inhabited by the the 99%, the only good thing about the jobs situation is that it could be worse.

Employment in August was 144 million, still 2 million below the pre-crisis peak in 2007. If we include growth in potential labor force, we are 8 million jobs below the pre-crisis level.

For the three months thru September, the average job gain was a pathetic 143,000. This was a substantial drop from the mediocre 207,000 average for the first 3 months of 2013. Considering the growth rate in the working age population, at current rates it would take 10-15 years to return to the pre-crisis level of employment - a level that still left too many without jobs.

Most of the drop in the official unemployment rate is due to people leaving, or not entering, the labor force. If someone is unemployed, but has not actively looked for work in the past month, they are not counted in the headline unemployment figures.

But the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) compiles another statistic, known as U6. This includes the regular unemployed, plus those who are working part time but want full time work, plus those who are available for work and have looked in the last year, but not in the last month. This more realistic measure gives an unemployment rate of 13.7%.

Even this misses a lot of people who are not working, would work if jobs were available, but don't show up in any statistics. Examples include full-time students, surviving on student loans; and people in the 55-64 age group who have moved from unemployment to an impoverished retirement.

All together, there is an estimated shortage of about 25 million full-time jobs.

Youth are especially hard hit. The portion of people aged twenty to twenty-four who have jobs has fallen from 72.2 percent in 2000 to just 61.5 percent. Since 1973, median wages have fallen by 30% for young men, and 17% for young women.

Older Americans are also experiencing increased joblessness. The unemployment rate for workers over the age of 55 is still more than double its level before the crisis. At the same time, older workers are the only age group whose employment level is as high or higher than before the crisis. How is that? Even as older workers who are laid off find it impossible to find work, those who still have jobs are afraid to or can't afford to retire, and are increasingly working into their late 60s, 70s, and even 80s.

In an article titled America's Jobless Generation, Jeff Madrick summed up: "We have a situation in which older, more qualified adults are taking scarce jobs from young adults, young adults from teens, the college-educated from those with only a high school degree."

For African Americans, the headline unemployment rate is 13% - double that of whites. For Latinos, it is 9.3%, about 50% higher than for whites. For various reasons, jobless African Americans and Latinos are even less likely to be counted than whites. It is likely that the real unemployment rates are in excess of 26% for African Americans, and 20% for Latinos. The Bureau of Labor Statistics monthly reports do not give figures for native Americans, but previous reports show unemployment close to that of African Americans. Undoubtedly on reservations, as in depressed inner cities and rural areas, unemployment is far higher.

Is unemployment structural?

What is the reason for continued high unemployment? Business economists and commentators blame structural unemployment. The argument is that the economy has changed. There are potential jobs, but the unemployed workers aren't qualified for the jobs that are out there. Effectively, the blame is put on workers - they haven't got the education, or they aren't willing to do the work, or they aren't willing to move to where the jobs are.

If the problem was structural, you would expect certain occupations to show low unemployment rates, with rapidly rising wages as employers compete to hire workers. But the evidence all points in the other direction. Compared with pre-crisis levels, unemployment has increased similarly for all education levels, for most occupations, and for most areas of the country.

It makes a difference. If unemployment is structural, it means the worker has to change - get the right education, the right training, move to the right location. So the policy response can be limited to training programs. But the real problem is lack of jobs. In New Haven last month, a new fast food restaurant posted a sign saying "Now Hiring." More than 600 people lined up for the minimum wage jobs. Only 15 would be hired full time, another 30 part time. It doesn't matter how well trained or educated they were: at least 90% of the applicants would still end up without a job. Education and training are important, but not as the only or even the major component of a jobs program.

Job Quality

What about the quality of jobs that do exist?

The trend to low-wage, temporary, part-time jobs has accelerated since the crisis. In one example, Reuters reports that many Walmart stores are only hiring temporary workers, and temps are now 10% of the payroll, up from 1% or 2% before this year.

Many of the relatively good jobs that were lost in the recession have been replaced with low-paying jobs in sectors like restaurants and retail. A recent report that shows large numbers of college graduates in occupations that do not usually require a college degree, such as taxi drivers and retail clerks. All together, as many as 48 percent of all college graduates are employed in occupations that require less than a college degree.

The situating confronting low-wage workers was dramatized when McDonalds released a financial planning guide for their employees. The McDonalds budget reportedly included "working a second job, turning off their heat, spending just $20 a month on health insurance, and never buying food or clothing." Not to mention providing for children, increasingly common for fast-food workers whose median age is 28.

There is a direct connection between high unemployment and low wages.

High unemployment seems like a dream come true for business. It allows them to hire over-qualified workers at rock-bottom prices. They can have a just-in-time work force, available 24-hours a day, but paid for only those hours they are called in to work. No wonder, as Robert Reich reports, "Employee pay is now down to the smallest share of the economy since the government began collecting wage and salary data sixty years ago; and corporate profits, the largest share." Most of profit share has gone to the biggest corporations, especially the financial sector.

The result of all this is that the median (typical) under-65 household has lost $7,490 in annual income since 2000. Just-released figures show that there were nearly 6.7 million more poor people in 2012 than in 2008.

Then, there are the attacks on public workers, the disappearance of company pension plans and the erosion of private retirement accounts as people approach retirement; the continuing home foreclosures, often in defiance of agreements or even of the law, and the erosion of services at all levels of government.

The Coalition for Human needs summed it up: Three years into the Great Unshared Recovery, poverty is worse than in 2008, median income is down, and people are slipping out of the middle class. More than one-third of our nation is near poor-106 million people live below twice the poverty line, one lay-off or crisis away from poverty.

An article in the New York Times by Eduardo Porter, hardly that paper's most liberal writer, is titled America's Sinking Middle Class. He cites a 2010 Census Bureau study defining the middle class "as a house, a car or two in the garage, a vacation now and then, decent health care and enough savings to retire and contribute to the children's college education." Porter's article shows that a shrinking minority of the population, and certainly a minority of working class Americans, fit that definition.

This is the real world that we all inhabit.

Real nature of crisis. Class warfare.

As Communist Party Chair Sam Webb points out, the government shutdown and threatened debt ceiling default were the latest in a string of ultra-right attempts to reverse the outcome of the 2012 election and stage a "very American coup." Ending the shutdown without concessions was not only a political victory for the administration - it was a victory for democracy and for the American people.

There were three major factors that contributed to the ending, or suspension, of the October political crisis. The first was the overwhelming rejection by the American people of the extortionist tactics employed by the Tea Party. The second was the firm stance by the Obama administration and the Democratic congressional leadership that they would not submit to blackmail. The third was the consensus from mainstream business and Wall Street groups, that the Tea Party had gone too far in threatening to force default.

The ruling class (i.e., the wealthiest and most powerful individuals and corporations who exercise direct control over much of the economy and significant influence and control over all levels of government, most popularly known as the 1%) is divided on tactics, but they share many of the same economic goals. In a sense, the Tea Party is playing bad cop, while more mainstream elements take on the role of good cop, saying "Agree to a few more concessions or I won't be able to restrain my crazy Tea Party partner."

In an October 9 email, Sen. Bernie Sanders (Independent-VT) summed up the class warfare aspect of the budget crisis:

It is also important that people understand that the real issue here is not just the desire of Republicans to defund Obamacare. At a time when the middle class is collapsing and poverty is increasing, these right-wing ideologues want to repeal virtually every piece of legislation passed in the last 80 years which protects the elderly, the children, the sick, the poor and the environment. The truth is that ending Obamacare is just a small part of the right-wing extremist agenda, which is heavily funded by the Koch brothers and other very wealthy and powerful special interests. Their full agenda includes privatizing Social Security, ending Medicare as we know it, slashing Medicaid funding, eliminating the EPA and the Department of Energy and abolishing the concept of the minimum wage. Needless to say, they also want more tax breaks for the rich and large corporations. It should be clear to everyone that their long-term goal is to move this country into an oligarchic form of society in which billionaires completely control the economic and political life of this nation.

Sanders is one of the 29-member Conference Committee charged, in the wake of the government shutdown, with drafting a new budget. He has called for a budget that protects Social Security and moves forward to address the real needs of the American people for jobs and economic security. But other committee members include rabid Tea party Republicans (including Paul Ryan, the committee co-chair), and mainline Republicans. The committee also includes a wide range of Democrats. In the past, some have indicated a willingness to compromise in the direction of accepting cuts to Social Security, as long as they get some concessions in return. Recent statements by Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid, to the effect that past concessions were a mistake and he would not support a "grand bargain" in the conference committee are encouraging, but he has left the door open for future concessions.

Working people need a program that addresses the real needs of the 99%.

No more Tea Party hostage taking! Abolish the debt ceiling, and pass a real budget.
End the sequester. The budget should reflect real needs, not artificial spending limits.
No cuts to Social Security, Medicare. Medicaid, Food Stamps, Unemployment Insurance or other safety net programs. Pass H.R. 3118 increasing Social Security benefits.
Jobs at living wages for the 20 million unemployed and underemployed meeting the real needs of the country for infrastructure, health, education, environment, renewable energy and research.
Financing through increased taxes on the very rich, closing loopholes that favor the wealthy and their corporations, and enacting a financial transaction tax, and cutting military spending.

A program along these lines is realistic and possible - the U.S. has the resources and there is broad popular support for these items. The 80-member Congressional Progressive caucus has introduced legislation that moves in this direction. But the political balance in Congress makes any forward motion extremely difficult. It will be a tough battle even to resist the pressure for more cuts as the price of avoiding a new budget crisis when the present agreement expires in January.

The factor that can tilt the balance in a progressive direction is a continuation and escalation of the mass pressure that helped force an end to the October crisis, and has strengthened the positions of President Obama and Democrats like Harry Reid. Millions of phone calls, letters, marches and rallies in every congressional district are the only thing that can shift the focus away from Wall Street's phony focus on deficit reduction to the real work of rebuilding the country and increasing economic security for working Americans.

Photo: "Stand for Workers" demonstration, Philadelphia, August 11, 2012. Ben Sears

Rejecting the G2

An Gang — Mon, 14 Oct 2013 09:23:00 +0000

Is China a world power second only to the United States? On September 12, when delivering a speech at the Research Institute of Tsinghua University in Shenzhen, former Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing gave an humorous answer when he said, "Only a fool would believe that China and the United States should co-lead the world under some sort of a 'G2' arrangement." He explained that Chinese people can feel proud as China grows stronger but should not become arrogant.

Li has been retired for several years, but his frank words still express the mainstream views of current Chinese leadership and government-run academic circles over China's international position. As early as May 2009, when then Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao attended the 11th China-EU Summit in the Czech capital of Prague, he declared openly that China disagrees with the "G2" idea, stating that it is wrong to claim that China and the United States should co-lead the world.

Chinese authorities have repeatedly denied the concept of "G2" and similar views that were first raised by U.S. scholars and politicians including Director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics Fred Bergsten, Harvard University professor Niall Ferguson as well as former U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski.

Domestic strategy

After decades of blistering growth since China initiated reform and opening-up policies in the late 1970s, the country has achieved great success in many fields. It has become a mainstream international consensus that China has become one of the major powers in the world. However, the views of "G2" or "co-leading the world" are neither consistent with China's domestic reality nor with China's independent foreign policy of peace.

China's strategic outlook stresses self-knowledge, with an eye for objective and comprehensive understanding of history before making decisions about the future. Few countries in the world are as keen as China to discuss, declare and clarify their international positioning. As China undergoes changes much faster than others, it must focus on the present and look to the future when making domestic and foreign policies.

The Chinese per-capita GDP still ranks below 80 globally, with more than 100 million people still living on less than a dollar a day. China also faces severe problems such as ecological deterioration as well as social unrest. In the meantime, it has not realized national reunification and still faces threats of separatism. The country is far behind developed nations and even some developing nations in terms of soft power, as it carries little influence over international public opinion.

A basic consensus within China is that the country should keep a clear mind about its fundamental national condition and focus on its domestic affairs. It should put the transformation of its economic growth pattern as the first priority, focusing on the quality of growth rather than the quantity. China should avoid falling victim to the dreaded middle-income trap or becoming self-inflated by its achievements and competing for spheres of influence worldwide. The priority of China's foreign policy should be on resolving various problems affecting its sustainable development and protecting its growing legitimate rights and interests in the world.

The Chinese Government also believes that the "G2" concept does not imply that Washington sincerely wishes to share power with China, but rather seeks to regulate it through an established arrangement. The fundamental purpose of the concept is to serve the unipolar world dominated by the United States. If China accepts, it will be against the promises of Chinese leaders to never seek hegemony or become a superpower. It will be also against the multipolar world and democratic international relations that China advocates. "China threat" rhetoric would be much more widely accepted and trust and support from neighboring countries, developing countries and emerging economies to China will also be weakened. Finally, China would be mired in vicious competition between big powers.

Foreign policies

The 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) held in November 2012 reiterated that China is still in the primary stage of socialism and will remain so well into the future. It was emphasized in the congress that China's international status as the largest developing country in the world has not changed.

After Xi Jinping took over as general secretary of the CPC Central Committee, he said at a group study session with members of the CPC Central Committee Political Bureau that since the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, the country has put forward the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence; established and carried out an independent foreign policy of peace; made a solemn commitment to never seek hegemony and expansion; and emphasized that it will always remain a staunch force in safeguarding world peace. He stressed that China will unswervingly adhere to these principles, policies and commitments.

In a speech delivered on September 7 at Nazarbayev University in Astana, Kazakhstan, Xi elaborated on China's Central Asia policy. He emphasized that China will never interfere in the internal affairs of Central Asian nations, seek a dominant role in regional affairs, nor try to nurture a sphere of influence.

The new Chinese leadership has also pursued building a new type of relationship between major countries when handling issues with the United States. The concept was accepted by Washington and has become the principal axis of Sino-U.S. relationship in the new era. The core of the concept aims to handle properly the strategic relationship between the biggest and fast rising developing country and the world's only superpower. It will help the two countries build a mutually beneficial cooperation framework, prevent misjudgment and avoid confrontation. It is starkly different from dividing world power or co-leading the world.

On September 20, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi delivered a speech at the Washington-based think tank Brookings Institution, during his first U.S. trip after assuming his post in March. Wang shared his thoughts on the way toward a new type of major-country relationship between China and the United States. He said, "Win-win progress is only possible when both countries are committed to cooperation. Moreover, such a win-win outcome should not just be beneficial to China and the United States-it should also be beneficial to all countries of the world." He went on to say, "China is prepared to engage in comprehensive cooperation with the United States at regional and global levels. What we seek is not the so-called 'G2,' but each complementing the other with its respective advantages. China is ready to shoulder international responsibilities commensurate with its national strength and realities, and together with the United States, offer more quality public goods for the global community."

China's explicit rejection of the "world's second power" laureate and the "G2" is not an attempt to cover up an aspiration of being a world power. Rather, it holds a rational understanding of its own path of development and adheres persistently to its own strategic culture. The new leadership shows resolution in realizing the Chinese Dream, the core of which is to build China into a prosperous and strong country.

Shortly after China overtook Japan as the world's second largest economy, the government-backed Chinese Academy of Social Sciences released a blue book at the end of 2010, which said that China is set to become one of the top five G20 countries by 2020; and by 2050, it will be the world's second most competitive country only after the United States.

Changes in the international system not only manifest as the rise and fall of economic strength and power status, but also show up as the changes of dominant institutional models, values, principles and norms.

Since modern times, China has never been so close to world power status, and is already playing the role of de facto power in more and more fields. Meanwhile, China has also been pushed to the cusp of increasing international contradictions. In the next decade, China's position in the world will undergo fundamental changes. In the process of becoming a world power, it must confront several issues: How to meet the needs and safeguard the interests of China's own development; to what extent it must shoulder international responsibilities in line with its national strength and realities; and how to stay on the path of peaceful development while promoting the peaceful development of the world.

from Beijing Review September 30, 2013

Photo Wuhan men at work, Creative Commons 3.0

Are Black teachers becoming extinct nationally?

B. Denise Hawkins — Wed, 09 Oct 2013 14:32:00 +0000

When a group of education researchers, practitioners and activists gathered at Howard University in April to address the lack of diversity in the nation's teacher workforce, Dr. Leslie T. Fenwick reminded her audience that such a time had already been foreshadowed.
Nearly 60 years ago, Thurgood Marshall first "warned that Black teachers would lose their jobs to racist displacement as the nation's schools were integrated," said Fenwick, dean of the Howard University School of Education. Marshall, in 1955, was serving at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund when he reported on the impending plight of these teachers. The year before, Marshall had argued and won the landmark desegregation case of Brown v. Board of Education that opened up classrooms and education to Black children.
The elimination of Black teachers from the classroom would not only be an economic loss for those educators, but a disservice to their students and a detriment for the teaching profession, says Fenwick, further sharing Marshall's troubling words during a town hall event hosted by Howard's School of Education, the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation and the American Federation of Teachers.

Today, Marshall's sobering observations have proved true, say experts pointing to the academic and social benefits that come when African-American and Hispanic students attend schools where racial and gender diversity of teachers and staff is high. But that doesn't reflect the makeup of most urban public schools when "73 percent of teachers are White and 68 percent of principals are White," Fenwick adds.

Black and other minority children are being taught in deeply racially isolated schools and are more likely to spend their entire K-12 education in public schools without ever seeing or having a teacher of color. In fact, Fenwick says, "This is the most populous generation of African-American children who have never been taught by an African-American teacher or who have never attended a school led by an African-American principal."

But Amy Wilkins, the College Board's new civil rights fellow, pointed out at a town hall forum on teacher diversity that "we have our own mess to clean up" as Black educators.

"Some of the most hurtful things that have been said about Black children have come out of the mouths of Black teachers," says Wilkins to applause. Just because a Black teacher is in the classroom for Black children, Wilkins adds, there is no guarantee that a positive learning experience is taking place or a role model is there.

What's needed, says Wilkins, the former Education Trust executive, "are teachers who respect our children and who can be ruthlessly demanding" when it comes to expecting the best academically from Black and minority children, as they do from White students.
And as practitioners and schools of education, urged AFT President Randi Weingarten, "We need to do more to ensure teachers better represent the students they teach. This includes thinking differently about recruitment and retention and about how we as a country view teaching."

HBCUs, which produce 50 percent of the nation's Black educators, have been doing just that, says Dr. Chance Lewis, who "is tired of the familiar refrain, ‘We can't find any good Black teacher recruits.'"
They are out there, and the process begins on college campuses, maintains Lewis, the Carol Grotnes Belk Distinguished Full Professor of Urban Education in the College of Education at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

When Dr. Ivory Toldson surveys the education workforce, he finds that "teaching is the No. 1 profession among Black men with master's degrees," but there are less than 2 percent of them in the classroom. Improving their college-going and completion rates makes boosting the professional teaching pipeline that much more complicated, but it can be done, says Toldson, a Howard University professor and senior research fellow with the Congressional Black Caucus. The expected retirement of more than 1 million teachers in the coming years offers a great opportunity for racial and gender diversity in the profession, experts say.

For Black male teachers, though, their journey shouldn't end in the classroom, Toldson suggests. They have too much to offer. "It would be a disservice to the profession if they aren't also used to improve diversity," or tapped to help educate those concerned about best practices for teaching young Black males, or if they aren't allowed to provide other quality services that can benefit all students regardless of race or gender.

from The Black Star Project

An experiment in living socialism: Bulgaria then and now

F.S. — Wed, 02 Oct 2013 12:07:00 +0000

"The Communist Manifesto now reads as if it was written just a few weeks ago. ... the experience of Eastern Europe and of the Third World shows the vital need for a universalist left as the only real alternative to diverse forms of barbarism."[1]

Building blocks for a 'people's history' of socialism 1.0

At this critical juncture, given the fierce urgency of now, it is time for the left to give renewed attention to the socialist experience in Eastern Europe. We need to re-explore in depth across the radical left in North America, Europe and elsewhere what was progressive and successful, in the former 'real-socialist' economies in Eastern Europe-especially the smaller socialist states like Bulgaria-along with their weaknesses, mistakes, contradictions and myriad problems engendered by the enduring impact of the Cold War. The socialist countries have been turned with a vengeance into a "testing ground of an extremely aggressive form of neo-liberal social engineering, an attempt to violently impose a change in social paradigm".[2] We are seeing a metamorphosis in political and economic paradigms at the hands of the IMF, EU-and a nouveau riche comprador bourgeoisie and coterie of oligarchs-that has transmuted much of the post-socialist world into a vast societal poorhouse.

Researchers have argued that the neo-colonial tsunami in the wake of the Cold War has brought extreme neo-capitalist versions of neo-liberalism into Eastern Europe, with devastating results for education and social welfare.[3] Bourgeois history's irony--or perhaps its Cunning of Reason in Hegel's classic sense--is that major achievements under 'real existing' socialisms in the 20th century were what people everywhere under austerity capitalism are fighting for here and now.

My core thesis is this: The narratives of ordinary people who grew up in socialism and now work and live in post-socialist societies in the throes of anomie [a widespread breakdown in social order] and severe poverty, their basic dignity trampled, need to be collected, discussed and disseminated widely. This will provide a record of authentic experience and memory as radical as reality itself. Such narratives can only sharpen our visions of 21st-century 'democratic socialism.' Such a project should be oriented toward oral history and biographical inquiry, exploring what life in these socialist states actually was like, as seen by ordinary citizens now living in the chaos of restored capitalism.

It has been argued that the restoration of market economies and bourgeois democracy across Eastern Europe, along with a massive de-collectivization of agriculture and privatization of industry have trashed human dignity and slashed the gains of 'real-socialist' welfare over many decades. Economic and ideological colonization from the West intensified for the vast majority of working families on a massive scale. One author recently observed that

"The dismantling of socialism has, in a word, been a catastrophe, a great swindle that has not only delivered none of what it promised, but has wreaked irreparable harm .... Numberless voices in Russia, Romania, East Germany and elsewhere lament what has been stolen from them - and from humanity as a whole: 'We lived better under communism. We had jobs. We had security.'"[4]

Speaking about 'socialism 2.0' for the 21st century, Peter Mertens, chair of the Workers Party of Belgium, noted in a 2012 interview: "It's also not the case that we don't know anything at all or that we have to start from a blank sheet of paper. There exist experiences, there was a socialism 1.0, with its strong points and its weak points, with its fantastic achievements, but also with its grievous mistakes. And we're living in different times."

The Cold War is over, yet it continues in some socialist ranks in a kind of ideological time warp. In forging left unity, debates about how to build a broad Marxist party need an empirical 'counter-grounding' in what the socialist workers' experiments in Eastern Europe actually meant for ordinary families, as perceived by real people today, now caught up in the chaos of contradictions under restored capitalism in these same societies. Their authentic stories-the subject-anchored nexus of history and memory-are relevant to the present struggle and reflect the once functioning realities, which have now been gutted, about which many North American socialists seem to be remarkably oblivious. But it is precisely this contrast between then and now in post-socialist societies in Eastern Europe that is highly instructive. We can learn much from past achievements as they were experienced and lived. This can serve to counteract the "danger of a single story" in our lingering conceptions of what socialism was (and was not) in Eastern Europe.

Bulgaria-An Icon of the Post-Socialist Freefall

Today, in 2013, the Bulgarian economy is in massive contraction under capitalism's neo-liberal 'shock therapy'. Bulgaria is now the lowest-income post-socialist state, with the highest levels of economic emigration in Europe, reflective of capitalism's 'race to the bottom' in the EU. As one author noted in 2009: "Capitalism's failure to lift living standards, impose the rule of law and tame flourishing corruption and nepotism has given way to fond memories of the times when the jobless rate was zero, food was cheap and social safety was high".[5] Many Bulgarians who were born in the 1970's and before view the socialist period as "a golden era" compared to today. There is a popular current Bulgarian joke about a woman who wakes up and runs about her house at night in panic, looking into the medicine cabinet, the refrigerator and then out the window into the street. Relieved, she returns to the bedroom. Her husband asks her, "What's wrong with you?" "I had a terrible nightmare," she says. "I dreamt that we could still afford to buy medicine, that the refrigerator was absolutely full, and that the streets were safe and clean." "How is that a nightmare?" the husband asks. The woman shakes her head, "I thought the communists were back in power."[6]

A substantial segment of the Bulgarian population over the age of 40 remains convinced that, 25-35 years ago, the socialist welfare system in Bulgaria delivered the necessary goods and services for most families-production for basic human and societal needs-within a largely egalitarian system that was firmly grounded on the development, availability and access to universal social programs. More empirical research is imperative, including qualitative inquiry probing 'working people's post-socialist subjectivity and memory,' explorations in the 'oral history of real Socialism,' biography as a 'flare' to illuminate past societal and communal realities. Nothing is black and white, and every point touched on here can be explored further. A tiny minority of privileged or much younger Bulgarians will of course disagree.[7] Bulgarian narratives can be supplemented by stories from Russia, Ukraine, Romania, Serbia and elsewhere.

'Democracy' is a knee-jerk expletive many Bulgarians born 1970 and before use with open contempt, identifying it with the restoration of capitalism, return to a class society, poverty, despair, insecurity, and gross inequality--the wholesale trashing of the human dignity of ordinary people. Bulgaria, which has basically been colonized by neo-liberalism, now has the lowest wages in Europe and is faced with the NATOization of the country, massive joblessness, and the near collapse of Bulgarian agriculture. The country is now confronted with corrosive social chaos, widespread social breakdown, a new ruling class in power, and "predatory globalization", all at the expense of ordinary workers. Bulgarians are now bombarded with endless rhetoric exalting the cult of the commodity and "becoming Europeans." Wracked by the havoc of 23 years of unending social and economic crisis, substantial numbers of Bulgarians-including Roma, many now working as economic migrants in Western Europe-feel that they and their families were significantly better off materially under the old 'universal welfare' regime, whatever its defects, with its southern and southeastern border in front-line confrontation with Greece and Turkey, key capitalist client states in the eastern Mediterranean.

A vast, ever-expanding economic gap has emerged between Bulgaria's haves and its have-nots. The latest Eurostat statistics show that Bulgaria had the highest share of persons at risk of poverty or social exclusion in the EU in 2011, at just under 50 percent. The Bulgarian 'rule of law' ranking is among the world's lowest. Today the Pentagon operates four military bases in Bulgaria, its compliant new ally. Some 20 percent of the country's population has emigrated since 1990. We have seen a gigantic exodus, the direct result of an unplanned, corporate-run 'free market' economy and a society in constant crisis since the 'obscure disaster' of 1989. A recent opinion survey concludes that a majority of people in Bulgaria think the "situation is unbearable". In 2013, there have been a number of public suicides by the desperate. A "demographic collapse" is looming due to massive emigration, and the birthrate has dropped to its lowest level since 1945.

As Gowans (2011) underscores: "A 2009 poll conducted by the Pew Global Attitudes Project found that a mere one-in-nine Bulgarians believe ordinary people are better off as a result of the transition to capitalism. And few regard the state as representing their interests. Only 16 percent say it is run for the benefit of all people." A new oligarchy and its supporters, largely based in Sofia and closely linked with the colonizing EU, enjoy remarkable privilege, at the majority's expense. Part of this wealth is centered in the Bulgarian and foreign-owned Black Sea tourist industry. As Alexander Andreev recently observed

"Since the breakdown of the communist system in 1989 and 1990, Bulgaria has been ruled by networks of oligarchies and clientilism. Practically all parties and coalitions in power serve the interests of large economic actors - or worse, those of shadow organizations which began as organized crime running protection rackets, who later established themselves as powerful market agents."[8]

Like many of the social democratic parties across Europe, the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP), the transformed Bulgarian CP of old, is largely pro-NATO, espousing a 'milder' makeover of neo-liberal market capitalism. It is headed by Sergei Stanishev. A somewhat puzzling political paradox here is the absence of any anti-capitalist movement in the streets or in the electoral arena. Disillusioned with politicians, mass alienation from the political elite is rife, as reflected in popular protest in February 2013 and again against the newly installed, BSP-led government from June 2013. Andreev (2013) bemoans the "lack of coherency" in the protests, given that the demonstrators have "formed no political party ... Aside from a couple of generally formulated goals, they also have no understandable list of implementation measures - which would be required for the crisis-bound fields of education, healthcare, energy or the stagnating economy." "People before profits" is not a key demand, while the popular slogan "Red Trash!" points up the center-right political sentiment driving many of the demonstrators. Dawson (2013), a British political scientist, critiques the openly anti-Turkish and racist innuendo among the disgruntled on the streets of Sofia and some other towns in the June-August mass protests. Living in this post-socialist labyrinth of contradictions, alienation between the Bulgarian masses and the State is perhaps at its highest level since liberation in 1878 from nearly five centuries of Turkish rule.

Looking back with more than nostalgia

The southernmost of the former socialist countries, Bulgaria was arguably the most successful East European socialist economy and polity. The percentage of ordinary Bulgarian working people aged 40 and over who think they were far better off under socialism in the 1970s and 1980s is markedly higher than their counterparts who have been polled in the former Soviet Union, Romania, and Poland. They traveled freely throughout the socialist bloc, at very low cost, and could see life elsewhere, and talk with citizens there. Bulgaria was also packed with summer and wintertime vacationers from the socialist bloc, on the Black Sea and at its skiing facilities. There were rich opportunities to interact and exchange perceptions. So why do we continue to engage in stereotypical generalizations about a monolithic 'Soviet' system? Why should we assume that the USSR was necessarily representative of the distinctive local realities in far smaller states such as Bulgaria? The memories of many older Bulgarians belie the notion that socialism was 'dictatorial,' a totalitarian society of unending hardship, oppression and lack of freedom, with its drab economy producing only shoddy goods.

On the other hand, it may well be the case that a significant segment of older Bulgarians would echo what Irina Malenko (b. 1967), author of the memoir/novel Sovietica, has written about growing up in the Soviet Union. Recently interviewed, Malenko (2013) noted

"Our life was very secure, safe, in a quiet, non-stressful environment, absolutely free of drugs, with virtually no crime. There was quite a lot of social control: if somebody was doing something wrong, his colleagues or neighbors would set him right. Every adult was in employment, except for disabled people, family care providers - if they wished to stay at home - and retired people. Retirement age was fifty-five for women and sixty for men. Soviet people were also the most literate people in the world. All art was very easy to access. Libraries were free of charge. Books, theater plays, concerts, museums, and exhibitions were extremely cheap.

We had a guaranteed right to housing, the right to have a job, and the right to have a paid holiday. Housing costs were extremely low. People paid only for water and electricity, just three or four percent of their wages in total. The state would give people apartments free of charge, for life, and their children could stay to live there, but you were not allowed to sell it. Public transport was extremely cheap too, as well as food. Children' clothes and shoes were subsidized by the state. Schoolbooks were supplied free of charge. ... We had whole publishing houses working specially on children's books; there was an enormous amount of cartoons and feature films produced especially for children ... All sports clubs were fully free of charge. Kids were encouraged to attend them."[9]

Bulgarian collectivized agriculture thrived, and industry expanded significantly. A major computer industry was built, centered in the town of Pravetz. Many agro-collectives, enterprises, factories, schools, and universities had vacation spots on the Black Sea providing nearly cost-free vacations for their workers. Now all that has vanished and Black Sea vacations are too costly for most. Importantly, there was a minutely planned economy that oversaw production to meet basic human needs, not the free-market chaos rife in the country today. Ostensible regime aims, basically implemented for most citizens, were a distinctive form of radical material equality, full guaranteed employment. There was a concerted effort to develop a strong sense of social solidarity, despite existing racism toward large ethnic minorities, Turkish and Roma. They were integrated as 'citizens' but not as collective ethnic minorities, with rights of their own. Socialist laws reduced structural discrimination. Yet endemic racism against Roma remained, a clear failing of socialist states across Eastern Europe (see below).

The Bulgarian socialist system was grounded on free education, free high-quality medical care, and excellent nearly cost-free public transport. In essence, most services for basic needs were 'de-commodified,' with the cost to consumers very low, and indeed almost 'demonetized' for water, electricity, transport, and central urban steam heating. Those costs are now skyrocketing, most especially for electricity and gas. The Bulgarian railroad system, once a model, is now in deep trouble as passenger numbers have plummeted by over 50 percent since 2001. Municipal bus fares are now 18 times the cost of a ticket under state socialism, where the old fare of 6 stotinki (= $0.04) was largely 'symbolic.' Cafes and restaurants used to be packed with working people, because they were low-cost and non-profit; now far fewer people can afford to go out. Maternity leave under socialism (three years partially paid) is now severely restricted, with many mothers distraught at the meager assistance they receive. Under socialism Bulgaria was reputed to have one of the best medical systems in Eastern Europe; today there is a huge emigration of medical personnel, given that salaries for health-care workers in Bulgaria are the lowest in Europe and the severe lack of medical equipment (once good, now antiquated). There was a good local pharmaceutical industry in Bulgaria in the 1970s and 1980s, which was run on a not-for-profit basis, producing low-cost, high-quality medications. Today nearly all medications are imported from the West and are costly, and many Bulgarians will tell you that their quality is questionable. Lots of older people are dismayed because they cannot afford essential drugs. Big bribes for doctors are now common and many patients are penniless. All this is destructive of basic human dignity.

As Mimi Vitkova, a Minister of Health in the 1990s, noted a decade ago

"We were never a rich country, but when we had socialism our children were healthy and well-fed. They all got immunized. Retired people and the disabled were provided for and got free medicine. Our hospitals were free. Today, if a person has no money, they have no right to be cured. And most people have no money. Our economy was ruined."[10]

Family incomes under socialism were often better in terms of actual buying power than after 23 years of 'democracy' and the free market. Many ordinary older working and retired Bulgarians will corroborate this fact. Then all had a job at a living wage. Now the gap between the few rich and the many poor in Bulgaria is huge and widening by the month. A large proportion of average working Bulgarians, and all pensioners, live on the edge, and 30-40 percent of the population is pauperized. The minimum salary is set at €160 per month, but many are struggling in precarious, part-time hourly jobs. Mean salaries are 25-30 percent lower than in neighboring Romania. Some eight percent of the Bulgarian population, a slim stratum of nouveau riche situated mainly in Sofia, Plovdiv, Varna, and Burgas, is now better off. Some social workers make the equivalent of €140 a month and are struggling to survive. In interviews, many Bulgarians report that the work atmosphere was formerly more pleasant, collegial, and productive - and far less stressful than today. Strong bonds of neighborliness and simple human solidarity were common, but daily interactions are now encumbered by economic stress, and social breakdown.

Especially instructive are comparisons in the area of education. Socialist education in Bulgaria was in important ways similar to the educational system in today's Cuba. This was particularly true in the sense of building a 'moral economy of solidarity and community' and overcoming the divide between the curriculum and life beyond the classroom in the natural, social and 'communal' worlds, a process known as 'schooling the revolution.'[11] Education was demonstrably better under socialism in terms of funds allocated, teacher quality and, significantly, in student attitudes to learning. Schools were demanding and geared to high performance levels, energizing student engagement and anti-capitalist Marxist thinking. However, 'critical thinking' in the current bourgeois sense, was lacking. Little open dissent was tolerated, which in retrospect was a systemic error. Public universities (none private!) were hard to enter and high grades were needed. But tuition was free and there was a job guaranteed by the state after graduation. There were no student debts or unemployed graduates. Social class distinction was kept very marginal in schools and discipline was strict. Today a severe lack of student discipline is ravaging the entire educational system. Attendance even in university classes is desultory and overall standards are in decline in today's 'mis-education nation'. Every teacher I have interviewed agrees on this. One senior educator said: "Bulgarian education has been destroyed. The result is total chaos in a system once among Eastern Europe's best." Expensive private schools have proliferated, serving the small elite class. Many students just want to get a degree and emigrate. Polls indicate that two-thirds of Bulgarians would like their children to study abroad. A youth survey in May 2012 noted that 40 percent of young people want to leave Bulgaria the first chance they get. A 2013 Ministry of Education poll determined that 52 percent of the 2013 high school graduating class applied for university abroad. In 2012, one-in-six high school graduates went on to study at foreign universities. Another 2012 study suggests a genuine national crisis, indicating 41 percent of Bulgarians aged 16 are "alarmingly illiterate". Bulgaria once was the Silicon Valley of the socialist bloc. Today the National Astronomical Observatory in Rozhen, the largest in southeastern Europe, is facing severe cutbacks, as are many areas of scientific research, with a huge storm of protest erupting over the devious distribution of research funds in late 2012.

Prior to the restoration of capitalism in Bulgaria, there existed a huge array of well-organized, state-run extra-curricular activities, with free summer camps and excursions for schoolkids. The Pioneers, for ages 9-13, and Komsomol (the Young Communist League), for ages 14-18, organized young people both in and after school. All of that is now dismantled, often wistfully recalled. Youth normally were mobilized to participate in compulsory agricultural harvest brigades under state socialism. This was mandated from above, yet many say there was enjoyable camaraderie, with campfires and singing and dancing in the evenings. There was heavy physical labor, small pay, and summers of required social service. Kids now live in a world of social atomization, with too little stress on physical fitness and love of nature, once central components of Bulgarian education.

The experience of this entire complex of organized youth movements and their key role in shaping the young, recollected from today's perspective, needs in-depth inquiry. Some teachers' colleges were built in part by their own first students, organized in construction teams. Lending a working hand was needed and expected.

Once upon a socialist time in Bulgaria, there were decent libraries, cultural activities, and sports of all kinds. Many school children attended monthly concerts of classical music, which were obligatory in the socialist curriculum. Now few go to such performances, which have become quite rare. Recent studies report that the average Bulgarian family spent the equivalent of €6 on books in the past year and €2 on the cinema/theatre/concerts. Under socialism, extremely low-cost books were far more common, but a whole 'reading culture' has now been trashed. Under socialism, all publishing was socialized, nothing was for profit, and cheap books were a priority. The arts were supported by the state, and there was a notable Bulgarian film industry (some of the best can be found on YouTube) that imploded in 1990 and has not recovered. The system of state-run theaters, where excellent dramatic productions could once be seen in many cities and towns, is today in shambles. Today, even going to see a movie is unaffordable for many, with tickets many times more costly than under socialism. Experienced librarians are now earning as little as €180 a month, and the extensive urban and rural library system-with traditional chitalishte reading rooms-is badly under-funded. In sports, the system of national teams is in a state of severe contraction. Bulgaria had its worst performance in 60 years at the 2012 London Olympics, in what was widely deemed an authentic national disgrace.

Socialist Bulgaria: a non-consumerist society?

In significant measure, socialist Bulgaria was an economy on the road to a virtually non-consumerist society, with an abundance of basic goods, which were not produced for profit and largely affordable. There were identical controlled prices for all items, nation-wide. There was no advertising industry and for 25 years there were no ads on TV. Much production was in a sense 'de-commodified.' There was one kind of yoghurt, of high quality and sold in returnable jars, not 25 brands as there are today. In fact, Bulgarians are now ranked as among "the most pessimistic consumers in the world" according to a recent report. People say 90 percent of the yoghurt now is a fake admixture, as is also the case with basics like yellow cheese (kashkaval), the traditional Bulgarian salami (lukanka), and all lower-cost table wine (once world-class). Under socialism, quality control of food was very strict, but this has now largely vanished. The capitalist market today is heavily colonized by foreign-owned grocery chains. Many items are imported and the quality is often questionable. Under socialism, municipal steam heating (covered by heavy state subsidies) was provided at very low cost, and the cold Bulgarian winters were cozy inside. Now most people in urban apartments cannot afford the privatized steam heat, and have resorted instead to dirty and dangerous wood-burning stoves or costly electric heating. Years ago, such stoves were mainly in villages, where the demand for fuel destroyed much needed woodlands. Today, messy and increasingly costly wood-burning stoves have become the reluctant norm in many urban apartments.

The Spirit of Community

Substantial social energy used to be directed into communal initiatives of all kinds such as neighborhood clean-up committees and snow-removal teams. The Communist Party was actively engaged in spurring communal consciousness at the neighborhood level. Importantly, in socialist Bulgaria there was virtually no violent crime in everyday life, with few break-ins and muggings. Today petty crime is rampant and 'security' is a major issue. The country was recently described by a government minister as an "oasis of organized crime". Older workers often say that years ago many never even locked their front door, and the key was left under the mat as there was no need to steal. There was no grinding poverty then as many Bulgarians and most Roma face today, with a burgeoning community of impoverished retirees, many with pensions the equivalent of €70-130 monthly. Unemployment benefits are set at around €65 a month, scarcely enough for minimal survival.

Widespread xenophobia is rampant today against the Roma throughout Bulgaria, even among university academics, and against the large minority of ethnic Muslim Turks. Racism and discrimination is worsening and rightwing nationalism is on the rise. Anti-Roma racism and historical dislike of ethnic Turks run very deep in Bulgaria. This animosity against Roma was dampened in part under state socialism and its 'assimilationist' policy, but it is now becoming increasingly virulent. Richie Parrish provides an insightful overview of the plight currently
facing Roma in Bulgaria. Many are trapped in extreme poverty. Almost a quarter of Roma children aged 5-15 do not regularly attend school. He cites a 2011 UN report indicating that "only 46.2 percent of the Roma population in Bulgaria completed primary education and only
7.8 percent of Roma completed secondary education."[12]

Toward a people-grounded, empirical approach

Raleigh's oral history work (2006; 2011) strongly challenges the one-dimensional view of Soviet 'totalitarianism' and standard narratives of Soviet history widespread in the West, especially in Great Britain and the United States. Based on several decades of fieldwork in the country and bolstered by numerous narratives of ordinary working people, Kideckel (2008) describes the fear and alienation besetting industrial workers in their everyday lives in post-socialist Romania. Looking back at socialist Hungary and its educational system, Millei (2013) analyzes the memories of five Hungarian kindergarten teachers about what teaching was like under socialism, and "the ways in which explicit socialist ideology is understood by the interviewed teachers." Anthropologist Gerald Creed (1999: 224) stresses: "people have multiple images of the past ... and the synthesis that results is very much a contemporary product." His own long-term fieldwork in the small northwestern Bulgarian village of Zamfirovo illuminates how farmers adapted to socialist practices, and the myriad problems that have been engendered since 1990 (Creed, 1998; 2010).[13]

In Summary

We should avoid "the danger of a single story" in describing what life was like under socialism. We need to take an unblinkered look at 'socialist model' achievements, authoritarian elements notwithstanding. In building a participatory economy and society beyond capitalism, especially a world of guaranteed full employment and largely de-commodified social production, 'socialism 1.0' is our own history and legacy. The stories of average working people who grew up under socialism and now live in a widening vortex of post-socialist alienation, anomie and inequality-along with the narratives of their children about life today-need to be collected more systematically and distributed widely. The need is urgent.

The author is a North American with substantial experience over many years in provincial post-socialist Bulgaria. He speaks Bulgarian fluently and has many ties with ordinary Bulgarian working families and a number of educational institutions.

Notes

[1] Kagarlitsky, Boris, New Realism, New Barbarism (London 1999) vii, viii.

[2] Panagiotis Soltiris, "Austerity Capitalism and Education in Greece" in Dave Hill, ed. Immiseration Capitalism and Education, Austerity, Resistance and Revolt (Brighton 2013).

[3] Tom G. Griffiths and Millei Zsuzsa, Logics of Socialist Education: Engaging with Crisis, Insecurity and Uncertainty, (2013) 1-18.

[4] Stephen Gowans, "We Lived Better Then." What's Left, December 20, 2011.

[5] Anna Mudeva, "Special Report: In Eastern Europe, people pine for socialism," Reuters (2009).

[6] Maria Todorova, "From Utopia to Propaganda and Back," in Todorova and Zsuzsa Gille, eds., Post-Communist Nostalgia (Oxford 2010) 1-13.

[7] See, for example, Kapka Kassabova, Street Without a Name; Childhood and Other Misadventures in Bulgaria (London 2008).

[8] Alexander Andreev, "Violence in Bulgaria to be Expected," Novinite, July 26, 2013.

[9] Irina Malenko, An Interview with Irina Malenko, author of Sovietica, NCCUSA 2 February, 2013.

[10] Gowans, "We Lived Better Then."

[11] For a detailed description of some of these patterns in the 1960s see John P. Georgeoff, The Social Education of Bulgarian Youth (Minneapolis 1968), a classic study in English.

[12] Richie Parrish, "Roma Minority Faces Uphill Battle," The Prague Post, 6 March, 2013. On the education of the Roma in Eastern Europe generally see Maja Miskovic, Roma Education in Europe: Policies, Practices and Politics (London 2013).

[13] See Daniel J. Raleigh, Soviet Baby Boomers: An Oral History of Russia's Cold War Generation (Oxford 2011); David A. Kideckel, Getting by in postsocialist Romania: labor, the body, & working-class culture (Bloomington 2008); Zsuzsa Millei, "Memory and kindergarten teachers work: children's needs vefodre the needs of the socialist state" in Tom Griffiths and Zsuzsa Millei (eds), Education in/for socialism: historical, current and future perspectives, special issue, Globalisation, Societies and Education (2013) 170-193; Gerald W. Creed, Masquerade and Postsocialism; Ritual and Cultural Dispossession in Bulgaria (Bloomington 2011).

Photo: Central market, Sofia, Bulgaria. Creative Commons 3.0

The Price of Imperialism

Norman Markowitz — Fri, 27 Sep 2013 11:39:00 +0000

When the Second World War ended, U.S. prestige among progressive and revolutionary forces through-out the world was never greater. Under the New Deal government of Franklin Roosevelt, the U.S. had served as the center of the "allied powers," holding a coalition of the British empire, under conservative leadership seeking to maintain its empire, and the Soviet Union, under Communist leadership fighting a war of survival and liberation for its own people and the people of Europe, together to defeat the fascist imperialist Axis powers.

Both the U.S. and the British Empire were also imperialists by Marxist definition, but the differences between them and their allies and the fascist Axis and its allies were clear. On the world scene the Allies constituted a center-left coalition against the forces of the Right, not only fascists but reactionary and conservative parties and movements, secular and religious, and those corporate capitalist groupings, including American capitalists, who sought to do business with the Axis powers.

The U.S. had used its influence to establish a United Nations organization and was under the New Deal government (itself relying on the support of a center-left coalition of labor and political forces) advancing policies to transform that organization into a political center to maintain international peace. There was also hope that the U.S. would support efforts to make the UN, through its social agencies, a body that worked to implement global policies to increase food production as well as sanitation, health care, and international labor standards that address the economic and social inequalities that produced war (and past imperialist policies which had greatly increased all of those inequalities).

But the balance of political forces in the U.S. had changed significantly during the war. Wartime economic expansion had bolstered what would later be called the military industrial complex and strengthened corporate and conservative forces. Their policy, called "The American Century" by prominent anti-New Deal publisher Henry Luce, would be to recycle and update U.S. policies of gunboat/dollar diplomacy and seek to apply those policies to the whole world.

One can debate whether or not history would have been different if Franklin Roosevelt, with his enormous political skills and leadership abilities, had lived to complete his fourth term. Or if Henry A. Wallace, who lacked those skills but was committed to a global peace and development policy centered on building the UN and continued American-Soviet cooperation (what he called "progressive capitalism"), had retained the Vice Presidency in 1944 and become President upon Roosevelt's death in 1945. But those questions are of course counter-factual and speculative in the extreme. We do know what happened and can analyze its causes and consequences.

The Big Picture of the Cold War

First, the Truman administration expressed hostility to the Soviet Union from its very first days in April, 1945, as the Red Army fought the last battle of Berlin and the European War ended. Then the Truman administration, initially fearful of the Red Army's military power and the influence of the Soviets and Communists throughout Europe and Asia, began to see the atomic bomb as a weapon that would frighten the Soviets into complying with U.S. demands for the economic and political organization of postwar Europe and Asia.

Even before WWII ended, the Truman administration had adopted the policy that Winston Churchill sought unsuccessfully to have Roosevelt adopt in the last two years of the war. That policy was to move away from anti-fascist cooperation with the Soviets and "Big Three Unity" toward a policy of undermining Communist-led insurgent movements and preventing Soviet forces from advancing into Eastern and Central Europe, even if that meant prolonging the war. It also meant quietly embracing fascist collaborator forces, as the British army did in the fall of 1944 when they invaded Nazi occupied Greece and opened fire on the Communist-led insurgents who had been fighting the Nazis for over three years.

The Truman administration began, in effect, to do the same thing in the Asia Pacific region from its first days. Even before the end of the war, General MacArthur's intelligence staff, in the bloody fighting for control of the Philippines, sought to distance itself from its most important grassroots ally, the Communist led people's army (HUKs). The HUKs had saved the lives of Americans and worked with American troops. Under MacArthur's orders, his staff began to provide cover stories for Japanese collaborators who the U.S. military would restore once the fighting stopped.

After the Japanese surrender, the Truman administration used the large Japanese armies on the Chinese mainland as a police force (as Truman later admitted in his memoirs) to keep the Chinese Communist party, whose influence had grown tremendously during the war, from sweeping to victory. Also, the Truman administration retained the Japanese Emperor, Hirohito, who Americans during the war had seen along with Hitler and Mussolini as the third member of an "Axis of Evil". Hirohito and all members of an extended royal family were given immunity from war crimes prosecution, even though a number were directly involved in atrocities against the peoples of China and other Asian nations.

When the war ended, Korea was "temporarily divided" into U.S. and Soviet zones of occupation. In the South, Syngman Rhee, a conservative who had spent most of the previous thirty five years on U.S. soil, was brought in by the U.S. occupation. Rhee was soon to become "our son of a bitch," the first of many local tyrants who the U.S. would establish in the postwar era and/or keep in power. In Korea also, the commander of the U.S. occupation, General James Hodge, was notorious for his racist contempt for the Korean people and his use of well known Japanese collaborators in the police to suppress student and worker opposition to Rhee and the American Military Government (AMG).

As it confronted the post war world, U.S. imperialist policy was deeply influenced by its closest ally, the British Empire. From the beginning of the cold war to the present the British Empire acted as the most faithful servant of U.S. imperialism, which mixed and matched British policies of creating balances of power and advancing in the name of "progress and civilization" policies which were their very antithesis. 1

After the British Army attacked the anti-Nazi resistance movement in Greece in 1944 (a center of its traditional sphere of influence in the Eastern Mediterranean) and installed a conservative monarchist regime filled with many Nazi collaborators and prewar Greek fascists, a bloody civil war ensued. But by the winter of 1947, the British Empire, bankrupt ideologically and financially, was withdrawing everywhere and in a state of near collapse. The Truman administration, already using indirect nuclear and other threats against the Soviets in Europe and recruiting former Nazis from the intelligence and police services of the Axis ("experts" in anti-Communism and anti-Sovietism) leaped in with a "Greek Turkish Aid bill" to replace the British military in the Greek Civil War and to buttress Turkey. Turkey had been neutral during WWII, had limited but not insignificant military power, and had a history of wars with Russia going back to the 17th century.

Along with this policy, Truman's call for a U.S. commitment to "aid free peoples" who are fighting against "subjugation" by "armed minorities" or "outside pressure," came to be known as the Truman Doctrine. However, former Vice President Henry Wallace accurately branded this policy a "world Monroe Doctrine." One could also see it as an extension of gunboat/dollar diplomacy imperialism from the Caribbean and the Western Hemisphere to the whole world. This of course was a very loosely expanded interpretation of the Platt Amendment, which claimed for the U.S. the "right" to intervene in the affairs of all nations in defense of their rights to "self determination and independence" as defined by the U.S. government.

In the years to come the invasions of Cuba, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, and the failed interventions in Mexico would be repeated in Greece, Korea, Vietnam, Taiwan, Lebanon, and Iraq (directly) and in France, Italy, Indonesia, the Congo, Brazil, Chile, Angola, Mozambique, East Pakistan, and Afghanistan indirectly. In a number of countries indirect interventions would, in the gunboat diplomacy tradition, be followed eventually by direct interventions.

These direct and indirect interventions meant concrete support of "our sons of bitches" throughout the world with military and economic "aid;" the training of military and police forces to oppress the people of these nations; the advance of "free market" policies that destroyed the limited social protections the people of these nations had; and of course the fomenting of economic crises, internal subversion against those governments who did not accept this globalized Monroe Doctrine/Platt Amendment Policy. The rationale for all of this was an unending war against a Soviet directed "world Communist conspiracy," a perpetual cold war to prevent a nuclear hot war. 2

The Big Picture of the "End of the Cold War"

Then, when the Soviet Union was dismembered and its East European alliance system collapsed (1989-1991) a funny thing happened. The cold war was over and Communism "dead in the cold, cold ground"; the conservatives proclaimed that capitalism had conquered the world and ended history. A peace dividend was coming for the U.S., the liberals shouted. But none of this actually came to pass; the military budget plateaued, as it had after the Korean and Vietnam Wars and as it was beginning to do after the truly unprecedented Reagan era spending increases. Budget deficits were sharply reduced for a while, thanks to a more rational tax policy under the Clinton administration and a more rationale trade policy, rather than any peace dividend. Legions of political missionaries and businessmen flocked to former Soviet Republics and Soviet allies, the missionaries dreaming of saving souls for their various denominations of liberty and democracy and the businessmen as always looking for money to make. Meanwhile, the military industrial complex kept rolling along.

The Big Picture of Cold War and "Post Cold War" Consequences for the United States

The distinguished historian of U.S. foreign policy, Walter LaFeber, estimated that U.S. military spending during the period from the Truman Doctrine to the dismemberment of the Soviet Union, with all of its hidden and ancillary costs, amounted to ten trillion dollars! By my estimate, military spending over the last 22 years in the "post cold war period" has more than doubled that. The pattern of expansion (Korean War), plateau(post Korean War), expansion(Vietnam War), very short inflation limited plateau(post Vietnam War), great expansion(Reagan Hollywood "virtual wars"), plateau("post cold war",) expansion on steroids(" wars and occupations against terrorism" in Afghanistan, Iraq, who knows where next) continues to this day, regardless of the administration.

The grand design/game plan of U.S. imperialism, the use of protectorates/satellites/client states and spheres of influence as against formal colonies had both avoided the high overhead costs of colonial imperialism and the politically disadvantageous loss of life that colonial military interventions led to. This was its "strength" as it developed its control over the Western Hemisphere and campaigned to open up the colonial regions, protectorates, and spheres of influence of its former imperialist rivals. The" globalization" of this policy (gunboat/dollar diplomacy) with the Truman Doctrine, the formation of NATO and subsequent military alliances(SEATO, CENTO and bilateral ones) meant that from 1947 to the present the U.S. would spend much more on the global cold war and its sequel, the global war against terrorism, then all of its allies and enemies combined. 3

Also, the U.S. would in the name of "containment," "counter-insurgency," "low intensity wars," and "proxy wars," do most of the fighting and suffer most of the casualties among the major powers. This was true in the Korean and Vietnam wars and later "wars against international terrorism" in Afghanistan and Iraq, wars that this policy of global "gunboat diplomacy" led to. While these casualties would be very small compared to the native populations of these regions, they would nevertheless be very great by all previous U.S. standards outside of the Civil War and the World Wars.

Some Speculation of the Costs of Roads Not Taken

In calculating the "price" of American imperialism to the American people, the overwhelming majority of whom are workers and salaried employees, retirees (former workers and salaried employees) students(future workers and salaried employees) many of the costs are incalculable, because of what did not occur.

How much higher would general social security benefits have been over the last sixty six years if general revenues had been added to the regressive payroll taxes (a concept which Roosevelt showed sympathy for and progressives put forward in legislation) and the social security based national health system (that was the subject of a fierce legislative battle after the war) had been enacted? How much less expensive and more secure would U.S. electrical power be for industrial, commercial and personal use if the large public power projects on the TVA model for the Columbia and Missouri rivers had been enacted? How much lower would the cost of all housing and higher education be today for the people if public housing legislation on the model of the original United States Housing Authority and federal aid to education on the model of the National Youth Administration had been enacted?

And most of all, how much lower would unemployment and insecurity have been for the whole people had the original full employment legislation put forward after the war been enacted and implemented? Given the wartime economic expansion, the establishment during the war of a system of progressive taxation, the fact that 1/3 of all workers outside of agriculture were unionized (even with the divisions between the conservative exclusionist AFL and the inclusionist CIO, the AFL had moved to the left due to competition with the CIO) the mass organizational support for all of this as well as a sympathetic public opinion was present at the end of WWII.

We might call this the "third New Deal," the one that failed to materialize. The postwar "containment" of labor through the Taft-Hartley Act and labor's precipitous decline in the Reagan and post Reagan era also meant that the large increase in wealth from 1980 to the present (seen, for example, in the tenfold increase in the Dow Jones Stock market average) was not accompanied by large increases in the real money incomes of the American working class. Although a much stronger labor movement had been able to fight for those increases in the period 1945-1975, the last two decades of the 20th century and the early 21st saw stagnation and sometimes declines in real wages.

The cold war wasn't the only reason why groups like the American Medical Association, the National Association of Manufacturers, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the private power companies, and their conservative coalition servants in Congress were able to bury this progressive program, but it was a central reason. The association of this program (a social security based system of national health care, public power expansion on the TVA model, federal aid to education, housing, and transportation) with "creeping socialism," the purges in the trade union movement and the arts, sciences and professions of its most militant advocates, all in the name of anti-Communism, systematically helped to defeat the entire program.4

And there were other costs that could not be easily calculated in dollars and cents. For example, we should cite the cost to the trade union movement over the last 66 years of tens of millions in members' real and potential wages as the number of workers in private sector unions dropped from 35% in 1947 to single digits today. (The cold war influenced Taft-Hartley law of 1947, sold to the people as a way to purge Communists from unions, was the beginning of this. It permitted states to pass anti-union "right to work" laws.) We should cite the continuing cost to hundreds of millions of Americans over that period of many billions of dollars in out of pocket health care expenses that working people in the rest of the developed world do not have to pay--and which we would not have had to pay if the legislation put forward at the end WWII, the Wagner-Murray-Dingell bill, had been enacted. On the other hand, the passage of Taft-Hartley, over time, gave conservative anti-labor politicians and the Republican party a huge advantage in "right to work states," which now function like the "rotten boroughs" of Britain before universal suffrage. There and then, some rural districts would re-elect aristocratic conservatives under all circumstances.

By the 1960s, this led to a situation in which, before the establishment of Medicare, senior citizens were the largest group living in poverty. Other developments one cannot put a price tag on were the high rate of infant mortality compared to other developed countries that existed in the U.S. and the emergence from the Reagan era to today of children as the largest group living in poverty. The U.S. is the wealthiest large country in history, yet it has many more poor people than any other rich developed country. That, more than anything else, sums up the domestic American tragedy.

The Little Nitty Gritty History of U.S. Imperialism. Believe it or Not, a Short List

Let me begin with a list of U.S. interventions during the "cold war" aka the period of the "World Monroe Doctrine/ Global Gunboat/Dollar Diplomacy /Platt Amendment" policy:

1. China: The Truman administration spent over three billion in military aid to Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang regime, (1946-1949) organized the regime's "elite divisions," and only ended its formal aid when the revolutionary forces had clearly gained the upper hand. The U.S, then refused to recognize the Peoples Republic of China, blocked its admission to the UN until 1972, did not establish full diplomatic relations with it until 1978 and over time gave many billions in military aid to "the Republic of China"(Chiang's rump regime on Taiwan).

Also, the U.S. helped to train Chiang's commandoes for raids against the Chinese mainland, threatened war in the 1950s over the islands of Quemoy and Matsu in the Formosa Straight with China, provided financial and indirect military aid to feudal-religious elements for an uprising in Tibet against the Peoples Republic of China(1959) and subsequently, as it came to recognize China, maneuvered to create conflicts between China and India and to use China as a "strategic ally" against the Soviet Union.

For the American people, this meant real war dangers as U.S. paratroops prepared to raid the Chinese mainland in the event of full scale war in the Formosa Straight in the mid 1950s, a peacetime draft was established (1948-1972) that undermined working class communities by taking those who could not be deferred because of they were enrolled in colleges for medical reasons, or were unacceptable because of criminal records.

2. Italy, the new CIA's first "test": the agency called by its members "the company" spent millions to defeat the united front of Communist and Socialist Parties, expected to win 1948 elections. It also engaged the Democratic party in the U.S to mobilize Italian Americans to send telegrams to relatives, provided both Marshall Plan aid and other forms of aid to the Italian government, funded Mafia elements in Sicily and Southern Italy to undermine a free election, continued over the next four decades with limited success to try to defeat and isolate the Italian Communist Party, supporting both former and neo fascists, traditional conservatives, and anti-Communist factions of the socialist party to achieve those ends

The CIA's activities here also began a pattern of involvement with organized crime groups who would use their increased wealth and connections to develop the heroin market in U.S. working class communities, destroying over time hundreds of thousands of lives and increasing crime significantly in American cities

3. Greece: The U.S. military's "successful" intervention in the Greek Civil War, with huge loss of life for the Greek people, and subsequent support for conservative authoritarian governments,(which outlawed the Communist Party )and a liberal "loyal opposition." CIA and Johnson administration support for the brutal military junta regime established in 1967, to prevent the liberalization of Greek politics and the possible triumph of left forces through free elections .

4. The Philippines: After nominally giving the Philippines its independence, U.S. "military advisors" organized the campaign to crush the anti-Japanese Huk army, electing and then removing Filipino presidents until the 1960s, when one of their "assets," Ferdinand Marcos, realizing that the U.S. was turning against him, made himself "president for life". Marcos retained U.S. support until the ouster of his brutal corrupt regime in the mid 1980s

U.S. agribusiness corporations, Dole especially, participated in and profited greatly from the exploitation of the Filipino people in alliance with terroristic regimes and local rightwing gangs to murder peasant organizers and drive poor peasants from their land

Edward Landsdale, a classic imperialist adventurer in the tradition of Britain's Chinese Gordon and Lawrence of Arabia, organized the political campaign to elect Ramon Magsaysay President of the Philippines in 1952, then directed the U.S. military mission to French colonial Indochina (1953) to remove the French and bring in Ngo Dinh Diem, a U.S. "asset" to establish a dictatorship over "South Vietnam" in violation of the 1954 agreement calling for reunification of Vietnam in a two year period.

Lansdale then served as director of the CIA's operation Mongoose (1961) the largest and most expensive CIA operation in the world, to overthrow the revolutionary government of Cuba and try to murder Fidel Castro and its other leaders.

Lansdale was an advertising man from San Francisco before WWII. He employed in a completely amoral way the methods of contemporary advertising/propaganda, connecting them to traditional policies of sabotage, assassination, infiltration and subversion of revolutionary movements and anti-imperialist governments, all the while, like Chinese Gordon and Lawrence of Arabia, seeing himself as a missionary for progress (in his case "democracy"). In the Phillipines he is remembered for using the slogan "Magsaysay is My Guy," for the election of U.S. backed presidential candidate, Ramon Magsaysay, a slogan which may have made sense in a U.S. commercial but was completely lost on the tagalong speaking Filipino rural population

The U.S. Intervention first in the French colonial war and then in its own version of a colonial war (1950-1975) would cost directly 58,000 lives, hundreds of thousand wounded, and the psychic trauma that many experienced because of the atrocities that were and are the reality of "counter-insurgency" as against the rhetoric of winning the hearts and minds of the people.

For millions of Americans the great struggles unleashed by the Civil Rights movement and enacted in Great Society legislation brought with them the possibility of winning decisive victories against poverty and racism in the U.S. The intervention in Vietnam, when all the slogans were stripped way, was, like the dozens of pre cold war and cold war interventions in Latin America, a war against the poor with a large racist subtext. 5

5. National Security Council Memorandum 68 (1950), calling for a fourfold increase in U.S. military spending needed to implement the Truman Doctrine/"containment" policy worldwide.

U.S. involvement in Korean Civil War (1950-1953) defined to American people as a United Nations "police action" became the basis for the implementation of NSC-68. (U.S. interventions in the Caribbean had been defined as the use of "the international police power" under the Platt Amendment to "maintain order" and protect the "independence" of the people who were being invaded).

The Korean war ended with a "truce," a devastated Korea(an estimated three million dead) with the U.S. creating the largest "protectorate/satellite/client state" in its history, establishing a large military presence and nuclear forward bases against North Korea, China, and potentially the Soviet Union, supporting repressive regimes and the military over the decades, and doing nothing to resolve either the Korean national question or the threat of war that its large and costly military presence represented and continues to represent.

The implementation of the principles in NSC-68, would mean trillions in military industrial complex corporate subsidies, a "warfare state capitalism" that would prevent the development of a modern "welfare state" social system in the U.S., a development over subsequent decades that would see U.S. life expectancy decline in relationship to other developed countries, public education and child care services both stagnate and the U.S develop a level of income inequality greater than in any other developed country.

6. Europe: Development of the U.S.-NAT0 bloc, (1949-present) included the nuclearizing of NAT0 to fight an envisioned WWIII against the Soviet Union and its allies; the rearming o of "West Germany," extensive and ongoing CIA involvement with intelligence agencies of NAT0 countries; involvement in French and Italian politics to isolate and defeat influential Communist parties; involvement in West German and British politics in the German Social Democratic and British Labor parties to defeat Kurt Schumacher and Aneurin Bevan, leaders of left anti-cold war factions, respectively, in favor of pro NAT0 and on domestic policy ant-nationalization of industry politicians, Hugh Gaitskell in Britain and initially Erich Ollenhauer in West Germany, a tame social democratic opposition to conservative governments (the model preferred by the U.S. for Europe).

CIA establishment and funding of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions(ICFTU) and international student, youth, and cultural organizations to fight against The World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) and student, youth and cultural international organizations in which Communists played an important role. In the "name of freedom," Communists and those defined as "sympathetic to Communism" are barred from all CIA funded organizations.

Following the exposure of many of these organizations in the 1960s and 1970s, the Reagan Administration, in what is a grim joke, established a federally funded "Endowment for Democracy" to continue their work, that is to advance anti-Communist, anti socialist, pro militarist propaganda and organizations in the name of "democracy", using the model of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), whose funding Reagan sought to restrict, as it sought to defund all of the social gains won by the American working class and the whole people, demonizing these gains in ideology as "entitlements".

7. Iran: U.S. Intervention in Iran, 1946, against a Soviet supported uprising by the Azerbaijani minority in Northern Iran (Azerbaijan was a Soviet Republic at the time) threatening the Soviets indirectly with nuclear blackmail to have then withdraw their support. In the aftermath, there was brutal repression of the Azerbaijanis in Northern Iran, which went un-noticed in U.S. media.

The Eisenhower administration's use of the CIA to achieve its first successful overthrow of a government in Iran in 1953 (it had been involved in various unsuccessful attempts to overthrow governments in Czechoslovakia and Albania and undermine governments in Poland and Rumanian who were allied to the Soviet Union earlier).

After Mohammed Mossadegh, democratically elected Prime Minister, nationalized what was a private monopoly of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, Britain launched a blockade of Iranian oil. When the U.S. government refused him any assistance, Mossadegh turned to the Soviet Union to break the blockade.

After the Soviets offered aid, the U.S. declared Mossadegh a "communist" and orchestrated his overthrow, replacing him with the Shah, previously a constitutional monarch, who established a brutal terroristic dictatorship in which the U.S. was the principle backer and beneficiary. The oil was then privatized and in a classic imperialist "redivision," U.S. oil companies received 40%, other U.S. influenced companies 20%, and the former Anglo-Iranian oil company, now calling itself British Petroleum(BP) more famous today in the U.S. for spilling oil then spilling blood, was left with 40%

U.S. corporations then did very profitable business with and in Iran for the next twenty-five years, selling arms, engaging in construction projects and taking their cut of the oil. Secular liberal forces, the Tudeh (Communist) party, and all other opponents of the regime were ruthlessly suppressed, leaving the Islamic clergy as a venue for opposition.

The 1979 revolution, in which millions took to the streets against the Shah's regime, millions who understood from their life experience the history of 1953 and all that followed, was taken over by a section of the Islamic clergy to establish a clerical "Islamic Republic" which channeled mass opposition to imperialism into portrayals of the U.S. and its people as "the great Satan' and secular "Western society" as at war with all Muslims.

U.S corporations lost billions in Iran although the U.S. froze Iranian assets in U.S securities valued at over 20 billion in 1980 (they remain frozen, and their present value is unknown) and the Reagan administration did "receive" over fifty million dollars from the Iranian government in the illegal "arms for hostages" deal in order to provide the Iranian military, which had received arms from the U.S. until the revolution, with weapons to use in their war against Iraq, which the Reagan administration had supported. Most of this money "disappeared" although some was siphoned off to support the Nicaraguan contras, an expression in the 1980s of old fashioned Platt amendment gunboat diplomacy.

The cumulative effects of "warfare state" policies by the 1980s were these: a labor movement whose leadership allied with the most reactionary warlike elements of the capitalist class in the service of imperialism abroad and had been and would continue to be unable to organize against the massive export of capital abroad, which was in effect the domestic policy of imperialism in the U.S. This created the most dangerous of conditions, a chronic economic crisis and a political vacuum on the labor left, which in turn, with the blowback of the Iran Hostage crisis, enabled the Taft-Goldwater Republican right to win the presidency under Ronald Reagan and seek literally to expand the "warfare" state by either eliminating or marginalizing all positive labor and social legislation since the New Deal.

8. Latin America: Farewell to the Good Neighbor Policy and a list far too too long to go into great detail

a. Guatemala: CIA overthrow of the democratically elected Arbenz government In Guatemala (1954) and establishment of a brutal dictatorship under Carlos Castillo Armas (a U.S. trained officer) which would take thousands of lives, the most terroristic regime in the region up to that time.

b. Cuba: 1958-present. After initial failure to remove the Batista dictatorship and establish a military Junta that would defeat the guerrilla army led by Fidel Castro, steady escalation of attacks on the revolutionary government, establishment of an embargo against it, organization of a Cuban exile military force to launch an invasion of Cuba completely funded and orchestrated by the CIA to establish a puppet regime, suppress all pro revolutionary forces, and restore all U.S. property (on the Guatemalan model).

Continued CIA actions after the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion to overthrow the Cuban government and murder Fidel Castro, raids against Cuba, use of bacteriological warfare to destroy Cuban swine herds, organized sabotage campaigns against the Cuban economy, continued plots to murder Fidel Castro(last documented one in Angola in mid 1970s), work with Gorbachev regime to reduce Soviet aid to Cuba and intensification of economic blockade against Cuba following the dismemberment of the Soviet Union.

The cost to the American people: the spending over the last 53 years of tens of billions of U.S. public funds to "contain/destroy" the Cuban revolution, , the suffering of the Cuban people, the loss to all of Latin America of what a policy of Cuban-American friendship and solidarity could have meant for the development of the region, given the outstanding achievements of Cuba in education and health care, connected to what the U.S. has to offer in terms of technology, capital, and its own technical and professional workers.

Also, a major blowback from the Cuban policy in the Watergate conspiracy, (1971-1974) in which former FBI and CIA agents organized a group of Cuban criminals who had worked in CIA terrorist actions against Cuba through the 1960s to wiretap phones and microfilm documents at the headquarters of the National Democratic party in Washington

c. Dominican Republic: Indirect CIA intervention in Dominican Republic to support Juan Bosch as a "democratic alternative" to the Cuban revolution and then direct military intervention, first support for a rightwing military junta's overthrow of Bosch when his government moved in a socialist direction and threatened the interests of U.S. corporations, followed by an Invasion of 25,000 U.S marines in the name of defeating "Communists" after constitutionalist military officers sought to restore Bosch to the presidency he had won( the largest direct military intervention by the U.S in Latin America in history, thirty two years after Franklin Roosevelt formally repudiated the Platt Amendment.

The involvement of the top leadership of the AFL-CI0, in these actions throughout Latin America during the presidency of George Meany and his successor Lane Kirkland, the role of Jay Lovestone, a former CPUSA leader of the 1920s, who served to bring the AFL and later the AFL-CI0 together in funding global anti-Communist, anti-socialist actions and subversions in the world left and labor movements .

American workers and trade unionists paid a price for the actions of the AFL-CI0 leadership in collusion with the CIA. These acts not only dishonored and disgraced American labor globally when they were made known but strengthened a bureaucratic outlook in the top AFL-CIO leadership, a suspicion and disdain for militancy, social activism and class organization in favor of "working with business and government." In part because militancy, social activism, and class consciousness, on which the labor movement in the U.S. had won all of its victories,( were exactly the forces internationally the the CIA supported labor fronts were fighting.)

d. Guyana: U.S.-British joint covert action to subvert and defeat through elections the Peoples Progressive Party of Guyana (former British English speaking Western Hemisphere colony) targeted its leader, Cheddi Jagan, who openly referred to himself as a Marxist and sought to advance a socialist program. Under both the Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson administrations, Jagan, whose party was elected three times, the last in 1964, was driven from office

There is an important subtext to these events related to the history of racism. In Guyana the two groups who make up the overwhelming majority of the population were former slaves of African extraction and indentured laborers from British colonial India, after the indigenous population had been destroyed. British colonialism used the classic tactic of playing one group against the other, with those of Indian extraction being heavily agricultural laborers and those of African extraction much more urban workers.

Jagan, of Indian background, sought to develop solidarity between the two groups. U.S. policy, aided and abetted by the CIA's AFL-CIO conduits, actively supported Forbes Burnham, "our son of a bitch," a corrupt politician of African extraction who emulated U.S. labor racketeers and whose government pursued discriminatory policies against Guyanians of Indian extraction.

In the 1970s, Burnham is widely believed to have been behind the murder of Walter Rodney, a distinguished Marxist scholar, the author of the now classic study, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, and the most important opponent of African extraction of the Burnham government. Jagan, a dentist by profession, had been educated in the U.S. and had an American wife, who later led the party following his death. His study and involvement in Marxism and the socialist movement had really begun in the U.S.

As a bitter, ironic footnote to these events, the CIA's actions in Guyana were the only time in U.S. recorded history that the U.S. government, overtly or covertly, when intervening in a conflict between a group of African extraction and a non African group, supported the African group!!

d. Brazil: Indirect support for military coup in Brazil (1964) ousting a democratically elected progressive oriented government. Active support for military junta regimes in Venezuela, Argentina, Paraguay, etc, then supporting or opposing civilian governments based on their subservience to U.S. economic interests. AFL-CI0 Meany leadership support for these activities, helping to train trade union henchmen for the regime.

e. Chile: CIA intervention in Chilean elections of 1958, 1964, 1970, funding opposition to Popular Unity (Peoples Front) coalition of Socialist and Communist parties and liberal groups led by Socialist Party leader Dr. Salvador Aliende. Nixon administration economic/political war against democratically elected Allende government, economic policies fomenting strikes and inflation crisis, support for rightist and ultra-left groups to destabilize government, attempts to foment army coup against government, leading to the bloody Pinochet coup and massacre of thousands of people's front partisans.

All out support in terms of economic aid and political support for Pinochet regime as it destroyed trade unions, privatized Chilean social security, establishes with the "advice" of "free market economists associated with Milton Friedman a regime I would call "free market fascism," combining the politics of traditional fascist regimes, which were state capitalist, with "laissez-faire" economics, regarded by scholars of Latin America as the most brutal and repressive regime in Latin American history

f. Nicaragua: Support for the "contra war"(elements of the former Somoza dictatorship) against revolutionary Sandinista government in Nicaragua and the more traditional ultra right Salvadorian government against revolutionary FSLN in two "low intensity wars"(the new term of the 1980s) that claim in excess of 120,000 lives in two small countries through the 1980s. Blowback in the form of Reagan administration continued support for contra war following murder of U.S. nuns in Nicaragua and passage of Boland Amendment. Intensified surveillance and of U.S. peace movement, especially The Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES)

g. Venezuela: support for failed coup against government of Hugo Chavez in oil rich Venezuela (2002) and continued policy of harassment against Chavez's Bolivarian government as it moved in a socialist direction. Venezuela's oil wealth and location offered and continues to offer its socialist oriented government protection from direct gunboat diplomacy intervention

9. Indonesia: 1948-present.

Initial refusal to back restoration of Dutch colonialism and support for Sukarno, WWII Japanese collaborator as leader of an independent Indonesia, because of his opposition to Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI() in 1948. Opposition to Sukarno as he forms an informal alliance with PKI against Islamic conservatives and military-CIA supported assassination attempts against Sukarno, U.S. support for conservative elements of the military in Indonesia, fifth largest country in the world in terms of population at the time. Direct involvement in genocidal coup of 1965, in which an estimated one million PKI activists, workers, peasants and members of the ethnic Chinese minority are killed by the military and vigilantes linked to rightwing Islamic groups.

CIA boasts of its list of 10,000 key PKI cadre provided to the military, all of whom were allegedly murdered

U.S government support for brutal corrupt Suharto regime over decades and, in the tradition of gunboat dollar diplomacy, denying all involvements in this sordid history after Suharto's removal in 1998 and claiming since the 9/11 attacks to represent the forces of liberty and democracy against "Islamic terrorism" in Indonesia.

While most of this was minimized in the U.S. and the U.S/NATO bloc countries , in large part because the people were massacred were Communists and people of the left, Indonesia's invasion and occupation of East Timor, former Portuguese colony supported by the U.S. in 1975, became the source of an international protest movement.

East Timor, whose population is primarily Christian, declared its independence Portugal. Amnesty International has estimated that the Suharto government murdered, with U.S. supplied weapons, as many as 200,000 of East Timor's population of 700,000, while the U.S. continued to support Indonesia's "sovereignty" over East Timor in the United Nations and block attempts to punish it for its crimes. American people suffer from the leading role their government played in funding, aiding and abetting what were two genocidal campaigns,

10. The "Middle East: 1947-present. Follow the Oil

Initial replacement of British and French Empires and support for reactionary British installed monarchies in Egypt and Iraq. Close working relationship with feudal Saudi Arabian monarchy, center of the world's largest concentration of oil deposits through Arab-American Oil Company (ARAMC0) a consortium of U.S. oil companies developing the world's richest oil deposits.

initialcoolness toward Israel in the Arab Israeli-Palestinian conflict (1948-present) in favor of an "Arabist policy," support for conservative monarchist regimes in Jordan, Iraq, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, to protect the oil.

Nationalist and socialist oriented revolutions in Egypt (1952) Iraq (1958) undermine this policy. Opposition to British-French-Israeli invasion in Suez Crisis(1956) as a message to the old colonial powers that U.S. imperialism was calling the shots in the region and would not tolerate any restoration of British and French power

a. Lebanon and Syria: Eisenhower Doctrine pledging U.S. military intervention in region against "Communist influence," U.S. marine intervention under doctrine in Lebanon against Pan Arab pro Syrian and Egyptian forces having nothing to do with Communist movement

b. Iraq: Intimidation of Socialist oriented military government which overthrows rightwing monarchy (1958) in Iraq, involvement in plots with nationalist Pan Arabist Baath party of Iraq to assassinate government leaders, using anti-Communism and opposition to Soviet influence as pretext. Later initial support for Baath Party dictatorship, as Baath leader and former CIA "asset" Saddam Hussein plays the Soviets against the Americans, establishes a personality cult based dictatorship and, to the chagrin of U.S. imperialists nationalizes oil holdings(1970s)

Reagan administration returns to policy of support for Hussein's regime when, seeing the U.S.-Iran conflict, Hussein sees an opportunity to attack Iran and gain rich oil lands, launching an eight year war which costs hundreds of thousands of lives and bankrupts Iraq.

Reagan administration acts to cover up Hussein's use of poison gas and other atrocities in war, encourages its oil rich protectorates to continue to lend him money to finance the war, and resists Iranian overtures to end the war contingent upon his removal.

In aftermath of war, Hussein, believing the U.S. will not oppose him (it hadn't in the past) invades oil rich Kuwait, leading to first Gulf War (1991) as Pentagon and Bush administration seek to keep military spending up as Soviet Union collapses and cold war rationales decline.

Decision is made to keep Hussein in power after his regime's total military defeat as a pawn to be used against Iran. Subsequent massacres of Muslims of the Shia religious domination and people of the Kurdish ethnic minority both opposed to the Hussein regime, were ignored by the Bush I and Clinton administration in the "post cold war era"

Post 9/11 invasion and occupation of Iraq, actively opposed by France, Germany, and other NAT0 bloc nations ; invasion based on crude propaganda contentions above and beyond anything that the U.S. government had advanced in the cold war era-that Hussein's regime was the ally of Al Qaida, which was sworn to destroy it and whose members it had hunted down and killed; that the regime was hiding" weapons of mass destruction," even though more than a decade of UN inspections showed this to be false; that the regime was a military threat even though its military forces and strength were at less than half of 1991, first Gulf War capacity.

The subsequent occupation brings together Reagan-Bush capitalism, private construction contractors, private corporate food providers to the military, private security forces, robbing the U.S, taxpayer of billions, outraging millions of Iraqis,(unemployed former soldiers watching foreign workers come and take high paying manual labor jobs) and placing the U.S. military in greater danger. The Iraq occupation, Americans should see, is an example of the kind of capitalism that the right would establish in the U.S. if they could get away with it. In retrospect, Iraq under Bush was treated more like a 19th century Indian Reservation in the U.S. then any previous U.S. occupation, with private corporations playing a larger role than in any of the early 20th century "protectorates" in Latin America

c. Libya, former Italian colony: The Libyan government of Muammar Gaddafi was seen as a threat to U.S. "World Monroe Doctrine" foreign policy in North Africa because of its idiosyncratic government was untrustworthy, i.e, Gaddafi whatever else he and his regime represented was not "our son of bitch." For the Reagan administration, Gadaffi became the guinea pig for cowboy movie diplomacy, the villain who would be hunted down and killed by the sheriff and his deputies. Accusing the regime of inciting terrorist attacks the Reagan administration responded with air attacks on Libya aimed at killing Gadaffi, attacks which failed, although scores of Libyans lost their lives in the attacks, including Gadaffi's daughter.

Resolving disputes by capturing and killing your rival was standard practice among criminal gangs through the world and among rival warlords through history. Hunting and killing the head of state of a sovereign nation flew in the generations of international law and at least of few centuries of diplomatic practice.

d. Israel as the military middleman: In the 1960s, faced with the loss of the three large Arabic states, Syria, Egypt, and Iraq, as protectors of the Gulf Oil Reserves, the U.S. government forged a strategic alliance with Israel in the aftermath of the 1967 Six Day War, which resulted in complete Israeli occupation of the all of the territories that in the original UN partition was supposed to be a Palestinian Arab state(territories taken by Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, who did nothing to consolidate such a state in the previous 19 years). For U.S. imperialism this alliance was a necessity, because no other regional power existed to protect the oil, and Israel's garrison state history and mentality, along with the refusal of the Arabic states to accept its existence and negotiate with it on regional issues, made it largely subject to U.S. imperialist control, whomever was in power and at the same time made it both a servant and a convenient scapegoat for U.S. imperialism, to be used in the Iran-Contra adventures under Reagan and today as a military knight in a strategic chess game against Iran.

The American people pay and continue to pay the price of a sixty year policy recycling the largely the imperialist policies of the former British empire in the region in the interest of U.S. based transnational energy corporations, making the incomes and jobs of millions of American workers subject to the conflicts and crises in this region, manipulated by the transnational energy corporations in alliance with various governments for their profit. The American people and the people of the world also pay the environmental costs of these policies to land, water, and air as alternative "green" energy sources are remain underdeveloped

10. Africa:

The U.S. had not been involved in the colonial carving up of sub Saharan Africa, although American corporations like Firestone Rubber were involved in Liberia and other U.S. companies were involved in the exploitation of Europe's African colonies through various transnational corporations. Cold War U.S. governments both supported the colonial powers as they sought to hold onto their colonies and, as a plan B position, conservative nationalists, separatists, and military protégées of the colonial powers who would turn their nations into protectorates of U.S. imperialism and its allies, or "neo colonies" as this kind of control came to be known in the former colonial regions of the world.

a. The Congo: Using the UN as a cover, the U.S. and France intervened in the collapsing Belgian Congo, scene of some of the worst genocidal crimes in human history at the end of the 19th century, to defeat the leader of the national liberation movement, Patrice Lumumba, whom the CIA compared to Fidel Castro as a socialist revolutionary menace.

The CIA helped orchestrate the murder of Lumumba, spent millions to keep his supporters from gaining power democratically, and then turned to Joseph Mobuto, who established what international observers regarded as one of the world's most corrupt regimes, looting billions while the overwhelming majority of people were malnourished and plagued by the old diseases of poverty and a new one, AIDS, without the most rudimentary forms of medical care.

c. Angola and Mozambique: The CIA supported Portuguese colonialism in Angola and Mozambique in the 1960s and 1970s. CIA plan B strategy in Angola was to support "our son of a bitch," Holden Roberto, corrupt nationalist brother-in-law of Joseph Mobuto, against Marxist influenced and socialist oriented MPLA (Popular Front for the liberation of Angola). The CIA aligned itself with the South African Apartheid government, first to use force to keep the MPLA from taking power and then, to support a rightist separatist guerrilla war led by the adventurer, Jonas Savimbi. Similar developments occurred in Mozambique with a much greater South African participation. U.S. escalation of these actions under the Reagan administration, supporting and protecting South African military incursions and, in Angola, the wars of Savimbi and Renamo (the group made up of former Portuguese colonial forces under the direction of South Africa). Hundreds of thousands died and a greater number were made homeless through these interventions, which continue into the 21st century, largely burying the possibility for progressive social development and socialist construction advanced by the MPLA in the 1970s.

c. South Africa: The U.S. supported the Apartheid regime, under both Democratic and Republican administrations. The regime was led, from 1948 to its downfall, by the Nationalist Party whose leaders had been imprisoned by the British during WWII because of their support for and connections with Nazi Germany. Upon coming to power in 1948, in an election which saw the African population (roughly 75% of the nation's people) disenfranchised entirely, the regime enacted "race laws" which were modeled (and in some instance copied in regard to language) after the Hitlerite Nuremburg race laws.

The crimes and atrocities of the Apartheid government were known and condemned throughout the world, including the U.S. This did not prevent the major imperialist powers, and corporations from those nations, from continuing to invest in and profit from the Apartheid regime, to sell it weapons and protect it from various political sanctions at the United Nations and from international economic sanctions.

Whatever occasional negative comments U.S. political leaders made about the Apartheid state, the CIA worked closely with its South African counterparts from the 1950s to the 1980s, helping to capture African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela in the early 1960s; acting in concert with the South Africans to advance the Savimbi forces in the "contra war" in Angola; working with the South Africans as they occupied Southwest Africa(Namibia) and sought to turn it into something between a colony and a protectorate.

Under the Reagan administration, the policy was carried to its grotesque extremes. The African National Congress was, because of its historic alliance with the South African Communist Party, seen as an agent of Soviet and Communist world domination. Furthermore, South Africa itself, as the most developed region of the continent with its abundant resources, was seen as potential Soviet Union of Africa and an "ANC-Communist" government would expand northward to put the entire continent under "South African communist control."

To counter this, the Reagan administration put forward a policy of "constructive engagement", a more extreme version of the appeasement policy which the British Empire directed toward Nazi Germany in the 1930s, encouraging and apologizing for South African military aggression in Southern Africa (as against refusing to act against Nazi aggression in Central and Eastern Europe), resisting in the United Nations and in the U.S. movements for sanctions against the South African regime.

Peoples movements in the U.S. and globally eventually did compel both state sanctions and, through disinvestment campaigns, significant withdrawals of investment from the Apartheid state. It's military defeats in Angola especially, where Cuban-MPLA forces won a decisive victory against South African/Savimbi forces and the intensification of resistance by the South African masses led to the release of Nelson Mandela, the legalization of the ANC, the SACP and other political groups, and the establishment of a parliamentary democracy on the ruins of Apartheid South Africa, itself a monstrous relic of the Hitler fascism that had been defeated in WWII.

Although president George HW Bush welcomed Nelson Mandela, now leader of a liberated South Africa to the U.S. (and lectured him about the superiority of capitalism over socialism) no major power in the world had done more to support the Apartheid state since its inception than the U.S., something that should be a source of both shame and outrage for all anti-racist and anti- imperialist Americans.

Some Conclusions on the "Cost Benefits" of the American brand of Imperialism for Americans

As a popular credit card commercial goes, the price to the American people of American imperialism is, in a negative sense, "priceless."

At the end of the article I have cut and pasted as an appendix a chart and graph which looks at the history of U.S. military spending in all of its ramifications, using new GDP formulas and adding many billions to the traditional significantly lower statistic that I have long used(for example, the 12 billion in 1950 is shown as 20 billion and the numbers increase to their present 700 billion plus, well over 100 billion of the traditional estimates, which omit categories that these charts include.

Below that I have cut and pasted as a second appendix a short factual traditional account of the National Debt from WWII to today, one that uses formulas based on the percentage relationship of the Debt to GDP, using what I call conservative Keynesian formulas to explain the debt. Here the implicit argument is that all was well until the economic crisis of the 1970s, that is, what the prominent Historian Richard Hofstadter called in the 1950s "military Keynesianism" worked as military spending along with other spending and progressive taxation brought about economic growth. I reject that contention entirely, although the economic data presented in a clear form should be of great value to our readers.

Of course, none of these statistical analyses calculates (nor can they) what the effects of spending even 25% of these trillions in public expenditures for public education, public housing, public transportation, public health care, comprehensive environmental protection policies, might have been. That is truly priceless

When the cumulative effect of military spending is combined with the cumulative effects of the national debt, they show to all willing to see the "double whammy" effect, a term from the comic strip L'il Abner, of U.S. imperialism on the living standards American people

Part one of the "double whammy" is the diversion of trillions in capital from socially useful policies. Part two is the accruing of a debt whose annual interest payments provide further super profits for finance capital in the U.S. and abroad and serve as a further deterrent for (omit for) to the necessary funding of programs whose purpose is to raise the living standards and improve the quality of life for the American people, not export death and destruction in the name of national security and defense through the world.

And of course, there are the hundreds of thousands who were killed and wounded in the not so cold Korean and Vietnam Wars, the Americans who were killed and wounded in the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the American forces being killed and wounded in Afghanistan today, and all of the possibilities of interventions in the near future in the name of the "war against terrorism," or "humanitarian intervention," by those in power in the U.S. who refuse to realize that any political structure, however democratic and formally protective of civil rights, has little meaning without an economic and social foundation to stand on.

In conclusion, to use a phrase from another and much better comic strip, Walt Kelly's Pogo, "we have met the enemy and he is us," not the American people but the capitalist ruling class of the U.S. and the military industrial complex which they have used since the end of WWII to gain super profits, to defeat movements to enact social legislation that would increase the living standards of the American people, to divert funds from existing programs, and to pave the way for transnational corporations to export millions of jobs to countries and regions that the U.S ostensibly was defending from "international Communism."

The way out is to get out, to heal rather than wound, to begin a phased reduction of military spending and all of its ancillary costs, to reduce it by at least half over a four year period, and shift those funds to policies of public sector reconstruction and a serious conversion to a peacetime economy, creating jobs, higher real incomes, and, with the restoration of progressive taxation sharply reducing deficits in regard to GDP development, and quite possibly running budget surpluses that would begin to significantly reduce the debt itself. None of this of course is possible without the end of the policies of American imperialism which we have outlined and the military industrial complex which is its foundation and which feeds off it.

Notes

1. "Progress and Civilization" were catch phrases of 19th century British imperialism as it created the largest colonial empire in history. "Defense of the free world" against the forces of "totalitarianism and international Communism" where the catch phrases of cold war U.S. imperialism as it established military bases through the Western Hemisphere Europe, Asia, the Pacific, the Near East, the whole world outside of the Soviet bloc and its allies, China, and Sub-Saharan Africa. Those bases represented real and direct threats to the Soviet Union and China and a potential threat to India, while except for a few months in Cuba in 1962, neither the Soviets, the Chinese or anyone else had any military base directly threatening the United States.[1] [1]

2. The list of "our sons of bitches" became truly global as names like Chiang Kai-shek, Syngman Rhee, Ngo Dinh Diem, Ferdinand Marcos, Generals Ya Ya Khan and Zia of Pakistan, Joseph Mobuto, Holden Roberto and Jonas Savimbi in Africa, and in the 1980s the Arabian anti-Soviet "freedom fighter" Osama bin Laden, joined the long established and continuing list of Latin American personalities, along with unacknowledged Nazi and other fascist war criminals. These included Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo butcher of Leon, given safe passage to Latin America after he worked for the U.S. occupation forces in early postwar Europe, General Reinhardt Gehlen, head of Hitler's counter intelligence service, who brought himself and many of his underlings to the service of West German and U.S. intelligence, and others who had served as collaborators with the Nazis in the war against the Soviet Union, who were given safe passage to Latin America(the Germans mostly) and the U.S(Eastern Europeans, Ukrainians, and Russians ). In the "post cold war period," New Russia's Boris Yeltsin headed the list of "our sons of bitches."

3 William Appleman Williams, the historian whose post writings challenged the cold war consensus more forcefully then anyone else, made these points in path breaking works like The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, Contours of American History, and Empire as a way of life. Williams, in the tradition of John Hobson, whom Lenin respected greatly but saw as a "social liberal," saw these policies as rooted in a search for continually expanding foreign markets that would produce the economic growth necessary to sustain the U.S. political economy. Like Hobson, he saw these policies as leading to preparations for war and war itself. Like Hobson also, he called for the nation and the people to abandon these policies within the existing political/economic system.

4 In 1946, the Chamber of Commerce published a pamphlet declaring "Communism Abroad and Labor at Home" as the two enemies "America" faced. Developing cold war tensions and the Truman administration's domestic failures in its first year (including its turning against the large industrial unions in early postwar strikes) led rightwing Republicans to win control of both houses of Congress, defeating many New Deal incumbents by connecting the new Soviet enemy abroad to the unions and progressive mass organizations at home. Richard Nixon in the House and Joseph McCarthy in the Senate won seats on this basis and soon represented the dominant trend in Republican political circles. Although Truman was re-elected in 1948 on a pledge to revive the New Deal at home, and Democrats regained Congress, including progressive Democrats, the anti-Communist political purges continued in the unions, the Justice Department chose to indict and try Alger Hiss in a concession to HUAC, and the New Deal revival program was killed in Congress without much opposition from Truman, whose priorities were establishing NAT0, quieting fears about the Soviets getting an Atom Bomb, and drawing cold war lines in Asia in response to the Chinese revolution.

5 Martin Luther King expressed this reality most eloquently in the period and for all time when he, said in what history may see, alongside his March on Washington speech, as his greatest speech at the Riverside Church a year before his assassination on April 4, 1967 "Beyond Vietnam: Time to Break the Silence" as expressed below.

There is something seductively tempting about stopping there and sending us all off on what in some circles has become a popular crusade against the war in Vietnam. I say we must enter the struggle, but I wish to go on now to say something even more disturbing. The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality we will find ourselves organizing clergy- and laymen-concerned committees for the next generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy. Such thoughts take us beyond Vietnam, but not beyond our calling as sons of the living God.

In 1957 a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. During the past ten years we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which now has justified the presence of U.S. military "advisors" in Venezuela. This need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counter-revolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Colombia and why American napalm and green beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru. It is with such activity in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."

Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken -- the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investment.

I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

Photo: Ben Sears

Detroit through the lens of class and race

Sam Webb — Fri, 27 Sep 2013 09:39:00 +0000

Labor in the white skin cannot emancipate itself when in the black skin it is branded." - Capital, Vol. 1, Karl Marx

Much has been written about the trauma that Detroit is going through. And much of the commentary places the blame for this crisis in one of two places.

One line of thinking, articulated by the likes of conservative columnist George Will , Fox television host Bill O'Reilly, and more recently Kevin Orr, Detroit's emergency manager, is that the people of Detroit - read: its African American majority - are themselves responsible for the city's predicament. In this explanation, supposedly excessive wages and benefits for Detroit's workers, a corrupt political class starting with the city's first African American mayor, Coleman Young, and a "culture of victimization, irresponsibility, and dependency" combined to bleed city finances, wreck its industrial base, turn Detroit into a municipality of "moochers" and "mayhem," and relegate its "glory days" to a distant past when white people were the majority.

The other narrative holds that Detroit's current catastrophic conditions, including the bankruptcy imposed by a right-wing Republican governor, are just the latest stage of an economic decline that dates back a half-century or more. In this telling, the city's fate is simply the result of the impersonal forces of the market that act behind people's backs. It's the consequence of the unstoppable and uncontrollable logic of de-industrialization and globalization, in which there are inevitable losers, such as Detroit and its workers, and winners - the 1 percent and a handful of transnational corporate giants that dominate the world economy. And, it's simply the predictable endgame of a city that unwisely, even irresponsibly, rode a single "horse" (the auto industry) for much too long.

The first narrative is obviously more dangerous, and more outrageous. In fact, it is a shameless appeal to white people to buy into racist images and perceptions of Black people. Its aim is to heighten divisions between people who are absolutely necessary allies going forward - Black and white, city and suburb, and labor and the African American freedom movement. It is also intended to legitimize state and federal government inaction and neglect, and even encourage punitive policies, in response to an exploding and profoundly hurtful urban crisis.

Another objective is to provide fresh fodder to the old (as old as slavery) but recently amplified, especially by right-wing extremism, racist notion that the "problem" of Black people is Black people.

Finally, blaming the crisis on its victims is designed to divert the eyes of the American people from the actual causes of the crisis and its agents. The former are located in the structures and dynamics of racialized capitalism, while the latter are the individuals and institutions who drive the crisis and also enrich themselves mightily from this system of class and racial exploitation and domination of the immense many by the minuscule few.

The second narrative (economic and technological determinism), while not as mean-spirited and toxic, is not much better. It also conceals in its own way more than it reveals about the fix that Detroit is in and what to do about.

How? By blaming Detroit's crisis solely on markets and technologies that are supposedly blind, class-neutral, and independent of human actions, it not only detaches the crisis from its socio-economic, racist, and class context, but also easily becomes the fertile soil for feelings of fatalism, hopelessness, and passivity. This is just what the victims of the crisis and their supporters don't need.

So what does explain the current disaster that is gripping Detroit, this storied and heroic city whose people have contributed so much politically, economically, and culturally to our nation?

I would argue that Detroit's past and present are not the outcome of overarching economic forces that operate outside the rough and tumble of history, politics, and struggle, outside the structures and dynamics of class, race, and capitalism.

Nor are they explained by any mythical "culture of irresponsibility and dependency," supposedly peculiar to Detroit's African American community.

Instead, Detroit and the auto industry's trajectory over the past half century is the result of people, social classes, and diverse and changing coalitions interacting and clashing on a number of different issues and levels over decades. In auto plants and union meetings, in neighborhoods and schools, in the corridors of government and collective bargaining negotiations, on the streets and picket lines, and in churches, barber shops, planning boards, voting booths, and other places far beyond the city limits, Detroit's future has been contested over the decades.

On one side were:

* auto executives who stripped Detroit of its industrial base and relocated production and plants to places that were not steeped in working class and democratic traditions;

*redlining real estate agents who practiced and profited from discrimination against Black homebuyers at one moment and encouraged white flight to surrounding suburbs at another;

* white ethnic working class neighborhoods in Detroit that resisted by any means necessary the "invasion" of Black families into "their" neighborhoods;

* planning boards that sanctioned segregated housing patterns;

* mortgage companies that exacted onerous terms from Black homebuyers over decades, maybe none worse than those that floated subprime mortgages in recent years, knowing all the while that they were unsustainable;

* investment firms that squeezed the city with complicated financial deals;

* elected officials at the state and national level, and especially right-wing Republicans, who relentlessly squeezed Detroit and other urban areas;

* federal housing and transportation authorities whose policies over decades encouraged and subsidized the movement of white homeowners to segregated suburbs.

These are but some of the more prominent political actors on one side of this confrontation that stretched over decades.

On the other side were African Americans and African American workers who seldom yielded in their struggle for a livable wage and city, a people-centered economy, and long overdue equality. It is a story of uncommon courage in the face of difficult odds and belligerent and well-heeled foes.

They were joined in small skirmishes and big battles by a section of their white, Latino, and Arab American brothers and sisters in the UAW (United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America ) and other unions as well as their allies in churches, community organizations, and other progressive and democratic organizations at the local, state, and national level.

Occupying an inconsistent position were a range of social and political forces, but for the purposes of this article, I will mention just one, because its role was so critical: the leadership of the UAW during the second half of the 20th century..

Even when it was negotiating contracts that increased wages and benefits, staking out progressive positions on civil rights, breaking with AFL-CIO President George Meany over Vietnam, and challenging the likes of Barry Goldwater, George Wallace, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan in the electoral arena, it was slow to bring African American workers into union leadership, reluctant to support Detroit's African American political leaders, less than vigorous in integrating the skilled trades, and, not least, too quick to cede the right to organize production - management prerogatives - to auto companies, including the unilateral right to relocate production to sites of management's choosing.

Moreover, in the early 1980s, regular contractual gains gave way to concessionary bargaining by the union's top leadership, which had a particularly negative impact on Detroit and its African American auto workers.

These struggles in Detroit, stretching out over six decades, didn't take place in a vacuum however. Their character and outcome were shaped as well by a number of interrelated factors operating on a far larger political, economic, and geographical scale.

What were some of the most important ones?

* First of all, the erosion, if not disappearance, of the conditions that powered a nearly three-decade-long expansion of U.S. and global capitalism in the aftermath of Word War II. That expansion gave way in the mid-1970s to slower growth, greater economic (and financial) instability, rising unemployment and inflation, the restructuring and spatial reorganization of capital, economic activity, and the working class, and, not least, a new model of government-corporate governance, popularly called neoliberalism.

This model, in contrast to the Keynesian model that facilitated corporate profit-taking and the post-World-War-II expansion, no longer accented, as its predecessor did, shared prosperity; corporate, financial, and trade regulation; consumer, safety, and environmental protections; expansion of the public sector and public goods (education, health care, retirement security, etc.); an equitable tax structure; a commitment to full employment; and enlargement of civil, labor, and other social rights. The neoliberal model accented, instead, the very opposite, and with a vengeance.

In doing so, it facilitated capital's accumulation (profit-making) and growth, like the earlier Keynesian model did, but in a different way and in decidedly new conditions of exploitation, intra-capitalist competition, monopolization, and market saturation in a global capitalist economy. As a result, corporate profits soared and the unearned income of the 1 percent reached unprecedented levels, even if growth rates never returned to earlier levels. But the cost of this neoliberal turn for working people, people of color, women, youth, seniors, and urban centers like Detroit was enormous.

* Second, the breakup of the New Deal coalition on the shoals of racist (and ultimately self-destructive) resentment harbored by white people in reaction to the new assertiveness and just demands of the African American people. The breakup was made easier by the Cold War repression of the old left (mainly communists), the sectarianism of the new left, and the ascent of business-minded, pro-war, and anti-democratic leadership to the top tiers of the labor movement in the 1950s.

* Third, the difficulty of the African American freedom movement and its leaders, in part due to the assassination of Martin Luther King, in transitioning to a new stage of struggle for full political, economic, and social equality in the post-civil-rights period.

* Fourth, the steady and sustained ascendancy of right-wing extremism, fueled by the mobilizing language of white supremacy and reaching a new level with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.

* Fifth, a coordinated and many-leveled intensification of the class struggle by the capitalist class in the mid-1970s that the now badly weakened labor and democratic movement were unprepared ideologically and organizationally to effectively resist and turn back - even now, 40 years later.

* Sixth, the emergence of new global institutions and rules that broke down national barriers inhibiting capital flows, while pressuring downward the price of labor power (in other words, wages) worldwide.

* Finally, the integration of new centers of capital accumulation in the global periphery, with massive pools of low-wage labor, particularly China and India, into the system of global capitalism.

Thus, Detroit's current landscape - marked as it is by huge swathes of vacant and foreclosed homes; shuttered factories; decrepit roads, schools, and infrastructure; homeless and hungry children; violence and crime; failing schools; widespread and extreme poverty; environmental pollution; catastrophic levels of joblessness, and now bankruptcy - wasn't preordained by some kind of irresistible economic logic. Nor can it be accounted for by purported moral and familial failures in the African American community.

It was a product of a protracted, complex, and cumulative process. Its main inflection points were on the axis of class and race. It took place on many levels and played out on a political, economic, and ideological terrain that shifted continually and sometimes in profound ways. And in the end the forces of profit-making, exploitation, political reaction, and, above all, racism prevailed over the forces of economic justice, anti-racism, democracy, full equality, and peace.

If the outcome was dependent on many things, few loomed as large as the insufficient breadth and depth of anti-racist understanding and unity in the labor and people's movement at the local, state, and national levels. The hopes raised by people's victories to expand democracy and freedom and rein in the war machine of U.S. imperialism in the 1960s and subsequent decades never morphed into a lasting, broad, democratic, class based, and consistently anti-racist movement (either in Detroit or nationally).

Forty years later the building of that kind of movement remains the overriding challenge facing Detroiters and others who are feeling the weight of this crisis - while its architects are smugly tucked away in opulent communities, executive suites, and the corridors of political power. Only such a movement can thrust Detroit, other urban centers, and our nation as a whole on a trajectory of economic renewal and security, equality, substantive democracy and sustainability, and peace.

It would be wishful thinking to say that such a movement is around the corner. But it is not a stretch to say that we see early signs of such a movement in the struggles of the present.

They are evident in the day-to-day resistance of Detroiters and other people in similarly situated communities to efforts to sell and privatize vital services, deny them political representation and voice, and impose on them more austerity measures to resolve a crisis that they had no hand in making.

The signs are also apparent in the struggles in Washington for jobs and infrastructure renewal.

They are plain to see in the hundreds of thousands who this August celebrated the 50th anniversary of the 1963 march for freedom and jobs too.

In the new energy in the labor movement too, we see signs of a better future.

Much the same could be said about the new initiatives to defend voting rights and resist the new racist offensive.

In the battles to overhaul the system of criminal justice, racial profiling, stop-and-frisk, and mass incarceration that falls so heavily and negatively on African Americans and other peoples of color, especially young men, we detect the beginnings of a better future as well.

The beginnings are obvious in the struggle for gay rights, including marriage equality.

The precursors are found in the inspiring and multi-dimensional campaigns for immigrant rights.

In the ongoing efforts to rein in U.S. military ventures in Syria and other far-flung parts of the world and turn swords into ploughshares and a sustainable economy, we can catch a glimpse of this emerging movement.

Signs are also evident in the actions to heal and cool our planet.

Finally, they are visible too in the new common sense embraced by tens of millions that people's needs, equality and fairness trump corporate profits and the unconscionable piling up of wealth.

I wish there were an easier way to address the crisis in Detroit as well as elsewhere in our country, but if there is it escapes me.

Certainly, schemes that favor real estate interests, downtown development, and gentrification hold little promise for residents living in Detroit's decaying neighborhoods and idled by the lack of jobs, despite claims that economic growth and vitality will radiate from the core to the surrounding city.

Nor, in my opinion, will plans of socially committed people and organizations to reclaim unused land in the city and foster small-scale entrepreneurial development. Such initiatives can bring some relief, and relief no matter how small is to be welcomed. But it seems doubtful to me that these efforts will ever achieve the necessary scale and economic/industrial mix to set Detroit and its people on a new foundation of growth, renewal, equality, and economic security.

Any viable future for Detroit will require a lot of heavy lifting, a sustained popular movement, the full participation of the UAW and the rest of the trade union movement, diverse forms of struggle, and higher levels of multiracial and working class unity and understanding.

It will also entail the re-imagining of Detroit in new ways that empower people and mobilize (and it will have to be mobilized; it won't come on its own) public capital for living wage jobs, infrastructure renewal, neighborhood revitalization, affordable housing, economic and green development, worker/community owned enterprises, quality public education for every child from pre-kindergarten through high school, and so forth.

But those efforts will bear full fruit only if three other conditions are met.

* First, the necessary long-term restructuring of Detroit has to be embedded in the immediate battles to shift the burden of the city's crisis onto the banks, auto corporations, and state and federal government.

* Second, the city's future can't be separated from the overriding political objective in 2014 and 2016 of rolling back the grip of right-wing extremism on the structures of state and federal government.

* Finally, the near- and long-term struggles of the people of Detroit have to be connected to the energies of like-minded people in nearby suburbs and around the country who also aspire to radically restructure the politics, economics, culture, and racial relations of their city, region, state, and country.

But if past history in general and specific historical turning points in particular are any guide, the success of this struggle in Detroit as well as elsewhere will hinge especially on the degree of anti-racist understanding achieved by white people and workers in particular.

Such an understanding (and practice) is informed by a sense of moral outrage. But it also arises and crystallizes into a more durable form from an awareness that, in this era of systemic economic crisis and generalized attack on the entire working class and people, the struggle for racial equality and against racism in its old and new forms is as much a condition for the freedom, well being, and security of people in white skin as it is for people in black and brown skins.

Anything less guarantees that Detroit and other cities and the rest of us will sink together. Maybe not at the same speed or to the same exact place, but wherever we land it won't be pretty for anyone, leaving people morally and psychically scarred, culturally impoverished, economically hurting and fearful, and politically near powerless.

photo: Creative Commons 3.0 Labor Day parade in Detroit

A legacy of scholarship and struggle: W.E.B.Du Bois and the political affairs of his twilight years

Phillip Luke Sinitiere — Mon, 26 Aug 2013 19:59:00 +0000

Introduction

In the coming weeks, commemorations of the March on Washington will acknowledge Martin Luther King's iconic "I Have a Dream" speech. Others will recall the addresses of labor leader A. Philip Randolph and the activist and future Congressperson John Lewis along with the inspiring musical performances of Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, Marian Anderson, and of course Mahalia Jackson.

Likely to get lost in the mix of history and memory is another speech-effectively recounted in Charles Euchener's Nobody Turn Me Around: A People's History of the 1963 March on Washington-NAACP Executive Secretary Roy Wilkins' announcement of W. E. B. Du Bois's death in Ghana the day before the March. In one breath, Wilkins praised Du Bois; in the next breath, he maintained a severe distance from the towering intellectual and civil rights activist. To the thousands gathered at the Washington Mall on that warm August day, Wilkins praised Du Bois's famous 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk, remarking that it was Du Bois's "voice that [called] to you to gather here today in this cause." However, Wilkins quickly lamented that "in his later years Dr. Du Bois chose another path." Wilkins' reference to "another path" meant Du Bois's vocal advocacy of socialism and communism, convictions Du Bois proclaimed in the closing decades of his life during the 1930s, 40s, and 50s.[1]

Yet, there are other memories of that historic day. Black intellectual John Oliver Killens recalled that as he gathered with James Baldwin, Sidney Poitier and others at the Willard Hotel in Washington, D. C., on the morning of August 28, 1963, someone walked in an announced that "The old man died." According to Killens, no one had to inquire about the old man's identity. "We all knew who the old man was, because he was our old man. He belonged to every one of us. And we belonged to him," Killens stated. A writer with a keen ability to flesh out the feeling of a particular historical setting, Killens continued: "More than any other single human being, [Du Bois], through the sheer power of his vast and profound intelligence, his tireless scholarship and his fierce dedication to the cause of black liberation, has brought us and the other two hundred and fifty thousand souls to this place, to this moment in time and space." However, Killens also knew that on that August day in 1963 he was firmly in history's grasp. His awareness beamed. "There was a kind of poetic finale that made sense to us," Killens noted, "that [Du Bois] should die on the very eve of this historical occasion. He was a man of irony. He had run a tremendous race, and now it would be up to us, all of use everywhere, to take the torch and carry it forward. He had left us a legacy, of scholarship and struggle."[2]

Wilkins' striking announcement and Killens' recollection of Du Bois's death powerfully illustrate the combative politics of the modern civil rights era. These historical snapshots also forcefully remind us of the visceral anticommunist rejection of Du Bois's radical politics during his twilight years. Today, 50 years after his death, Du Bois's later years remain obscured and underappreciated. Only a handful of scholars-namely the work of the late Manning Marable, Gerald Horne, Amy Bass, and Eric Porter, among others-have incisively chronicled Du Bois's latter decades. In this year of half-century anniversaries of momentous civil rights events (e.g., King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail," Medgar Evers' murder, Sixteenth Street Baptist bombing, etc.), let us also recall the importance of Du Bois's "legacy of scholarship and struggle"-particularly that of his later years. It is imperative that communities committed to justice not only remember Du Bois's death, but also explore Du Bois's work from his closing decades to generate renewed energy, inspiration, and intellectual capital to tackle the economic and racial injustices that continue to bedevil humanity. Du Bois's global perspective, critique of capitalism, and support for multiracial solidarity beckon our attention.

A Short History of W. E. B. Du Bois's Twilight Years

I locate W. E. B. Du Bois's twilight years from 1934, when he exited the NAACP, to 1963, the year Du Bois passed away. The year 1934 marked a career-shifting development, both professionally and personally. Given Du Bois's passing in such a momentous year and amidst the growing heat of the Cold War, questions about his legacy deserve recognition as well.

Du Bois resigned from the NAACP in 1934 over the most effective approaches to civil rights. Parting ways with an association he co-founded also meant the termination of his quarter-century career at The Crisis magazine, the NAACP's magazine he founded and edited. Thereafter Du Bois returned to college teaching at Atlanta University, where he remained until 1944. While in Atlanta Du Bois traveled across the globe to places such as Germany, Russia, and Japan, and published important studies like the Marxist-framed Black Reconstruction (1935) and an autobiography Dusk of Dawn (1939). By the late 40s-in his seventies-Du Bois's international perspective on global justice found a home with Left organizations such as the Council of African Affairs and the anti-nuclear Peace Information Center. The aging but still insightful scholar even ran for the U. S. Senate in 1950. Amidst the Cold War hysteria over Communism, Du Bois's pointed critiques of the deep relationship between capitalism, colonialism, and racism-in short, his cogent analysis of the global color line-raised the ire of rabid anticommunists and drew additional attention of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. As a result, Du Bois found himself arrested for refusing to register as the representative of a foreign principal. Ultimately acquitted in November 1951, Du Bois's experiences steeled a resolve that focused on proposing a socialist solution to a world gripped in the chaos of gross injustice, a message he committedly proclaimed in numerous speeches throughout the 1950s. Since the State Department seized Du Bois's passport for most of that decade-a practice it continues to inflict on principled dissidents in our own day-Du Bois's stateside sequester limited his global travel but did not prevent his socialist vision from impacting the world. Du Bois's writings continued to make their way into the hands of hungry readers, such as the summary of his McCarthy persecution from In Battle for Peace (1952), and his midcentury newspaper columns with Amsterdam News, Chicago Defender, People's Voice, National Guardian, and Freedom. During 1958 and 1959 with passport in hand, Du Bois commenced another global excursion, traveling to England, Sweden, and France. In Russia Du Bois sojourned for five months, and in a meeting with Nikita Khrushchev persuaded the premier to sponsor an Africa Institute. Continuing eastward, Du Bois's two-month stay in China included meetings with Mao Zedong and the Chinese premier Zhou Enlai. Thousands turned out to greet Du Bois in February 1959 when he delivered a lecture in China the day he turned 91.[3]

Over the next few years, Du Bois continued to write and to advocate for justice. However, two developments of note occurred in October 1961. On October 1, Du Bois wrote to Gus Hall, formally requesting membership in the Communist Party. "I have been long and slow in coming to this conclusion," Du Bois wrote, "but at last my mind is settled." The same month Du Bois penned his membership letter, he received an invitation from Ghanaian leader Kwame Nkrumah to continue work on a long-germinating project, the Encyclopedia Africana. In Ghana Du Bois and his second wife, the Communist writer and activist Shirley Graham, welcomed a steady stream of guests and disciples at their comfortable Accra residence. Du Bois's faltering health in 1962 necessitated an emergency trip to London and a recuperation period in Switzerland followed by a return trip through Russia and China. Back in Ghana, Du Bois visited the American Embassy to renew his passport. Officials refused, citing legal requirements that no member of the Communist Party could have a U. S. passport. Embittered but passionately principled, Du Bois became a Ghanaian citizen. Du Bois spent his remaining days under U. S. surveillance, and despite a weakened constitution, he entertained guests and continued to think and plan the Encyclopedia Africana. Du Bois died in late August 1963, the day before Martin Luther King announced his iconic dream for America's future. Du Bois's widow relayed that in the days leading up to his death, Du Bois was aware of plans for and "greatly interested" in the March on Washington. At Du Bois's state funeral in Ghana, mourners heard a number of eulogies as they processed to his final resting place. As the journalist William Branch reported in Amsterdam News, a torrential rain pelted those present as the ceremony concluded-a sign Africans took as a libation from heaven in recognition of Du Bois's life well lived.[4]

The legacy of W. E. B. Du Bois's life after death demands our attention as well. One place we observe Du Bois's legacy is to recall the creation of W. E. B. Du Bois Clubs. Founded in the 1960s by Du Bois comrade Bettina Aptheker (and daughter of former Political Affairs editor Herbert Aptheker) along with the tireless efforts of many others including the CPUSA's Jarvis Tyner, the Du Bois Clubs naturally caught the attention of the U. S. government, but also riled up rabid anticommunists like Richard Nixon. In 1966 Nixon, then chair of the Boys Club of America, made the ludicrous claim that since "Du Bois" rhymed with "Boys" W. E. B. Du Bois Clubs sought to dupe would-be members of Boys Club of America into joining the Communist cause. While long since disbanded, Tim Wheeler reported earlier this year in Peoples World that Du Bois's legacy is alive and well with former Du Bois Club comrades. Former members gathered not only to recall their history, but also to pool social and intellectual capital to pledge renewed commitments to justice. We also see Du Bois's legacy in his hometown of Great Barrington, Massachusetts, where contests over his memory blazed in the late 1960s and 1970s but also even as recently as 2004 over the naming of a school in Du Bois's honor.[5]

Let us also not forget that at a meeting in 1968 to commemorate Du Bois's century mark, some of the twentieth century's most notable people maintained the legitimacy of Du Bois's closing decades through bold, public proclamations. For example, in the tumultuous year of 1968-turning points in international and domestic affairs-Du Bois continued to be a flashpoint of controversy even as sympathetic interests sought to champion his legacy. Martin Luther King delivered a speech titled "Honoring Du Bois" at a Freedomways ceremony at Carnegie Hall celebrating Du Bois's 100th birthday. "History cannot ignore W. E. B. Du Bois," thundered King only three months before his assassination, "Because history has to reflect the truth and Dr. Du Bois was a tireless explorer and a gifted discoverer of social truths. His singular greatness lay in his quest for truth about his own people." King also demanded a robust reckoning with Du Bois's politics. He stated, "We cannot talk of Dr. Du Bois without recognizing that he was a radical all his life. Some people would like to ignore the fact that he was a Communist in his later years . . . It is time to cease muting the fact that Dr. Du Bois was a genius and chose to be a communist. Our irrational obsessive anticommunism has led into too many quagmires . . . . Dr. Du Bois has left us but he has not died." At that same meeting, a young history professor named John Hope Franklin gave a keynote, cognizant of the moment's historical gravity. Franklin observed that, "The manner in which the death of W. E. B. Du Bois was reported in some quarters here in the United States is itself a curious commentary on the extent to which the country of his birth was out of touch with him." Conscious of the politicization of Du Bois's memory, Franklin jumped to his defense: "[I] wish I could erase from my memory the picture of Dr. Du Bois at eighty years of age handcuffed like a common thief, accused of being the agent of a foreign power. Even his subsequent exoneration [in 1951] cannot obliterate . . . the impression that, perhaps, will always remain: that he was the victim not merely of the fanaticism that characterized those years, but that he was being punished for what he had represented for more than half a century."[6]

W. E. B. Du Bois for the 21st Century

Both praised and excoriated for his principled convictions and critical analysis of the world in which he inhabited, it is important to pause at the half-century mark of Du Bois's passing and consider the enduring power of his historical witness. Although commemorations and celebrations of the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington will likely overlook the anniversary of Du Bois's death-or relegate him to a mere footnote of that historic event-Du Bois remains relevant for our own time. As Keith Feldman stated in a recent Al Jazeera article, "[W]e turn to Du Bois to plumb the thick emancipatory dreams persistently articulated by and for the world's darker peoples, to draw on their searing legacies and insights . . . We need Du Bois today, perhaps more than ever."[7]

Why do we need Du Bois now more than ever? First, Du Bois's international perspective was not only prescient, it is vital for the global moment of which we are a part. Second, Du Bois's critique of capitalism, along with capitalism's contemporary problems, demand envisioning more equitable solutions to current dilemmas. Finally, Du Bois's cognizance about multiracial alliances in the quest for racial justice-something he did not always see-is crucial as claims about today's so-called post-racial moment conceals gaping inequality even as it seeks to levy more power for the ruling classes. The prophets of today's so-called post-racial age, while they champion examples of individual racial and ethnic solidarity, often fail to analyze the structural inequalities that continue to divide those same individuals.

Du Bois remains relevant first because he framed his analysis of history and society in international perspective. After all, Du Bois first made his famous and prophetic pronouncement about the color line as the problem of the twentieth century in London. Convened in 1900, Du Bois's "Address to the Nations of the World" at the first Pan African Conference portended a life of organizing, writing, and otherwise agitating for justice across the globe. From numerous works of his later years such as Black Folk Now and Then (1939), Dusk of Dawn (1940), Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace (1945), and The World and Africa (1947), we read how Du Bois understood the interdependence of the world's peoples, and how empires and unjust regimes commit themselves to a sadistic dynamism of exploitative practices. In the Introduction to his 1947 Appeal to the World, Du Bois presented racial justice in the United States in global terms. He wrote, "Therefore, Peoples of the World, we American Negroes appeal to you; our treatment in America is not merely an internal question of the United States. It is a basic problem of humanity; of democracy; of discrimination because of race and color; and as such it demands your attention and action. No nation is so great that the world can afford to let it continue to be deliberately unjust, cruel and unfair toward its own citizens." Today's interconnected and interdependent world is not just about snazzy smartphones, Skyping with friends, or the crowdsourcing of knowledge at Wikipedia; it is also about understanding the interconnection of capital and labor-mediated through amazing technological advances-and how the moneyed and ruling classes seek to harness such technologies to wrest both power and profits from working-class and middle-class folks.

Du Bois's relevance also has to do with his incisive criticism of capitalism. Du Bois deftly drew analytical connections between capitalism, race, empire, class, and democracy, particularly in his later works. Du Bois's 1952 book In Battle for Peace, a summary of his McCarthy trial, makes these connections. "As, then, a citizen of the world as well as of the United States of America, I claim the right to know and think and tell the truth as I see it," Du Bois proclaimed, "I believe in Socialism as well as Democracy. I believe in Communism . . . I believe in free enterprise among free men and individual initiative under physical, biological and social law . . . . We claim that America leads in democracy. This claim is old and has at times approached truth. It is not true today. For democracy, while logical in theory, is difficult to achieve and maintain in practice . . . . Wealth is not and never was entirely the result of individual effort; it always involved some measure of group co-operation."[8]

Another place to place to observe Du Bois's critique of capitalism is to return to his October 1961 letter of application to the Communist Party, referenced above. Speaking confidently with conviction, the 93-year-old Du Bois wrote to Gus Hall: "Capitalism cannot reform itself; it is doomed to self-destruction. No universal selfishness can bring social good to all. Communism-the effort to give all men what they need and to ask of each the best they can contribute-this is the only way of human life. It is a difficult and hard end to reach, it has and will make mistakes, but today it marches triumphantly on in education and science, in home and food, with increased freedom of thought and deliverance from dogma. In the end communism will triumph. I want to help bring that day." While in hindsight Du Bois's confidence in communism's ascendancy seems to overreach, it is true today that a Communist Party rules the world's most populous socialist country.

In Du Bois's final book, his posthumously published Autobiography (1968), he commented, "I believe in communism. I mean by communism, a planned way of life in the production of wealth and work designed for building a state whose object is the highest welfare of its people and not merely profit of a part. . .Once I thought that these ends could be attained under capitalism, means of production privately owned, and used in accord with free individual initiative. After earnest observation I now believe that private ownership of capital and free enterprise are leading the world to disaster." Du Bois linked these observations about capitalism and communism to particular political and economic events of his twilight years. Strikingly, and sadly, Du Bois's prescient words describe our own day, and deserve lengthy quotation. "Even today the contradictions of American civilization are tremendous," Du Bois wrote in his Autobiography's Postlude, "Freedom of political discussion is difficult; elections are not free and fair. Democracy is for us to a large extent unworkable . . . Those responsible for the misuse of wealth escape responsibility, and even the owners of capital often do not know for what it is being used and how. The criterion of industry and trade is the profit that it accrues, not the good which it does either its owners or the public. Present profit is valued higher than future need. We waste materials. We refuse to make repairs. We cheat and deceive in manufacturing goods. We have succumbed to an increased use of lying and misrepresentation . . . I know the United States. It is my country and the land of my fathers. It is still a land of magnificent possibilities. It is still the home of noble souls and generous people. But it is selling its birthright. It is betraying its might destiny."[9]

Finally, Du Bois is relevant today for his vision of a multiracial coalition to work vociferously for justice. In the midst of his McCarthy persecution, his 1951 loyalty trial, Du Bois experienced the generosity and goodwill of a multiracial, cross-class coalition of comrades. As Gerald Horne suggests in his book Race Woman, Shirley Graham Du Bois helped to usher in a wider coalition of comrades who would maintain solidarity with the couple in the face of intense federal scrutiny. In Du Bois's In Battle for Peace (1952), he wrote, "I find, curiously enough then, that my experience in the fantastic accusation and criminal process is tending to free me from that racial provincialism which I always recognized but which I was sure would eventually land me in an upper realm of cultural unity, led by 'My People' . . . . I am free from jail today, not only by those efforts of that smaller part of the Negro intelligentsia which has shared my vision, but also by the steadily increasing help of Negro masses and of whites who have risen above race prejudice not by philanthropy but by brotherly and sympathetic sharing of the Negro's burden and identification with it as part of their own . . . . I therefore thank all Communists and Socialists who stood out for my right to advocate peace, just as I thank all conservatives and liberals for daring to stand for what they conceived to be right, despite the 'Red' smear. I utterly refuse to be stampeded into opposition to my own program by intimations of dire and hidden motives among those who offer me support."[10]

These quotations taken from several of W. E. B. Du Bois's later works document his analytically based international perspective, present his cogent critiques of capitalism, and disclose his vision of multiracial democratic solidarity. Despite the sobering and difficult circumstances of Du Bois's closing years-not unlike our own times that demand sober analysis and committed action-from Du Bois's later work we can both recall his "legacy of scholarship and struggle" and continue to benefit from his "legacy of scholarship and struggle" for the days ahead.

Coda: Reading W. E. B. Du Bois

While Du Bois's full corpus deserves careful study, in this historical moment the tremendous work he produced in his twilight years demands our undivided attention. In the midst of a busy final three decades narrated above, consider the roster of Du Bois's published books during his latter decades. Keep in mind, Du Bois was in his late 60s when he published Black Reconstruction in 1935 and 93 when he published the third and final volume of the Black Flame trilogy. Two posthumous books also reflect work completed during his later years.

W. E. B. Du Bois's Late Career Books

Black Reconstruction 1935

Black Folk Then and Now 1939

Dusk of Dawn 1940

Color and Democracy 1945

The World and Africa 1947

In Battle for Peace 1952

Ordeal of Mansart 1957

Mansart Builds a School 1959

Worlds of Color 1961

ABC of Color 1963, 1970

The Autobiography 1968

The immediate task for our own time is to continue to cultivate a principled consciousness coupled with a critical perspective on today's most vital issues. One way to achieve these goals is to engage in perpetual historical study, investigation, and analysis of Du Bois's writings. Secondary works are of tremendous value in narrating the multiple contexts of Du Bois's later years-and the scholars noted above have produced excellent work-but I also urge a close reading of Du Bois's own words. In addition to the volumes listed above and referenced in the footnotes, recent publications provide access to Du Bois's global vision such as Bill V. Mullen and Cathryn Watson's, W. E. B. Du Bois on Asia: Crossing the World Color Line (University Press of Mississippi, 2005) and Eugene Provenzo and Edmund Abaka's W. E. B. Du Bois on Africa (Left Coast Press, 2012). Two valid on-line proletarian options, which I'd recommend to Du Bois students of all ages and backgrounds, are Dr. Robert Williams's WEBDuBois.org. Williams's site is the most up-to-date compendium of Du Bois on the Internet. While the large majority of the site provides tremendous material on the first half of Du Bois's life, Williams continues to update links to the work of Du Bois's later career. Finally, thanks to a number of timely grants and the heroic and painstaking work of archivists, the digitization of Du Bois's Papers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst will continue for many years to come. The user-friendly Credo digital archive yields a tremendous amount about Du Bois's twilight years, including a large collection of photographs and rare video footage. Begin reading here.

I end this Coda with Du Bois's own words. I select a prayer that comes from a series of meditations Du Bois wrote while teaching at Atlanta University around 1910. As Herbert Aptheker explained in his Introduction to the collection he edited and titled Prayers for Dark People, these prayers resurfaced toward the end of Du Bois's earthly sojourn in 1961 as Aptheker was editing Du Bois's enormous archive. These prayers were not published until 1980, 17 years after Du Bois's death. Timely when he first uttered them, timely when Aptheker discovered them in 1961, Du Bois's mediation remains important today.

Grant us, O God, the vision and the will to be found on the right side in the great battle for bread, which rages around us, in strike and turmoil and litigation. Let us remember that here as so often elsewhere no impossible wisdom is asked of men, only Thine ancient sacrifice-to do justly and love mercy and walk humbly-to refuse to use, of the world's goods, more than we earn, to be generous with those that earn little and to avoid the vulgarity that flaunts wealth and clothes and ribbons in the face of poverty. These things are the sins that lie beneath our labor wars, and from such sins defend us, O Lord. Amen. Micah 6:1-8.[11]

[1]Charles Euchener, Nobody Turn Me Around: A People's History of the 1963 March on Washington (Boston: Beacon, 2011), 182-184.

[2]John Oliver Killens, "Introduction," in W. E. B. Du Bois, An ABC of Color (New York: International Publishers, 1968), 9-10.

[3]Books that effectively chronicle Du Bois's closing years include Gerald Horne, Black and Red: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War, 1944-1963 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963 (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), Manning Marable, W. E. B. Du Bois: Black Radical Democrat (Boulder: Paradigm, 2005), Gerald Horne, W. E. B. Du Bois: A Biography (Santa Barbara: Greenwood, 2010), Eric Porter, The Problem of the Future World: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Race Concept at Midcentury (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), and Yuichiro Onishi, Transpacific Antiracism: Afro-Asian Solidarity in 20th Century Black America, Japan, and Okinawa (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 1-15, 54-93.

[4]W. E. B. Du Bois to Gus Hall (October 1, 1961), in W. E. B. Du Bois, The Correspondence of W. E. B. Du Bois, Volume 3 Selections, 1944-1963, ed. Herbert Aptheker (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1978), 438-440; Horne, W. E. B. Du Bois, 186-191; Horne, Black and Red, 331-357; Henry Louis Gates, Jr., "W. E. B. Du Bois and the Encyclopedia Africana," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 568 (March 2000): 203-219; Jonathan Fenderson, "Evolving Conceptions of Pan-African Scholarship: W. E. B. Du Bois, Carter G. Woodson & the Encyclopedia Africana, 1909-1963," Journal of African American History 35/1 (Winter 2010): 71-91; Yunxiang Gao, "W. E. B. Du Bois and Shirley Graham Du Bois in Maoist China," Du Bois Review 10/1 (2013): 59-85; Julius Lester, "Introduction," in W. E. B. Du Bois, The Seventh Son: The Thoughts and Writings of W. E. B. Du Bois, ed. Julius Lester (New York: Vintage Books, 1971), 1:147-152.

[5]See, for example, Bettina Aptheker, Intimate Politics: How I Grew Up Red, Fought for Free Speech, and Became a Feminist Rebel (Emeryville, CA: Seal Press, 2006), 93-94; Bettina Aptheker, "W. E. B. Du Bois: Personal Stories/Political Reflections," 17th Annual Du Bois Lecture (2011), http://www.thewebduboiscenter.com/w-e-b-du-bois-center/events; Douglas Robinson, "Du Bois 'Duplicity' Decried by Nixon," New York Times (March 9, 1966), http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/11/05/specials/dubois-nixon.html; Tim Wheeler, "Du Bois Clubs Reunion: Memories, Battles Yet to Be Fought and Won!," Peoples World (June 18, 2013), http://peoplesworld.org/dubois-clubs-reunion-memories-battles-yet-to-be-fought-and-won/; Amy Bass, Those About Him Remained Silent: The Fight Over W. E. B. Du Bois (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009).

[6]Martin Luther King, "Honoring Dr. Du Bois," in W. E. B. Du Bois, W. E. B. Du Bois Speaks: Speeches and Addresses, 1890-1919, ed. Philip S. Foner (New York: Pathfinder, 1970), 12-20; John Hope Franklin, "W. E. B. Du Bois: A Personal Memoir," The Massachusetts Review 31/3 (Autumn 1990): 409-428.

[7]Keith Feldman, "A Haunting Echo: W. E. B. Du Bois in a Time of Permanent War," Al Jazeera (February 10, 2013) available at http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/02/20132772031503974.html.

[8]W. E. B. Du Bois, In Battle for Peace, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007 [1952]), 114-117.

[9]W. E. B. Du Bois, The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007 [1968]), 35, 273.

[10]Gerald Horne, Race Woman: The Lives of Shirley Graham Du Bois (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 140-141; Du Bois, In Battle for Peace, 107-108, 112.

[11]W. E. B. Du Bois, Prayers for Dark People, ed. Herbert Aptheker (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), 29.

*[Biographical note: Phillip Luke Sinitiere (Ph.D., University of Houston) is Professor of History at the College of Biblical Studies. A scholar with specialties in American religious history and African American studies, he is co-author of Holy Mavericks: Evangelical Innovators and the Spiritual Marketplace (NYU, 2009), and co-editor of Protest and Propaganda: W. E. B. Du Bois, The Crisis, and American History (Missouri, 2013) and Christians and the Color Line: Race and Religion after Divided by Faith (Oxford, 2013).]

Photo: BET

Work in Indiana and make less than in 1967

George Fish — Sun, 18 Aug 2013 07:24:00 +0000

In 1967 I worked a full-time job in a fast-food restaurant in Michigan; because this restaurant was unionized, under collective bargaining with HERE, the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees, AFL-CIO, I received an hourly wage of $1.60, 20ȼ, or 14.29%, more than the 1967 federal minimum wage of $1.40 an hour. Today, mid-2013, I am working in a warehouse in Indiana through a temp service for $9.00 an hour; that means, in real terms, I am making less than I made in 1967, both in terms of the minimum wage, and my wage of 20ȼ over the minimum wage. In this, I am but a typical Hoosier worker.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) of the U.S. Department of Labor provides a most useful table for calculating real wages in terms of past income, its historical table of all the changes in the calculation of the monthly Consumer Price Index (CPI) from 1913 to the present, holding the average of the years 1982-1984 as the benchmark of 100.

With a 1967 yearly average CPI of 33.4, and a current (June 2013) CPI standing at 233.504, we can calculate that it would take a wage of $9.78 an hour to have the same purchasing power of the 1967 minimum wage of $1.40 per hour, and it would take a wage of $11.11 an hour to equal the purchasing power of my then-earned $1.60 an hour. Or, I would have to earn 78ȼ an hour more just to have the purchasing power of the 1967 minimum wage, and $2.11 more in order to have the purchasing power of my then $1.60 per hour. A good measure of just how much, not only I, but many other workers, have lost in the interim! An interim characterized ever since the 1970s by stagnant wage rates, only sporadic increases in the minimum wage, and continuing inflation: in real terms, workers have lost purchasing power, and the economy has been sheltered from the full effect of this loss only by more and more people relying on credit: credit cards, loans, and cashing in on housing equity before the housing bubble burst and brought on the current recession. All this while CEO pay has jumped to 354% of the average worker's pay, the largest such gap in the world (even greater than China's), according to the AFL-CIO - and the massively increased productivity gains since the 1960s have almost entirely gone to the already very rich, the famed 1% that Occupy movements brought to the public's attention.

Here in Indiana we have an especially able measure of workers' loss and even descent, in many cases, into the working poor.

That's because the state government agency, the Council for Economic Development, calculated and determined that a "livable wage" in the State of Indiana in 2001 would need to be at least $10.00 an hour for a single person. Since Indiana's cost of living is approximately equal to the national average, and Indiana's "livable wage" is equivalent to the notion of the Living Wage that has been employed both by economists and economic activists, and which is set to be 130% of a poverty wage, we can use the data above provided by the BLS to calculate just what would constitute a Living Wage and a poverty wage that would have general validity across the U.S.

From this data we can see that a Living Wage in June 2013 would have to be $13.18 in order to have the same purchasing power of the $10.00 an hour "livable wage" of 2001. This would make a poverty wage $10.13 an hour or less.

But Indiana's economic shift from a manufacturing hub, with its concomitant loss of good-paying, frequently union, jobs [Indiana lost 200,000 jobs in manufacturing alone from the late 1970s to 2010. Building Indiana, August 27, 2010, "Study Details Indiana's Manufacturing Industry,"

This doesn't include job losses in other sectors.], and its transformation into a "logistics economy" of warehouses (due to Indiana's central location and access to airports, railways and interstate highways) ; the "logistics economy" has greatly expanded since then.] and low-wage service industries, means that a typical Hoosier wage now is only $9.00-$10.00 an hour, and in retail and food services even less. (Here in Central Indiana where I live, warehouse employment, often only or primarily through temp agencies, is ubiquitous and pays only $9.00-$10.00 per hour.) What that means is that numerous Hoosier workers are in fact toiling for poverty-level wages. $9.00 an hour is only 88.45% of the upper-bound poverty wage of $10.13, and even $10.00 an hour is still only 98.717% of this wage. In terms of a Living Wage it's even worse: $9.00 an hour is only 68.29% of the $13.18 per hour Living Wage rate, and $10.00 an hour is only 75.87% of it.

For those making even less, a large number of Hoosier workers, the situation is even worse-and to top it off, the inadequate federal "poverty guideline" of $1,211 per month for food stamps for a single person such as myself, and the state "income standard" of only $710 for a single person to qualify for Medicaid without out-of-pocket costs, or "spend-down," means many working Hoosiers, though in poverty, are still too "rich" for welfare!

In fact, if one works a full-time job at the minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, one makes too much to qualify for food stamps. Thus are the poor double-whammied: first by inadequate income, second, by being too "rich" for needed welfare benefits.

The response of the two houses of Indiana's legislature, the Indiana General Assembly, both Republican/Tea Party-dominated, and Indiana's last two Republican Governors, Mitch Daniels and Mike Pence, who've controlled the Governorship since 2004, has been only to attack working people and the poor for "greed": Indiana became a right-to-work state in 2012; the previous year it reduced unemployment benefits by 25% and capped them at only $360 per week (or the full-time job equivalent of $9.00 an hour; but only high wage earners would qualify even for this amount!); further, under present Governor Pence, setting up insurance exchanges and expanding Medicaid coverage to those who make 133% of the federal poverty level under Obamacare, even though federal assistance would be provided, have been refused.

Indiana's poverty rate averaged 14.1% from 2007-2011 under inadequate federal guidelines under inadequate federal guidelines, up from 10.6% in 2006 (data from U.S. Census) and its economic well-being marred by drops in per capita income. (Indiana ‘s per capita income dropped steadily from 2005-2009, and has only risen 1.4% in the last ten years. Indiana ranks 40th nationwide in per capita income; its per capita income in 2012 was only 86.4% of that for the U.S. as a whole, down from 90.6% in 2002.

Such is work and wages in Indiana, where Hoosier workers make only 86ȼ for every dollar in wages paid elsewhere (stated by an organizer with Justice for Janitors, SEIU Local 1).

Photo: Creative Commons 3.0

Reposted from The Examiner.com

Mandela - schmaltzy icon or revolutionary leader?

Mark Waller — Sat, 17 Aug 2013 06:11:00 +0000

Sooner or later the news will break that Nelson Mandela has died, and the frenzy whipped up by the media about ‘what will happen next' will resume. The news of his passing and the obituaries are already written and recorded. In many cases eulogies have already been presented, and new ones will be made as soon as the looming announcement is made.

Mandela's condition is variously described as improving, steadily improving, serious but stable, and responsive to treatment. He is receiving the best that the world class South African private health care system can provide, as the Heart Hospital specialises in intensive care and life support, principally, but not only, for coronary patients. But the fact that he's there and not in one of the other hospitals that he's been treated at underscores the seriousness of his situation.

Thousands of messages, drawings, posters and photos from Mandela's masses of admirers decorate the outer walls of the hospital. It's a moving scene of spontaneous feeling amidst the indifferent roar of city traffic. Many of the messages are from schools and youth groups, written by children for whom his time in prison and momentous release are distant legends. People bring their families to visit the place, lay flowers or write their greetings.

In a world singularly lacking in inspiring, visionary and uncorrupted leaders, Mandela seems to be needed more than ever. Though he has been out of the public eye for several years, his authority as a reconciler, peacemaker and champion of the oppressed still resonates, both in South Africa and around the world.

He was admitted to hospital in June, suffering a recurrence of the lung infection that has dogged him on and off since his prison days. He had been hospitalized several times since 2011, and with each round of treatment the speculation over his demise has intensified. Whatever public hysteria there may be when he goes will have become a self-fulfilling media prophecy.

The intense veneration that surrounds Mandela is being stoked and pumped for all it's worth by most formal areas of South African society - government, the tourist industry, publishing, education, and of course the print and broadcast media. ‘Follow Mandela's legacy' is the logo flashed up on public broadcaster TV channels. The streams of TV advertising between programmes are laden with references to the former African National Congress leader, with exhortations to be like Madiba (the clan name that has morphed into an affectionate sobriquet).

In 2009, the UN General Assembly declared 18 July, Madiba's birthday, as International Nelson Mandela Day. The theme of this year was ‘Take action, Inspire Change, Make Every Day a Mandela Day'. And the emphasis of this year's Mandela Day was on food security, shelter and literacy. "Overcoming poverty is not a gesture of charity," he had said in 2005. "It is an act of justice."

Masses of people congregated around the Heart Hospital on 18 July to sing and celebrate. Ministers sang ‘happy birthday' on a TV special held at the Union Buildings, the official seat of government. Pupils in schools across the country sang ‘happy birthday' in unison at 8.00 local time. President Zuma handed over new houses to poor residents in Danville, near Pretoria.

‘A Celebration - The Man & The Icon', was the headline on the cover of the South African edition of Reader's Digest in July, not a magazine renowned for celebrating revolutionaries. Inside there was a reprint of an old interview with Madiba, highlighted by quotes from Bill Clinton, Bono and others. "Mandela is the closest thing the world has to a secular saint," ran a citation from Time magazine managing editor Richard Stengal.

How are we to disentangle all this from the reality that Mandela represented in his long career as a liberation fighter? The secular sainthood bestowed on him now, and inevitably all the more so in the coming period, is a soft-focus image of a smiley old man dishing out platitudes about inspiration and motivation.

Mandela Day and the image of Mandela we are constantly fed seem to be all about charitable good deeds, or smiling and laughing with Princess Diana, another secular saint. Unwittingly perhaps, and keen to keep Mandela its own, Madiba's lifelong political home, the African National Congress, is happy to promote this cheesy image. And yet Mandela never saw the war on poverty, or on HIV-AIDS, for instance, as having anything to do with charity. It was far more about social justice.

The mountains of glossy Mandela coffee table books, or pocketbooks of anodyne ‘inspirational' Madiba quotes promote a schmaltzy iconography that tends to displace the more arresting accounts in the biographies or autobiographies of Mandela's comrades - people such as Joe Slovo and Mac Maharaj, both leading communist party members before and after the banning of the party in the early 1950s.

As SACP general secretary in the early 1990s, Slovo was Mandela's minister of housing in South Africa's first democratically elected government, inaugurated in 1994. Slovo - the unfinished autobiography of ANC leader Joe Slovo gives a penetrating insight into Mandela's political development.

Initially, in his student days and as a young activist, he was very anti-communist, and aligned to the nationalist liberal-bourgeois mainstream of the early ANC. Mandela was known for heckling communists at ANC meetings - "heckler and disrupter in chief," as Rusty Bernstein later recalled. Later, Slovo found that Mandela's political understanding of Marxism and the history of the communist movement had deepened markedly.

Mandela's great teacher and role model was Walter Sisulu, an immensely influential communist and ANC leader. It was Sisulu more than anyone who shaped the ANC's allegiance with the communist party (the party was first called the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA), and then after it re-launched itself underground in 1953 the South African Communist Party (SACP).

Mandela, Sisulu and Oliver Tambo established the youth wing of the ANC in 1944, and represented a new generation of young leaders who gave the ANC a more radical direction. This became particularly crucial following the formal creation of apartheid after 1948, when the ultra-right wing and white supremacist National Party took power.

Some of the best accounts of this era are in Mandela's much sold but little read Long Walk to Freedom, and Padraig O'Malley's Shades of Difference: Mac Maharaj and the Struggle for South Africa.

The increasing militancy of the ANC and the broader Congress Movement, which encompassed other population groups that were oppressed by the apartheid government, eventually led to the realization by Mandela, Sisulu, Tambo, Slovo and other leaders that armed action had to be incorporated into the ANC's tactics and strategies.

Mandela's great contribution to the ANC as a leader in the 1950s was to turn the movement in favour of armed struggle. He was the first commander in chief of Mkhonto we Sizwe (MK), formed following the Sharpeville massacre in 1961. "For almost three decades," he recalled in 1993, "our army and people were compelled to engage in a war of the disadvantaged against the privileged, a slow but intense war of attrition."

SACP leader Chris Hani in addition to Slovo led MK after the 1963-64 Rivonia trial -so-called because of the location where the banned ANC strategized for armed action. The trial aimed to decapitate the ANC, imposing life sentences on 10 ANC leaders, including Mandela, mainly for their activities in the armed struggle. Mandela was the only one of the Rivonia prisoners who was not a member of the SACP central committee.

The history of all this is available from the books, speeches and other publications that one can download from www.anc.org.za the website of the ANC. This, plus the various accounts still available, presents a rounded portrait of Mandela as a political leader whose ideas and actions were rooted in revolutionary traditions.

The SACP was instrumental in shaping the course of ANC policy up until the early 1990s, and the input of communist thinking was key to the movement's regeneration and momentum.

Before the Mandela Miracle and the Rainbow Nation of 1994, the ANC's chief champion on the world stage was the Soviet Union and its allies. The West - the US, Britain, France, West Germany and others - routinely opposed sanctions against the apartheid regime and labelled the ANC and Mandela as terrorists. Without the support of the Soviet Union it is unlikely that the ANC would have managed to wage the level of struggle it did during the years of exile and underground operations.

Mandela never wavered in his respect for the SACP its role in South Africa or sought to distance the ANC from it when opportune. "It is special," he said of the SACP's place in 1995, " because of the critical role the party  has played in our country's history, because of its relevance to today's politics; and because it is bound to make an impact on the future of our  society."

He also believed strongly in the Alliance, comprising the ANC, SACP and the trade union confederation COSATU, which remains a core institution in South Africa's political landscape.

As he mentions in his autobiography, he differed from communists in his belief that class antagonisms could be reconciled, but he saw in them crucial and dependable allies in the liberation struggle.

In the years immediately after his release from prison and the unbanning of the ANC, the SACP and other organizations, the National Party government under FW De Klerk sought to cripple the ANC and sever its links with the SACP in a mass of covert and semi-covert ways.

Using a loose clandestine network of security operatives and right-wing elements, it promoted violence between supporters of Inkatha Freedom Party leader Mangosutho Buthelezi and the ANC, and thousands of other random killings and attacks.

The aim was to destabilize the ANC by depicting it as steeped in violence and disorder, in particular in order to enflame fears among the country's white minority population about what would happen to them under majority rule in a unitary state.

Mandela condemned the regime for playing a double game of being in talks with the ANC in the Conference on a Democratic South Africa, but all the while stoking violence throughout the townships. He and SACP leader Chris Hani worked together closely, and toured the country together to urge peace making in communities.

He saw the urgent need to foster reconciliation, not only to tackle the violence affecting the country, but also in order to narrow the divisions that apartheid had created between the population groups. Doing so was the key to gaining the stability needed to sustain any sort of democratic future.

Hani's assassination in April 1993 put South Africa on the verge of civil war. Mandela put all his efforts into calming the situation, wholly eclipsing De Klerk in moral authority and gravitas. A white assassin had murdered Hani, a point the ANC leader used astutely:

"A white man, full of prejudice and hate, came to our country and committed a deed so foul that our whole nation now teeters on the brink of disaster. A white woman, of Afrikaner origin, risked her life so that we may know, and bring to justice, this assassin."
Mandela set the course for reconciliation needed to sustain the democratic transformation - the National Democratic Revolution (NDR), beginning with the country's first ever democratic elections. The South African ‘miracle' and the ‘rainbow nation' were born, and with them much of Mandela's global kudos.

But Mandela's iconic status owes much to his role as a team player and disciplined ANC cadre. That he became the symbol of the struggle and the worldwide campaign against apartheid was a conscious decision of the ANC leadership imprisoned on Robben Island or in exile.

Once he was released he frustrated many an interviewer by rooting his motivation for his part in the struggle in the decisions and orientation of the ANC and the liberation movement, and not in some one-man crusade steeped in the aura of personal charisma.

And yet it is the latter view that prevails. Outside the ANC and the Alliance, Madiba is rarely depicted in his political context. Conservative politics in South Africa and elsewhere opportunistically use his image and stature to draw a negative distinction between him and the current ANC.

And in the mass media and popular culture we tend to get an apolitical, toothless Madiba devoid of revolutionary identity, and wholly at odds with his views on fighting social injustice. Worse, there is the unseemly squabbling among some of his family over the use of his name, and more recently the money grubbing cretinism of the Being Mandela reality show, featuring two of his granddaughters.

For the school children and other youngsters who come to the Heart Hospital in Pretoria to paste a ‘get well' message to Madiba and have their photo taken alongside his portrait, his life and example have much to offer that is dynamic and revolutionary. Far more so than the sentimentalized, branded and saintly figure being propagated in his twilight days.

Photo: Wiki

"Humanitarian Intervention": A fraud and a danger for world peace

Emile Schepers — Tue, 13 Aug 2013 06:54:00 +0000

Samantha Power, appointed by President Obama and confirmed by the Senate to replace Susan Rice as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, is one of the best known advocates of a foreign policy orientation variously known as humanitarian intervention or Responsibility to Protect (R2P).

This is not good news for those who want a responsible U.S. foreign policy. Ms. Power, an Irish immigrant and a journalist with legal training, has had a long interest in the issue of genocide and crimes against humanity. In her journalistic capacity, she observed the Bosnia War in the early 1990s. She has written a number of books, the best known of which is "A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide" (Flamingo, 2003). Her thinking on how to respond to threats of mass violation of human rights was strongly influenced by the Rwandan Genocide of 1994, in which between a half a million and a million people were slaughtered, and the Kosovo War in 1998-1999.

The frame of reference for Ms. Power's thinking sees the United States as self-evidently a force for good in the world, when and if it chooses to act to end the brutal abuses of despotic regimes overseas. U.S. administrations are to be criticized for their failures to act forcefully, not their interventions. She was shocked when the United States, in her opinion, failed to act more forcefully to intervene in Rwanda and the Balkans. She also thinks that there should have been an intervention to overthrow the bizarre Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia in 1975 to 1978 (there was, but by socialist Vietnam and not "the West"). She was a strong advocate for U.S. and NATO intervention in Libya in 2011, and pushes for more forceful intervention in Darfur in the Sudan.

In addition, she sees the main source of violations of human rights worldwide as being national governments and ruling elites who use violence to control their peoples. She pays little attention to economic injustices which, in any given year, kill more innocent people that direct armed action does, through starvation, malnutrition and preventable diseases. And she is criticized for emphasizing the failure of the United States to intervene against certain states, while not talking and writing nearly as much about the fact that the United States, France, Britain and other wealthy capitalist states have themselves been the major supporters of many brutal genocidal regimes: Suharto in Indonesia, the military regimes in Central and South America, the apartheid regime in South Africa, and others. She had criticized Israeli mistreatment of the Palestinians, but hastily backed away from those views at her confirmation hearings. It is likely that she will be part of the faction in the Obama administration that pushes for more direct intervention in Syria.

Samantha Power did not invent the "humanitarian intervention" stance by herself. It has been promoted by others, including Power's predecessor as U.N. ambassador, Susan Rice, and former French cabinet minister Bernard Kouchner, the founder of Medicins sans Frontieres. Kouchner was Minister of Health in a Socialist Party government but then Minister of Foreign Affairs under right wing President Nicolas Sarkozy. Specific humanitarian interventionists such as Power, Rice and Kouchner are often accused of as being "leftists" but in fact their political advocacy brings them on a converging trajectory with right wing groups such as the neo-cons (in the case of Kouchner, supporting Sarkozy's push to intervene in Libya). Power has been close to President Obama since his Senate days, and would have been given a top post in the Obama administration much earlier had she not, during the 2008 presidential campaign, blurted out to a reporter that she thought Hillary Clinton was "a monster".

Her predecessor, Susan Rice, did not get the job of Secretary of State because of the Republican campaign against her on the issue of the Benghazi attack in which the U.S. ambassador was killed. But as U.S. ambassador to the U.N. she has been known for her attacks on socialist Cuba which have sometimes been quite intemperate.

The humanitarian intervention or R2P stance has spawned the creation or got the support of numerous NGOs.

While the humanitarian position was originally formulated, supposedly, in response to massively genocidal situations, it is subject also to mission creep. In her confirmation hearing, Power emphasized that she was going to work to shape up the United Nations, and specifically that she would use it to go after Cuba, Venezuela, Iran and Russia, all of whom she accused of persecuting "civil society", but in none of which is anything going on remotely similar to the Rwanda genocide. The comments on Venezuela led to Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, whose election on April 14 is still not recognized by the United States, to back away from efforts at reconciliation with the Obama administration. http://english.eluniversal.com/nacional-y-politica/130719/washington-endorses-samantha-powers-criticism-against-venezuela

The Humanitarian Intervention/R2P policy stance as articulated by people like Power, Rice and Kouchner and as practiced by NATO and by the U.S. and Western European governments can be criticized for additional things:

*It weakens the United Nations and other real international bodies, and works to substitute NATO military force for international cooperation.

*It weakens the state sovereignty of the poorer countries in the world; this sovereignty is essential to prevent the wealthier capitalist powers from riding roughshod on other nations and forcing them to accept trade and financial arrangements that are opposed to the interests of their working class and poor farmers.

*It willfully ignores the law of "unintended consequences"; in the case of Libya, for example, it glosses over the fact that the violent overthrow of the Gadafi regime has had some extremely negative consequences, including civil war in Mali and the loss of formerly generous Libyan financial aid to very poor African countries.

In several of the cases which have been used to push the argument for humanitarian intervention by the U.S.A., NATO or the wealthy powers, it can be shown that these powers had a lot to do with creating the circumstances for genocide in the first place.

In the Bosnia and Kosovo cases, the United States, after the Second World War, provided refuge for fascist ultra-nationalists of all groups (including Serbs, Croatians and others), and worked for decades to exacerbate ethnic tensions in socialist Yugoslavia. Sometimes right wing Serbian "Chetniks" and Croatian "Ustashe" were known to fight it out within ethnic enclaves of the United States itself, but the point was to undo the fragile ethnic unity of Tito's socialist Yugoslavia. "Displaced persons", included Nazi collaborators, were allowed to settle in the United States and continue to agitate for their irredentist ethnic causes. When the Yugoslav communists could not keep things together after the death of Tito, these elements came to the fore with programs of ethnic cleansing.

The case of Rwanda involved commercial and geopolitical rivalry between the United States and France in Central Africa. Rwanda, and its twin state, Burundi, were never French colonies. They had been independent African kingdoms until taken over by Kaiser Wilhelm's Germany in the 1890s. After the First World War they were awarded to Belgium, to punish Germany and to compensate Belgium for German depredations during the war. Nobody asked the mass of the Rwandan and Burundian people for their views on the matter; nor did it occur to the victorious Entente powers that Belgium's record in colonial administration in Central Africa was not exactly spotless!

Both Germany and Belgium found it convenient to rule Rwanda and Burundi through their indigenous monarchs, who were derived from the Tutsi social group, about 17 percent of the population of Rwanda. The social stratification of the two kingdoms involved a differentiation of wealth, prestige and power between an elite group of the dominant Tutsis and the subordinate Hutu farmers. Instead of trying to soften these differences, the German and Belgian colonial regimes made them more rigid. Thus, when the two countries gained independence in 1960, violence between Hutus and Tutsis flared. Long before the 1994 genocide, there had been bloodletting in both places, both of whose monarchies were overthrown. In Ruanda, the Hutus became dominant and many Tutsis were exiled.

The wealthy developed countries, France and the United States, did not play a constructive role. The French, under the presidency of the Socialist Party's Francois Mitterand, saw an opportunity to expand trade and influence into another "francophone" state, Rwanda. They began to channel support to the government of President Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu, in spite of the fact that its policy toward the Tutsi population was moving in a genocidal direction. http://porfinenafrica.blogspot.com/p/el-genocidio-de-ruanda.html The United States began to tilt toward Tutsi rebels living in Uganda. Washington brought a major leader of the Tutsi exiles in Uganda, Paul Kagame, to the U.S. to participate in a military training course, and flew him back to assume command of the Rwandan Patriotic Army, composed of exiled Tutsi fighters, in 1990.

There is much yet unknown about the specific roles that outside forces, particularly France and the United States, played in the lead-up to the Rwandan genocide. Two days after the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi were killed when their airplane was shot down over the Rwandan capital, Kigali, two French agents and the wife of one of them were murdered by parties unknown in their house in Kigali, raising the suspicion that they might have known too much about French-Rwandan cooperation and the plans for the genocide. http://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade+world/rwanda A French parliamentary investigation after the fact is seen as a snow job by some. But a new investigation is ongoing.

Kagame, now president of Rwanda, has been praised by some for bringing order and prosperity to his country. But some of that prosperity may have come from continuing conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo next door, where Rwanda is accused of participating in the violent looting of Congolese mineral wealth. The deaths in the various Congolese civil wars, still ongoing, have passed five million, or five to ten times the maximum number who died in the 1994 Rwanda genocide. In addition, Rwandan laws prohibiting denial of the 1994 genocide have been used to persecute dissidents.

In other cases, including especially Darfur in the Sudan and the multiple conflicts in the Sahel region of West Africa, massive human rights crises have been caused by conflict arising from competition over resources. In both places, advancing desertification has led herding communities to push into areas traditionally inhabited by crop cultivators, leading to bloodshed and massive refugee problems. The "West" has worsened these situations by its trade and economic policies, and by the military intervention in Libya which has spread former Libyan fighters and vast quantities of armaments all over the Sahel region. This has given France a convenient excuse for yet more "humanitarian intervention", in this case in Mali.

In each of these cases, the imperial policies of the "humanitarian" developed capitalist states set the stage for the ensuing bloodshed. In each case U.S. and European based multinational corporations were the beneficiaries of the intervention. Yugoslavia's publicly controlled industries, including the Yugo automobile works, were destroyed, to be replaced by multinationals. In Ruanda, the replacement of French by U.S. interests has been so great that the country is now an Anglophone and not Francophone state.

There is real danger that with appointments such as those of Power and Rice, the Obama administration may be moving in an even more interventionist direction. All progressive people should oppose this, and struggle instead for a policy that eschews military solutions even under a "humanitarian" pretext, and instead, changes U.S. trade and economic policy in such a way that the kinds of situations which are likely to produce mass killings and refugee crises can be stopped before the blood begins to flow.

Photo: Creative Commons 3.0

for t.m.... somewhere between a requiem and a te deum

Gary Hicks — Sat, 03 Aug 2013 12:45:00 +0000

the only

problem

with stand

your ground

is that we

need

to get

better

at standing

ours

on proletarian

feet not

on liberal

knees

subject

to being

capped

stand your

ground

at every

site where

a sister

or brother

was murdered

by a cop

every twenty

eight hours stand

your ground

at every

dark alley

where

a drug deal

goes foul

a back alley

abortion

turns fatal

at every

room in a

house where

someone

took someone's

or one's own

life

at every

newtown

columbine

virginia tech

schoolroom

where a

suburb turned

out to be

in the 'hood stand

your ground

with those

of us

working

struggling

fighting

praying

singing to

get to that

place where

we don't

have to stand

our ground

because we

can now sit

together

in peace

berkeley ca 7-25-2013

Photo: Creative Commons 3.0

China: The panda in the left's living room

Norman Markowitz — Wed, 26 Jun 2013 15:07:00 +0000

This article is a slightly revised version of a presentation made by Rutgers historian and Political Affairs editorial board nember Norman Markowitz at the Annual Left Forum Conference on June 9th in New York. The presentation was part of a Panel "China, the Panda in the Left's Living Room," organized and chaired by U.S. China Friendship Association member and Political Affairs editorial Board member Gary Hicks.

Chair, Speakers: Gary Hicks -- Niebyl-Proctor Marxist Library Oakland CA, Norman Markowitz -- Rutgers University, Wei Xiaoping -- Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Martin Rivlin -- independent scholar, Columbia University

China and the U.S. in the 21^st Century: A Marxist historian's perspective

The serious study of History is always about understanding the past as it relates to the present and on that basis trying to grasp what are the likely developments in the near future

Marxist analysis of history is about understanding the larger political economic system, the social classes in conflict within that system, and the dialectical relationships, that is dynamic interactions between changing conditions and social movements. Ideologies serve as bridges between social movements and changing conditions. In that sense, Marxism enables us to understand in a holistic way the relationship of the general to the specific, to understand the relationship of dominant ideologies to economic political systems, and the relationship of cultures to changing political economy. Finally, Marxism connects theory with practice. It is a science of society, with social class partisanship, providing a holistic analysis that can become a force in itself to advance positive change, the interests of the working class and show the path to socialism. Let me try to brief and apply that analysis in broad outline to Chinese- U.S. relations today and in the near future.

First a look at global political economy and the capitalist world system

The capitalist world system has developed for centuries, but for the questions we are asking concerning U.S. China relations, its most important developments have taken place with the rise of industrial capitalism in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. Industrial capitalism produced modern imperialism, the imperialism of export capital and with it the world or global market, leading to globalized militarization, global wars, global depressions. This modern imperialism has produced its dialectical antithesis, attempts at socialist revolutions and anti-imperialist national revolutions, including the Chinese peoples Revolution, of the 20^th century. This Revolution, combining anti-imperialist national liberation with a commitment advanced by the Chinese Communist Party to construct a socialist society, is by far the most important, both in its time and today.

Let us look very briefly at the United States and how it got to where it is today. The United States had the first major anti-colonial revolution in modern history, a revolution that established an independent bourgeois republic. It became in the 19^th century the first large capitalist republic in modern history, expanding across North America. After 1890 it surpassed Britain to become the leading industrial capitalist nation. After WW I, it replaced Britain as the leading finance capitalist nation. Today in the early 21^st century its ruling class and the political economy that they control are in a very contradictory position.

The U.S. state was after WW II the founder and leader of the NAT0 bloc, against the Soviet Union and its allies and the world communist movement until the fall of the Soviet Union. This served as a 20^th century industrial capitalist version of the old 19^th century "Holy Alliance" which, with Britain in the background, fought against the expansion of the French Bourgeois revolution, against the revolutionary Jacobin state and the later Bonapartist empire. Britain used the forces that made up the Holy Alliance against the French Revolution and Napoleon, but the British state kept a distance from the Alliance's more reactionary expressions even as Britain advanced its initially hegemonic economic power to develop its global empire in the name of "civilization, "progress, and "free trade." Unlike the British, the U.S. state was always both the creator and leader of the NAT0 bloc and the advocate of its most aggressive and reactionary policies.

Also, the British economy emerged richer and more powerful from its "victory" in the wars of the French revolution. The U.S. economy, on the other hand, emerged from the U.S. NATO bloc's Cold War "victory" in a much weaker position in terms of industry and finance than it was immediately after WWII. Of course, this did not prevent U.S. leaders, George HW Bush and others, from foolishly proclaiming a "new world order" and genuflecting to the concept of "globalization." Although they would never admit it, in all likelihood even to themselves, the capitalist leaders of the U.S. fear that China will in the 21^st century follow their path of the 19^th and 20^th.

After winning independence, U.S. leaders, in practice, moved away from the stated principles of their anti-colonial revolution, first under Jefferson's slogan of an "empire for liberty" then under the Monroe Doctrine and Manifest Destiny. Then the commercial and later industrial/financial bourgeoisie led the U.S. to become an imperialist power fashioning a non-colonial imperialism, first in the Caribbean, Central America, and indirectly the rest of the Western Hemisphere. Then, under the banner of the Cold War, they undertook a global imperialism which "united ", and aimed to gain hegemony over all of the other imperialist powers.

And what will the 21^st Century bring? Will we see a Chinese "empire for a socialist market economy" controlling the industrial heart of Asia and controlling Asian markets, with preferential access to the raw materials of Africa and other parts of the world, with Chinese domination of the IMF World Bank system? I don't see that as China's likely future, and I am no more for that than the U.S. capitalists, but for of course very different reasons.

Now a look at China

China has, over the last three decades, been remarkably successful in ways that the defenders of capitalist policy fear is beating them at their own game, whatever the long-term effects of playing that game may be.

It has been the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party that has pursued the old axiom that nations have interests, not permanent enemies. It is the leadership of the Chinese Communist party which has put one foot in the capitalist world, and kept one large foot out-buying shares in the public debt of the U.S. to give it leverage against possible anti-Chinese policies launched by the U.S. state, balancing the largest mixed economy in human history, while controlling (to use Lenin's term about industry of a nearly a century ago) "the commanding heights" of finance capital. China is no longer capital poor, as the Soviet Union was until its end in 1991. It is the second economy of the world, as was the Soviet Union, but the Soviet Union lost capital massively in subsidizing allies, having to take foreign capital at high interest rates, and selling nothing except raw materials on world markets. China has developed a mixed economy system which has accumulated capital domestically and internationally, becoming a major exporter of finished goods, high value goods, in international trade.

The major capitalist states established in the Cold War era all of their economic, political and military institutions under U.S. leadership to encircle and destroy the Soviet Union and its bloc. The one thing that they never had to worry about was Soviet competition for world markets. What worried them was the Soviets' support of revolutionary movements that would take more and more of the world out of the capitalist world system

Now, to use a favorite ploy of American comedians, there is for U.S. NAT0 bloc capitalists both good and bad news. The good news is that they don't have to worry about China actively supporting revolutionary movements that would remove major parts of the world out of the world capitalist system. The bad news is that if they seek to encircle China through a neo Cold War policy, destroy the government of the Peoples Republic and the Chinese Communist party and transform China into an enterprise zone for foreign investment and exports, not only will they fail, but they will in all likelihood create an economic catastrophe for the world capitalist system.

China's relationship to world politics and the capitalist world system is radically different than was the case with the Soviet Union. This means that any neo Cold War strategy of "containing China" by forging military alliances with Japan, South Korea, and other states bordering China would be not only sinister but absurd. The only beneficiary in the short-run would be the military industrial complex of the U.S. which has been a parasitic force, especially since Reagan's election to the presidency. It has absorbed trillions of dollars in public funds for projects which detracted from the development of the civilian economy, detracted from scientific and technological development which would have enabled the U.S. to sustain the great advantages that it previously possessed in terms of production technology, investment capital and a skilled labor force. U.S. military spending during the cold war alone, 1947 to the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 has been estimated at 10 trillion dollars. This, along with the huge reduction in taxes on corporations and the wealthy and the post cold war "war against "terrorism" (and its spending of many trillions) has created the spectacular increase in the national debt which has made the U.S. if not capital poor, capital vulnerable.

What policies should a responsible American left see in U.S.-Chinese Relations?

First, it is important to grasp that China is vital to the maintenance of peace certainly in East Asia and the Pacific, to the development of a peace policy on the Korean Peninsula, to peace and development in Southeast Asia directly.

China also can play, and the responsible left should support, a role in the development of a peace process for South Asia generally. Here I think that the U.S. and China can work together fruitfully to both engage with India and disengage from Pakistan, with whom China has nothing really in common. (Pakistan is an anti-socialist, theocratic state ruled by a military junta which aids and abets reactionary Islamic terrorist groups, which have directly attacked the U.S. and potentially can be a threat to China, given its Islamic minorities).

It would be short-sighted in the extreme for China to see Pakistan as a geopolitical military pawn against India, since Pakistan's economic backwardness and militarist adventurism against India only undermines regional economic development and harms both India and China. Their mutual interest really is in expanding regional economic relationships. The U.S. policy of funding and arming Pakistan from the 1950s as an anti-Communist, anti-Soviet "containment state" and then allying with Pakistan to subvert and attack the Communist led Soviet supported government of Afghanistan in the 1980s led directly to the establishment of Al Qaeda, later to the Taliban government and all of the disasters of the recent past and present.

What else can the American Left, whose divisions sadly have undermined its development since the post WW II political persecutions, give in the form of constructive advice to China? First, I would advise the Chinese Communist Party activists to look seriously at what CPUSA leader Gus Hall called "bill of rights socialism," socialism with civil liberties, as a necessity for socialist development. Mao Tse-tung's concept of "from the people to the people" is in itself a Chinese expression as I see it of Bill of Rights Socialism, because trust in the masses of people and in their understanding and development, is necessary if the masses of people are to trust in you .

Just as the feudal Confucian philosophy had (as I remember from my studies of Chinese history at the University of Michigan over four decades ago) a concept of a righteous scholar representing both the Confucian path and the people against corruption, Chinese Communist cadres can perhaps develop the concept of the "righteous cadre" living with and for the people, not above them, teaching and learning from them. The cadre of the CPC could then lead to limit the accumulation of personal and family wealth, educate and organize the people to root out bribery and corruption, both domestic and that resulting of Foreign Direct Investment. It was, we should remember, this commitment to the people, to live with them and like them that enabled the Chinese Communist Party to defeat the Japanese and later U.S. imperialists, warlords, landlords, and the reactionary Kuomintang regime. It is something that should be remembered as China struggles to construct a socialist market economy.

I would also say to our Chinese comrades (broadly defined) that planning is the key component of all models of socialism. There are three components of planning in any system, including public sector institutions and corporations in capitalist systems. The first is strategic planning, that is policies to achieve long range goals like Deng's Four Modernizations at the end of the 1970s.

The second component is tactical planning, that is flexible responses to changing conditions in regard to the policies to achieve the goals of the plan.

The third component is human relations planning , that is, gaining the active participation, support, and trust of the masses of people. These are what one might call the three principles of effective planning.

Without the third component, effective human relations planning and policy, no planning process will ultimately be effective. I would say that adoption of and adaptation to national conditions of Bill of Rights socialism, socialism with civil liberties, is the most effective human relations policy for those seeking to develop socialism.

The development of socialism remains the stated goal of the Chinese Communist Party, which came into existence to liberate the Chinese people from domestic feudalism and foreign imperialism and to open the door to the construction of a socialist Society with Chinese characteristics.

Let me say also a word to those on the left who spend their time criticizing Chinese policy. Our struggle is here and our only real influence is and can be what we can do here to advance peoples movements in the direction of a socialist path and to unify ourselves so that we can fight monopoly capitalism and imperialism. Our primary task is not to attack countries which have had revolutions and whose stated aims are to establish socialist societies. By condemning China for its domestic and foreign policies, those on the left are "tailing"" (to use the old language of the Comintern) reactionaries and neo cold warriors.

If the left in the U.S. is to be taken seriously about anything, it might begin by looking at where the U.S political economy is today in comparison to China before blithely accusing the Chinese Communist Party and state of leading an exploitative capitalist system. Those who mock the CPC's stated commitment to develop a "socialist market economy with Chinese characteristics" should note that the political power structure of the United States, including the most progressive Democrats, would not dream of transforming the United States into "a socialist market economy with American characteristics".

Recently they, and here I include the Obama administration, have been so timid as to shy away from the policies associated with the American New Deal, that is, "social democratic" policies which the New Dealers drew in limited forms from the Communist and socialist movement: public works jobs for the unemployed, laws protecting trade unions, public old age pensions and unemployment benefits, large public developmental projects, even food stamps to assist the poor and food store proprietors. They have pursued instead such policies as "bailouts" to Wall Street and Banking and Industrial capital, with no concessions demanded from capital in terms of jobs, trade union rights, or serious tax reform. Such planning would, in terms of an anti-depression strategy and winning the support of the masses (similar to New Deal policies), in effect, have successfully borrowed, in a very limited form, socialist programs to both save and reform capitalism.

What the Chinese Communist party is doing or trying to do is to adopt, in a limited form, the capitalist policies of market, private investment and competition, to develop a socialist market economy and society. Whether they will succeed or not over time cannot of course be answered, but their attempts do not deserve to be prejudged.

The Obama administration, I would suggest, has a great deal to learn from the Chinese government's control of the banking system and its ability to channel capital investment into the Chinese economy through a planning process that makes "bailouts" reciprocal rather than a one way street.

We cannot look seriously at China and U.S. Chinese relations without looking at our political economy, power structure, and the policies which they have advanced.

Let me conclude with a few suggestions for the issues of those relations

First, the development of a clear co-existence policy that would defuse potential military conflicts in the Asia Pacific region and prevent arms races related to that region.

Second, working with China in and through the United Nations in campaigns against world hunger, environmental destruction in the poor countries, global environmental policies, instead of self-righteously denouncing Chinese pollution and ignoring the positive achievements of Chinese scientists in ecology. Third, the U.S. and China working together and with other nations through the United Nations social agencies to develop regional fair labor standards for a global economy.

Finally, I would strongly suggest as a necessary concomitant to such policies the dissolution of the NAT0 bloc.

Note: the following four paragraphs were omitted because of time constraints.

The U.S. through NATO continues to waste hundreds of billions of dollars in its adventures through the world and in maintaining military force against nonexistent enemies in Europe. These policies would permit the U.S. to reduce its military spending by more than half, which would still be first in the world and signicantly greater than China and also encourage China to reduce its non productive military spending

Some think that China will become a leader of a "Second World" including the BRIC nations, Brazil, Russia, India, China; that however is extremely unlikely and I would say not something to be wished for either.

A broad policy of Sino U.S. cooperation internationally and a changed U.S. Chinese economic relationship, one that encourages increased Chinese purchasing power, joint ventures, and bilateral trade agreements from which both China and the U.S. and the Chinese and American people would benefit, offers a much better and more realistic policy for Sino-U.S. relations. The Obama administration in its second term still is in a position to advance such policies, as the other major nations of the U.S. NAT0 bloc are not.

The U.S. is currently struggling to recover from a debilitating more than three decades old physical and mental illness-regressive, even infantile "neo liberal" capitalism or as I like to call it Friedmanitis. China, whatever it's relatively recent feudal past and the devastating effects of imperialist intervention for its people, does not have that illness to worry about. U.S. Chinese cooperation of the kind that I have suggested, through the United Nations and other global venues, can also help eradicate that illness, which still acts to undermine the economic and thus social and political health of people throughout the world.

Some postscript comments from other panelists and the chair

The discussion which followed the presentations was rich and interesting. Professor Wei in her presentation dealt seriously and insightfully with the problem of economic inequality in China today, the dangers of over production and inadequate consumption, given the adaption of market economy from capitalism. She also made the point that there are no models of socialism in the world today and that China, after initially adopting the Soviet model of central planning and no private business or market relations, has through trial and error and given the global necessity, moved toward the present socialist market economy. Martin Rivlin dealt with very contemporary developments in both China and U.S. Chinese relations, was critical of Deng Shao p'ing's tactical implementation of his four modernizations, but was extremely critical of U.S. finger pointing at China in terms of both its economic policy and its "human rights policy."

In response to criticisms of China's lack of "human rights", "labor's rights", and "democracy" all of the panelists saw this as hypocritical in the extreme. Chair Gary Hicks stated rightly that four years ago the Chinese Communist party and government demanded that Wal-Mart in China unionize and Wal-Mart did. Today, Wal-Mart in the U.S. is both the leading employer of non-union labor, and notorious for its violation of overtime pay and other U.S. labor laws. On the U.S. political system, Professor Wei mentioned that China does have a one party system and the U.S. a two party system , but the U.S. two party systems is controlled by the rich. Professor Wei contended that Chinese unions worked well for workers in the public sector but not well in the private sector where heads of firms bribed union representatives with stock issues. She was also very frank about the problem of corruption in China. I gave examples of corruption here and stated that the Chinese Communist Party had the power to effectively fight corruption. Gary Hicks, in response to my comments concerning an adaption of Gus Hall's concept of "Bill of Rights Socialism" argued that China had already implemented in principle the first ten amendments to the constitution.

Note. The following paragraphs also were not presented because I was running out of time.

When we look at rising Chinese inequality over the last decades, which no one should of course support, we should remember it has developed in a context in which more people have been raised out of destitution and poverty in China then in any society in human history over the last three decades.

The leadership of the Chinese Communist party deserves credit for having deterred the "jungle capitalism" of 19^th century Britain and the U.S, much less the brutal semi-colonial comprador capitalism that was China's developing fate under Chiang Kai' shek before the barbaric Japanese invasion (and Chiang was trying to return to after the defeat of the Japanese imperialists)

Higher levels of inequality in the U.S. during that time frame and in the nations of the NAT0 bloc have raised levels of real poverty everywhere and have been connected to economic stagnation, not real growth in the Keynesian sense of that, to the massive export of capital, and the creation of huge state, and in the U.S., crippling consumer debt, the latter providing super profits for finance capital and undermining what the Chinese leader Sun Yat -sen called the third principle of the people, the peoples livelihood.

Today, a Marxist analysis of history can tell us is that there is no first world, second world, third world anymore. The continuation of U.S. NAT0 bloc's anti-Soviet policies directed against China, that is, spreading fears of Chinese "expansion" in Asia and calls to "contain" China in military and political terms is senseless in the extreme. It is an example of the old definition of reactionary, that is, learning nothing from real conditions and forgetting nothing in terms of policy and advancing the same policies over and over again.

The authoritarian Asian regimes that reactionaries hailed as Asian Tigers have been shown to be paper tigers in regard to political economy. They have nothing offer the U.S. as part of an anti-Chinese alliance if that were possible. Japan remains a major capitalist competitor of the U.S.(and there are dangerous tendencies in Japan, from what I have read, forces seeking to abrogate the U.S. imposed postwar constitution which greatly limited Japan's military capacity, actions that are not in China's or the U.S. interests)

The 21^st century, given the distribution of world population and the dramatic, albeit different, developments in India and China, will in all likelihood be first and foremost an Asian Century. What kind of Asian century it will be will depend significantly on developing U.S. Chinese relations.

Photo: Chinese construction workers 2002 Creative Commons 3.0