11-07-06, 9:51 am
People Vs. Profits: Columns by Victor Perlo Volume II: The United States and the World New York: International Publishers, 2006
Victor Perlo, American Marxist economist and author of many books, wrote a regular column for the U.S. Communist newspaper for 39 years, from 1961 to 1999. A compilation of his articles, selected and edited after his death by his wife and children, has been published in two volumes. The book takes the name that his column carried many years. Volume I, dedicated to domestic topics, came out a few years past. Volume II, devoted to U.S. foreign policies and activities and to international affairs, has just been issued.
Though nearly unknown today, People Vs. Profits stands fair to become a classic. It contributes an unsurpassed ideological and historical record of the political economy of the latter half of the twentieth century, a period dominated by capitalism and, in particular, by American imperialism nearing full world power but obstructed by world socialism, centered in the Soviet Union, and by national liberation movements around the world. Its particular themes are likely besides to remain highly topical the next couple of generations.
This book ought to be famous today, distributed and read universally. Its importance in the ongoing struggle against imperialism can hardly be overestimated, especially in the United States.
Firstly, these volumes are highly topical. All the economic, political and military issues of the present have recurred multiply in the past fifty years in similar form and are treated in the book. The analyses are searching and broad, they expose the forces and motives that drive the events of today, the same ones that obtained yesterday. The book is an indispensable source of information critical to understanding affairs of the past and present.
The premier value of People Vs. Profits, however, is ideological. The massive propaganda disseminated by the rulers in the United States substantially fails to conceal, to a liberal, moderate or humanitarian observer, the evil nature and results of government policy and actions. The propaganda is notably successful, however, in concealing the socially antipathetic purposes of these policies and actions, and the nature of the government. Social critics accordingly decry the government for incompetence and petty venality, and pray for a superficial reform like election of the other ruling party.
The core of the propaganda is the contentions that the United States of America is a free country and a democracy: “freedom” and “democracy” are the watchwords. The truth is that the country is an oligarchy with power concentrated in a handful of dominant families surrounded by circles of privileged associates and retainers among whom the most influential positions in government, business, finance, and the military are held. The establishment resembles a kingdom. Yes, the United States is a republic, and bears a constitution that admits democracy, even that encourages it. Certainly the propaganda rests upon the presumption, usually implicit, that public election of executive and legislative officials, as obtains there, is tantamount to democracy. Government of the people, by the people, and for the people has not existed, however, in the United States since Lincoln; and that republic is the most extensive and perhaps the most successful oligarchy in history. As for freedom, the rich have very extensive freedom, the poor have little; and the poorest, numbering in millions, have the freedom to eat slops if they can find them and sleep in the streets. The freedom to work for pay is selective, occasional, and insecure: the ruling class of owners enforce their freedom to maintain a large dispossessed class of unemployed.
This oppressive and undemocratic character of the leading capitalist state is presented and established by Victor Perlo. The book, and especially Volume 1, is full of instances and proofs, for Perlo is a superb researcher, not merely a polemicist.
Perlo proceeds to explode another cornerstone of national propaganda, a very important one. That is the conceit that the government, however forward and even corrupt, are basically a civil body who mean to serve the public and who observe fundamentally decent and civil objectives, similar to those of the public. The truth is that at the highest level and consistently, the government is a gang of looters who resemble a criminal syndicate far more nearly than a representative town administration. Their object is to expropriate the wages of the public and give them to the small elite whom they verily serve. They accomplish this hand over fist. Their legislatures, when they can, pass laws that enable this plunder, and their judiciary generally uphold these laws. When they cannot enact laws on account of the Constitution or public concern, their executives issue directives to plunder by fiat, regardless of the law. Perlo demonstrates richly firstly, that the ruling class loot the people; secondly, that they employ the government as an active agent in this enterprise; and thirdly, that the government acts therein without regard to the law nor to any civil virtue or responsibility. Besides exposing the deeds of the gang, often conducted secretly, he repeatedly cites the words of their leaders, words not intended for public exposure, as proof of their motives. All administrations pretend at least to provide public services. The reader sees that most administrations offer services with one hand and loot with the other, the current regime of George W. Bush loots with both hands. That is the difference.
In Volume II, the author films the same syndicate as they loot the entire world over the course of two generations. The armed forces are their enforcers; and they are shown proceeding like hoodlums, violently and unconscionably, with reckless disregard of international law, of universal standards of human rights, of the preservation of the species from nuclear holocaust. They are revealed as nuclear terrorists, as mad bombers, as exponents and indiscriminate users of the most lethal and horrible weapons, as despoilers of democracy. Again, word and deed are well documented. Perlo establishes as well that the violent policies of the government afford no benefit, direct nor indirect, to the national public; to the contrary, they are entirely inimical, aiding the ruling industrialists and financier, as they do, to move operations to lower-wage colonies and further impoverish American workers. Again, the words as well as the deeds of the imperialists are cited. The first chapter, a lecture delivered in 1953, is a leitmotif for the Volume.
After reading People Vs. Profits, and Volume II in particular, the world today makes sense. The administration are not engaged in a destructive, chaotic and expensive foreign war from misjudgment nor misinformation. Their policies at home and abroad are not inept, misguided failures. The sociopathic results of administrative policies and actions are not failure, they are success. These outcomes fail the nation and the world; but they enrich the ruling clique at an historic rate. Looting is afoot, naked but for trite propaganda. The reader who appreciates this has achieved a breakthrough in understanding the world, and is ready to undertake effective organization and action.
The forms of looting have all been seen before, repeatedly, and are documented in the book. The multiplication of gasoline prices underway is one dramatic form; the author exposes its predatory character when it occurs on previous occasions. The forms of propaganda too are well worn. The Terrorists of today have replaced the Communists of the preceding generations as bogeyman. Of course the similarity is only partial, as the religious fundamentalists whom the administration billets as terrorists truly are fell in general. To be sure, they were armed and sponsored by the U.S. government; and to be sure, the government has constantly armed and supported an opposing faction of military religious fundamentalists.
Perlo effectively exposes the Big Lie of the preceding generations, that the militant activities of the U.S. armed forces were in the nature of defense against the military threats of the Soviet Union, the Communists. He establishes that on the contrary, the Communists sought peace continually, and reacted every time to threats, escalations, and incursions by the United States. He exposes that U.S. military leaders did not view the USSR as aggressive nor as a threat to start a war. That lesson carries over however malevolent some of the small despotic governments and guerilla factions may be today, they are minor players compared to the United States and her armed clients, vastly inferior in destructive capacity, comparatively insignificant in terrorist actions and destruction wrought therein.
Besides affording a classic cinema of state monopoly capitalism and imperialism under field conditions for forty years, the columns treat many diverse subjects of interest and color. In Volume 1 are many articles about U.S. labor, wages, working conditions, living conditions, prices, rents, prices and quantities of foods. There are articles devoted to taxes and the means that one administration after another have employed covertly to muddy statistics, reduce the taxes of the rich, and increase taxes of the poor. The struggle against racism is treated extensively within the overall context.
Volume II treats many major themes recurrently. One is the Soviet Union and its socialist allies. Trips to the USSR and Cuba are recounted. Economic and political warfare waged by the United States against socialism is detailed over decades, as well as military maneuvers and procurements, especially preparation for nuclear war. The doctrine justifying nuclear war if expedient, under which each administration operated during the Cold War, is exposed chillingly; there is no evidence that it has been abandoned since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Vietnam War is covered extensively, and from some important but unfamiliar angles. Globalization is analyzed and explained from its incipient stage as an important phenomenon through the imposition of NAFTA. National liberation struggles are followed in South America, the Middle East, and elsewhere. Every important issue and event in the country and the world today is echoed in the book, in most cases; the detail matches closely and the analysis and counsel are entirely apposite.
Some of the articles are lighter and more colorful. They take us to Spain, to a city in France with a Communist administration, to the Canadian far north, they take us to a collective farm in the Soviet Union and an imaginary discourse over U.S. intelligence analysis.
One serious theme that ought to be well regarded is the drift toward fascism associate with the most aggressive and belligerent policies of the U.S. ruling class. Perlo sounds the alarm repeatedly in the book, and the state of affairs today is closer to fascism than at any time since the prevalence of McCarthyism. Fight oligarchy, monopoly, imperialism and fascism, fight for freedom, democracy and peace. Read People Vs. Profits and distribute it to everyone.
