People Before Profit blog

Labor and the 2012 Election – Confidence Gained, Challenges ahead

Mon, 02 May 2011 11:00:00 +0000

Organized labor will be among President Barack Obama’s most determined supporters in 2012. Obama’s return to office will be regarded as a matter of life and death for the labor movement. However, labor will be aiming higher in 2012 than in 2008. For American workers, organized and unorganized, the 2012 election will be about much more than the race for the White House, as important as that will be.

Now, let’s consider the statement you have just read. What would prompt this writer to make this prediction with such confidence more than a year before the event?

First the Obama Administration has, over the last two plus years, accomplished much on behalf of working people. We have seen the passage of a stimulus package that prevented the Great Recession from deteriorating into a second Great Depression. We have seen the passage of health care legislation that expands affordable coverage to millions of working Americans and their families. And we have seen Presidential appointments to the Supreme Court, to the Cabinet and to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) that all have the potential to change the environment in which American workers struggle. We have been encouraged by the President’s recent pledge that Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare would not be cut while he was in the White House. And we can point to other recent developments that underline the significance of the changes that have occurred since the departure of George W. Bush from the White House.

Most recently, for example, action by NLRB general counsel and Obama appointee Lafe Solomon to try to block the Boeing Corporation's planned expansion of aircraft production at its South Carolina plant with non-union workers has drawn wide press attention and sent shock waves through the corporate community. Solomon described Boeing's move as an "illegal retaliation" against unionized workers in its Washington state plants. Indeed the quick and extensive coverage in the corporate media suggests how high the stakes are for American workers. The Wall Street Journal said the ruling would set “a terrible precedent … and undercut the right-to-work statutes in 22 American states.” On the other hand the New York Times, citing statistics on declining union density over recent decades, called the board’s action “a welcome effort to defend workers’ right to collective bargaining.” The point here is that this action by the NLRB would have been unthinkable during the Bush years.

So maybe that is the good news. Of course much of the news has not been so good. The conservative assault on the rights of the nation’s working people is so widespread and intense that labor is faced with enormous challenges in state after state across the country as well in the struggle to change the make-up of Congress in DC. Labor’s effort in 2012 is likely to be more determined and focused more on developing its own political independence than it was in 2008. The recent stunning developments in the Midwest, in Wisconsin, Indiana and Ohio in the first place, show clearly how intense the contest will be and what workers are ready to do bring a positive outcome. The workers of our country, in both the public and private sectors, have by all indications gained considerable confidence, consciousness and understanding over the last couple of years.

There is no question that we have had some major disappointments. The Employee Free Choice Act, once considered so close to passage, is still not the law of the land and remains unfinished union business. The health care law, as big a step forward as it is, lacks a public option. And most serious of all, unemployment remains stubbornly high, and as AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka recently observed, “successful job creation is the key to making long-term deficit reduction both easier and more politically achievable.” And he went on to say, “President Obama does not yet have the balance right between spending cuts and new revenue …” as he warned against “balancing the budget on the backs of the poor and the middle class.”

And it is clear that there remain deep disagreements between certain sections of the labor movement and the Administration. For instance, to the teachers’ unions, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s “Race to the Top” looks too much like the universally rejected “No Child Left Behind” initiative which characterized the Bush years.

What needs to be emphasized is that the disagreements and the disappointments should not dampen labor’s support for Obama in 2012. If anything, these experiences will strengthen labor’s determination to flex its muscle, to struggle to defeat conservative and reactionary anti-people candidates, and to build and expand its own independent role in our nation’s politics. This will require labor to reach out and build alliances with other core forces with renewed determination. This has been the message from labor speakers at rallies across the country this spring. As Patrick Eiding, President of the Philadelphia AFL-CIO told a rally against education cuts on April 4, “We are coming together as working people, union and non-union. We have to spread the word that we will not let corporate leaders steal our country.” Or as Randi Weingarten, President of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) told the same rally honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, “King walked to bring together the labor community and the civil rights community; we need to bring them together as never before.”

As we celebrate May Day 2011 this has to be the vision of the American labor movement. That will be preparation for 2012.

Photo couresty AFL-CIO/Flickr

Crisis as the New Normal: The Economic Situation Today

Mon, 02 May 2011 10:59:00 +0000

Claims of recovery are not entirely empty. Let's look at them, before we examine, what kind of recovery and for whom?

GDP rose at a modest 3.1 percent rate in the fourth quarter of 2010. [1] Many other indicators of economic activity – freight tonnage, hotel occupancy, industrial production – have rebounded significantly from their low in 2009. [2] Like GDP, they are increasing moderately, but hardly at the rate of vigorous expansion.

Employment is growing faster than necessary to absorb new workers, but not by much. The rate of layoffs has declined more than 1/3 from its peak,[3] and job openings are above the low point in 2009, though still too few to make a significant dent in the numbers looking for work. [4] The official unemployment rate has declined modestly over the past year, but only because so many of the unemployed gave up looking for work and are no longer counted.

Despite some positive signs, in many ways the US economy is still in the depression phase of a capitalist cycle. This is seen in continued high levels of unemployment, large inventory of unsold goods (especially housing and commercial real estate) and excess capacity, though all of these have improved from their worst. And a large surplus of idle capital.

Recovery for who?

As far as the capitalist system is concerned, the crisis is over at least for now. For capitalists, the most important things are profits and stability.

Profits have been restored – by speeding up workers, cutting wages, and getting rid of or swallowing up competitors. You can hear that from the horse's mouth: "Corporations are taking huge advantage of the slack in the labor market [unemployment] - they are in a very strong position and workers are in a very weak position. They are using that bargaining power to cut benefits and wages, and to shorten hours." That from Desmond Lachman, a former managing director at Salomon Smith Barney. [5] The "slack in the labor market" is unlikely to end any time soon. At the rate jobs have been created for the last six months, the unemployment rate will continue above six percent for the next seven years!

Stability is restored, or at least the illusion of stability. The corporate class believe they have contained any gains made by the working class in the first two years of the Obama administration, and have launched a broad counter-offensive, aimed at smashing unions, further institutionalizing corporate domination, and substantially lowering the working class standard of living. The breadth of the right-wing corporate attack is stunning. Even with Republicans controlling only one house of Congress, the offensive is more sweeping than at the height of Bush administration power.

For the rest of us, the recovery means a new normal. Older workers forced out of work, but can't afford to retire, competing with grandchildren for minimum-wage jobs. Workers who formerly had stable jobs, along with growing numbers of young people, are forced into the always-present contingent workforce on the margins of the economy, moving from one to another part-time insecure, low-wage, no-benefit jobs. The jobs lost in 2008-2009 were weighted toward the better paying jobs; the few jobs gained in the past year were weighted toward the lowest-paying. [6] College students are graduating with huge outstanding loans and Starbucks-level jobs. Crises of youth, especially African Americans, and immigrants, and rural, consign whole communities to economic and social wastelands.

We can't separate economic prospects from the political situation. This is seen in the two biggest obstacles to recovery: home mortgage crisis and fiscal policy, which threaten to tip even this partial recovery into a new crisis.

Home Mortgage Crisis

A few words about the mortgage policy. A ruthless gang of 3-piece-suit thugs have driven 3-5 million families from their homes, with another million in the pipeline for this year. They used massive fraud, and have not only escaped jail, but been rewarded with bonuses and golden parachutes. One quarter of homeowners with mortgages owe more than the houses is worth, and every week thousands more fall behind on their unsupportable payments. The most effective though modest measure proposed by the Obama administration – giving bankruptcy judges the right to lower mortgage principal – was defeated in 2009 by Senate Republicans with help from 12 Democrats. The administration's HAMP program to adjust mortgages has been largely ineffective, relying as it does on the cooperation of the same banksters who profit from the crisis. Yet even this is being threatened with repeal by House Republicans, who also are attacking other administration efforts that slightly mitigate effects of the crisis. The financial industry policy is to squeeze every possible last penny out of homeowners, plundering any savings they and their families might have, before evicting them from their homes. The economic effects of this crisis has been to depress consumer demand by about $700 billion per year, and keep housing construction (and employment) at record-low levels – a drag on the economy that will continue for several years. The human effects are incalculable.

Fiscal Policy

The more immediate obstacle to recovery is fiscal policy. That's a fancy word for government spending. The money from the stimulus bill (ARRA), passed in February 2009, has mostly dried up. The debate in Congress is whether to enact a small or a large anti-stimulus program – that is, whether to cut essential services by $40 billion/year or $100 billion/year or $250 billion/per year. The recent agreement to keep the government running is a cut of $77 billion per year from the 2010 budget level. Republicans are demanding far deeper cuts in the coming year.

The Congressional Progressive Caucus has released an alternative Peoples Budget [7] which maintains vital services, invests in green energy, infrastructure and education, and taxes the rich. It is an practical and reasonable alternative. Not surprisingly, the mass media have almost completely refused to cover this proposal.

The just-enacted cuts will cost about 450,000 jobs this year alone. State and local governments, which have shed 400,000 jobs over the past two years, will likely double that number this year. Job loss from government cuts are almost entirely negating the modest gains in private-sector employment.

This goes beyond the loss of government jobs. And beyond the loss of jobs providing goods and services to the now-laid-off government workers. The effect of Republican policies is to convince private capital not to invest in productive or green industries. We have the example of Wisconsin, where a train-manufacturing facility will be shut down because of Gov. Walker's decision to kill high-speed rail in the state. [8] With the tremendous investments needed, why would a company invest in rail, mass transit, advanced wind and solar power, or any of the other technologies and infrastructure we so urgently need, when funding or tax benefits can be withdrawn at a moment's notice.

The anti-stimulus fiscal policies being enacted at the national state and local levels, combined with the failure to take meaningful action on the home mortgage crisis, threaten to derail the fragile stability the capitalist economy has achieved.

There are some establishment individuals and institutions that recognize the danger. For example, a recent editorial, the New York Times summarized the economic impact of anti-stimulus budget cuts:

"On the federal level, the fixation on the deficit above all else is particularly dangerous. An economy with significant labor slack requires more — not less — government spending. Unfortunately, Republicans have successfully framed the debate so that spending cuts are inevitable, and the best one can hope for is that the White House and Congressional Democrats will hold down the size of the cuts.

"Clearly, it is not uncertainty about government that is impeding hiring; it is lack of work. And lack of work is due to the fallout from the financial crisis and recession. It stands to reason that government spending, job-creation programs and regulations to ensure that there isn’t another crash would help the economy and lead to more jobs. Reason, however, is in short supply." [9]

Destructive, anti-stimulus policies are not unique to the United States. In almost every European country, the powerful banks and financial institutions are insisting, successfully, that governments institute sharp austerity measures. These include, as in the the U.S., sharp attacks on public services and public sector workers, dismantling of many hard-fought pension, job security and other benefits, and soaring unemployment. The same destructive "medicine" that global capital, still dominated by U.S. financial interests, forced on developing countries and former socialist countries in the last two decades is now being applied to the developed capitalist countries. Resistance and solidarity are also growing on a world scale.

Class Interest

Reason, as the Times suggested, may be in short supply. But it is not because all the Tea Partiers and Republicans in Congress, the establishment think tank economists and media pundits, and the deficit hawks within the Obama administration are unreasonable, stupid, or can't count. It is not a question of reason. It is a question of class interest. As the early 20th century author and socialist Sinclair Lewis said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" [10]

Profits are rising, wealth and power are even more concentrated in a few dozen corporate empires and a few thousand ultra-rich families. The ruling class is profiting financially in this broken economy. They also hope to profit politically. By blocking effective recovery, they hope the Obama administration will get the blame. Further, after forcing the administration to accept harmful cuts as the price of keeping the government running, they can blame Obama for the bad effects of those cuts.

The potential game-changer is the class struggle. Six months ago, who would have thought that hundreds of thousands of U.S. workers would be marching, rallying, occupying state capitols, sitting in, in explicit defense of working class rights against corporate greed; that not only the leadership, but rank and file workers would be talking about class struggle and class unity; that the emerging slogan would be "we are one" explicitly calling for unity of employed, unemployed and retirees, youth and seniors, private sector and public sector, unions and community.

The attacks, launched by a right wing emboldened by electoral victories last November, have made clear to millions of workers that the crises they face are political as well as economic. The deficit is used as an excuse to accomplish political goals of destroying any concept that government exists to promote the general welfare. Health, education, safety, environment are all on the chopping block. The deficit is also used as an excuse to attack any government function that gets in the way of the capitalist class. (One minor example is Republican attempts to defund IRS enforcement, giving a green light to tax evasion that will cost many times in lost revenue.)

Political struggles ahead

Political and economic struggles are now focused on budget battles in Washington and state capitols. The newly-energized working class and broad mass movements will at best be able to limit the damage done by the rightward political shift this year. Defeating the right in the 2012 elections will be an essential part of reversing the destructive, anti-working class policies.

As long as the "deficit reduction" is the context for policy discussion, the best that can be hoped for is to limit the damage (See The Deficit Trap, Peoples World, Nov. 16 2010). [11] The economic and social security of our country, now and for future generations, cannot be met without focusing on real needs: useful and productive jobs providing health and education, safe and environmentally friendly infrastructure, renewable energy and clean, efficient transportation, with major research, development and production in the U.S. Such a program is achievable, along with a sustainable budget and rising living standards for the vast majority. It requires only that the unprecedented inequality in our nation's wealth be reversed, and that surplus wealth be applied to the public good instead of financial speculation and the export of jobs.

Notes:

1] http://eyeonhousing.wordpress.com/2011/03/25/real-gdp-growth-2010-fourth-quarter-third-estimate-revised-higher-but-the-future-is-uncertain/

2] Calculated Risk gives a good overview of economic indicators at http://cr4re.com/charts/charts.html

3 Initial unemployment claims peaked in early '09 above 600,000/wk. They are now (3/10/11) just under 400,000. Historically, the number has to drop below 350,000 for significant job growth, and near or below 300,000 for robust recovery. http://cr4re.com/charts/charts.html?Employment#category=Employment&chart=WeeklyClaimsMar102011.jpg

4] See JOLTS chart at http://cr4re.com/charts/charts.html?Employment#category=Employment&chart=JoltsJan2011.jpg

5] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/09/weekinreview/09powell.html

6] http://www.nelp.org/page/-/Justice/2011/UnbalancedGrowthFeb2011.pdf?nocdn=1

7] http://grijalva.house.gov/uploads/The%20CPC%20FY2012%20Budget.pdf

8] http://www.jsonline.com/news/statepolitics/111686184.html

9] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/04/opinion/04mon1.html

10] http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Upton_Sinclair

11] http://www.peoplesworld.org/the-deficit-trap/

Marxism in the Marketplace of Ideas

Mon, 02 May 2011 10:58:00 +0000

"The right words are worth a hundred regiments" - V.I. Lenin

In "Capitalist Ideology in Anti-Capitalist Politics" I observed the effect the dominant ideology, as defined by the capitalist class and its social system, has on many anti-capitalist forces in the United States and other places under capitalism's influence.

That article's primary focus was on the material effects of capitalist ideology and how it can be countered in action.

The focus of this piece is on how left wing forces can counter the influence of the dominant ideology in discourse, when engaged in action among others and in their publications.

In this time of great unrest it is important that left wing groups be able to use what material means they gain to shift people's mode of thought, replacing old assumptions which bind people to propositions limited by what seems possible in the political, economic, and social systems as they are, with new methods of thinking which lead them to challenge their assumptions and fight for the "future" many leftists assert "is possible".

This is a chance to lead.

Again, key to this is a basic understanding of what Marx observed in regarding ideology in The German Ideology and other works.

According to Marx and other materialists, the consciousness of people in any system is rooted in the environment in which they exist. Those who control the means of producing that environment are those who formulate the widespread consciousness of the people. This consciousness represents more than just what seem to be isolated opinions on certain issues, such as the legitimacy of global warming. Societies make-up socializes the individual and becomes internalized such that it becomes the mode of thought through which they judge nearly everything they encounter in the world.

In capitalist societies, the dominant consciousness is primarily controlled by the few people fortunate enough to own and direct the means of production. When this is observed, it becomes apparent that underlying the consciousness of many is ideology. In capitalism, capitalist ideology is the dominant ideology, and it frames peoples consciousness according to it's assumptions.

This is incredibly important for those who wish to propose an alternative to capitalism, as any communication concerning an alternative will be interpreted by most of those receiving it using the method of thinking capitalist ideology has given them. To keep one's message from being lost in translation requires an effort to break down the assumptions of capitalist ideology and to present the message so that the alternative ideology is, explicitly or implicitly, recognized as intended by those receiving it.

The need for such intentional use of language has been long recognized by those engaged in strategic communication within the boundaries of capitalist politics.

Liberal cognitive linguist George Lakoff documents this in his book Don't Think of an Elephant!

Written in response to the Democratic Party's inability to present a meaningful set of values independent of a stronger Republican set, Don't Think of an Elephant! is a basic guide to "framing" debate.

"Frames are mental structures that shape the way we see the world," writes Lakoff. "They are part of what cognitive scientists call the 'cognitive unconcious' -- structures in our brains that we cannot consciously access, but know by their consequences: the way we reason and what counts as common sense.... All words are defined in relation to conceptual frames."

This being understood, a well formed strategic message intentionally uses words which compose a frame.

Lakoff uses the phrase "tax relief" as an example. The mere combination of those two words assumes taxes are an affliction from which people have to be relieved.

Further, frames are based on values.

The reason conservatives rail against taxes for social programs can be traced to their idea that the society is comprised of isolated individuals, each of whom are solely responsible for their economic well-being. Progressives, on the other hand, recognize society as more than a mere collection of individuals, with different social groups and institutions which have policies reflecting those groups' disparate power relations.

There are certainly parallels between modes of thought and ideology and what Lakoff writes about messages being understood in relation to frames and those frames being based on values.

Framing is important to any political organization, but the use of frames is quite complex for those wishing to replace the entire dominant ideology. This is because the values on which frames rest, originating from the social situation as it exists now, are themselves understood in relation to the dominant ideology.

Indeed, Lakoff presents values as resting on moral differences, a view indicated in my previous article on ideology as often dependent on a subjective view of reality which largely ignores socialization as well as ideological influences' fluidity. Those who aim to replace the capitalist system must have a timeless theory with which to judge contemporary values.

The contemporary ideas of philosopher Slavoj Zizek can be coupled with Lakoff's ideas to compensate for the latter's oversight.

Drawing from Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, a book which owes much to the philosopher Antonio Gramsci, Zizek addresses the issue of people's conception of word's meanings and ideologies' role in determining them in his work The Sublime Object of Ideology.

Zizek explains that words like "peace" or "freedom" have much of their meaning determined by the context which ideology gives them.

This is fairly easily recognized the broader the concept addressed by the word. For example, the words "good" and "bad" are nearly meaningless without a context. "Peace" and "freedom" are not as open to interpretation, but are still vague enough that what they mean is reliant upon a person's mode of thought and the ideology behind it.

Drawing from Laclau and Mouffe, who are in turn using the terms rooted in a grander philosophical tradition, Zizek refers to these words as "floating signifiers" which can only be "anchored" by their relation to other ideas in an ideology, which becomes a "master signifier."

It is understood that what is at stake in ideological discourse is the interpretation of messages in the terms of a specific ideology – the way they are interpreted being set in a frame reflecting that ideology's mode of thought.

Zizek gives examples of a few word's meanings when "Communism" is the ideology acting as the master signifier: "'Freedom' is effective only through surmounting the bourgeois formal freedom, which is merely a form of slavery; the 'state' is the means by which the ruling class guarantees the the conditions of its rule; .... 'war' is inherent to class society as such; only the socialist revolution can bring about lasting 'peace'; and so forth."

What are the practical means the Communist can employ to further his or her ideology in discourse then?

We exist in an age in which even the greatest cynic often unknowingly assists in the propagation of capitalist ideology. To engage in revolutionary strategic communication now requires one to break down messages formulated using the dominant ideology while simultaneously building a new set of references which efficiently highlight where the dominant ideology's definition of a word contradicts the reality.

Observe the word "democracy," for the purpose of illustration.

Linked to "freedom," democracy is currently incomplete for the Communist. There are a great number of social institutions, most of them economic, in which the idea is not yet employed. To the average person using the mode of thought found in capitalist ideology though, we live in a society that is democratic.

Communists would do well to describe our current democracy as a "capitalist democracy," especially when conflicts arise in contemporary society which lay bare current differences in power between capitalists and all other people – where the assumed definition of democracy contradicts the lived experience. The controversial use of the police to forcefully remove a group of people from a capital building, for example, ought to be referred to as an aspect of capitalist democracy.

When the phrase "capitalist democracy" is repeatedly used in this way, the word democracy is broken down and a redefinition which better reflects reality is possible.

As describing the current system as a capitalist democracy immediately introduces the notion of different forms of democracy, the ability to effectively use the word democracy where it is not currently used grows.

It becomes easier of Communists to promote the idea of a "democratic economy" which is not yet realized. Further, the introduction of the idea of a democratic economy also implicitly observes that the current economy is not democratic.

This concept also links nicely with the idea that union representation stands for "democracy in the workplace." Cohesion is present and more and more words' concepts are affected.

"Freedom," an aspect of democracy, can also be transformed.

It has been said that, whenever a person spoke of freedom in his presence, Lenin always asked "freedom for who?"

This question was rooted in an observation Marx made in Capital. Capitalists' "free market" meant workers may be free to seek work, but are also "free" of the possessions (means of production) necessary to make a living. Capitalists benefit a great deal more from freedom defined as such, essentially claiming a "freedom to command."

By focusing on self-determination it is possible to show that the amount a person can do with their freedom is limited by secondary factors. A person whose parent's could not save money for his or her college, for example, does not have the same freedom to determine his or her future career as someone whose parent's could save. The capitalist that owns a majority of the commercial property in a certain city district has a great deal more freedom to determine what types of businesses are eventually built in that district than even the majority of people who live there, no matter who they elect to represent them.

In opposition to capitalists' freedom to command others, Communists stand for "equal freedom," focused on a net increase in people's self-determination and best understood philosophically as positive liberty.

Nearly every message can be broken down and redefined this way.

By recognizing and adapting to the fact that one's own messages are often interpreted in frames reflecting the mode of thought the current, dominant ideology gives people, one can communicate a great deal more effectively.

Such practice cannot replace activity taken to gain the material means necessary in producing our social environment, those institutions which produce media and otherwise, but it is an essential strategy to employ alongside that work.

(Author: Yes, this article's title was meant to be ironic).

Photo by The unnamed/c by 2.0/Flickr

It’s Not the S-Word, It’s the P-Word

Mon, 02 May 2011 10:57:00 +0000

It’s Not the S-Word, It’s the P-Word

There are two major human-made powers in the modern world: governments and corporations. Ostensibly, the role of government is to protect its citizens. To do so, it must be large enough to cover the many issues that threaten harm or which diminish the quality of life for its people. When it fails to protect, when it fails to bring about a certain minimum living standard for those it governs, it must be reformed or overthrown. If the government operates in a democracy, reform can be achieved through discussion, debate and ultimately by voting. If that doesn’t work, and all other peaceful methods have been exhausted, revolution may be justified.

Ostensibly the role of corporations is to satisfy its shareholders. In a capitalist economy that means maximizing profits. History bears out the fact that this role is often at the expense of citizens, since corporations are not beholden to them. They are not beholden to them because that is not their raison d'être. Since corporate leaders are not elected officials, the citizens who suffer from their decisions cannot appeal to them directly. More often than not they don’t even know who is responsible.

Historically, when corporate exploitation and abuse rose to a certain intolerable level, the other power – the government – stepped in. This stepping in effectively clipped the wings of such corporate maneuverings. Since corporations in this country operate in a democracy and since they must always contend with this other power, they were compelled to resort to subtler ways to exploit citizens, pushing up against the law but not transgressing it. But sooner or later their pushing went too far – their subtly was exposed and consequently opposed – and the government was compelled to step in again to curtail this new display of corporate power.

Thus we see the trend. Governments grow because corporations exploit more and more. The latter is responsible for the former’s far-reaching influence. If corporations behaved, the need to micro-manage, the need to come up with countless programs to protect citizens from capitalistic excesses would be unnecessary, and government would be proportionally smaller and less intrusive.

If government did not provide a safety net for its citizens, quite literally millions would simply be blown off the face of the Earth. Interestingly enough, such a pandemic would cause the culprits – the corporate elites – to suffer too. This is due to the law of parasitic behavior: if one is compelled to take and take and take until the host dies, this activity ultimately kills the parasite as well.

Since, as we have seen, the only entity powerful enough to prevent corporations from all out abuse is the government, it became incumbent upon corporate leaders to attempt to control government. Thus we now see billions of corporate dollars poured into the election process. Take a moment and ask yourself, why should the Koch brothers be interested in seeing that a particular Governor or Supreme Court Justice gets elected in Wisconsin? Answer: it is in their interest to do so. This clearly shows that corporations tacitly acknowledge the superior power of government. They know that government can affect their profits and so they stop at nothing to control government.

That’s the state of affairs today. The two powers which were formerly opposed are becoming one, more and more, with each election as mayors, governors, senators, and judges are associated to a greater and greater degree with the lobbyists who got them elected. As this becomes widespread, the role of government to protect its citizens is only ostensible. In reality, it endeavors to promote the interests of corporations. This is a major problem because corporate interests are almost always at odds with citizen interests.

One massive power means those in control of it can pursue their goals unchecked by any democratic process. In fact, the democratic process becomes a joke, a ruse, to keep the rabble – the citizens – thinking they do have a voice in determining what kind of world they live in. But the public is not buying it, as evidenced by the abysmal voter turn-out.

With all this in mind, let’s briefly consider the debate between socialism and the free-market.

Those who advocate the so-called free market do so in the name of freedom: the freedom to buy and sell as one sees fit. This is the basic philosophy of the Right and especially the Tea Party constituency of conservative ideology. Nothing should stand in the way of this freedom, and these people argue that socialism takes freedom away.

And they are right. But it should be pointed out that it does so for the citizens; it does so in order that we all have a decent standard of living. And when that occurs, we all have the same amount of freedom. In other words, it is egalitarian all the way: the same freedoms, the same opportunities for all. A strong socialist state should be equated with a strong protective role of government to meet the needs of its citizens across the board, uninfluenced by corporate shenanigans.

What the Tea Party fails to mention is the way capitalism takes freedom away. For it forces people to make choices they would rather not make, e.g. taking on a second job, shopping at Wal-Mart, working at a company only for economic reasons, coming out of retirement to make ends meet, throwing kids in daycare because both parents have to work, etc., etc. Again, this is because capitalism operates not for the citizens, but for a few corporate elites, and strictly to maximize profits for these elites.

Now, unless you are an anarchist you should understand that in the modern world one must give up some freedom in order to live safely, harmoniously – fairly. But given the two choices, which are associated with two very different p-words, it seems obvious which one is most beneficial to the average citizen.

Photo by PeoplesWorld.org

Poetry

Mon, 02 May 2011 08:35:00 +0000

And Then You Think

It’s like voting
for Republicans
year after year
and never making the connection

it ‘s like growing up in Lake Hiawatha
where the Indians were killed off
the polluted lake filled in
long ago

it’s like wondering
if Peace for Galilee means
the invasion of Lebanon
how come making love isn’t a war crime

it’s like the moon and the stars
as you say goodbye to your friend
and then head home to
separate ghettoes

it’s like learning it costs the same
to send a kid to prison as to college
so asking why the kid can’t
just be sent to college

its’s like the glitter of the rich
buying mazeratis
and the sound of the nothingness
trickling down

it’s like a benefit
for breast cancer research
sponsored by the Dow Chemical
Company

It’s like a war
from the folks who brought you
the war
to end all wars

It’s like watching the news one night
amid the layoffs of your life
and stumbling upon
the presidential candidates debate:

“I’m running for President
because I believe
with strong leadership
America’s glorious days

will always lie ahead of us,
just as they lie
ahead of us
now…..”

the way things sound
smooth and deep,

and then you think ---

--by Chris Butter. Originally published in Blue Collar Review (Spring 2011). Used with permission.

Remember

(In memory of Juliano Mer Khamis)

our paths
never crossed

work
mind
ideology
daily
I’m sure

artist
teacher
director
advocate
intellect
father
son
funny man
much more

5 bullets
casings on the floor
blood painting the pavement
masked gunman gone
people chattering
fingers pointing
Israeli media
and politicians
sharpening knives

won’t let him rest
five minutes
before digging in
for points
serving an agenda
he fought daily

won’t let his kids
process
breathe
mourn
break down
gasp for breath

don’t know
what runs through
someone’s veins
before that trigger
is pulled
what excuse
what idea
allowed
oxygen to enter
that motion

wanted to meet you
shake hands
share coffee
say
keep working
it is appreciated
it is loved
it is felt
now
rest in peace
rest assured
your memory will
be a theater
open nights
until justice is served
freedom is brought
and a stage is set
that pities this landscape

--by Remi Kanazi. Kanazi is a Palestinian-American poet, writer, and activist living in New York City. He is the editor of Poets For Palestine and the author of the newly released collection of poetry and CD, Poetic Injustice: Writings on Resistance and Palestine. For more information, visit www.PoeticInjustice.net.

Book Review: Baghdad Mon Amour

Tue, 26 Apr 2011 15:38:00 +0000

Baghdad Mon Amour
Selected writings of Salah Al Hamdani
Curbstone Press, 2008

From his imprisonment in Saddam Hussein's infamous prison fortress Abu Ghraib to his exile in France, the life and poetry of Salah Al Hamdani register a consistent defiance of tyranny and dictatorship, war and imperialism.

Born in Baghdad in the 1950s to a poor family with many children, Al Hamdani developed an early interest in words but could find no steady employment. At the age of 17 he joined the Iraqi army, one avenue for social mobility available to Iraq's poorest people in those days.

In the army, Al Hamdani joined a Marxist faction even as Baath Party leaders in the army, such as Saddam Hussein, rose to claim power with the aid of U.S. agents. In this period, Al Hamdani was arrested and imprisoned for political reasons. After several months at the hands of torturers, Al Hamdani was expelled from the army and sought intermittent work in Baghdad's poorest neighborhoods.

In those neighborhoods, Al Hamdani encountered writers and books. He eagerly consumed the works of great European writers from Rimbaud and Marx to Camus. The writing he produced in this period only got him into more trouble and caused his political enemies to try to kill him. In an act of self-preservation, under guise of a brief trip to Lebanon, Al Hamdani fled to France in 1975.

Friends in Paris helped him enter the University of Vincennes where he studied theatre. He took jobs acting and launched a career as an actor in cinema and theatre. By the 1980s he served as a representative of the Iraq League of Democratic Artists, Writers and Journalists in Exile. He published books on poetry as well as several collections of poetry, including Bedouin Throats and The Cemetery of Birds. His later poetry, including Baghdad Mon Amour (which includes several prose pieces and stories) were written in French and translated into English.

He became an active supporter of the Palestinian cause in the 1980s and the 1990s. When George W. Bush launched his war on Iraq under fabricated conditions in 2003, Al Hamdani joined with thousands of others on the streets of Paris to protest, earning him physical attacks from pro-Saddam members of Iraq's expatriate community in France. Al Hamdani returned to Baghdad in 2004 where he wrote some of the poems for Baghdad Mon Amour.

"The Crossing," the prose piece which opens the collection, is a lament on exile. It opens with a recollection of his impoverished youth: "My days of misery were not light-hearted, but they were alive." And it continues with a recurring obsession with nothingness and loss: "Oh Baghdad! I wanted to come to your aid, garner your patience, save your house, gather in your tears, uproot your mourning and protect your laughter. But, you see, I am only good at raking up a child's dream. Without ceasing, exile tracks my every step." Alienated from his home and even his language, this deep sorrow affiliated with crossing over the border between home and exile remains a central theme of Baghdad Mon Amour.

Among the most beautiful and stirring in this collection are lines such as these:

From "Reflection" (April 2004):

…
I detest the banners of victory
and the coffins
set down in silence
our eyes captive

I dream of my children on one leg,
standing like storks ...

From "Here, from Baghdad, we say to you that we are alive":

…
If you were a woman, Baghdad
you would be my river of sorrow
and I would know the dying of love

I would at last see your immense eyelids
amid a store of solitude
where no one knows us
but love is learned from taking measure of life
from man's hate
from death as well.

And, addressed to the American poet Sam Hamill, who edited the moving Poets Against the War collection in 2003, from "Farewell to Arms" (2003):

...Friend
take this body of an Iraqi exile
with its history and its fears
offer it in sacrifice to the assassins of Mesopotamia, our
mother
like a torment of light riveted to the rain
then tell them there are too many child soldiers here
buried under the starred flag of the night.

Why the Rich Get Richer, and Other Truth Stories

Fri, 22 Apr 2011 08:54:00 +0000

Here are some stories I’ve heard:

The truth is that the rich get richer because they’re smarter and bolder than the rest of us.

But do you want to know the truth? It’s luck not smarts because if it were smarts, every smart guy would be rich and every stupid guy would be poor or just getting by. The real truth is that the rich get rich because they’re in the right place at the right time. From then on, compound interest does it all.

Truthfully speaking, every means of redistributing the wealth available that would prevent a democracy becoming a plutocracy has been eroded, except thievery, and the wealthy run the game there.

If truth be told, the rich will themselves to be rich – like Oprah -- and they keep on getting richer because they never doubt themselves. They have a Will to Be Rich.

But here’s the truth of it, the rich get in there and compete with great savvy and strategy, like on the reality TV show Survivor, and they come out the winner because they out-strategize everyone else. Think of a general in a war: the rich are skilled Napoleon tacticians while the rest of us take orders.

People that aren’t rich can’t handle the truth but it’s this: rich people see business opportunities where the rest of us are content just to earn a salary.

Whatever anyone may say, the truth is that rich people pass their wealth and property on from one generation to another so every generation starts off privileged and gets a head start on the working and middle classes.

Let’s go to the foundation of things where the truth is. What do you find? It’s in the genes. Rich people have the sort of alpha/uber genes that make them rich.

This is truth and not truthiness or truism: we’re in a zero sum Monopoly game here in the U.S. and it’s going to happen that pretty soon all the cash and all the property will be in one guy’s hands. We don’t play Socialist Monopoly; it doesn’t exist.

The bottom line truth of it is that we all like the rich to get richer because some day when we’re rich—and that’s just a lottery ticket away -- we want to keep getting richer.

It’s a hard truth to accept but the rich get richer because they shine in the light of God’s favor as chosen for salvation while the poor and struggling bear the dark marks of their eventual perdition and damnation.

But here is a truth that cannot be denied: the rich may get richer in this mortal vale but it will be as hard for them to bear their riches into paradise as for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. Meanwhile, the poor and meek of this world will earn the riches of paradise.

When you step back and look you see not one Truth but a gaggle of truth stories, some on totally different tracks, some conflicting with each other. Of course, if one of the stories happens to be your story of what truth is, it isn’t a story, but The Truth. You go to www.truthout.com for the truth only if you are already in a “truth story” that says this is where the truth is. The truth is out here and not there. You tune into to Cenk and not O’Reilly or vice versa. You go to where your truth story says the truth can be found, a truth that fits into the truth story you are already in, a truth story which is never a story but The Truth. Knowing what the truth is and knowing how to find it is something you’ve probably never thought it was: a vicious circle.

Americans prefer to reason their way to personal truths, which can have social or even universal applicability but they need not. It doesn’t matter. Truths made to hold in society matter a great deal less than personally discovered truths. Reason does the discovering. It sorts and sifts through until it finds The Truth. Not only is our reasoning faculties free to do this but we are free to choose what reason reveals as truth. No outside force lobbies us away from our personal choice nor infects our reliable reasoning.

If you’re in this sort of “mindset” – and who isn’t in our design-your-own-reality Millennial clime? – you can easily winnow through the responses as to why the rich get richer and you can find the truth. You’re in – if you don’t mind my saying so – a “truth story” regarding reason and choice that enables you to do that. We won’t quibble if you want to call your “truth story” The Truth because none of us are prepared to descend into a chaos of truth stories we can’t climb out of so as to reach some Archimedean point where we can leverage truth from falsehood. Nevertheless, I am not deeply embedded in a truth story which contains chapter and verse on reliable reasoning and unconstrained free choice. But I am deeply embedded in a truth story that is in pursuit of truth stories that keep the Many embedded in a reality in which the Few get richer and the Many are retrogressing to feudal serf conditions.

What are the stories we tell ourselves not only in regard to why the rich get richer and the poor get poorer but why Wisconsin protests won’t rise to Egypt-like revolt? Why we won’t give up nuclear energy even while the nuclear catastrophe in Japan reaches apocalyptic levels? Why increasing global warming has less and less impact on us? Why our wars in which “volunteers” continue to die have less and less impact on u? Why an economic collapse manufactured by wealth speculators needs to be salvaged by savaging the working and middle classes? Why we can disassociate the amazing story of former American class mobility from the struggles of unions and unionization, from the hard won victories of collective bargaining? Why beneficiaries now and in the future of Medicare and Social Security must be steadily badgered into accepting the inevitability of failure and collapse of these programs? Why the word “public” produces as much disdain in 90% of the population, who benefit greatly from all public programs, as it does in the wealthy 10%, who have no need of such programs? Why we continue to accept the “truth story” of the wealthy that no class warfare exists even though that warfare, unilaterally conducted, has, since Reagan, brought the middle class to its knees alongside an underclass already flat on their backs?

The truth stories we are in concoct our answers. Some of these are in motion and some persist and hold on leading us to think that such longevity is proof of their truthfulness. Political campaign strategies and marketing strategies are engaged in tracking these stories and do so without being impeded by what’s empirically verifiable or ideologically faithful or logically anticipated. Such tracking, however, has progressively taken a back seat to the actual fabrication of “truth stories.” Stories now reach us online as well as offline so you might say the capacity of political lobbyists and Madison Avenue marketers to reach us has gone from uni-verse to multi-verse, from single dwelling to duplex to multi-plex. Why track what “truth stories” people are in if you can produce them and thereby, like a Celestial Entity, know the minds you yourself have created? It’s the simplest access and it is now done with astounding success.

If I believed reason was more than what Nietzsche called it, that is, a strumpet who works both sides of the street, works for power, bends to power, I would have the means to reject in a flash the possible existence of a great many “truth stories” which are in fact now in existence. But how do you get out of a “truth story” you yourself are already in as a character, a truth story you yourself tell, a truth story through which you pursue your understanding of the world? How do you stop the lobbyists from lobbying for space in your brain? The marketers from selling you what you then call your thoughts? I think you have to get to know the field you are playing on, or more truthfully, the field upon which you are being played. Once we begin to search for the stories that have attached us to what we hold true as well as attaching us to our ways of knowing what is true, we have a chance of taking back our own minds and with that done, taking back our share of our democracy.

We have the numbers; those economically wounded and hurting plus those already in the ER vastly outnumber those who have benefited from a “trickle down” economics and politics, from the deregulation of everything that would have kept the wealth gap in the post- WWII to Reagan era level, from the collapse of an effective progressive income tax, and from the hi-speed expansion of corporate “reachability” power to nothing short of the brain washing of individuals and the corruption of egalitarian democratic processes. Unfortunately, the “truth stories” of the wealthy few have inundated the minds and hearts of the many, tsunami-like. But the truth story the Tokyo Electric Power Corporation tried to tell gave way before the overwhelming reality of increasing radioactivity. We all have to believe that eventually a story of the truth gets out that does justice to the reality we have framed for ourselves, that eventually what we believe and say corresponds to a state of affairs that exists, to conditions here “on the ground” that are actually going on. Unfortunately, too many are deep within “truth stories” that have little or no connection to a present state of affairs that is oppressing them mightily.

Human See, Human Do

Thu, 21 Apr 2011 10:57:00 +0000

Where does human prejudice come from? What causes one group of humans to dislike and look down on another? Is this phenomenon inherent in the human species, or is it the result of cultural conditioning? What do scientists (or maybe "scientists") have to say about this?

Well, some scientists think they have the answer, as reported in ScienceDaily online on March 18, 2011 in an article entitled "Human Prejudice Has Ancient Evolutionary Roots."

As an introduction SD tells us that monkeys show prejudice "like humans" and that they are also "flexible" when letting others join their group. Now that monkeys can be territorial and hostile to outsiders is not disputable but that this is "like humans" is disputable. Now if the expression means outwardly and superficially similar – as in "humans make love just like monkeys" that is one thing, but without knowing the inner cognitive state of monkey lovers it seems negatively anthropomorphic to say their love making is the "same" as humans. In the same way it is probably not correct to draw equivalencies between monkey and human "prejudice."

OK, what do the scientists actually have to say about this? SD reports that researches at Yale, headed by Laurie Santos, a psychologist, by conducting "ingenious experiments" have shown that monkeys treat outsiders "with the same suspicion and dislike" as humans do. This leads to the suggestion the "roots" of human prejudice and inter group conflict go deep into our evolutionary past.

"Pretty much every conflict in human history," Dr Santos said, "has involved people making distinctions on the basis of who is a member of their own race, religion, social class, and so on. The question we are interested in is: Where do these types of group distinctions come from?" Well, one answer may be that they come from the fact that there are really different religions and social classes. We should also note that some of the greatest conflicts in history were between members of the same "race" (a really outmoded term for a scientist to be using) conflicts between various European nations for example; the same religion (conflicts between various Christian nations, also within Islam) and the same social class as in the feudal conflicts between various kings and nobilities with each other. There are even many examples of people with the same "race", religion and social class fighting with each other. So insiders are just as likely to suffer "prejudice" as outsiders as far as humans are concerned.

Dr. Santos agrees that human culture is a factor, but she also thinks 25 million years of evolutionary development is also a factor. She came to this conclusions by studying the rhesus macaques [Macaca mulatta] living on Monkey Island (Cayo Santiago) off the coast of Puerto Rico. These are the descendants Old World monkeys who were transplanted to Monkey Island from India in 1938. They have the island to themselves and they serve as a research station for scientists. The website states, "Because of almost 70 years of research at this field site, subjects are well habituated to human experimenters." They also get free monkey chow provided by the scientists. Presumably the monkeys act the same way as their ancestors in the forests of India who were not habituated to humans and getting free monkey chow.

Santos' group gave various psychological tests to the monkeys and determined that, by looking at pictures of other monkeys, both in group and out group, monkeys looked longer at the pictures of out group monkeys and this suggested that they "spontaneously" detected strangers. This is because there is a "well known tendency" for animals to look longer at "novel or frightening things than at familiar or friendly things." Well, humans do that too I would think, so maybe the scientists are on firm ground in this respect.

Neha Mahajan, a team member, stated: "What made this result even more remarkable [why is a "well known tendency" remarkable?] is that monkeys in this population move around from group to group, so some of them who were 'outgroup' were previously 'in-group.' And yet, the result holds just as strongly for monkeys who have transferred groups only weeks earlier, suggesting that these monkeys are sensitive to who is currently to be thought of as an insider or an outsider. In other words, although monkeys divide the world into 'us' versus 'them,' they do so in a way that is flexible and is updated in real time." What is "flexible" about reacting just as strongly about former in, and now out, group monkeys as about monkeys that have always been out group. It seems to me this a "rigid" response: You are all the same, outies!

Using a test they devised based on the IAT (Implicit Association Test) which claims to test humans for "implicit biases" against others, the research group concluded, according to SD, that, "Like humans, monkeys tend to spontaneously view ingroup members positively and outgroup members negatively."

As a result of the Monkey Implicit Association Test they devised, the researchers think "the roots" of human prejudice may be 25 million years in the making since that is how long it has been since we shared a common ancestor with the rhesus monkeys.

Mahzarin Banaji, another group member, says, "Social psychologists introduced the world to the idea that the immediate situation is hugely powerful in determining behavior, even intergroup feelings. Evolutionary theorists have made us aware of our ancestral past. In this work, we weave the two together to show the importance of both these influences at work."

Santos herself concludes that "The bad news is that the tendency to dislike outgroup members appears to be evolutionarily quite old, and therefore may be less simple to eliminate than we'd like to think. [This reinforces those who think prejudice, racism, etc., are "natural" rather than learned behaviors]. The good news, though, is that even monkeys seem to be flexible [we saw above there is no basis for this statement] about who counts as a group member. If we humans can find ways to harness this evolved flexibility, it might allow us to become an even more tolerant species [assuming we are a "tolerant" species in the first place]." Anyway, being tolerant means respecting people in other groups not just accepting them into your own – "How white of you" does not indicate tolerance.

It should be noted that if the monkeys can simply change groups when they feel like it, and be accepted, there is no "prejudice" at all going on. Before I give up the view that human prejudice is 99 percent cultural I would like to see both scientists produce a "prejudice gene" and historians provide an example of monkeys gassing each other. A friendly welcoming manner is just as likely as prejudice toward the "other" – cf. how the Caribs welcomed Columbus, granted this was their mistake, and Squanto helped out the Pilgrims. Native Americans had to learn to dislike Europeans.

As for the Implicit Association Test, its critics charge that it lacks empirical evidence of its efficacy and that its reliability measure is low – i.e., when the same subjects are retested they give different responses. The IAT is not therefore a really strong scientific tool to use for the claims made on the basis of its results. What is true of the IAT would follow for the Monkey IAT as well.

A final quote from a Science News article: William von Hippel a psychologist at the University of New South Wales has said, "Rarely has a methodological tool garnered such strong adherents and detractors. The IAT should be vigorously researched and debated, but we still do not really understand what it reveals."

Photo by Salim Virji/cc by 2.0/Flickr

Relationship Problems: Evaluating the Communist Party's 1st Annual Conference

Thu, 21 Apr 2011 08:47:00 +0000

One of the most important talking points I took away from the CPUSA national conference this past weekend was the need to build relationships before outwardly trying to organize people into direct action. This is something that I have personally struggled with in the region where I live which is largely conservative, and even those who subscribe to a more liberal mindset take away misleading facets of ideology from mainstream liberal mouthpieces.

Without getting into minute specifics of worldviews, the most pervasive that I face is that of rugged individualism, or pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps.

Indeed, the reality we live in proves this to be false. No one person is successful on his/her own merits. Even people who purport this train of thought to be true, in lesser-populated areas like mine, especially, will borrow something of their neighbor’s to get a job done; they will barter services in lieu of paying cash for household, vehicle, or farm equipment repairs. They form close friendships with neighbors and help each other with the tasks of raising children. Yet, this myth persists that all was attained by their own hands.

For reasons that the ruling class has successfully embedded within the structure, it is much more desirable to claim success by “going it alone” when that is never the case. We are social, interdependent beings. This is not a popular concept to admit to.

I do not need to go on about all of this—people who struggle to organize and raise consciousness are well aware of these things. However, we are not free from the pull of these thoughts; it is in the culture which we live and breathe—which is us, essentially—it is broadcast to us in a myriad of ways. It is in our language.

When it comes to understanding people, many of us will try to relate our own experiences to another’s to try to find some common ground. While this is not necessarily a bad thing in itself, it can sometimes lead to discounting another’s own personal struggles in an attempt to “hook” them for whatever cause we may be promoting.

For instance, is it possible for me, a person who has benefited from the color of my skin in many life experiences, to truly understand what a person of color has been through in trying to remain gainfully employed or accepted by white majorities? Likewise, is it just of a white male to tell me that he understands that women are still a marginalized group while going on to use sexist language against members of his own gender who display more “feminine” qualities?

These common uses of language left unexamined actually work against us when we are trying to organize. They are essentially stereotypes which prevent us from forming a more unified front.

To try to illustrate this point, I will use an anecdote from my own experience. While conferencing with a group of like-minded people discussing ways in which to organize, this question came up: “How do we attract more women into our groups?” Another participant answered, “Perhaps we should offer a free pair of shoes to each new female member.” Instantly appalled, and with a continuing barrage of laughs coming from the other male participants, I snapped back about how sexist that sort of comment is. Because of my frustration with this, I failed in not breaking down the specifics of why such a thing is uncalled for and how it is ultimately divisive, driving away the population they wish to recruit more of.

Unfortunately, the education of the more privileged of our society often rests on those who are oppressed and/or discriminated against by those same members.

First of all, such a stereotype is plain silly. I know many males who are much more of the “clotheshorse” than myself or many of my female friends.

Second, someone who claims radical politics should always be open to dialectic and study without relying on tired cliches to garner support from people who are already involved with their organization. What is to be examined here? How about the fact that women, as a class, have been targeted not only as objectified commodities themselves, but also as the class who should not worry their little heads beyond shopping and consuming products specifically aimed at them.

The irony of attitudes such as these is that while the people who continue to brush them off and treat them as mere jokes are essentially saying to women that hey, it’s okay for you to leave your own habits unexamined in purchasing these trifles that I am going to mock you for anyway.

If one is preaching the fact that one would like to see more of this or that group involved without giving an honest look into how one uses the accepted vernacular, then no amount of recruitment will be fruitful. It is certainly not acceptable to lump different socially constructed races with preferences for consumables—why would it be okay to do that with another group?

What is important to recognize in building solidarity is the limits of our own thought. This is not a new concept, and it certainly shouldn’t be shied away from just because we might find new insights into ourselves that may be uncomfortable. This sort of introspection can help us rid ourselves of the imposed shame larger society perpetuates and take a more honest look at what we are facing. Again, it is a task that we must face together.

All of these different structures, these modes of thought encouraged by institutions that uphold the status quo, are alienating and create prisons of the mind. None of us are exempt from this, and quite frankly, we only hold blame when we ignore these facts and refuse to look further down the rabbit hole than we already have. This is not to say that I believe that comrades I interact with are largely ignorant of these things, but that we should keep them in mind when we personally interact with people while building relationships. How do we repeat these structures in interpersonal communications with others? The links I have included provide insights into these problems, but it is up to us to develop reflexive thought processes that take into account the ways in which we inadvertently build barriers that prevent us from attaining solidarity.

Photo by WeNews/cc by 2.0/Flickr

Consequences of the Premature Socialization of Agriculture in the USSR

Thu, 07 Apr 2011 09:34:00 +0000

Communists need not regard the shift from a centrally planned socialist economy to a socialist-oriented market economy by China and Vietnam as a retreat from the path of socialist development. To understand why this is so, it is necessary to look at the timing of the abandonment of market relations in agriculture, industry, and trade within the process of socialist development. I will focus here primarily on agriculture in the Soviet Union.

It should not be surprising that those inspired by the spirit of revolutionary Marxism should be eager to realize their dream of a communist society as quickly as possible. In May 1918, Lenin called for a slowdown in the process of nationalization then in full force. To the call of the Left Communists that “the systematic use of the means of production is conceivable only if a most determined policy of socialisation is pursued,” Lenin replied:

Today, only a blind man could fail to see that we have nationalised, confiscated, beaten down and put down more than we have had time to count. The difference between socialisation and simple confiscation is that confiscation can be carried out by “determination” alone, without the ability to calculate and distribute properly, whereas socialisation cannot be brought about without this ability. (1974a, 334)

Lenin noted that the socioeconomic structures of the Russian economy consisted of patriarchal elements (mainly natural – that is, subsistence – peasant farming), small commodity production (including the majority of peasants selling their grain), private capitalism, state capitalism, and socialism (335–36). Lenin later (in 1921) described the essence of state capitalism as an economic relationship between the Soviet government and a capitalist under which

the latter is provided with certain things: raw materials, mines, oilfields, minerals, or ... even a special factory. The socialist state gives the capitalist its means of production such as factories, mines and materials. The capitalist operates as a contractor leasing socialist means of production, making a profit on his capital and delivering a part of his output to the socialist market. (1973, 296–97)

Soon the civil war forced a switch in economic organization to what became known as “war communism.” In 1921, Lenin introduced the New Economic Policy (NEP), under which market relations were restored and requisition (that is, seizure) of grain from the peasants was replaced by a tax in kind. The peasants were then allowed to market any surplus that remained after the tax. While he saw NEP as a short-term measure, he made no predictions regarding its duration. Earlier, in 1918, after first projecting the utilization of state capitalism for socialist development, he reminded his Left Communist critics that

the teachers of socialism spoke of a whole period of transition from capitalism to socialism and emphasised the “prolonged birth-pangs” of the new society. And this new society is again an abstraction which can come into being only by passing through a series of varied, imperfect and concrete attempts to create this or that socialist state. (1974a, 341)

Although the land was nationalized, the peasant families retained the right to work it and own their means of production and the right to retain or market agricultural products after paying a tax in kind. Moreover, the wealthier peasants (kulaks) continued to employ restricted amounts of peasant labor. Because the peasants constituted the majority of the population, Lenin continually stressed that the dictatorship of the proletariat is the direction of policy by the proletariat in alliance with the middle and poor peasants (1973).

After Lenin’s death, the CPSU, under Stalin’s leadership, pursued Lenin’s moderate course of implementing the dictatorship of the proletariat in the framework of this alliance. It successfully resisted the demands of the Left Opposition, led initially by Trotsky, later joined by Zinoviev, for large-scale expropriation of grain from the peasants to provide resources for rapid industrialization and for greater material support for revolutionary movements abroad on the grounds that it was impossible to build socialism in one country.

The Central Committee continued the tradition established by Lenin that those taking a position strongly opposed by the majority should continue to retain positions of responsibility as long as they were willing to implement Party policies. In July 1927, Stalin placed the question of the expulsion of Trotsky and Zinoviev on the agenda of a Central Committee meeting, but lacked the votes and settled for a warning (McNeal 1988, 104). He raised the question again in October in view of their continued factional activity. Trotsky and Zinoviev were then removed from the Central Committee, but not from Party membership (105). In November, Stalin claimed that reliable evidence showed the opposition had been planning a coup during the celebration of the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution, but called it off because the Party was ready to deal with it. The Trotskyites and Zinovievites did, however, organize their own street demonstrations on 7 November, with their own slogans (History 1939, 285). On 14 November, the Central Committee expelled Trotsky and Zinoviev from the Party; Kamenov and other members of the opposition were expelled from the Central Committee. In November or early December, the Politburo rejected Stalin’s subsequent call for their arrest (McNeal 1989, 105–6).

The Fifteenth Party Congress in December 1927 again overwhelmingly rejected the position of the Left Opposition. Seventy-five leading members of the opposition (including Kamenov) were expelled from the Party. The next day, the Zinoviev group, but not Trotsky and his supporters, submitted a statement in which they acknowledged their violation of Party discipline and the incorrectness of their views. The Congress required individual statements for reinstatement, after which six months time must pass to ensure that they were conforming to pledges of compliance with Party policy (Popov 1934, 327–28).

The Politburo remained accountable to the Central Committee. Strong disagreements were tolerated without personal recrimination. Within the Party, Stalin’s emerging tendency to physical repression of opposition was constrained by the Politburo. There were limits to this constraint, however; Trotsky and many of his supporters who did not request readmission were deported to Kazakhstan and other regions of the USSR. Trotsky continued from afar his efforts to maintain an organized opposition and was expelled from the USSR in 1929.

The Fifteenth Party Congress took two major steps intended to form the basis for socialist development of the economy: acceleration of collectivization of agriculture and the introduction of a five-year plan for economic development in a framework of centralized economic planning. Although the rationale for both these measures needs further discussion, I limit myself here to the collectivization of agriculture.

The Russian peasants wanted the land nationalized so that it would not be taken away from them as it had been under the overthrown feudal-landlord system. They did not, however, want it to be converted into state farms on which they would be employed as wage workers as an agricultural proletariat. They wanted family land-use rights along with the right to inheritance.

The land socialization law of 19 February 1918, although granting use of agricultural land to “individual families and persons,” also prescribed:

the development of collective farming as more advantageous from the point of view of economy of labour and produce, at the expense of individual farming, with a view to transition to socialist farming (Article 11, paragraph e). (cited by Lenin [1974c, 308])

Lenin exercised extreme caution on the question, preferring to use the term cooperatives rather than collective farming:

The NEP is an advance, because it is adjustable to the level of the most ordinary peasant and does not demand anything higher of him. But it will take a whole historical epoch to get the entire population into the work of the co-operatives through NEP. At best we can achieve this in one or two decades. Nevertheless, it will be a distinct historical epoch, and without this historical epoch, without universal literacy, without a proper degree of efficiency, without training the population sufficiently to acquire the habit of book-reading, and without the material basis for this, without a certain sufficiency to safeguard against, say, bad harvests, famine, etc. – without this we shall not achieve our object. (1974b, 470)

The Fourteenth Party Congress in 1925 set socialist industrialization as the focus for the next stage of socialist construction. The next three years saw the beginning of many major construction projects, including the world’s largest hydroelectric dam (on the Dnieper River), the Turkistan-Siberian Railway, the Stalingrad Tractor Works, and ZIS automobile works.

By 1926–27, the main indicators for Soviet agricultural production exceeded the prewar level. The standard of living of the peasantry greatly improved. Despite the overall gain in agricultural production, the gross yield of grain was 91 percent of the prewar level, while the market share of the grain was a mere 37 percent of the prewar figure (History 1939, 256). Despite the growth of industrial production, the growing peasant demand for textiles, shoes, agricultural tools, and other products could not be satisfied because the industrial investments were tilted in favor of heavy industry and toward building up the national industrial infrastructure (electrification, transport, etc.). At the end of 1927, the manufacture of consumer goods was only 1 to 2 percent higher than the previous year, while the after-tax peasant income from the sale of grain sold to the state was up by 31 percent (Medvedev 1989, 216). The well-to-do peasants accumulated a great deal of currency, but the goods they wished to buy were not available. These principal producers of marketable grain—the kulaks and richer middle peasants—had no need to accumulate more banknotes and either stored their grain to wait for higher prices or reduced the acreage of sown grain. The poorer peasants preferred to increase their own personal consumption in face of the lack of products to buy. As a result, there was not enough grain to feed the urban population and for export abroad to provide foreign currency for importing machinery needed for industrialization.

In December 1927, in his report to the Fifteenth Party Congress, Stalin declared that the way out

is to turn the small and scattered peasant farms into large united farms based on the common cultivation of the soil, to introduce collective cultivation of the soil on the basis of a new and higher technique. The way out is to unite the small and dwarf peasant farms gradually but surely, not by pressure, but by example and persuasion, into large farms based on common, co-operative, collective cultivation of the soil with the use of agricultural machines and tractors and scientific methods of intensive agriculture. There is no other way out. (History 1939, 288)

Was this really the only way out for an agricultural economy that still lacked the means for mechanization? Toward the end of the 1970s, Vietnam, concerned about the slow growth of agricultural production in the absence of mechanized agriculture, gave its peasants, then organized into collective farms, the right to return to family farming. The peasants overwhelmingly chose this option (Marquit 2002). In 1981, China reorganized its agriculture from collective farming in the communes to family farming.

Even in the industrialized capitalist countries with their highly mechanized agriculture, family farms—not large-scale corporate farms—predominate in grain production, for both economic and cultural reasons.

Marxist theory has traditionally viewed peasants, once they move from subsistence farming to the production of a surplus for the market, as petty bourgeois. Trotsky even considered the peasants as natural enemies of socialism. A fundamental difference exists, however, between the peasant as a petty bourgeois and the urban petty bourgeois. Peasants have deep cultural-historical roots to the land they have traditionally tilled. They do not view themselves as entrepreneurs, and in this sense, they are a class in themselves with interests coinciding more with the working class than with big capital. For example, in the United States, right-wing political leaders raise arguments against farm subsidies on the grounds that the government has no business subsidizing unsuccessful businesses. Farmers who are forced by the agribusiness monopolies to sell their grain at prices below the cost of production actually are not failed business people, but victims of capitalist exploitation. In my home state of Minnesota, where we have 100,000 family farmers, the Minnesota Farmers Union—a progressive farmers’ organization—has established a close political alliance with the state’s labor movement, which in turn supports (as does the Communist Party USA) federal subsidies for farmers when the price they receive for their products is below the cost of production.

Why is grain being produced by 100,000 highly mechanized family farms in Minnesota, rather than by corporate farms? Despite mechanization, grain farming requires dawn-to-dusk labor that can be organized more cost-effectively by putting family members to work for long hours on land to which they are deeply attached culturally rather than by employing a landless rural proletariat.

While collective labor is a necessary precondition for the development of a truly socialist consciousness, it does not necessarily follow that collectivization of agriculture was the best path to increase marketable grain production under the conditions of technological underdevelopment that prevailed in the Soviet Union at the end of the 1920s. The primary problem in 1927 about the shortage of marketable grain, however, was not the technological organization of grain production, but the lack of incentives for the peasants to produce and market more grain.

The decision of the Fifteenth Congress of the CPSU to accelerate collectivization was based on more than ensuring increased grain production. It was anticipated that collectivization would have an ideological impact in developing a socialist consciousness among the peasants. Also important was that collectivization would make it more difficult for peasants to deceive tax collectors on the size of the harvest and it would eliminate the hoarding of grain by individual peasants for later sale at higher prices, thereby making more grain available for purchase by the state.

A Fifteenth Party Congress resolution also gave the following directive:

To develop further the offensive against the kulaks and to adopt a number of new measures which would restrict the development of capitalism in the countryside and guide peasant farming towards Socialism. (History 1939, 189)

The peasants were not to be coerced into joining the collectives. Loans and promises of machinery and other aid were to be used as inducements. Collectivization was not to be an excuse for reverting to the forcible requisitioning of grain as had been advocated by the Left Opposition. Roy Medvedev writes that at the Fifteenth Party Congress, Vyacheslav Molotov, then already the Politburo member closest to Stalin, “declared that those who proposed a ‘forced loan’ from the peasantry were enemies of the alliance between the workers and peasants; they were proposing the ‘destruction of the Soviet Union.’ At that point Stalin called out “Correct!” (Medvedev 1989, 218). Referring to the resolution on restricting the kulaks, Stalin cautioned:

Those comrades are wrong who think that we can and should do away with the kulaks by administrative fiat, by the GPU: write the decree, seal it, period. That's an easy method, but it won’t work. The kulak must be taken by economic measures, in accordance with Soviet legality. (cited in Medvedev 1989, 217)

Mikoyan’s proposals for increasing grain procurement were to correct the imbalance between prices for manufactured goods and those for agricultural products and to deliver increased supplies of low-priced manufactured goods to villages even at the cost of temporary shortages in the cities. Mikoyan’s proposals were incorporated into the congress resolutions (218).

Once the congress was over, Stalin, flushed with the victory of having defeated the challenge to his leadership from the Left Opposition, immediately reversed course. Medvedev writes:

Stalin made a sudden sharp turn “to the left” in agricultural policy. He began to put into effect the forced requisition of grain that the entire party had just rejected as “adventurist.” In late December, Stalin sent out instructions for the application of extraordinary measures against the kulaks.... Then on January 6, 1928, Stalin issued a new directive, extremely harsh in tone and content, which ended with threats against local party leaders if they failed to achieve a decisive breakthrough in grain procurements in the shortest possible time. There followed a wave of confiscations and violence toward wealthy peasants throughout the entire country. (218)

According to Molotov, who never faltered in his worship of Stalin and defended his own actions until his death, the extraordinary measures were not directed just against the kulaks.

On January 1, 1928, I had to go to Melitopol on the grain procurement drive. In the Ukraine. To extort grain. . . .

From everyone who had grain. Industrial workers and the army were in a desperate situation. Grain was all in private hands, and the task was to seize it from them. Each farmstead clung to its stock of grain. . . .

... We took away the grain. We paid them in cash, but of course at miserably low prices. They gained nothing. . . .

... I applied the utmost pressure to extort the grain. All kinds of rather harsh methods of persuasion had to be applied. . . .

Soon I returned to Moscow. Stalin met with the most experienced grain collectors. I reported on how I used pressure tactics and other ruses. . . .

... He said then, “I will cover you with kisses in gratitude for your action down there!” I committed these words to memory. . . “for your action.” He wanted that experience, and soon afterward set off for Siberia. . . . After that we went out seeking grain every year. Stalin no longer made the trips. But we went out for grain five years in a row. We pumped out the grain. (Chuev 1993, 241–42)

Medvedev writes that the extraordinary measures adopted immediately after the Fifteenth Party Congress led to a significant, but brief, increase in grain procurements; soon nothing remained to seize.

In the spring and summer of 1928 new directives went out to back off from the “extraordinary measures”; grain prices were raised 15 to 20 percent and more manufactured goods were made available for purchase by the peasants. These new measures proved to be too late, since less grain had been sown; many kulaks liquidated their holdings by selling off their means of production. Middle peasants, fearful of being labeled as kulaks, were hesitant to increase their production. In the fall of 1928, grain procurement again fell short and the extraordinary measures were again repeated (220), which is why Molotov and other Party leaders had to go again on their “grain-extorting” missions. In 1929, despite a good harvest, rationing of grain in the cities was introduced.

To deal with this continuing debacle of his agricultural policies, Stalin once again reversed his strategy. Quotas were established region by region to drive the peasants into the collective farms despite the fact that the original Five-Year Plan (1929–34) envisaged that 17.5 percent of the total sowing area would become part of the socialized sector (Kim et al. 1982, 261). By 1931, in the principal grain-growing districts, “80 per cent of the peasant farms had already amalgamated to form collective farms”; 200,000 collective and 4,000 state farms “cultivated two-thirds of the total crop area of the country” (History 1939, 315). By the end of 1934, collective farms “had embraced about three-quarters of all peasant households in the Soviet Union and about 90 percent of the total crop area” (318).

On 30 January 1930, a Central Committee resolution endorsed Stalin’s proposal to change the decision of the Fifteenth Party Congress from restricting the kulaks by economic rather than by administrative means to the elimination of the kulaks by administrative means. Their property was confiscated and their fates were determined by how their attitudes toward collectivization were assessed. Those who were accused of engaging in terrorist acts or sabotage were imprisoned or shot and their families exiled; others were exiled to distant lands with their families, still others were resettled in nearby regions or allowed to farm on land outside the collective, retaining only the necessary implements and possessions (for a more detailed account, see Medvedev 1989, 230–40). Molotov boasted that he personally “designated districts where kulaks were to be removed.... We exiled 400,000 kulaks. My commission did its job” (Chuev 1993, 148). Medvedev gives the official figures for deportations in 1930–31 to distant regions as 381,000—close enough to Molotov’s figures (234).

The violence with which the peasants were herded into the collective farms immediately produced such negative affects on grain procurement that Stalin, in his “Dizzy with Success” article published 2 March 1930, denounced the local officials for carrying out the excesses that he had ordered. This hypocritical behavior of giving orders and then condemning those to whom the orders were given for carrying them out became a pattern that he employed repeatedly for the rest of his life. The policy of forced collectivization was resumed, and increasingly draconian measures had to be taken to prevent the complete collapse of agricultural production.

The net result of forced collectivization was a drop in gross agricultural output from 16.6 billion rubles in 1927–28 to 13.1 billion in 1933. Livestock production dropped to 65 percent of the 1913 level (227). The published figures on the fulfillment of the plan, as Khrushchev was later to reveal, were falsified by a change in the way agricultural statistics were handled. Not until the 1950s did grain production rise above the pre-Revolutionary level.

Stalin’s measures to procure grain by forcible collectivization aroused concern among veteran Communists. In 1928–1929, three Politburo members, Nicolai Bukharin, Mikhail Tomsky, and Alexei Rykov, proposed continuation of the NEP policy of using market forces to stimulate grain production, but were unsuccessful in their efforts to sway the majority of the Politburo and the Central Committee away from support of Stalin, who promptly labeled them the Right Opposition. The three warned about the consequences of rupturing the alliance between the working class and the peasantry. They were correct in predicting that forced collectivization would encounter strong peasant resistance.

To stop peasants from fleeing the collective farms, Stalin, in November 1932, introduced a system of internal passports for travel within the USSR. Passports were issued only to urban dwellers, not to peasants. Peasants were again tied to the land, as under feudalism.

Subsequent events indicate that many of the Old Bolsheviks (Communist veterans of the October Revolution and the Civil War) shared the concern of Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky. Although no organized opposition to Stalin’s leadership emerged, Stalin was able to sense the growth of widespread concern among the Old Bolsheviks. His response was physical extermination.

In his report to the Twentieth Party Congress, Khrushchev disclosed that 70 percent of the members of the Central Committee of 1934 were executed. Of the 1,966 delegates to the Seventeenth Party Congress in 1934, 1,108 were arrested on charges of counterrevolutionary crimes (Khrushchev 1962). Medvedev cites additional evidence that the Old Bolsheviks were particularly targeted by the purges. At the Sixteenth Party Congress in 1930 and Seventeenth Party Congress in 1934, some 80 percent of the delegates had joined the party before 1920; the comparable figure was only 19 percent at the Eighteenth Party Congress in 1939 (450).

The official basis for the large-scale executions of the Old Bolsheviks was provided by show trials of former Soviet leaders that were held in Moscow in 1936, 1937, and 1938. The convictions were based on confessions extracted from the defendants by beatings and other forms of torture and with few exceptions were followed by execution. Some, like Tomsky, committed suicide before their arrest. Bukharin, in a personal letter to Stalin written just before his trial and execution, and kept secret until 1993, wrote that he had no intention of recanting to the world at large at his public trial the confessions he had signed during his interrogations, but that he was in fact innocent of the crimes to which he had confessed (Getty and Naumov, 1999, 556). A secret trial of military leaders followed in 1938, in the wake of which almost all military commanders of the Red Army, Navy, and Air Force, and thousands of officers were executed.

Examination of the now available Soviet archives has established that 681,692 executions (largely political) were carried out during the years 1937–38 (Getty et al. 1993, 1022). In his secret speech to the Twentieth Party Congress, Khrushchev discussed only the cases in which nonpublic trials were held. These included the trials of Marshall Michail Tuchachevsky and other high-ranking military officials on the charge of conspiring with Germany, Poland, and Japan to give them Soviet territory in exchange for their support for a military coup (the same charge for which Bukharin and Rykov were executed). In discussing the grounds for the rehabilitation of Tuchachevsky and others, Khrushchev cited the text of a message sent by Stalin to the NKVD authorizing the use of physical torture to extract confessions (1962). No documentary evidence was presented at any of the trials. Khrushchev explained in his memoirs why the victims of the public trials had not been rehabilitated:

The reason for our decision was that there had been representatives of the fraternal Communist parties present when Rykov, Bukharin, and other leaders of the people were tried and sentenced. These representatives had then gone home and testified in their own countries to the justice of the sentences. We didn't want to discredit the fraternal Party representatives who had attended the open trials, so we indefinitely postponed the rehabilitation of Bukharin, Zinoviev, Rykov. (1970, 352–53)

For details on the trials, I again refer readers to Medvedev’s revised edition of Let History Judge (1989).*

What then was the net effect of Stalin’s rush to collectivization? Had Lenin’s policy adhering to the alliance of workers and peasants been continued by allowing the peasants, including the kulaks, to market their surplus at reasonable prices, while providing them with a greater supply of manufactured goods, a greater amount of grain would have been available to feed urban workers and as a resource for industrialization. This would have allowed a faster rate of industrialization than had been achieved in the course of the first two five-year plans. The kulaks, though not enamored with socialism, had not represented a counterrevolutionary force committed to the overthrow of Soviet power.

A most negative consequence of the forced collectivization was the fear that it generated in Stalin and those closest to him that it would give rise to a challenge to their leadership from those Communists who wanted to continue on Lenin’s course—Communists Stalin arbitrarily labeled “Rightists.” In his conversations with Chuev in 1973, Molotov states, “The confessions seemed artificial and exaggerated. I consider it inconceivable that Rykov, Bukharin, and even Trotsky agreed to cede the Soviet far east, the Ukraine, and even the Caucasus to a foreign power. I rule that out” (1993, 264). But this was precisely the main basis for the execution of Bukharin and Rykov in 1938. This nonexistent plot was also the basis for the execution of Tuchachevsky and almost all the military commanders. It is clear from other comments by Molotov that Stalin’s real reason for the executions was that he considered the victims rightists who might challenge his leadership: “We could have suffered greater losses in the war—perhaps even defeat—if the leadership had flinched and allowed internal disagreements like cracks in a rock.... Had no brutal measures been used, there would surely have been a danger of splits within the party” (256–57). Further, “It is indeed sad that so many innocent people perished. But I believe the terror of the late 1930s was necessary.... Stalin insisted on making doubly sure: spare no one, but guarantee absolute stability for a long period of time.... It was difficult to draw a precise line where to stop” (278).

Nikolai Yezhov was put at the head of the NKVD by Stalin in 1936. Molotov states that Yezhov “set arrest quotas by region, on down to districts. No fewer than two thousand must be liquidated in such and such region, no fewer than fifty in such and such district ... he just overdid it because Stalin demanded greater repression” (262–63). After uneasiness over the executions began to surface, Stalin’s had Yezhov executed for the excesses that he, Stalin, had demanded. Molotov states that Stalin, as head of the Party, would sign the lists of people to be arrested and that he, as head of the government, would sign whatever lists Stalin signed (as did other members of the Politburo). “I signed lists containing the names of people who could have been straightforward and dedicated citizens. The Central Committee was also to blame for running careless checks on some of the accused. But no one could prove to me that all these actions should never have been undertaken” (297).

When one member of a family was shot, it was common practice to arrest the other family members or send them into exile. “They had to be isolated somehow,” explained Molotov. “Otherwise they would have served as conduits of all kinds of complaints. And a certain amount of demoralization” (277–78).

It is beyond the scope of this commentary to go into arrests and executions beyond the Party. Suffice it to say that outstanding scientists, scholars, engineers and other technical personnel, artists and cultural workers were also enmeshed by the terror.

Stalin was nevertheless able to convince the bulk of the urban population that these measures were necessary to protect the Soviet Union from the domestic enemies who had been corrupted and bribed by imperialism to destroy the achievements of the October Revolution, the benefits of which the population was just beginning to enjoy as industrialization began to improve the living conditions of the urban population toward the end of the thirties.

Had a Leninist course been pursued in agriculture and in party governance, and socialist legality respected, industrialization could have moved ahead at a faster pace and the military forces would have been better equipped and better commanded so that the Nazi blitzkrieg could have stopped well before it reached the outskirts of Moscow.

Stalin’s great skill in political intrigue and his brutality of character enabled him to use the political and economic problems unavoidable in the creation of a new socioeconomic system to ascend to a level of state and Party leadership with unchallenged personal power. The socialization of agriculture is, of course, a necessary step on the path to a communist society. Experience in the Soviet Union, China, Vietnam, and Cuba has shown that it is worth experimenting with a variety of organizational structures on the basis of a substantial level of mechanization. Premature attempts at socialization amount to a form of voluntarism that borders on utopian socialism.

Stalin used the victory of the proletariat in the October Revolution as a vehicle to satisfy his desire to go down in history as an adulated god-like figure. He was determined that the benefits anticipated by the working class from social ownership of the means of production be attributed to his great genius. During the second five-year plan, the Soviet media consistently credited Stalin’s masterful leadership for the rise in living standards and social welfare resulting from the progress of industrialization. The gains were indeed impressive, but they could have been far greater had the Leninist collective leadership of the Party and the principle of “All Power to the Soviets” not been abrogated by Stalin’s unbridled lust for personal power

--Originally written in English and publishe in German translation under the title “Politische und ökonomische Folgen der verfrühten Vergesellschaftung der Landwirtschaft in der Sowjetunion” in Philosophie und Politik: Festschrift für Robert Steigerwald, edited by Willi Gerns, Hans Heinz Holz, Hermann Kopp, Thomas Metscher, and Werner Seppman in cooperation with the Marx-Engels Stiftung, Wuppertal, 262–79 (Essen: Neue Impulse Verlag, 2005). An abrdiged version was published in English in the Communist Review, Fall 2005 (journal of he Communist Party of Britain).

NOTE

*The draft of the first edition of Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism, in most respects a Marxist-Leninist critique of the Stalin period by Soviet historian Roy Medvedev, then a member of the CPSU, began circulating informally in the USSR in 1964. After Brezhnev replaced Khrushchev as leader of the CPSU in 1964, criticism of Stalin was limited to the phrase cult of the individual; no details about the terror of the 1930s were permitted, nor criticism of forced collectivization other than what had been allowed in Stalin’s time. Stalin was, in effect, rehabilitated. Soviet publications such as History of the USSR, written in 1974, again justified the excesses—for example, the 1928 Shakhty frame-up trials in the course of which confessions were beaten out of members of fictitious organizations of wreckers and saboteurs “in the service of Russian and foreign capitalists and foreign intelligence;” Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky were again referred to as leaders of the Right Opposition, who “expressed the interests of the kulaks and other well-off elements in the villages that were opposed to the socialist reconstruction of agriculture” (Kim et al. 1982, 252, 259). Medvedev was expelled from the CPSU in 1969 after his book was published in the West. His Party membership was restored in 1988.

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