People Before Profit blog

Today We March, Tomorrow We Vote

Wed, 06 Oct 2010 08:30:00 +0000

Politically-active Americans who identify themselves as liberal or progressive often make the mistake of thinking that the electoral process and politics are equivalent. There are two major errors people make if they start with this false premise. Either they focus on voting or campaigning for the candidates they support, or they opt out of the electoral process entirely in favor of other kinds of political activity. The November 2nd congressional elections provide the opportunity for us to understand the value of getting involved in each kind of activity, getting out the vote and participating in post-election political activity. We need to be involved on both levels in order to preserve and advance the major victories which have been won over the past year and a half.

Non-electoral forms of political activity, including involvement in the wide range of organizations, both local and national, that comprise the broad-massed people's movement and offer a refreshing alternative to traditional political structures, from Earth Day celebrations and local food cooperatives to anti-war demonstrations and teach-ins, defending the rights of immigrants, supporting gay marriage and opposing "don't ask, don't tell," supporting the One Nation Working Together March For Jobs in Washington, D.C. on October 2, and writing letters to the editor in response to the issues of the day are all vital to strengthening democracy and building public pressure on particular issues. They are key factors in achieving changes in specific policy and eventually deeper social transformations. It is an unfortunate fact, however, that many people who engage in these important forms of social activism fail to fully appreciate the significance of the electoral process and active participation in it. Thus engagement in non-electoral political activity becomes an end in itself – a way to influence public policy regardless of who is in office.

A left-wing variant of this outlook is that some become so cynical about the nature of the two-party system that they choose to confine their involvement in politics to third-party activism, even when it is futile, brings no real political change, and actually improves the chances of the Republican right to win elections by siphoning off votes and grassroots enthusiasm. People in this camp often appear to suffer from the delusion that the political representatives of the two main parties are more or less the same, i.e., that Sarah Palin holds the same views and shares the same goals as John Conyers, or that there is no real difference between Glenn Beck and Rachel Maddow. Leftists of this "purist" variety deal in slogans like "Obama is the same as Bush," even claiming it is the President and the Democrats who pose the real threat to working families.

Fortunately there are tens of millions of Americans who oppose this apathetic trend, define themselves as politically active, do not make the mistake of underestimating the importance of elections, and refuse to buy into the tired old slogan that the Republicans and Democrats are no different than Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

But perhaps the biggest problem in American civic life is the belief that after donating one's time and money and voting for a favored candidate, one's responsibility ends, because elected officials will either solve society's problems or create new ones, which the next election will attempt to fix. Such ballot-focused individuals are correct in seeing elections as the biggest political mobilizations that take place in this country, and that they fundamentally determine the balance of power at the local, state and federal level. Nevertheless, they fail to see the importance of what happens between Novembers. Another factor, of course, is that for millions of Americans work and family issues prevent more than temporary commitments to political activity of any sort. For many people free time for political work or community involvement is just not available.

For America's progressive voters there is no room for apathy or "sitting it out" this election year. After the Tea Party takeover of the Republican Party, America is standing on a political precipice. If enough voters are hoodwinked into voting against their own economic interests and the health and well-being of their families and communities, then the obstructionism cynically practiced by the Party of No will result in a violent lurch to the right unparalleled in the American political experience. If the Republicans retake power in the House and Senate, the already feeble regulation of Wall Street will be totally abandoned.

An historic outpouring of more than 70 million Americans in 2008 began to turn the page on the Bush years and Republican and corporate domination of American politics, along with all the grave damage inflicted on the country by financial schemes, the outsourcing of jobs, and the near total deregulation of the petroleum, mining and financial industries. A grassroots upsurge led to the epoch-making election of America's first African American president in 2008. But now, just 22 months into Obama's presidency, the Republican Tea Party (lavishly funded by extremist billionaires like the Koch Brothers, whose political views are to the right of the John Birch Society) has mounted a far-right resurgence that threatens the significant gains of the past year and a half. Obama and the Democrats have managed to achieve important political victories, often by single-vote margins, in the face of total Republican intransigence, driven by the fanatical desire to return to power and force America's working families to suffer once more under the failed policies of the Bush years, coupled with even more terrifying excesses such as the abolition of the 14th Amendment, the total dismantling of Social Security, an end to unemployment insurance, and the complete deregulation of the oil, mining and financial industries. Even in the face of such frantic opposition, President Obama and the Democratic Congress have managed to win significant victories in health care, education, regulating Wall Street, providing loans to small businesses, and shoring up our ravaged manufacturing sector. At the same time they are attempting to wind down two fundamentally misconceived wars left behind by the Bush Administration, in which hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost and billions of dollars have been looted from the US Treasury.

Starting with a lie-filled campaign to block health reform, the Republican Party, decked out in its Tea Party costumes, stormed town hall meetings in a flood of rage. Simultaneously, the media wing of the GOP, Fox News, along with several hundred corporate-funded right wing shock jocks blared forth torrents of anti-immigrant, anti-Islamic, and anti-Obama rhetoric to stir up the Party's right-wing base. These shameless tactics have certainly lured the lunatic fringe out of the woodwork and onto center stage. Not surprisingly, given the residual racism that infects the No Party's simmering base, right-wing America has rushed to participate (Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck pointing the way) in both electoral and non-electoral political activity, toting guns and brandishing their racist signs at hate-filled demonstrations and rallies. At this crucial juncture, the corporate-funded right wing seems more attuned to the value of social movement building than the progressive Democratic base.

The degree of success of the radical right will ultimately depend on whether we can rekindle the grassroots spirit that delivered an historic, earth-shifting victory at the polls in 2008. To accomplish this we must shake off any apathy the Republican obstructionists and the corporate media have managed to instill in the first 22 months of the struggles of the Obama administration and the Democratic majority. This majority is substantial in the House, but hangs by a thread in a Senate paralyzed by the constant filibustering tactics of the Party of No. The Republicans have only one goal in mind, to bring down Barack Obama, return to the disastrous policies of George W. Bush, and move from there to a far-right dystopia that will surpass the Mad Hatter's Tea Party in its assault on reason and the pain it inflicts on the American people.

Just two years into the Obama Administration and the new Democratic majority, who were handed the daunting task of trying to deal with the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, with no help whatsoever from Republicans, is no time for the country's progressive base to contemplate throwing in the towel. The critical task before us is to get out the vote and get to the polls on November 2. If we can get fired up to engage in this all-important election, we will succeed in preserving the Democratic majority in the House and Senate. We will then have a powerful wind at our backs, and the renewed strength to continue to forge a broad alliance among America's grassroots organizations – the labor, civil rights, environmental and anti-war movements, all of which have begun to grow and unite in strength, community by community. Without a doubt we are now engaged in a mighty struggle with the extreme right. Ours is the struggle to preserve and extend America's democratic ideals, the dreams of countless working men and women who have fought since the Revolution to improve the lives of America's people. We are fighting to defend the interests of the majority against the depredations of the richest two percent, who have everything that money can buy, including the Republican Party and its Tea Party wing.

The responsibility for stopping the Tea Party this November lies in the hands of America's progressive, working-class base. The labor movement was the first to enter this fight. Union members and their supporters are already going door to door and working the phones in a skillfully coordinated effort to reach labor voters in key congressional districts. Unions are also airing commercials that slam Republican candidates for pursuing their long-held dream of privatizing Social Security and eliminating unemployment benefits, a real nightmare for millions of Americans that must never become reality. The labor movement is also holding Democratic candidates responsible for protecting Social Security, not just from privatization, but also from benefit cuts and threats to raise the retirement age, moves that would have a devastating effect on America's seniors and other beneficiaries.

Labor's commitment and unity will be a major force in this election struggle. But even though labor's role was crucial to the outcome in 2008, it alone cannot prevent a GOP takeover. Republicans have obviously proven they have no solutions for the economic crisis, only roadblocks to policies that benefit working families, and tax cuts for the rich. At every attempt to move forward, they have stood united, intransigently opposed to every major investment in job creation President Obama and the Democrats have offered, and every effort to fix our broken health care system. They have shattered all records in their cynical use of archaic and fundamentally undemocratic parliamentary procedures such as the filibuster, to weaken the economic recovery, stand in the way of financial and credit card reform, slow the passage of the health care bill, and consign scores of judicial appointees to limbo, in a concerted effort to stall the economic recovery and wreck President Obama's progressive agenda – all with the aim of achieving political victory in the midterm elections. They must not be rewarded for their obstruction and total lack of ideas about how to solve the country's problems, and how to come to the aid of those who have been hurt worst in the Great Recession, the millions upon millions of unemployed and the 43 million Americans who now live in grinding poverty and don't have a home to live in, access to health care, or the means to provide for their families.

The GOP has stood in the way of climate change legislation, steadfastly denying or minimizing the very real dangers to health and the environment posed by industrial pollution and the consumption of fossil fuel. Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas) immediately went to the defense of BP after the Gulf Oil oil spill, and offered the committer of the crime his heartfelt apologies. Barton accused the President of "shaking down" the oil giant because he demanded the company pay for the cleanup of millions of gallons of oil it spilled and pay for the damage it caused to the communities of the Gulf Coast by poisoning the ecosystem on which its fishermen and tourist industry depend. We all need to be acutely aware that the same man who apologized to BP, Joe Barton, is set to become the new Chairman of the Energy Committee, if the Republicans retake the House. It comes as no surprise, as well, that the Republican election effort is being massively fueled by a gusher of petrodollars from the coffers of Big Oil.

In August the GOP voted in lockstep against a bill offered by the Democrats to provide the emergency funding necessary to keep teachers in the classroom, cops on the beat, and firefighters protecting our homes. One of their main objections to the bill was that the funding would be paid for by closing that loopholes that reward US corporations with tax breaks for shipping millions of jobs overseas. For the Party of No such paltry considerations as the education of America's children and and the protection of our communities should never stand in the way of attempting to defeat every single item on the Democratic agenda, no matter how urgent and absolutely necessary it might be.

The Republicans also voted almost unanimously to protect the rights of health insurance companies to deny coverage to the sick. In a united chorus they continue to claim that health insurance companies should be have the right to deny people coverage based on pre-existing conditions like diabetes and asthma. Addressing the Value Voters Summit in Washington, DC on September 17, Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee callously compared the plight of people with pre-existing conditions to someone attempting to buy fire insurance for a house that has already burned down. Repeal of the Health Care Reform Law is at the top of the Republican agenda if they retake the House and Senate in November. To prevent this from happening, America's real values voters need to stop the party of Palin, Huckabee, Gingrich, and Beck from seizing majority power in the mid-term elections.

The burst of moral courage provided by their impending retirement from the Senate fortunately permitted Senators George Voinovich (R-Ohio) and George LeMieux (R-Florida) to join with the Democrats in September to pass a bill that funneled $30 billion in TARP money to community banks, to enable small businesses get the loans they desperately need to expand and hire. The primary beneficiaries of the TARP funds, the "too big to fail" banks, have stubbornly refused to use the money the taxpayers gave them to provide loans to small businesses. Prior to the passage of the small business/community bank loan legislation, every Republican voted in unison against tax benefits to help small business owners provide health coverage for themselves and their employees.

Before passage of the history-making Health Care Bill, when insurance company bureaucrats unfairly denied millions of Americans coverage in order to increase their profit margins, the Republicans' only words of comfort were, "You're on your own."

In 2007, in the twilight of the Bush years, the Republican Party stood in the way of raising the minimum wage and even tried to block provision of health care to the country's poorest children. Today they are holding up passage of the START nuclear weapons reduction treaty with the Russians. They also say no to giving women workers stronger protections against gender-based job discrimination. They said no to improvements in the Department of Veterans Affairs and essential investments in our country's education system, no to infrastructure repair and development, no to clean energy, no to high-speed Internet access to thousands of communities currently without it, no to new healthcare technology, and no to investment in hundreds of Community Health Centers. With all of this obstruction, it is no wonder they've become the "Party of No."

They have no ideas of their own. All they have to offer are reactionary soundbites and hatred aimed at immigrants and Muslims. There should be no doubt in anyone's mind about the very real threat to the basic tenets of the Constitution posed by Republican immigrant-bashing and Islamophobia. And the Republican Party attacks on public school teachers, union members, and the millions of unemployed who depend on unemployment insurance are nearly as intense in their hate-filled scapegoating. Many Republicans have even pledged to hold congressional hearings on the legitimacy of President Obama's claims to American citizenship if they gain power.

Given the terrifying prospect of what a Republican victory portends, voters generally, and progressives specifically, are faced with a very real choice. Either we can sit back, refuse to pull our own weight, and watch apathetically as the Republicans return to power, or we can stand up to the threat, get involved, and cast our votes to preserve a political terrain that is finally favorable to the interests and needs of working families. We must also work to promote a political environment that ensures the complete withdrawal of our ground forces from Iraq next year and the start of withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Labor law reform and pro-working-class appointees are possible only with increased Democratic majorities. The record proves that it is only the Democrats in Congress who will fight to maintain and expand the new health care reforms which they finally passed under intense Republican opposition and a campaign of misrepresentation based on outright lies such as "death panels" and the enforced rationing of health care by the federal government. The new Health Care Bill will add more than 30 million uninsured Americans to the health insurance rolls. It is a powerful step in the right direction and must be defended and expanded.

Only Democrats will vote for investments in transportation, our decaying infrastructure, clean energy jobs, the protection and further strengthening of Social Security, tax breaks for working families, and reforms that prevent Wall Street from once again committing the same crimes that caused the thunderous Crash of 2008.

The choice before us is clear, and the choice is ours to make.

(Photo courtesy OneNationWorkingTogether.org)

U.S. Colonial Policies and Native Americans, Int. with David Chang

Wed, 06 Oct 2010 08:29:00 +0000

Editor's note: David A. Chang teaches history at the University of Minnesota and is the author of The Color of the Land: Race, Nation, and the Politics of Landownership in Oklahoma, 1832-1929, out now from the University of North Carolina Press. Listen to the audio version of this interview here. The interview was conducted by Joel Wendland and transcribed by Peter Zerner.

PA: What was your main aim in writing The Color of the Land? What inspired you to undertake this project?

DAVID CHANG: I went searching for the project actually. I initially had begun a dissertation project, a book project, on Hawaii and Puerto Rico and Louisiana, and I was going to look at American sugar production in America’s growing empire. That seems very far afield from Oklahoma and it is.

But as I was beginning that project I decided I was going to put it on hold because it was too ambitious. I didn’t have the budget to pull off the book at the time because there was a lot of travel. But I wanted to understand how race and class work together in an expanding American colonial situation, and I realized that I could study this process as much in what we call the 48 states, the continental United States, as I could by going to places like Hawaii and Puerto Rico. My concern was try to understand race and class together, to try to understand, that is, material relations and cultural history in relationship to one another, because I felt that a lot of times the writing on these things was going in different directions. We were talking about race and class in very different vocabularies, oftentimes in very different books, and not understanding their relationship, I thought, with the proper complexity.

My goal was to find a place where I could understand race in a complex manner, not just two groups, but three or more groups in relationship to each other, and it was essential to me that one of those groups be indigenous, because one of my goals is to demonstrate the centrality of indigenous history to the history of the United States and the modern world. Those of us who are interested in Indian and indigenous history often see our work sidelined just into a kind of interesting footnote area, and I think that is not where our work belongs. I tried to speak to central issues in United States history and demonstrate the central place of indigenous history, of American Indian history, in that story.

PA: As your title suggests, the question of land is really at the center of the narrative you are telling, which seems to naturally raise the question of how property is defined and distributed and so on. The Creek Indian nation defined land in a very different manner than we are used to in the 20th and 21st century. Could you explain?

DAVID CHANG: You’re right, land is absolutely at the center of the book, and I think that has to be an important theme in U.S. history. We forget how rural a nation this country was for a long time, and of course land is a central part of the history of wealth. It is not only a form of wealth; it is also much more than that. It is also the place where we live, the place that we identify as our homeland.

But if we start to think about land as property, a good place to start is actually to think about what we mean by our contemporary sense of property. Lawyers and legal scholars talk about our current U.S. American property system as being mostly a fee-simple property system. That is, to own a piece of land is to own a title to it, and that title brings us a whole bundle of rights, the right to own, the right to build, the right to extract, the right to resell. So that’s the system we work with today.

The Creek system was not a system in which property was unknown. Property was known but it was a very different type. The fundamental thing is that first of all property was understood in terms of community property. A town owned its town lands, and when those towns ended up allying and creating a confederation called the Creek Nation, the Creek Nation owned the national domain together. So there is a sense of property there.

Beyond that, there is also a sense of individual property in terms of being generated out of a property of rights over use. Sometimes these are called usufruct rights. I prefer the simpler term “use rights.” That means that these lands belong to our town, let’s say to Tuskegee town – these are Tuskegee town lands. But some of those lands are not currently being exploited by anyone on an ongoing basis, so if a member of the town chooses to go and clear a field, plant that field, build a home there, that field and that home are the person’s property, but the land underneath them is not. So this was the way property and land ownership was expressed, not only among Creek Indian people, but also by many other people.

In English law, this is to say that one owns the improvements but not the land. You own the field but you don’t own the land underneath the field. You own the house and you own the right to use that area, but once you cease using that field, once you cease planting and harvesting, once you cease living in and maintaining a home, you forgo the use rights to that field or to that home, and that property returns back to the common property of the town.

PA: You highlight the differences between how white Americans and Creeks understood property, and how whites connected these difference to their racial theories. Could you explain how that worked?

DAVID CHANG: I think that whites came to see their mode of property ownership as superior. It was part of the many ways that whites thought of their own racial superiority. Not only in the Creek Nation, but also across the continent, whites looked at Indians and said they don’t own anything, they merely move about, and of course this goes with a long history of non-Indian people looking at Indians and ignoring their agricultural work, for one thing, and their agricultural lands, but it also goes along with denying the internal legal systems of indigenous people and the coherence of those internal legal, political, social and economic systems, and seeing simply incoherence, saying, for instance, that Indian people just kind of helter-skelter plant things here and there.

The other thing that happened was that in the middle of the 19th century some Creeks expanded their wealth exponentially through the use of enslaved African labor, and the legitimacy of that was called into question by white Americans in order to undercut native claims to land.

PA: One of the things that students of American Indian history are going to find really fascinating about your book is that you show how Creeks defined citizenship, which also was dramatically different from how white Americans were doing this. What were some of the differences?

DAVID CHANG: Well the concept of citizenship it seems it is constantly evolving, and this is one of the things I try to talk about in the book. Citizenship and inclusion are understood, or were historically understood in the Creek Nation, if you will, from the ground up, from the local up. The Creek Nation is a confederation of towns in its origin. Those towns were local entities and they were made up of families. Therefore to be a member of a town was to be a member of the confederation of those towns; it was to be a citizen of the nation at its origins.

Over the course of the 17th and 18th centuries a bunch of towns in the Southeast came together, and they formed what we now call the Creek Confederation. That entity existed only as a creation out of the local towns, the talwa. If you belonged to a talwa, you therefore automatically belonged to the nation. Then over time there was an effort by one faction in the tribe to formalize this – beginning around the 1840s – and to talk about national citizenship in more explicit terms.

Another thing to emphasize about the difference in the Creek conception of citizenship, is that entering a town almost meant entering a clan, entering a family, and being included in that manner in the society. And while I do want to emphasize how this is very different from how we understand American citizenship today, it also important to understand that my work is also part of an ongoing effort by American historians to point out that we have not always understood property in the U.S. as we do today, nor have we always understood citizenship in the United States as we do today.

Citizenship was an idea that had to be worked out in law and in politics in the United States over more than a century, and obviously it is still under contestation today. An effort to show changing notions of citizenship in an American Indian society in the context of U.S. colonialism is also a way of bringing attention to the constructed and the contested nature of citizenship across the board in a comparative sense, and that includes the United States.

PA: One of the ways that idea was contested in the Creek Nation is that their rules didn’t exclude, at least initially, African Americans, people of mixed race who were of European descent, or even those who were not of mixed race. How in general did those rules work?

DAVID CHANG: Let’s talk about the early period, the period up to about 1840. Here we are up to the period where the United States forced the majority of the Creeks to move from the Southeast to what we now call Oklahoma. At that time a lot of people became Creek who had not been born Creek. Some of those people were African Americans or enslaved Africans who left slavery in the American South and went to the interior and joined up with native people, and then through a variety of means were incorporated into the Creek nation.

Sometimes they were initially something like what we might call a captive slave, which is a form of Creek slavery, of domination, but generally that slavery was very different than the form that came to be known as American slavery. People who were in that position, including people who were of African descent, could marry into Creek families, and they and their children could become members of Creek families, members of Creek clans, and members of Creek towns, and thus members of what became known as the Creek Confederacy, and thus they would become citizens.

Similarly, by the late 1700s there were many whites in the Creek country. Many of them were Scots of U.S. birth, who came in to work as traders or for other reasons, intermarried with Creek women, with the men from Creek towns, and their children became Creek citizens. Some very important early Creeks came from such families.

So there were means of inclusion that extended the Creek nation in lots of ways. And it’s not only people of what we would call different races, such as whites and African Americans, but also many native people from different areas entered the Creek Confederacy in this way. If you think about it, that is what a confederacy is, that is what a confederation is, a way for people with many differences to create a unity among themselves, to declare themselves part of a larger whole. When a different group came into a town and became Creeks, say when a group of Alabaman Indians goes from being a separate tribe to a town affiliated with the Creek Confederacy, it is in many ways the same process as an individual entering the Creek Nation and becoming a member and a citizen. Being born out doesn’t mean that one is permanently excluded.

PA: You paint a picture up to the late 19th century of a really dynamic society, although it is being buffeted about by a harmful US colonial policy. But there is still an attempt to preserve a dynamic, growing society with its own ideas about how to use the land and the common value of each member of the nation. The centerpiece of the story is that something dramatically changes this outlook toward property, about property ideas, about citizenship ideas, and about race. What happens to cause that change?

DAVID CHANG: Well, the biggest change that you are referring to is the practice of allotment. Allotment was a policy whereby the United States government found ways of imposing on native nations the notion of individual land ownership. For a long time in the 19th century some Americans had been looking at native land ownership – and the Creeks were not the only people who had forms of land ownership that were very different from that of Americans, who owned land in common as a nation, and many of the them had use rights land like the Creeks.

In any case, all these land systems were different and Americans disliked that. They were considered by many white Americans to be inferior, and they were also a barrier to white acquisition of Indian lands. If you think about it, if a nation owns everything together it’s hard to buy a plot, right? Because it is a lot easier to alienate a small piece of land than to get an entire nation to sell off pieces of land.

For a whole variety of reasons, in the 19th century a lot of whites called for the creation of private land ownership, of getting native groups to divide their lands up into private plots, to assign those plots to either all male citizens or to all citizens, and then for those to become the private property of the individuals. The goal was to dissolve nations and create private land-owning individuals. This was called allotment.

What this did was to attack all those things we have been talking about. It undermined in serious ways the material basis for what had been a strong Creek resistance that was based on the idea of a common nationhood that brought all Creeks together, whatever their race, whatever their cultural orientation – and their were many different cultural orientations in the Creek Nation. That form of resistance that said we are all Creeks and all of this land is the Creek Nation, and we stand in resistance to its alienation, to the alienation of Creek land, and we stand in resistance to its domination by the United States.

The dividing up of the Creek Nation into lands also entailed a policy of dividing up Creeks into different segments of race. An enrollment, which is something akin to a census, was taken of the Creek Nation in preparation for allotment. That enrollment registered people formerly and unchangeably according to what was called their blood quantum, that is their supposed degree of indigenous ancestry, of black ancestry or white ancestry.

These racial categorizations over time became the means, through laws that were imposed in the first decades of the 20th century, of creating very different legal regimes over people of different racial backgrounds. This facilitated the sale and the loss of land by Black Creeks and allowed Creeks of mixed white and native ancestry a variety of means of selling their land or managing it in different ways. It also imposed a greater degree of white administrative supervision over the allotment lands of people who were deemed “full bloods.” You now had different laws covering different Creek lands according to how they had been racially categorized in the enrollment process, which was the first step, if you will, toward sectioning and dividing up the land.

PA: So in very fundamental ways dominant US ideologies about race really drove how this big change about citizenship in the Creek nation took place?

DAVID CHANG: In the most basic sense, yes, but one thing that is really important to recognize, and I really try to emphasize in the book, is that it is not as if ideas of racial difference and racial superiority and inferiority did not already exist among Creeks. There were already many Creeks who believed that it was better to be not Black than to be Black, and there were a lot of Creeks that thought that to be full blood was to be a real Indian. Then there were other Creeks who thought that to be of mixed blood might mean having access to the advantages of white ancestry. These ideas were out there, and they were already complicating Creek politics in the 1860s, the 1870s and the 1880s, but it was allotment that encoded them as law and as divisive law in Creek society in a brand-new way.

PA: Why is this historical study still relevant to understanding current US colonial policies towards Indian nations?

DAVID CHANG: One thing that is important to remember is that all of this was not so very long ago. Allotment, not only in the Creek Nation, but in most nations, was something that happened between 1887 and 1915. That’s when most of this happened, and we are still living through the aftermath of it. The legal problems that allotment brought on are still very much with us. One of these is the problem of fractionated land ownership. It is a major problem in Indian country, where some of the lands belonging to an allottee have to be inherited in an equal share by all heirs, and then when those heirs die, all of their heirs inherit an equal share of that land. There are literally pieces of land in Indian country today which are owned by hundreds of people and therefore become utterly unusable to anybody. Nobody can make a decision about them.

The questions of division, of inclusion and exclusion, and of citizenship within native nations, are very complicated in a number of nations today, most famously in the Creek Nation but also in the Seminole Nation, for instance, where questions of how race corresponds to whether one is or not part of the nation, are deeply related to the racial categorizations that were permanently imposed by allotment. The rolls that I talk about in the book, the Dawes Rolls that categorized people according to race, are important documents, and they are documents that people refer to when they talk about blood quantum and ancestry. So those documents remain active and complicating parts in American Indian country today.

My book also really documents the efforts of a sovereign nation to struggle for the maintenance of its sovereignty in the context of vastly unequal power relations with the colonial power. This should remind us of a couple of things, I think. First of all, that the colonial situation is still very active in the United States. It is important for Americans to understand that they occupy a republic that is also a settler colony – that the lands we occupy are indigenous lands which were seized and distributed according to new property regimes by a settler regime. This is very obvious in places like Oklahoma, because the division of tribal lands happened so very recently that people’s grandparents and great-grandparents were part of the process. But it did not happen all that long ago anywhere frankly. We need to know the basic situation that underlies where we are.

Second of all, it is important to realize that so much that we take for granted and as a given in terms of what property is, what a race is, what it means to be American, and what it means to be Indian are recent and recently contested political creations. Defining what an Indian is, what an American is, what it means to be Black, what property is, who is a citizen, what property should be taxed, what property should be untaxed, all of these are recent political decisions and are open to reinterpretation and to challenge. I think a lot of historians think this way. We try to demonstrate how things were made, but fundamentally there is an emphasis that if things are made in a certain way, they can certainly be remade and changed.

PA: One of things I appreciated a great deal in this book is the use of non-elite, non-official voices in the telling of the story, uncovering those primary sources where you find American Indians speaking up and talking about African American Indians for instance, people who have something to say about the issues of property and citizenship, and the things that are happening to them that they have little control over. How important is that aspect of history writing for you?

DAVID CHANG: It is one of my primary goals. There is a lot of writing about non-elite people in U.S. history. I am really by far not the only person doing this and it is extremely important. In the 1970s and the 1980s and into the 1990s, there was a strong emphasis on history from the ground up – trying to understand things from the point of view of the most humble, the most disenfranchised, the poorest, etc. And that was great.

For the last I would say 15-20 years there has been a strong emphasis on trying to understand the creation and the elaboration of structures of ideas, of ideologies like race, citizenship and property, the sorts of things I talk about in my book. My real effort is to make the history of non-elite people not just a history of what people did, but of what they thought.

As we embrace cultural history, the history of ideas and of ideologies, this needs to be a history that is based not only on ideas and ideologies that one can trace and easily access in public documents, it also history we can do through methods that historians have generally called social history methods, the methods of understanding poor and humble people. That is my goal: to be able to look at the ideas of Indian people, of indigenous people, of poor Black farmers, and of white sharecroppers, and to understand them in the larger history of ideas and ideologies, to understands their voices, and to access their voices as an active part of the debates over crucial ideas like what it means to be a citizen, what does it mean to be Creek, what is property, what is belonging or exclusion?

I take it as a given, and I think we should all take it as a given, that non-elite people have and continue to generate very complex ideas about the world and the political and social situation that they encounter. Some of the ideas that appear in this book are really quite startling in their complexity, and there is a lot that I hope we can learn from the voices that we encounter in this book.

PA: What new projects are you working on now?

DAVID CHANG: I have moved back to working on Hawaii. That is where my ancestry is from, so something that matters a lot to me is indigenous Hawaiian history. I have been teaching myself Hawaiian. Tons of documents were generated in Hawaiian in the 19th century in the Hawaiian language. What I am working on is trying to understand native Hawaiian ideas and understandings of global geography in the 19th century. Most of us when we encounter Hawaii see it as an episode, an anecdote almost, in the history of European expansion, globalization and exploration. When Captain Cook stumbled on the shores of Hawaii it was one small part of his exploration of the Pacific, but it was also, for the Hawaiian people, an important point in their long exploration of the globe, where Hawaiians through their reading, through their travels, through contacts that they made with people from around the world, and through their intellectual culture and economic and labor activities, came to an understanding of what the globe was that they lived in and what there place was in it.

The 2007 Economic Crisis and the "Great Reset"

Wed, 06 Oct 2010 08:28:00 +0000

The reinvention of the "American Dream" in the middle of the Great Recession was one of the topics on the Aug. 29 episode of Fareed Zakaria's often informative, if usually ideologically unchallenging, CNN show "Fareed Zakaria's GPS" (see minute 31:27]). In the segment, author and business professor, Richard Florida, explained how economic crises often spur new waves of innovation and new ways of organizing life in America, what he called a "great reset." Florida's claim offers an important starting point for discovering big changes under way now and imagining what may be possible tomorrow.

While close scrutiny of some of the historical contexts of his ideas exposes flaws in his argument, generally, Florida made some valid points. His argument went like this: The decades of the Great Depression and the economic crisis of the 1870s "were the most innovative decades in American history." He argued, "What happens in these crises is America, particularly, invents new ways of living and working." He cited the transition from rural life to urban, industrialized life after the 1870s as his primary example.

The Crash of 2008 and Historical Materialism Florida's linkage of economic crisis to innovations in capitalism and social change generally are worthy of a hearing, but they don't come from a working-class perspective. (The analysis in "The Crash of 2008 and Historical Materialism" works better.) Florida cited data indicating that Americans are giving up on homeownership as an essential feature of the American dream and are looking for new ways to build communities, including returning to cities. Maybe this re-urbanization signals an important new demographic trend. But what is the big substantive change? That isn't explained in the segment with Zakaria. For a fuller development of Florida's ideas, one would have to go to his book.

Before rush out and spend the $10 or so to download Florida's "The Great Reset" onto your Kindle, however, I propose accepting his general argument and highlighting here some important possible big changes that are already happening. If urbanization, industrialization, and bureaucratic rationalization of life and ideas followed the 1873 crash, and globalization of markets, elevation of regulatory schemes (in the U.S. government and in international bodies like the World Bank, IMF, UN), and consumerism as true Americanism followed the Great Depression, what follows the Great Recession of 2007? Not all of the data is in yet, but there is strong evidence that the Obama administration's response to the Great Recession under the Obama administration will likely be as meaningful in terms of regulation and infrastructure development and modernization as the New Deal under Roosevelt, as well as significantly larger in dollar amount.

Despite his acceptable historical generalizations overall, Florida's ideological alignments peeked through. Aside from ignoring the fact that depressions and recessions hurt working families on a massive scale and typically take decades to recover from while the rich and powerful are often able to martial enough resources to squeak by, he offered no materialist explanation for these major changes, but rather saw big changes as "natural" and "organic" to American life. In addition, Florida gave little in the way of analysis of the new imperatives, logics, or demands of capitalism, as a system, behind the changes and seemed to insist the best solutions to problems and innovations do not center on radical alterations in the system of capitalism itself. Indeed, Florida's "great reset," as he told Zakaria, is not a "big top-down government reset." In other words, along with the positives, the crises that plague capitalism and unevenly impact social groups because of class, race, gender, etc. – particularly in America – are a natural part of life and outside the parameters of human control or design. And while Florida advocates major transformation in social life, he favors the status quo in terms of the property arrangements, and even seemed to express a preference for the ideologically conservative levels of public oversight and regulation that held sway in what he says is the outgoing social order. Simply put, Florida apparently advocated a discredited political superstructure with its old rules in a new social order founded on an unchanged economic system. So really what's the difference?

I agree that big changes are imminent and probably already underway. Rather than clinging to worn-out political, economic, and social ideologies, however, it's time to turn the page, especially on the discredited ideas of neoliberalism.

Neoliberalism

The 2007 recession and subsequent financial crash of 2008 prompted the widespread delegitimation of the economic ideologies and policies most closely associated with the Republicans and the global right generally, commonly referred to as neoliberalism. (For further analysis of the connection of neoliberalism and the global right, see British economist Grahame Thompson's book "The Political Economy of the New Right." [1990])

I know, it's confusing. Republicans are neoliberals? Neoliberal, in this sense, refers not to being some new-fangled version of Jane Fonda, but to the general trend in economic and political thought originating with capitalist ideologies that insisted only the marketplace can bring freedom, and governments should leave them alone, literally laissez-faire. Capitalism works best – or only – when markets are allowed to self-regulate. Government or regulatory interventions are oppressive and cause economic problems.

In the late 20th century in the U.S., beginning with Reagan, the neoliberals, reacting to the successes of the New Deal and Johnson's Great Society in improving the lives of working families and inspired by right-wing economic libertarianism and previously discredited laissez-faire blather, won political power. They exploited patriotism and stoked fears of nuclear war with the Soviets aimed at military build-up and cobbled-together alliances with religious fundamentalist movements to gain power. Their real goal, however, was to advance the idea of the unfettered marketplace mainly by eliminating social programs and regulatory oversight that benefited working families and the poor.

This too followed a logic of capitalism. They believed that both the power of the state and the resources it is able to mobilize and rationalize should be returned to the capitalists in order to maximize profits. They sought to accomplish this goal not through the expansion of productive capacity and new innovations, but rather through massive redistribution upward (massive social wage cut, rich tax cuts, government subsidies to corporations) and through the formation of free spaces in which market speculation and manipulation can happen unfettered. But support for the "free" market is a pretense; only those sections of capital most closely aligned with the Republican Party benefited. In fact, public organizations as well as non-corporate, non-state actors were not recognized as equal market participants. The coercive authority of the state shifted from regulating financial markets to attacking labor unions, for example.

Naturally – if anything could be said to be natural – abuses, corruption, excesses, and general harm became a matter of course in this post-Reagan neoliberal reality. Enduring war, financial scandals, political corruption, environmental and health degradation emerged as symptoms of the general disease of neoliberalism, a world of unfettered capitalism.

Both deregulation and the social wage cut for working families are direct causes of both the Great Recession itself as well as its depth and endurance. Unfettered speculation that led to the bubble in the deregulated housing market sparked the financial crash of 2008, but the 30-year stagnation in wages for most working families (notwithstanding temporary improvements in the mid-1990s offset by noticeable declines in the 2000s) ensured the general economic contraction that began in December 2007 would become the deepest recession in 80 years. This general stagnation of working-class wages, the slashing of the social wage, and the dramatic five percent drop in middle-class incomes during the Bush years can be traced directly to the neoliberal policies advanced most fervently by the Republican Party.

So neoliberalism has been discredited; now what?

Public opinion polls suggest that between one-fifth and one-third of Americans view socialism as a solution to the problem. While I agree with this minority, it is clear that most people do not, and that even of those who view socialism positively, no consensus as yet exists on what that means. And those who spend much of their time discussing socialism in meaningful ways are often, for good reason, more fascinated with social and political developments in other countries or remain cynical about or disinclined to engage, for no good reason, the political realities in the U.S.

Instead of focusing solely on the intellectually abstract exercises associated with big "-ism" words, then, a more detailed look at what is possible and what is happening is worthwhile. Below, following Richard Florida's general thesis, I detail some of the big changes emerging in three vital social arenas: healthcare, energy, and foreign policy. I would emphasize from the outset that these three areas are linked in material and ideological ways, which I will elaborate below, that makes treating them discretely as nothing more than a rhetorical gesture at ease and clarity.

Health reform

First, no more defining example of the abuses of "free" markets can be found than in the health insurance industry in the U.S. From their beginnings, the corporations that dominated this industry avoided the fate of just about every other major capitalist organization in the mid-20th century: regulation and government oversight. After decades of spending literally billions, not to improve the quality of care or access to it, but to block "socialistic" efforts to regulate health insurance, the health insurance industry has just this past year suffered the first major blow to its autonomy.

With the passage of health reform, it is possible to show how the new law creates a potential arena for major new innovations in how this aspect of American life is rationalized and distributed. Regulation or elimination of the profit-creating schemes developed in the insurance industry are only one set of such changes, however. New technologies and the rationalization of distribution through a variety of schemes up to and including government-sponsored programs are other key ingredients. The logical – and moral – outcome is the complete removal of healthcare from the "free" market altogether.

The big transition, or "reset," coming out of this crisis that signals new patterns in how Americans live their lives may be centered not on a government "takeover" of healthcare – for now Florida may be right on this point – but on a rationalization through the formation of a mixed system of private and profits ventures designed to provide the most affordable access possible (not completely equivalent to universal healthcare with free access). Still, the idea that healthcare is a basic civil right emerged as a dominant theme in the contentious and poisonous ideological atmosphere engulfing the health reform struggle.

One part of health reform even hardline Republicans gave only token resistance to was the public investment in healthcare infrastructure. Republican Party leading lights like Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann, of course, denounced new healthcare technologies and community centers funded by health reform and the recovery act as scary "big brother" invasions of privacy and abortion factories respectively.

For the typical American, however, interactions with these innovations have provided vastly different experiences. Many people who have visited their doctor recently may have noticed her or the nurse tapping their medical data into a laptop computer. With this new technology, a patient's history can be stored on instantly accessible databases. Trends in a patient's medical profile can be pulled up immediately; the most recent information about cholesterol levels, diet, and medications, even local trends in communicable diseases, can be immediately studied. Some of the great medical mysteries can be instantly revealed, improving the quality of the care by providing patients and families with the latest knowledge about how to care for themselves and each other.

Seems like putting this data on computers is a big duh, right? Until now, with passage of investments as part of President Obama's health reform (and the recovery act), however, the recourses and capacity to do so on a grand scale have been absent for most parts of the country. Even access to high-speed Internet is still unavailable for an estimated 36 percent of the country. Obviously new health technology and more community centers, which right now serve 17 million Americans, will change the way millions of Americans live their lives, access and use healthcare, socializing both the investment and benefits of a transformed health industry.

Energy

One of the most noticeable linguistic shifts in recent years in public discourse has been the discarding of the words "petroleum" and "oil" as key ingredients of economic development and global power in favor of the word "energy." On the one hand, this shift resulted from the ongoing public disapproval of petroleum as a polluting, exploitative industry that drives much of U.S. foreign policy. On the other, the use of the word energy signals a broader recognition of the needed diversity of the industry to satisfy pubic needs and demand.

The drive for a coherent "energy policy" only barely hides the huge internecine battles within the capitalist class itself for hegemony in a changing industry. While Dirty Coal and Big Oil fight to maintain government preferences (subsidies and deregulation – the sum total of what the Republicans call "energy policy"), emergent and innovative technologies like renewable electricity from wind and solar power and alternative fuels (biofuels) have earned serious new investments under the Obama administration.

A former Lansing, Michigan area owner of solar power manufacturing business recently explained to me some of the historical trends and conflicts in this field. He said that in the 1970s, especially with the election of President Carter, enterprising types like himself jumped full tilt into the clean energy industry. "By the end of the 1970s one could open the phone book and find literally dozens of solar power-related businesses just in the mid-Michigan area alone (where he established his business)," he recalled. After Reagan infamously took down the solar panels format the roof of the White House signaling the government's lack of interest in promoting that emergent industry, however, the number of renewable electricity-based businesses collapsed to almost nothing in just a few short years.

Simply put, this historical episode revealed laissez-faire ideology to be little more than a myth used as a fig leaf to cover a serious struggle for power within the capitalist class. The alliance of the Republican Party with Big Oil (notably this alliances crosses partisan lines but the general configuration put here remains pertinent), and the Democratic Party's general preference for alternatives represents on a basic level this fundamental intra-class rift in the energy sector. This rift is sure to intensify as President Obama has recently called for eliminating tax subsidies for major oil companies in order to pay for new investments in job-creating infrastructure development.

These signs indicate the pendulum may be swinging away from old energy aligned with the Republican Party machine. According to Time magazine writer Michael Grunwald, the Republican Party's aversion to clean energy notwithstanding, one of the big changes America may be going through as a result of the 2008 crash is how it manufactures, distributes and consumes energy.

Grunwald writes, Obama's policies represent "the most ambitious energy legislation in history, converting the Energy Department into the world's largest venture-capital fund." Nearly $100 billion since February of 2009 have been allocated for clean energy alternatives such as wind, solar, new mass transit, electric cars, new battery technology, biofuels, "smart grid" technology, and R&D in the field. Grunwald noted that investments in related infrastructure, such as expanded broadband access (which administration officials have correctly compared to electrification in the South under the New Deal) and institutionalized research facilities, are "game changers" that will permanently "reset" how Americans live their lives.

Of importance also is the administration's effort to regulate carbon emissions produced by outdated energy technology and Big Oil and Dirty Coal. While climate legislation that would create an EPA-administered marketplace for carbon emissions (and generating billions for investments in cleaner and clean alternatives) has stalled in Congress, the administration has pushed forward with direct agency regulation of emissions under its Clean Air Act authority.

Of course, Grunwald's optimistic claims and the success of comprehensive climate legislation, which could put the seal of permanence on this energy transformation, depends most immediately on whether or not Republicans, who typically deny the need for transforming the energy infrastructure, regain their former political dominance, or even return to control parts of the government with effective veto power over these changes.

In the bigger picture, the intra-class struggle over energy can benefit the working class. Right now, leadership in the drive for public investment in "green jobs" (in alliance with the venture capitalists who want to foster the emergent clean energy sector) as a remedy to the unemployment crisis has revitalized the labor movement. Capital alone cannot drive this big change in how Americans live their lives; it will be the level and quality of involvement by working people, not just in doing the work that creates this change (e.g. building wind turbines, creating paper-free healthcare records systems, or retrofitting buildings for energy efficiency), but in the political struggle over the socialization of its benefits that will determine how working families ultimately experience that "great reset."

Foreign policy

Will the Great Recession drive big changes in how the U.S. relates to its global neighbors? Unfortunately, a clear conception of how this might play out hasn't been fully envisioned by strategists of a non-imperialist U.S. foreign policy. With a few exceptions emerging in the labor movement in recent years around criticisms of "free" trade agreements and human rights crises, the coherent formation of foreign policy concepts has been almost the exclusive domain of the ruling class and the specific capitalist interests into which it is divided.

On occasion, such as with the case of the war in Iraq, the peace movement and its working-class allies have successfully forced, along with a confluence of events, an alteration in that policy. More rare, however, has been the formation of comprehensive alternatives that match the scope and depth of policy initiatives managed and concocted in ruling-class think tanks.

Those of us who are proponents of a non-imperialist U.S. foreign policy spend so much time on the short end opposing war, nuclear build-up, and excessive and wasteful Pentagon spending that little time is devoted to formulating a comprehensive policy outline. Thus, most alternatives to war and military build-up in ruling circles center on things like "smart power" and non-military forms of intervention that hardly measure up as non-imperialist. So far, "anti-imperialism" alone remains an unsatisfactory alternative as it contains little in the way of constructive and positive policy alternatives. Unfortunately, many on the left who rigidly define themselves as "anti-imperialists" tend to disapprove of the formulation of policy alternatives and to characterize such proposals as "liberal" or as concessions to the imperialists.

Former Cuban President Fidel Castro's recent description of the U.S. military industrial complex (M.I.C.) – really a profit-motivated multinational and technological complex of corporations – as un-Constitutionally transcending the personal authority of the Commander-in-Chief, a judgment that coincides with the warnings of outgoing Republican President Eisenhower almost 60 years ago (earning him affiliation with the Communists in the minds of hardline John Birchers), deserves to be kept in mind by those who would strategize a non-imperialist foreign policy. That power nearly always ensures that military and defense-related industries feed unfettered at the trough of the public treasury and, as evidenced by the slight punishments for the hundreds of identified atrocities committed by the private security contractor formerly known as Blackwater, now XE, almost always avoid serious public scrutiny and government regulation.

The sheer power of the M.I.C. isn't the only social force to contend with regarding foreign policy. With 28 million veterans in the general population and a general positive feeling about them, mostly of working-class background and orientation, patriotism and loyalty to service members are often and easily manipulated by Republican Party leaders to promote build-ups, interventions, and wars. While the peace movement has taken this aspect of U.S. culture into account, effectively building organizations of pro-peace veterans in the process, principled anti-imperialists and non-imperialist strategists have yet to take this under serious consideration in their own rhetoric. While there are complicated legal, human rights, and ethical issues that will remain unresolved here, the reduction of U.S. troops to "dupes" or even criminals is indefensible, especially in consideration of the "poverty draft."

Despite the almost insurmountable power of the M.I.C. and the popular "structure of feeling" towards patriotism and military service, as Marxist cultural critic Raymond Williams might have called it, and the realities of the power of the M.I.C., the Obama administration has risked its political capital to set in motion some major changes. At the outset, he proposed the biggest slow-down in military spending since the end of the Cold War's "peace dividend." He ended combat operations in Iraq and signaled his intent to begin troop withdrawal from Afghanistan next year. He called for major reductions in the world's nuclear arsenals, a proposal that earned him a Nobel Prize for Peace; and he successfully negotiated a new nuclear weapons reduction treaty with the Russians. In addition, Defense Secretary Gates has put on the table $100 billion more in cuts to help reduce the deficit, a proposal that incomprehensibly has been more or less ignored or viewed cynically by the left.

Enduring support for service members is combined with strong emotional patriotism among the general American population. In addition, and perhaps even more critical to our analysis here is the fact that the historical alliance between the U.S. state and corporations with profit-motivated interests in other parts of the world – a relationship formed out of the logic of capitalism to seek access to labor and commodity markets in other parts of the globe – has promoted also a history of animosity among both competing capitalist and nationalist forces in various parts of the world. The intricacies and dynamics of the Cold War with the Soviet Union and the very hot wars in the satellite states provide prime examples.

Consider Afghanistan, for example, in which the U.S. has fought a war now for almost nine years. The very forces that have been labeled as "enemies" were given material aid and training by U.S. operatives and surrogates in the 1980s during the "holy war" against the Soviets. The mujahideen earned one of few exceptions to widespread Islamophobia in U.S. popular culture and politics in those years, with numerous Hollywood movies like Rambo III and major media personalities like Dan Rather celebrating (sometimes with doctored footage) their anti-Soviet activities.

Unfortunately the pro-Soviet regime which had seized power in 1979, despite excellent policies that expanded educational opportunities and healthcare access, promoted economic development and trade, broke down traditional gender barriers, tried to shift power from local religious leaders to secular authorities with a redistributive land policy and more, failed to win broad popular support and fought internecine conflicts that exposed its authoritarian and coercive character. To save itself, the regime called for Soviet intervention, knowing the USSR would go to great lengths to protect a friendly government along its southern flank in a region with important natural resources and rapidly shifting global allegiances. Now, the forces that Reagan touted as freedom fighters, after seizing power as the Taliban and providing a safe haven to the perpetrators of the Sept. 11th attacks, are a threat so imminent they require, according to proponents of intervention and war, a military force of tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers and the full array of powerful war-making technology the U.S. can wield to kill even in the remotest part of the country.

Terrorism strikes fear, and Americans have become professionals at being afraid, even if at times they are able to suppress it in favor of focusing on work and family issues, watching good movies or entertaining sporting events, getting involved in civic activities, or thinking through the immediate cause of anxiety. Republican Party-affiliated media at FOX News and talk radio have tried promote a culture of fear by linking all Muslims to the Sept. 11th attacks and have succeeded in convincing most of their audiences that President Obama poses a grave danger by siding with those who favor "Islamization" of America. Fear, thus, can become a material force that governs the nature and parameters of foreign policymaking, a fact that cynics dismiss at their peril and demands a special attention to national security issues.

So far, a description of existing realities doesn't help us fully understand how innovations in foreign policymaking could change the way we live, vis-a-vis Richard Florida's thesis. An end to war, military budget cuts, and nuclear weapons reductions may not themselves seem like they add up to innovative changes, but living without war enables us to shift our priorities. Right now, those priorities are focused on the need for job creation, a fear that has for most people outstripped anxieties about what may be brewing in Afghanistan. Still, we're talking about the absence of destruction (through war) rather than the presence of innovation.

A non-imperialist foreign policy might resemble the stated foreign policy of China, a subject that also comes up in an earlier segment of the Zakaria show, though viewed through a distorting lens of that country's supposed threat to U.S. global leadership. (As if a shared, multilateral leadership would be such a bad thing.) As China tells it, its foreign policy, termed "peaceful development," stems from its desire for internal economic development based on building peaceful, mutually beneficial global economic relationships created not through coercion and military might but through shared interests. As a result, Chinese companies and development institutions have invested in projects in Africa, for example, where the U.S. simply has, for the past decade, failed to show much economic interest.

China has been forced to build up militarily out of ongoing pressures from the U.S. M.I.C., but those who interpret these as threatening signs really misunderstand Chinese goals. While U.S. capitalists and pro-imperialist ideologues tend to include military build-up in the general category of economic growth (if you cut it, they say, it will cost jobs), China's leaders say that sort of economic activity as mostly negative and destructive. Military contractors exist to maximize profits, just like every other capitalist corporation; but in order to create new orders, old equipment has to be ordered, used, and new demand must be created. Such a theory of creative activity may work when talking about cellphones or ham sandwiches, but if its cruise missiles, their only use-value is destructive and violent.

(Discussions of how to handle the complicated trade, currency and debt relationship between the U.S. and China cannot be resolved here except to say that both governments can most effectively address each others' concerns at the bargaining table rather than non-diplomatic discourse, i.e., military gestures.)

A non-imperialist foreign policy would start, more broadly, from the stance that the national sovereignty of other countries includes their right to determine the level of socialization of their economic development, not simply adherence to absurd abstractions about "free" markets imposed by outsiders. In other words, neoliberal interventions should be discarded in favor of cooperative global exchanges.

To address national security issues adequately, a non-imperialist foreign policy must envision it as multifaceted issue comprised of more than simply unilateral militarization, or having bigger and deadlier weapons. U.S. national security also involves multinational engagement of issues of even economic development, sovereignty, unbiased concerns for democratic and human rights, fair approaches to environmental sustainability, support for equal treatment in international organizations, and prioritization of diplomatic efforts.

Then what?

Unlike the significant changes that have been set in motion domestically in the areas of health and energy, the major transformation in our lives resulting from potential new foreign policy concepts have yet to be realized. The power that seeks to maintain the status quo, centered in the M.I.C., is so great real change will depend on the effectiveness of the unevenly matched social movements (premised on broad concepts of alliance) for peace, fair trade policies, and cooperative international arrangements. Ideals and hopes for cooperative, non-imperialist relationships will have to be themselves transformed into imperatives and necessities.

One such necessity is the reality that success in making meaningful change in the health and energy fields depends in no small way on saving the resources now expended on military build-up and war. A new energy policy, many proponents of alternatives convincingly assert, will make interventionism less of an imperative. Creating the resources to sustain innovative transformation will require non-hostile international relationships undisturbed by the threat of war or violence – just to cite some of the possible linkages and relationships among these fields. If economic development with high rates of socializing the benefits of such development replace profit as motive for participation in and sustenance of the big changes in these three fields described above, deeper political and economic transitions would be realizable. Human beings may grow to enact and thrive in a world of lesser inequality and greater democracy.

(Photo by Leoncillo Sabino, courtesy Flickr, cc by 2.0)

Techniques of empire: What is new and what is the same old stuff?

Wed, 06 Oct 2010 08:26:00 +0000

Original source: Diary of a Heartland Radical

Empires past

Nations, tribes, armed members of messianic religions from time to time have engaged in conquest of others. Peoples have been slaughtered for their land, their natural resources, their mistaken beliefs. The techniques used to be simple: killing, imprisonment or enslavement, and occupation.

With the rise of capitalism as a global economic system, accumulated resources were used to create modern instruments of war -- guns, ships, pollutants, and poisons. As Marx claimed long ago, capitalism was of necessity a global system so nation-states created in the era of economic modernity were compelled to pursue exploitable labor (particularly slaves), natural resources, market opportunities, and investment sites everywhere. Mercenary armies were created to conquer people and land and fight against the mercenary armies of other capitalist countries.

The British empire (“the sun never sets on the British Empire”) was caused by and facilitated the industrial revolution. In the 1880s European imperial powers came together to divide up the African continent. After the first of two world wars in the twentieth century, wars which cost 60 million deaths, the Middle East was divided up among declining powers, Great Britain and France.

The United States joined the imperial fray in the 1890s. It took the Hawaiian Islands, fought Spain to conquer Cuba, occupied other Caribbean Islands, and crushed the independence struggle in the Philippines. Over the next 30 years the United States invaded countries in the Western Hemisphere some 25 times, often leaving U.S. Marines in place for years.

The United States and the Cold War

A variety of imperial techniques became common as the United States fought the Communist enemy during the Cold War. With the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency in 1947, the first of many “intelligence agencies” was launched to interfere with the political life of countries the U.S. regarded as strategic.

CIA money was used to shape elections in democracies such as France and Italy. Money flowed to Christian Democratic Parties created to oppose Socialist campaigns. Also money found its way into anti-Communist trade union federations. This pattern of interference was replicated in Latin America as well and later in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.

The United States engaged in visible campaigns to create and support military coups; the most critical being in Guatemala and Iran in the 1950s, Brazil and Indonesia in the 1960s, and Chile in the 1970s. And of course U.S. policymakers launched long and brutal wars in Korea and Vietnam leading to four million Asian deaths and 100,000 American soldiers killed.

The pursuit of U.S. empire included some modern strategies as well as conquest and subversion. President Truman, through the Marshall Plan, instituted an expensive campaign of economic and military assistance which would become a staple of U.S. Cold War policy. From the initiation of the Marshall Plan in 1948 with a modest $14 billion aid program to anti-Communist regimes in Europe through the Carter years, $235 billion was provided to selected and strategic imperial partners: first in Europe, then Asia and the Middle East.

President Kennedy contributed to the imperial tool kit; the provision of military advisors, funding for local militaries in countries threatened by revolution (such as in Central America), and training programs for military officers such as in the old School of the Americas. Economic assistance came with strings, the promotion of market-based economies, and opposition to indigenous and Communist political forces, at least as much as local political contexts would allow.

President Reagan was an imperial innovator as well. Constrained by the “Vietnam Syndrome,” public opposition to further Vietnam-style military quagmires, he established policies based upon “low intensity conflict.” Creating and funding local counterrevolutionary armies in places as varied as Nicaragua, Angola, Ethiopia, Cambodia, and Afghanistan, the U.S. role in conflicts could be kept off the front pages of newspapers.

Civil war violence stimulated by U.S. resources would not be “low intensity” in countries where it occurred but it might be considered so in the U.S. Citizens would not learn of the critical U.S. support given to Islamic fundamentalist rebels, including Osama Bin Laden, fighting a pro-Soviet regime in Afghanistan in the 1980s until quite recently.

To insure the limited visibility of U.S. global operations, and to reward political allies with government contracts, the Reagan administration dramatically expanded programs privatizing U.S. military operations. Support for the Contra war against the Nicaraguan people involved transferring public funds to private armies and using key foreign policy advisers, such as Colonel Oliver North, as conduits and organizers of networks of private sources of funding for war.

Thus began public programs to encourage and stimulate the creation of private companies that would fight America’s wars. The American people had little way of knowing how deeply involved they were in violence around the world and the danger of sinking into new Vietnams.

Roman legions. Image from Cultural Resources.

21st century techniques of empire

The world has come a long way from the days of Roman legions slogging across land pillaging and killing. The days of nineteenth century colonial rule -- clumsy and arrogant with foreign occupants of land lording over exploited local workers -- has changed. However, it is important to reflect on the new or more developed techniques of empire, while never forgetting that there are centuries long continuities of techniques of imperial rule.

For starters, Marc Pilisuk reports in Who Benefits From Global Violence and War: Uncovering a Destructive System that the character of war has changed over the years and centuries. Wars today are not usually between nations. Casualties of wars are overwhelmingly civilians rather than soldiers. The weapons used in wars today are more likely than in the past to temporarily or permanently damage the natural habitat as well as kill people.

Wars in recent years have been likely to be fought over natural resources. Nations and groups now are more likely to be supplied with weapons produced by a handful of corporations that specialize in the production of military supplies. These weapons are provided by a small number of nations. Finally, wars fought in modern times, the last 100 years, have caused more deaths than in any other comparable period of human history.

Pilisuk reports that since World War II 250 wars have occurred causing 50 million deaths and leaving millions homeless. (The United States participated significantly in 75 military interventions.)

Recently a number of journalistic and scholarly accounts have added to our understanding of newer techniques of empire, particularly U.S. empire.

* Global presence. Pilisuk, Chalmers Johnson (The Sorrows of Empire) and others have estimated that the United States has over 700, perhaps 800 military installations in more than 40 countries. Some years ago the Pentagon determined that huge Cold War era military bases needed to be replaced with smaller, strategically located bases for rapid mobilization to attend to “trouble-spots” in the Global South. While forward basing in South Asia and in nations formerly part of the Soviet Union has received some attention seven new U.S. bases being established in Colombia (within striking distance of hostile Venezuela) and increased naval operations in the Caribbean have not. In addition, there are some 6,000 domestic military bases, many that anchor the economies of small towns.

* Privatization of the U.S. military. David Isenberg (“Private Military Contractors and U.S. Grand Strategy,” PRIO, Oslo, 2009) refers to “...the U.S. government’s huge and growing reliance on private contractors” which “...constitutes an attempt to circumvent or evade public skepticism about the United States’ self-appointed role as global policemen.” While PMCs provide many services, such as combat, consulting, training armies, and military support, their combat presence in the two major wars of the 21st century, Afghanistan and Iraq, has generated the most, if limited, public attention. Isenberg says that between 1950 and 1989 PMCs participated in 15 conflicts in other countries and from 1990 to 2000 another 80. PMCs were employed in civil wars such as in Angola, Sierre Leone, and the Balkans.

A recent Washington Post investigation compiled a data base, “Top Secret America,” “that found 1,931 intelligence contracting firms” doing top secret work “for 1,271 government organizations at over 10,000 sites.” TSA indicates that 90 percent of the intelligence work is done by 110 contractors. Defense department spokespersons and legislators claim that the United States needs to continue allocating billions of dollars to private contractors to maintain military performance levels that are minimally acceptable.

The X-47B unmanned combat air vehicle. Artist's rendering from Defense Industry Daily.

* Unmanned aerial vehicles. Nick Turse (The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives) describes the introduction of unmanned aerial weapons in the 1990s and their current weaponry of choice for the White House and others who prefer antiseptic and bloodless (on our side) technologies to eliminate enemies. New predator drones can be programmed to fly over distant lands and target enemies for unstoppable air strikes. Drones have been increasingly popular as weapons in fighting enemies in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen.

Connecting drone strikes to assassination teams and other war-making techniques, Shane, Mazzetti, and Worth, (“Secret Assault on Terrorism Widens on Two Continents,” The New York Times, August 16, 2010) refers to shadow wars against terrorist targets. “In roughly a dozen countries -- from the deserts of North Africa, to the mountains of Pakistan, to former Soviet republics crippled by ethnic and religious strife -- the United States has significantly increased military and intelligence operations, pursuing the enemy using robotic drones and commando teams, paying contractors to spy and training local operatives to chase terrorists.”

* Assassinations. The United States has initiated campaigns to identify and assassinate presumed enemies. CIA operatives and private contractors join teams of army specialists under the Joint Special Operations Command (13,000 assassination commandos around the world) to kill foreigners alleged to be affiliated with terrorist groups. These targets can include U.S. citizens living abroad who have been deemed to be terrorist collaborators. In the Western Hemisphere, the United States, through Latin American military personnel trained at the School of the Americas, has long supported assassination programs that now seem to be “globalized,” that is administered everywhere.

Fred Branfman (Alternet, August 24, 2010) starkly describes the assassination policy: “The truth that many Americans find hard to take is that mass U.S. assassination on a scale unequaled in world history lies at the heart of America’s military strategy in the Muslim world, a policy both illegal and never seriously debated by Congress or the American people.”

* Missionary humanitarian interventions. While most techniques of empire involve the direct use of violence, public and private organizations expand the presence of empire through so-called “humanitarian assistance.” While the work of the missionary has often followed the flag, never has such activism impacted so heavily on global politics as today.

For example, The New York Times (July 6, 2010) reported that Christian evangelical groups have transferred substantial amounts of funds to Jewish settlements in occupied territories of the West Bank. Furthermore, fundraising for settlements that stand in the way of the creation of a Palestinian state receive tax exemptions. The newspaper reports on “...at least 40 American groups that have collected more than $200 million in tax-deductible gifts for Jewish settlement in the West Bank and East Jerusalem over the last decade.”

The newspaper correctly points out that so-called “humanitarian” and tax deductible donations to entities in other countries tied to U.S. foreign policy are not new. But, the article suggests that donations to the settler movement are special “because of the centrality of the settlement issue in the current talks and the fact that Washington has consistently refused to allow Israel to spend American government aid in the settlements. Tax breaks for the donations remain largely unchallenged, and unexamined by the American government.”

What is new about imperial policies

While the general character of imperial policies remains the same, whether the empire is Rome, Japan, Germany, France, Great Britain, or the United States, changes in technology, the state system, ideology, and tactical thinking have had their effects.

First, imperial rule has become truly global. From bases in far-off places to unmanned drones flying over literally millions of targets everywhere, empires operate with no constraints based on geography.

Second, the military has become big business. Private corporations assume a greater share of Department of Defense budgets. Private companies now clean up and cook for the troops, train foreign soldiers, assassinate assumed terrorist enemies, and fight small wars with almost no visibility to publics.

Third, the United States is moving toward fighting wars without soldiers on the ground. Enemies can be identified by computer and military technologists can then push the right buttons to kill the unfortunate targets. Killing has become antiseptic. Killers can say goodbye to the kids in the morning, drive to work, push some buttons, drive home and spend the evening with the family. Meanwhile thousands of miles away there are mourners crying over those just assassinated.

Fourth, empires, at least the U.S. empire, can kill with impunity. Targets labeled terrorist can be eliminated by unmanned space weapons, specially trained assassination teams, or average foot soldiers.

Finally, empires can expand and change the destiny of peoples through so-called “humanitarian assistance.” Local goals, good or bad, are furthered by the large financial resources that special interests can bring to other countries.

Empires have had a long and ugly history. Because of technology, economics, and ideology new techniques of empire have been added to the old. The struggle against all empires must continue.

Capitalist Ideology in Anti-Capitalist Politics

Wed, 06 Oct 2010 08:25:00 +0000

The ideology of the ruling class so permeates our capitalist society that many anti-capitalist activists often accidentally reference that ideology's set of theoretical assumptions when planning their own actions.

Karl Marx observed the power of the ruling class to control our mode of thought, or method of thinking, in his work The German Ideology. He wrote:

"The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas…."

This control over the individuals' mode of thought is not to be understood simply as control over what an individual thinks of specific issues, such as one's opinion of the "Ground Zero Mosque," or even something as important as the wars in the Middle East. It also refers to the total set of assumptions a person takes-for-granted when judging this world around him/her, and which presents him/her with what appears to be the only positions available when other positions, or opinions, are indeed possible – if only he/she were to have knowledge of this other set of assumptions.

The set of assumptions present in each individual may vary, but not to such a degree that it is impossible for social scientists, such as sociologists and marketers, to identify trends in social thought and make approximate predictions based on them. Marx, often credited as being one of the first sociologists, refers to the sum of an individual's assumptions as his/her consciousness. When this consciousness is based on an ideology formulated by a group outside of the individuals' influence, putting them in a position in which they are essentially in another's control, Marx states that they are in a state of false consciousness.

Capitalism, as a system defined by class antagonisms, perpetuates false consciousness among the entire subordinate class.

Marx's The German Ideology then focuses on the philosophy of Max Stirner, a specific philosopher present in Marx's time whom Marx identified as perpetuating false consciousness. Stirner, an idealist anarchist, did not observe the power of ideology, ignoring material conditions on which it is based, and erroneously postulated that the class problem capitalism presents could be done away with by simply encouraging individuals to adopt a new principles. Marx rightly pointed out that, as consciousness follows ideology and ideology is so controlled by the ruling class, a critical amount of real, material organization to produce a new consciousness would have to come into the control of the working class itself before the majority of that class could adopt a consciousness which would make possible a revolution that would lead to a classless society.

Most modern anarchists have cast aside the views of Stirner, as his theoretical predecessors adopted materialist views that recognize individuals' socialization.

Regardless, the views of many in contemporary anarchist, and socialist, organizations are still today influenced by capitalist ideology's false consciousness.

In the United States, much of this can be blamed on the capitalists' suppression of the peoples' movements of the 1960s. As discussed in Adam Curtis's documentary film series "The Century of the Self," many active in the politically anti-capitalist organizations of that time were demoralized when the oppression of the peoples' movement in 1968 unveiled the complexity of revolutionary action. This caused many of the activists to turn inward, to become preoccupied with new forms of spirituality, and to turn political action into something resembling an individual morality. Simultaneously, political policy experts and corporate marketers were able to, in varying degrees, adapt to what had become but cultural values among the younger generation. It became possible to be rebellious in one's style, and to represent one's values in lifestyles represented by the purchasing of certain products or the mimicking of certain subcultures present in capitalism.

Even those who remained politically conscious became influenced by this change, which continues to confound many leftists today. Disconnected from theory, leftists have started to judge actions in and of themselves. Radicals are tempted to judge their actions based on principles, often resembling a moral system, rather than a timeless, theoretical method.

The contemporary theorist Slavoj Zizek commented on this phenomenon when we said, in effect, that he was surprised to find many in the anti-war movement of 2003 to be more interested in taking a stand against the war "to save their beautiful souls," deriving guidance from a personal moral idea of their own, more so than a set of theoretical assumptions that saw the war as an extension of a soon-to-be commonly experienced oppression.

The problem with relying on this method to guide one in political action lies not so much in the fact that it has represented itself in a moral form, but that it individuates political action so that it becomes nothing more than a reaction to the actions of capitalism, and further allows the individual to be satisfied with his/her personal actions rather than broadly-felt results.

The best example of this can be found within the anti-consumerism idea.

Anti-consumerism has a noble goal, encouraging people to look beyond the spectacle marketers build around products and focus on the way in which those products actually come into being. The problem with the current anti-consumerism movement is that it draws from assumptions rooted in false-consciousness, tending to place responsibility for corporate action on individual consumers.

The movement against consumerism encourages people simply to not buy products which are produced in ways that harm the environment or violate workers rights. The idea is similar to that which drives boycotts. However, the anti-consumerism movement wants not to influence companies to change specific business practices, but to go so far as to defy practices that are essential to remaining competitive in capitalism. What the movement does not realize is that it is relying on the capitalist concept that the consumer is the determining source of capitalism's features. Popularized by the Austrian School of economics, the notion is that one dollar equals one vote, and that the capitalist economic system is a democracy. This notion is terribly flawed, as it is immediately apparent that some people have far more dollar votes than others. To further complicate the matter, the cheapest commodities also tend to be those produced by the largest, most economically efficient firms. One ends up blaming the very victims of globalization, the poor and all those whose oppressions intersect with poverty, for dependence on commodities produced by such exploitative companies.

In response to people's concerns with what they consume, even Starbucks offers a "fair-trade" coffee among its "free-trade" selection now. If one protests using capitalist ideology as a basis, Starbucks can conveniently place blame for their exploitative practices on all those who do not buy their fair-trade coffee, since "the consumer holds the power."

Countered by the dominant ideology again and again, individual activists start to lose hope. Many in the anti-consumerism movement, and anti-globalization movement in general, have become fascinated with the concept of living "off the grid." The end result of political action being conceived of as something defined by personal life decisions convinces the individual that removing themselves from the capitalist system is the best course of action. In a society defined by capitalist ideology, the individual removes themselves from society.

The capitalist class could be no happier.

To challenge capitalism requires more than personal conviction. It requires real, mass action. It requires class consciousness.

Class consciousness is not only the knowledge of how capitalism splits people into haves and have-nots, but the actual realization of the fact that one is in a class with other people. Marx focuses on this in this early works, where he calls for the end of discrimination and a realization that all people, regardless of race, nationality, sex, gender and economic class, ought to be self-determining. Lenin expounds on this idea in his book What Is To Be Done?, declaring that Communists are to not to merely fight for the aid of the workers in the economic field, but to lead to their emancipation, along with the emancipation of minority groups experiencing ethnic discrimination, and those who, in his time, were affected by the criminalization of youth associations.

All oppressed people are included in the what Marxists call the proletariat, distinguished from the capitalist class by the ways in which they lack power and by their common claim to self-determination.

Once this is understood, anti-capitalist politics are redefined. Politics is recognized as more than just the sum of acts of performed by individuals, but as something that make individuals accountable to their class.

If one does not recognize class, and the importance of mass action, it is tempting to view the revolutionary process as nothing more than a series of proclamations, and do little more than seek to capitalize on the spontaneous uprisings of the oppressed. The movement is isolated, anti-capitalist sentiment ebs and flows, and "leaders" preach among whatever choir exists at any given time. As real, whole class consciousness goes unrecognized, strategy takes backstage to tactics, and opportunities to build an anti-capitalist movement are squandered.

In The Communist Manifesto, Marx explains that this type of anti-capitalist action is the result of revolutionaries still relying on the capitalist ideology, and labels the activists engaged in such actions as petty-bourgeois revolutionaries. The proletariat forms stronger bonds, but does not recognize itself. Expanding on this idea, Lenin distinguished between what he called "doctrinaire" Marxists and "orthodox" Marxists in a pamphlet titled Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder. Lenin criticized political movements of the doctrinaire type, who used the Marxist label but who represented Marxism as a set of principles rather than a guiding theory. This led such parties to shun all reform, to shirk responsibility for their communities by refusing to participate in politics (including electoral work) when such engagement would have yielded positive results for the oppressed, and to damage their own movement by refusing to build toward socialism in steps that would have expanded democratic power.

As emancipation is the goal of those seeking the overthrow of capitalism, the people themselves must be the guide of political action. At the end of Marx and Engels' Communist manifesto it is written that Communist parties are not to be separate from the proletariat, but are to be active within in the proletariat, guiding while, at the same time, representing the class at whatever stage of struggle they are in. Lenin, repeated this sentiment when he countered doctrinaire reluctance to work in reactionary trade unions. He wrote that it was even more importance for Communists to work among those still harboring petty chauvinisms, because that is the only way such chauvinisms can be countered and eradicated.

In our current situation, we in the anti-capitalist movement cannot count on the mere dissemination of our ideas to bring about change. The overwhelming majority of socialization in our society results from individuals' involvement in the consumption of ideologically capitalist media, in capitalist work places, in capitalist defined recreationally activity, etc. Our ideas have to be linked with action, and we must engage in struggles which afford us the opportunity to mingle with others in our class – the proletariat. Practical action to build our influence must be undertaken, and if popular reforms lead to our increased influence, we must unabashedly use reform to further class consciousness.

Theory is what allows for strategy, and tactics – one's actions – must adapt with regard to the stage of struggle the people themselves are engaged in in any given time and place.

As ideology is the result of socialization, and the means of any form of production, exchange, and other social organization performs socialization and builds ideology, we must not retreat from our current society, scared or repulsed by its current manifestation, but engage it with a transformative theory drawn from our class experience.

The Force Theory of Herr Eugen Dühring

Wed, 06 Oct 2010 08:24:00 +0000

Chapters two, three and four of Part Two of Engel's book Anti-Dühring, "Political Economy," deal with Dühring's theory that political systems and power are PRIMARY and economic relations are SECONDARY – both historically and in the present day. Engels says Dühring gives no evidence or arguments in favor of this theory (which he claims is ORIGINAL) but simply asserts it as a given. Engels says this is old hash and has been the way history has been seen since the beginning. The true history of humankind has actually taken place behind the scenes and is the real basis for the pompous doings of the kings and presidents, popes and generals that strut the stage and are memorialized in the history books.

Dühring's idea that all the previous history of mankind is based on man's enslavement of man – i.e., on force – and that this is the only way we can explain it is exemplified by his example of Robinson Crusoe and Friday. Crusoe enslaves Friday. But why does he do this? Engels says "only in order that Friday should work for Crusoe's benefit." That is for an ECONOMIC MOTIVE. Dühring has reversed the true relation between political order and economic order and does not see "that force is only the means and that the aim is economic advantage."

Slavery, by the way, the condition from which Dühring starts out his "political force is the basis of history" nonsense is itself the result of prior historical and economic developments.

Slavery requires two preconditions: tools and material for the slave to work upon and a food supply to provide a basic subsistence for the slave. This means that a prior historical period in which distribution of social wealth has developed must have preceded the introduction of slavery.

Engels gives as examples primitive societies with common land ownership where there was no slavery or it "played only a very subordinate role." This is also true of ancient Rome before it became an imperial power. Even in the US, Engels says, the cotton industry of England was more important than force in maintaining slavery in the South so that "in those districts where no cotton was grown or which, unlike the border states, did not breed slaves for the cotton growing states, it died out of itself without any force being used, simply because it did not pay."

But wait a minute. Doesn't this sound right about the world we live in? Dühring says capitalist property today is the result of the use of force in the past and in fact all past property accumulations are also based on force (Rome, Egypt, etc.,) and force is, in Dühring's words, "that form of domination AT THE ROOT OF WHICH LIES not merely the exclusion of fellow-men from the use of the natural means of subsistence, but also... the subjection of man to make him do servile work." It sounds right. Big business and the oil giants use force to take over natural resources (Niger Delta, Iraq, the Amazon), they force masses of third world workers into sweat shops at low wages, etc. Why isn't Dühring right on?

Well, Engels says he is not: "Private property by no means makes it appearance in history as the result of robbery [so much for 'property is theft'] or force. On the contrary, it already existed ... in the ancient primitive communes of all civilized peoples." Engels gives many examples of the development of private property by trade, individual labor, and the accumulation of wealth in the form of domestication of animals – none of which involved force or robbery. His logical argument is, however, that before you can use force to take someone's property or to steal it from him, it (i.e., property) must already exist "therefore force may be able to change the possession of, but cannot create, private property as such." If Dühring had meant this he would have been correct but force is NOT at the root of the domination of man by private property.

Nor is force the cause of the "subjection of man to make him do servile work" at least with respect to modern capitalism. At this point Engels gives a long quote from DAS KAPITAL [from Vol. 1: Section One of Chapter XXIV "Conversion of Surplus Value Into Capital"] the upshot of which is that economies based on commodity production where property is based on the labor put into it evolve into capitalist economies where surplus value develops and labor becomes separated from property and "property," Marx writes, "turns out to be the right, on the part of the capitalist, to appropriate the unpaid labour of others or its product, and to be the impossibility on the part of the labourer, of appropriating his own product. The separation of property from labour has become the necessary consequence of a law that apparently originated in their identity."

Engels points out that Dühring never mentions Marx's arguments (since they would demolish his own) and that the whole structure of modern exploitation and servitude "can be explained by purely economic causes; at no point whatever are robbery, force, the state, or political interference of any kind necessary."

Again, Dühring is totally wrong when he writes "political conditions are the decisive cause of the economic situation." If that were the case, Engels says, then capitalism would have been voluntarily brought about by the feudal system; but that didn't happen. In the struggle to overthrow feudalism "the decisive weapon" was the ECONOMIC power of the bourgeoisie. An example being the great French Revolution of 1789 which broke out because the capitalist system had become the dominant economic power but, "The 'political conditions' in France remained unaltered, while the 'economic situation' had outgrown them." As a result the nobles no longer had an important social function but they nevertheless tried to keep control of the social wealth "in the revenues that came to" them.

This is not unlike today (2010). We have a socialized economy in that the large industries and banks etc., could be kept running by their workers alone if the capitalist class vanished overnight – they too have no important social function. Even though they are useless they still fight to control the social wealth and increase their revenues. When the workers finally wake up to this fact, and their living conditions are as desperate as the French in 1789, the game will be up for the capitalists. A few more depressions will suffice one hopes.

While the living standards of the world's working class approaches, day by day, the level of the French in 1789 we find, as Engels says, "the bourgeoisie has already come close to occupying the position held by the nobility in 1789 [in our day they are no longer "close" they have equaled the position of the old nobility-T.R.]: it is becoming more and more not only socially superfluous, but a social hindrance; it is more and more becoming separated from productive activity, and like the nobility in the past, becoming more and more a class merely drawing revenues...." All this not only points to a socialist future but decisively shows that Dühring's view that politics determines economics is a "delusion."

Building Working-class Power from the Ground Up, an Interview with Amy Dean

Wed, 06 Oct 2010 08:22:00 +0000

Editor’s note: Amy Dean is a career activist with the several labor unions. She is co-author with David Reynolds of A New New Deal: How Regional Activism Will Reshape the American Labor Movement, out now from Cornell University Press. Listen to the audio version of this interview here.

PA: What inspired your involvement in this book project, “A New New Deal”?

Amy Dean: On the question of what inspired me, you know, I’m not an author, I’m an activist, but one of the things that I observed over my 20 years in labor and community organizing is how infrequently activists write about their experiences and, conversely, how frequently business leaders write about theirs. The latter allows for the proliferation of best practices, and I think the organizing world and the social justice world have much to learn from that practice in the business community. When the business community is successful at creating a new way or a better way of accomplishing its goals, it has an entire infrastructure that can advance the narrative around how best to do it. There are literally dozens and dozens of business magazines and business schools, and the whole approach business schools use about learning about any particular aspect of business is through case studies. But I have always felt that our side of the aisle does not take the question of institutional evolution as seriously as our opponents do. So the writing of the book was simply a way to accomplish two things: 1) To hopefully share the experiences of successful efforts with other activists around the country, in the hope that they will be inspired to take a look at this particular model we discuss in our book for organizing in their own region, and 2) to put out information for groups who are trying to figure out a way to do their work better.

PA: What does the term “institutional evolution” mean?

Amy Dean: It means that in order for social change to be successful, it has to happen in the context of institutions. I don’t believe that we can contest for real power in this country through loose-knit coalitions or loose-knit grassroots organizations, but that, instead, if we want to be successful in advancing an agenda that is more fair, more compassionate, and more just for people in this country, we have to be able to build our efforts through the creation of institutions – labor organizations and community organizations, groups that are on the ground and are effective at managing staff, at strategic planning, at being able to merge together the tactics of both thinking and acting, both advocacy and policy and research. In other words, if we are not building strong institutions, then we cannot be successful going up against the business community, which has very strong and very powerful institutions and doesn’t create a new campaign each time it has a new set of interests.

PA: To what extent does the recent economic crisis impact your thinking?

Amy Dean: The current economic crisis impacts my thinking dramatically in the following ways. One is that it makes – crystal clear – that the social safety net that at one point was in place in America has completely been eliminated. The safety net we knit together over the course of decades from World War II up until the 1970s was intended to catch people during the inevitable ebbs and flows of economy – to catch them so they wouldn’t hit the rock bottom and could bounce back economically when the economy turned. One of the things that we have seen from the last several rounds of recessionary times in this country is that when people hit the bottom, they aren’t able to spring back. When they hit the bottom – when they are severed from employment, instead of being able to pick themselves back up and be protected or insulated by America’s social safety net – because there really isn’t one. So when they do hit the bottom, it is not as likely that they will come back and be viable economically. That is one very crystal clear thing we see taking place today, that people are hit much harder when the economy ebbs and flows, which is an inevitability.

The second thing that is so clear about the current economic downturn is that it’s not just the lack of jobs that people are hurt by, it’s also the fact that the quality of employment today has been so reduced that it’s not just a conversation about jobs – there has to be a conversation about what kinds of jobs. Really the institution of the social safety net and the institution of collective bargaining have been so whittled away and so dismantled, that even in the case when people have gainful employment, their ability to improve the conditions of their employment, to increase wages, to increase the kinds of access to health insurance, and the other kinds of social supports we once were able to receive from our employment but are no longer there. So we have a diminished social safety net, we have the erosion of the institution of collective bargaining, and downward pressure on the quality of employment. All these things make us that much more vulnerable when the economy turns down in the business cycle, and when we come out of it, in the last several decades of recessions, we don’t come out and ever replace what we've lost. There is a downward spiral happening in this country, and I would argue that there are three forces in the economy that contribute to the downward spiral – the completely unfair rules around global trade (which is not to say that global trade in and of itself is unfair), but the ways in which we conduct our involvement and integrate ourselves into the world economy ... are massively unfair. The second is the fact that we don’t have mechanisms to catch people when they are disconnected from employment. So when they hit bottom they can’t bounce back up. And third, the institution of collective bargaining, which at one time allowed people to work and receive from their employment a decent standard of living, has also eroded. Those three things I would say, and obviously there are many more things – if you’re an economist you can argue about all the different things that are happening around monetary policy and the financial markets, and all these other things, but to the extent that the main important institutions in our country really no longer work for working people, that is something that deserves much more attention and much more militancy around from people who are concerned about the quality of life and human dignity in this country.

PA: The title of your book, A New New Deal, is an obvious reference to the Roosevelt Administration and its response to the Great Depression. We tend to the think of that time period as a time when the government took matters in hand and passed a bunch of laws that put in place the safety net that you are describing as having now been diminished. Even the collective bargaining laws that created somewhat of a level playing field were first enacted under FDR. But your work really describes the New New Deal as more than a set of laws. Could you talk about that in some detail?

Amy Dean: I think the title of the book, and why we chose to reference the New Deal, but yet call it a New New Deal relates to three main ideas. One is that we need a set of accommodations again in this country between employers and employees, and we need to return back to the days when the three major sectors of the economy shared more or less equally the burdens that result from the inevitable ebbs and flows of the economy. In other words, there will always be risks associated with a market-based economy, and the way we chose to respond to that in this country was, under the old New Deal, to ensure at least that workers, employers and the government all shouldered that risk to some extent. The biggest difference between the New Deal economy and that set of accommodations and today's economy, is that slowly the inevitable risks associated with the business cycle have come to be borne almost exclusively by the individual. And so the need to reconstruct a set of accommodations that share equally the risks of the economy is something we must return to, and that requires much more than piecemeal legislation. That’s one point.

The second point is that in the old New Deal people experimented with innovation at the state level before the national set of accommodations were put in place. In other words, it really did come from the bottom up, even though when we think about America’s old New Deal we think about a set of federal policies. But the federal government was not the first to act – the federal government was the last to act. My co-author, David Reynolds, and I would argue that if we today look to the federal government to solve our problems as progressives, we will continue to be disappointed over and over. Instead we need to look at regions and states as the playing field for experimentation in creating a new set of rules that can help us shoulder the risks and burdens of the market-based economy.

The third point in A New New Deal is that it is unlikely, given the massive transformations in today’s economy, that we can achieve restating and rebuilding the same public policies. One thing that remains constant are the values of America’s old New Deal, but today’s version will look very different. What do I mean by that? If we look at the twin pillars of America’s old New Deal, the social safety net and collective bargaining, we know that to recreate those institutions again will look very different because the economy looks very different. Our notions of social justice have changed and are also very different. What does that mean concretely? It means that it is unlikely that we will have collective bargaining, and it is unlikely that an industrial model of collective bargaining would meet our needs, even if tomorrow we were to recreate it. It is unlikely that the kinds of social policies that formed America’s old social safety net would be necessary today. For example, we have a different economy today, where we are no longer insulated by national borders, where people work part time or on a short-term basis and move from job to job, and they identify more with their occupation than they do with their place of employment. So the next generation of trade unions has too look very much like the way in which capital has reorganized itself today – decentralized, occupationally-based, and moving from job to job, given that there is a volatility and flexibility in today’s economy. To recreate collective bargaining in the way it once was is not relevant. Instead of a social safety net that simply looks at unemployment policy, we need to look at things like rent supports, or other kinds of temporary infusion of support for people when they are not working, based on the fact that they probably will not be employed full-time, but that rather there will be periods of unemployment more frequent than under the old New Deal. We argue in A New New Deal, that the values remain the same, but the way we look at rebuilding the two institutions of collective bargaining and the social safety net will probably look a lot different. Basically those are the three big ideas behind the title, and that’s how we tried to make the case about the distinctions between the two New Deals.

PA: Your book outlines what you call a three-legged, power-building plan that involves the creation of coalitions and institutions as you described earlier, but it also includes regional power-building and political action as the other legs of that plan. What is regional power-building?

Amy Dean: We refer to regions, and the subtitle of the book is “How Regional Activism will Reshape the American Labor Movement.” What we mean by a region is an economic unit, because there really is no political unit as yet; but there is an economic unit that is smaller than a state and bigger than a city. The way in which industry organizes itself today is in a much more decentralized way, and companies have tried to externalize any costs of doing business that are not core to the function of the firm. So you have client companies, groupings of contractors, and other business relationships that tend to be more horizontal and spread out over the space of a region. The idea that we are only interested in our neighborhood or our community is not effective. And to simply look at the state level without the building blocks of regional power could turn into the same kind of Beltway politics that we have in Washington. The idea behind a region is not our original idea. There is much literature on the subject of regions, but they are increasingly economic units. As a consequence of that, you see public policies whose outcomes are very important to working people organized around regional boundaries. In other words, the federal government passes money down for lots of different things, for example, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act ($30 billion including construction). The federal government creates a loose-knit set of goals with that money, and then it comes down from the states into the communities. Transportation dollars are allocated in the same way. The federal government allocates billions of dollars for transportation funding, it comes down to the states, and then regions request and plan for how that money will be used. Oftentimes housing policy, affordable housing, will be determined across multiple cities, because we know we just can’t plan little box by little box. In order for working families, people living in communities, to be successful, we need to activists to begin to think about these kinds of policies well beyond simply the particular interests of their neighborhoods. Why these polices are so important is because the only public funding that comes down these days is for very specific goals. There is no such thing as money that just comes down unspecified. That’s long gone. So the need is for activists to be able to shape how those dollars are spent and toward what end, and what kinds of jobs are created as a result of those public dollars is very important. Because it can mean the difference between community well being or not.

But let me back up a little. We chose under a Democratic administration, in the Clinton years, to wash our hands of paying a social wage by eliminating the role of welfare. That now means that any spending that the public sector does has to be looked at through a social welfare lens. In other words, even if we were to reinstate collective bargaining in America for service sector jobs, unions would still have to be very interested in how transportation funding is spent, how affordable housing monies are spent, and how land use policy is developed, because these things can mean the difference between economic viability or not for working people. For instance, it is extremely important that the transportation money that gets spent in my area is used to move the people who are most dependent upon public transportation from their homes to their jobs, versus often industry’s interest in moving knowledge workers from their communities to their places of employment.

The idea of a region is that increasingly industries are organized around regional economic boundaries, so activists have to think beyond simply a city and sometimes have to look at organizing across multiple counties, because funding comes down that way, and the kind of funding that comes down is really important for whether or not working people will live in a community and that is viable or not. We talk about the region as an important political unit for organizing, and then we say that in order to be successful in making sure that land use policy creates good jobs and that it enhances our tax base, making sure that affordable housing really is affordable for those at the bottom of the hourglass, making sure that transportation funding is spent for those who are really most heavily dependent upon public transportation, means that we have to be able to have institutions that are able to guide that funding. We need progressive institutions, as I said when we began the interview, because the funding is complex, because the public policies we need to advance are complex, and because we can’t simply have loose-knit coalitions and expect to impact how the monies are spent.

In the Nation I recently wrote a piece called “Doing Green Jobs Right.” It talks about a case study that took place after the New New Deal was published, where labor and community organizations have been organizing and building capacity for some time now called Community Labor United, in Boston, a labor-community think/act tank, which has been working very hard to build their own institutional capacity to impact public policy in their community. Recently they had a very successful victory that grew out of their organizing, where they scored sort of a "triple bottom line" around green jobs. Lots of money is coming down from the federal government to “green the economy” and reduce carbon emissions in our communities, and every state has to put together a plan for how they are going to reduce carbon emissions in their areas. Oftentimes, for instance, there are programs to weatherize homes, but they are not affordable to low income people or people don’t even know that those programs exist. Well-off families with homes in higher-income communities tend to benefit more from these weatherization programs.

The Community Labor United group has a Green Justice Coalition that has been working together for some time, and they intervened in the state’s policy. The first thing they said was you have a plan that is not resulting in a net reduction of carbon emissions. Now in order to be able to determine that the coalition had to have some kind of policy and research capacity to identify it. If we are going to have bigger victories, we better have the policy chops to win them. It doesn’t mean that we are simply developing think tanks, but think tanks that can connect to action. Number one, this group was able to identify to bureaucrats at the state level that their programs were not achieving a reduction in carbon emissions. That was the first thing. The second thing they were able to discover was that the jobs that were being created to go out and weatherize these homes were not high-road, high-paying jobs, in challenging the federal government by pointing out that if we really do want a green economy that results in good-paying jobs, we have to be able to measure whether or not public policies are achieving that. The third thing that they were able to discover, again by their public policy and research capacity, is that low-income communities weren’t even taking advantage of this program, because even in the event that they did know about the program, they couldn’t afford to weatherize their homes. Older homes have much bigger problems than new construction, and people who have a higher income can afford to put money out for weatherization, versus what most of us can do, which is to put bubble wrap around our windows when it gets cold. They discovered these things by having a pretty sophisticated capacity to do policy and research, and this grew out of a coalition of interests between labor and environmentalists, that had already been working together well in advance of any kind of campaign.

Again, we see the notion of building institutions as opposed to bringing together loose-knit coalitions to try to challenge power. As a result of their coalition building and merger of interests of groups, Community Labor United were able to take those interests and begin to analyze what was going on in the state program, and then begin to act in the same way activists have acted for years, which is by challenging power. The difference, though, is in also advancing a set of ideas for how to make it different. What they ultimately put forward is what won a victory with a triple bottom line. It is no longer acceptable to say, if we want to advance the interests of low-income communities, we have to trade off the wages of union workers. It is no longer effective or acceptable to say that in order to pay for those communities to be successful, then we have to take it out of labor costs. When you merge groups together from the beginning and you begin to expand your vision for what is possible, enabled by policy-research chops, the victories are far greater. What did they win? Not the sky, but the beginning of a shift in public policy at the state level with a set of escalating demands. They won a financing mechanism for low income communities to be able to take advantage of the weatherization program, so that there is public financing of weatherization and investment in low income peoples’ homes, which is very important and would not have happened without their technical capacity. They were able to say we can lump these jobs together by going door-to-door to identify the homes that need these weatherization benefits the most, and lump these needs together so they could go to bigger contractors to perform the work. But the contractors, all with union contracts, didn’t have the work force to do this kind of work, because many in the skilled trades are already busy working where their skilled crafts are needed. So the building trades were able to get the work and then reach out to the immigrant community and to people who weren’t already in the building trades and say we’ve got all these jobs now and we’d like you to train for them. Lastly they won not just the right to lump these jobs together so that you could get prevailing contracts with union labor, but they were also able to write themselves into the execution of the program by becoming a sort of state work force that went door-to-door and mobilized the community to apply to benefit from the weatherization program.

All of which is to stay, when you look at the regional power-building model and the three legs to the stool – policy and research married with organizing and advocacy to connect into political action. You know we elect these folks all the time to do good work for us, but if we don’t have creative things that we need from them, like going to all these meetings where bureaucrats were debating how to best execute the weatherization program, we cannot achieve our goals. When you can link all these things together and you have creative things to you expect from elected leaders, as opposed to uncreative things, or you don’t define what you want from them, then the victories are small, if at all. We have to think differently today as progressives, as activists, leftists or whatever we call ourselves. Those of us who can imagine a more just, fair and compassionate world, have to build organizations that are far more tactical and far more sophisticated than organizations of the past. What we argue for in the book is a combination of thinking and acting under one roof that we call regional power building – the three legs to the stool – executed through think/act tank organizations different from what we were used to in the past. For so many years we have been used to research groups in Washington doing the heavy thinking. Their reports come flying off their shelves and they hope that activists catch them and run with them and implement the ideas, and we know that that doesn’t work. Building regional organizations that can house these capacities together is what we argue is the winning combination for institution building, so that we can win bigger victories.

PA: Could you give an example from the book of where you think this three-legged model really works the best on a regional level?

Amy Dean: In all the case studies, we think those are the best practices, and the question is why we don’t have more of it going on. That is what I would rather address. In our case studies, we say that model grows out of California, then it spreads to other parts of the country. We thought it was important to write about this because we wanted to hold up California as the model, and we also wanted to demonstrate that this is not just California exceptionalism, because it’s liberal there or progressive there, but that rather this model can be created in other parts of the country when there are already models on the ground. This is an important reason why we wrote this book. When you have a model on the ground that takes 15 years to build, and yet programs now are in place and the knowledge of how to do things is in place, you can pick it up in Denver and learn how to do it in half the time, or pick it up in Atlanta and learn how to do it in half the time, or in the case of Boston, which was not an original, first generation organization, but went to the working partnership in San Jose and learned from it. Because activists in Denver, Boston and Atlanta came and learned from the California model, they could build these groups faster. There is no short cut to doing the hard work, but it doesn’t take the same amount of time, as if you were cutting trail from the beginning. The question is why we have so little of it. If this is the right model and this is effective, if this is the right thing to do, we argue, why don’t we have more of that?

I think the explanation for it is that, number one, we are still, as a progressive movement, as Democrats and progressives, and those who want to change America, still focused on the idea that the government at the federal level is the solution. And we tend to put all of our resources and all our attention into change at the federal level. Almost all the foundation funding in America on the progressive side of the aisle, which is limited compared to the Right, and most of the labor funding, which are the two big institutions that fund progressive work, really focus nationally. They say that we care about communities and states, but we’re going to give the money directly to the national groups to decide how to figure it out and divide it up. The groups that are funded at the national level are then told to go out and build something in different communities, and we know that funding national intermediaries to build groups on the ground has not been terribly effective. We also know that there is still a disproportionate amount of funding around research and policy at the national level. So there is still this bias about how we apply and spend our resources, looking nationally, and looking at the regional level as just too small a unit.

The second thing is we tend, as progressives, to have short-term memories, and to go from election cycle to election cycle. So we move on an 18-month calendar, and we get somebody elected, and 18 months later we’re in the middle of getting them re-elected again. Because we aren’t building our political machinery in the context of institutions but building it in the context of temporary, part-time electoral organizations, we don’t have a lot of institutional memory and history. For example, we’re all bemoaning the fact that we’re going into this election cycle and we’re going to get crushed, but how different is 2010 from 1994? We spent the first 18 months of the Clinton administration being disappointed. Our President had amnesia about the kinds of things he promised on the campaign trail, namely to have labor and environmental side-agreements in trade. Eighteen months into his administration, six months out from the 1994 elections, we were all bemoaning the fact that we had a NAFTA agreement that had no side-agreements for labor and the environment that were legitimate. Then we had to rev the troops up, after we had been bemoaning how bad the President had been for the first 18 months, rev them up and get them excited, when we up until that point we had expressed/been expressing our disappointment.

Well, it’s not that much different in 2010 from what it was in 1994 as we approach the midterm elections. Why don’t we learn from those experiences? Why is it so hard to remember, so that we continue to recreate the same mistakes over and over? I would argue that when community groups make the same mistakes over and over, it’s because we lack an institutional memory. Institutional memories can only be housed and learned from in the context of permanent organizations. So now there is a) the bias that if we spend our money federally, it’s the best way to correct our problems, b) we lack permanent political organizations, so we tend to forget from cycle to cycle, therefore recreating the same scenario over and over again, and c) I would argue that, at least when it comes to the labor movement, we need to have a healthy debate about the extent to which national versus regional organizations, and investment in that level of organization, can turn around our fortunes.

There are probably many more reasons why building regionally has been slow and less successful in terms of their number, but I would say that those are the three big ones we have to come to terms with if we are really going to get our arms around changing this country, and stop the bleating every time we elect somebody and we put our hopes in that person and then we feel disappointed. It’s not the person; it’s our expectations, and our lack of realizing that we have to be able to build on the ground. We talk about accountability. You don’t hold people accountable in a beltway. You hold people accountable in a community, and the only way to hold people accountable in a community is to have strong, lasting, durable organizations. The business community understands this and we need to understand it too.

You Might Be a Marxist If ... You’re Against Imperialism

Wed, 06 Oct 2010 08:20:00 +0000

Have you ever wondered why the United States interacts with the world in the way it does? Ever wondered why our country always seems to be at war with the world, why our government is always demonizing, attacking, and fighting other countries, their leaders, and often their entire populations?

Have you ever wondered why our government and mass media promote the view that the world outside our borders is a corrupt, chaotic, frightening place full of ignorant, perverse, backward, lazy, and vicious barbarians who want nothing more than to invade and terrorize us, steal our hard-earned wealth, and destroy our way of life? Every wonder why our mass media, the military, our politicians, and sometimes even our teachers and clergy participate in dehumanizing the world’s peoples by promoting monstrous caricatures of their appearance, beliefs, and customs and by constantly referring to them as “gooks,” “A-rabs,” “Hajis,” “wetbacks,” “zipper heads,” “Reds,” and “terrorists”?

Have you ever been shocked to realize that many people in our society, particularly members of the business, military, and political elites, think the best thing that can happen to a foreign country, especially a poor developing country, is for the U.S. to invade, “clean the place up” by overthrowing its government and destroying its social system, and install a U.S.-backed “democratic” government in order to put its hapless people on the road to American-style capitalism?

Can you even think of a time when this ignorant, simplistic, comic book view of the world—us (good) vs. them (evil)—wasn’t being crammed into your head? Or a time when our country was truly at peace with the world, a time when our government wasn’t carrying out some kind of big war, small war, proxy war, hot war, cold war, coup d’état, police action, invasion, incursion, counterinsurgency campaign, assassination plot, air strike, missile attack, or bombing run?

Have you ever wondered why there is so much saber rattling and so many wars? Iraq, Afghanistan, the two world wars, the atomic bombings of Japan, the Korean War, the bay of Pigs, the Vietnam War, the Contra-War, the invasions of Haiti, Grenada, Panama, the Dominican Republic, and on and on ... why the daughters and sons of the American working class must fight and die to prop up this rotten, bloodthirsty system and why working people around the world are made its targets and victims? And why is it constantly drummed into our heads that all this racism, xenophobia, fear mongering, militarism, and bloodshed is absolutely necessary for our national security; for the sake of God and country; for democracy and free enterprise; for peace, prosperity, and a better world?

The reason for all of these outrages can be summed up in a single word: IMPERIALISM. From the time we are born, we must be prepared to do the bidding of imperialism. We must fight and die; we must live in poverty and violence; our minds must be poisoned and warped by ignorance, fear, and suspicion of our fellow human beings; entire peoples must be subjugated and slaughtered, all for the sake of this monster, imperialism.

What is imperialism? Imperialism is capitalism at its most virulent stage of development. It is capitalism astride the world; exploitation of workers and farmers on a global scale; capitalists taking control of nation states and their economies and using these vast powers to go on the march to conquer and plunder the wealth of not just a few countries or regions, but every corner of the earth. It is established and maintained through fraud, political blackmail, and imperialist war. It is the creation of a grotesquely unequal world in which a few wealthy imperialist countries lord it over a vast number of impoverished and exploited peoples.

But imperialism is not invincible and it is not permanent. V. I. Lenin, the leader of the socialist revolution in Russia in 1917, pointed out that despite its immense power imperialism is ultimately unsustainable. The constant wars waged to support it and its astonishing waste of resources and human lives gradually weakens imperialism. Sooner or later the workers of the world are driven to rebel against it and replace it with socialism. Thus Lenin called imperialism the highest and final stage of capitalism, “highest” in terms of the intensity of exploitation and its geographic extent and “final” in the sense that it is the last stage of capitalism before its revolutionary transformation into socialism. [1]

Imperialism is the result of capitalism’s inexorable tendency towards globalization. Capitalism exists to maximize profit, and capitalists do this by stealing as much surplus value as possible from the working class. At first, capitalists establish themselves in individual countries and use their power to enact brutal exploitation of the working class at the national level. But capitalists can’t out-compete their competitors or increase their profits to the absolute maximum by staying local. Eventually, national capitalism develops to a point where production is concentrated in giant monopolies that are controlled by the huge banks that finance them. The finance capitalists who control these banks take state power as well, and they use their economic, political, and military power to take capitalist exploitation to a whole new level. The dominance of finance capital is the key component of imperialism because finance capital begins to look abroad for even greater returns on investment. Finance capitalists start investing all over the world in order to steal surplus value from the entire human race. That’s right; they aren’t satisfied with exploiting you and your fellow citizens in perpetuity. They don’t rest until they are stealing with impunity from working-class people around the globe.

Thus, like any other criminal enterprise, capitalism starts out small, but it must keep growing in order to survive. There’s a passage from Part I of the Communist Manifesto that does an excellent job of describing the forces that push capitalism towards globalization:

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie [the capitalists—D.P.] over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere. . . . The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all nations, even the most barbarian, into civilization. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In a word, it creates a world after its own image.

It should be noted that Marx and Engels are not discussing imperialism per se. They are talking about an earlier stage of capitalism that emphasized the production and export of physical commodities, whereas imperialism focuses on the export of finance capital. Under imperialism, investment capital itself is used to “batter down all Chinese walls” and when this doesn’t work it uses naked political and military aggression to open up a country to capital investment. Furthermore, capitalists have no intention of making the world bourgeois in the sense of covering the globe with capitalist countries that can compete on equal terms. They want a world in which finance capital based in the powerful developed countries is totally free to move around the globe and make investments that subject workers in the weaker developing countries to forms of super-exploitation even more brutal than those experienced by workers in advanced capitalist countries. The whole system works to keep the advanced capitalist countries on top and the weaker capitalist countries on the bottom, while at the same time working to force countries not yet dominated by finance capital (such as the former Soviet Union and the ex-socialist countries of Eastern Europe) to join the world capitalist system as subordinate and exploited developing countries.

It bears repeating that capitalism is fundamentally a criminal enterprise, thus it is not surprising that imperialists will stop at nothing to extend their global dominance. They will use any form of fraud or violence, up to and including world war and nuclear weapons, in order to penetrate markets around the world, extract surplus value from the global working class, and maintain their dominant position. They will also go to war against their fellow imperialists in order to settle disputes over the partitioning of the world. World Wars I and II were fundamentally imperialist wars fought to determine the division of the world among the big imperialist powers, Soviet participation in WW II notwithstanding.

Even though you probably never learned about it in school, resistance against imperialism by the global working class has been a major factor shaping world history since at least the latter part of the nineteenth century. The Russian, Chinese, Vietnamese, Cuban and Nicaraguan revolutions were all victories in the struggle against imperialism, as were the decolonization of Africa and Asia and the break up of the French, British, and other empires after World War II. But imperialism is still with us. At the end of the Second World War, the United States took on the role of the world’s most fearsome imperialist power. The U.S. has suffered some major defeats at the hands of anti-imperialist fighters—think of the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and Cuba. Although it scored a tremendous victory with the break-up of the Soviet Union and the fall of socialism in Eastern Europe, the dividends of that victory have been squandered on financial scandals and military adventurism. The U.S. is still the leading imperialist country and imperialism still controls much of the world, but its position has been weakened most recently by rising economies such as China and India, by the economic depression that began in 2008, and by the huge costs of and poor performance by the U.S. military in the two imperialist wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We have seen that as capitalism grows it develops into imperialism, but what happens to imperialism as it undergoes inevitable decline? What can we expect from a faltering U.S. imperialism? Like a wounded animal, imperialism becomes more dangerous when it senses that its survival is at stake. And when imperialists fight for survival they always resort to fascism. Fascism has been defined as “the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital.” The U.S. isn’t fascist yet, but just think what things will be like in 10 or 20 years if the country keeps moving further to the right.

What can working people do to stop the drift towards fascism? Remember, the movement toward fascism is a sign that imperialism is on its death bed, which in turn opens up opportunities for socialist revolution. This brings us to the subjects of working-class unity and internationalism, the united front against fascism, and the fight for international socialism, all of which will be discussed in later articles.

Notes:

[1] Interested in learning more about imperialism? The best introduction is still V. I. Lenin’s Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, written in 1916. It’s still in print and available in numerous editions.

Recovering America’s Communist History

Wed, 06 Oct 2010 08:18:00 +0000

New Studies in the Politics and Culture of U.S. Communism.
Edited by Michael E. Brown, Randy Martin, Frank Rosengarten, and George Snedeker.
New York, Monthly Review Press, 1993

Editor’s note: This article originally published in Monthly Review (June 1994): 55-63.

Anti-Communism has influenced—some would say, distorted—every aspect of U.S. scholarship. It should not be surprising; therefore, that anti-Communism has dominated the study of United States Communism itself. This volume of eleven essays demonstrates the value of a newly evolving approach to the history of the Communist Party which views it not as an object of vilification, but as a phenomenon deserving understanding. The received version of the Communist Party’s experience has been enormously influenced by scholars, such as Irving Howe, who at one time or other have been identified with varieties of social democracy which defined themselves by their opposition to Communism, and ex-Communists, like Theodore Draper. [1] Their work depicts an institution whose slavish devotion to the Soviet Union overshadows any other line of inquiry. Its leaders were hard-bitten bureaucrats, its members (of whom we hear next to nothing) were dupes or, depending on the degree that any of them were aware of what they were doing, manipulators, deceivers, and traitors.

Liberal historians have written relatively little directly about the subject. In the textbooks and general histories of the period that they author, the accomplishments of the Party in organizing the industrial working class or placing racial equality at the very top of the progressive agenda are at best brushed in; the repression of the Party is marginalized by the attention given to “innocents” (that is, non-Communist) victims. However, in recent years, liberal historians’ treatment of the Party has tended to become fuller and more balanced. Not surprisingly, the excoriations of the social democrats and ex-Communists have attracted more response than the omissions of the liberals.

Since the publication of William Z. Foster’s History of the Communist Party in 1952, the Communist Party itself has been unable to offer any meaningful presentation of its own history. International Publishers has printed some autobiographies and biographies of various leaders, which are of varying value, but no general history. [2] But then, as Eric Hobsbawm has pointed out, no Communist Party anywhere has been able to write its own history.

The new left defined itself ideologically and organizationally in opposition to the experience of the Communist Party and therefore its adherents lifted nary a pen to counter the anti-Communist interpretation of U.S. Communism. The new left in fact added a new series of criticisms of the Party from the left, most especially that its members’ unwillingness to operate openly deterred the organization of an American left and contributed to the Party’s repression. [3]

It took both the collapse of the old and the new lefts to clear the ground for a new interpretation of the Communist Party’s experience. Memoirs of long-time Party leaders and scholarly studies began to de-emphasize the discontinuities in the Party’s theory and practice brought about by international events and focused on the Party’s continuous activities on behalf of those who never could or would benefit from capitalism. Among the best of the studies that focus on the accomplishments of the Party are Al Richmond’s A Long View from the Left (1972), which documents the Party’s leadership role in the 1935 San Francisco general strike, [4] and Roger Keeran’s The Communist Party and the Auto Workers Unions (1980), uncovers the key role of Communists in organizing automobile workers. [5]

New Studies in the Politics and Culture of U.S. Communism presents versions of papers originally delivered at a conference held at the City University Graduate Center to commemorate the seventieth anniversary of the founding of the Party sponsored by the Research Group on Socialism and Democracy, which among its other concerns has sought to examine the history of the Party “free from uncritically negative biases.” Central to this approach is the understanding that whatever the lack of democracy within the Party and its subordination to the political perspective of the Soviet Union, the CPUSA had fulfilled an important oppositional role in U.S. society.

Michael Brown’s introductory essay on the historiography of the CPUSA places this book within the context of the “new historians” who have begun to apply the techniques of social history which have so powerfully influenced the discipline since the publication of E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class in 1963. [6] These historians approach the Communist Party not as a political institution but as a movement. The emphasis is thereby shifted from the leadership to the membership, from public pronouncements to actual experience. [7] The very best of these essays represent major contributions to the new history of the Party.

There is no arena that absorbed more of the Party’s time and energy than the organization of the working class into trade unions. The Party acted on the premise that the work of labor politics could not proceed without substantial progress toward the organization of the American working class. In “Communist Influence on American Labor,” Keeran encapsulates this very large topic. [8] He first develops a typology for the existing interpretations of the Party’s trade union work and concludes, “the predominance of evidence produced by the last decade of scholarship decisively supports the conclusion that the Communist Party was an important and distinctive influence on the labor movement and that Communist influence was decidedly beneficial to unions and workers.” These studies show that workers in unions led by Communists worked under superior contracts and that these unions operated in a strikingly more democratic fashion than their counterparts led by non-Communists. Moreover, Keeran finds that the “most distinctive feature of Communist behavior in unions was their opposition to racial discrimination.” Ultimately, a political organization which never numbered as many as one hundred thousand members organized unions with some millions of members.

Keeran shows that during the so-called Third Period (1928-34) the Party’s organization of “revolutionary unions,” which mainstream scholars have generally dismissed, frequently laid the groundwork for the highly successful organizing drives associated with the Congress of Industrial Organizations. He also notes their contribution to the Communist-initiated Hunger March on March 6, 1930, which mobilized over one million people in demonstrations in major cities throughout the United States.

Unfortunately, Keeran basically concludes his essay with the expulsion of the Communist-led unions from the CIO in 1949. Yet despite the most extraordinary repression almost all of these unions continued to exist in some form, albeit with steadily decreasing connection to the CPUSA. The International Longshoremen’s Workers Union remained intact and others, though in much weakened and reduced form, survived. One by one they merged with their heretofore antagonists. It is fortunate for the American working class that the United Electrical Workers Union still exists and upholds a version of trade unionism consonant with the radical origins of the CIO.

Mark Naison’s “Remaking America: Communists and Liberals in the Popular Front” succeeds in one short essay in outlining substantial parts of the Party’s history during the period of its greatest influence, the Popular Front, 1935-1939. [9] In 1936 Earl Browder declared that: “The direct issue in the 1936 election is not socialism or capitalism, but rather democracy or fascism.” Working with “progressives” (that is, liberals willing to work with Communists), the Party helped build not only the CIO but an astounding array of organizations that impacted on every phase of American life.

He reminds us of the International Workers Order, a mutual aid society organized into sixteen language sections, which claimed 187,000 members in 1947. In its lodges these radicalized immigrant communities sustained and passed on to the next generation their primary cultures, while participating in a wider secular “progressive” culture that featured celebrations of Negro History Week and May Day. They also provided meeting places and cadre for the organization of the CIO. Naison strangely omits discussion of the American Association for the Protection of the Foreign Born, which organized legislative advocacy and legal support for these same communities.

Naison also documents the enormous reach of the Party into the electoral politics of the period. Unfortunately, he neglects to discuss its most singular success in this arena – the American Labor Party. The ALP became a major force in New York City politics: it amassed almost 36 percent of Fiorello LaGuardia’s vote for reelection for mayor in 1937 and 1941 as well as ensured Vito Marcantonio’s reelections to Congress until he was defeated in 1950 by a coalition candidate of the Democratic, Republican, and Liberal parties. During the Popular Front, the Party ceded leadership to the social democrats. Its focus on fighting racial discrimination and fostering left-center unity, however, contributed to its gaining decisive control of the ALP by 1944. [10]

Naison’s contribution is strongest in crediting the Communist Party with doing nothing less than “reformulating the U.S. nationality” through the creation of a popular culture that placed the contributions of Black people and all the immigrant groups on a footing equal to Anglo Saxons. In this schema, the Party demanded that progressives reject class privilege and race prejudice and replace those with a deeply held democratic sensibility strong enough to defeat domestic and international fascism. It was during this period that the Party jazz and folk music became integral to the Party’s work. Popular Front culture flourished in Hollywood movies where the large numbers of Party members and sympathizers working in the industry helped populate movies with sympathetic characters with Jewish or Italian names and place virtue in the hearts of ordinary folks.

Gerald Horne’s “The Communist Party and African Americans in Historical Perspective” discusses the Party’s work in searching for a U.S. history to sustain this new culture. He mentions the Party’s contribution in rediscovering African-American achievement during the Reconstruction Era. [11] Horne notes that “along with the trade union question, the Negro question was of central concern to the leadership of the CP.” [12] Unfortunately Horne does not sharply illustrate the Party’s connection to the African American experience. Horne’s essay does, however, contain some new and important information. For example, Horne discusses the close ties between the Garveyite movement and the Party. Most memorable however is his discussion of the African Blood Brotherhood, which as early as 1918 advocated a Black republic in the South. In 1925 the Black Brotherhood joined the Party en masse bringing with it a tenet of the Party’s program that has been universally ascribed to Comintern diktat. Lastly, Horne reminds the reader of the Party’s commitment to racial equality via a stunning quote from Browder which in part states, “everything that touches on the Negro question is for our Party of fundamental principled importance, a matter of life and death.”

Alan Wald’s “U.S. Communist Writers Reconsidered” represents a treasure trove of topics for scores of as-yet unwritten doctoral dissertations and books. [13] He estimates “there are several hundred U.S. Communist-influenced novelists and poets of real merit who have received no critical attention.” (Unfortunately, he does not include American writers writing in languages other than English, perhaps especially those writing in Yiddish-who were influenced by the Communist movement.) Under Jewish-American for example, he lists Nelson Algren, Tillie Olsen, and Abraham Polonsky. These writers found that their participation in the Communist movement caused “an augmentation, complication, and enrichment of their literary lives.” Wald reports that his research has “convinced me of the importance of reconsidering the centrality of the Communist experience in United States cultural history.”

Wald identifies the suppression of this legacy as impoverishing the contemporary demand for the expansion and diversification of the literary canon. The Party’s unique contribution was to provide a literature which exposed class realities, elevated the experience of the workers, and took up topics of resistance. The current critique of the canon notes all the absences except that of the great majority of the people, the working class.

In central ways, Wald confronts the most relevant question, that is, the great damage that anti-Communism has done not only to scholarship but the sustaining of an opposition culture. This can only be rectified Wald posits, if “we come to terms with the Communist [Party] foundation of the left movement in this country.”

Annette Rubinstein’s “Cultural World of the Communist Party” recalls the Party as a society where “there really was a feeling of genuine democracy” and “a much more fundamental sense of equality.” [14] She explains: “You might speak to a rally of several thousand at Manhattan Center one day, climb up on a soap box to attract a dozen passers-by another, and act as an usher in Madison Square Garden the next week.” She tells of the steadfastness of human relations forged within the Party by people whose love was not based on looking at each other but by looking in the same direction.

In “McCarthyism and the Decline of American Communism: 1945-1960,” Ellen Schrecker’s extraordinary compilation of the use of state power to destroy the United States Communist Party shows how every branch of government collaborated in demolishing the Communist movement-not only the Party, but every manifestation of its influence. [15] She notes:

While the FBI was pre-eminent, other participants included the State, Treasury, and Justice departments, the White House, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Civil Service Commission, the Internal Revenue Service, the Subversive Activities Control Board, the National Labor Relations Board, the Post Office, and, of course, Congress and its investigating committees.

Schrecker then documents the role of local governments and private institutions in this process. Frequently, individuals or organizations would find themselves simultaneously under attack from two or more of these governmental agencies. Thousands upon thousands of hostile actions coming from all sides – with sanctions that included execution, jail terms, deportation, job loss, blacklisting, public humiliation, social isolation, physical and verbal attacks on self and loved ones—ultimately destroyed the political base of the party. She concludes that the demise of U.S. Communism can be ascribed to political repression and that the major accounts of the Party’s decline overemphasize the role of the Party’s mistaken tactics or the effects of Khrushchev’s 1956 speech. This reviewer only hopes that Schrecker’s subsequent work in this area will include a full discussion of the Party’s defense strategy and the almost total failure of the wider liberal community to support even the most minimal civil liberties for the Communist movement.

This collection’s other essays – which discuss the Party and women, the Rapp Coudert Committee Hearings, Communist education, and a somewhat incongruous interview with the venerable C.P. leader Gil Green – do not equally succeed in synthesizing aspects of the Party’s history or in opening up new ways of thinking about the Party. But in its totality this book represents a major contribution to the work of uncovering and writing the history of the U.S. Communist movement free from the influences of the Cold War. Keeping in mind that references to the Popular Front, the Party’s influence on the CIO, etc., are scattered throughout the book, the addition of an index in subsequent printings would greatly increase the value of this book as a research tool.

Perhaps there is nothing this reviewer could say that would more convincingly demonstrate the importance of New Studies in the Politics and Culture of U.S. Communism than the lengthily review by Theodore Draper in the New York Review of Books (January 13, 1994) denigrating both the book and its authors. [17] Draper simply will not abide scholarship about the Communist Party which attempts to make the Communist Party a “part of the larger family of socialism and democracy” and which refuses to view the Party “as if it were different from other political phenomena in the United States.” In the middle of his excoriations, Draper loses himself and openly laments: “Why should every other ‘anti’—anti-capitalism, anti-liberalism, anti-racism, anti-sexism, and all the rest – be intellectually permissible or legitimate but not anti-communism?” Of course Draper’s inability or unwillingness to answer this question has caused him and his friends, despite their embracing liberal and/or socialist identities, to give aid and comfort to the right. But just in case he has forgotten: anti-Communism begat McCarthyism and is always a primary ingredient of fascism. Draper has been fighting a lonely—and seemingly losing—battle against an increasing number of scholars who piece by piece have been reassessing the history of the American Communist Party. When Draper accuses these new historians of “only nibbling at the edges” of his general interpretation, he has a point. For whatever the value of these essays, none of the “new historians” has tackled a history of the Communist Party which would replace the work of Draper and his protégé Harvey Klehr. [18] Nonetheless, the publication of this admirable book makes that eventuality much closer.

Notes:

1. Theodore Draper, The Roots of American Communism (New York: Viking Press, 1957) ; and, American Communism and Soviet Russia: The Formative Period (New York: Viking Press, 1960). Irving Howe and Lewis Coser, The American Communist Party: A Critical History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957).

2. Simon W. Gerson, Pete: The Story of Peter V. Cacchione New York’s First Communist Councilman (New York: International Publishers, 1976). Benjamin J. Davis, Communist Councilman from Harlem: Autobiographical Notes Written in a Federal Penitentiary (New York: International Publishers, 1991). Gil Green, Cold War Fugitive: A Personal Story of the McCarthy Years (New York: International Publishers, 1984).

3. See for example: Alan Adelson, SDS: A Profile (New York: Charles Scribner, 1972), pp. 139-41. Christopher Lasch, The Agony of the American Left (New York: Vintage Book, 1969), pp. 211-12.

4. See also Peggy Dennis, The Autobiography of an American Communist: A Personal View of a Political Life (Berkeley, CA: Creative Arts Books, 1977). Dorothy Healey and Maurice Isserman, Dorothy Healey Remembers: A Life in the American Communist Party (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). George Charney, A Long Journey (New York: Quadrangle Press, 1972). For the perspective of a rank and filer see Nell Irvin Painter, The Narrative of Hosea Hudson (Cambridge: University of Harvard Press, 1979).

5. See also Maurice Isserrnan, Which Side Are You On?: The American Communist Party During the Second World War (Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1982). Joshua Freeman, In Transit: The Transport Workers Union in New York City: 1933-1966 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).

6. The new social history merges sociology with history in ways that bring it close to historical materialism. Here the masses are making history, and the leaders are distant and reactive. The categories of class and class struggle are prominent. Unlike historical materialism, however, social history is primarily concerned with informal groups and sees culture as a more decisive, almost autonomous, force.

7. See for example: Phillip Lyons, Philadelphia Communists, 1936-1956 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982). Vivian Gornick, The Romance of American Communism (New York: Basic Books, 1977).

8. See also: James Pickett, “Communists and the Communist Issue in the American Labor Movement, 1920-1950” (Ph.D. dissertation: University of California, 1975).

9. Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem During the Depression (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1983).

10. Gerald Meyer, Vito Marcantonio: Radical Politician, 1902-1912 (Albany: SUNY Press, 1989).

11. The Party’s achievements in this area were much broader than this, but this topic has yet to find its historian.

12. Gerald Horne, Black and Red: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Afro-American Responses to the Cold War, 1944-1963 (Albany: SUNY Press, 1986).

13. Alan Wald, The Responsibility of Intellectuals: Selected Essays on Marxist Traditions in Cultural Commitment (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1992).

14. Annette Rubinstein, The Great Tradition in English Literature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969).

15. Ellen Shrecher, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). A very large literature has developed about the McCarthy era. See for example: David Caute, The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist Purge under Truman and Eisenhower (New York: Touchstone, 1979). Victor Navasky, Naming Names (New York: Viking, 1980).

16. Draper’s earlier articles also published in the New York Review of Books (May 9, 1985) and (May 30,1985).

17. Harvey Klehr, The Heyday of American Communism: The Depression Decade (New York: Basic Books, 1984).

Father

Wed, 06 Oct 2010 08:17:00 +0000

MY FATHER

"The Pentagon is lying
about the war in Iraq,”
my father swears suddenly, on our way
to the post office.

My father, who worked as a high school teacher
for 30 years in Lake Hiawatha.

My father, who umpires little league games
when not tutoring veterans at the VA hospital.

My father, who still views my politics
with some suspicion.
30 years ago we agreed to disagree
about nuts and bolts of the Vietnam war.

Every day he reads the Daily News.
More speeches about freedom and democracy.
More boys coming home in body bags.
More blood for oil.

My father, who does not say much,
but when he does
does not say much
he does not mean.

"The Pentagon is lying
about the war in Iraq,”
he swears suddenly, on our way
to the post office.

If my friends the socialists
say that, that is one thing.

But if my father says that,
then surely it must beat
in the hearts and minds
of many people.

--Christopher Butters
Used with permission. Originally appeared in the Summer, 2010 issue of Blue Collar Review.