People Before Profit blog

2012 ELECTION AND THE FIGHT FOR AFRICAN AMERICAN EQUALITY

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 16:24:00 +0000

The 2012 election has become a battle on the basic direction of our country; whether it will be more democratic or more oppressive. Whether the it will be Bush II on steroids; a government which will intensify the Bush offensive against labor and people of color, or will it open the door to a new era of democratic advance. Nancy Pelosi in a speech at the Congressional Black Caucus Legislative Conference asked the question, "Will we have a government of the many or a government of the money?"
Millions of working people, of all races and nationality see this election as a battle over what kind of democracy we will have.
The African American people show a high understanding of what's at stake in this election. Polls show that 95% oppose the policies of Romney and Ryan and their coalition of the extreme right.
Some comrades know that with the BRC we were actively registering voters in Harlem for many weeks. In that in grass roots activity you get a good idea of where people are at politically.
Not surprisingly there were a few people who registered Republican and an occasional a person would come by and express their dislike or disappointment with Barack Obama. Overwhelmingly, the vast majority of the people of Harlem we met, were not only in support of Obama, but were enthusiastic in their support. They were really "fired up and ready to go". Most people thanked us for being out there. The phase I heard the most "we've got to reelect the President --- the Republicans will mess things up".
Another experience was on Obama's Birthday. Over 500 people gathered in front of Sylvia's Restaurant in Harlem to celebrate. Largely by email and word of mouth. They sang Steve Wonder's "Happy Birthday" and chanted "Yes we can" and "4 more years". Then they lined up did this dance they called the "Obama wiggle". It was quite a spontaneous demonstration for the President. Everyday, working people you meet on the streets of Harlem are particularly angry at the Republican racist attacks and their sabotage of Obama's domestic programs.
The election of Barack Obama continues to be an enormous source of pride especially in the African American community. He remains very popular president among a majority of the US population. From the perspective of the fight against racism in particular and against the right wing in general, the president's personal popularity, his enormous support and feelings of racial pride are very important.

GOP: Party of racism in the new Millennium

The media often talks about how the Democrats are not winning over "hard working middle class white people" It a way of trying to push their program to the right and away from the struggle against racism. They rarely talks about the fact that the Republican Party is moving towards becoming virtually an white only party. You saw their convention...That's their party; a Party of rich middle aged white men.

A Pew poll taken in June 2012 showed that from 2000-2012 the percentage of Republicans who are white has remained at 87%. This is (from an article by Charles Blow in the NY Times, June 7, 2012). The poll further showed that the number of Democrats who are white have dropped nine points from 64% in 2000 to 55% this year. This may reflect the growth of black and brown registrations.

These differences are deeper then race. The poll showed that blacks and Latinos are far more likely to believe that poverty is a result of circumstances beyond a person's control rather than a result of lack of individual effort. Also the poll showed that "87% of both blacks and Hispanics believed that government should guarantee everyone enough to eat and a place to sleep. Fifty two percent of whites also agreed. That view has become a majority view in the country.
Contrast that to Romney's notion that half the country is free-loaders who don't want to work.

The poll also showed on the Presidential race that 90% of Romney's supporters are white. Only 4% are Latino (Hispanic), and less than 1% are black, 4% other.
Obama supporters are 57% white, 23% black, 12% Latino (Hispanic) and 7% other races. One has to ask, in this historic election struggle, which party's racial composition most reflects the nation? It is clearly not the Republicans.

Pat Buchanan is a prominent Republican media personality. He came out with a book last year that really shows the deep reservoir of racist ideology within the Republican Party. The book is called "Suicide of a Superpower". In one chapter entitled "The end of White America, "Buchanan says, "Mexico is moving north'. He asks, "Has our passivity in the face of this invasion imperiled our union?" This book is like a call for race war. It's a Neo-Fascist book coming from a prominent Republican ideologue. These views seem to be quite at home in the ranks of the GOP, Tea Party, and Libertarian Alliance.

The African American Vote

In 2008 130 million people voted. It was the largest voter turn out in the history of the United States. Obama won majorities among the following groups of voters; Catholics (56%, women(62%), youth(66%), labor households, Asian(62%), Latino (67%), Jewish(78%) and African Americans (95%).

Because African Americans voted as a bloc for Obama, that vote had an impact beyond its numbers especially in big cities and in the battle ground states.
While some have been predicting that African American support for Obama's in 2012 would not be as strong as it was in 2008, recent polls show that it remains in the 95% range. The actual number depends on the turnout of course.

I don't think it means that African Americans are satisfied with the first 4 years but I think it shows a high personal regard for the President and above all a strong rejection of the racist and anti working class policies of the Romney/Ryan ticket.

If you look at the impact of the Stimulus package, the Auto Bail out, and saving and creating jobs especially in the public sector, the several extensions of unemployment benefits and the "middle class" tax cuts, Obama's policies have helped many African American families survive. Much more needs to be done but and if the unrelenting Republican opposition had not been there, the impact of the Obama policies would have been much greater.

For many decades, our party has been calling for a plan on the level of the post war Marshall Plan to meet the deep going poverty in the Black and Brown communities of our nation. The private sector is not interested in such a plan. Obama's Jobs Bill, that calls for public works jobs is a good start. The entire movement needs to push hard to pass this Bill to meet the urgent life and death situation.

Life has been extremely hard these last four years but there is a real feeling among black folks that the problems --- the deep financial and economic crisis, mass unemployment etc. --- were fundamentally caused by the Bush policies. And the main opposition that's blocking government action are the Republicans. Currently one out of seven African Americans are jobless. One out of 10 Latinos. The black unemployment is double that of whites. Latino rate is 40% higher than for whites. Over 30% of African American youth are out of work and in some big cities and communities it is 50% and higher.

Our view has been on the vital issues Obama should have rallied the people and confronted the Republicans more and try to compromise with them less. The Republicans are not for compromise. They have rejected every piece of legislations to help the working class and the jobless especially after 2010.

Their priority was to "make Obama a one term President" as Mitch McConnell openly admitted. Their approach, "Let the unemployed suffer, Obama must fail."
In States where the Republicans rule thousands of public workers were fired. Wages were cut and in the chaos public unions were under attacked in Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio.... with more to come. They are using this crisis to drastically cut wages and destroy unions. To bring Obama down, they are willing to sabotage the economy, as Sam Webb entitled his recent article. They don't care if they make millions of people suffer.

This is a party that now claims to be for helping the middle class?

While the unemployed received little or no relief, what do the Republicans say, "hang on we have to give the rich more wealth first, and defeat the unions and cut services and after all that, maybe then you'll get a job".

In the meantime 600,000 public workers were fired. One third of African American workers are in the public sector, these lay offs hit black public workers hard. The mortgage crisis (which was sparked by the racist sub prime scam, as Joe Sims' article pointed out). The massive loss of family wealth, pensions and savings, together with these mass layoffs hit the black and Latino communities like Katrina hit New Orleans. So many families and young people were devastated. The increase in drug-related gun violence in cities all across the country is rooted in the astronomically high unemployment, cut in education, in health care, and other vital services evictions and foreclosures and outrageous levels of poverty in black and Latino communities....

Comrades, our slogan; "Poverty and Racism Kills" needs to be revived.

There is a sharp racist edge to the Republican policy of denying relief to the unemployed, the foreclosed, the hungry and the homeless... Remember food stamp President. The policies of the Republican Party are steeped in racism and indifference to the plight of the people.

Racist Edge

The youth and students who can't get work and can't afford tuition. This hits, youth of color extra hard. The Republican war on women has a sharp racist edge. Who can lest afford contraception? Rich women have always been able to have abortions even when it illegal but it is poor and working class women and women of color who will lose the right to contraception and to choice if the Republican have their way.

That's why the last poll showed African American are 95% for Obama and a unheard of 0% for Romney. Imagine a major party in our country with it huge multi national, multi racial population, receiving a 0% from the over 40 million African American people.

In this the most racially mixed country on the planet the African American people who had to fight their way up from slavery standing almost unanimously against the Republican/Tea Party candidates for Congress and the Romney/ Ryan ticket. What a powerful stand for equality and justice.

Strategic position of the AA vote and Voter Suppression.

The Republicans know full well the strategic role of the Afircan American vote. In battle ground states, Florida, North Carolina, Va. Pa. NJ. Ohio, and Wisc. the AA voters make the difference.

The Black vote is decisive to a Democratic victory.

The rise of the Latino vote in the South is also key. In North Carolina for example, since 2008 the Latino vote has more than doubled to 91,000 from 44,000. The AA vote in NC, grew by 300,000 in that same period. These new multi racial movements growing in the south against the wave of vicious anti immigrant bills are very positive development. Muti racial class unity is key to transforming the South politically and it is happening (Pat Buchanan).

The Republicans have launched the most aggressive effort to suppress the African American, Latino, youth and student vote in US history. For African Americans it is like the return of Jim Crow elections but not just in the South and it's aimed more than African Americans. There are 178 laws introduced in 41 states with millions in Koch Brother's dollars to spend in their obvious attempt to steal the election. If they win in November and continue to control the Supreme Court majority, in practice the Voting Rights Act could be made completely ineffective.

The reality is that the number of cases of real voter fraud are very few unless you count what the Republicans did in Florida in 2000 and in Ohio in 2004 Presidential race. This year it's not just forcing people to get voter IDs it canceling early and same day voting and purging voter list. If they would succeed in all the states it is estimated that as many as 5 million democratic voters could be prevented from voting.

The argument that some have been making that only a small number of voters will be effected has proved to be not true. Just this Tuesday the courts in Pennsylvania ruled that the voter ID law could not be put in effect for this election because the number of people who need IDs was so large that the State could not provide them before November 6th. The law is planned to be implemented in 2013.

That was a still a victory. Just like the rejection of the Texas Bill and the more restrictive voter registration procedures in Florida. And of course what the people of Ohio who vote down their Republican voter suppression law. Before the election there will likely be more rulings against the bills. But in some cases it will be too late.

But all is not loss. There is a huge nation wide civil rights type movement that has sprung up to counter the attempt to suppress the right to vote. It see itself as the continuation of the historic struggle of the 60's.

The Republicans in defense of their brand of Capitalism basically sees the American people as having too many rights and they are out to role them back including the right to vote. Basically, democracy itself is under severe attack including labor's rights, civil rights, immigrant rights, women's rights ect.. It is so important that there is a real movement that is preparing to take steps now to avoid being denied the right to vote. Labor and people's org. must organizing to counter the massive voter intimidation that will be carried out by this "True Vote" the Koch brother funded outfit that is planning to put 1 million voter intimidators at the polls on election day. To challenge voters in mainly Democratic districts right to vote.

Does it matter who wins?

For those who think it doesn't matter who wins in November, you must explain why 95% of African Americans. Nearly 70% of Latinos despite Obama's mixed immigration policies, majority of women, youth, students and labor households. After the 47% remarks and the Ryan/Romney threat to Medicare Senior are moving towards the Democrats too. Among these are some of our most politically sophisticated, class-conscious voters. They know the difference. They know what's at stake.

The very diverse Obama electoral coalition that set a record in turn-out in 2008, is being mobilized. This election debate is centered around domestic issues and from the health care issue to marriage equality and democratic minded voters see miles of difference between Obama and Romney. And everybody is talking no repeat of 2010. They are preparing to continue the struggle in the post election.
On the voter suppression this is a basic democratic question and calls on the vest majority of American people to speak out and protest what the Republicans are trying to do.

The ruling class is split on this question. Our basic understanding of strategy includes taking into account any and all divisions in the ruling class.
Victory for the working class is not possible without this understanding.

On Tuesday' (date) NYTimes there was a full page ad by the founder of the supper wealthy Dreyfus Fund. Billionaire William Louis- Dreyfus speaking out forcefully against voter suppression. He was appalled to hear his ruling class friends bragging that Romney would win because of voter suppression. In the ad he said, " If the election will be decided by this effort (voter suppression (JT), then a poison will have been injected in the blood of our democracy. And that represents as great a danger to our democracy as has ever existed from within our borders. If that effort succeeds, we will have become a false democracy.

He then pledged to donate $1 million to counter the effort in the courts.
This is part of the answer to those who see no difference between Obama and Romney.

Churches are organizing early voting, the unions are putting hundreds of thousands of GOTV workers going door to door. Trade unions and democratic minded people ... They will be in a position to take on the racism and red baiting of the Republicans. The effect of this hard core grass roots work could be very positive in the long term struggle against racism and for higher levels of class unity and labor militancy.

The cover of the recent issue of the Teamster Magazine has the slogan, "If Romney wins, Workers lose." If the Republicans win democracy will lose. If the Democrats win the White House and Congress the fight will still be to keep the pressure on. And the people will fight. But we will be in a better position to fight if the Republicans are defeated. Certainly for democratic minded people it is morally unacceptable if they steal another presidential election.

Congressman John Lewis, defined the bottom line on how to fight-back against voter suppression. He called on Obama supporter to "Vote like you have never voted before" and I would add and keep up the fight in the post election!

Congressman Lewis was part of the panel at the huge town hall meeting at the CBC Foundations Legislative Conference; At the meeting the panel was ask by the moderator, "what would Martin Luther King say about this moment?" Cong. Lewis responded with, "He would say, 'Be grateful for the progress we have made. The election of Barack Obama was not the fulfillment of the dream. It was only a down payment. Continue the struggle"
Another member of the panel added " He would say. Get off your Butts and make some noise"

Manifesto of an Occupier

Sun, 07 Oct 2012 16:54:00 +0000

Dedicated to all those who, upon encountering the slogan "freedom isn't free,"

interpreted the phrase not as an immutable law, but as a fantastic challenge.

Introduction

This pamphlet is one Occupier's attempt to make sense of what is yet a very young movement, considering the task with which it has charged itself.

It is both a work written for myself and others like me, who are attempting to analyze where it is we are today, imagine the world as we want it to be, and develop a method that promises to take us from here to there.

Existing in a world that is not of our choosing, limited in what we can successfully communicate by the influence of an obsolete, dominant ideology, and limited in what we can do by non-inclusive institutions, it is essential we have, in the least, a rough theoretical method. We can have no strategy, nor tactics to serve it, without theory. Without distinguishing between strategy and tactics our movement becomes an all-or-nothing propostion in which nothing is the most likely outcome. Utilizing a theory that unites strategy and tactics, with the two working in sync, allows us to most effectively build the better world we have for so long insisted "is possible".

It is essential that I make it clear this is a manifesto of an Occupier. I am only one person in a collective. This pamphlet is not to be understood as representative of the whole of Occupy. I do not intend for it to be treated as definitive, but I do hope it proves useful.

You will find that much of this pamphlet is influenced by Marxism. It should be known that much of what it contains is drawn from previous theoretical work I contributed to Political Affairs, the Communist Party USA's online journal. I am a six-year member of that party, yet I have also campaigned for progressive Democrats, spent many years out of the last ten organizing as an anarchist, and enjoyed one year as member of the Socialist Party USA before I committed myself to the CPUSA and its popular front platform.

This history may seem rife with contradiction, but so is the world as it exists today. Perhaps what is outlined in the following pages will provide some insight into this personal history. That history is, afterall, as politcally diverse as those who have been successfully working together as part of Occupy.

The Problem

Near the end of the last century the United States' became a nation of unparalleled military and economic power. With the fall of the Soviet Union and the rapid expansion of global trade some in the capitalist class even proclaimed that the West had entered "the end of history".

Political philosopher Francis Fukuyama made such a claim in his 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man. Fukuyama argued that liberal democracy, in part defined by a capitalist economy, complemented human nature and was to become the final social model for every society.

As the U.S. economy grew over the course of the decade, Fukuyama's proclamation seemed to become accepted wisdom among politicians and administrators who embraced neo-liberal trade policies and deregulation. The utopian hubris was such that it even disturbed economic libertarian Alan Greenspan who, as Federal Reserve Chairman, warned against "irrational exuberance and unduly escalating stock prices" in a 1996 speech to the American Enterprise Institute.

Most of the growth in this period was not due to production of goods with actual use value as much as it relied on the growth of the financial sector.

The financial sector surpassed manufacturing as the higher source of GDP in the same year Fukuyama introduced his theory. From 1990 to 2005, manufacturing's portion of GDP fell from 16.3 percent to 12 percent, a 26.4 percent drop from its original share, while finance grew from 18 percent to 20.4 percent, expanding 13.3 percent. In the same time period average wages remained stagnant, growing by only about 15 dollars a week, or 780 dollars a year.

As Professor David Harvey noted in his speech to the RSA, capitalism spent the nineties promoting the illusion of material growth through private debt. Effective demand for goods was created by the financial sector's finding new ways to lend money to people through credit and, especially, home mortgages. With unfounded optimism and a desire to maximize profits, financial institutions used the livelihoods of working people as bargaining chips to grow wealth in ways far removed from reality.

One way they did this was through expanding the use of derivatives, financial instruments which derive their value from the value and characteristics of one or more underlying entities such as an asset, index, or interest rate. A move was made to better regulate derivatives at meeting of the President's Working Group on Financial Markets in 1998, but this was prevented by Alan Greenspan and Robert Rubin, who was then acting as Treasuring Secretary after 26 years of work in the financial giant Goldman Sachs. When the Bush administration took over there was no longer any consideration of regulating these increasingly speculative practices. In fact, derivatives known as mortgage backed securities were deregulated in 2004 and the private mortgage industry was able to take on greater risk through distribution of bundled sub-prime mortgages.

It was the Bush administration's idealistic belief in the ability of markets to regulate themselves that led to the Great Recession that afflicts the U.S. economy now. When the housing market retracted in the final year of the Bush presidency the reduction of houses' value effected the mortgages financial institutions held and sent shockwaves throughout the economy. Finance was no longer supplying credit. The financial sector spent more than two decades making itself an increasingly essential economic fuel as wages stagnated and its collapse strangled the entire nation's economy.

Pinned by its own utopian capitalist ideology, but knowledgeable enough to know something had to be done, the Bush administration made a bold yet unimaginative push to restore the economy's basic functionality by bailing out the institutions that had led to the crisis. If limited by the laws of the capitalist system, the financial bailout package was absolutely necessary to prevent what would have led to a massive shortage of money in industry and households and to stymie a much greater economic collapse.

When the Obama administration entered office it was prepared not to bring a socialist plan but to pursue a modest Keynesian approach with the intent to restore what had been before. The resulting debate over economic recovery has been framed by the same ideas that led to the economy's fall. The Republican Party is proposing even less be done by elected officials to monitor the market, maintaining the status of the nation's wealthiest individuals and institutions, while proposing the market take over Social Security and that cuts be made to Medicare and other social programs.

As politicians debated, CEO pay returned to its pre-recession levels in 2010 and the census recorded the largest income disparity in its history. At the same time, the financial industry has taken many working peoples homes and caused overall home equity to drop more than 35 percent. Unemployment doubled to over 9 percent. Underemployment went from 8.8 percent in 2007 to 17 percent in late 2010 as many people left full time jobs to work part time and, on average, the workers who became unemployed and then managed to find new full-time positions saw their pay drop.

The economic crisis will not be resolved using the same reasoning that started it.

Proponents of unrestrained capitalism, who favor the ideas of economists like Friedrich von Hayek, argue that society should let economic crisis occur without government interference. They believe that markets will naturally recover in the end. This would makes sense if capitalist societies were indeed at the end of history, but history has surprised before. Historically, entire empires, such as the Dutch or British, have collapsed as the result of economic crises. Both declines began as the result of growing economic disparity, the simultaneous displacement of manufacturing by finance and their no longer possessing an unrivaled manufacturing sector. In the past, specifically in the crisis preceding both world wars, the U.S. recovered because of the relative strength of its manufacturing. With China recently surpassing our production and the other two factors met, the historically exceptional standard of living people in the U.S. have grown accustomed to is very much in jeopardy.

One of the better explainations of the current recession can be found in a theory of political economy most economists prefer to ignore: Marxism. Marx observed in Capital that capitalism has internal contradictions that eventually cause it to self-destruct. These contradictions lead to economic crisis where economic disparity, rooted in the shrinking purchasing power of workers and the accumulation of wealth in capital, eliminates the demand for goods that capital requires for profit. A paradoxical cycle results where businesses either eliminate workers or reduce wages in an attempt to again profit and subsequently cause the lack of demand for their own goods to worsen. A few contemporary economists, including Nouriel Roubini, famed for predicting the current economic crisis, have recently stated that Marx's analysis of this problem is correct. In a recent interview in the Wall Street Journal, Roubini aptly observed that the current crisis can even be considered the second leg of the Great Depression, and had been put off by the growth of finance. Despite their finding certain powerful truths in Marxist economics, Roubini and his colleagues go on to introduce ideas that would provide temporary fixes to the system but which shrink from addressing the fundamental contradictions they themselves highlighted. It is up to a much braver group of people to take action.

No later than one month after Roubini's admitting the applicability of a theory which advocates capitalism be transcended, a group of people calling themselves the 99% began to occupy an area near one of the most iconic emblems of capitalist power: Wall Street.

The Occupy movement is about people's exercising self-determination, the very process of decision making used in its General Assemblies to be juxtaposed to the current lack of power participants feel in our capitalist democracy.

Like previous anti-capitalist movements, Occupy drew to the fore the contradiction contained in the phrase "capitalist democracy".

The preamble to the Declaration of the Occupation of New York City states:

"As one people, united, we acknowledge the reality: that the future of the human race requires the cooperation of its members; that our system must protect our rights, and upon corruption of that system, it is up to the individuals to protect their own rights, and those of their neighbors; that a democratic government derives its just power from the people, but corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the Earth; and that no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power."

"We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments."

Yet the Occupy movement is young and at its beginning, as corporations and the class which operates them are so entrenched in U.S. politics.

The most widespread reason Occupiers give for why the wealthy and corporations exercise so much political power involves the process of campaign finance. In the past decade the majority of money presidential and congressional candidates raised came from contributions of $200 or more. Less than one percent of the population made these donations, 81 percent of whom had incomes of more than $100,000 a year. These donations pale in comparison to the amount of money businesses donate directly to candidates' political parties, which comprise near 90 percent of total contributions in any given election.

But corporations not only have a powerful effect on elections -- They are a virtually inseparable component of the U.S. political process itself.

The 1% of the capitalist class is able to use the wealth generated by the corporations which they run to continuously lobby on their behalf.

Lobbying is a constant component of corporate strategy. In 2010, the oil and gas industry spent over 146 million dollars while employing 802 lobbyists, the pharmaceutical industry spent over 244 million dollars while employing 1,612 lobbyists, and finance (insurance and real estate) spent over 475 million dollars while employing 2,563 lobbyists. In comparison, public sector unions, representing the largest non-corporate, politically active institutions in the U.S., spent just over 14 million dollars and had a mere 150 lobbyists.

Further, as corporations are institutions which both own and manage a nation's resources, they naturally become politicians' biggest source for relevant information with which to form public policy. Corporate directors, executives, and those they employ as top level accountants or lawyers form the basis of the nation's largest think tanks and policy discussion groups.

Think tanks organize corporate money and industry experts to discuss issues surrounding public policy. They debate current policy, identify issues of their own and train experts. Of the ten largest think tanks in the U.S., seven are either explicitly conservative or promote ideas in line with the stated goals of the Republican Party. The other three define themselves as non-partisan. Some think tanks, like the Heritage Foundation, focus on promoting experts and their interpretation of policies via public relations efforts while other think tanks, like the American Enterprise Institute or Chamber of Commerce, focus more on providing information and expertise to involved corporations, policy discussion groups, or directly to politicians.

Policy discussion groups are leaner than think tanks and tend to be focused more directly on policy formation. These are corporations' political working groups, where experts from think tanks present ideas to the heads of corporations and position statements are formed. One of the most powerful policy discussion groups is the Business Council, which began as a quasi-governmental advisory group in the 1930s only to become an independent entity in 1962. The Business Roundtable is the Business Council's active branch. These groups either meet directly with members of Congress and the Executive branch or work through lobbyists.

Corporations are, therefor, not only economic entities. They represent institutions of organized power and are the foundations that allow the capitalist class the constant influence in politics which the Occupy movement stands against.

The economy, having developed so that a small group of capitalists wield such a vast amount of power, forces progressives to reconsider capitalist democracy. The directors of these corporations are not only members of the nation's wealthiest one percent, but have been observed by sociologist G. William Domhoff to also be about 90 percent male and 95 percent white. These numbers have trended so as to point to an increase in the numbers of people of color and women on corpoate boards, but but Domhoff's research shows that the people of color and women who are selected by the majority white, male boards tend to be selected because they have put aside their values and adopted those of their wealthy white, male counterparts.

Capitalism has developed such that it undermines democracy itself.

The 1%, conservative politicans, and their allies are directing us to join them in looking at stars as they march us over the edge of a cliff. They present us with a utopian vision of capitalism, proposing we wait out the Great Recession while they design plans that would have us competing for jobs in a global economy which pays its workers wages far lower than what we earn now. They would have us believe there is no alternative to this vision, that we have entered the end of history and that the U.S. will be an exception among nations which have collapsed as a result of similar circumstances.

Let them march on alone. Let them have their end of history. We'll take the future.

Our Problem

The ideology of the ruling class so permeates our capitalist society that many progressive activists often accidentally reference that ideology's set of theoretical assumptions when planning their own actions. Just as this outmoded way of thinking promises to continue the decline of society, it promises to undermine efforts at building a movement capable of changing that society for the better.

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:

"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...."

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

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

The German Ideology continues, focusing on the philosophy of Max Stirner, a specific philosopher present in Marx's time whom Marx identified as perpetuating false consciousness. Stirner, an idealist, 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 asseerted 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.

The views of Stirner were for some time advocated among anarchist groups, although most have adopted materialist views that recognize individuals' socialization. Today, whether attributed to Stirner or not, many left wing activists of all types share with the general progressive community a paradoxical combination of prinicipled individual action and consciousness of individuals' socialization.

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, "living" 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 corporate power at the expense of the majority of people on both sides of the conflict.

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, further allowing the individual to be satisfied with his/her personal intentions rather than broadly-felt results.

Another example of capitalist ideology's influence on progressive politics can be found within the way many activists think of consumerism.

Anti-consumerism has a worthwhile 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. There are problems with the current anti-consumerism movement where it draws from assumptions rooted in false-consciousness, where it tends 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 now offers a "fair-trade" coffee among its "free-trade" selection. 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, for themselves, the best course of action. In a society defined by capitalist ideology, the individual removes themselves from society.

The 1% could be no happier if the Occupy movement where to isolate itself. But to challenge capitalism requires more than personal convictions. If Occupy aspires to represent the 99% it must strive to be an accountable mass movement.

As ideology is the result of socialization, and the means of any form of production, exchange, and other social activity performs socialization and builds ideology, we must not retreat from our current society, repulsed by its current manifestation, but engage it everywhere with a transformative theory built from those experiences of ours not reflected within it.

The Solution

The progressive movement widely accepts the idea that people's mindsets are products of their environment -- that they are socialized. Those who have the most power in socializing individuals are those in command of the economy, for it is they who have the final say in the construction of the majority of the population's work, the media viewed, and the very products which make up the social environment.

Further, the majority of those with economic power are inundated with the values of wealthy, heteronormative, white men. In a society where differences in power still exist among gender, sexuality, and race, people of color, women, and LGBTQ individuals are predominantly engaged in work that is both determined by wealthy straight white men and which further promotes the values of wealthy straight white men over their own.

Occupy has been criticized by some as being a response of previously privileged people to the loss of their status. There are real reasons for ire toward a movement that only acheived popularity after the recession. Women have consistently been paid a fraction of mens' wages since such statistics were recorded, currently making 77 cents for every dollar earned by a man in the same position, and African-American unemployment has not been below 10 percent at any point for over 50 years. However, while it is true a white worker, a black worker, a male worker, and a woman worker are not equally oppressed, they are all, none-the-less, without the power to be self-determining.

The Occupy movement does not represent the 99% as it is, but it is important that it desires to be representative of the 99%. Counter to the false consciousness that is perpetuated by a society made up of power divisions, Occupy proposes a new way of organizing based on solidarity and a common desire for self-determination.

As such, Occupy is seriously posing capitalism as a question. A pew poll in conducted in late 2011 revealed that, for the first time, a majority of 18 to 29-year-olds thought of socialism as a system superior to capitalism. At about the same time, the Republican governor's association met in Florida in part to talk about messaging. Frank Luntz, a Republican political messaging strategist, insisted that conservatives respond to the growing unpolpularity of capitalism by replacing the word with the words "economic freedom" or "free market". A change made to Texas textbooks at the same time also replaced "capitalism" with "free enterprise system".

The capitalist question, when posed as a matter of economic freedom, prompts those without power to respond "freedom for whom?". The question begs an answer that calls for the need for a democratic economy.

This question has been posed before, and was elaborated on in Karl Marx's Capital. In Capital, capitalists' "free market" meant workers may be free to seek work, but are also "free" of the possessions (means of production) necessary to make a living. Capitalists benefit a great deal more from freedom defined as such, essentially claiming a "freedom to command".

The left in the U.S. has long emphasized equality primarily for the reason that it alleviates unjust poverty, while the right is often seen as the champion of freedom. This is because most people think of freedom as having "freedom from" something, which is what political theorists call "negative liberty".

The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution represents negative liberty. It legally guarantees freedom from censorship and is meant to prevent the government from favoring one religion over another.

Recent progressive actions have resulted in the return of another idea of freedom. Before Occupy, the occupation of the Wisconsin Capitol in Madison heralded this idea's return. What the labor movement there realized is that they where organizing for the "freedom to" join a union and the "freedom to" make decisions about what their work entailed. This is "positive liberty".

Positive liberty exists in many other places in the U.S., with little recognition.

Pell grants represent the idea of positive liberty because they provide low-income college applicants with resources which allow them to pursue degrees they would not be able to if the grants were not available.

The feminist movement often stands for positive liberty. For example, their promotion of comprehensive daycare programs recognizes that jobs can often be inflexible and a parent gains more economic freedom if they can be sure their children will get the care they need when they need it.

This definition of two freedoms is often credited with the political philosopher Isaiah Berlin. However, if we look beyond the official historical narrative promoted by the dominant ideology, which credits Berlin, we find that the distinction is more accurately traced back to a book titled Escape From Freedom, which was published in 1941 by Marxist philosopher Erich Fromm.

What Fromm observes in his work is incredibly important to contemporary progressive activism.

What Escape From Freedom seeks to explain is the dialectical nature of the expansion of freedom. It praises the expansion of negative freedom, which lead to modern society, but also points to the fact that real increases in inequality have subordinated many people to the power of wealthy capitalists and their corporations, the 1%, in ways that begin to contradict the ability for many, the 99%, to fully enjoy freedom. The individual person increasingly loses his/her power to be self-determining as they become more and more dependent on late-stage capitalism's large, privately controlled corporations for work, goods, information, and recreation.

Suddenly, many find that negative freedom alone isolates and weakens them. While a few individuals remain quite free and become very powerful commanding others about in large economic organizations, the worker feels subject to gigantic forces beyond his or her control.

Fromm wrote: "....Freedom has a twofold meaning for modern man: he has been freed from traditional authorities and has become an 'individual,' but at the same time he has become isolated, powerless, and an instrument of purposes outside himself, alienated from himself and others....".

The only way society can preserve freedom in general is by recognizing the need for positive freedom. The problem of the modern person being rooted in the complexity of social and economic forces, Fromm wrote that increasing freedom requires society "replace manipulation of men by active and intelligent cooperation, and expand the principle of government of the people, by the people, for the people, from the formal political sphere to the economic sphere."

This position is based on a critical observation of the organization of the capitalist economy. In late-stage capitalism, capital accumulates quite densely in the coffers of very small a percentage of the population. In the United States, 10% of the population owns about 71% of the wealth and the top 1% owns over 38%. On the other hand, the bottom 40% owns less than 1% of the nation's wealth.

This wealth of resources is used by the individuals who control it to employ others in their exercise of negative freedoms matching their goals. Media apparatuses are bought or created. Political foundations are formed to manipulate public opinion and lobby government. People are barraged by constant advertisement. And this manipulation is all regarded as business as usual.

Consider who has the most ability to make use of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. All have the theoretical ability to enjoy this negative liberty, yet it is global news corporations, radio conglomerates, corporate advertisers, and the recording industry, acting on the behalf of their wealthy investors, which are most able to make real use of it. The result is that most people experience freedom of speech passively, and those who do not become frustrated when they have to constantly engage a deceptively "common" message which does not reflect their lived experience.

Given the material situation described throughout this pamphlet, in which the 99% finds itself not only economically unequal but with less liberty than those who comprise the 1%, it is apparent that a movement which seeks to renew democracy, so that people of all races, creeds, genders, and sexualities are in the position to determine their futures themselves, must challenge capitalism.

The capitalist system can never really be democratic. Even the concept of equal opportunity does not satisfy this end. Private ownership of industry, by definition, requires that a majority of people be left out of decision making regarding their very own labor. Even if they all work as intensely and intelligently as they possibly could, it is impossible for the 99% to ever become the 1%.

In place of aspirations to establish an equal opportunity to command, which promises to continue general subservience, the economy must itself become democratically structured.

The most powerful force in a modern society being the commanding heights of economic institutions, the dominant governing structure that is the corporation must be replaced with an alternative structure that is defined by inclusion. It is necessary to form a democratic economy.

The struggle which lies ahead is not only a struggle for equality. This struggle is a struggle for freedom.

Building the Solution

Those who desire a society that operates such that self-determination is inherent are frequently able to identify ways in which society currently limits self-determination, sometimes have an understanding of how systems might be structured so they naturally result in self-determination, but find most troublesome the path leading from the world as it is now to the world that many insist "is possible".

If this process confounds many who desire social change, it baffles those who are not so concerned even more.

This accounts for some of the confusion demonstrated as many political pundits of various media institutions demanded the Occupy movement declare a list of grievances at its founding. Though not immediately, and not uniformly, different sets of demands have emerged from many of the 100 or so occupations found in cities across the United States. Such demands give some idea of what the Occupy movement is about, but focusing too narrowly on the demands misses the movement's very important core element. The most important feature of the Occupy movement is the very process by which demands were made.

The Occupy movement is important in that it no longer looks to the government, as it is currently, to acheive its overall goal. The General Assembly, the legislative body present at each occupation, represents in miniature an alternative governing organization meant to both demonstrate everyday people's ability to manage their affairs as well as act as a body to be compared to the government itself. In fact, Goldsmiths, University of London anthropologist David Graeber, a founder of Occupy, made many statements indicating this as the reason for the movement's being organized as it was.

Occupy is organized such that it is not defined by its demands, but by its method. This keeps it from becoming a movement which can be satisfied by any act of politicians that moves society one step closer toward freedom, but may very well remain many steps from its actual attainment.

Many thousands of people are experiencing a type of self-determining power in being part of occupations across the country, but the freedom experienced by any individual in Occupy has thusfar been limited primarily to the confines of Occupy activity itself.

In order to transform society, such that self-determination is the norm, Occupy needs to translate the theoretical understanding at the root of its democratic method to form a strategy and coherent tactics to tackle society as it is, transforming it in all its complexity.

Tactics describe temporary work that promise short-term gains important in that they both provide people relief from the worst aggressions of an oppressive system and assist a revolutionary movement with popular support or a new social, political, or economic tool to serve its strategy.

Strategy is the big-picture view. Strategy makes sense of tactics, stringing the results of tactical action together in an effort to make a previously unattainable action possible. Strategy is flexible, but serves the ultimate goal.

Occupy has thusfar done well in establishing itself as a new political force without outlining a clear strategy. Using clever slogans, an identifiable label, and occupations across the United States and other nations, it drew into it people with all manner of concerns regarded economic, political and social inequality.

Presented with the task of remaining relevant in what is now apparent will be a long term struggle, Occupy must consider strategy.

Having drawn together great numbers of people with diverse political backgrounds, ranging from anarchists to progressive Democrats, Occupy is presented with the challenge of maintaining relevancy among both those involved within it as well as those it seeks to represent in general. It would do well to be mindful of sectarianism. The modified consensus methods used in General Assemblies, which allow for ample discussion and encourage mutual respect in the act of passing a proposal, encourage internal solidarity. Further, media and outreach working groups which work to draw in new members provide a mechanism which can be used to keep an occupation accountable to the 99% in general.

Practiced in balancing the ambitions of its members, and focused on accountability, Occupy must also maintain momentum. In making demands, but not being defined by demands, the Occupy movement cannot rely on protest as its only activity. The primary aim of protests tend to be to frame public opinion or push those with power to make a certain decision. Either relies on outside forces to do something for those in the group protesting. This is a useful tactic, but does not change the balance of power. To change the balance of power, proposals that affect how the the system itself operates must be made and won. In the current situation, this is a call for the proactive creation of local victories which increase the self-determining power of any member of the 99%.

As Occupy remains relevant and gains momentum its base of support should grow. The tactics employed as part of this strategy ought to be relevant to other people or organizations in contact with Occupy who represent the 99%. As growth in local areas occurs, each occupation could free up the resources to devote additional attention to coordinating nationally with other occupations. Occupy would then be better able to act as a national movement, and achieve the power necessary to render the system of the 1% obsolete.

In serving this basic strategy, which ought to be elaborated on as experience provides insight, a variety of tactics may be employed.

One of the most promising developments to come out of Occupy has been the discussion of a diversity of tactics. While each individual may have a prefered tactical activity, the strategy of a political movement allows for many types of tactics, and often requires a variety of them in any given situation.

Protest is a necessary tactic to influence public opinion. A Nexis study in late 2011 revealed that Occupy had, in the course of its occupations, caused the media to increase mentions of "income inequality" by 500%. In the same time period, a NYT/CBS News poll reported that a majority of people in the U.S. favored wealth redistribution for the first time since the Great Depression. Similarly, when the Iraq War was first proposed in October of 2002, about two thirds of the U.S. population supported military action. After months of protests against the war, the number was reversed, with two thirds of the population against it.

The fact the movement in the latter example failed to gain victory points to the fact protest may sway opinion and gain a group support, but it cannot always be relied on to achieve victory by itself. This is why direct action and strikes are important.

Direct action, shyed away from by some of Occupy's "less radical" members, is important in that it can both prevent those with power from conducting business as usual and achieve important victories. One of the largest, recent uses of direct action to stall policy was achieved in 1999 when 50,000 activists prevented the WTO from meeting in Seattle, Washington by blockading the streets. Direct action which advances the cause of self-determination is illustrated in recent actions involving the Republic Window and Doors plant in Chicago. In 2008, worker activists prevented the plant from closing and in February 2012, an action by workers, unions and Occupy Chicago prevented a second attempt to close the plant which may further result in a transfer of the factory to worker control.

Strikes are similar to direct action, but should be distinguished from that tactic for the important reason that they are primarily associated with the excercise of democracy in a workplace. Unions, armed with the power to strike, are able to consistently excercise collective bargaining power as a democratic counterweight to employer power. The power of unions earns workers organized in within them a median weekly wage nearly $200 higher than non-unionized workers, among other benefits. Important connections are being made between Occupy and unions, many joining Occupy Oakland in a general strike in November 2011. If unions and Occupy can work for each other's mutual benefit, the strike could become a very powerful tactic in advancing the cause of a democratic economy.

Voting, disdained by some of Occupy's "more radical" members, is none-the-less another essential tactic. The U.S. government, and the two parties which comprise the vast majority of elected officials, are not monolithic entities. Important differences exist between the Republican and Democratic parties, as well as throughout their membership, and these divisions among the ruling class can and should be exploited to Occupy's advantage. The history of organized labor provides an important and relevant lesson here. Union membership went from 3 million members in 1933 to 15 million in 1945 because workers campaigned for and elected public officials. Owing their office to organized labor prevented these politicians from acting against strikes, including the Minneapolis Teamsters Strike of 1934 and the Flint Sit-Down Strike of 1936-37, which would have normally be suppressed by use of the police or national guard. These strikes, like Occupy's activism, involved the occupation of public space.

If Occupy embraces a diversity of tactics, and can maintain solidarity between members who may strongly favor one tactic over another, it will advance in its strategy and further implement the self-determination central to its theory.

The situation of many in the 99% calls for it.

The lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer struggle is a struggle for self-determination which should be of interest to Occupy. Lesbian and gay couples do not have the freedom to marry in 30 states, five states have laws which make bar them from being free to adopt children, and 19 states provide absolutely no employment protection for LGBTQ individuals. Occupy can participate in safe space trainings so as to ensure their GAs are welcoming, assist in the organization of pride events to generate social acceptance, protest businesses that discriminate against LGBTQ people and begin to draft legislative proposals at the local level which would protect LGBTQ people's freedoms.

Race relations in the U.S. must be addressed as well. Formal liberties were granted as a result of Civil Rights struggle, but equality, and the postive liberty that entails, remains elusive. Michelle Alexander's book The New Jim Crow provides ample evidence of this, as do the recent cases of Troy Davis, Trayvon Martin, and Rekia Boyd. Police watch programs and the creation of local Civilian Review Boards can alleviate some of the abuses the state perpetuates against African Americans. Community programs which serve workers should also be tailored to people of color. Further, campaigns to repeal Arizona's anti-immigration law, SB1070, and copycats are important. The unpopularity of such bills among those who exploit undocumented workers suggests that the unionization of those workers could serve to greatly empower them.

Women's freedom and the feminist movement should also be embraced. The recent attack on women's access to contraception by Republican politicians brought the struggle between women's freedom and the employers supposed right to limit that freedom to national attention. Further, the prohibitive cost of childcare in the U.S., at an average of $224 a week, greatly limits mothers' freedom to work. Local child care subsidy programs could provide for this freedom.

Heteronormativism, racism, and patriarchy must all be challenged by a movement that desires to maximize freedom. Further, for the multitude of reasons described throughout this pamphlet, women, people of color, and LGBTQ individuals are of the 99% and, while their respective oppressions are not rooted solely in economic causes, they share with the working people of the 99% a necessary struggle to democratize the economy such that their interests trump those of the 1%. There is no better time to advance this cause than the present.

Given the popularity of the Occupy movement's slogans regarding the undemocratic nature of capitalism, as well as the high demand for jobs, Occupy is presented with an opportunity to begin to build the foundation for a democratic economy.

In order to reduce inequality and defend the 99% from austerity measures, many in Occupy have been advocating progressive taxation.

Considering total income accrued by the wealthiest 10 percent of households jumped from 34.6 percent in 1980 to 48.2 percent in 2008, and that the wealthiest 1 percent's share in the same time period rose from 10.0 percent to 21.0 percent, it would not be a radical idea to levee an increased tax on the rich as part of such a plan. These income groups paid taxes at 70 percent in 1980, but now pay half that at 35 percent. It is estimated that for every 1 percent taxes is raised on only the wealthiest 1 percent of households that 150 billion dollars of annual revenue would be generated. Gaining a victory in this regard would largely neutralize concern over the nation's debt, save social programs and allow Occupy to free resources from reactive struggles to proactive activity.

In order to provide much needed employment and empower the 99%, Occupy could organize recent interest in worker cooperatives into a movement that makes them a reality.

The book America Beyond Capitalism: Reclaiming Our Wealth, Our Liberty and Our Democracy, published in January, 2012, provides examples as to how a people's movement might establish worker owned cooperatives. A March, 2012, report by the United Steel Workers, titled Sustainable Jobs, Sustainable Communities: The Union Co-op Model, also provides insight into how that union, and the labor movement in general, could participate in the creation of worker owned cooperatives modeled after Spain's 85,000 member-strong Mondragon cooperative.

These reports, and the successful cooperatives studied as part of them, indicate that worker cooperatives are established at the local level. Using government credit, investment from foundations, start up money from friendly institutions, or the direct occupation of closing plants, organized workers can build, purchase, or be given businesses of considerable size and begin to operate those workplaces themselves. Such cooperatives may further join together and create revolving funds to assist in further propogation of cooperative workplaces.

In furthering self-determination, Occupy could assist in the construction of cooperatives in which each worker has an equal vote in determining the nature of their business. A cooperative's policy may also include caveats that demand equal representation of women, people of color, and minorities, resembling those rules contained in the by laws of certain 501(c)3 non-profits.

It is imperative we build structures of positive liberty where self-determination has stagnated and private ownership is characterized by a tyranny no less powerful than that which has, throughout history, pushed people to stand for freedom.

The next time a corporation requires a bailout it should be bought out. It's about time the 1% understand what it's like to be handed a pink slip, and it should be the 99% which hands it to them.

Occupy's struggle will be a long struggle, containing both times marked by great gains and other times in which it seems all is lost. The ideas contained in this final chapter are ideas for the present. It is not comprehensive, nor meant to be limiting. While a theory may be timeless, tactics are responsive to the situation, and I look forward to what great gains that future holds.

As I stated previously, Occupy is still an incredibly young movement.

It has a lot of growing to do yet.

#OccupySpring

Romney’s wrong on deficits

Sat, 06 Oct 2012 09:37:00 +0000

via Peoples World

According to Mitt Romney, the top economic priority is to put our fiscal house in order. If we don't do something almost immediately, he says, we will walk off a fiscal cliff beyond which is nothing but economic disaster. Our future will resemble Greece's present and worse.

So how does he propose to do this?

On the spending side, he would either ruthlessly cut or eliminate or privatize social programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, while Obamacare, whose benefits are increasingly enjoyed by tens of millions of American people, would be overturned.

A chunk of the spending cuts would also come directly from programs that make life much easier for low and middle income Americans. Spending for infrastructure, education and research that are necessary for economic growth and restructuring would be slashed too. Romney's fiscal plan would place the responsibility of rising health care costs squarely on the shoulders of those least able to afford them.

The food stamp program that is essential for tens of millions in a stagnant economy would be drastically scaled back by a Romney presidency. Housing assistance and Pell Grants would meet a similar fate.

On the revenue side, the main element of his fiscal plan is not what you would logically think, that is, to increase taxes in order to enhance government revenues. Rather Romney would cut taxes of the 1 percent by a whooping $5 trillion (that's on top of the Bush era tax cuts), while increasing taxes on you know who - the 99 percent.

What is the upshot of all this? Do the numbers add up? Would it bring order to our fiscal books and jump-start the economy? Would it put people back to work?

By no means! Instead of reducing the deficit, most analysts say the Romney plan would result in bigger deficits as far into the future as the eye can see.

And instead of stimulating economic activity and creating jobs, his plan would further depress an already depressed economy.

All of which makes me (and many other people) conclude that the Romney plan has other objectives in mind than balancing the federal budget and rebooting the economy.

What interests him and his backers, in fact, is turning the current fiscal and economic crisis into an opportunity (never pass up a crisis) to roll back the social safety net, slash living standards, and radically redistribute income to the very top tiers of our society. Yes, he's a redistributionist!

Luckily, more and more people are seeing through the demagogic fog of Romney, Ryan, and right-wing extremism. The jig may not be quite up, but his defeat on November 6 will be not only send Romney back to Bain Capital - it will also give the people's movement leverage to battle austerity and reactionary redistributive politics in the post-election period.

Fiscal deficits at some point have to be addressed to be sure, but now is not the time. The main focus of public policy now should be on creating good paying jobs and stimulating an economy that remains in the doldrums.

Once people get back to work and once the economy recovers, then we can turn our attention to reeling in deficits, but along very different lines than proposed by Romney (and too many politicians on both sides of the aisle for that matter).

On the table must be cutting military spending, ending corporate subsidies, and increasing corporate taxes. This is a working-class as opposed to a corporate-class approach to our fiscal problems.

Green Dreams and Feet of Clay

Fri, 05 Oct 2012 15:43:00 +0000

I like the Green Party’s “Green New Deal". It is a radical, reasonable, and straightforward appeal for large scale public intervention in key sections of the economy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and achieve the ideal of more sustainable and more equitable economic development. It deserves every American’s consideration.

In addition, its advocacy of strong democratic reforms expanding the participation of working people in governing this society, and in managing this economy, are inspiring. Its promotion of more cooperative forms of firm ownership, public goods and wealth distribution are indeed some of the frontiers of next generation social and economic organization.

The Green Party’s financial and wall street reform proposals get to the heart of high risk practices in too-big-to-fail institutions: break up of big banks, prosecution of fraudulent activity, separating commercial and investment banking, imposing transparency and a “self-insurance” tax on all classes of transactions.

Global climate change has compelled many people, not just outright communists or socialists, to challenge long standing capitalist prerogatives that stand in the way of both economic and environmental sustainability. Many are demanding a more rational, scientific approach to economic, development and environmental policy.

Catastrophic and/or structural changes in social and economic infrastructures destabilize institutions, and create grave political risks. Courts, congresses, state legislatures, federal and state departments, can all begin to fail, can be consumed by interest driven -- in other words, class --- politics. (Look what we have learned from Romney “telling it like it is” to his rich donor friends!)

Yet, the increasing risks of these catastrophic events remain largely external to market pricing mechanisms. Which means --- the risk -- and the disasters -- fall on the public. The proportional and scientifically recommended steps are, in effect, a market failure. There is no market for the solutions. Only government can or will implement them.

Objective Pressures for Action are Rising NOW

Boston is drafting budget estimates NOW for dealing with 6-10 foot ocean surges as seas rise. A major struggle is underway NOW between coal and much cheaper and cleaner-burning shale gas as both aging coal-fired plants, and virtually all new plants, switch to natural gas. Addressing those risks means rethinking and re-marking the true costs of much economic activity, especially activity that burns fossil fuels.

Measuring costs and benefits of non-market services and goods, and other externalities from the mild and beneficial to the catastrophic is a necessary but non-trivial problem. In many cases we are dealing not with scientific certainty, but probability. Thus, it is important to be careful about the negative side of ideology in assessing scientific controversy. I agree with Bill Clinton who said on John Stewart’s show that “Ideology has the weakness of ‘having an answer’ before the evidence is really in”. This is especially true when debating probabilities.

Thus, for example, opposition to fossil fuels, period, is, or can be, an ideological position that bars any political distinctions between oil, coal, and shale gas. But from a class position, a careful weighting of shale gas vs oil and coal technologies and costs from both an environmental, political and overall energy and job requirements may well conclude: make a deal with shale gas for 30 years, and force the ultra reactionary cliques in oil and coal into political isolation.

Where to divide monopoly capital and its allies, picking correctly the weakest link in the reactionary chain to hold, and thereby holding the strongest key to unity and progress, is the mandatory question of a class approach to 2012 politics. For those readers versed in the history of Vladimir Lenin --- 1905 tactics, not 1917, are the better guide to classic thinking on this question in this time.

While shunning excessively ideological approaches to ecology, I nonetheless submit that when one thinks about a “more scientifically managed society” -- they are thinking very Marx-like thoughts (which were overwhelmingly about capitalism, not socialism), and yet touching exactly on what a “more socialist” and “less capitalist” society means.

As productive forces develop and all labor becomes ever more interdependent -- public management of rising entitlements and public goods becomes ever more necessary. I am enough of a student of Marx to understand that capitalist relations of one kind or another will be with us as long as commodities exist -- which will be as long in time and wide in degree as there is a demand for scarce goods. In addition, for development of new goods, markets are an important motivation, reality test and source, of innovation. But, the public, cooperative, partnership, shared profit, and non-profit spaces and work-models, as well as new forms of independent employment in the economy will expand and become stronger once they are protected with greater national health care, retirement and educational security, and the rights to self-association.

Of course the corporate ideologists of the free-market fundamentalism schools -- funded heavily by Exxon and other energy giants --- are busy repeating ad nauseum that “climate change fanaticism is the trojan horse for socialism and communism.” (Limbaugh ---he keeps using the trojan horse metaphor, but that horse may be the only ride out of town in an emergency!). The truth is that socialism and republicanism (of the kind advocated by the founders of the US) have a lot in common, and that every society since the rise of capitalism is mix, a difficult marriage if you will, of public and private enterprise stamped with its particular history of class, democratic and social struggles.

The notion of society being guided by a more scientific, more disinterested polity runs deep in our history, back to Franklin, Jefferson, Washington, Paine and the ideals of the Enlightenment. Karl Marx, to my mind, was indeed the last great thinker of the Enlightenment in that he sought to extend its ideals to all who labor. He contended that of all social classes created under various capitalist societies, the working class was the most “disinterested”, and thus the best suited to govern in both a more democratic, and more scientific , direction.

I like the Green Party Program, Yet I am Voting for Obama

...but first, a parable from a shop struggle some years ago...

An upstate New York General Electric shop once built industrial capacitors. It may still. Some thirty-five years ago, a union worker in the shop observed a foreman handling incoming shipments on which a skull and crossbones and other insignia appeared. The foreman was performing bargaining unit work -- a contract violation in some circumstances. The Union investigation showed that the materials were a type of epoxy which contained a high concentration of a known carcinogen. Shortly word spreads of the “cancer threat”, and a petition requesting an official OSHA complaint circulates among employees and union members. The company responds with a statement declaring the danger to be exaggerated and, “anyway, there is no alternative and production might have to relocate to a more suitable country.”

No surprise -- soon, a new petition is circulating through the plant requesting retraction of the first petition -- to save the jobs!

Pressure is building for the union to resolve what now threatens a split between those still concerned about a high exposure to cancer risk, versus those now even more concerned about losing their jobs -- one of the best paying for their kind. Emotions are running high at the meeting. The artful compromise that ended up uniting the membership was to a) concede that survival might dictate working with more cancer but b) the company should open the contract to re-negotiate upward the early payout on their pensions since their likely lifespan was now reduced.

Rather than entertain opening a local agreement in a nationally negotiated contract, within a few days, GE “discovered” an epoxy free of the carcinogen.

A Class Approach to Ecology?

A Ho Hum anecdote to some, perhaps. But -- illustrative of the complexity of what legitimately can, or cannot, lay claim to a working class perspective on ecology. A class perspective cannot simply assert “that’s capitalism” at the very concrete challenges that are arising every day and deliver “äfter the revolution everything will be fine” lectures. A socialism, or, for that matter, a Green New Deal, without tactics and strategic concepts is no socialism, or Deal at all; or rather, a socialism and Green New Deal entirely of the mind. There are other objections that can be made to overly ideological economic and environmental programs. History is replete with examples of many striking political upheavals, but there are no examples of comparable economic great leaps. Economic change involves millions of transactions and rules both legal and cultural, and is always incremental at best. Any environmental shift in a new directions will include a new regime of winners and losers, jobs and occupations and services created, and those left behind. A class approach is concrete, and attentive to details. Forced marches are possible, if short, but cannot be sustained.

The same objection --- a certain classlessness in outlook --- applies to the Green party, as well as to the “we will fix it after capitalism” crowd. In the abstract most Green Party positions are enlightened. But in real life they take on too many enemies at once to build the needed class coalition unity, which must, if at all possible, focus on the weakest link in the chain of monopoly political power. I make a short list of the enemies of the Green New Deal: Most of finance capital, most energy, chemical, construction, pharma, defense, insurance, agbiz, real estate, and I could keep going. In addition, employees in these industries will have a wide range of political opinion on many matters, but will often be captives of their own employer’s industrial policy -- like coal, for example. The company owns the jobs!

This is too many enemies to take on at once. Plus, no matter how strong, and more perfectly, the Green Party were to advance its program -- the stronger and better it gets, the more of a spoiler it must play in two-party politics. In any battleground state, a vote for Jill Stein is a vote that ignores the vast divide in policy and philosophy and class coalition between Obama and Romney. Ignorance on that matter can come with a very high price. Even in West Virginia, where polls show many workers are persuaded that Öbama’s EPA is “waging a war on coal”, a vote for Obama is arguably a more potent pro worker and pro environment act than a vote for Jill Stein and Cheri Honkala. There is a fierce battle going on in the WV Democratic party over the Blue Dog table manners of Governor Earl Ray Tomblin and Senator (and former Governor) Joe Manchin boycotting the national Democratic convention, refusing to endorse the President, and adopting false, Republican talking points in their campaigns. Should not, from a class perspective, that battle be fully engaged?

So, I am voting for Obama. But -- at the same time (and this is the insanity induced by the restrictions on new thinking the two-party system imposes) --- I would like to see Jill Stein on a third lectern in the national debates. I am dreaming green, but with feet of clay. When Romney spewed absolute garbage about the green incentives in the stimulus package under Obama, Obama did not rise to its defense. But Ms Stein would have, immediately, doing important ideological lifting the campaign needs!

But that’s my testimony. What is yours?

The 2012 Election and Global Climate Change: This is Why We Fight.

Thu, 04 Oct 2012 05:36:00 +0000

Steven McAllister and Greg Rose

Climate change is an irrefutable fact of our time. The monthly average temperature worldwide has been higher than the twentieth century average for 329 straight months. Global annual mean temperatures have broken records in eleven out of the last thirteen years. On August 28, 2012, the polar ice cap was smaller than it has ever been in recorded history.

Earlier this summer, 97% of the ice cover in Greenland was melting. The scientific community is essentially unanimous in its call for immediate and sustained action on the part of the world community to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases, gases that are driving the increasingly calamitous extremes in the Earth’s climate. The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change already projects that much of the United States will no longer be arable for food crops by the end of this century if current trends continue.

And to hear the Republican Presidential candidate tell it, nothing is wrong that more oil and coal extraction will not fix.

The contrast between Romney-Ryan and Obama-Biden on recognition of the importance of global climate change could not be sharper. In his acceptance speech at the Republican national convention Mitt Romney flippantly joked about the Democrat’s commitment to address climate change: “President Obama promised to begin to slow the rise of the oceans and heal the planet. MY promise... is to help you and your family."\

President Obama, in his acceptance speech at the Democratic national convention, was forthright in identifying the key difference between himself and Romney: “…climate change is not a hoax. More droughts and floods and wildfires are not a joke. They’re a threat to our children’s future. And in this election, you can do something about it.”

The problem is that failure to recognize and take action on global climate dooms billions of working class families here and abroad to poverty, misery, and death as the accumulated environmental disasters which capitalism has engendered continue to raise global temperatures and destabilize global climate patterns with increasing severity. That is the path Mitt Romney has chosen to endorse: superprofits for energy companies, disaster for the rest of us. We need jobs – the jobs a Green New Deal would create -- and Romney offers nothing.

It is not accidental that Romney has abandoned any pretense of scientifically-based policy making since his presidential ambitions loomed. While governor of Massachusetts Romney helped to create a regional cap-and-trade program to start to deal with greenhouse gas emissions; now cap-and-trade is presented by Romney as a plot by Obama to destroy American jobs. As the New York Times recently reported, Romney has hewn toward Republican orthodoxy – climate change denial – since recognizing the need to position himself further to the right to win the nomination. Under the influence of the massively-funded energy industry campaign to deny climate change, Romney’s chosen running mate, Paul Ryan, has been a mouthpiece for those energy industry interests since entering Congress, openly declaring climate change a hoax in a 2009 op ed; Ryan argued that global climate change resulted from "the hyperpoliticization of science" and "the use of statistical tricks to distort... findings and intentionally mislead the public on the issue of climate change."

It is useful to compare the 2012 national platforms of the Republican and Democratic parties on climate change to see just how radically different they are on this issue. The Republican platform mentions climate change only once in a paragraph laden with sarcasm about President Obama’s elevation of the issue to a major national security concern:

…the strategy subordinates our national security interests to environment, energy, and international health issues, and elevates "climate change" to the level of a "severe threat" equivalent to foreign aggression. The word "climate," in fact, appears in the current President's strategy more often than Al-Qaeda, nuclear proliferation, radical Islam, or weapons of mass destruction. (p. 40)

On the other hand, the Democratic platform addresses the issue with an appropriate seriousness:

We know that global climate change is one of the biggest threats of this generation -- an economic, environmental, and national security catastrophe in the making. We affirm the science of climate change, commit to significantly reducing the pollution that causes climate change, and know we have to meet this challenge by driving smart policies that lead to greater growth in clean energy generation and result in a range of economic and social benefits.

President Obama has been a leader on this issue. We have developed historic fuel efficiency standards that will limit greenhouse gas emissions from our vehicles for the first time in history, made unprecedented investments in clear energy, and proposed the first-ever carbon pollution limits for new fossil-fuel-fired power plants. As we move towards lower carbon emissions, we ill continue to support smart, energy efficient manufacturing. Democrats pledge to continue showing international leadership on climate change, working toward an agreement to set emission limits in unison with other emerging powers. Democrats will continue pursuing efforts to combat climate change at home as well, because reducing our emissions domestically -- through regulation and market solutions -- is necessary to continue being an international leader on this issue. We understand that global climate change may disproportionately affect the poor, and we are committed to environmental justice....

Our opponents have moved so far to the right as to doubt the science of climate change, advocate the selling of our federal lands, and threaten to roll back environmental protections that safeguard public health. They leaders deny the benefits of the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts -- benefits like job creation, health, and the prevention of tens of thousands of premature deaths each year….

The national security threat from climate change is real, urgent, and severe. The change wrought by a warming planet will lead to new conflicts over refugees and resources; new suffering from drought and famine; catastrophic natural disasters; and the degradation of vital ecosystems across the globe.... [W]e will continue to champion sustainable growth that includes the clean energy that creates green jobs and combats climate change. (pp. 59-68)

The Romney-Ryan energy plan makes the implications of this difference clear. In this the Republicans demands an end to environmental regulation of fossil fuels extraction, puts forward a plan which amounts to little more than “drill, baby, drill” everywhere, and fails to mention even once the importance of global climate change or the relationship between fossil fuels and climate change. In the Romney-Ryan world climate change is a mad scientist’s fantasy. But the Romney-Ryan energy plan is based on an oil-imperialist’s fantasy: the Republican plan explicitly bases its clam to achieve “energy independence” by expropriating Canada’s oil reserves and abrogating the Mexican constitution to seize its reserves. What they call “North American” energy independence is unremitting dependence on energy monopolies controlling the resources of our neighbors at bayonet point if need be. Even at that, the looming intersection of peak oil and climate change is ignored completely, and nature will not allow the bayonets of American imperialism to hold that crisis indefinitely at bay.

By contrast, while the Obama administration’s plans embodied in the 2011 Blueprint for a Secure Energy Future did not go nearly as far as progressive advocates and climate scientists would have preferred, and the interim report, issued a year later, does not make enough progress even on the modest agenda of 2011, it still represents hugely more progress – and more movement in the right direction – than any Romney administration could conceivably accomplish. This is particularly true in that for the Republican Party climate change is the crisis that dares not speak its name.

While the Obama administration is still emphasizing increasing U.S. petroleum and natural gas supplies rather than embracing a full Green New Deal to transition beyond fossil fuel dependence and create the hundreds of thousands of jobs such a New Deal would entail, it is embracing stricter regulation of fossil fuel extraction, funding development of next generation fuel technologies, and energy markets as well as promoting the 54.5 mpg standard for fuel economy by 2025.

Romney’s response is “My view is that we don’t know what’s causing climate change on this planet.”

We need jobs, jobs created by non-fossil-fuel technologies, jobs created by a national campaign to weatherize all buildings in this country to higher, more fuel-efficient standards. We are not going to get those jobs with a Romney administration.

With the situation presented by a reelected Obama administration, organizing science, organized labor, broad sectors of American working people, and elements of the ruling class who can see that climate change dooms humanity to take decisive action – the wide popular front we are precisely building in our electoral strategy – we will have set the stage for the next level of struggle: the struggle to create full employment and defeat the energy monopolists. No one claims that an Obama administration will not have to be goaded by mass action to take the necessary steps to enact the Green New Deal and other measures which meeting the challenge of climate change necessarily entails.

But a Romney administration, propelled by the pseudo-scientific know-nothingism of the ultraright, will present progressives with a stunning retrenchment and place working people entirely on the defensive at a time when we most need to be moving forward to confront the crisis of global climate change.

This is what is at stake in the 2012 election

This is why we fight.

Steven McAllister is chair of the Climate Change Working Group of the Communist Party USA. Greg Rose is a member of the Climate Change Working Group of the Communist Party USA.

GMO controversy -- Keith Kloor and Respondents

Tue, 02 Oct 2012 05:58:00 +0000

Editor: Below is an article by Keith Kloor from Salon, followed by counter-commentary via Portside, claiming anti-scientific bias behind GMO (genetically modified organism) foods.

__________________________

GMO Opponents Are the Climate Skeptics of the Left

Keith Kloor

I used to think that nothing rivaled the misinformation spewed by climate change skeptics and spinmeisters.

Then I started paying attention to how anti-GMO campaigners have distorted the science on genetically modified foods. You might be surprised at how successful they've been and who has helped them pull it off.

I’ve found that fears are stoked by prominent environmental groups, supposed food-safety watchdogs, and influential food columnists; that dodgy science is laundered by well-respected scholars and propaganda is treated credulously by legendary journalists; and that progressive media outlets, which often decry the scurrilous rhetoric that warps the climate debate, serve up a comparable agitprop when it comes to GMOs.

In short, I’ve learned that the emotionally charged, politicized discourse on GMOs is mired in the kind of fever swamps that have polluted climate science beyond recognition.

The latest audacious example of scientific distortion came last week, in the form of a controversial (but peer reviewed!) study that generated worldwide headlines. A French research team purportedly found that GMO corn fed to rats caused them to develop giant tumors and die prematurely.

Within 24 hours, the study's credibility was shredded by scores of scientists. The consensus judgment was swift and damning: The study was riddled with errors—serious, blatantly obvious flaws that should have been caught by peer reviewers. Many critics pointed out that the researchers chose a strain of rodents extremely prone to tumors. Other key aspects of the study, such as its sample size and statistical analysis, have also been highly criticized. One University of Florida scientist suggests the study was "designed to frighten" the public.*

That's no stretch of the imagination, considering the history of the lead author, Gilles-Eric Seralini, who, as NPR reports, "has been campaigning against GM crops since 1997," and whose research methods have been "questioned before," according to the New York Times.

The circumstances surrounding Seralini's GMO rat-tumor study range from bizarre (as a French magazine breathlessly reports, it was conducted in clandestine conditions) to dubious (funding was provided by an anti-biotechnology organization whose scientific board Seralini heads).

Another big red flag: Seralini and his co-authors manipulated some members of the media to prevent outside scrutiny of their study. (The strategy appears to have worked like a charm in Europe.) Some reporters allowed themselves to be stenographers by signing nondisclosure agreements stipulating they not solicit independent expert opinion before the paper was released. That has riled up science journalists such as Carl Zimmer, who wrote on his Discover magazine blog: "This is a rancid, corrupt way to report about science. It speaks badly for the scientists involved, but we journalists have to grant that it speaks badly to our profession, too. ... If someone hands you confidentiality agreements to sign, so that you will have no choice but to produce a one-sided article, WALK AWAY. Otherwise, you are being played."

Speaking of being played, have I mentioned yet that Seralini's book on GMOs, All Guinea Pigs! is being published (in French) this week? Oh, and there's also a documentary based on his book coming out simultaneously. You can get details on both at the website of the anti-biotetch organization that sponsored his study. The site features gross-out pictures of those GMO corn-fed rats with ping-pong-ball-size tumors.

It's all very convenient, isn't it?

None of this seems to bother Tom Philpott, the popular food blogger for Mother Jones, who writes that Seralini's results "shine a harsh light on the ag-biotech industry's mantra that GMOs have indisputably proven safe to eat."

Philpott often trumpets the ecological and public-health dangers posed by genetically modified crops. But such concerns about GMOs, which are regularly echoed at other left-leaning media outlets, have little merit. As Pamela Ronald, a UC-Davis plant geneticist,pointed out last year in Scientific American: "There is broad scientiﬁc consensus that genetically engineered crops currently on the market are safe to eat. After 14 years of cultivation and a cumulative total of 2 billion acres planted, no adverse health or environmental effects have resulted from commercialization of genetically engineered crops."

So what explains the lingering suspicions that some people (even those who aren’t Monsanto-hating, organic-food-only eaters) still harbor? Some of these folks are worried about new genes being introduced into plant and animal species. But humans have been selectively breeding plants and animals pretty much since we moved out of caves, manipulating their genes all the while. The process was just slower before biotechnology came along.

Still, being uneasy about a powerful, new technology doesn’t make you a wild-eyed paranoid. The precautionary principle is a worthy one to live by. But people should know that GMOs are tightly regulated (some scientists say in an overly burdensome manner).

Many environmentalists are concerned that genetically modified animals such as “Franken-salmon” could get loose in the wild and out-compete their nonengineered cousins, or lead to breeding problems for the wild members of the species. But even the scientist on whose research the “Trojan gene” hypothesis is based says the risk to wild salmon is “low” and that his work has been misrepresented by GMO opponents.

Another big concern that has been widely reported is the “rapid growth of tenacious super weeds” that now defy Monsanto’s trademark Roundup herbicide. That has led farmers to spray their fields with an increasing amount of the chemical weed-killer. Additionally, some research suggests that other pests are evolving a resistance to GMO crops. But these problems are not unique to genetic engineering. The history of agriculture is one of a never-ending battle between humans and pests.

On balance, the positives of GM crops seem to vastly outweigh the negatives. A recent 20-year study published in Nature found that GM crops helped a beneficial insect ecosystem to thrive and migrate into surrounding fields. For an overview of the benefits (and enduring concerns) of GM crops, see this recent post by Pamela Ronald.

The bottom line for people worried about GMO ingredients in their food is that there is no credible scientific evidence that GMOs pose a health risk.

Even Philpott, in his charitable take on the Seralini study, admits that, "no one has ever dropped dead from drinking, say, a Coke sweetened with high-fructose syrup from GMO corn." In the next breath, though, he wonders: "But what about 'chronic' effects, ones that come on gradually and can't be easily tied to any one thing? Here we are eating in the dark." Despite the study being a train wreck, Philpott's takeaway is that it "provides a disturbing hint that all might not be right with our food—and shows beyond a doubt that further study is needed." What's beyond a doubt here is Philpott's unwillingness to call bullshit when it's staring him in the face.

I single out Philpott not to pick on him, but because he represents the most reasonable, level-headed voice of the anti-GMO brigade (whose most extreme adherents don white hazmat suits and destroy research plots). The same goes for Grist, which calls the French study "important" and says "it's worth paying attention to what Seralini has done.”

Such acceptance by lefties of what everyone else in the reality-based science community derides as patently bad science is “just plain depressing,” writes a medical researcher who blogs under the name Orac. He compares the misuse of science and scare tactics by GMO opponents to the behavior of the anti-vaccine movement.

The anti-GM bias also reveals a glaring intellectual inconsistency of the eco-concerned media. When it comes to climate science, for example, Grist and Mother Jones are quick to call out the denialism of pundits and politicians. But when it comes to the science of genetic engineering, writers at these same outlets are quick to seize on pseudoscientific claims, based on the flimsiest of evidence, of cancer-causing, endocrine-disrupting, ecosystem-killing GMOs.

This brand of fear-mongering is what I've come to expect from environmental groups,anti-GMO activists, and their most shamelessly exploitive soul travelers. This is what agenda-driven ideologues do. The Seralini study has already been seized on by supporters of California's Proposition 37, a voter initiative that, if successful in November, would require most foods containing genetically modified ingredients to be labeled as such in the state.

What's disconcerting is when big media outlets and influential thought leaderslegitimize pseudoscience and perpetuate some of the most outrageous tabloid myths, which have been given fresh currency by a slanted 2011 documentary that is taken at face value at places like the Huffington Post.

In a recent commentary for Nature, Yale University's Dan Kahan lamented the "polluted science communication environment" that has deeply polarized the climate debate. He writes: “People acquire their scientific knowledge by consulting others who share their values and whom they therefore trust and understand.” This means that lefties in the media and prominent scholars and food advocates who truly care about the planet are information brokers. So they have a choice to make: On the GMO issue, they can be scrupulous in their analysis of facts and risks, or they can continue to pollute the science communication environment.

___________________________________________________

Portside commentary from Chris Lowe.

It is a shame that Portside chose to circulate this tendentious, one-sided, pro-corporate industrial agriculture piece.

Start with the headline. Climate change skeptics are on the side of large corporate interests who benefit from ecological destruction and argue for deregulation. Who occupies the similar position in the GMO debates? People like Keith Kloor. Climate skeptics, pro-corporate and anti- regulation. GMO skeptics, anti-corporate and pro-regulation. Not the same.

Then there is the prestidigitation, bait-and-switch character of the argument. This operates at two levels, that of the French study, and the question of what the GMO debate is about, which goes far beyond the possible health harms caused by the genetic modifications in
consumed foods.

The French study addressed two topics: possible health harms caused by the genetically modified plant material, and possible health harms caused by consuming Roundup that makes its way onto and into food. Kloor addresses only the first question. Even if the French study is as slanted as he says, it points to need for further research on how protecting plants from being killed by pesticides by genetic modification may lead to more pesticides entering the food chain. Kloor is intellectually dishonest in not acknowledging that
issue.

That issue points to two larger social ecological issues related to GMO crops: the promotion of ecologically and public health destructive industrial monoculture in agriculture, and regulatory capture and politicized defundiing of the regulatory agencies (FDA, USDA and EPA) charged with protecting the public health and the ecology in our food system, by oligarchical and oligopolistic corporate interests.

Even when the genetic modifications involved resemble those made by older selective breeding methods, many of those methods have been hugely destructive to plant diversity in themselves (read _Tomatoland_ for one good recent example, similar literature exists for maize, bananas and apples). Speeding up that process is not progressive. Moreover, the old and new genetic modifications are tied to high inputs of herbicides, insecticides and fertilizers, many of which also involve processes that add to the greenhouse gas burden. The
herbicides and insecticides in turn affect flora and fauna far beyond their industrial agriculture intended targets, and enter into animal and human food chains. Significant GMO technology is directed to expanding the use of pesticides.

The purported scientific consensus is questionable. Kloor points to the anti-GMO intellectual commitments of the authors of the French study. It's a fair point. He does not raise the question of the economic interests behind pro- GMO scientific activity, which include both
direct funding from the GMO producing corporations, the skewing of federal agricultural research priorities and definitions to industrial agriculture that shapes academic research, and the corporatization of even public universities toward an orientation toward corporate theories of intellectual property. Plus research in general is woefully underfunded.

Those problems are compounded by an attitude that says "no evidence means no risk." This is legitimate over time, if the right questions are asked and actual research on them is conducted. But in a situation where some questions are put off the table, and no research is done simply because it is not funded in other cases, and policy directives to evaluation committees mandate the assumption of no risk despite the manifestly inadequate level of research, the claim of scientific consensus is spurious. There is bureaucratic-industrial consensus.

Then there is the matter of the ethics of authoritarian science. One of the reasons science is in the parlous state that it is, in terms of the breadth of cultural acceptance being less than it should be, is that far too many scientists adopt an authoritarian and paternalistic
attitude toward the public. A proper scientific attitude looks to sharing best current knowledge and educating the public about it. But it also acknowledges that best current knowledge changes, and sometimes has been spectacularly and destructively wrong, as in the
case of the scientistic racism that was the "consensus science" of the Western world from the 1870s to the 1940s. Other cases much closer to GMO issues include the failures to recognize the processes that would lead to resistance to anti-biotics and pesticides in medicine and agriculture, and the continuing regulatory inability to cope with those issues in the face of corporate interests, and the erroneous imposition of Western agricultural "science" in African ecologies with very different characteristics, causing ecological
devastation.

Real science is humble. Scientism is arrogant, authoritarian and patronizing, like Kloor's article. Scientism is self-defeating, as it only creates distrust. It is the enemy of true science and of the goal of creating a scientifically literate and engaged public.

As the example of scientistic racism shows directly, and the other examples show in terms of their implication with class-based economic systems and colonialism and neo- colonialism, many of the issues around the application of scientific knowledge are not scientific issues. They are ethical and social and political and policy issues. Scientists are not necessarily experts in those areas. Often they are quite deficient in thinking about them.

Finally, there is the issue of consumer choice and informed consent, particularly when it comes to choices of what one ingests, but also how one acts as a consumer within the economic system. Generally speaking the left has supported food labeling. Health science may tell me that eating many of the food additives that are required on labels probably won't hurt me. It does not tell me about the tens of thousands of chemicals that have been created and not studied for health consequences. It does not tell me about the ecological consequences of the production of those chemicals or the synthesis of foods out of them in combination with plant and animal products. My own experience tells me that many of those foods are of low quality and in combination with my sedentary lifeways probably are bad for my health.

Preferring not to eat them may be irrational. Food preferences are irrational. De gustibus non est disputandum. I have the right to be irrational, and I have the right to know what I am choosing to eat or not to eat. If that creates a marketing problem for Monsanto and the maize farmers, good. They need to deal with it, and so do the genetic scientists.

Are people who prefer to pay more to eat organic food irrational? Or are they seeking to find ways to act collectively to promote ecologically sustainable food systems? Is the pesticide and fertilizer based industrial monoculture food system that Kloor and
Monsanto promote really rational? I say its preferences should not dictate my freedom to know what I'm eating and to choose according to my own lights. That's not a scientific issue. It's an ethical and political one.

Chris Lowe

Fascism in Greece

Thu, 27 Sep 2012 14:12:00 +0000

The news from Greece is not good. The hope by many that the election of Socialist Francois Hollande as President of France on May 6 would alleviate pressure on Greece, by the troika of the European Union, the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank, to enact even harsher austerity policies, has not panned out so far. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/25/francois-hollande-greek-crisis_n_1829804.html?utm_hp_ref=business And within Greece, the coalition government of Prime Minister Antonis Samaras, pledged to implement the austerity measures, is faced by ongoing mass discontent and protest. To the pressure from the left, fueled by the acute suffering that the austerity program has brought to the Greek people, is now added that of a very dangerous fascist movement called “Golden Dawn” (Chrysi Avgi). Recent surveys have shown Golden Dawn's support surging and overtaking that of PASOK, the social democratic party that had ruled Greece for decades, alternating with the right wing New Democracy party. http://greece.greekreporter.com/2012/09/06/golden-dawn-rises-again-overtakes-pasok/

Fascism has been part of the Greek body politic since at least the period between the two World Wars. After the First World War, liberal Prime Minister Eleftherious Venezelos had attempted to take advantage of the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire to seize Western Anatolia and the Black Sea coast for a greater Greece. Venezelos was defeated in the elections of 1920 and a right wing successor government was defeated militarily by the Turks. Executions of rightist Greek military and political leaders followed, embittering political relations for years. Also, there was restiveness among Slavonic speaking inhabitants of the hinterland of the city of Thessaloniki, the Mediterranean port which Greece had taken over from Turkey. The newly formed Communist Party of Greece, the KKE, was increasingly active, including in support of the rights of the Slavonic minority.

The conflicts between bourgeois liberals and monarchists, and the fear of national and international communist advances, led to a coup d'etat, in 1936, by General Ioannis Metaxas (1871-1941), who, appointed by King George II to stop communist advances, eventually set up a military dictatorship with many fascist characteristics. Temporarily, squabbling civilian politicians were set aside and the KKE suppressed as Metaxas ruled through the military and police establishment. But in 1940, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini invaded first Albania and then Greece. When the Greek military gave the Italians a drubbing, Nazi Germany invaded Greece in support of the Italians (in April 1941, after Metaxas had died from a throat infection) and set up a brutal, militarized occupation.

Most of the liberal politicians went into exile, while many on the right incorporated themselves in one way or another into the collaborationist regime of the German supported Prime Minister, Ioannis Rallis. But Communists and allies organized resistance in many areas of the country, and carried out effective armed strikes against the collaborationist government with its special “Security Battalions”, and the German and Italian occupiers.

As the war moved toward its end, the British government of Winston Churchill shifted priorities toward stopping “communist expansionism” in Eastern Europe. Although the idea originally was to create a coalition government including the communists, the latter soon found themselves attacked by the combined forces of the restored monarchy and the British, later supplemented by the United States. Members of the pro-Nazi Security Battalions ended up fighting on the side of the monarchy. The Greek communists received some support from Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, but eventually were ground down.

The result was that in the post war period, the KKE was suppressed and the right wing elements which had collaborated with the Nazis were not punished, except for a few individuals. Right wing extremism rooted in the Greek ruling class, and heavily represented in the military and police leadership, remained strong. In July 1965, a dispute between the liberal Prime Minister, George Papandreou the elder, and the King, Constantine II, was used as a pretext for a military coup d'etat by officers who were basically fascists. These were also backed up the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and by the “stay behind” structures of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), shadowy elements which had been set up by NATO and local reactionaries in several European countries to engage in sabotage in case communist regimes came to power, in some cases using old fascist networks.

The brutal “Regime of the Colonels”, headed by Colonel George Papadopoulos, who had collaborated with the Germans in World War II and persecuted the KKE afterwards, repressed not only the left but all democratic tendencies, including labor and student organizations. The armed attempt by some of its supporters to annex Cyprus to Greece was the pretext for a Turkish invasion of that country, creating a problem that still has not been resolved.

Organizing by the left finally led to a student uprising which forced the Colonels' government out in 1974. Under the new democratic dispensation, the KKE was legalized. A new social democratic party, PASOK (Pan-Hellenic Socialist Movement), headed by old George Papandreou's son Andreas, attracted the support of other sectors of the left and center. Two governments headed by Andreas Papandreou (1981-1989 and 1993-1996) brought about many democratic reforms in Greece, but were troubled by corruption scandals.

But the class roots of Greek fascism in the indigenous ruling class, military and security establishment had not disappeared; nor had the basic economic problems been solved.

The incorporation of Greece in the European Union in 1981 and in the Euro currency zone in 2001 were the prelude to the present situation, in which Greece is faced with a choice of staying in Europe at the price of having to implement brutal austerity, or leaving and facing severe economic damage also.

Greece has one of the highest military budgets in Europe per capita (military spending aimed largely against Greece's NATO ally, Turkey) and the Greek ruling class still gets huge tax breaks (ship owners, one of the most powerful sectors, by law do not pay income taxes). http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/24/business/global/as-greece-turns-leftward-its-tycoons-stay-in-background.html?pagewanted=all So the wealthy and powerful have a lot to protect. On such occasions, scapegoats have to be found, and the fascist card is advanced. The main scapegoats right now are the immigrants. As in other European countries, the worldwide instability created by corporate globalization has brought in immigrants from various non-European countries, including Western and Southern Asia. These, now, are the targets of the attacks by Golden Dawn, which does not confine itself to racist, anti-immigrant rhetoric, but also organized armed groups of thugs to invade immigrant neighborhoods and physically assault the residents. Attacks are escalating; on August 13 an Iraqi youth was stabbed to death and there have been many other incidents. http://www.keeptalkinggreece.com/2012/08/13/racist-attacks-increase-iraqi-stabbed-to-death-in-athens/A major source of worry is the degree to which the police sympathize with Golden Dawn. http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/06/are-greek-policemen-really-voting-in-droves-for-greeces-neo-nazi-party/258767/and either collaborate with its depredations or at any rate refuse to intervene to stop them.

On the left, the two elections, on May 6 and June 17, left PASOK battered and bleeding, punished by the voters because of its acquiescence to the austerity measures. PASOK lost 119 seats in the May election, and 8 more in the June one, leaving it with only 33 seats in Parliament where it had started the year with a majority, 160 seats. But the KKE, traditionally rooted in the working class and in its PAME labor federation, also lost nearly half of its strength in parliament, gaining 5 seats in May but losing 14 in June, to end up with 12 seats as compared to the 21 they held before May. The difference was made up by the radical left party SYRIZA (Coalition of the Radical Left), which came close, but not quite close enough, to being able to form a government, winning 19 new seats in the June election for a total of 71, which made SYRIZA the second force in Parliament after Prime Minister Samaras' New Democracy with its 129 seats (including the 50 which the Greek electoral system awards to the party with a plurality in Parliament). In the end, the government was formed as a coalition of the New Democratic Party, the remains of PASOK, and another social democratic party, the Democratic Left.

But besides the meteoric rise of SYRIZA the May and June elections saw a spectacular rise of support for Golden Dawn, which now has 18 seats in Parliament, having won 6.92% of the popular vote.

SYRIZA is the result of the amalgamation of several other left and left-center parties. The central group comes from Sinaspismos, which was founded in 1991. To this have been added Trotskyite, Maoist, social democratic and green tendencies, plus defectors from the KKE and PASOK. Because of the heterogeneity of its origins, SYRIZA does not have the centralist governing system of left parties in Europe that come out of the traditions of Third International communism. It is, inevitably, a work in progress, with potential for internal conflict. However, it is currently the largest left party in the Greek parliament, and has captured the imagination of important sectors of the masses.

The reaction of the Greek coalition government to the Golden Dawn phenomenon has been insipid at best. At worst, Prime Minister Samaras has made concessions to the anti-immigrant mood by initiating a crackdown on the undocumented. http://www.athensnews.gr/portal/1/56227 So the fight against Golden Dawn falls to the left outside the ruling coalition, namely SYRIZA and the KKE. Both have been involved in grassroots organizing and mobilizations against Golden Dawn, but currently they are unable to work together closely, because of political differences. Nevertheless, both have denounced Golden Dawn's anti-immigrant hooliganism and Samaras' crackdown on undocumented immigrants. http://digitaljournal.com/article/330174

The failure of Samaras' government to act against Golden Dawn and especially to defend immigrants plays into the hands of the fascist ultra-right which is a direct descendent of the fascist regime of the colonels in the 1960s and 1970s.

Similar scenarios are playing out in other European countries, with Hungary perhaps being the most extreme example. In each case, the promise that European integration under capitalism would “lift all boats” is turning out to be illusory, and austerity measures undertaken under pressure from international monopoly capital and the conservative European political establishment are causing great suffering among the working class and other mass sectors. In each case, the left has not been strong enough numerically to able to put itself at the head of all protests, and so demagogic ultra-right populists like Golden Dawn in Greece are making their bid for leadership.

This is definitely a moment of extreme danger, from which we in the United States are not immune.

A Class Approach to Ecological Crisis

Thu, 27 Sep 2012 11:52:00 +0000

Humanity is inextricably linked to the natural world on which we depend. We are facing environmental issues that threaten human development. Sustainable economics are not about sustainable profits for the few, they are about what is best for all humankind. Environmental issues are also class issues – struggles over political and economic power, control, and decision-making. The working class has a crucial role to play in the fight to save the earth’s capacity to provide the essentials of life. Socialists must address the new challenges posed by the latest ecological science, by the limits on growth required by nature’s limits.

In his graveside address for Marx, Frederick Engels (1883) noted that Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc. These are the fundamental realities of all human life: our lives are based on food, water, and resources that come from nature. As well, the ways in which we create and distribute food, drink, and shelter impact the natural world we depend on. We need nature for our survival. If the air becomes too polluted for human health, we cannot simply breathe something else. Pollution that is blown away is blown away to somewhere else; it does not just disappear. We cannot just stop eating. We require clean water daily. This understanding must underpin our views on ‘politics, science, art, religion, etc.’, as well as our views on economics, class struggle, and socialism.

Humans are not separate from their environment, and the environments of different countries are not separate from each other.What we experience in one region of the world is intimately connected to what people experience in other regions. What happens to natural global systems happens to all of us. All value to humanity comes either directly from nature or from nature altered by human labor. If we compromise nature’s ability to regenerate the materials we need for our survival, we compromise our own ability to survive. We face a series of linked environmental problems – climate change, water use, soil depletion – which have the potential to negatively affect sea levels, weather systems, our ability to grow food and drink water, and other essential aspects of human life. We cannot endlessly alter the balance of natural systems like the atmosphere or the oceans without suffering the consequences of that alteration.

Human survival requires a rebalancing of human activity with natural systems and resources. The list of environmental problems and crises that humanity faces is long and growing: global climate change; decreasing agricultural yields; increasing water stresses; the accumulation of persistent organic pollutants in the water, soil, and air; depletion and destruction of fisheries; ocean acidification; the depletion of many kinds of non-renewable resources; annihilation of many species of plants and animals; increases in extreme weather events; rapid increases in urbanization without corresponding increases in water and sewage infrastructure; destructive mining practices; deforestation; and more. The reality is that the world can no longer afford our current energy systems, our current financial system, our current industrial system. All these and more will have to change in order for the balance of humanity with nature to readjust to sustainable levels.

Issues of building the capacity to save the planet from environmental devastation are issues of democratic power for the majority. This means power for workers, their families, and poor people
who together make up the vast majority of all societies.

Humanity in general is not causing these problems. Capitalism, in addition to exploiting human nature, relies on ever-expanding markets, ever-expanding production of commodities, ever-expanding development, and ever-expanding growth of private profit, which are all root causes of the imbalance with nature. Short-term, short-sighted calculations of profit, as the sole measure of value, underlie many of the crises which affect humanity. Capitalism operates on several deadly assumptions: that nature is ‘free’, that natural resources are limitless, that the waste-absorbing capacity of nature is infinite, that economic activity and the natural world are separate, that short-term profit is more important than long-term sustainability, that economic profit can be reasonably calculated while ignoring social and environmental costs borne by society as a whole, and that the production of more commodities without end represents real progress. These are in addition to the human exploitation and oppression capitalism engenders and profits from.

There are direct human costs of capitalism, but there are also serious indirect costs, as capitalist production and agriculture exploit the non-renewable resources we depend upon in an ever-speedier race to catastrophe. Capitalism is the root cause of most of the environmental problems we face, and the biggest obstacle to finding real solutions. To counter the power of the capitalist class and its control of the levers of power in much of the world, the organized power of the working class is the only force capable of saving humanity from capitalism. This is why environmental issues are working-class issues, and why supposed solutions which ignore the class divisions in society can at best only postpone the worst impacts of global warming, the spread of persistent organic pollutants all over the world, and other environmental crises that face all of humanity. Without the organized force of the working class, we are stuck with an unsustainable economic system which will cause ever-increasing environmental catastrophes. We can either work with nature, or nature will work against us. Nature does not ‘care’ about humanity; humanity must care about nature. We must work to enable nature to sustain us.

Limitations of environmental discussion

Most discussions of global climate change and other serious environmental challenges are limited. The problems are seen as problems of human interaction with natural systems (which hey are) or as problems in need of technological solutions (which they are). But little is done to connect any of this to our economic and social systems. In a private property system, when we collectively face problems that need collective solutions (and it does not get much bigger or more collective than global climate change, both on the problem side and the required solution side), we run into private property rights and private decision-making about production, land use, resources, disposal of waste, and investment. We also run into the limits of capitalist-funded political systems.

Much of the agitation and media discussion of global warming and other ecological crises promote a valuable goal: educating the public about the gravity of these problems and the need for action. However, most of that publicity blames the problem on ‘overpopulation’ or ‘excessive consumption’. This lets the capitalist system off the hook, and in the long run defeats the goal of decreasing the amounts of greenhouse gases, the main immediate causes of global warming, and of solving the other symptoms of the imbalanced human relationship with the environment on which we depend.

Approaches that blame ‘people’ in general fail to address the underlying causes of global warming. Few people, in any country, have or had much to do with the decisions that are causing many rapidly-developing environmental crises. Those decisions were private decisions, made by capitalists and their managers. As long as that continues to be the case, efforts to slow global warming and solve other environmental problems will fall far short of the fundamental transformations needed in our economic, political, agricultural, industrial, transportation, and social systems. International environmental problems are often explained using gross averages, which end up concealing more than they reveal. When figures for ‘average per capita energy consumption’ are used to compare the ‘energy footprint’ of people in different parts of the world, those averages conceal the gross differentials in energy usage within countries, and conceal who has decisionmaking authority over industrial production, energy production, distribution systems, and national environmental policy. The average person in the United States has no more of a role in deciding whether or not to build another coal-fired electricity generating plant than the average person in Indonesia plays in deciding how much of the rainforest to cut down. The average North American plays no more of a role in setting up the systems that require constant car use by individuals (suburbs, lack of public transportation, long commutes) than the average sub-Saharan African plays in setting up the systems (or lack thereof) that result in cutting down precious trees to make charcoal.

Most people are relegated to the role of victims, victims who are blamed for the problems to which they are subjected. People are blamed for a profligate lifestyle while corporations advertise endlessly for more consumer spending, more consumer debt, and more consumer behavior that ignores the effects of the increasing burden on the environment. Class aspects of environmental problems What are some of the main class aspects of environmental issues? One, while the main per capita emitters of greenhouse gases are the United States, Australia, Japan, and Western Europe, the main victims of global warming, at least in the early stages, are in the poorest countries. Those poorest nations are most negatively affected by capitalist resource extraction, by imperialist oppression, by the history of European colonialism, by the problems of international debt (which benefits the major capitalist banks), and by living the closest to the edge of survival already. Sometimes portrayed as a ‘North–South’ issue, this reality follows identically the centers of financial power and the current pathways of international trade. Justice, fairness, and basic human decency are all affronted by efforts to blame the global warming crisis on ‘too many people’. Acknowledging this is basic humanity, but it is also class reality – the international corporations did the most to create the problem, they benefit most from the way things are, and they also are among the main obstacles to seriously tackling solutions. Real solutions will hurt their bottom line and challenge their power and control over production decisions. Two, in any class-divided society, the rich and powerful use their wealth and power to escape the consequences of any type of crisis, including any type of environmental crisis. They seek to place the blame and the burden on workers and poor people. They seek to find ways to profit from human suffering. The rich and powerful have the largest vested interest in continuing to profit from maintaining unsustainable industry and resource extraction. Three, when environmental movements seek to bring about fundamental change, they run into aspects of capitalist power. The struggle over implementing real solutions to environmental problems is a struggle over control – control of resources, control of institutions, control of decisionmaking, control of production and industrial processes, control over land and land-use, and control over the political process. These struggles are class issues too. The struggles of workers to wrest power away from ‘employer prerogatives’ parallel and complement the struggle of citizens to wrest power away from private property prerogatives. The struggle for real democratic control over the economic decisions that affect our lives relates directly to the struggle for real democratic control in communities over the economic decisions that produce pollution, environmental degradation, reckless development, and many other challenges to a sustainable balance between immediate human needs and the long-term human need for a healthy environment. A short-sighted focus on environmental problems to the exclusion of the economic framework that creates and maintains those problems is as self-defeating as a short-sighted focus on global warming and greenhouse gases to the exclusion of other environmental threats.

As dialectical materialism shows, the world and all its systems are one interconnected web. The environmental movement needs workers, needs alliances with and participation from unions. Because organized workers have the potentialpower to wrest control of production decisions away from the capitalist class, they are an essential element to fighting for fundamental change. Another class issue is that workers are among the first to be victimized by toxic chemicals on the job, before those toxic chemicals are dumped in ways that affect all of us. Workers in the factories and workplaces die, contract environmentally induced diseases, and get a double dose of pollutants – by being exposed both where they work and where they live. Corporations are no more hesitant to hurt their employees than they are hesitant to hurt the communities where those employees and many others live. This is not a new phenomenon – coal miners and their communities have suffered severe respiratory problems for hundreds of years, and efforts to ameliorate those problems have been resisted by the corporations at every step.

Energy consumption and water consumption are driven by more than individual choice. Individual consumer choice has little to do with irrigation systems that draw down the water table faster than rainfall replenishes aquifers; little to do with power plant construction; little to do with the financial decisions that result in massive loans for energy industry projects; little to do with whether or not governments decide to subsidize nuclear energy plants or coal-fired plants. Individual choice has even less to do with foreign policy towards oil-producing countries (or else the majority of US individuals who wanted an end to the Iraq War would have ended it years ago1).

Environmental approaches that blame ‘all of us’ ignore the class divisions in society, ignore the predominant role of money, wealth, and power in governmental decision-making, ignore that 1In CNN/Opinion Research Corporation Poll conducted in March 2008, 68% respondents opposed the Iraq War; in the Gallup poll conducted in April 2008, 63% respondents believed that going to war in Iraq was a mistake; in the CBS poll conducted in February 2009, 55% respondents believed that United States should have stayed out of Iraq; in the CBS poll conducted in August 2010, 59% respondents believed that going to war in Iraq was a mistake; in the Gallup poll conducted in November 2011, 75% respondents approved Obama’s decision to withdraw US troops.

The financial benefits from the economy as currently constructed go disproportionately to the top few percent of the population (in other words, to the biggest capitalists), and ignore which groups within society have a vested interest in preventing change. Such limited approaches ignore the class divisions within ‘rich’ countries. Hurricane Katrina provided many examples of the existence of widespread poverty in the United States. The government and government agencies (i.e. the US Army Corps of Engineers) ignored clear warnings of the danger to the levee system, allowed thousands of poor people to remain in the path of the oncoming destruction, and responded slowly to the rising human catastrophe. This again proved that oppressed and exploited people do not share in the benefits of the United States’ ‘high standard of living’ (which has been going down for the majority for several decades now), and proved again that inequality and injustice exist within supposedly ‘rich’ societies.
Such class divisions within developed industrial countries show that the conflict is not between the ‘rich North’ and the ‘poor South’ of the world, it is between capitalists and rich landowners the world over on the one hand, and workers, family farmers and poor people the world over on the other.

Sustainability

The world and all the world’s peoples need a sustainable economic system, which includes sustainable agricultural and industrial processes for our survival. ‘Sustainability’ does not mean how to continue to make excess profits on endless development and endless production of more commodities. The keys to human sustainability are not gross economic measures; people and nature must be the measures of sustainability, not profits. Various capitalist interests are trying to take advantage of the climate crisis for their own advantage. The nuclear power industry wants the government to make it easier for them to build more nuclear power plants, which they claim produce no carbon dioxide emissions. They want us to ignore or forget that considerable carbon dioxide is created in the construction process, and creates more in the process of moving toxic nuclear waste for disposal, and ignore that no one knows how to deal with or protect us from that nuclear waste. There are differences between real solutions and advertising campaigns. Changing our industrial production so that it runs on different kinds of energy and so it does not create pollution in the first place are not the same as ‘green marketing’. Major government investments in improving the efficiency and affordability of solar power are not the same as adverts from British Petroleum claiming that it is now an energy company rather than an oil company. Figuring out how to better insulate our housing stock so that less energy is wasted is not the same as figuring out how to make money by trading carbon credits.

Sustainability is all about human survival at a level of advanced technological production and health. All humans have a powerful self-interest in their own survival and that of their offspring. When a few powerful capitalists maintain their power and enrich themselves by ignoring the need for immediate action or by obstructing positive action, it is foolish to expect them to lead programs for making changes that challenge their power and wealth. The issues facing humanity are not simple. They require many fundamental changes in how we produce food and goods, how we transport and distribute them, and how we stop depleting the soil, water, oil, forests, and natural gas. They require increasing the capability of the atmosphere, oceans, and climatic systems to absorb pollution and greenhouse gases. While these issues are in part about individual choices, lifestyles, and habits, the biggest impacts must come from changing our major agricultural, industrial, transportation, and marketing systems. These issues are class issues, and they need working-class solutions. Working-class solutions do not limit themselves just to consideration of carbon footprints or individual recycling. They do not rely on some magical market to solve problems for us. Solutions are based on understanding that technology is a tool, and that technological solutions and improvements must go hand in hand with social and economic changes to be effective. Workers need to work in safe workplaces, free of toxic chemicals. They need to live in neighborhoods and houses which minimize energy loss due to inadequate housing construction and endless commutes. They need to live free from toxic waste and industrial pollution. They need sources of clean, safe water. They need healthy, affordable food supplies that do not use chemical pesticides, and do not rely on carbon-burning transportation over huge distances. They want and need to know that their children will have the possibility of living healthy lives in a world where all people have choices, opportunities, and democratic and economic power. Workers need to shoulder their share of the costs of change, but they do not need to shoulder the share of the capitalists, their luxuries, their conspicuous consumption, their arrogant use of power, or their resistance to any change that challenges their ‘right’ to make excessive profits. Any serious discussion of environmental solutions points to more social decision-making, to more social control over what is produced, where it is produced, and how it is produced, packaged, distributed, and consumed. Society’s ability to implement solutions requires changes in political power, changes in governmental structures, changes in national priorities, and significant changes in economic decision-making.

Serious solutions require peace and international cooperation on a new level. Pre-emptive war, invasion, and occupation, research on developing ‘bunker-busting’ nuclear weapons, unilateral militarization of space, are the antithesis of what humanity needs. War is among the worst causes of serious environmental degradation, carbon dioxide release, and wasteful production unrelated to real human needs.

Environmental challenges to socialism

Socialism, the collective ownership of and authority over the major means of production, distribution, and finance, is necessary to mobilize the resources of whole societies and of the whole world to fund and accomplish the massive changes we need to make, to change the tools we use to measure progress and development, to put people and nature before profits. Socialism is an essential aspect of the changes we need to protect the survival of our species. Socialism is a necessary, essential precondition, but is not sufficient by itself. While socialism makes possible the massive changes we need, socialism by itself is no guarantee that the right choices will be made about what to do with limited resources.We also need education, democratic inputs from popular struggles, independent environmental organizations, more scientific knowledge, and a deeper understanding of the interrelationships between land, water, air and weather, agriculture, industry, and society.

Contradictions are not just between exploiters and exploited. There are many contradictions and tensions between humans and nature, and socialism does not make them disappear – those contradictions will still drive struggle and change. As well, uneven development is a reality of all change and that by itself can result in contradiction and conflict, and this is not only true of change from primitive society to feudalism to capitalism, it is true of socialism. The basic truth is that all development and change is driven by contradiction. Neither socialism nor communism will alter this fundamental reality – contradictions of many kinds will continue to challenge humanity. Marxist economic concepts have to be expanded to include the restrictions of limited natural resources, the requirements of nature to not be so overloaded that it cannot absorb waste products, and the necessary limits of planetary climatic systems. Planned economies need to include nature’s requirements and limits in their plans.Marxist economists pay great attention to the necessary balance between production of consumer goods and production of the means of production. These concepts have to be expanded to include the limits of natural resources, and the environmental effects of production decisions. Serious environmental solutions require socialism based on a scientific understanding of the need to correct the current imbalance between human activity and production and the natural systems essential for human survival. Socialism is about ending hunger and poverty, about creating health care, jobs, equality, peace, international cooperation, an end to the exploitation of human labor for private profit, and about planned social and economic development. But it must also include what is beneficial for the environment. If we destroy the ability of natural systems to regenerate and recuperate, we destroy the possibility of all kinds of growth for humanity. We cannot have a healthy humanity without a healthy natural world.

An often unnoticed secondhand affect capitalism has on socialist countries is that in the rush to industrialization, when socialist countries adopt technology and machinery directly from capitalist countries, they unintentionally import the built-in capitalist economic and environmental assumptions made by engineers and designers. Those include assumptions about labor, waste disposal, and natural resource use. Ultimately, problems and shortcomings of socialism represent a failure to think, research, and implement dialectically and democratically. Economics and development are ultimately based on the ability of nature to reproduce itself, based on maintaining a healthy balance between human needs and the needs of the natural systems humanity depends on. If development does not work to maintain that balance, it works against the healthy survival of humanity, and that is as true of socialist development as any other kind.

While we can find in Marx and Engels many references to the necessity of basing ourselves on the imperatives of the natural world, many socialist planners subordinated these to the imperatives of increased production, increased industry. When these imperatives came into conflict, usually industrialization won out. Often, objective needs and pressures contributed to over-centralization and to ignoring the environmental consequences of development decisions.Unlike so-called ‘deep ecologists’ who argue for ignoring human needs to let nature triumph, and unlike limited socialist thinking based on fallacious assumptions of ‘man’s triumph over nature’, we need a rounded, all-sided, in-depth understanding of the interrelationships between human and natural systems. To accomplish the kind of socialism required needs greater cooperation and unity between the communist parties of the world, needs a higher level of scientific and environmental awareness in the programs of these parties, and needs increased communist, union, and workers participation in the growing environmental movements. Environmental issues, like issues of nuclear war and peace, are class issues but they also affect all humanity. As a result, it is possible and necessary to gather, around the working-class forces for change, broad coalitions that include cross-class forces – forces such as peace movements, environmental movements, movements for equality for women, movements for equal civil rights for racial minorities and nationalities, youth movements, and other movements for social and political change. This is not a substitute for working-class leadership and organization, but can complement it and bring additional strength to the movement for an environment that can sustain all humanity.

Conclusion

Nature is letting us know in no uncertain terms (through global warming, extreme weather events, decreasing agricultural yields, declining fisheries, and other escalating environmental problems) International Critical Thought 69 Downloaded by [Marc Brodine] at 09:52 30 March 2012 that the development path taken byWestern Europe, Japan, Australia, and the United States is not available to other countries, not without hurting everyone including the vast majority of people in the developing nations themselves. Humanity needs all developing countries to take a different path to industrialization. All of humanity also needs the United States, Europe, and other developed countries to transform their industrial production, transportation, and agricultural systems. As a world, we are headed for serious adjustments, either planned or involuntary or both, which will recalibrate the balance between humans and the nature on which we depend. The sooner we take a planned, cooperative approach to finding solutions, the less expensive and disruptive those changes will be. Conversely, the longer we take to seriously tackle these issues, the solutions will be more expensive and difficult. Since the world’s ecosystem is shared by all of us, changes to protect it must fall on all of us. More and more people are starting to understand that continuing in the old way is no longer a possibility. Part of our job is to help convince them that another world is possible, another system is necessary, and that human survival requires fundamental change.

Environmental change will not happen just because it ‘should’, just because humanity needs such change. Environmental change requires organized social forces to push and create such change. Fundamental change requires class struggle, along with scientific and educational work. It is not enough to understand environmental problems and their causes, we must change our industrial, agricultural, energy, and transportation systems; we must change our economic and financial systems.
We, the workers of the world, must transform the world. Humanity’s survival depends on it.

Notes on contributor Marc Brodine is a social activist and a member of the National Committee of the Communist Party USA. He chaired the committee that drafted the first new CPUSA program in 25 years, The road to socialism USA, adopted at the CPUSA’s 28th National Convention in 2005. He is co-author of the CPUSA’s environmental program, People and nature before profits. He is author of a mystery novel, Blood pressure (2010), and edited and wrote the introduction to Red roots, green shoots (2007), a collection of environmental writings by his mother, Virginia Brodine, a pioneering Marxist environmentalist. He is a community activist, writer, guitarist, and woodblock print artist.

References
CNN/Opinion Research Corporation Poll. Summary of CNN Iraq War polling from 2006-2008.
Pollingreport. http://www.pollingreport.com/iraq.htm.
Engels, Frederick. 1883. Frederick Engels’ speech at the grave of Karl Marx. http://www.marxists.org/
archive/marx/works/1883/death/burial.htm.
Jones, J. Opposition to Iraq War reaches new high. Gallup. http://www.gallup.com/poll/106783/oppositioniraq-
war-reaches-new-high.aspx.
Jones, J. Three in four Americans back Obama on Iraq withdrawal. Gallup. http://www.gallup.com/poll/
150497/Three-Four-Americans-Back-Obama-Iraq-Withdrawal.aspx.
Montopoli, B. Poll: Most Americans say Iraq War was a mistake. CBS. http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-
503544_162-20014856-503544.html?tag=contentMain;contentBody.
Roberts, J. Poll: Fading support for Iraq War. CBS. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/10/10/opinion/
polls/main930772.shtml.

GOP willing to sabotage economy to win “last stand” election

Sun, 16 Sep 2012 17:19:00 +0000

Mitt Romney and his fellow Republicans are a cynical and calculating bunch. They are extremists the likes of which we have never seen in American politics.

In commenting on the anemic jobs growth in the last quarter - 96,000 jobs - they place the entire blame on the president. Not a hint of criticism was directed at congressional Republicans. But everyone knows that Republican leaders in the House and Senate have attempted to block anything that might remotely reinvigorate the economy and create jobs.

Even small initiatives have been obstructed and then dismissed as examples of the Obama administration's fascination with "big government budget-busting" solutions to problems that can only be solved, so Romney and gang say, by the private sector.

But there is no evidence that entrepreneurial capitalism will set the economy on a dynamic, job-creating growth path. Facts on the ground tell us that while the engine of capitalism is not quite on life support today, it is experiencing, by nearly all measures, a crisis that is more deep-going and protracted than any crisis since the Great Depression.

To entertain the idea that the system will move onto a robust path of development on its own, as a result of a "burst" of entrepreneurial activity, is delusional, as is increasingly evident with each passing quarter of dismal economic reports.

In fact, long-term stagnation is more likely than robust recovery.

Thus waiting for the economy to first jump start itself and then throw itself onto a sustained high-employment growth trajectory is a fool's errand. It just won't happen. Capitalism is not a self-correcting system, especially in current conditions.

But I don't believe that the Republicans even care if the economy rebounds. A sluggish economy in their view is their only path to the White House in this election cycle. If confronted, they will deny it, but if you judge them by their actions in Congress, it seems apparent that sabotage of the president's economic plans is at the top of their agenda. It is the thin reed on which their return to power and domination rests.

To say that Romney and his fellow Republicans are consciously undermining the economy for the purpose of winning this election is probably hard for many Americans to swallow.

Even with their skepticism of politicians and the political process, many American people still believe that there are bounds beyond which neither party would go to accomplish its aims. That is not the case in this instance in my opinion. No matter what the cost and pain, Romney and the Republicans are hell bent on undermining any recovery of growth rates and jobs in order to emerge triumphant on Election Day.

Don't forget that today's Republican Party is of a different vintage than the Republicans of even a few decades ago. The extremists who used to be on the fringe are now at the center of the GOP. They formulate policy, they set the agenda, and they frame the message.

Moreover, they have an existential fear that demographic trends - the country is becoming majority minority while the Republican base among older white voters is literally dying out - are going to render them a historical anachronism. For them, that ratchets up the stakes of this election. It becomes their "last stand." It incites them to do whatever is necessary to win in November - lies, demagogy, racism, misogyny, immigrant bashing, homophobia, voter suppression and intimidation, and yes, economic sabotage.

Will they realize their objective? I don't think so, but the outcome of these elections isn't written in the stars by any means. No stone should be left unturned to ensure the decisive defeat of Romney, Republicans in Congress, and right-wing extremism.

THE WAY FORWARD Green New Deal: An Ecosocialist Perspective

Sun, 16 Sep 2012 16:50:00 +0000

Let me first provoke: the lack of strategic thinking is the great deficiency of much of what calls itself Left today. Saying or even demonstrating with great eloquence that capitalism must be replaced by socialism is the mere beginning for political intervention, not a strategy. I hope here to begin to confront this deficiency in order to reignite a discussion on socialist strategy in the 21st century. One present symptom of the lack of strategy is to summarily reject the possibility of a Green New Deal (GND) with a critique of so-called Green Capitalism (Smith, 2010). Here I will rather propose a consideration of the struggle for a GND as a nexus of class struggle with the potential of opening up a path to ecosocialist transition on a world scale.

Can we draw lessons from the experience of the success of the New Deal during the Great Depression of the 1930s as we consider ecosocialist strategy and a potential Green New Deal approach to dealing with the current economic crisis facing capitalism today?

Contrary to popular belief, FDR's New Deal was implemented to save capitalism, and its most progressive initiatives only came as a response to fierce class struggle, including the resurgence of the industrial worker movement, which resulted in the formation of the Congress of Industrial Unions in 1936. The Wikipedia page on the CIO describes it this way:

While the bureaucratic leadership of the AFL was unable to win strikes, three victorious strikes suddenly exploded onto the scene in 1934. These were the Minneapolis Teamsters Strike of 1934, the leadership of which included some members of the Trotskyist Communist League of America; the 1934 West Coast Longshore Strike, the leadership of which included some members of the Communist Party USA; and the 1934 Toledo Auto-Lite Strike led by the American Workers Party. Victorious industrial unions with militant leaderships were the catalyst that brought about the rise of the CIO. (Wikipedia n.d.)

While manufacturing employment increased by 3 million from 1933 to 1939, the unemployment rate did not significantly decline, hovering between 15 percent and 20 percent until military-related production started taking off by 1940 as a result of WWII (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Deal). The organized Left, socialist and communist, had grown into a powerful political force that was only smashed after a concerted anti-democratic campaign, which demonized those who challenged unfettered capitalism, by the defenders of capital during the Cold War. This effort eventually succeeded, culminating with the leadership of organized labor making its Faustian bargain with capital to purge the Left and collaborate with U.S. imperialism in exchange for promises that the real wages of workers would rise to unprecedented levels. This worked for a short time, until capital began to renege on the deal with the neoliberal restructuring of the economy that began in the 1970s. Since then, wages for the vast majority of people have stagnated.

Now, in the current profound crisis of capitalism driven by financialization, we are likely facing a prolonged period of high unemployment with significant sectors of the U.S. ''middle'' class approaching the insecurity of marginalized workers in the global South. And for the first time since the Great Depression, older workers are facing the prospect of permanent unemployment, while even educated youth now confront a bleak future of part-time work and ever-accumulating debt.

The Green New Deal has been championed as a solution to the current crisis; as a green Keynesian reprise of the New Deal, it has the potential of generating millions of new jobs both in the energy conservation/clean energy sector and for the repair of physical infrastructure. The BlueGreen Alliance in the U.S. (http://www.bluegreenalliance.org), One Million Climate Jobs (http://www.climate-changejobs. org) in the U.K., and the Global Green New Deal (GGND)¹ are examples of GND initiatives.

These developments are barely visible in the writings of Marxist critics of Green Capitalism such as Richard Smith. Smith's critique of market-driven Green Capitalism is timely, thorough, and to the point. He concludes that the only real solution is

. . .collective democratic control over the economy to prioritize the needs of society and the environment. And they require national and international economic planning to re-organize the economy and redeploy labor and resources to these ends. I conclude, therefore, that if humanity is to save itself, we have no choice but to overthrow capitalism and replace it with a democratically planned socialist economy. (Smith 2011, 112.)

While I share Smith's conclusion, he provides not a trace of a strategy to achieve this goal. Will workers have a role in overthrowing capitalism, other than perhaps by some miraculous undescribed process of conversion, I suppose, during this system's terminal illness? Apparently, workers simply are forced to share the same goals as the capitalists: ''So CEOs, workers, and governments find that they all ''need'' to maximize growth, overconsumption, even pollution, to destroy their children's tomorrows to hang onto their jobs today because, if they don't, the system falls into crisis, or worse.'' (Smith 2011, 112.) Other than those who become socialists by virtue of reading a convincing article, who will be the gravediggers of capitalism?

Smith hints at one narrow window of opportunity under real existing capitalism for socialist intervention: promoting non-market solutions:

. . . the only way to prevent overshoot and collapse is to enforce a massive economic contracttion in the industrialized economies, retrenching production across a broad range of unnecessary, resource-hogging, wasteful and polluting industries, even virtually shutting down the worst. Yet this option is foreclosed under capitalism because this is not socialism: no one is promising new jobs to unemployed coal miners, oil-drillers, automakers, airline pilots, chemists, plastic junk makers, and others whose jobs would be lost because their industries would have to be retrenched - and unemployed workers don't pay taxes. (Smith 2011, 112.)

But didn't massive job creation for the unemployed financed by government spending and not the market actually happen once before in the history of capitalism - i.e., in the New Deal, when organized workers, employed, and unemployed forced it to happen through class struggle? Alas, the possibility of class struggle within capitalist society seems to be left out in Smith's account. Didn't class struggle, in its broadest aspects, involving the environmental/occupational health movements, actually win non-market regulatory power in 20th century U.S. capitalism in the form of the Clean Air Act and the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency and Occupational Safety and Health Administration? To be sure, these agencies have been diluted and weakened with the neoliberal offensive of capital over the last 30 years. And indeed, barely constrained by a very weak regulatory regime, the global expansion of capital reproduction has brought us ever closer to irreversible tipping points to ecocatastrophe.

But is Smith's ''massive economic contraction in the industrialized economies'' really required to prevent such an outcome? The qualitative aspects of growth, and not simply the level of the GDP, need to be addressed. And yes, we absolutely need rapid economic contraction of themilitary/fossil fuel/nuclear-powered economy that produces the vast amounts of short-lived commodities that end up in ever-mounting junk piles or

are destroyed in resource wars. But what about economic expansion of the green economy*producing clean energy and repairing and restoring the physical infrastructure, including mass transit and green cities? This possibility is ruled out by Smith:

Renewable energy scientists argue that integrated comprehensive systems can solve the problem of base-load generation. The I.E.A. estimates that solar power alone could produce almost a quarter of the world's electricity needs by 2050. . . But as Ted Trainer points out, given the variable and intermittent output of renewables like solar and wind, even if sun and wind were to be large contributors to electricity supply, given the need for backup reserve capacity, little or no reduction in the amount of coal or nuclear capacity would be feasible. (2011, 133.)

I strongly disagree with this assessment appropriated from Trainer. (See Schwartzman and Schwartzman 2011).

Smith goes on:

Yet even if we could get a dramatic shift to solar and other renewables for energy generation, given the Jevons paradox . . . we cannot assume that this would necessarily lead to large permanent reductions in overall pollution. For if there are no non-market constraints on production, then the advent of cheap clean energy production could just as easily encourage the production of endless electric vehicles, appliances, lighting, laptops, phones, iPads and new toys we can't even imagine yet. . . The expanded production of all this stuff, on a global scale, would just consume ever more raw materials, more metals, plastics, rare earths, etc., produce more pollution, destroy more of the environment, and all end up in some landfill somewhere someday. In short, at the end of the day, the only way society can really put the brakes on overconsumption of electricity is to impose non-market limits on electricity production and consumption, enforce radical conservation, rationing, and stop making all the unnecessary gadgets that demand endless supplies of power. (2011, 134, emphasis in the original.)

Indeed, imposing such non-market limits is imperative, but the struggle to impose them must begin in capitalist societies now, and not be posed simply as the policies of future socialism. Yes, aggressive energy conservation is imperative, especially in the United States and other countries of the global North. We can all live better with a sharp reduction of wasteful consumption, breathe clean air, drink clean water, and eat organic food. Nevertheless, there needs to be a global increase in the power capacity, employing clean energy and not fossil fuels or nuclear power, to insure every child born on this planet has the material requirements for the highest quality of life (Schwartzman and Schwartzman 2011).

But should we anticipate that Green Capitalism, even pushed to its limits by class struggle, could indefinitely postpone the final demise of global capitalism and could actually replace the present unsustainable energy base with a renewable power infrastructure fast enough to avoid catastrophic climate change (C3)? I submit this prospect is highly unlikely. The legacy and political economy of real existing capitalism alone makes global solar capitalism a delusion (Schwartzman 2009).While the Pentagon pretends to go ''green,'' it remains the servant of the imperial systemprotecting fossil fuel and strategic metals flowing into the MIC, the Military Industrial (Fossil Fuel, Nuclear, State Terror) Complex. The immense power of the MIC is the biggest obstacle to implementing an effective prevention program that has a plausible chance of avoiding C3. The avoidance of C3 requires an end to coal and fossil fuel addiction, giving up the nuclear option, and a rapid conversion to a high-efficiency solar energy infrastructure.

To summarize, the MIC is at present the biggest single obstacle to preventing C3 because:

1. It is the present core of global capital reproduction with its colossal waste of energy and material resources.

2. The fossil fuel and nuclear industries are integrated within the MIC.

3. The MIC has a dominant role in setting the domestic and foreign policy agenda of the United States and other leading capitalist countries.

4. The Pentagon is the ''global oil-protection service'' for both the U.S. imperial agenda (Klare 2007) and the transnational capital class itself (e.g., Robinson 2004).

5. The MIC's Imperial Agenda blocks the global cooperation and equity required to prevent C3.

Nevertheless, what the struggle for a GND can accomplish is very significant, indeed critical to confronting the challenge of preventing C3. Humanity cannot afford to wait for socialism to replace capitalism to begin implementing this prevention program. And I have argued that starting this prevention program under existing capitalism can open up a path toward ecosocialist transition, indeed a 21st century Socialism worthy of its name.

Climate science tells us we must proceed now for any plausible chance of avoiding tipping points plunging us into C3. Green job creation is likewise the creation of a new working-class sector committed to ending the fossil fuel addiction. Such an historic shift to renewable energy supplies would be comparable to the industrial revolution that replaced plant power in the form of wood and agricultural products with coal. Though this is necessary, it alone won't be sufficient for preventing C3. Given the Jevons paradox, as Smith noted, we will also need to implement a strong regulatory regime for curbing carbon emissions in order to avoid just expanding renewables as a supplement to the continued reliance on fossil fuels. At the same time, a broad global alliance of the working class and oppressed people including blue green labor, women's movements, marginalized workers, indigenous people, and yes, even factions of capital investing in solar, can potentially create the power to challenge the privileged position of MIC capital and begin the process of global demilitarization, putting the MIC dinosaur in the Museum of Prehistory where he belongs, to be followed soon by his parent, Global Capitalism.

Chris Williams advocates a similar approach when he observes:

Some of the more far-sighted corporations without significant investments in fossil fuels will see the way the wind is blowing and that money can be made from investing in alternative energies, as is already the case. This will create tension and splits among ruling elites and between conflicting corporate interests, which will open up space for social and labor movements to demand swifter and more coordinated action. (2010, 166).

I have observed before that we need to reload the political genius of Lenin by fully utilizing every division among the factions of capital (Schwartzman, 2009). Further, it should be stressed that the struggle to achieve this broad alliance must overcome the divisions in the working class and its potential allies, which the ruling classes and elites encourage to their advantage. The class struggles in the New Deal era made significant gains in the U.S. in fighting racism, and of course the civil rights movement of the 1940s through the 1960s achieved many victories codified into law. However, we are now faced with the continuing legacy of mass incarceration of mainly minorities, the ''New Jim Crow'' (Alexander, 2010), as well as the demonization of immigrant communities, especially those from the global South. These new challenges must be confronted by the organizers for a GND, since unity, rather than division among oppressed peoples, will take away a powerful tool that ruling elites use to distract the masses from the abuses they themselves inflict on the majority.

And unlike the New Deal, achieving the GND on a global scale in the context of a robust solar transition, by necessity accompanied by demilitarization, will not end with a reinforcement of militarized capital, as was the case in WWII and the Cold War aftermath. Rather, the GND has real potential for opening up a path out of capitalism into ecosocialism. WWII and the emergence of the MIC postponed the terminal crisis of capitalism to this century. Now we face the welcome project of taking that terminal crisis on and finishing the job.

We need a strategy of transition. This should be a priority in theory and practice for ecosocialists. Any Left worth its label and demonization by Glenn Beck and company must not only confront the immediate needs of the great majority of those exploited and oppressed by big capital, but also be a leader in organizing to fight back. So jobs, affordable housing, health and child care, environmental quality, and environmental justice must be on the left agenda. But what kind of jobs? For unsustainable or sustainable green production? And what about the conditions for the reproduction of labor power, itself a site of multi-dimensional class struggle, as Michael Lebowitz has argued (2003). Thus, the fightback program must confront the ecological crisis and demand solutions that address climate change by embracing clean energy.

We should never advocate or even think that the ''worse the better'' will deliver socialism by the collapse of capitalism, anticipating its terminal illness as hope. For capitalism's dead weight will kill us all. No slogan or propaganda alone can achieve success, as important as this ideological struggle is. Rather, only multidimensional and local-to-transnational class struggle within capitalism (see Abramsky's illuminating volume 2010) can terminate this system, which unfortunately will not die a natural death on its own accord. It will have to be put to sleep forever. A critical role of the ecosocialist Left is to identify the strategic class sectors - those existing and those in formation - that will be the gravediggers of capitalism. Additionally, the ecosocialist Left must also, of course, participate in the creation of a collective vision and its realization as embryos within capitalism of the new global civilization ending the rule of capital.

We now witness or can soon anticipate ongoing struggles for social governance of production and consumption on all scales from neighborhood to global. Areas of struggle in this fight should include nationalization of the energy, rail, and telecommunications industries; municipalization of electric and water supplies; the creation and maintenance of decentralized solar power, food, energy and farming cooperatives; the encouragement of worker-owned factories (solidarity economy), the replacement of industrial and GMO agriculture with agroecologies; the creation of green cities; and of course organizing the unorganized in all sectors, especially GND workers. All of these objectives should be part of the ecosocialist agenda for struggles around a GND, which of course, must include the termination of the MIC. One outstanding example of how to begin is found in Mike Davis (2010), who argues for the potential of a radical movement for green urbanism (see my commentary, Schwartzman, 2008).

The history of capitalism is the history of class struggle, its ebbs and flows. It is certainly not a history of the working class as a passive instrument in the machine of capital reproduction. To write off class struggle is to revert to the empty idealist prescriptions of what ought to be rather than focusing on materialist theory and practice to make it happen. The prospect of a Green New Deal gives us a powerful wedge if we choose to use it.

Footnotes

1 See, for example, the article from the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC 2011) posted on the

Ecosocialism Canada blog. Here is the post in its entirety: ''Unions Welcome Pathway to Green Economy in

UN Environment Report.'' 21 February 2011: A green economy can mean higher overall employment and

better jobs, and is not just a luxury for wealthy countries, reveals the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) in

its Green Economy report released today. Supported by concrete examples from around the world, and a

thorough macroeconomic analysis, the report underlines what the labour movement has maintained for several

years: that a Green Economy, based on the right principles and properly planned, can deliver for workers and

the poor.

''I am pleased to read that UNEP shares with workers around the world the deep belief that a green

economy should work for the people and the planet, and not just for GDP growth and a few wealthy

companies,'' said ITUC General Secretary Sharan Burrow. ''As the report signals, one of the challenges is to

ensure a just transition that will steer transformation across all sectors of the economy and lead us towards the

decent and sustainable jobs of tomorrow.''

The report indicates that the allocation of 2 percent of global GDP towards the green economy could lead

to immense benefits for workers and communities around the world and help overcome the diverse challenges

countries are facing. It finds that a green economy can generate at least as much employment as the traditional

economy, and outperforms the latter in the medium and long run, while yielding significantly more

environmental and social benefits. The report stresses the importance of ensuring trade union rights, including

freedom of association, and occupational health and safety in traditional and emerging sectors.

To those who consider that there is a high risk of ''green and social-washing,'' Burrow reacted, ''the risk is

the status quo. The green economy presents an opportunity to engage in a transformational path towards sustainable development. We must ensure this is not misused, we must ensure that [the] green economy works

for working people.

''The UNEP report sets out a clear pathway towards a green economy, but policies being pursued by

governments at the moment risk taking us backwards. Neoliberal recipes, based on the dictates of the financial

markets, have to be jettisoned in favour of a progressive approach in which governments fulfill their

responsibility to regulate banking and finance, promote policies which stimulate greening of workplaces and

creation of new green jobs, and ensure that this is based on social dialogue and social inclusion,'' explained

Burrow.

Along with specific education and training policies to ensure the skill needs for a green economy are met,

economic safety nets and social protection are crucial to achieving the necessary transformation in a way which

maximises the economic and social benefits.

''A green economy which works for social justice can only be a collective endeavour; it should therefore be

equitable, inclusive, democratic and people-centered. We will continue to push the case, in the coming days at

the UNEP Governing Council meeting in Nairobi, and also during the next 16 months in the run up to

RIO_20, to make the green economy a driver for prosperity and decent work,'' concluded Burrow. Source:

http://www.unep.org/.

References

Abramsky, K., ed. 2010 Sparking a worldwide energy revolution. Oakland: AK Press.

Alexander, M. 2010. The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. New York:

New Press.

Davis, M. 2010. Who will build the Ark? New Left Review 61: 29_46.

International Trade Union Confederation. 2011. Unions welcome pathway to green economy in

UN environment report. March 18, Ecosocialism Canada blog. http://ecosocialismcanada.

blogspot.com/2011/03/unions-welcome-pathway-to-green-economy.html.

Klare, M.T. 2007. The Pentagon vs. peak oil. June 15. http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/

20070615_the_pentagon_v_peak_oil/

Lebowitz, Michael A., 2003, Beyond Capital. 2nd edition. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.

Robinson, W.I. 2004. A theory of global capitalism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press.

Schwartzman, D. 2009. Ecosocialism or ecocatastrophe? Capitalism Nature Socialism 20 (1): 6_33.

___. D. 2010. Review of ''Who Will Build the Ark'' by Mike Davis, published online at:

http://www.dcmetrosftp.org/newsletters/NL20100316.html#Ark.

Schwartzman, P. and D. Schwartzman. 2011. A solar transition is possible. Published online at:

http://iprd.org.uk and http://www.solarutopia.org.

Smith, R. 2011. Green capitalism: the god that failed. Real-World Economics Review 56: 112_144.

Wikipedia. n.d. Congress of Industrial Organizations, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congress_of_

Industrial_Organizations.

Williams, C. 2010. Ecology and socialism. Chicago: Haymarket Books.

To cite this article: David Schwartzman (2011): Green New Deal: An Ecosocialist Perspective, Capitalism Nature Socialism, 22:3, 49-56

Obama & the Democrats Sending Mixed Messages about the Catfood Commission

Sun, 16 Sep 2012 07:52:00 +0000

Editor: This article was originally published in Black Commentator

Like a lot of people, I often wonder: Do these people meet?

The words of a party's platform and the declarations of its candidate don't mean much in the real world of political wheeling and dealing.

Serendipity does not quite describe what happened the day the Democratic Party convention opened. It looked more like collusion or perhaps just a well-executed campaign maneuver. There was the ubiquitous David Brooks in the New York Times openly challenging President Obama to come out forthrightly for "Simpson-Bowles" in his acceptance speech. He was referring to a set of proposals made by the co-chairs of a deficit reduction panel appointed by the President two years ago that called
for cuts in Social Security, Medicare, and other safety-net programs and for tax "reforms" that would actually reduce tax rates for the well-to-do and large corporations. That same morning editors of the London-based Financial Times called for more "middle-class sacrifice," asserting that "Only by demonstrating his backing for long-term reform can Mr. Obama make the case for fresh steps to help revive the US economy. It is good politics and good economics. Endorsing the Bowles-Simpson
recommendations would place Mr. Obama on the high ground for this election - and afterwards."

Meanwhile the ultimate in "Simpson-Bowles" chutzpah appeared on the opinion page of the Wall Street Journal, wherein so-called centrist Democrats Patrick Caddell and Douglas Schoen, operatives in the Carter and Clinton Administrations, respectively, called up the President to "change direction - immediately and decisively," and "embrace the findings of the 2010 Simpson-Bowles deficit-reduction commission and make it clear that he too has a plan to revitalize the U.S. economy, reduce the deficit, reform entitlements and spur economic growth through a fairer and leaner tax system." (The commission itself made no "findings," never came to agreement and adjourned without ever voting on anything.)

Why this coordinated waving of the "Simpson-Bowles" banner on the eve of Obama's acceptance speech?

My hunch is that some people have decided that there is a good chance the President will win reelection and their aim is be able to claim the election, in part, as a mandate for going after Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, "afterwards" under the cover of "compromise." Brooks would seem to be supporting this conjecture when he writes, "A landslide or 'mandate election' in November is unlikely because neither party enjoys a clear advantage. Most fundamentally, any solution to the nation's fiscal crisis is going to require compromise. No matter who is in charge, taxes will have to go up and entitlements will have to be scaled back. The math doesn't work any other way."

I guess it was inevitable that "Simpson-Bowles" would find its way into former President Bill Clinton's nominating speech but it only rated a mention. He praised Obama for offering what he called a "reasonable' and "balanced" plan" for deficit
reduction as "the kind" contained in the "approach" of the "bipartisan commission" that he said was "better" than the Republican's plan. That is an understatement. What Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan propose to do to seniors, patients and poor kids is truly horrendous.

The President said, "No American should ever have to spend their golden years at the mercy of insurance companies.

Clinton, to his credit, also used the occasion to do something practically nobody in his party's leadership has had the sense - or courage - to do. He laid out what the threat to alter Medicaid actually entails. "They also want to block grant Medicaid and cut it by a third over the coming decade," he said. "Of course, that will hurt poor kids, but that's not all. Almost two-thirds of Medicaid is spent on nursing home care for seniors and on people with disabilities, including kids from middle class families, with special needs like Down syndrome or autism. I don't know how those families are going to deal with it. We can't let it happen."

The Financial Times editorial didn't sit too well with some of the paper's U.S. readers. A Colorado doctor, Ron Forthofer, responded that Obama's endorsement of "Simpson-Bowles" "would be using a bipartisan commission as cover to satisfy the demands of the financial sector and so-called fiscal hawks for deficit reduction without inflicting much pain on the US oligarchy." And Reba Shimansky of New York wrote, "Bowles-Simpson is the document of two very wealthy right-wingers, Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, and it expresses their point of view. Bowles-Simpson is a prescription for downsizing government while lowering the marginal tax rate, cutting corporation taxes, Medicare, Medicaid and cost of living adjustments for social security" adding, "It is a not a bipartisan approach to reducing the deficit. Liberals refer to it as the catfood commission because if its proposals were implemented that is all most Americans could afford to purchase."

Brooks is simply wrong. The Ryan plan is not to "cut spending and restructure entitlements," it's to restructure spending and cut entitlements. The restructuring involves more money for the military and lower allocations for education and nutrition aid for those with low incomes; the cuts called for involve Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Repeating what has become their mantra over the past couple of years, the editors of the Washington Post said September 5 that taxes must rise and"entitlements will have to be scaled back."

He specifically promised not to slash those programs in exchange for tax cuts.

"We're saddled with monster deficits, and the Republicans refuse to let this president do the brave thing Bill Clinton did, and get us more revenue," New York Times columnist Gail Collins wrote last week. True. And that's where "Simpson-Bowles" comes in. The money has to come from somewhere but rather than raise taxes on those who have been making out like bandits the past couple of decades the aim is to take it from sick people, seniors and poor kids and make life even more precarious for
the million of working people who have lost so much and are still losing out amid the ongoing economic crisis.

The final moments of the convention revealed to what extent the full court press to make endorsement of "Simpson-Bowles" an objective of the Obama-Biden campaign succeeded. In his acceptance speech the Vice-President mentioned it in passing. In his address Obama avoided the term but said, "Now, I'm still eager to reach an agreement based on the principles of my bipartisan debt commission. No party has a monopoly on wisdom.

No democracy works without compromise. I want to get this done, and we can get it done."

That's mealy-mouthed. If he means the principle that revenue increases should be accompanied by spending cuts that's one thing. If he means he is open to taking a meat axe to Medicare, Social Security in return for making the very rich pay taxes at rates they once did, that's another ball of wax. In his speech he pledged not to do the latter but his bow to "Simpson-Bowles" is not at all reassuring.

Digby at the Campaign for America's Future wrote after the President's speech, "There's a lot of wriggle room in there, and quite a few straw men, but if you read it literally, he specifically promised not to slash those programs in exchange for tax cuts. What he didn't do was promise not to cut those programs in exchange for tax hikes --- which is what the Democrats are seeking. He won't agree to tax cuts for millionaires. That's a good thing. But will he agree to cuts if the Republicans agree to raise some
taxes? We don't know."

"Mitt Romney must not become president," Adam Green, head of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, tweeted right after Obama concluded his speech. "But it's unacceptable for a Democratic president to pull the wool over supporters' eyes by talking blandly about a 'bipartisan commission' that actually proposed extreme cuts to Social Security and Medicare benefits -- and lowering corporate tax rates."

Simpson-Bowles "offers draconian austerity for the many and even more tax breaks for the wealthy few," says Richard (RJ) Eskow of the Campaign for America's Future. "No wonder Simpson and Bowles keep praising Paul Ryan to the skies: Simpson/Bowles and Romney/Ryan differ only in emphasis."

The Ryan plan is not to "cut spending and restructure entitlements," it's to restructure spending and cut entitlements.

"While voucherizing Medicare will presumably save the government money (at least up front) and balance its books, it'll do so on the backs of most American seniors," writes American Prospect co-editor Harold Meyerson. "Obama's value of citizenship won't permit that, and it's on this battlefield that the Democrats will fight this fall."

One hopes. But a lot of us would feel a lot better if the Administration stopped sending out mixed messages.

David Brooks didn't like Obama's speech at all and that's good news. "The Obama speech offered some important if familiar hints of big policy ideas," he wrote. "There was a vague hint of a major tax reform. There was a vague promise to accept an agreement based on the principle of the Simpson-Bowles committee on deficit reduction. But it's hard to be enthusiastic about President Obama truly championing initiatives that get no more than a sentence or a clause."

Likewise, the editors at Washington Post - prone as they are to counsel austerity for working people-were disappointed as well. "He vowed, 'I will never turn Medicare into a voucher,' but he gave his audience no indication that his solution - controlling health care costs - might involve sacrifice on the part of seniors, they wrote the morning after the President's speech. "He promised 'responsible steps to strengthen' Social Security, which he has neglected throughout his first term. As to which steps those might be, not a word."

Hardly a speaker at either the Republican or Democratic conventions could step away from the microphone without referring at least once to the "American dream" (which used to mean owning your own single family house) and ascribing so many different and conflicting attributes to it as to render the term meaningless. On the eve of the confab in Charlotte, the Financial Times'chief foreign affairs commentator, Gideon Rachman, warned Obama to "be careful not to tread on the American dream," and went on to inform us that "The idea of the 'land of opportunity', where an individual is free to make his own way, remains inspiring - far more inspiring to most Americans than the notion of a social safety net." He could be right but I'm certain he didn't poll people in my neighborhood.

The Democratic Party platform says the Romney-Paul Republican budget plan to give seniors coupons for health care "would end Medicare as we know it." And, it pledges a new Obama Administration "will not ask seniors to pay thousands of dollars more every year while they watch the value of their Medicare benefits evaporate. "It further pledges to "find a solution to protect Social Security for future generations" and to block Republican efforts to subject Americans' guaranteed retirement income to the whims of the stock market through privatization." The President said, "No American should ever have to spend their golden years at the mercy of insurance companies. They should retire with the care and the dignity they have earned. Yes, we will reform and strengthen Medicare for the long haul, but we'll do it by reducing the cost of health care, not by asking seniors to pay thousands of dollars more. And we will keep the promise of Social Security by taking the responsible steps to strengthen it, not by turning it over to Wall Street."

The argument will be made that the words of a party's platform and the declarations of its candidate don't mean much in the real world of political wheeling and dealing. Often that's true and it's why one of the most important challenges facing progressives, seniors and labor in this election period is acting to secure a guarantee that such promises are kept, that digging our way out of capitalism's latest crisis (far from over) is not premised on preserving present class inequities while undermining the security and economic well-being of working people on the job or in retirement.
____________

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member and Columnist, Carl Bloice, is a writer in San Francisco, a member of the National Coordinating Committee of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism and formerly worked for a healthcare union

Sustainable Economic Development: Central To The Durability Of Political Reforms In Arab States

Sat, 15 Sep 2012 14:18:00 +0000

There is a pressing need in the Arab states, especially the countries with nascent democratic restructuring such as Egypt, Tunisia and Libya, to adopt sustainable development projects in parallel to, and concurrent with, political reforms in order for the latter to endure and develop further. Indeed, the rush to hold elections in these countries that faced popular uprisings will continue to experience political instability not only because they have never developed a culture of democracy but also because the public wants more than the right to vote. These newly formed governments must find the means, especially through sustainable development projects, to provide the public with their basic needs or they will soon face another upheaval, no matter how committed these governments remain to political reforms.

The root causes of the many regional uprisings stem primarily from the deprivation and economic inequalities suffered by the majority of Middle East populations. Historically, Arab governments tended to favor state-run development projects and exercise near-to-complete control of their economies which exacerbated socioeconomic inequalities and created a new class of enriched elites, many of whom benefitted from the largesse of autocratic regimes (Syria and Libya being good examples of this). When these countries moved from the socialist economic model to engagement in the liberalization and privatization of their economies, the neoliberal processes did not lead to sustainable and egalitarian development that could serve as a new source of legitimacy for the regime or enhance its stability.

Though the overturning of despotic regimes in Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt can be counted as tangible successes, the reality is that vast numbers of youth in these countries (and throughout the Middle East) remain despondent. They want food, health care, education, and the opportunity to grow and prosper with dignity. If peaceful and orderly transitions are to be the reality, there must be an immediate concurrent undertaking of sustainable economic development projects. Such projects may include the farming of produce and animals including poultry, the planting of fruit trees, building irrigation systems, the reclamation of wasteland and scores of other projects. The great benefit in engaging in sustainable development is that small communities are empowered to collectively decide on projects of their choice from which they can benefit, while the principles of democratic culture are simultaneously fostered through the need for majority consensus about any project that the community decides to adopt. Moreover, such projects require limited capital and employ less-sophisticated technologies without the need for a continuous infusion of money or new technologies before these projects develop a strong financial base.

Sustainable economic development invariably creates wealth both for the communities, which adopt such projects, and for the state treasury, which can generate more income through increased tax revenues, which in turn can be used toward improving the social safety net and the overall health of the economy. Moreover, given that these projects are community-orientated and designed to create local wealth, providing block loans or financial assistance directly to the state, however large, will not serve a broader (or moral) societal purpose. In giving money directly to communities, however, governmental agencies such as the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) could go a long way in financing thousands of community projects from the bottom-up. Such an approach makes it possible to locally enhance education, achieve better health care and develop the necessary infrastructure that allows for the expansion and sale of the product or produce that the community has created.

In addition to international organizations, domestic non-governmental organizations (NGOs) can play an integral part in ensuring the success of the sustainable development model. Due to the participatory principles that formed them, NGOs have a greater commitment toward democratic processes while enlisting people’s ideas and material contributions for developmental interventions without threatening the government. The goals of local communities organized by NGOs reflect local interests more than government-driven initiatives. The resources NGOs procure locally or through international donors to help marshal development include a mix of educational, technical, and material support. The United States, for instance, could dramatically expand the Peace Corps from its current total of around 10,000 to well over 100,000 and increase its financial aid, which proportionately pales in comparison to France or the United Kingdom.When communities choose their own projects based on their immediate needs through collective decision-making (based on advice and consent), the basis of democracy is developed. Morocco’s post-protest approach, for example, to, “wed [democracy and development] together so that each is advanced by way of the other,” can serve a good model for reform (albeit still on a small scale). Morocco’s stated goal of decentralization emphasizes the “participatory method,” a democratic approach applied by local communities to assess their development challenges and opportunities, and create and implement action plans that reflect their shared priorities. Apart from Morocco, Israel has had notable success in the area of sustainable development.

The Kibbutz and Moshav movements, for instance, sought to base their development on collectivity and self-reliance. Before the formation of the State of Israel, the early Jewish settlers overcame poverty through community development and methods of settlement. Notwithstanding the hostilities between Israel and many of the Arab states, Israel’s eminent success in sustainable development offers a model that can be emulated by most underdeveloped and developing Arab states. In contrast to states that have experimented with sustainable development, others in the Middle East region, notably the Gulf States such as Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, had to “buy” their populations off with generous handouts in order to pacify them in an effort to quell the region’s revolutionary trend from knocking down their doors. By doing so, the concentration of power is left in the hands of the government and the political status and financial dependence remains unaffected. Indeed, sustainable development could theoretically pose a threat to the existing governance, as it directly empowers people to work within their own communities and take control over issues that affect their daily lives. That said, those Arab countries that have not experienced a social uprising (the Arab Spring) as of yet can avoid being swept up by the revolutionary fervor if preference is given to sustainable development rather than resorting to “handouts” to stultify their populations which offer only a transient respite.

The uprising in Egypt, following Libya’s revolution and Tunisia’s “Jasmine Revolution”, opened a new chapter of change in the Arab world. For the long-entrenched Arab regimes to avoid the same fate as the regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Syria, they must heed the powerful message being expressed on the streets throughout the region. Some Arab tyrants, such as Assad of Syria, may temporarily succeed in subduing popular resistance but it will take tremendous violence to achieve that. Realizing the inevitability of change, however, Arab governments should now rethink their approach by adopting gradual and political reforms that must be accompanied with sustainable participatory development projects including, if not especially, the countries that have already gone through the revolutionary process. In doing so, and as long as the public is clear and trusts their governments’ commitment in this regard, these governments can avoid potential new upheaval, as the Arab Spring is not a passing phenomenon. Indeed, no Arab government should engage in wishful thinking as the Arab youth have finally been awakened to a reality that they are no longer willing to accept, however long the struggle may take. In the final analysis, the democratic dividends that can be reaped from the Arab Spring will be squandered unless accompanied by sustainable development projects. By following this path, local communities will be empowered through decentralization and consensus-building while fostering durable democratic principles with sustainable economic growth.

Alon Ben-Meir is a professor of international relations at the Center for
Global Affairs at NYU. He teaches courses on international negotiation and
Middle Eastern studies. alon@alonben-meir.com. Web: www.alonben-meir.com