Twenty years of grassroots organizing by Black and Latinx community organizations, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), and the broad Left propelled CTU organizer Brandon Johnson to victory in the April 2023 Chicago mayoral race. Similarly, across the country, progressive and left organizations are focusing on electoral politics as a central arena of struggle. These campaigns are part of a larger…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
This post was originally published on Real Progressives.
The past never truly stays where it belongs. Even when the truth is carefully scrubbed from our understanding of history, its spores disperse through time to seep into the firmament like a persistent black mold poisoning the air we breathe. We are familiar with its effects, but none the wiser as to its causes. It is in the assumptions of media figures and pundits as to which policies are “practical” and which candidates are “electable.” It is in all of the trite and shallow excuse-making by the powerful as to why better things aren’t possible, and why straightforward solutions to basic problems of governance are out of the question. It is in the refusal of elected progressives to use the very tools of power and leverage that their corporatist and right-wing rivals wield with impunity. It is in the insistence that making demands is impertinent, and that the solution is to continue doing the things that didn’t work before, but with more feeling. Be civil, be congenial, play by the rules, vote harder. These patterns are not new; they were old when Ralph Nader complained of them in the 1960s. They are not mere accidents of fate, nor are they some natural evolutionary outcome of rigorous public debate and discourse. As with all social constructs, the heavy hand of intention is evident for those who know where to look for it. There is a story of how it got there, and that story’s erasure from the public discourse is a critical part of it. The true details were omitted from accounts of our history to promote a false consciousness among the public as to what this country is and how it got to be this way.
While the full story may never be entirely uncovered, we now have access to enough of it to establish the pattern thanks to the resourceful original research conducted by University of Iowa history professor Landon Storrs in her book The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left. Storrs profiles dozens of cases of the best and the brightest young professionals who responded to the call to public service in the darkest hours of the Great Depression. These people were non-communist leftists who reflected the popular consensus of the time that unfettered capitalism and “free enterprise” had led the world to the brink of ruination, and that the future would necessarily include some form of democratic socialism. They understood that, as FDR framed it in his 1944 State of the Union address, “necessitous men are not free men,” and that true democracy required economic security for all. These were the architects of the greatest of the New Deal programs that saved the country from economic collapse in the 30s, achieved unthinkable levels of productivity during World War II, instituted modern labor laws, and brought underdeveloped portions of the country into the modern world. These heroes and heroines were rewarded for their service with a 20th century version of the Spanish Inquisition, a cynically manufactured pretext weaponized by the right-wing forces of the existing capital order to thwart economic democracy and purge the very idea from the public consciousness. Many were hounded out of government and pursued in private life by federal agents who sabotaged their employment prospects using the stigma of the allegations. Still others survived the purges by abandoning their visionary policy agendas and social priorities, forced instead to live a lie. The work of people like Isidore Falk on national single payer healthcare, Arthur “Tex” Goldschmidt on public power utilities, and Catherine Bauer Wurster on Austrian style public housing was derailed and purged from the discourse by toxic associations with “subversive” tendencies. Many others were persecuted for their work on the right’s most hated policies including Social Security, consumer rights, labor rights, minimum wage, and the Marshall Plan in post-war Europe. Their legacy, and that of their oppressors, echoes through time to the present day like an invisible assassin of hope and possibility.
In a period dominated by the circus-like antics of Martin Dies’s House Un-American Activities Committee, which had a travelling roadshow and numerous state-level spinoffs, it is easy for the far less public Federal Employee Loyalty Boards to slip under the narrative radar. These secretive closed-door proceedings were more action-oriented and less performative than the better-known red scare institutions of the period. Storrs describes a heavy-handed process that, once begun, never truly ended. There were no due process rights or protections against double jeopardy; a closed case could be reopened at any time and for any reason. Rumor and innuendo were sufficient; there were neither rules of evidence nor a right to face one’s accuser. As a condition of employment, subjects were required to submit to exhaustive investigations of their personal lives by investigators who had little training and an excess of zeal in the hunt for subversive tendencies and “thought crimes.” Short of the dreaded “full field investigation” by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, they could be forced to submit extensive written answers to “interrogatories” at any time and for any reason. They could expect to be interrogated as to friendships, affiliations, and social interactions going back decades, as well as those of their spouses and other relatives. Even the defense attorneys retained by these civil servants faced ostracism and intimidation. These incredibly invasive procedures were weaponized by the right-wing coalition behind the established order to de-rail the New Deal agenda and to punish its champions.
The stakes were high, and the consequences of failing a Federal Employee Loyalty Board investigation were dire. A federal employee did not merely face dismissal from their job and a ban on government employment. They also faced a broader unofficial employment blacklist, a social and economic ostracism that would follow them wherever they went. With that in mind, the attorneys for these civil servants advised them to burnish and exaggerate their anti-communist bona fides. They urged them to denounce and distance themselves from friends and family members who were seen as liabilities, whether they had affiliations with the Communist Party or merely causes that could be labeled as “subversive” or “communistic.” Their legal counsel advised them to construct a false identity and repudiate many of their core beliefs. Because of the never-ending nature of these loyalty proceedings, any perceived inconsistency could trigger a renewed cycle of career jeopardy and harassment. These defendants thus were forced to live the lie of those false identities, and to abandon their ambitious and visionary agendas. They were forced to either reinvent themselves as fiercely anti-communist cold war liberals, or to leave the government and policy arena entirely.
In an era when the mere accusation of disloyalty could ruin lives, those who survived this inquisitorial gauntlet took great pains to hide their trauma and keep their past a secret. They acquired reputations as forceful reactionaries who repudiated those of younger generations who strayed too far to the left in their politics. In many of the cases examined by Storrs, the defendants’ own children were unaware of what happened to them until after their deaths. Between the trauma-conditioned desperation of loyalty defendants to keep their secrets, and the destruction of many of the records on the government end, Storrs was forced to engage in an odyssey of creative detective work to uncover the details of the cases discussed in the book. As a credentialed academic historian, Storrs acknowledges that she cannot prove the Loyalty Board persecutions were the reason for these drastic political transformations, but readers are free to use their intuition and draw the obvious conclusion. The real problem, as Storrs points out, is that neither their contemporaries nor the historians who chronicled the life and times of these people are aware that this happened at all. The terror of these survivors became quietly institutionalized. It became part of the political culture of the Beltway, instilled in subsequent generations of civil servants and elected officials with no explanations as to why. Soon enough, people stopped asking and started assuming. Thus, this new consensus became “just the way it is,” with no acknowledgement of the way it was before these dystopian inquisitorial purges took place.
Antonio Gramsci, in the notebooks he penned from a prison cell in Mussolini’s fascist Italy, refers to this consensus as the “common sense.” He describes it as working in service of “cultural hegemony,” the process by which the consensus view of the powerful becomes accepted as the inevitable status quo, or “just the way it is.” With the use of this draconian process, in tandem with many other persecutorial institutions of the period, the power elite in the US reasserted their hegemony by purging the old common sense and replacing it with a new one. They secured its acceptance as cultural norm by suppressing knowledge of how it got there, and by silencing discussion of what came before until it was largely forgotten.
Modern progressives periodically rediscover the old writings of these legends of the New Deal era, with no knowledge of what happened to them. They engage in a naïve kind of solutionism, believing that if they just adopt this forgotten bit of wisdom from the past, the current system will work the way it was always meant to. They fail to realize that the system is working the way it was meant to; that the fate of those Institutionalists like Leon and Mary Keyserling, Katherine Bauer Wurster, Tex Goldschmidt, Elizabeth Wickenden and many others who espoused those views was persecution and repudiation. Missing from their understanding is the knowledge of the kind of brutal countermeasures that the powerful can mobilize should advocates of such policies get too close to success.
Generations of politicians, pundits, and regular people raised in the milieu of this new cultural hegemony regurgitate the inane assumptions of this ossified “common sense” from every major media platform like a catechism or statement of religious faith. In a recent interview, former MSNBC host Chris Matthews recited the pedestrian understandings of his time, things “everyone knows” that just aren’t so. Particularly illustrative is his discussion of the 1972 candidacy of George McGovern as proof that the Democratic Party will suffer ignominious defeat if they go “too far left.” This conventional wisdom, so ubiquitous amongst Matthews’s generation, is ridiculous on its face. McGovern was a milquetoast moderate with a pragmatic stance against the war in Vietnam. His crime was to win the nomination with grassroots support against DNC favorites like Edmund Muskie. Deriving Matthews’s conclusion requires ignoring the degree of treachery from within the establishment of the DNC leadership, many of whom openly campaigned for Republican Richard Nixon. The terror of “drifting too far to the left,” a product of this cultural hegemony, is conditioned into his generational cohort to the degree that he readily accepts this flimsy narrative without evidence and without question. In doing so he misses the real lesson of the 1972 campaign: the savagery with which the forces of the power elite will respond to perceived threats to their cultural hegemony.
In his ignorance, Matthews became an agent of that agenda. Like many others in the so-called “liberal” media space, he was determined to police the left boundaries of acceptable discourse with no insight into why. In his career ending move, his comically exaggerated alarm at seeing those boundaries breached led him to compare the Sanders primary win in Nevada to Germany’s invasion of France in 1940, on the heels of his ludicrous speculation that a Sanders victory would lead to guillotine executions in Central Park. In that irrational panic we see echoes of Leon Keyserling and thousands of other victims of the Federal Employee Loyalty Boards, whose learned phobia associated with that perceived red line was institutionalized while its origins were hushed up. That fear and the new common sense built around it are the legacy of the second red scare.
The lessons of this history and its ripple effects through time reveal broader truths. The boundaries of establishment consensus discourse and what Gramsci calls the “common sense” were not handed down from the heavens etched on stone tablets. They were put there by people, usually in service of an elite agenda to defend and maintain the arrangements that suit them. The things we assume without question can obscure important truths with the potential to alter everything we think we know. They can also be used to manipulate people who perceive some benefit from the status quo arrangement into acting as agents of its perpetuation. Awareness of what they are doing is not necessary or even particularly common. The distinction makes little difference in practice. Lawmakers are responding to institutional imperatives that have far more power over their policy decisions than majority opinion or democracy. This is maintained by the soft power of elite cultural hegemony, which is reinforced every time a pundit or politician gaslights the public about what’s practical, possible, or realistic. Less often explicitly articulated is a conditioned existential dread of the ill-defined consequences of challenging these norms from the left, and only from the left. Whether it is cynical dissembling or is legitimately believed, this primal fear is the justification for progressive lawmakers’ refusal to wield the same tools of power their right-wing counterparts exercise so freely. By failing to interrogate the legitimacy of those boundaries and how they got there in the first place, they help to perpetuate the scam of “pragmatism” and the demoralization of their base. As psychologist Stephanie Preston pointed out in a recent Macro N Cheese episode, those who seek to manipulate public opinion understand one thing very well: without access to contravening facts, people can be induced to accept all manner of transparently false assumptions that benefit the existing order.
History teaches us that there is nothing inevitable about “the way it is,” and there is nothing “pragmatic” about accepting the inevitability of the status quo. Like any social construct, it was put there by interested parties and could be taken down. Questioning the legitimacy of such assumptions and how they got there is a fine place to start. But the more important inquiry is cui bono – who benefits from this arrangement. When the façade finally falls, we can expect those beneficiaries to be waiting on the other side with knives out. Like those who came before them, the heirs of the legacy of the red scare are not known for accepting defeat with equanimity. Breaking free of false consciousness is the beginning of the fight for a better future, not the end.
This post was originally published on Real Progressives.
On 3 October, the homes and offices of over one hundred journalists and researchers across India were raided by the Delhi Police, which is under the jurisdiction of the country’s Ministry of Home Affairs. During this ‘act of sheer harassment and intimidation’, as the Committee to Protect Journalists called it, the Delhi Police raided and interrogated the Tricontinental Research Services (TRS) team. Based in Delhi, TRS is contracted by Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research to produce materials on the great processes of our time as they play out in the world’s most populous country, including the struggles of workers and farmers, the women’s movement, and the movement for Dalit emancipation from caste oppression. It would be a dereliction of duty for TRS researchers to ignore these important developments that affect the lives of hundreds of millions of Indians, and yet it is this very focus on issues of national importance that has earned them the ire of the government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Is it possible to live in the world as a person of conscience and ignore the daily struggles of the people?
At the end of the day, the Delhi Police arrested Prabir Purkayastha and Amit Chakravarty, both of the media project NewsClick.
During the raid of the TRS office, the Delhi Police seized computers, phones, and hard drives. I very much hope that the Delhi Police investigators will read all of the materials that the TRS team has produced with great care and interest. So that the Delhi Police does not miss any of the important texts that TRS has produced for Tricontinental, here is a reading list for them:
1. The Story of Solapur, India, Where Housing Cooperatives Are Building a Workers’ City (dossier no. 6, July 2018). Balamani Ambaiah Mergu, a maker of beedis (cigarettes), told TRS researchers that she used to ‘stay in a small hut in a slum in Shastri Nagar, Solapur city. When it rained the hut used to leak, and there wouldn’t be a single dry patch inside’. Since 1992, the Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU) has campaigned to secure dignified housing for workers in this town in the state of Maharashtra. Since 2001, CITU has been able secure government funds for this purpose and build tens of thousands of houses, a process led by the workers themselves through cooperative housing societies. The workers built ‘a city of the working class alone’, CITU leader Narasayya Adam told TRS.
2. How Kerala Fought the Heaviest Deluge in Nearly a Century (dossier no. 9, October 2018). In the summer of 2018, rain, and subsequent flooding, swept through the southern coastal state of Kerala, impacting 5.4 million of the state’s 35 million residents. TRS researchers documented the flood’s rage, the rescue and relief work of organised volunteers (largely from left formations), and the rehabilitation of both the Left Democratic Front government and various social organisations.
3. India’s Communists and the Election of 2019: Only an Alternative Can Defeat the Right Wing (dossier no. 12, January 2019). To understand the political situation in India in the lead-up to the 2019 parliamentary elections, the TRS team spoke with Communist Party of India (Marxist) leader Brinda Karat. Rather than confine her analysis to the electoral or political sphere, Karat discussed the challenges facing the country at a sociological level: ‘Cultures promoted by capitalism and the market promote and glorify individualism and promote individualistic solutions. All these add to the depoliticisation of a whole generation of young people. This is certainly a challenge: how to find the most effective ways of taking our message to the youth’.
4. The Only Answer Is to Mobilise the Workers (dossier no. 18, July 2019). In April–May 2019, the National Democratic Alliance, led by the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party, prevailed in India’s parliamentary elections. In the aftermath of the elections, the TRS team met with CITU President K. Hemalata to talk about the periodic massive strikes that had been taking place in the country, including an annual general strike of nearly 300 million workers. Whereas working-class movements in other countries seemed to be weakened by the breakdown of formal employment and the increasingly precarious nature of work, unions in India displayed resilience. Hemalata explained that ‘the contract workers are very militant’ and that CITU does not distinguish between the demands of contract workers and permanent workers. One of the best examples of this, she said, is the anganwadi (childcare) workers, who – along with Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHA) workers – have been on the forefront of many of the major agitations. Both of these sectors – childcare and health care – are dominated by women. ‘Organising working-class women is part of organising the working class’, Hemalata told TRS.
5. The Neoliberal Attack on Rural India (dossier no. 21, October 2019). P. Sainath, one of the most important journalists reporting on rural India and a senior fellow at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, traced the impact of the crises of neoliberal policies and climate catastrophe that are simultaneously imposed on India’s farmers. He documents the work of Kudumbashree, a cooperative made up of 4.5 million women farmers in Kerala, which he calls ‘the greatest gender justice and poverty reduction programme in the world’ (and about whom we will publish a longer study in the coming months compiled by TRS).
6. People’s Polyclinics: The Initiative of the Telugu Communist Movement (dossier no. 25, February 2020). In the Telugu-speaking parts of India (which encompass over 84 million people), doctors affiliated with the communist movement have set up clinics and hospitals – notably the Nellore People’s Polyclinic – to provide medical care to the working class and peasantry. The polyclinics have not only provided care but have also trained medical workers to address public health concerns in rural hinterlands and small towns. This dossier offers a window into the work of left-wing medical personnel whose efforts take place outside the limelight and into the experiments in public health care that seek to undercut the privatisation agenda.
7. One Hundred Years of the Communist Movement in India (dossier no. 32, September 2020). Not long after the October Revolution brought the Tsarist Empire to its knees in 1917, a liberal newspaper in Bombay noted, ‘The fact is Bolshevism is not the invention of Lenin or any man. It is the inexorable product of the economic system which dooms the millions to a life of ill-requited toil in order that a few thousand may revel in luxury’. In other words, the communist movement is the product of the limitations and failures of capitalism. On 17 October 1920, the Communist Party of India was formed alongside scattered communist groups that were emerging in different parts of India. In this brief text, the TRS team documents the role of the communist movement in India over the past century.
8. The Farmers’ Revolt in India(dossier no. 41, June 2021). Between 1995 and 2014, almost 300,000 farmers committed suicide in India – roughly one farmer every 30 minutes. This is largely because of the high prices of inputs and the low prices of their crops, a reality that has been exacerbated by neoliberal agricultural policies since 1991 and their amplification of other crises (including the climate catastrophe). Over the past decade, however, farmers have fought back with major mobilisations across the country led by a range of organisations such as left-wing farmers’ and agricultural workers’ unions. When the government put forward three bills in 2020 to deepen the privatisation of rural India, farmers, agricultural workers, and their families began a massive protest. This dossier is one of the finest summaries of the issues that lie at the heart of these protests.
9. Indian Women on an Arduous Road to Equality (dossier no. 45, October 2021). Patriarchy, with its deep roots in the economy and culture, cannot be defeated by decree. In the face of this reality, this dossier offers a glimpse of the Indian women’s movement for equality and maps the range of struggles pursued by working women across the country to defend democracy, maintain secularism, fight for women’s economic rights, and defeat violence. The dossier closes with the following assessment: ‘The ongoing Indian farmers’ movement, which started before the pandemic and continues to stay strong, offers the opportunity to steer the national discourse towards such an agenda. The tremendous participation of rural women, who travelled from different states to take turns sitting at the borders of the national capital for days, is a historic phenomenon. Their presence in the farmers’ movement provides hope for the women’s movement in a post-pandemic future’.
10. The People’s Steel Plant and the Fight Against Privatisation in Visakhapatnam (dossier no. 55, August 2022). One of my favourite texts produced by the TRS team, this dossier tells the story of the workers of Rashtriya Ispat Nigam Limited, who have fought against the government’s attempts to privatise this public steel company. Not much is written about this struggle led by brave steel workers who are mostly forgotten or, if remembered, then maligned. They stand beside the furnaces, rolling the steel out and tempering it, driven by a desire to build better canals for the farmers, to build beams for schools and hospitals, and to build the infrastructure so that their communities can transcend the dilemmas of humanity. If you try to privatise the factory, they sing, ‘Visakha city will turn into a steel furnace, North Andhra into a battlefield… We will defend our steel with our lives’.
11. Activist Research: How the All-India Democratic Women’s Association Builds Knowledge to Change the World (dossier no. 58, November 2022). The dossier on Visakha Steel was built in conversation with steel workers and reflected the evolving methodology of TRS. To sharpen this method, the team met with R. Chandra to discuss how the All-India Democratic Women’s Association (AIDWA) has used ‘activist research’ in the state of Tamil Nadu. Chandra shows how AIDWA designed surveys, trained local activists to conduct them among local populations, and taught the activists how to assess the results. ‘AIDWA’s members no longer need a professor to help them’, she told TRS. ‘They formulate their own questions and conduct their own field studies when they take up an issue. Since they know the value of the studies, these women have become a key part of AIDWA’s local work, bringing this research into the organisation’s campaigns, discussing the findings in our various committees, and presenting it at our different conferences’. This activist research not only produces knowledge of the particularities of hierarchies that operate in a given place; it also trains the activists to become ‘new intellectuals’ of their struggles and leaders in their communities.
12. The Condition of the Indian Working Class (dossier no. 64, May 2023). In the early days of the pandemic, the Indian government told millions of workers to go back to their homes, mostly in rural areas. Many of them walked thousands of kilometres under the burning hot sun, terrible stories of death and despair following their caravan. This dossier emerged out of a long-term interest in cataloguing the situation of India’s workers, whose precariousness was revealed in the early days of the pandemic. The last section of the dossier reflects on their struggles: ‘Class struggle is not the invention of unions or of workers. It is a fact of life for labour in the capitalist system. … In August 1992, textile workers in Bombay took to the streets in their undergarments, declaring that the new order would leave them in abject poverty. Their symbolic gesture continues to reflect the current reality of Indian workers in the twenty-first century: they have not surrendered in the face of the rising power of capital. They remain alive to the class struggle’.
The Delhi Police investigators who took the material from the TRS office have each of these twelve dossiers in hand. I recommend that they print them and share them with the rest of the force, including with Police Commissioner Sanjay Arora. If the Delhi Police is interested, I would be happy to develop a seminar on our materials for them.
Study and struggle shaped the Indian freedom movement. Gandhi, for instance, read voraciously and even translated Plato’s The Apology into Gujarati, rooted in the belief that reading and study sharpened his sense not only of how to struggle but how to build a better world.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
What would it look like if we subordinated finance to the public interest?
This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.
When considering the recent performances at the General Assembly of the United Nations this year, the echoes of “peace” resound through the plenary hall. Why should anyone want peace in the Ukraine more than any other place the Empire is waging war? My suspicion is that many of these calls are really for Russia to withdraw to its pre-2014 borders. They believe that would make the US regime happy and be a great relief to the minor and little league oligarchs who long for return to business as usual. Calm and intelligent people could be forgiven for doubting the sincerity of many peace petitioners.
After all, don’t the continuing wars in Africa, the still pending “United Nations” war against the DPRK (where there is only a 70-year-old armistice since 1953), and the innumerable economic wars being waged in places and ways we do not even know, deserve to end too?
Like the war in the Ukraine, one will hear how complicated these wars are. They cannot be simply ended. Yet they are all simple in one material way: without the US and its NATO cut-outs—often the principal aggressor in violation of the Kellogg-Briand Treaty—many of these wars would never have started or would have long ago been resolved. So why not demand that the US stop waging wars and why not apply sanctions to the US for its belligerence and violations of the law of nations? How can the United Nations end wars when it cannot even end the one it started in 1951? Could it be that too many of the parties among those who convene to call for peace, really need and want just a piece of the action?
The two military veterans probably best known for criticising US policy in Ukraine, Colonel Douglas MacGregor USA and Major Scott Ritter USMC, have said loud and clear that at least from a military standpoint the Ukrainian armed forces have lost the war against Russia. There have been numerous voices calling for an end to the conflict, not least because the more than USD 46 billion and counting in military aid alone, has yet to produce any of the results announced as aims of what has finally been admitted is a war against Russia.i If Mr Zelenskyy, the president of Ukraine’s government in Kiev, is to be taken at face value, then the hostilities can only end when Crimea and the Donbas regions are fully under Kiev’s control and Vladimir Putin has been removed from office as president of the Russian Federation. To date no commentator has adequately explained how those war aims are to be attained. This applies especially after the conservatively estimated 400,000 deaths and uncounted casualties in the ranks of Kiev’s forces since the beginning of the Russian special military operation in February 2022.
Before considering the political and economic issues it is important to reiterate a few military facts, especially for those armchair soldiers who derive their military acumen from TV and Hollywood films. As MacGregor and Ritter, both of whom have intimate practical knowledge of warfare, have said: Armies on the ground need supplies, i.e. food, weapons, ammunition, medical care for wounded, etc. These supplies have to be delivered from somewhere. In ancient times, armies could live off the land. Essentially this was through looting and plunder—stealing their food from the local population as they marched. To prevent the local population from becoming the enemy in the rear and avoid early exhaustion of local supply, generals started paying for what was requisitioned. Defending forces would often withdraw the civilian population and destroy what could not be taken to avoid supplying their enemies. In fact, this kind of rough warfare against civilians still occurs although it has been forbidden under the Law of Land Warfare.ii Naturally the soldier in the field can no longer make weaponry. Even less can they be plundered from the local inhabitants—unless one comes across some tribe the US has armed with Stingers. All the weapons the Ukrainian armed forces deploy have to be imported from countries with manufacturing capacity. As the two retired officers, among others, have said, such capacity is unavailable to the Ukraine. Obviously it would also be unavailable to NATO forces were they to deploy in Ukraine in any numbers. It is illusory to believe that a NATO army can do what the Wehrmacht could not some eighty years ago with three million men under arms and the most modern army of its day. This was so obvious from the beginning that one has to wonder why this war ever started. Is it possible that wars are started without any intention of winning them? If winning the war is not the objective, then what is?
Forgery and force: Explicit and implicit or latent and expressed foreign policy
Historical documents are essential elements in any attempt to understand the past and the present. However, this is not because they are necessarily true or accurate. Forgeries and outright lies are also important parts of the historical record. Perhaps the most notorious forgery in Western history is the so-called Donation of Constantine. This document was used to legitimate papal supremacy and the primacy of the Latin over the Greek Church. Although it did not take long for the forgery to be discovered, the objective was accomplished. Even today most people in the West have learned that the part of the Christian Church called Orthodoxy is schismatic when the reverse is true, namely the Latin Church arose from a coup d’état against Constantinople.
There is now no shortage of evidence that the British Empire forced the German Empire into the Great War and with US help justified the slaughter of some four million men, ostensibly to expel German forces from Belgium. There is systematically suppressed testimony by commanders in the field and others in a position to know that the Japanese attack on the US colonial base at Pearl Harbor was not only no surprise but a carefully crafted event exploited to justify US designs on Japan and China. Yet to this day the myth of surprise attack against a neutral country prevails over the historical facts. Even though there is almost popular acceptance that the US invasion of Iraq was based on entirely fabricated evidence and innuendo, the destruction of the country was not stopped and continues as of this writing.
What does that tell us about historical record and official statements of policy? Former POTUS and CIA director, George H.W. Bush expressed the principle that government lies did not matter because the lie appears on page one and the retraction or correction on page 28. In short, it is the front page that matters. That is what catches and keeps the public’s attention. Truth and accuracy are immaterial.
Let us consider for a moment one of the most durable wonders of published state policy—the Balfour Declaration. This brief letter signed by one Arthur Balfour on 2 November 1917 was addressed to the Lord Rothschild, in his capacity as some kind of conduit for the Zionist Federation. Carroll Quigley in his The Anglo-American Establishment strongly suggests that Lord Rothschild, also in his capacity as a sponsor of the Milner Round Table group, presented the letter for Mr Balfour to sign. As Quigley also convincingly argues the academic and media network created by the Round Table has successfully dominated the writing of British imperial history making it as suspicious as the Vatican’s history of the Latin Church.
This “private” letter to the British representative of the West’s leading banking dynasty is then adopted as the working principle for the League of Nations’ Mandate for Palestine awarded to the British Empire. From this private letter an international law mandate was created, continued under the UN Charter, to convert a part of the conquered Ottoman Empire into a state entity for people organized in Europe who imagined that some thousand(s) of years ago some ancestors once inhabited the area.iii The incongruence of this act ought to have been obvious—and in fact it was. The explicit policy with which the British Empire had sought to undermine Germany and Austria-Hungary was that of ethnic/linguistic self-determination of peoples. So by right—even if the fiction of a population in diaspora were accepted—this could not pre-empt the right of ethnic/linguistic self-determination in Palestine where Arabic was the dominant language and even those who adhered to the Jewish religion were not Europeans.
As argued elsewhere there has been a century of propaganda and brute force applied to render the dubious origins and the legitimation for the settler conquest that was declared the State of Israel in 1948 acceptable no matter how implausible. Like the Donation of Constantine, the Balfour Declaration served its purpose. No amount of rebuttal can reverse the events that followed.
Motors and motives
However, the question remains what is then the policy driving such acts? What is the motive for such seemingly senseless aggression against ordinary people? Why does an institution supposedly based on national self-determination deny it so effectively to majorities everywhere whose only fault appears to be living on land others covet? By the time the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples was finally adopted in 1960, there was no question of reversing the de facto colonisation practiced by the mandatory powers under the League. Moreover the Declaration was only an act of the UN General Assembly, a body wholly dominated by the three permanent imperial members of the Security Council, each with their veto powers.
To understand that and perhaps to better illuminate the principal subject—Ukraine—it is helpful to recall that of the five permanent members of the Security Council, the two most powerful are not nation-states at all. The United Kingdom is a colonial confederation as is the United States.
Russia, France, and China are all states derived from historical ethnic-linguistic determination. Beyond doubt they were formed into such unitary states through wars and revolutions. As de Gaulle famously said, “France was made with the sword”. However, there is no question that these three countries are based explicitly on ethnic-linguistic and cultural congruity within continental boundaries, in the sense articulated by the explicit text of the Covenant and the Charter. On the contrary, Great Britain and the United States are commercial enterprises organised on the basis of piracy and colonial conquest. There is not a square centimetre of the United States that was not seized by the most brutal force of arms from its indigenous inhabitants. “Ethnic-linguistic” among the English-speaking peoples is a commodity characteristic. It is a way to define a market segment.
Great Britain gave the world “free trade” and liberalism and the US added to that the “open door”. Nothing could be more inimical to the self-determination of peoples than either policy.iv How can a people be independent and self-determined when they are denied the right to say “no”? The Great War and its sequel, the war against the Soviet Union and Communism, aka World War 2, were first and foremost wars to establish markets dominated by the Anglo-American free trade – open door doctrine. One will not find this explicitly stated in any of the history books or the celebratory speeches on Remembrance Day (Memorial Day in the US) or the anniversary of D-Day, to which properly the Soviet Union and Russia ought not to be invited. After all D-Day was the beginning of the official war by Anglo-America against the Soviet Union after Hitler failed. More of Italian, French and German industrial and domestic infrastructure was destroyed by aerial bombardment from the West than by anything the Wehrmacht did—since its job was to destroy Soviet industry. This will not be reported in schoolbooks and very few official papers will verify this open secret. That is because like the Donation much of what counts as history was simply “written to the file”. The facts, however, speak for themselves. When the German High Command signed the terms of unconditional surrender in Berlin-Karlshorst, the domestic industry of the West, except the US, had been virtually destroyed leaving it a practical monopoly not only in finance but manufacturing that would last well into the late 1960s.v Only the excess demand of the war against Korea accelerated German industrial recovery. No one can say for sure how much of German, French, Italian, Belgian, or Netherlands capital was absorbed by Anglo-American holding companies. Hence those that wonder today about the self-destruction of the German economy have to ask who owns Germany in fact. To do that one will have to hunt through the minefield of secrecy jurisdictions behind which beneficial ownership of much of the West is concealed.
It is necessary to return to the conditions at the beginning of the Great War to understand what is happening now in Ukraine. One has to scratch the paint off the house called “interests” and recall some geography. F. William Engdahl performed this task well in his A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order (2011). It would do well to summarise a few of his points before going further.
Geography and aggrandizement
Continental nation-states need secure land routes. Pirate states need secure sea-lanes. Britain succeeded in seizing control ruling the waves after defeating the Spanish and Portuguese fleets. It reached a commercial entente with the Netherlands, which helped until the Royal Navy was paramount. The control of the seas meant that Britain could dominate shipping as well as maritime insurance needed to cover the risk of sea transport. So it was no accident that Lloyds of London came to control the financing of maritime traffic. Geography dictated that the alternative for continental nation-states was the railroad. Germany was building a railroad from Berlin to Baghdad which would not only have delivered oil to its industry but allowed it to bypass the Anglo-French Suez Canal and the British controlled Cape route. Centuries before the predecessors to the City of London financed crusades to control the trade routes through the Middle East, propagandistically labelled the Holy Land, whereby this was wholly for commercial reasons. The Anglo-American led NATO captured Kosovo not out of any special loyalty to Albanians but because of geography. Camp Bondsteel lies at the end of the easiest route to build pipelines between Central Asia and the Mediterranean. In short there is not a single war for “self-determination” waged by the Anglo-American special relationship that was not driven by piratical motives, for which ethnic-linguistic commodities are expendable.
In 1917, the “interests”, for whom Lord Rothschild spoke and no doubt provided financial support, coincided with the pre-emptive control over real estate that had been desired by the banking-commercial cult at least since the establishment of the Latin Church. It is no accident that serious investigations have established that the state created from the British Mandate in Palestine was a commercial venture like all other British undertakings. Moreover it has been able to use its most insidious cover story to veil itself in victimhood and thus immunity for those criminal enterprises, both private and state, that use it as a conduit: money laundering, drug and arms trafficking, training of repressive forces for other countries on contract, etc. all documented and protected by atomic weapons. Moreover this enterprise has been the greatest per capita recipient of US foreign aid for decades. Its citizens are able to use dual citizenship to hold high office in the sovereign state that funds it, too. Any attempt to criticize or oppose this relationship or its moral justification by a public official or personality with anything to lose can lead to the gravest of consequences. Its official lobby in the US, AIPAC, is only one instrument by which any act that could interfere with the smooth flow of cash or influence between Washington and Tel Aviv can be prevented or punished. It draws on an international organisation that does not even have to be organised. The status of ultimate victimhood combined with mass media at all levels committed to protecting “victims” can summon crowds just as Gene Sharp predicted in his works.vi
A business too innocent to fail
Now we come to the issues with which this essay began. What is the aim of the war in Ukraine? Will it end when the military operations have failed?
In April 2022, i.e. just over a month after the Russian intervention, Volodymyr Zelenskyy described “the future for his country”. He used the terms “a big Israel”. In Haaretz it was reported that Zelenskyy wanted Ukraine to become “a big Israel, with its own face”. Writing for the NATO lobby, the Atlantic Council, Daniel Shapiro elaborated what Zelenskyy might mean: the main points are security first, the whole population plays a role, self-defence is the only way, but maintain active defence partnerships, intelligence dominance, technology as key, build an innovation ecosystem, maintain democratic institutions.vii The stories depict this stance for better or worse as the creation of a state under permanent military control, always giving priority to existential threats—presumably from the East.
But is that really what Zelenskyy meant? Or perhaps that is what he was just supposed to say. What about those who have directed nearly all of NATO armament and so many billions through the hands of the Kiev regime—one notorious even before 2022 as the most corrupt in Europe, if not anywhere? Maybe another construction is to be applied. Perhaps Zelenskyy is talking, like some latter day Balfour, on behalf of his sponsors whose Holocaust piety never prevented them from subjecting nearly entire populations to forced medical experiments starting in 2020. Perhaps he is talking about the extensive participation in all sorts of international trafficking, either as agent or protection for the principals. Perhaps he is talking about the permanent and undebatable foreign aid contributions from the US and the extortion from other countries, e.g. as Norman Finkelstein documented.viii There is no doubt that Ukraine has become a major hub for human trafficking, arms smuggling, and biological-chemical testing. They have atomic reactors and have asked for warheads.ix
Add to this the potential of a large and potentially self-righteous diaspora spread throughout the West, heavily subsidised and already equipped with influence in high places. A “Ukraine Lobby” was already in preparation in 1947 when the British shipped some eight thousand POWs of the SS Galizia Division (a Ukrainian force) from Italy to Britain without a single war crimes investigation.x From there they were able to spread throughout the Empire as Canada amply indicates.
Much of the debate about the Ukraine war remains confused because of the successful obfuscation around the term “Nazi”. Essentially a Hollywood story has been substituted for analysis of the historic development of the ideology and government that prevailed in Germany between 1933 and 1945.xi Nazism is treated as sui generis based on criteria that are not unique at all. For example, great attention is given to uniforms and insignia. In fact, after the Great War all the major political factions and parties, e.g. the SPD and DKP, had uniformed paramilitary organisations formed mainly of front veterans. When the NSDAP was able to ban all opponents those uniforms also disappeared. Contemporary fascism also uses current fashion and language. Only the nostalgic retain antiquated uniform and language styles. However repulsive the ideology may be these so-called neo-Nazis are equivalent to the historical re-enactment units found throughout the US for example.
After WW2 much of Europe was a wasteland, especially the East. Refugees understandably fled as far west as they could because getting to North or South America meant living in territories unscathed by war. The British and US secret services deliberately exploited these refugee waves to cover the removal into safety of the residue of their fascist allies. There they were to prepare for the continuation of war against the Soviet Union by other means. These formations often hid behind ethnic front groups, as the fascists did in occupied West Germany. Hence when an embarrassing discovery was made—usually some low or middle grade Nazi veteran—then he could be disgraced, tried or deported while leaving the bulk of the clandestine organisation in tact. These Nazis were obviously the result of careless immigration oversight but by no means a reflection of state policy.
Together, historical re-enactment Nazism and “exposed” single Nazi veterans distracted from the large scale programs supporting and expanding anti-communist forces both domestically and for expeditionary deployment. Much more seriously, these two “shows” and the deliberate suppression of meaningful debate about fascist policies and practices—always reduced to anti-Jewish attitudes and actions alone—have successfully prevented any coherent analysis and debate about the relationship between Anglo-American monopoly capital and the cartels that backed the NSDAP regime or the relationship between US/ NATO policy and its consistent support of fascist regimes in Spain, Portugal and throughout the world. It has prevented coherent debate about the long forgotten but documented participation of reconstructed Nazis in the government of the Federal Republic of Germany and their active participation in the Ukrainian war against the Soviet Union after 1945.
Zelenskyy and his fellow travellers cannot be blamed for their self-confident fascism. It is not an anomaly but a historical product of decades of Anglo-American/ NATO business plans—including the distraction of “Nazi” from the substance of those plans. Given how successful Lord Rothschild’s model for Israel has been, one can scarcely blame a patriot like Volodymyr Zelenskyy for seizing the opportunity to apply it to his own country. The model has been so successful that no one in public dare oppose it. Why not establish another such parasitic machine? Russians just like Arabs provide the permanent enemies with which to sell the permanent victim status at the expense of millions of displaced Ukrainians.
In other words, there is a very successful business model to be implemented wholly consistent with free trade and the open door and all those other slogans, which have anointed plunder and pillage by the occasionally alpine commercial cult in their campaign to assure that all of us own nothing and they will be happy.
Endnotes
i Jonathan Masters and Will Merrow, “How Much as the US Sent to Ukraine Here are Six Charts”, Council on Foreign Relations (10 July 2023). Among those declaring this was Foreign Minister of the German Federal Republic, Annalena Baerbock. Angela Merkel, the former chancellor of the Federal Republic is on record having said that the so-called Minsk Accords were intended to stall the Russian reaction in Donbas until Ukraine could be sufficiently armed to fight against the Russian Federation.
ii Principally the Hague (1907) Conventions and subsequent Geneva Conventions
iii More likely the Eastern Europeans in question were descendent from the Khazar kingdom located far closer to what today is Ukraine. The ruling elite was to have converted to Rabbinic Judaism in the 8th century. The Khazar Khaganate was disbursed by the end of the first millennium CE. This would better explain the hostility toward Russia and myth of a national homeland, displaced in 1917 to Palestine based on contemporary political realities.
iv Historian Gerald Horne ascribes “free trade” to the so-called Glorious Revolution, which also abolished the Royal Africa Company, opening “free trade in slaves”; see The Counter-Revolution of 1776 (2014).
v Bombing of German factories conspicuously omitted Ford plant in Cologne and GM’s Opel factory in Russelsheim, although both Ford and GM claimed and received reparations for damage done by Allied bombers.
vi Gene Sharp, From Dictatorship to Democracy (1994)
vii Daniel B. Shapiro, “Zelenskyy wants Ukraine to be ‘a big Israel’. Here’s a road map”, New Atlanticist (6 April 2022) “By adapting their country’s mind-set to mirror aspects of Israel’s approach to security challenges, Ukrainian officials can tackle national security challenges with confidence and build a similarly resilient state”.
viii Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry (2000)
ix This notorious request by Zelenskyy at the Munich Security Conference in 2022 for atomic weapons was another reason President Vladimir Putin gave for a military response to Kiev’s attacks on the Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine that Russia had been forced to recognise as two independent republics and grant protection.
x A documentary produced by Julian Hendy (The SS in Britain) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjj__aya4BA contains interviews, e.g. with civil servants who were told by US authorities that no pre-immigration investigations were to be conducted. This film about the 14th Waffen SS Division Galizia division has been almost scrubbed from the Web. The film, originally to be broadcast by Yorkshire Television (UK) was never shown. Geoffrey Goodman described details after a private viewing in a Guardian article (12 June 2000).
xi A useful source for the historical context and actual description of the NSDAP regime can be found in Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933-1944, a detailed study written originally in English by Franz Neumann. This book comprises two parts: the NS state and the economic system. Very little attention is paid to the section on the economic system although the regime cannot be understood without its legacy economic policies and the bureaucracy responsible for implementing them.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Tyranny, Inc. aims to build a working-class coalition between the left and right. But Ahmari cannot get around the GOP populists’ dismal record on labor.
This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.
The neoliberal order has been exposed as fraudulent, inefficient, and inequitable. Yet it hardly lies in the dustbin of history.
Nothing has replaced neoliberalism as a better descriptor for the political-economic order we inhabit.
Neoliberal ideas and institutions are still with us, but the political order they constituted is not.
Neoliberal ideas and institutions are still with us, but the political order they constituted is not.
I’m reposting this article about the Democratic Party five years after it was published because after re-reading it, I wouldn’t change a thing. In addition, the Democratic Party has become even more right-wing since it gained power in 2020. At the end of the article I will name the many ways it has gotten still worse.
How to Conceive of the Two-party System
Lesser of two evils
Among liberals and all the different types of socialists, when the subject of the Democratic Party comes up, there are at least two variations. One is the familiar liberal argument that the Democratic Party is the “lesser of two evils”. For them, the Republican Party is the source of most, if not all, problems while the Democratic Party is presented as shortsighted, weak and/or incompetent bumblers. Among some of the more compromising members of the Green Party, the lesser of two evils manifests itself when it implores its voters to “vote in safe states”
There are a number of reasons why I will claim that the Democratic Party is not the lesser of two evils. But for now, I want to point out that the lesser of two evils has at its foundation a political spectrum which is organized linearly with conservatives and fascists on the right. Along the left there are liberals, followed by social democrats, state socialists, and anarchists on the extreme left. All the forces moving from liberals leftward are broadly categorized as “progressive.” What this implies is that there are only quantitative differences between being a liberal and being any kind of socialist. In this scenario, being a liberal is somehow closer to being a socialist than being a liberal is to a being a conservative. However, there is an elephant in the room, and the elephant is capitalism.
What unites all socialists – social democrats, Maoists, Trotskyists, council communists and anarchists – is opposition to capitalism? What divides us from liberals, whether they are inside or outside the Democratic Party, is that liberals are for capitalism. In relation to the economic system, liberals are closer to conservatives than they are to socialists of any kind. So, the “lesser of two evils “argument is based on the expectation that socialists will ignore the capitalist economic system and make believe that capitalism is somehow progressive. It might have been possible to argue this case 60 years ago, but today capitalism makes its profits on war, slave prison labor and fictitious capital. Characterizing this as “progress” is ludicrous.
The parties are interchangeable
Most anarchists and various varieties of Leninists claim there is no difference between the parties. They say that capitalists control both parties and it is fruitless to make any distinctions. I agree they are both capitalist parties, but what most socialists fail to do is point out that, in addition to protecting the interests of capitalists as Republicans do, the Democratic Party: a) presents itself as representing the middle and lower classes; and (b) stands in the way of the formation of a real opposition to the elites.
The second reason I disagree with the idea that the two parties are simply interchangeable is that it fails to make a distinction between the interests of the ruling and upper classes (Republicans) on the one hand, and the upper middle class (mostly Democrats) on the other. There are real class differences between elites that should not be dissolved.
The Democrats are the greater of two evils
The argument I will make in this article is that the Democratic Party is worse than the Republican Party for about 85% of the population. I make this argument as a Council Communist, and my argument in no way implies voting for Republicans, Greens or even voting at all. Before giving you my reasons for why the Democratic Party is worse for most people I want to give you a sense of how I came up with the figure of 85% .
Old money vs new money and the class composition in the United States
Sociologists have some disagreements over how many classes there are in the United States and what occupations cover what social classes. While some might have a bone to pick about my percentages, I am confident that I am at least in the ballpark. The ruling class constitutes the 1% (or less) of the population and the upper class another 5%. What these classes have in common is that they all live off finance capital and do not have to work. This is what has been called “old money”. This old money had its investments in extractive industries like oil, mining and the war industry. This is the stronghold of the Republican Party.
The upper middle classes consist of doctors, lawyers, architects, and senior managers who make a lot of money, but have to work long hours. It also includes scientists, engineers as well as media professionals such as news commentators, magazine and newspaper editors, college administrators and religious authorities Yet there are tensions between the elites and the upper middle class. The upper middle class represents “new money” and makes their profits from scientific innovation, the electronics industry, including computers and the Internet, among other avenues. This class constitutes roughly 10% of the population. The upper middle class is the stronghold of the Democratic Party.
A number of economists from Thomas Piketty to Richard Wolff have argued that for these social classes there has been an “economic recovery” since the crash of 2008. For all other classes there has been decline. The role of the Democratic Party is
Far be it for me to say that the Republicans and Democrats represent the same thing. There is real class struggle between the interests of the ruling class and the upper class on the one hand and the upper middle class on the other. My point is that for 85% of the population these differences between elites are irrelevant. What the top three classes have in common is a life and death commitment to capitalism – and this commitment is vastly more important than where the sources of their profits come from.
Who are these remaining 85%? Poor people, whether they are employed or not, constitute about 20% of the population. When they are working this includes unskilled work which simply means no previous training is required. Working class people – blue and white collar – represent about 40% of the population. This includes carpenters, welders, electricians, technical workers, secretaries, computer programmers, and X-ray technicians. Middle class people – high school, grammar school teachers, registered nurses, librarians, corporate middle management, and small mom-and-pop storeowners – are about 25% of the population. Most poor people don’t vote and in a way, they are smart because they understand that the Democratic Party can do nothing for them. While many working-class people don’t vote, highly skilled working class people do vote, and many will vote Democrat. Middle classes are also more likely to vote Democrat with the exception of small business owners. In fact, research by labor theorist Kim Moody into the voting patterns of the last election showed that a high percentage of this petty bourgeois voted for Trump.
The Democratic Party has nothing to offer the middle class
When I was growing up in the 1950’s and 1960’s, my father worked as a free-lance commercial artist about 40 hours per week. My mother stayed home and raised my sister and I. One income could cover all of us. My parents sent me to Catholic grammar schools and high schools, which were not very expensive, but they had to save their money to do it. They helped pay for part of my college education after I dropped out and then came back. They helped my partner and I with a down payment on a house in Oakland, CA. Today both parents in a middle-class family need to work and the work-week for middle class workers is at least 10 hours longer. As for savings, if a middle-class family buys a home, it is much more difficult to save for their children’s education.
In 1970 I was living in Denver, Colorado and had my own studio apartment for $70/month. I worked 20 hours a week at the library as a page and could afford to go to community college part-time. Twenty years later I tried to communicate this to my stepdaughter who was 20 years old and then compared it to her experience. She was working full-time as a waitress, had to live with two other people and could only afford to take a couple of classes without going into debt. Reluctantly and seemingly defeated she had to return home to live if she were to ever graduate from a community college. The Democrats did nothing to stem the tide of the decline of the middle class. Working class and middle class people may continue to vote for Democrats, but that doesn’t mean Democrats are delivering the goods. It just means these classes don’t want to face that:
Now on to why I believe the Democratic Party is worse that the Republican party for this 85% of the population.
The Democratic Party has nothing to do with being liberal
Most people who support the Democratic Party don’t really consider the party as it actually is, but how they imagine it should be according either to political science classes they’ve picked up in high school or college or from what they have picked up unconsciously through conversations. They have also gotten this from Democratic Party members themselves who talk about liberal values while in practice acting like conservatives. These voters think the Democratic Party is liberal. What do I mean by liberal? The term liberal has a long political history which I have traced elsewhere (Counterpunch, Left Liberals Have No Party) but let’s limit the term to what I call “New Deal Liberals”.
These New Deal liberals think that the state should provide essential services like pensions, food stamps, natural disaster relief as well as road and bridge construction. They also think the state should intervene to minimize some of the worst aspects of capitalism such as child wage work or sex slavery. These liberals think that Democrats should support the development of unions to protect the working class. This class deserves an adequate wage and decent working conditions. They also think – as it is in the American dream – that in order to justify their existence, capitalists should make profit from the production of real goods and services. These liberals think that the Democratic Party should support the development of science and research to create an easier life so that the standard of living for the American population should go up from generation to generation. These are the values of New Deal liberals. If the Democratic Party acted as if it supported these things, I could understand why liberals would say voting for the Democratic Party is the lesser of two evils. The problem is that these New Deal liberals are trapped in a 50-year time warp when the last real liberal Democratic president was Lyndon Johnson. The Democratic Party hasn’t been liberal in 50 years. This is one reason why the program of New Deal liberal Bernie Sanders had been so popular.
It does not take a Marxist to argue that the United States has been in economic decline since the mid 1970’s. It won’t do to blame the Republicans alone for this 50-year degeneration. The Democratic Party has had presidents between 1976 and 1980, in addition to eight years of Clinton, as well as eight years of Obama. They have had twenty years’ worth of chances to put into practice liberal values and they have failed miserably. Under the Democratic Party:
Please tell me in what sense is this party liberal?
The Democratic Party is not an oppositional party: the Republicans play hardball; the Democrats play badminton
It is right about this time that a liberal defending the Democratic Party would chime in and say something about the Supreme Court. The line is “If we don’t get so and so elected, then the evil right-wing judge will get appointed and Roe vs Wade will be threatened.” This line has been trotted out for the last 45 years. What it conveniently ignores is that the Democratic Party has been in power for at least 40% of the time, whether in the executive or any other branch. It has had forty years to load the Supreme Court with rabid liberals so as to bury the right-to-lifers when they had the chance. An oppositional party would have done this. The Democratic Party has not.
Trump has been on a tear destroying what was left of US international diplomatic relations put into place by Kissinger and Brzezinski. His “policies” are consistently right wing “interventions”, whether they succeed or not. At the same time, domestically Trump has been consistently right wing on every issue from public schools, to immigrants to social programs. What he has done has destabilized international and domestic relations. Conservatives have been doing this kind of thing for 50 years, but with more diplomacy. If the Democratic Party were really an oppositional party, I would expect to find liberal interventions that are roughly the reverse of what Trump and the conservatives have done. There have been no such interventions.
Examples of what an oppositional party would look like
Under an oppositional Democratic regime we would have found a normalization of trade relations with Cuba. There would be scientists and engineers sent to Haiti to build and repair roads and bridges destroyed by natural disasters. There would be normalization of relations with Venezuela and bonds built with the social democratic parties of the Latin American left. Domestically the minimum wage would be restored to at least the standard of 50 years ago. After all, statistics show “productivity” has gone up in the late 50 years. Why wouldn’t the standard of living improve? Social Security and pensions would be regularly upgraded to keep up with the cost of inflation. Bridge and road repair would have been undertaken and low-cost housing would be built. A real liberal president might be so bold as to deploy US soldiers to build them since most of them would no longer be employed overseas. They might also have put forward bills implementing a mass transit system, one that is as good as those of Europe or Japan. Has the Democratic Party done any of these things?
This is “opposition”?
Internationally the Democratic Party’s policies have been indistinguishable from the Republicans. Obama did try to normalize relations with Cuba but that was in the service of the potential for foreign investment, not out of any respect for the social project of building the socialism Cuba was engaged in. The US Democratic regimes have done nothing for Haiti. Its attitude towards the Latin American “pink tide” has been hostile while supporting neoliberal restoration whenever and wherever possible.
Domestic Democratic regimes have done nothing to stem the tide of longer work hours and marginalization of workers as well as the temporary and part-time nature of work. Social Security and pensions have not kept up with the cost of inflation. The Democratic Party has had 20 years to repair the bridges, the roads and the sewer systems and what has it done? The Democrats had 20 years to build low-cost housing and get most, if not all, the homeless off the streets. What have Democrats done? Like the Republicans, the Democrats have professed to have no money for infrastructure, low cost housing or improving mass transit. Like the Republicans they have gone along in blocking Universal Health Care that virtually every other industrialized country possesses. But just like the Republicans they suddenly have plenty of money when it comes to funding seven wars and building the prison industrial complex. Time and again Democratic politicians have ratified increasing the military budget despite the fact that it has no state enemies like the Soviet Union.
In 2008 capitalism had another one of its crisis moments. Marxists and non-Marxist economists agree that the banks were the problem. The Democrats, with that classy “first African American president” did not implement a single Keynesian intervention to reign in the banks. No banker has even gone to jail. What a real Democratic opposition would have done is to tell the banks something like, “look, the public has bailed you out this time, but in return for this collective generosity, we require that you make your profits from undertaking all the infrastructural work that needs to be done, like building a 21st century mass transit system and investing some of your profits in low cost housing.” This is what an oppositional party would do. Notice none of this has anything to do with socialism. It’s straight New Deal liberalism.
In sum, the last 45 years have you ever seen a consistent left liberal intervention by Democrats that would be the equivalent of what Trump is doing now or any conservative regime has done in the last 50 years in any of these areas? Has Carter, Clinton I or Obama done anything equivalent in their 20 years of formal power that Republicans have done in their 30 years? No, because if they ever dreamed of doing such a thing the Republicans would have them driven from office as communists. When was the last time a Democratic candidate drove a Republican from office by calling them a fascist? The truth of the matter is that the Republicans play hardball while the Democrats play badminton.
The second reason the Democratic Party is not an oppositional party is because “opposition” is a relative term. The lesser of two evils scenario works with the assumption that parties are partisan: all Republicans vote in block and all Democrats vote in block. This, however, is more the exception than the rule. Most times some Republicans support Democratic policies and most times some Democrats support Republican measures. Many Republican policies would not have been passed had the Democrats really been an oppositional party. In 2004, when Ralph Nader ran for president, he was raked over the coals for “spoiling” the elections. Yet as later research proves, more people who were registered Democrat voted for Republicans than the total number of people who voted for the Green Party.
The Democratic Party is a party of the elites
Those politicians and media critics who inhabit the nether worlds between left liberal and social democracy such as Robert Reich, Bernie Sanders, Cornell West are tenacious in their search for the “soul” of the Democratic Party. They insist on dividing Democrats into conservative and liberals. The latest version is to call right-wing Democrats “corporate” Democrats as compared to some other kind of Democrat labelled “progressive”. The implication is that it is possible not to be bought hook line and sinker by corporations if you are in the Democratic Party. I am skeptical that any person can run as a Democrat candidate win an election and not make some compromises with corporations even at a local level, I am cynical this can be done at a state or national level. Corporations are ruling class organizations and they own both parties. There is a reason why Martin Luther King, Malcolm X never joined the Democratic Party.
If the last Democratic primaries in which Clinton II was handed the nomination over Bernie Sanders was not enough to make you leave the party, the World Socialist Website published two major articles on how the CIA is running its own candidates as Democrats this year. When a world terrorist organization runs candidates under a liberal banner, isn’t that enough to convince you that the Democratic Party is a party of the elites?
Earlier I stated that the upper middle class represents the Democratic Party and the upper class and the ruling class represent the Republican Party. While each may have interclass differences it is essential for all three social classes that their struggle be seen by the 85% as something this 85% has a stake in. It is important for the ruling class and the upper class that there is a party that appears to represent the unwashed masses (the Democrats). The ruling class and the upper class need the Democratic Party even if they have differences with the upper middle class, whom the Democrats represent. They need the Democratic Party to help create the illusion that voting is an expression of democracy. But the Democratic Party has as much to do with democracy as the Republican Party has to do with republicanism.
The Democratic Party’s presence is an obstacle to building a real opposition to elites
By far the greatest reason the Democratic Party is worse than the Republican Party is the way in which the presence of the Democratic Party drains energy from developing a real opposition to the elites and the upper middle class.
The Democratic Party attacks the Green Party far more than it attacks Republicans
While the Democratic Party plays badminton with Republicans, it plays hardball with third parties, specifically the Green Party. It does everything it can to keep the Greens off the stage during the debates and makes things difficult when the Greens try to get on the ballot. After the last election, Jill Stein was accused of conspiring with the Russians to undermine the Democrats.
If the Democratic Party was a real liberal party, if it was a real opposition party, if it was a party of the “working people” rather than the elites, it would welcome the Green Party into the debates. With magnanimously liberal self-confidence it would say “the more the merrier. May all parties of the left debate.” It would welcome the Greens or any other left party to register in all 50 states and simply prove its program superior.
The wasted time, energy and loss of collective creativity of non-elites
About 10% of the 40% of working class people are in unions. Think of how much in the way of union dues, energy and time was lost over the last 50 years trying to elect Democratic candidates who did little or nothing for those same unions. All that money, energy and time could have been spent in either deepening the militancy of existing unions or organizing the other 30% of workers into unions.
Think of all untapped creative political activity of working class people who are not in unions that was wasted in being enthusiastic and fanatical about sports teams because they see no hope or interest in being part of a political community. Instead of being on talk show discussion groups on Monday morning talking about what the Broncos should have done or could have done on Sunday, think of the power they could have if instead they spent their time strategizing about how to coordinate their strike efforts.
Think of all the immigrants and refugees in this country working at skilled and semi-skilled jobs that have wasted what little time they had standing in line trying to get Democratic Party politicians elected. That time could have been spent on more “May Days Without An Immigrant” as happened thirteen years ago
Think of all the middle class African Americans whose standards of living has declined over the last 45 years who wasted their vote on Democrats and put their faith in the Black Caucus. Think of the wasted time, effort and energy of all middle class people who often actively campaign and contribute money to the Democratic Party that could have been spent on either building a real liberal party or better yet, a mass socialist party.
For many years, the false promise that the Democratic Party just might be a party of the working people has stood in the way of the largest socialist organization in the United States from building a mass working class party. Social Democrats in the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) who should have known better continue to blur the line between a real socialist like Eugene Debs and left liberals like Bernie Sanders. With 33,000 members there are still factions of DSA that will not break with the Democrats.
Are there real differences between the neoliberal Democrats and the neoconservative Republicans? Are there differences between Soros and the Koch brothers? Yes, but these differences are not, as Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Claire have said, “a dimes worth of difference”, especially compared to what the presence of the Democratic party has done for 50 years to 85% of the population. Their fake opposition has stood in the way of building a mass left political party.
The Democratic Party is a parasite on social movements
Can you remember a time when the Democratic Party had an innovative program of their own that was clearly separate from the Republicans yet distinct from any left wing social movements?
I can’t. What I have seen is a Democratic party that does nothing but sniff out the flesh and blood of social movements and vampirize them. I have no use for identity politics, but I can remember a time when the Democratic Party wanted nothing to do with it. Now it runs candidates based on identity politics. Black Lives Matter is now part of the Ford Foundation, a Democratic Party think tank. The Occupy Movement term “occupy” was taken as a name for a Facebook page sympathetic to the Democrats, Occupy Democrats, as if the Democratic Party could be occupied. The Democratic Party, which did nothing for feminism while it was attacked and marginalized by the right wing since the 1980’s, has suddenly “discovered” feminism in the Pink Pussy cats. This is an upper middle class party that sings “We Shall Overcome” fifty years too late.
What should be done?
Rather than focusing on the evil Republican Party, which makes the Democrats seem merely wishy- washy or inept, the policies of the Democratic Party should be attacked relentlessly while paying little attention to Republicans. In the election years, the Green Party should abandon its strategy of soliciting votes in “safe states”. Instead, the Greens should challenge those who claim to be “left-wing” Democrats to get out of the party as a condition for being voted for. In my opinion, there needs to be an all-out war on the Democratic Party as a necessary step to building a mass party. The goal of such a party should not be to win elections, but to use public opportunities as a platform for deepening, spreading and coordinating the commonalities of the interests of the poor, working class and middle class people.
How the Democratic Party Has Gotten Worse in the Last Five Years
On the other hand the Democratic Party has embraced New Deal liberalism in the following ways….ummm…it’s okay, I’ll wait.
• First published in Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism
This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.
Today, we are witnessing the nudging (manipulation) of the population to accept a ‘new normal’ based on a climate emergency narrative, restrictions on movement and travel, programmable digital money, ‘pandemic preparedness’ courtesy of the World Health Organization’s tyrannical pandemic treaty, unaccountable AI and synthetic ‘food’.
Whether it involves a ‘food transition’, an ‘energy transition’, 15-minute cities or some other benign-sounding term, all this is to be determined by a supranational ‘stakeholder’ elite with ordinary people sidelined in the process. An undemocratic agenda designed to place restrictions on individual liberty, marking a dramatic shift towards authoritarianism.
In the 1980s, to help legitimise the deregulation-privatisation neoliberal globalisation agenda, government and media instigated an ideological onslaught, driving home the primacy of ‘free enterprise’, individual rights and responsibility and emphasising a shift away from the role of the state, trade unions and the collective in society.
We are currently seeing another ideological shift: individual rights and freedoms are said to undermine the wider needs of society and the planet – in a stark turnaround – personal freedom is now said to pose a threat to national security, public health or the climate.
As in the 1980s, this messaging is being driven by an economic impulse. This time, the collapsing neoliberal project.
In the UK, poverty is increasing in two-thirds of communities, food banks are now a necessary part of life for millions of people and living standards are plummeting. Indeed, the poorest families are enduring a ‘frightening’ collapse in living standards, resulting in life-changing and life-limiting poverty).
In the US, around 30 million low-income people are on the edge of a ‘hunger cliff’ as a portion of their federal food assistance is taken away. In 2021, it was estimated that one in eight children were going hungry in the US. Small businesses are filing for bankruptcy in the US at a record rate.
The Bank of England’s chief economist, Huw Pill, says that people should ‘accept’ being poorer. This is similar to the response of Rob Kapito, co-founder of the world’s biggest asset management firm, BlackRock. In 2022, the unimaginably rich and entitled Kapito said that a “very entitled” generation of (ordinary working) people who have never had to sacrifice would soon have to face shortages for the first time in their lives.
While business as usual prevails in Kapito’s world of privilege and that of major arms, energy, pharmaceuticals and food companies, whose megarich owners continue to rake in massive profits, Kapito and Pill tell ordinary people to get used to poverty and the ‘new normal’ as if we are ‘all in it together’ – billionaires and working class alike. They conveniently use COVID and the situation in Ukraine as cover for the collapsing neoliberalism.
But this is part of the hegemonic agenda that seeks to ensure that the establishment’s world view is the accepted cultural norm. And anyone who challenges this world view – whether it involves, for instance, questioning climate alarmism, the ‘new normal’, the nature of the economic crisis, the mainstream COVID narrative or the official stance on Ukraine and Russia – is regarded as a spreader of misinformation and the ‘enemy within’.
Although the term ‘enemy within’ was popularised by Margaret Thatcher during the miners’ strike in 1984-85 to describe the striking miners, it is a notion with which that Britain’s rulers have regarded protest movements and uprisings down the centuries. From the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381 to the Levellers and Diggers in the 17th century, it is a concept associated with anyone or any group that challenges the existing social order and the interests of the ruling class.
John Ball, a radical priest, addressed the Peasants’ Revolt rebels with the following words:
Good friends, matters cannot go well in England until all things be held in common; when there shall be neither vassals nor lords; when the lords shall be no more masters than ourselves.
The revolt was suppressed. John Ball was captured and hung, drawn and quartered. Part of the blood-soaked history of the British ruling class.
Later on, the 17th-century Diggers movement wanted to create small, egalitarian rural communities and farm on common land that had been privatised by enclosures.
The 1975 song ‘The world Turned Upside Down’ by Leon Rosselson commemorates the Diggers. His lyrics describe the aims and plight of the movement. In Rosselson’s words, the Diggers were dispossessed via theft and murder but reclaimed what was theirs only to be violently put down.
Little surprise then that, in the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher used the state machinery to defeat the country’s most powerful trade union and the shock troops of the labour movement, the National Union of Mineworkers – ‘the enemy within’. She needed to do this to open the gates for capital to profit from the subsequent deindustrialisation of much of the UK and the dismantling of large parts of the welfare state.
And the result?
A hollowed-out, debt-bloated economy, the destruction of the social fabric of entire communities and the great financial Ponzi scheme – the ‘miracle’ of deregulated finance – that now teeters on the brink of collapse, leading the likes of Kapito and Pill to tell the public to get ready to become poor.
And now, in 2023, the latest version of the ‘enemy within’ disseminates ‘misinformation’ – anything that challenges the official state-corporate narrative. So, this time, one goal is to have a fully controlled (censored) internet.
For instance, US Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) recently awarded Accrete a contract for Argus to detect disinformation threats from social media. Argus is AI software that analyses social media data to predict emergent narratives and generate intelligence reports at a speed and scale to help neutralise viral disinformation threats.
Accrete AI is a leading dual-use enterprise AI company. It deployed its AI Argus software for open-source threat detection with the US Department of Defense in 2022.
In a recent press release, Prashant Bhuyan, founder and CEO of Accrete, boasts:
Social media is widely recognised as an unregulated environment where adversaries routinely exploit reasoning vulnerabilities and manipulate behaviour through the intentional spread of disinformation. USSOCOM is at the tip of the spear in recognising the critical need to identify and analytically predict social media narratives at an embryonic stage before those narratives evolve and gain traction. Accrete is proud to support USSOCOM’s mission.”
This is about predicting wrong think on social media. But control over the internet is just part of a wider programme of establishment domination, surveillance and dealing with protest and dissent.
The recent online article ‘How the Government Weaponizes Surveillance to Silence Its Critics’ notes that, on any given day, the average person in the US is monitored, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways.
The authors of the article ask us to consider some of the ways the US government is weaponizing its surveillance technologies to flag citizens as a threat to national security, whether or not they have done anything wrong – from flagging citizens as a danger based on their feelings, phone and movements to their spending activities, social media activities, political views and correspondence.
The elite has determined that the existential threat is you. The article ‘Costs of War: Peterloo’, written by UK Veterans for Peace member Aly Renwick, details the history of the brutal suppression of protesters by Britain’s rulers. He also strips away any notion that some may have of a benign, present-day ruling elite with democratic leanings. The leopard has not changed its spots.
As we saw during COVID, the thinking is that hard-won rights must be curtailed, freedom of association is reckless, free thinking is dangerous, dissent is to be stamped on, impartial science is a threat and free speech is deadly. Government is ‘the truth’, Fauci (or some similar figure) is ‘the science’ and censorship is for your own good.
None of this was justified. It only begins to make sense if we regard the COVID restrictions in terms of trying to deal with an economic crisis by closing down the global economy under cover of a public health crisis (see the online articles ‘What Was Covid Really About? Triggering a Multi-Trillion Dollar Global Debt Crisis’ and ‘Italy 2020: Inside Covid’s Ground Zero’ which outline how COVID policies can be explained by economic factors not health concerns).
The economic crisis is making many people poorer, so they must be controlled, monitored and subjugated.
The transitions mentioned at the start of this article along with the surveillance agenda (together known as the ‘Great Reset’) are being accelerated at this time of economic crisis when countless millions across the West are being impoverished. The collapsing financial system is resulting in an interrelated global debt, inflation and ‘austerity’ crisis and the biggest transfer of wealth to the rich in history.
As a result, the powers that be fear that the masses might once again pick up their pitchforks and revolt. They are adamant that the peasants must know their place.
But the flame of protest and dissent from centuries past still inspires and burns bright. So, with that in mind, let’s finish with Leon Rosselson’s lyrics in reference to the Diggers movement (Billy Bragg’s version of the song can be found on YouTube):
In sixteen forty-nine
To St. George’s Hill
A ragged band they called the Diggers
Came to show the people’s will
They defied the landlords
They defied the laws
They were the dispossessed reclaiming what was theirsWe come in peace they said
To dig and sow
We come to work the lands in common
And to make the waste grounds grow
This earth divided
We will makе whole
So it will be
A common treasury for allThе sin of property
We do disdain
No man has any right to buy and sell
The earth for private gain
By theft and murder
They took the land
Now everywhere the walls
Spring up at their commandThey make the laws
To chain us well
The clergy dazzle us with heaven
Or they damn us into hell
We will not worship
The God they serve
The God of greed who feed the rich
While poor man starveWe work we eat together
We need no swords
We will not bow to masters
Or pay rent to the lords
We are free men
Though we are poor
You Diggers all stand up for glory
Stand up nowFrom the men of property
The orders came
They sent the hired men and troopers
To wipe out the Diggers’ claim
Tear down their cottages
Destroy their corn
They were dispersed
Only the vision lingers onYou poor take courage
You rich take care
The earth was made a common treasury
For everyone to share
All things in common
All people one
We come in peace
The order came to cut them down
We come in peace
The order came to cut them down
Whether or not we’re moving toward a post-neoliberal world, the question that matters is if we’ll make a better one.
This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.
Special economic zones are not just a product of the effort to free capitalism from democratic authority. They are a response to a broader anxiety about power imbalance between multinational corporations and national governments.
This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.
Socially necessary labor should entitle us to respect, decent pay, and safe conditions—not a duty to work relentlessly, without complaint.
This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.
POLITICAL BYTES: By Ian Powell
There is a reported apparent rift within cabinet between Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta and Defence Minister Andrew Little over Aotearoa New Zealand’s position in the widening conflict between the United States and China.
While at its core it is over relative economic power, the conflict is manifested by China’s increased presence in the Pacific Ocean, including military, and over Taiwan. Both countries have long Pacific coastlines.
However, the United States has a far greater and longstanding economic and military presence (including nuclear weapons in South Korea) in the Pacific.
Despite this disparity, the focus is on China as being the threat. Minister Mahuta supports continuing the longstanding more independent position of successive Labour and National-led governments.
This goes back to the adoption of the nuclear-free policy and consequential ending of New Zealand’s military alliance with the United States in the mid-1980s.
On the other hand, Minister Little’s public utterances veer towards a gradual shift away from this independent position and towards a stronger military alignment with the United States.
This is not a conflict between socialist and capitalist countries. For various reasons I struggle with the suggestion that China is a socialist nation in spite of the fact that it (and others) say it is and that it is governed by a party calling itself communist. But that is a debate for another occasion.
Core and peripheral countries
This conflict is often seen as between the two strongest global economic powers. However, it is not as simple as that.
Whereas the United States is an imperialist country, China is not. I have discussed this previously in Political Bytes (31 January 2022): Behind the ‘war’ against China.
In coming to this conclusion I drew upon work by Minqi Li, professor of economics at the University of Utah, who focussed on whether China is an imperialist country or not.
He is not soft on China, acknowledging that it ” . . . has developed an exploitative relationship with South Asia, Africa, and other raw material exporters”.
But his concern is to make an objective assessment of China’s global economic power. He does this by distinguishing between core, semi-periphery, and periphery countries:
“The ‘core countries’ specialise in quasi-monopolistic, high-profit production processes. This leaves ‘peripheral countries’ to specialise in highly competitive, low-profit production processes.”
This results in an “…unequal exchange and concentration of world wealth in the core.”
Minqi Li describes China’s economy as:
“. . . the world’s largest when measured by purchasing power parity. Its rapid expansion is reshapes the global geopolitical map leading western mainstream media to begin defining China as a new imperialist power.”
Consequently he concludes that China is placed as a semi-peripheral county which predominately takes “. . . surplus value from developed economies and giving it to developing economies.”
In my January 2022 blog, I concluded that:
“Where does this leave the ‘core countries’, predominately in North America and Europe? They don’t want to wind back capitalism in China. They want to constrain it to ensure that while it continues to be an attractive market for them, China does not destablise them by progressing to a ‘core country’.”
Why the widening conflict now?
Nevertheless, while neither socialist nor imperialist, China does see the state playing a much greater role in the country’s economy, including increasing its international influence. This may well explain at least some of its success.
So why the widening conflict now? Why did it not occur between the late 1970s, when China opened up to market forces, and in the 1990s and 2000s as its world economic power increased? Marxist economist and blogger Michael Roberts has provided an interesting insight: The ‘New Washington Consensus’.
Roberts describes what became known as the “Washington Consensus” in the 1990s. It was a set of economic policy prescriptions considered to constitute the “standard” reform package promoted for economically struggling developing countries.
The name is because these prescriptions were developed by Washington DC-based institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and the United States Treasury.
The prescriptions were based on so-called free market policies such as trade and finance liberalisation and privatisation of state assets. They also entailed fiscal and monetary policies intended to minimise fiscal deficits and public spending.
But now, with the rise of China as a rival economic global power globally and the failure of the neoliberal economic model to deliver economic growth and reduce inequality among nations and within nations, the world has changed.
What World Bank data reveals
Roberts draws upon World Bank data to highlight the striking nature of this global change. He uses a “Shares in World Economy” table based on percentages of gross domestic production from 1980 to 2020.
Whereas the United States was largely unchanged (25.2 percent to 24.7 percent), over the same 40 years, China leapt from 1.7 percent to 17.3 percent. China’s growth is extraordinary. But the data also provides further insights.
Economic blocs are also compared. The G7 countries declined from 62.5 percent to 47.2 percent while the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) also fell — from 78 percent to 61.7 percent.
Interestingly while experiencing a minor decline, the United States increased its share within these two blocs — from 40.3 percent to 52.3 percent in G7 and from 32.3 percent to 40 percent in OECD. This suggests that while both the G7 and OECD have seen their economic power decline, the power of the United States has increased within the blocs.
Roberts use of this data also makes another pertinent observation. Rather than a bloc there is a grouping of “developing nations” which includes China. Over the 40 year period its percentage increased from 21.5 percent to 36.4 percent.
But when China is excluded from the data there is a small decline from 19.9 percent to 19.1 percent. In other words, the sizeable percentage of growth of developing countries is solely due to China, the other developing countries have had a small fall.
In this context Roberts describes a “New Washington Consensus” aimed at sustaining the “. . . hegemony of US capital and its junior allies with a new approach”.
In his words:
“But what is this new consensus? Free trade and capital flows and no government intervention is to be replaced with an ‘industrial strategy’ where governments intervene to subsidise and tax capitalist companies so that national objectives are met.
“There will be more trade and capital controls, more public investment and more taxation of the rich. Underneath these themes is that, in 2020s and beyond, it will be every nation for itself — no global pacts, but regional and bilateral agreements; no free movement, but nationally controlled capital and labour.
“And around that, new military alliances to impose this new consensus.”
Understanding BRICS
This is the context that makes the widening hostility of the United States towards China highly relevant. There is now an emerging potential counterweight of “developing countries” to the United States’ overlapping hegemons of G7 and the OECD.
This is BRICS. Each letter is from the first in the names of its current (and founding) members — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. Around 40 countries have expressed interest in joining this new trade bloc.
These countries broadly correspond with the semi-periphery countries of Minqi Li and the developing countries of Roberts. Predominantly they are from Africa, Asia, Middle East, and Central and South America.
Geoffrey Miller of the Democracy Project has recently published (August 21) an interesting column discussing whether New Zealand should develop a relationship with BRICS: Should New Zealand build bridges with BRICS?
Journalist Julian Borger, writing for The Guardian (August 22), highlights the significant commonalities and differences of the BRICS nations at its recent trade summit: Critical BRICS trade summit in South Africa.
Al Jazeera (August 24)has updated the trade summit with the decision to invite Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to join BRICS next January: The significance of BRICS adding six new members .
Which way New Zealand?
This is the context in which the apparent rift between Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta and Defence Minister Andrew Little should be seen.
It is to be hoped that that whatever government comes into office after October’s election, it does not allow the widening conflict between the United States and China to water down Aotearoa’s independent position.
The dynamics of the G7/OECD and BRICS relationship are ongoing and uncertainty characterises how they might play out. It may mean a gradual changing of domination or equalisation of economic power.
After all, the longstanding British Empire was replaced by a different kind of United States empire. It is also possible that the existing United States hegemony continues albeit weakened.
Regardless, it is important politically and economically for New Zealand to have trading relations with both G7 and developing countries (including the expanding BRICS).
Ian Powell is a progressive health, labour market and political “no-frills” forensic commentator in New Zealand. A former senior doctors union leader for more than 30 years, he blogs at Second Opinion and Political Bytes, where this article was first published. Republished with the author’s permission.
Hundreds of West Virginia University (WVU) students staged a class walkout outside the school’s student union in Morgantown, West Virginia, on August 21 to protest an administration proposal to cut 32 academic programs and 169 faculty positions. The students, wearing red T-shirts and bandanas as a nod to the West Virginia coal miners who famously went on strike a century ago, chanted “Stop! The!
A preview of our Fall 2023 issue.
This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.
In this discussion, Yuliya Yurchenko, Eric Toussaint, and Sushovan Dhar contextualize Ukraine’s struggle as part of the global movement against neoliberalism and debt. This public forum was organized by the Ukraine Solidarity Network (U.S.) on May 12, 2023 and was co-hosted by Haymarket Books. Each speaker made opening comments, with a discussion. Special thanks to Nate Moore for assistance with…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
A discussion featuring Yakov Feygin, Daniela Gabor, Ho-fung Hung, Thea Riofrancos, and Quinn Slobodian.
In the midst of Russia’s imperialist war, Ukraine’s unions and popular movements have carried out a double struggle: they have actively engaged in resistance against the invasion while also having to oppose Volodymyr Zelensky’s neoliberal policies and the growing indebtedness of the country fostered by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the European Union. In a recent forum sponsored by…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
After the arrest of the progressive-leaning opposition leader Ousmane Sonko in Senegal, protesters and dissatisfied segments of the political left have taken to the streets. In this exclusive Truthout interview, James Genova discusses the history and political culture of Senegal and talks about the root causes of the ongoing protests and the current crises unfolding in the country.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
A fiscal calamity awaits public schools once pandemic-related federal assistance ends.
This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.
By all indications, Balasore will be remembered as one of India’s worst rail disasters in years with the scale of trauma and devastation still unfolding, writes CPIML (Liberation).
This post was originally published on Green Left.
This post was originally published on Real Progressives.
This post was originally published on Real Progressives.
As French workers intensify their fight against President Emmanuel Macron’s deeply unpopular plan to raise the nation’s retirement age from 62 to 64, the stakes couldn’t be higher.
A poll released Wednesday shows that reactionary lawmaker Marine Le Pen—leader of the far-right National Rally party, the largest opposition force in Parliament—would beat Macron by a margin of 55% to 45% in a head-to-head rematch. The neoliberal incumbent defeated Le Pen in a runoff election last April, but the openly xenophobic and Islamophobic challenger has gained significant ground since their first matchup in 2017.
The new survey was conducted after Macron advanced his planned retirement age hike through executive order on March 16. The president bypassed the National Assembly once it became clear that his legislative proposal did not have enough support to pass France’s lower house.
“We’re in the middle of a social crisis, a democratic crisis.”
Macron’s blatantly anti-democratic move provoked an uproar. The labor movement had already been staging weekly nationwide strikes and peaceful marches since mid-January. But the president’s decision to circumvent a vote last month has brought more people to the streets, with heightened participation from high school and university students, some of whom have set up barricades on campus.
Progressive lawmakers and union leaders have urged the working class to keep up the pressure, portraying the left’s struggle against Macron’s pension attack as a struggle for democracy in France.
“Either trade unions win this, or it will be the far right,” Fabien Villedieu, a representative of a railway trade union, told France Info radio on Thursday. “If you sicken people—and that is what’s happening—the danger is the arrival of the far right.”
Laurent Berger, head of the French Democratic Confederation of Labor, told RTL radio that “we’re still asking for the reform to be revoked.”
“We’re in the middle of a social crisis, a democratic crisis,” he added.
Macron has so far refused to withdraw his proposed pension overhaul, which includes raising the minimum eligible retirement age and increasing the number of years one must work to qualify for full benefits. France’s constitutional council is evaluating the legality of the government’s plans and is set to issue a decision next Friday.
According to The Guardian:
The constitutional council, which has the power to strike out some or even all of the legislation, will assess the pension changes based on a strict interpretation of the law. Constitutional experts say the council is unlikely to strike the legislation down fully.
The government is playing for time, hoping protests and strikes will fizzle out. Unions want to show that the protest movement still has momentum, whatever the council’s decision.
Hundreds of thousands of people have continued to rally across France in recent weeks. The government has responded with an increasingly repressive crackdown.
An 11th round of strikes on Thursday caused further disruption to schools, public transit, and energy production. In addition, clashes broke out “between demonstrators and police on the edges of protests in cities including Lyon, Nantes, and Paris,” The Guardian reported.
Workers’ anger is palpable and mounting.
“In the capital, protesters briefly set fire to the awning of the Left Bank brasserie La Rotonde, well known for hosting Macron’s controversial evening of celebrations when he led the first-round vote in the 2017 presidential election,” The Guardian noted.
Meanwhile, rat catchers threw dead vermin at city hall.
\u201cParis has been without trash pickup for weeks. Chaos and garbage everywhere. And rats: lots of rats.\n\nNow the rat catchers joined the protest against the Pension Reform, and threw the dead vermin in front of the charming Hotel de Ville, Paris City Hall.\n\n\ud83d\udd25\ud83d\udd25\ud83d\udd25\u201d— Paul Serran (@Paul Serran) 1680748331
Also on Thursday, striking workers “forced their way into the building that houses BlackRock’s office in Paris Thursday, taking their protest against the government’s pension reforms to the world’s biggest money manager,” CNN reported. “About 100 people, including representatives of several labor unions, were on the ground floor of the building for about 10 minutes, chanting anti-reform slogans. BlackRock’s office is located on the third floor.”
Jerome Schmitt, a spokesperson for the French labor confederation SUD, told reporters: “The meaning of this action is quite simple. We went to the headquarters of BlackRock to tell them: the money of workers, for our pensions, they are taking it.”
BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager with a nearly $9 trillion portfolio, has not been involved in Macron’s assault on France’s public pension system. But workers targeted the financial institution due to its role in overseeing the private pension funds that they may be forced to rely on.
“The government wants to throw away pensions, it wants to force people to fund their own retirement with private pension funds,” one teacher told Reuters. “But what we know is that only the rich will be able to benefit from such a setup.”
\u201cStriking workers storm BlackRock\u2019s Paris office to protest the corporate giant\u2019s role in privatizing workers\u2019 pensions.\n\nJerome Schmitt, a union spokesperson, said, \u201cThe meaning of this action is quite simple. We went to the headquarters of BlackRock to tell them: the money of\u2026\u201d— More Perfect Union (@More Perfect Union) 1680789576
Le Pen, for her part, “has kept a low profile, hoping to increase her support among low-income workers, many of whom began their careers earlier and will be more greatly affected by the pension changes,” The Guardian reported.
Earlier this week, left-wing luminaries alarmed by France’s escalating repression of pension defenders as well as environmentalists campaigning against water privatization signed a Progressive International petition.
“We stand with the French people in the face of violent crackdowns on popular protest and the criminalization of dissent by Emmanuel Macron’s government,” it states. “The extreme violence of the police and the criminalization by the interior minister are clearly aimed at suppressing the movement against the pension cuts. This is an unacceptable attack on the democratic freedoms and human rights of French citizens.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
