People Before Profit blog

An Interview with Stewart Acuff on a Life in Organizing

Sat, 25 Aug 2012 16:38:00 +0000

Stewart Acuff is America’s best-known and foremost labor organizer. He started union organizing in 1982 as the Service Employees International Union organizing coordinator in Texas where he and his team organized 12 nursing homes in two years. In 1985, Stewart Acuff went to Georgia where he founded SEIU Local 1985 and built the union up to 3000 members. In 1990, he became president of the Atlanta AFL-CIO where he organized and led the historic campaign to unionize the 1996 Olympics, labor’s biggest victory ever in the South. In 2000 he went to work for the national AFL-CIO. Stewart Acuff was organizing director from 2001-2008. Under his tenure the labor movement grew by more than it had in a generation. Stewart Acuff developed the policy and legislation which became the Employee Free Choice Act and led the campaign to pass it. Stewart Acuff then worked as Chief of Staff of the Utility Workers Union of America until May, 2012.

This interview takes place on WSHC Radio, at Shepherd University in Shepherdstown, WV, on the Winners and losers Radio program's Labor Beat Show, which broadcasts 7:30 - 9 AM, EST, Thursdays. The hosts are John Case and John Christensen.

Stewart demonstrates the positive and uplifting faith in working people which has been his trademark for decades, and helped make him the most successful labor organizer in recent labor history.

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Acemoglu and Robinson: Why Nations Fail -- Book Review

Sat, 18 Aug 2012 18:01:00 +0000

Why Natons Fail is the the most important book about the rise and fall of nations and peoples since Jared Diamond's Collapse, and Guns, Germs and Steel, which were the most provocative books on the subject since Frederick Engles' The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State.

Daron Acemoglu is the Killian Professor of Economics at MIT. In 2005 he received the John Bates Clark Medal awarded to economists under forty judged to have made the most significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge. Many winners of this award eventually win a Nobel prize, too. James A. Robinson, a political scientist and an economist, is the David Florence Professor of Government at Harvard University. A world-renowned expert on Latin America and Africa, he is currently conducting research in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sierra Leone, Haiti and in Colombia where he has taught for many years during the summer at the University of the Andes in Bogotá.

Why Nations Fail strives to answer the question that has challenged and usually confounded experts, researchers and policy - makers for centuries: Why are some nations rich and others poor, divided by wealth and poverty, health and sickness, food and famine?

Is it culture, the weather, geography? Perhaps ignorance of what the right policies are?

Simply, argue the authers, no. None of these factors is either definitive or destiny. Otherwise, how to explain why Botswana has become one of the fastest-growing countries in the world, while other African nations, such as Zimbabwe, the Congo, and Sierra Leone, are mired in poverty and violence? Drawing on detailed and original research over a 15 year period, Acemoglu and Robinson survey the histories of the Roman Empire, the Mayan city-states, medieval Venice, the Soviet Union, Latin America, England, Europe, the United States, and Africa to build a new theory of political economy with relevance for the big questions of today, including:

China has built an authoritarian growth machine. Will it continue to grow at such high speed?
Do inequality trends in the US portend a reversal of a 250 year tendency toward more inclusive political institutions? Are we moving away from a virtuous circle of expanding empowerment and toward one in which efforts by elites to aggrandize power create a vicious circle that enriches and empowers a small minority?
What is the most effective way to help move billions of people from the rut of poverty to prosperity? More philanthropy from the wealthy nations of the West? Or learning the hard-won lessons of Acemoglu and Robinson’s ideas on the interplay between inclusive political and economic institutions?

Marxists have a set of categorical expressions such as class, state, means of production, 'objective' conditions, political superstructure, surplus value and others used to describe a political economy that can explain economic and social development. Most derive deductively from Marx's original and careful definition of a 'commodity', a definition with precise economic and philosophical dimensions, buttressed by 20 years of research at the British Museum into the history of the industrial revolution and the rise of capitalism in Britain.

Acemoglu and Robinson come from mainstream macro-economic traditions. But have striven to avoid a lot of well-worn expressions of their own disciplines, nevermind Marxist ones. Instead they develop elements of a new vocabulary to help understand the patterns and narratives that emerge from the vast data on the rise and fall of nations and civilizations they analyze. The most important of these concepts are: extractive and inclusive economic and political institutions, critical junctures, and creative destruction (the last borrowed from Marx via the economist Joseph Schumpeter). Avoiding or minimizing use of standard vocabularies is one way of allowing the data to speak for itself anew. Researchers have access to truly vast data stores in the information era compared to previous generations.

Extractive and Inclusive Economic and Political Institutions

All economic institutions are created by society....politics is the process by which a society chooses the rules that will govern it. Politics surrounds institutions for the simple reason that while inclusive institutions may be good for the economic prosperity of a nation, some people or groups ... will be much better off by setting up institutions that are extractive. When there is a conflict over institutions, what happens depends on which people or group wins out in the game of politics ---who can get more support, obtain additional resources, and form more effective alliances. In short, who wins depends on the distribution of political power....If the distribution of power is narrow and unconstrained, then the political institutions are absolutist, as exemplified by the absolutist monarchies reigning throughout the world during much of history. Under absolutist political institutions ... those who can wield this power will be able to set up economic institutions to enrich themselves and augment their power at the expense of society. In contrast, political institutions that distribute power broadly in society and subject it to constraints are pluralistic. Instead of being vested in a single individual or or a narrow group, political power rests with a broad coalition or a plurality of groups.

There is a close connection between pluralism and inclusive economic institutions. However the connection is more complex than can be captured in a phrase. For example, in the East African nation of Somalia, political power has long been widely distributed---almost pluralistic. Indeed there is no real authority that can control or sanction what anyone does. The distribution of power in this case leads not to inclusive institutions, but to chaos. No meaningful economic activity, trade, or basic security can develop without political centralization. The key to all examples of sustained progress is in combining political centralization with inclusiveness.

Some may object that the expressions "extractive" and "inclusive" are arbitrary; for example, the above definition of extractive at first glance may be little more than saying "extractive means extractive". However the accumulation of historical evidence the authors bring to bear on their subject gives the terms great depth by the book's end. The evidence would have even greater "depth" if examples included the very "extractive" relationship between corporations and workers throughout the history of capitalism. However, the larger points on the synergy between economic and political institutions in every society are clearly made. The cumulative research discussed powerfully argues that inclusive institutions stimulate more sustainable innovation and growth than extractive ones. The latter also can generate growth -- but for a much shorter duration and with greater political instability. On almost every dimension of democratic struggle, especially labor rights, the advantages of greater democratization and broader empowerment -- inclusiveness -- are reaffirmed by the historical record.

One weakness in the authors' analysis is some relative lack of attention to the technological foundations for levels of mass culture that truly make "inclusiveness" possible. But the volume of data mediates this weakness.

The advance of technology and science makes tension between political and economic institutions inevitable in every nation. New technologies replace old, forge new divisions of labor, create new jobs and destroy old ones -- developments that have serious political consequences for elites at all levels. Which brings us to the concept of creative destruction. The ability of a society to maintain inclusiveness depends on its skill -- and sometimes luck -- at managing the powerful forces behind creative destruction.

Creative Destruction

The fundamental problem is that there will necessarily be disputes and conflict over economic institutions...the economic growth which can be induced by institutions creates both winners and losers. This was clear during the industrial revolution in England, which laid the foundations of the prosperity we see in the rich countries of the world today.... Even though mechanization led to enormous increases in total incomes and ultimately became the foundation of modern industrial society, it was bitterly opposed by many. Not because of ignorance or shortsightedness; quite the opposite. Rather, such opposition to economic growth has its own, unfortunately coherent, logic. Economic growth and technological change are accompanied by what the great economist Joseph Schumpeter called creative destruction. They replace the old with the new. New sectors attract resources away from old ones. New firms take business away from established ones. New technologies make existing skills and machines obsolete. The process of economic growth and the inclusive institutions upon which it is based create losers as well as winners in the political arena and in the economic marketplace. Fear of creative destruction is often at the root of the opposition to inclusive economic and political institutions.

Mainstream economics has always been to some extent hamstrung by its aversion --- a better term, in this writer's view, would be simply "fear" -- of Marx. Schumpeter's creative destruction ideas were explicitly derived from Marx's early writing -- for example this famous paragraph from the Communist Manifesto:

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

Nonetheless, creative destruction is a process that invades every economic and political system in history -- slavery, feudalism, capitalism and socialism. It must be mastered and accommodated or it will certainly eventually tear a society up. How fast it operates varies with the pace of technological change, its midwife. But it cannot be denied indefinitely. It is the bane and ultimate ruin of extractive regimes and institutions.

Critical Junctures

When I used the term "luck" above no joke is intended. Throughout history not only general laws and tendencies are at work. Each nation that evolved over the centuries following the Roman Empire's collapse was shaped by some unique geographic, cultural, historical and environmental characteristics. At the time of England's defeat of the Spanish Armada -- a completely unexpected event given the large superiority of the Spanish navy with respect to England's naval resources --- pure chance guided the outcome. Spain had riches in gold and silver from its colonization of the New World, which it invested in its armed forces. England had to tax its Barons to pay for ships. Its colonies and native peoples had no gold. Nonetheless the alliance with broader sections of the landed aristocracy AND commercial interests compelled England to adopt a number of small steps toward inclusiveness and away from absolutism. These steps later proved critical in permitting the more rapid spread of industrialization, democracy and the rise of England as the dominant world economic power from then until World War II.

The Black Death was such a critical juncture: An externality to the existing system of institutional relations that compels a rapid change in institutions to adapt or survive. The Black Death began the decline of feudalism in Western Europe, while feudal institutions in Eastern Europe entered the Second Serfdom. Minor differences in institutions resulted in very different pressures and outcomes from the massive scarcity of labor created by the plague. Peasant rebellions against longstanding fines and levies were successful in the west. In England the attempt by the state to stop the changes of institutions and wages that came in the wake of the Black Death did not work. In 1381 the Peasants' Revolt broke out, and the rebels, under the leadership of Wat Tyler, captured most of London. Though eventually defeated, there were no more efforts to enforce the hated Statute of Laborers.

The discovery of the Americas was also a critical juncture. The response of nations varied sometimes only in degrees, but the differences later led to substantial divergences in development. No two nations have identical institutions. At critical junctures, minor divergences can determine an entirely new historical path.

Institutional Analysis and the USSR

Why Nations Fail surveys many countries and transitions. However, it devotes nearly an entire chapter applying the extractive vs inclusive institutional analysis model to the birth and collapse of the USSR, a subject of interest to many readers of this online journal. The flavor of Acemoglu and Robinson's approach can be seen this narrative. Some excerpts:

* Growth under extractive regimes:

Institutional differences play the critical role in explaining economic growth through the ages. But if most societies in history are based on extractive political and economic institutions, does this imply that growth never takes place? Obviously not. Extractive institutions...must create wealth so that it can be extracted. ..but growth under extractive institutions differs in nature from growth brought forth by inclusive institutions. Most important it will not be sustained growth that requires technological change, but rather growth based on existing technologies. The economic trajectory of the Soviet Union provides a vivid illustration of how the authority and incentives provided by the state can spearhead rapid economic growth under extractive institutions and how this type of growth ultimately comes to an end and collapses.

* Development Under Stalin.

...by 1927 Joseph Stalin had consolidated his grip on the country. He purged his opponents and launched a drive to rapidly industrialize the country. He did it via energizing the state planning committee, Gosplan, which had been founded in 1921. Gosplan wrote the first Five-Year Plan, which ran between 1928 and 1933. Economic growth, Stalin style, was simple: develop industry by government command and obtain the necessary resources for this by taxing agriculture at very high rates....the state did not have an effective tax system, so instead Stalin "collectivised" agriculture. this process entailed the abolition of private property rights to land and the herding of all people in the countryside into giant collective farms run directly by the Communist Party.

...It sounds like a recipe for disaster and stagnation, if not outright collapse. When the state or narrow elite controls all resources, neither the right incentives will be created nor will there be an efficient allocation of the skills and talents of the people. But in some instances the productivity of labor and capital may be so much higher in one sector or activity, such as heavy industry in the Soviet Union, that even a top down process under extractive institutions that allocates resources toward that sector can generate substantial growth.

*Conclusion

... The fact that truly effective incentives could not be introduced in the centrally planned economy was not due to technical mistakes in the design of the bonus schemes. It was intrinsic to the whole method by which extractive growth had been achieved. It had been done by government command, which could not solve some basic economic problems. It could not manage creative destruction and the deployment of technological innovation in production....[to fix the problems] the Soviet Union would have to abandon extractive economic institutions, but such a move would have jeopardized their political power. Indeed, when Mikhail Gorbachev started to move away from extractive economic institutions after 1987, the power of the communist Party crumbled, and with it, the Soviet Union.

These conclusions will be controversial and painful to some -- but the essential economic narrative will be difficult to refute. Readers looking for pat answers will not find them in Acemoglu and Robinson. Their model has the virtue of rendering no final verdict on the debate between Left and Right, capitalism and communism. Instead they challenge all with their determination to find harmony between the ideals of democracy and economic progress, and offer a new vocabulary to help shed light on themes that have deep currents throughout human history.

Its a great read -- check it out.

Some left intellectuals fall short on strategy and tactics

Sat, 18 Aug 2012 15:33:00 +0000

The left is blessed with a plethora of astute writers and powerful voices against capitalism and its predatory policies.

Their articles get wide circulation and they occasionally pop up on television. Last year they spoke regularly at the Occupy protests.

Like many others in left and progressive circles I look forward to their interventions. They offer both insight and inspiration.

But as good social analysts as they are, some of them - Noam Chomsky and Chris Hedges come to mind - come up short at the political level. By that I mean that, other than insisting that people on the left resist the predatory actions of capitalism, they offer little in the way of strategic and tactical thinking on how to build an enduring mass movement.

Or to put it differently, while their critique of capitalism and insistence on resistance to its dehumanizing values and practices are on point, what is missing from their articles, speeches, and interviews is a sense of how to proceed, that is, how to fight in concrete conditions.

They don't inform their audience about which change agents are critical to the success of any social struggle or to the durability of any social movement.

Nor do they suggest which alliances among which social groups are crucial to political advance.

The reader/listener gets no insight as to what the main political obstacle to social progress, including getting rid of capitalism, is at this moment.

And besides the need to resist capitalism's outrages, you get no inkling as to what the main political task is at this moment - certainly not the coming elections.

If organized labor enters into their analysis, it is never as a prime-time player whose role is of overriding importance to prospects of any social movement's durability, advance and victory. In fact, too often labor either comes in for criticism or as an afterthought or as just one among many other agents of change.

Few of these analysts emphatically say that the nation's working people - the multi-racial working class and its organized sector - have to be in the forefront of the democratic and revolutionary movement for it to succeed.

Much the same could be said about their attitude towards people of color and the struggle against racism. Yes, they vigorously oppose racism, appreciate the struggle role of people of color, and appeal for unity, but one doesn't get the impression that the participation of people of color is considered strategic to advancing the democratic and class struggle or that the fight against racism is at the center of the struggle for all-people's unity and victory.

Nor does one get the impression that these writers see women as a strategic force.

As far as divisions in the ruling class, little is mentioned. In fact, the tendency among these commentators is to treat the ruling class (including its two parties) as one undifferentiated mass - quite a different approach than that taken by the prophetic leader Martin Luther King, who was very conscious of splits in the top layers of society and between and within the two parties.

Perhaps more fundamentally, an appreciation of the balance of class and social forces at any given moment doesn't figure much in their political calculus nor do the mass moods of the overall population - all of which can lead to a sense that either everything is possible or nothing is possible but individual resistance.

What they put a lot of stock in - I would say even go overboard about - is expressions of resistance on the part of radicalized young people. A decade or so ago it was the youth in Seattle who were getting rave reviews from this grouping of left intellectuals and more recently the Occupy movement was at the top of their agenda.

Certainly both these manifestations of youthful upsurge justifiably generated excitement on the left and beyond. Both contributed mightily to recasting the conversation in the country. But neither one constituted by itself a fundamental political challenge to the existing power relations and arrangements nor replaced the main social forces of change.

Now don't get me wrong. Young people play an absolutely important and necessary role in any social movement. And in many cases their actions set off wider struggles in society. But to note their necessary and catalytic role in any broader social advance is not the same as turning them into a people's - oops I dare say the word - vanguard.

To be fair, no one on the left has come up with a compelling enough strategic and tactical visualization that reaches and excites millions and moves the country forward in a democratic and socialist direction.

I would like to think the Communist Party's strategic and tactical policy (which corresponds with the outlook of broad social forces in many ways) merits closer attention. But that is not my decision. In the end, life will decide whose strategic and tactical vision will capture the hopes of tens of millions.

The Crisis in Pakistan-United States Relations: Analysis of Recent Events

Sat, 18 Aug 2012 15:12:00 +0000

Background:

On November 26, 2012 in a brazen incident NATO attacked the Salala post on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border in which 24 Pakistani soldiers were killed. Pakistanis were shocked at the incident since it was unprovoked. The Government of Pakistan reacted by immediately closing the Ground Lines of Communications (GLOCs) for NATO supplies into Afghanistan from the Karachi port. Also, it demanded an apology and an investigation from the United States for the incident. Later on, an investigation was conducted by NATO which suggested that mistakes had been committed on both sides. Pakistan firmly rejected the NATO version and insisted that it was at fault in the Salala incident. It characterized the incident as "unprovoked, deliberate and planned (Dawn, July 5, 2012). The United States seemed to be forthcoming at the apology demand but later backed down because of another terrorist incident in Kabul blamed on the Haqqani network based inside North Waziristan inside Pakistan. Resultantly, relations between the United States and Pakistan were seveere3ly strained reaching to the lowest ebb in history. Finally, some seven months after the Salala incident Hillary Clinton the United States said sorry and on July 3, 2012 Pakistan and the United States reached an agreement to reopen the closed GLOCs. However, the United States still characterized the Salala incident as being the result of a mutual mistake and did not touch upon the key Pakistani demand of cessation of drone attacks inside North Waziristan, inside Pakistan (Dawn, July 5, 2012). More importantly, Pakistan was assured by the United States that there would not be any repetition of such an incident. Pakistan's reaction in closing GLOCs cost the United States at least $700 million, as it rerouted supplies across more expensive northern routes. It was reported that he final bill may have been significantly greater (Dawn, July 7, 2012).

Prime Minister Raja Pervaiz Ashraf said on July 5, 2012 that the decision to open the GLOCs was taken in the national interest and in light of parliamentary recommendations. The agreement was announce as a "turning point" by Hina Rabbani Khar Foreign Minister of Pakistan who further stated that "the progress achieved so far would now help the two countries to engage seriously on other issues (Dawn, July 5, 2012). Raja Pervaiz, Prime Minister of Pakistan said The News International Friday, July 06, 2012):

As the drawdown of NATO and Isaf forces got underway, Pakistan wanted to facilitate the process in the interest of regional peace and stability, because peace and stability in Afghanistan was closely linked to peace and stability in Pakistan...Pakistan was a partner of the international community and playing a leading role against terrorism as a frontline state....that the prolonged deadlock over the issue of supplies could have hurt the country's relations with the NATO countries, including friendly and brotherly Muslim states such as Turkey, Qatar and UAE... that it was for the first time in the country's history that a bipartisan parliamentary consensus was evolved on the broad contours of foreign policy....Pakistan made it clear that its red-lines should be respected and in the same context the new terms of engagement as approved by Parliament were visibly heeded to by the US and Nato countries.

Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, PML (Q) leader and a coalition partner of the ruling PPP also supported the government's decision to open NATO supplies and said (The News International, July 06, 2012):

No country could afford international diplomatic isolation...that the presence of US, NATO and ISAF forces in Afghanistan represented 50 countries under the UN mandate.... the diplomatic impasse over the issue could have created problems for Pakistan at the UN. ..Foreign policy decisions needed to be taken in a dispassionate and cool-headed manner as the stakes were too high to be left at the mercy of emotions and irrational behavior.

United States Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton held a three-way meeting with the Khar Pakistani Foreign Minister and Afghan Foreign Minister Zalmai Rassoul in Tokyo, Japan on July 8, 2012. Clinton said her discussions with Khar covered "stalled Afghan reconciliation efforts". They spoke as well about "enhancing US-Pakistani economic ties to make it a relationship defined more by trade than aid". She "acknowledged the lingering difficulties hindering US-Pakistani cooperation, without getting into details". She expressed hope on July 8, 2012 that Pakistan's recent reopening of the GLOCs might lead to a "broader rapprochement in US-Pakistani relations after a difficult period for the reluctant allies" http://dawn.com/2012/07/08/clinton-looks-for-better-us-pakistani-cooperation/ accessed July 8, 2012.

Clinton further said (http://dawn.com/2012/07/08/clinton-looks-for-better-us-pakistani-cooperation/ accessed July 8, 2012):

We are both encouraged that we've been able to put the recent difficulties behind us so we can focus on the many challenges ahead of us....We want to use the positive momentum generated by our recent agreement to take tangible steps on our many shared, core interests. The most important of these, was fighting the militant groups who've used Pakistan as a rear base to attack American troops and jeopardize the future of Afghanistan....focused on the necessity of defeating the terror networks that threat the stability of both Pakistan and Afghanistan, as well as the interests of the United States... a challenging but essential relationship....I have no reason to believe that it will not continue to raise hard questions for us both...But it is something that is in the interests of the United States as well as the interests of Pakistan.

The Recent Politics of the Pakistani Opposition

As expected, the Opposition parties, nationalist groups, and Islamic radicals in Pakistan were greatly angered at the development of the GLOCs reopening. The Zardari Government wasn't caught by surprise at the reaction and did anticipate such a reaction. The Difa-e Pakistan Council (DPC) announced protest march from Lahore to Islamabad on July 8, 2012. It was commonly known that the DPC was supported by the ISI. The DPC was headed by Maulana Samiul Haq of the JUI. The DPC was composed of a group of Islamist parties and other right-wing groups, including but not limited to, JUI, Jamaat-i Islami, the banned Jamaatud Dawa headed by Hafiz Muhammad Saied, Sheikh Rasheed Ahmed, Hameed Gul, Hafiz Rehman Makki (Dawn, July 5, 2012). Maulana Samiul Haq said that the Zardari Government had "defied the parliament which had clearly decided not to resume the supply as long as drone attacks were not stopped (Dawn, July 5, 2012). The main Opposition party the PML (N) and the Pakistan Tehrik-i Insaaf (PTI) also condemned the restoration of the GLOCs calling it a "violation of the parliament's resolutions" and also announced protest marches. Undoubtedly, the popular outcry against the United States was immense. Give, the high anti-Americanism in Pakistan, these protest marches would attract the people of Pakistan. The Opposition was bent upon simply riding the wave of the popular disgust against the United States. Mistaken politics at its best.

Was this really a breakthrough in United States-Pakistan relations as depicted by the Government of Pakistan and its coalition partners? Was the stalemate in Pakistan-United States relations been really broken and a new beginning made? Clearly the Government of Pakistan was in a damage control exercise. What actually happened was aptly captured by the Wall Street Journal which commented: http://www.thenews.com.pk/7/7/2012 accessed July 8, 2012

Pakistan had backed down as its anti-Americanism had exacted a diplomatic price...Pakistan is spinning the deal with the US to reopen NATO supply routes to Afghanistan as a triumph of its diplomacy. But it was Islamabad that climbed down from its extortionate demands and accepted the status quo ante. That's a big change from previous situations when it was able to extort more aid out of Washington...The deal ended a seven month-long diplomatic standoff that began with a Nato incident on the Af-Pak border in November and led to the closing of land routes through Pakistan. Islamabad sought a full apology from the US for provoking the firefight in which 24 Pakistani troops died. But Washington says the Pakistanis opened fire first in the border clash, and even now it offers a carefully worded statement that it's 'sorry for the losses... Pakistan's demands were partly bluster from the military, which has been looking to salve its pride since the Osama bin Laden raid. But the Obama Administration wasn't exactly eager to make nice with a country Americans increasingly believe is acting in bad faith. The generals also noticed that Defence Secretary Leon Panetta last month reached out to their traditional rivals in New Delhi, and their usual paranoia probably kicked in. It's useful to remind Pakistan it's not indispensable. The other reason Islamabad adopted such a stance and stuck to it for so long is more worrying. The ruling party - beleaguered at home - had whipped up so much jingoism that it feared a political backlash if it backed down easily. Opposition politicians, mostly from religious parties, are now threatening protests against the government, so Islamabad could yet try to back out of the deal. Pakistan's leaders find it convenient to open the Pandora's Box of radical Islam and anti-Americanism for short-term gains. It's Pakistan itself that has paid the highest price for that ugly bargain."

No matter the politics and the spin of the so-called breakthrough in Pakistan-United States relations, the reopening of the GLOCs can be seen as an overall a positive development for both the United States and Pakistan. Contrary to the impression given by the Government of Pakistan and the Opposition political parties, the drone attacks were happening with the permission of both the Zardari Government and the Pakistan Army. The only thing was that the Pakistanis were not willing to admit it because of the fear of a political backlash. Increasingly, Pakistanis had turned against the United States and the politicians as well as the Army brass knew full well that saying so would be a political risk for them. In some ways the drone strikes was a fake issue. There was a convergence of national interests, as seen by the Pakistan military and Government of Pakistan, on allowing these drone strikes inside Pakistan. Therefore, the lingering issue of drone strikes in North Waziristan can be resolved in some manner like sharing responsibility in some ways.

The real sticking point in Pak-US relations and the main divergence of national interests wasn't the war on terror inside Pakistan but the one in neighboring Afghanistan. This problem is real and remains. The real issue of conflict is the playing out of the so-called endgame in Afghanistan after the United States and NATO /ISAF troops depart by the end of 2014.

Obviously, the Government of Pakistan would like to see the Taliban in power in Afghanistan. At least, this seems to be the present thinking in the power corridors of Pakistan today. Whether this actually happens or not is dependent on a number of factors though. Anyway a lot depends on how this endgame is played out between the US and Pakistan. It remains to be seen whether the United States and Pakistan join hands on Afghanistan or not. . In the interest of regional peace it can be argued that both countries must join hands to earnestly plan for a viable endgame in Afghanistan. Nothing can be more significant than a doable Afghan endgame strategy for both the United States and Pakistan. Is Pakistan ready for the challenge? Unfortunately, the Zardari Government is too preoccupied with the internal political and economic crisis to do much in this foreign policy area. Plus, it simply doesn't have the capacity to take any meaningful action. Given the control of the army over foreign and security policy, not much can be expected of the Zardari Government. Also, the Foreign Office doesn't have a viable strategy in place to deal with the situation. It must be emphasized that peace in Afghanistan remains a formidable challenge.

Post-2014 Afghanistan?

The departure of US & allied troops from Afghanistan by end 2014 doesn't suggest that there will necessarily be peace in the country. There is a real danger of a civil war erupting in Afghanistan after the departure of these troops. The politics of Afghanistan is complex. Country is weak and fragmented on ethnic lines. The Afghan Taliban are somewhat supported by Pakistan, while the Northern Alliance is supported by the US & India. The Hazaras are supposedly supported by Iran. In the eventuality of the departure of United States and ISAF/NATO troops, the Taliban will make a bid for power in Afghanistan. The Taliban can be expected to be resisted in taking over Hazara, Tajik and Uzbek areas, however. Today, the Taliban control the Southern portion of Afghanistan only. Meanwhile, the United States has signed a strategic partnership agreement with Afghanistan to assist it in building the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) to strength of 230,000 at a cost of $4 billion. Given the reality of Afghanistan, the chances of a half decent national army are very slim. The present Karzai Government in Afghanistan is not only very corrupt but also weak and ineffective. Therefore, Karzai isn't expected to last long after most Nato-led foreign combat troops leave Afghanistan in 2014. Then the Karzai Government will assume responsibility for most of its own security.

The past performance of the Karzai Government has been dismal. In total Afghanistan has received nearly $60 billion in civilian aid since 2002. The World Bank says foreign aid makes up nearly the equivalent of the country's gross domestic product On July 8, 2012 international donors pledged $16 billion in a major donors' conference held in Tokyo, attended by about 70 countries and organizations. The conference aimed at setting aid levels for the crucial period through and beyond 2014, The US portion is expected to be in the decade-long annual range of $1 billion to this year's $2.3 billion. The total amount of international civilian support represents a slight decline from the current annual level of around $5 billion. Japan, the second-largest donor, says it will provide up to $3 billion through 2016, and Germany has announced it will keep its contribution to rebuilding and development at its current level of $536 million a year, at least until 2016. The $4 billion in annual civilian aid comes on top of $4.1 billion in yearly assistance pledged last May at a Nato conference in Chicago to fund the Afghan National Security Forces from 2015 to 2017.But the flow of aid is expected to sharply diminish after international troops withdraw, despite the ongoing threat the country faces from the Taliban and other militants.

Along with security issues, donors had become wary of widespread corruption and poor project governance. The aid was intended nevertheless to provide a stabilizing factor as Afghanistan transitions to greater independence from international involvement. But it will come with conditions. The pledges were expected to establish a road map of accountability to ensure that Afghanistan does more to improve governance and finance management, and to safeguard the democratic process, rule of law and human rights, especially those of women. Meanwhile, Karzai had vowed to "fight corruption with strong resolve." But he still faces international weariness with the war and frustration over his failure to crack down on corruption. Clinton had acknowledged that corruption was a "major problem." The donors planned to set up review and monitoring measures to assure the aid is used for development and not wasted by corruption or mismanagement, which has been a major hurdle in putting aid projects into practice (http://dawn.com/2012/07/08/afghan-donors-meet-offer-16b-in-development-aid/ accessed July 8, 2012).

The Next Steps:

What is happening in Afghanistan must be carefully analyzed from the perspective of different stakeholders, especially Pakistan. The Pakistan military is worried that India is making inroads in Afghanistan and desires a role in the future of the country. More importantly, it believed that the United States was encouraging India in this development. The military leadership was apprehensive of any Indian role in Afghanistan and also firmly believed that these developments were happening at the cost of Pakistan. The reality is different, however.

What should Pakistan and United States do now in Afghanistan?

1. They should join hands to broker a power sharing arrangement in Afghanistan. Different power groups in the country, especially the Taliban and Northern Alliance, are brought on the negotiating table for this exercise.

2. Intense and coordinated diplomatic activity shall be required for any meaningful intra-Afghan dialogue. These negotiations will surely be tedious but are needed nevertheless.

3. Pakistan must facilitate a Taliban-United States deal to the extent possible. The United States work with Pakistan on this one.

4. Both hold a series of meetings in Islamabad to chalk out the contours of a viable endgame in Afghanistan.

5. Later, invite other regional players like India, Russia, China, CARs and Iran to contribute their share in finalizing the endgame.

There are a number of things for Pakistan to do immediately:

1. Convince the US that Pakistan knows Afghanistan like no other and therefore must be trusted to play a key role in the endgame. A number of Confidence Building Measures (CBMs) are suggested:

a) Renounce the old discredited policy of 'Strategic Depth' and 'a friendly Western border' propounded by the Pak Army. Most importantly, the Zardari Government must wrest control of the Afghanistan policy from the hands of the military. It must immediately announce a stopping of support for the Haqqani network and the Lashkar-i-Taiba. Pakistan must engage the United States which is counting on it to help convince the Taliban and other groups fighting the Afghan government to halt violence and enter into a political dialogue.

c) Stop the Defa-e Pakistan Council from going overboard in protesting against the United States.

d) Joint efforts with the United States to tackle the Islamic extremist problem.

The United States, on its part, must also take immediate action in a number of areas:

1. Stop covert CIA activity in Pakistan

2. Reach out to the Pakistani Civil Society in a new effort at 'winning hearts and minds'.

3. Acknowledge that some past actions are responsible for a great deal of animosity among the Muslims.

4. Support the Palestinian cause and stop Israeli military subjugation and occupation of Palestine.

5. Support a final solution of the lingering Kashmir dispute between India and Pakistan

6. Openly support Pakistan in taking a final and decisive military campaign against terrorist's hideouts in North Waziristan. Remember the Pakistan Army is exhausted and badly stretched to do this alone.

7. Stop threatening Iran over the nuclear issue. Give diplomacy a fuller chance.

8. Release the stuck up CSF money to Pakistan.

Before the reopening of the GLOCs Pakistan-United States relations were at its lowest ebb but there are signs that they can still be repaired. Both sides must resolve their differences with a new determination. The US and Pakistan have a convergence of national interests in seeking a stable and peaceful Afghanistan. Therefore, both can, and should, work as real partners rather than rivals. Pakistan and United States also have much in common at the societal and cultural level also. There is no reason for the deep mistrust to prolong any longer. Undoubtedly, the United States has enemies inside Pakistan. Some Islamic radicals and other nationalists are convinced that the United States is their perpetual enemy. They believe that the United States is an enemy of Islam. Bad experiences and history has sharpened these perceptions. Circumstances change and so can perceptions. The people of Pakistan dislike the state policies of the United States but not just hate America as such. Media reports exaggerate these negative perceptions on both sides. The point is that these misperceptions cannot and should not come in the way of sensible policy making. Both need each other to build lasting peace in the region. Dreams of a prosperous, peaceful and secure Pakistan are the aspiration of all Pakistanis and Afghans. However, dreams of peace and prosperity aren't just made without sustained effort at achieving them. Proper planning and wise policy making is required. Prudence is the need of the hour and not just emotions. It is pertinent to add that Pakistan will lose more if the Afghanistan endgame falters. Most importantly, Pakistan must act immediately. The US-Pakistan Relations and the Issue of Afghanistan

Pakistan-US relations have been seriously strained because of recent events. This has happened primarily because of the logjam on the Afghanistan issue. Lack of vision and straight thinking in both American and Pakistan's leadership circles is mainly responsible for the sharp deterioration in these relations. Continuing American drone strikes inside Waziristan in Pakistan is causing a swell of anti-American feelings in the country. The Obama administration is not going to stop them any time soon. Meanwhile, the level of mutual distrust has created a crisis situation now. The shortcomings Zardari government in power in Pakistan is simply incompetent and preoccupied with the domestic political mess to take any bold decisions on the Afghanistan issue. Unfortunately, the military establishment is still calling the shots on matters of national security and foreign policy. This is largely happening by default because the civilian government is too weak to take charge. The Zardari Government has failed to give any reasonable direction on foreign policy or national security. The US troops will pull out in 2014 and the future power arrangements in Kabul are the main bone of contention between Pakistan and the US. Meanwhile, the negotiations between the US and Taliban in Qatar have stalled. Meanwhile, the US is losing patience with Pakistan as it is still backing the Afghan Taliban who are fighting the ISAF-NATO military forces in Afghanistan from safe havens established inside the country. This is an open secret now. Incredibly, the presence of these terrorist safe havens inside the country is officially denied by Pakistan. Why is Pakistan hedging its bets on the Afghan Taliban? This is happening because of Pakistan's legacy in Afghanistan, especially during the Soviet occupation in 1979 and eventual ouster in1989. Pakistan and the US had a convergence of interests then and both supported the Mujahedeen against the Soviet occupation force. It helped create the Taliban back in the mid-1990s and these connections supposedly matter, given the presence of a large Pakhtun population in the KPK province on the Pakistan-Afghan border area inside Pakistan. Plus, the Pakistan military believed in the infamous doctrine of 'strategic depth' inside Afghanistan as a national interest priority. Supposedly this was part of a larger strategic plan in its combat posture with arch enemy India. However, things have changed and the old doctrine is no more valid. India-Pakistan relations have improved somewhat and Pakistan is less threatened then before. Pakistan is a nuclear power and has formidable military muscle to deter India from any adventure against it. Reportedly, Pakistan has the fastest development in its nuclear establishment in the world. Undoubtedly, Pakistan's military might is awesome and India would never attack Pakistan for the fear of unleashing a nuclear Armageddon in South Asia. Pakistan does not have to fear India now. In other words, Pakistan has attained the stapes where it is reasonably protected against India and other enemies as well. Therefore, Pakistan has the luxury of shifting focus to human security and development areas. The economy of Pakistan faces a formidable challenge and requires immediate attention of its rulers. Pakistan has achieved a lot in the military area and now must focus on the welfare of its people.

Massive corruption, endemic bad governance, mismanagement and misperceived priorities have wrecked havoc in the country. The issue of human security, as opposed to military security, must now be the strategic priority of the government of Pakistan. This requires a paradigm shift as the military establishment is still obsessed with military security issues.

Will the military establishment of Pakistan realize that Pakistan has weakened from within because of the governance crises engulfing it today? Is the military establishment ready to cut its share of the budget pie and divest scarce resources to solve the very serious energy crisis in the country? More importantly, will the Pakistan military establishment give up its policy of backing the Taliban in Afghanistan? Unfortunately, the answer to all three questions remains in the negative. The problem with Pakistan military establishment is that it fails to see the people's aspirations as legitimate. Given its great power in still calling the shots in Pakistan, the military has lost vision of the true national interest of the country. The people of Pakistan just want stability, peace and economic opportunities and do not desire anything else. They want peace in the region which includes both Afghanistan and India. The Government of Pakistan must facilitate the US pullout in 2014 by immediately reopening the NATO supply routes closed since November last after the Salala incident. Insisting on an apology by the US isn't required now. There is still a basis for repairing the US-Pakistan relationship.

There is a convergence of national interest between Pakistan and the US on the issue of peace and stability in Afghanistan after the pullout. The Government of Pakistan must stop from playing favorites inside Afghanistan. It must reach out to the Northern Alliance groups and other non-Pashtun groups in a bid for reconciliation. The role of India in Afghanistan isn't necessarily a big issue for Pakistan. Afghanistan is a member of SAARC and India has legitimate interests in Afghanistan. Pakistan must negotiate an end of Indian interference in Baluchistan by severing its own links with the Jihadist entities inside India. A quid pro quo can be worked out with some tense diplomacy and patience. It is in Pakistan's supreme national interest to have peace and stability in Afghanistan by working out a power arrangement that includes the Taliban. Pakistan must have a proactive foreign policy and should take the imitative to arrange negotiations for a transfer of power after the pullout in 2014. Arrangements can be made to include the US, India, China and Iran in this diplomatic initiative. All concerned stakeholders can and should meet to settle a power-sharing arrangement. In Lebanon different ethnic groups have devised a formula for sharing power and this formula can be applied in case of Afghanistan as well. General elections will have to wait for this formula arrangement. While a Pakhtun can become a President of Afghanistan, other important positions must go to non-Pakhtuns. A sort of balance of power arrangement inside Afghanistan can be worked out and then general elections be held. The point is that the American model of democracy may not work in Afghanistan and a new democracy of ethnic groups power-sharing may be more applicable in tribal Afghanistan. There isn't much time left as these negotiations will be prolonged and tedious at best, and unworkable at worst. In the interest of peaceful and stable Afghanistan it is certainly worth a try. Only Pakistan can host this negotiations arrangement. No other country has more at state in the post-western Afghanistan than neighbor Pakistan. Unfortunately, the leadership of Pakistan is too inept and ineffective to take this needed diplomatic imitative. The region will surely loose if timely action isn't taken now to secure Afghanistan after the US & NATO troops have left in 2014. Eventually, a new peacekeeping force will have to replace the Western troops. It is best that an OIC peacekeeping force is placed to secure Afghanistan for some years. Pakistan can be instrumental in setting up this Muslim peacekeeping force for eventual deployment in Afghanistan. Firstly, Pakistan must get its own house in order and resolve its serious governance issues. A future of peace, prosperity and stability, in Afghanistan beckons both the United States and Pakistan only if they build a true partnership for the purpose. Nothing else will do. Meanwhile, the clock is ticking. Pakistan doesn't have much time to change direction.

Good contracts and community benefits at Yale University -- One union member's reflections

Sat, 18 Aug 2012 14:46:00 +0000

Union workers at Yale University are attending department meetings this summer to discuss their new wages and benefits. New history-making union contracts with the university were signed in June after a year-long organizing effort.

On the Yale University campus, there are many divisions among people: faculty-student, faculty-management, faculty-staff, management-staff, staff-student, academic-nonacademic, blue collar-white collar, male-female, white-black-brown-yellow-red. These distinctions existed in Yale's pre-union days, and they persist today. And even though the campus today is a unionized environment -- Local 34 (Clerical & Technical Workers) and Local 35 (Service & Maintenance) -- in some departments, there had been few daily reminders of the unions where, except during contract-negotiation time, or filing of grievances, members rarely spoke of their union.

In the midst of this environment of diversity, divisiveness, and relative silence, the leadership of Local 34, in particular, decided to organize to strengthen the members' collective voice and enhance their visibility on campus, their ultimate goal being to secure for them the best possible contract.

Historically, the New Haven Board of Aldermen has been a rubber stamp for the Yale's leaders. Whatever Yale wanted or needed, the Board, prompted by the mayor, obliged. To change this scenario, Yale's unions decided, in 2011, to run their own candidates for the Board in the local elections. After all, many rank-and-file members live in New Haven and own their homes in the city.

As a result of grass-roots campaigning in the summer of 2011-community outreach via canvassing and voter registration-union-backed candidates won primaries and all but one of their races in the general election for seats on the Board of Aldermen. Going forward, Yale's leaders would have to contend with employees in their dealings with city government, not just during labor disputes and contract negotiations. The University would be held more tightly accountable for more of its actions. The increased scrutiny would require more transparency of the University when doing business with the city.

Additionally, even before formal contract negotiations began, organizing actions happened on campus. These included union-membership surveys, departmental employee-participation meetings with management-facilitated by the members themselves, petition drives, and campus-wide membership meetings, marches, and rallies.

Based on the surveys, union leaders identified four areas of concern: job advancement (for current employees), jobs pipeline (training and employment opportunities for New Haven residents), health care (for current employees and retirees), and wages.

The goal of the employee-participation meetings was to communicate to the union leadership, in the former case, and to local management, in the latter, members' concerns about working conditions on campus and contract demands. Traditionally, union negotiators present contract demands to management's negotiators. Yale's union leaders aimed to create upward pressure on management by having members present their demands to their (bottom-level) managers.

Union members were not unanimously enthusiastic about all the actions, however, for example, petitions. The petitions declared the workers' value to the daily functioning of the university, and articulated their contract demands. Delegations of workers and union organizers delivered these petitions, unannounced, to university leaders: the president, the provost, the vice president for administration, and deans.

How would these delegations be received? Would leaders take the petitions into their offices, close their doors, and drop them into their trash cans? In that case, the action would have been pointless.

However, union leaders and organizers insisted that presenting petitions, an act of standing up for oneself and declaring one's self-worth, would make a lasting impression on Yale's leaders-even if they did indeed discard the petitions behind closed doors.

General membership meetings, rallies, and marches also contributed to the unions' visibility on campus, as well as throughout the city of New Haven. During the evening rush hour, Yale employees from the central (north) and medical (south) campuses would converge on downtown for a meeting. Afterward, members would spill onto The Green, joining with other unions from around the city, as well as city residents, rallying and marching in solidarity, announcing their presence, articulating their demands: livable wages, job security and advancement opportunities, benefits for current workers and retirees, training and entry-level jobs for city residents.

One union steward framed the struggle in terms of the 99% versus the 1%. In New Haven, it is clear who belongs to which percentile. If you're in the former group, you have to remind the latter that you have value in society, and that they have the resources to compensate you at the level that acknowledges your value, and reflects respect for you as a human being in society. So even if you don't feel anger toward the 1%, you still need to speak up and act out in your own behalf. The struggle of Yale employees is a part of the larger struggle of working people in New Haven, as well as nationally, as reflected in the Occupy Movement, which was organizing and acting at the same time.

Local 34's leaders wanted to have a contract to present to members for ratification by the end of June. Nobody wanted to extend negotiations through the summer, when many employees take vacation time. Members dreaded the prospect of a job action in September, at the beginning of a new semester, if negotiations failed. And given the protracted encampment of Occupy New Haven on The Green-the City went to court to evict the Occupiers before Yale's commencement festivities in May -- along with all the other labor actions throughout the city over the past year, the Yale administration was probably highly motivated to bring contract negotiations to a swift conclusion-more quickly than in previous years.

When the membership ratified their new contract, there were feelings of relief, disbelief, and joy: relief and joy that they had secured a new contract and would not have to strike; relief, disbelief, and joy that they'd gotten everything they wanted-despite the administration's initial resistance to union demands. The members did not have to give anything back, in spite of the economic climate and business leaders' hostile, anti-union attitude nationwide. In addition, members would receive a raise in each of the four years of their contract.

Many felt angry about the partial wage freeze in the current contract, and expressed reluctance to ask for significant raises in the new one, despite Yale leaders' earlier announcement that recent fundraising totals exceeded their expectations, and that Yale had begun to rebound from its portfolio devaluation a few years ago. Citing the current economic crisis, Yale did balk at any wage increases, but union leaders refused to give up their demand for them. They held to all their demands and tirelessly negotiated the best contract for their members, the women and men whose labor makes Yale University function smoothly each day as a world-renowned institution of higher education.

According to the union, "Members will see an average wage increase of 15%-20% over the [4-year] life of the contract. Both Locals will continue to enjoy free premiums at the award-winning on-campus health services, as well as affordable, high-quality alternatives for healthcare off-campus. In addition to these benefits, Local 34 created historic structural solutions to long-standing glass ceilings by creating joint University-Union oversight of internal hiring and promotions. Local 35 won advancement tracks for several job classifications, and "no-layoff" language for the life of the contract."

In addition, "Yale has agreed to invest in training opportunities for city residents and to prioritize local hiring. Local 35's new contract creates a number of new positions in both skilled trades and entry-level work, and Local 34 won language that would reduce the University's reliance on casual work by converting temporary positions into full-time Union jobs available to Local 34 members and New Haven Jobs Pipeline Program graduates."

The Difference Between Capital And Capitalism- -The Emergence Of Social Capital

Sat, 18 Aug 2012 14:23:00 +0000

The 21st century is witnessing an epochal change, something to be noted in the emergence of two economic poles-one dominated by Western capitalism and the other in the process of forming an association of former colonial countries in various levels and forms of economic development. Socio-economic changes have taken place in history similarly, but not with such an explosive and defining character. As an exception, capitalist colonial domination was part of its industrialization impinging on resources and cheap labor for greater personal gain.

There are now three forms of capital accumulation: privately owned industry, stocks, enterprises and financial capital; socially owned government accumulation utilized for industrial development, infrastructure, and forms of social obligations; and, social security wealth belonging to retired workers. Economic growth differs under the control of private and social forms of capital. The former is concerned with private individual accumulation. The latter is concerned with economic growth and improvement of the conditions of the working population, which creates the wealth in industrialized society.

The social security form of capital belongs to the people who have paid in during their productive years to support retirement and is a form of accumulation from their earnings placed in trust with the government for administration. For the past few years, this capital has been used and safely invested in the country and the proceeds added to the accumulation of the retirees.

The emergence of social capital reflects a major change in society, just as the emergence of private capital posited the change from feudalism to capitalism as an economic system and basis of social relations. The growth of social capital is inevitable as private capital ceases to expand domestic growth and job creation in developed Western countries, which comprise one third of the world's population and where labor has succeeded through historic struggles to increase wages and living standards. Hence, industrial growth in developed countries has diminished or ceased. Investments have shifted to former colonial countries, including China, for the past thirty years, with incredible rates of accumulation reflected in the highest earnings of Wall Street despite the 2008 economic crisis, which ended for private capital in mid-2009 but persists in its fourth year with fifteen million still jobless and 17% poverty stricken.

At the turn of the century an organization was formed by Brazil, Russia, India and China, under the name BRIC and renamed BRICS after South Africa joined in 2005, with the intention of economic development without foreign private capital controls to counteract the negative effect of the Western capital invasion. This is indicative of the creation of a bipolar economic world. BRIC has now called a meeting in 2012 to organize trade and investment stimulating national economic growth with little emphasis on the military other than defense.

The epochal change we now witness diminishes the domination of private capital and opens the road to structuring harmonious societies that combine private and social capital to maintain and accelerate industrial development destined to create social security and sustain the working population, which, in any event, is the prime source of national wealth.

Wealth itself was generated by labor time in all forms of industrial production of commodities and salable structures, which ultimately exchange into the money form of accumulation in the marketplace leaving it to private finance to determine the direction of economic growth and avoid the consequences of economic crisis. A number of instances of government use of social capital in China are: loans to private corporations for the development of high-tech, the direct financing of necessary industries with low capital gains that assist major industrial and human needs such as energy, increased food production at affordable prices, increased minimum wages at a rate of 10% per annum until 2015 aimed at enhancing consumption to rebalance the loss of foreign markets to balance consumption at home to balance the loss of foreign exports, the enlargement of infrastructure and social services in the fields of education, health, etcetera and other social necessities.

One must acknowledge the fact that it is capitalism that developed industrial production, which is the basis for creating a society of plenty that could take care of all its population and eliminate exploitation. Long before capitalism under tribal communal society there was no exploitation of man by man. Elders ran a collective society, which lived off nature's own production with little input of human labor other than gathering. That changed when some clever individuals learned how to use the forces of nature itself to increase nature's own production. They ultimately enslaved others, creating class-dominated society. This continued for centuries, developing into control of extended agriculture terrain and animal husbandry which became the main means for human sustenance and growth-this, under feudal serfdom.

During the feudal era, private ownership in many forms developed in early stages where individuals produced desirable items as commodities and ultimately exchanged them for money. Individual production flourished and created a mass market. Some clever individuals set up facilities inviting producers into a "factory" where they sold their products to the owners devoting sales time to additional production for mass marketing. This relationship between owner and producers changed into another form of remuneration-that is, wages based on the total labor-time in the production process. This was the beginning of the capitalist wage-labor industrial system, which then went through a number of changes ultimately culminating in mass production and monopolization. Today the further development of high-tech, which reduces the direct labor time content, is taking place in undeveloped countries with cheap labor to the neglect of increasing production in the home countries where their capital base had originated. Thus, the wage-labor form of exploitation became the basis of industrialization and economic growth.

Adam Smith, in his "Wealth of Nations" did not deal with the exploitation developed with factory industrial production nor did he recognize the danger of economic crisis resulting from relative overproduction affecting market conditions. Troubled by the tendency towards crisis, he wrote a second book in which he expressed the feeling that "an invisible hand" corrects the economic crises in the system with no indication of relative overproduction and market disruption. The quantification of labor-time is basically the value of a commodity because the monetary payment to the laborer is only a part of the values created. The total labor-time is realized in the market in the form of money, and that is where the accumulation of wealth begins, since the money becomes a form of capital and can be re-injected into a growing economy and can increase financial private wealth accumulation in the market place. It was not until 1857 when Karl Marx published his first volume of Capital establishing classical economics which clearly indicated the source of wealth in labor time and the tendency of interruption of the process in periodic overproduction relieved by a shutdowns and economic crisis. Thirty years later, British economists supplanted this with neo-Classical Economics, which posited the market exchange as the source of wealth. The market is merely the area into which the inherent wealth in the commodity is exchanged for its value in money resulting in capital accumulation.

Capitalists compete but also monopolize, circumvent competition, control prices and wage-labor relationships. Monopolization leads to a higher level of capital investment magnifying exploitation. Ultimately, financial capital dominates the system and withdraws support for industrial capital in countries with high labor costs. The USA is an example for the last 30 years. Today there is not enough industry to absorb the available work force without expansion, which might have to take place with government assistance. Finance capital investment in low labor cost countries generally includes high tech which adds profit because it requires a small labor force further increasing profits.

The present economic crisis in the USA is an excellent example of the fact that the capitalist class itself has split into two functions-financial and industrial-with finance, the dominant factor, resulting in a cessation of industrial growth, neglect of existing industries and the continuation of an economic crisis for workers and the middle class. Investments overseas have created more profits in 2010 than in the history of Capitalism. True, industrial capital seeks a profit and wealth accumulation, but at least jobs are created contributing to national economic development and adding to the level of consumption.

Financial capital has dominated the capitalist system in the United States since the election of Regan in 1980, abandoning national industrial growth. In a historical sense, it has lost its right to run society. In fact, the Glass-Steagle Act, which regulated finance capital, was eliminated before the turn of the century. It is the real enemy to change, standing in the way of mass industrial development in total disregard of human conditions. Interestingly, financial capital itself in Western Europe is in trouble. The German capitalist class is an exception in its sense of history and its adaptation to change. When it took political power in the early 1870's, it established the Welfare State to protect itself under capitalism; it has maintained a multi-party political system, representing various economic sectors. Furthermore, sensing world changes among former under-developed countries, they have established economic relationships with emerging countries, especially with China, welcoming Chinese capital investments in their own country and establishing mutual trade relations.

The German capitalist class recognizes the development of a bipolar world and is adjusting itself to participate in the changing international economic relations. Germany recognizes the growth potential of an organization named BRICS, which is planning an international meeting of former undeveloped countries in the spring of 2012 to foster economic unity, working with each other in trade and investment and no military involvements. This is a second pole in a bipolar world that is growing, notwithstanding denigration in the Western press, with the prospect of raising material investment and trade to stimulate living standards for where two-thirds of the world population resides.

Obviously, the world is changing in a positive direction. The only thing that would stop it is a war. There is only one country conducting military maneuvers and occupations on a global scale. Sorrowfully, it is the USA, which is not being supported by Western European nations as exemplified in the so-called NATO bombing in Libya which left the USA holding 75% of the bag for an operation in this guise. The New York Times wrote about that, and they agree. Just think about how federal money (which is social capital), now spent for destruction, could be used to revive industries and create jobs, which will then reduce the denigration of life in a humanist approach to improving living standards. Such a saving of capital by the federal government, as a result of reducing the Pentagon budget and the conduct of wars, can become accumulated social capital to be deployed in high-tech as well as protecting the country, its terrain, services, and people. Private capital can still be involved profitably, along with social capital and grow the economy to take care of the whole population.

In fact, Karl Marx observed, after noting class differences in France, "the Bourgeoisie will continue for a long time after the establishment of a socialist economy", appreciating the creativity of private capital. The Chinese put it a different way: "the creation of a Harmonious Society" combining private capital with government social capital in economic growth for the sake of improving the condition of the entire population. Hence, one might say that the continued growth of industries will depend upon national economic planning rather than individual capitalist enterprises and politics. This is an economy buttressed with government and private finance guided by a national growth plan. Furthermore, government-financed loans to private enterprises, oftentimes in joint-ventures, solidifies growth and achieves the national plan; but this could not happen with the dominance of private capital since the plan would have to be based on national requirement rather than private interests with necessary compromises but socially and financially successful.

China is on that road, though it faces many contradictions in a society still plagued by feudal relations and the contradiction of wage-labor relationships with an overall vision of building the first high-tech industrial economy in the world under national planning. Do they have problems? More contradictions than any other country ever-because their population is fraught with multiple human natures reflecting productive relationships of different eras being molded into harmony, a process which is not an easy task. We are now observing higher levels of contradiction in the development of democracy in China which ultimately, based on the majority, would be the wage working sector as it develops a massive unity supporting a government that continues to develop the country without private capital domination. We should take our hats off to the successful Chinese leadership especially under Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao, the former concentrating on guiding peaceful foreign relationships and the latter dealing with domestic questions, and both, leading the development of the next five-year plan which never has, nor will include the development of armed forces other than defensive necessities, because everybody knows where the threat comes from...and it is not the European countries.

By 2016 China has projected that their national production will equal that of the USA and then, surpass it. When one considers the fact that the Chinese are spending 90 billion USD per year for defensive military, one cannot help but realize how much social capital, that would be consumed in building offensive military forces, is being saved and used for socially productive purposes. This is a good example of why they were able to grow so rapidly and became the second largest economy in the world and destined to become the largest by mid-century, by tripling production to satisfy their population of 1.3 billion and growing. One must note this is the development of a harmonious society-by combining the use of private and social capital to achieve a centralized national plan.

Capital and Capitalism as categories are now historically different. "Capitalism" as a system developed capital as a form of money hoard used for continued exploitation and private accumulation. Accumulation of capital has divided in two forms with different social contents. The Chinese political system welcomes private capital investment in its multi-capital system but demands that private capital is invited to function together with social capital as part of, but not in control of, the national plan. Thus, social capital is now invested by the Chinese government as well as by Chinese individuals. That is a new production relation and historic contribution to humanity. In the last analysis, based on its ability to produce, this structure of capital investment will ultimately lead into a kind of high-level tribal existence, sans class aspects, with productive output reaching a level filling the needs of all. Let us call THAT Communism! "Socialism" is a historically necessary transitional stage to the ultimate state. To quote Karl Marx, the essence of socialism is reflected in his words: "from each according to ABILITY, to each according to CONTRIBUTION".

This Marxist conception of economic and social development was based upon the bourgeoisie continuing and even growing, within a harmonious society and overall economic plans not in the hands of but requiring, private capitalists who must adjust to the laws of humanistic social development as the objective of industrialization. Beyond that, Marx described the ultimate productive and social relations as "from each according to ABILITY, to each according to NEED"-which might be called a humanity and planet protecting industrial system without class antagonisms.

In the turn of the 21^st century we are witnessing a movement in that direction, essentially an economic development to achieve humanism and social justice-an idea first created by Jesus and followed throughout centuries of religious sentiment, which, in the latter part of the 18^th century in England, saw the first expression of the idea of socialism when religious movements (not the religious institutions) demanded of the new government that they add "a bit of socialism" giving the vote to men (today we include women).

The lesson is-"capital" itself is not the enemy. Capital now exists in two forms-private and social. Private capital is welcomed since it carries with it knowledge of industrialization that is the heart of building a society under present forces of production. Therefore, the real lesson is building industries with full advantage of ability for NATIONAL development. Private accumulation is respected, provided it obeys the law and stays subordinate to a new form of democratic political structure yet in the making. Private capital accumulation must be guided and combined in a new socio-economic relationship; otherwise we will have nothing but continuing economic crisis and the kind of anti-social decline we are witnessing today.

In the vernacular -Bless Occupy Wall Street- as Jesus the humanist might have done, having given his life to eliminate man's inhumanity to man. Historic change has created a positive direction for economic and social development, applying the humanism of religious sentiments with the addition of Marx's economic vision so that politics will follow the social needs of humanity for true economic and political democracy and freedom.

Sidney J. Gluck

E-mail: sjgluck@aol.com

Copyright March 15, 2012, reprinted with permission from author.

China's "peaceful" rising-A Marxist Historian's View

Sat, 18 Aug 2012 12:15:00 +0000

The following is an edited and expanded version of a presentation I gave at this years Left Forum at Pace University

First let me say that while I am not an historian of Asia and China, I did study Chinese East Asian history at City College with Conrad Schirokauer, whom I remember very fondly, and as a minor field at the University of Michigan with Albert Feuerwerker and Samuel Chu.

Memories of the "old normal" on China

In those days, Chinese history, or rather the history we studied ,ended in 1949. The Cultural Revolution was raging in China and it was being hailed by anarchist oriented New Left radicals and those I today call kindergarten "Communists" who formed groups to rival the CPUSA as they identified subjectively and selectively with Mao Tse-tung-the Progressive Labor Party,(PL) the Revolutionary Communist Party(RCP), and the Communist Party-Marxist Leninist(CPML)t[1]

But much of the scholarship of the time on China was liberal-in the tradition of John Fairbank, Benjamin Schwartz, and of course Owen Lattimore, who continued in academia the thinking of the "old China hands" who had been purged in the state department and Foreign Service after World War II[2]

While one could not clearly identify with the Chinese Communist party (I was occasionally warned about that in a gentle way) the achievements of the CCP in winning over masses of people, the corrupt and reactionary nature of the Kuomintang regime, and the exploitation and oppression of the Chinese people were at the center of understanding modern Chinese history.

In the study of the Soviet Union, of course it was very different. Joseph Stalin was an ecumenical devil; the Bolshevik revolution was a "coup" against the real February Revolution. Everything the Soviets did was cynical, ruthless, and the opposite of what they said. [3]

Today, things have changed in academic scholarship and popular media. Since the Soviet Union was destroyed a generation ago, Mao Tse-tung is no longer played against Joseph Stalin; he has joined

Joseph Stalin in the upper echelons of capitalist demonology, ironically as the defenders of the Vietnam War sought to portray him nearly a half century ago.

The New Portrayals of China-Capitalist Surrealism or Schizophrenia?

Since Deng Shao-ping, whatever one may think of his policies, did not become a Chinese Gorbachev (and there have been no Chinese Yeltsins and Putins to overthrow the Chinese Communist party and lead a new class of compradors and regional warlord bosses tied to the major capitalist states, and this shows no sign of happening), the relationship of capitalist world system and capitalist states toward the peoples republic remains very contradictory.

Some may nervously remember what is believed to be an old Chinese proverb-"be careful what you wish for; it may come true". The capitalist world did get from Deng the opening up of China to capitalist investment and significant trade (the latter not quite what they expected). They also gained an informal but significant strategic alliance from Deng against the Soviet Union in its last period-an alliance which increased divisions within Soviet leadership and may have contributed to the Gorbachev forces gaining power.[4]

They, the defenders of the capitalist path and their pundits both in the world of academic work (what sadly is often what the great social scientist Thorstein Veblen called the higher superstition) and mass media(what is often propaganda aka spin), are still looking for Chinese Gorbachevs to be followed by Chinese Yeltsins and Putins to give them what they want and have wanted since the Opium wars,--that is a weak China that they can control and use for their own profits.

Capitalists however clever they may be are compelled by thesystem in which they maneuver to act out the old definition of reactionary-to learn nothing and forget nothing. Even though they today trade with China, export capital to China under conditions that they are not completely happy about, and they accept Chinese credit for their own debt ridden economies, they still cheer on the Dalai Lama and all Chinese at home and abroad who appear to be enemies of the CCP. Since capitalists by nature are anti-intellectual (too much time thinking is bad for business) they do not stop to wonder why the China market they dreamed of in the past has become China's market.

China as "New Russia" is still there dream of a "free China"-Russia except for its nuclear weapons is back to some extent where it was in world affairs in the Czarist period-dismembered, its anti-Communist government weak, the major capitalist syndicates coveting its natural resources, trying to tie it to them, and succeeding in tying former Soviet Republics to them with loans and even military bases.

China's mixed economy path on the other hand has in the larger sense worked; it has since the revolution and particularly since it adopted its mixed economy path over the last three decades lifted more people out of poverty than any nation in human history. [5]

Just as politicians like Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the U.S. and others through the world adopted policies taken from the socialist movement to both save and reform capitalism, especially state investment based on Keynesian economic theory, Chinese leaders have adopted policies taken from capitalists, the use of markets and private investment for profit, along with a great deal of Keynesian economic theory, to develop socialism in China.

In the U.S, the political organizations and mass media of the right seventy five years ago and forever after accused Roosevelt's government of advancing socialism and Communism. In the U.S. and in the world, many on the non and anti-Communist left who have no real power or access media except when they criticize mainline Communists ,(the capitalists have always understood the value of having enemies of their main enemy)have written off China as a capitalist country.

China today is made a scapegoat for both the "evils" of Communism as seen by anti-Communists and also the "evils" of capitalism as seen by much of the non and anti-Communist left, what I call the lone ranger left, those who go from situation to situation, country to country, striking blows in the abstract for the working class, for revolution, and then marching off to the next demonstration for the next country-attacking sweatshops in China while the cities of the U.S. team with sweatshops. Condemning Chinese unions and labor laws while we in the U.S. have the worst labor laws for workers and just about the weakest trade union movement in the developed. World. Condemning "genocidal" policies against a Tibet about which they know nothing while keeping silent largely about the conditions of life in the slum ghettoes of the U.S. (where millions of people of color face daily dehumanization) about which they want to know nothing.

This lone ranger left, even when it rides into China, is sort of the reverse of Norman Thomas famous comment about liberals-that is they are more sympathetic to socialism the further away it is from the United States.

The groups of the lone ranger left are more critical and hostile to attempts to construct socialism in ways different from their views the further away it is from the United States and their abstract criticisms, sometimes for criticisms, sake means that the they nothing to contribute to the construction of socialism with American characteristic. It is easy after all to fight for Chinese workers at Apple Plants in New York, when less than one out of ten private sector workers in the U.S. are unionized, and millions of undocumented workers line up in front of supermarkets as day laborers with no protections of any kind.

What is China today?

As I see it, it is the world's greatest experiment in social construction and no one can say with any certainty where that great social experiment will lead to? But we can sympathize and empathize with the Chinese people and those of us who are for socialism can and must struggle for Sino-American friendship and cooperation, struggle to learn from and help each other.

Let me look briefly at Chinese history, a history which means little to capitalists or to the lone ranger left, These are my views based on my past study and analysis, not necessarily the views of my comrades in the CPUSA

Chinese feudalism, with its landlord-scholar bureaucrat economic political power structure interacting dialectically with its rationalist-idealist Confucian ideology, existed for millennia in large part because it as it developed became the most advanced feudal system in the world, absorbing conquerors expanding without over extending itself, keeping merchant capitalists and others who might threaten it at bay.

But the landlord class, its mandarin state machine and its Confucian ideology, could not withstand the assault of industrial capitalism, which in the name of "civilization and progress" free markets" and" the rule of law" fought wars to sell opium that destroyed the bodies and minds of millions of Chinese people; seized Chinese territories; looted and burned the emperor's summer palace in 1860; established unequal treaties and extraterritoriality for its agents, largely turning the Chinese people into servants in their own homes.

And then of course, for the Chinese, there was Japanese imperialism's annexations and its master plan to gain complete control of China as the foundation for its becoming the great Empire of Asia, removing and supplanting all of the European imperial powers and the U.S.

Where were the capitalist states and their agents when it came to preserving the human rights and civil liberties of Chinese people, not to mention their right to food, clothing, shelter, without which all other human rights are cruel jokes before the Chinese revolution?

In reality the capitalist imperialist states mission of "civilization and progress" was to wait like vultures for Chinese division, weakness, and then to take more and more from the crumbling feudal empire; to carry forward the savage suppression of what capitalists call the Boxer Rebellion; to hypocritically refuse to support the people's democratic reformer Sun Yat-sen and instead support the warlord of warlords, Yuan Shih K'ai ,as he betrayed the Chinese anti-feudal revolution of 1911 . Why? Yuen would give the consortium of capitalist banker and traders the economic concessions that they wanted and that was all they cared about in China in 1913 or in the Caribbean and Central America at the same time. As Franklin Roosevelt would say in the late 1930s about the military strongman of a Carribean country owned largely by U.S. interests and backed by U.S. marines, he was a "son of a bitch but our son of bitch." Yuen, like Ch'iang Kai-shek a decade later and many others through the world, was "our son of a bitch" who would protect U.S. capitalist economic and later military interests, and that was the real meaning of "freedom and democracy" as the capitalist powers practiced it.

And for China that was only the beginning. When the Soviet Union and the Comintern made anti-imperialism a foundation of world Communist policy and helped to craft a united front of the Chinese Communist party and Sun's KMT, all of the major capitalist powers opposed Sun, continuing their internecine rivalries, supporting their warlord stooges.

What a difference a month makes. March, 1927, Nanking, while the United Front under Chiang Kai-shek is still in existence, British, U.S. and Japanese ships bombard KMT outposts.

In April, when Chiang turned on Communists, workers and students in the bloody Shanghai massacre, betraying both the united front and the policies and legacy of Sun Yat-sen and claiming tens of thousands of lives, then all of the major capitalist states threw him their support as he became the "strong man" all of them except the Japanese wanted, since the Japanese did not want to "share" China with other imperialist states

The issue then became the battle over China, with Japanese imperialism by far, quantitatively and qualitatively ,the greatest evil, engaging in its aggressions , annexing Manchuria, bombing Shanghai and eventually, after a second United Front was established, launching a full scale war in 1937---the real beginnings of WWII, in which the people of China would be subject to war crimes and crimes against humanity on a scale comparable to what the Soviet people and the people of the Jewish religion in Europe were subject to at the hands of Hitler fascism and its fascist allies[6]

As for the U.S, the New Deal government eventually stood with Chiang's regime against the Japanese imperialists and also allied itself with the Soviet Union and the beleaguered British Empire to fight against the fascist German-Japanese axis, even though U.S. oil companies from 1937 to June 1941 continued to supply with oil the Japanese war machine as it carried out its atrocities in China. Fortunately for the world's people, this was not too little too late. One can only imagine what a Republican government, following the dictates of former President Herbert Hoover, who rejected this policy in favor a "fortress America" isolationist approach(expanding U.S. power in the Western Hemisphere and continuing to maintain economic and political relationships with both Axis and Allied powers) would have meant for the eventual outcome of the war had it been in power.

Under the heroic, and no one can seriously call it anything different, leadership of Mao-tse tung, Chou En layi, Chu-[7] teh, Deng Shao -ping and the revolutionary vanguard of the Chinese Communist party, the Chinese people fought back against Japanese imperialism, tying down millions of Japanese troops in a war of national liberation and social revolution which continued after the war as the Kuomintang with the support of the Truman administration sought to restore the prewar regime, to return to landlord rule with Chiang K'ai-shek as the warlord of warlords. [8]

However, short of a U.S. invasion on the scale of the Japanese, this was impossible and such an invasion was of course impossible,given both U.S. public opinion, geopolitical realities, and the overall commitment of U.S. cold war policy planners to "save" Western Europe and Japan, the devastated but developed capitalist regions, from socialist revolutions.

At the height of their arrogance, though, postwar reactionaries used the cold war political climate in the U.S. to carry out sweeping purges of those New Deal and progressive elements in the U.S. government who sought a peace policy with the new Peoples Republic of China . They were able successfully to contend that the U.S. had "lost China," thanks to Soviet agents and Communist spies in the U.S. government, as if China somehow was U.S. territory like Hawaii and such momentous events in history could be reduced to this espionage fairy tale.

The Days of McCarthy, the "Old Nixon", and a small Island called "free China"

Americans whatever their political views are not the people to judge the Peoples Republic of China. Before 1945, the U.S of the major imperialist powers had been the least of China's enemies. From 1946 to the rapprochement of the 1970s it became the greatest of China's enemies. Influenced by the development of the cold war and the postwar purges it brought about in the U.S., particularly, the hysteria fomented by Senator Joseph McCarthy, an alcoholic sociopath with who, the support of big capital, used the Chinese revolution as a point of departure to accuse the Truman administration of being under the control of Communist agents who orchestrated the "Red Chinese takeover" successive U.S administrations did the following;

Intervened in the Chinese Civil War to permit the Kuomintang to establish a fraudulent Republic of China on Taiwan in 1950;

Blocked the seating of the peoples Republic in the United Nations until 1971;

Threatened China's borders in the Korean War, leading to Chinese intervention and then engaged in nuclear threats or brinkmanship at a time that China had no nuclear weapons;

had the CIA work with feudal religious elements in Tibet to foment an uprising against the peoples republic;

aided Kuomintang commandos in various provocations and assaults on Chinese territory ;

refused to recognize the Peoples Republic of China fully for 29 years;

used its influence under the Truman and especially Eisenhower administrations to try to encourage other nations not to recognize or trade with China; engaged under the Eisenhower -Dulles administration in confrontations in the Formosa Straight that almost led to full scale war.

Some Lessons for Today, Or History Does Matter Unless One Wishes to Be Run Over By It

But that's old history you say. Who cares? What about labor conditions in Chinese factories. Chinese trade policies costing American jobs. Chinese pollution. The Chinese military buildup? That is all that matters

What do we care about Opium Wars, Taiping and Boxer Rebellions, tens of millions perishing in famine and war, American oil companies and other firms helping to arm Japan in the late 1930s while they engaged in mass murder in China, the loose John Foster Dulles talk about the use of nuclear weapons against China . Besides the moral and ethical questions involved, and the colossal hypocrisy of our ruling class's present position, we must both understand and care if we, meaning the broad left, are not to become the "useful idiots" of those who provoke Sino-U.S. conflict in ways that can only strengthen reactionary forces.

We indeed, all of the major capitalist nations should be "thankful" that the Communist Party of China continues to lead the Chinese people-were any narrow national party committed to capitalist development in power in China, a party like our own Republicans, they would certainly seek revenge for the abuse that China as a nation and its people have suffered over the last 170 years.

A rational China policy that a serious left seeking to represent the American working class should endorse as I see it is can and must include the following

First, a commitment not to use China as an excuse for the U.S. military industrial complex. Chinese military spending is second to the U.S. in the world, but we should remember that China, with four times the population of the U.S. is currently spending in U.S. dollars 1/6 of what the U.S. for all the propaganda about increasing Chinese military spending and the really absurd revival of the containment doctrine against China in Asia

Second, an economic policy that benefits both peoples. Raising the living standards of Chinese people in terms of their money incomes and of American people in terms largely of their social incomes will increase the mass purchasing power of both people, enabling them to purchase each other's goods without costing each other jobs as is currently the case.

Third, a clear commitment to socialism with intellectual and cultural freedom, a version ofwhat the CPUSA here has long called "Bill of Rights Socialism." I would say to my Chinese, American and international friends and comrades that intellectual and cultural freedom is not only precious but much more necessary under socialism than under capitalism.

Under socialism political and economic leadership is united, not separated institutionally as it is under capitalism. Open discussion and debate does not prevent large errors, but it does prevent the establishment of bureaucratic cliques who treat ideas and policies the way capitalists treat stocks and bonds-as their investments to be protected regardless of the consequences. And a society where intellectual freedom reigns is a healthy society and one that fosters loyalty among the masses to the socialist system.

It was the Marxist movement which advanced the struggle for democracy through the world. And in the Communist wing of that movement, democracy for the people, not only inside political parties, is do important to be left to social democrats, who often see the protection of democratic rights as a tradeoff with the acceptance of capitalist institutions and political economy

And there is much that we can learn from China today First, we can learn from China's mixed economy forms of planning, its control of state finance, and its advances in alternative energy development.

We can and must work together to create the foundation for economic cooperation that will greatly lesson the power if not eliminate entirely the transnational energy corporations who in alliance with feudal regimes in Western Asia hold both the developed and developing world hostage to their price fixing policies; to the IMF world bank system which channels the flow of investment capital to undermine the sort of public sector mixed economy that China is developing and advance free market "jungle" capitalism.

The Chinese have never said nor would they say that they would remake the U.S. in their image.

We must stop trying to remake China in our image, real or imagined. Not only because it wrong, but because it is absurd and impossible

In that sense we can begin to seriously advance with our friends and comrades in China and through the world a genuine policy of "civilization and progress" based on developing socialist economic forms, cooperative development, and international peace.

[1] Since this was the 1960s and compulsory mass education was in existence, Kindergarten Communist is my updating of Lenin's famous critique of "leftwing Communism---an infantile disorder." These groups, fragments of which still exist, fought with anarcho syndicalist types like the "Weather Underground." In 1976, there was a reunion of the defunct SDS at which in which this telling moment was recorded by a journalist. A group of SDS alumni were looking at a picture in which Hua Go-fang was toasting Mike Klonsky, CPML leader, at a banquet in Peking. One SDSer mentioned the absurdity of the leader of 900 million people toasting the leader of 900 people as a working class leader. Another, suggesting how much the student radicals really knew about China, looked at the picture and said "who is that Chinese man with Mike Klonsky." This to me is an example of these groups understanding of and use of Mao and the Chinese revolution.

[2] . Established academics like Fairbank particularly did much better than foreign service staff, messengers who were blamed and punished fo their accurate messages to U.S. policy makers about the mass support that the Chinese Communist party had because of its reforms in areas where it had leadership and its successful mobilization of a peoples war of national liberation against Japanese imperialism. This produced a disconnect which would become apparent during the Vietnam War resistance in the U.S., when East Asian questions in the U.S. government where handled by rigid cold warriors led by Secretary of State Dean Rusk(a reactionary "china hand" who advanced through the government purges) while the academic scholarship of Fairbank and others helped enable a generation to understand the national liberation struggle in Vietnam in terms of what had happened a generation before in China

[3] The work of E.H. Carr and others who sought to understand without ideological hostility what the Soviets were trying to build , influential work in the Interwar period and during WWII, was cut short in NAT0 bloc countries, the U.S. especially, as Soviet studies became "Kremlinology" in the post WWII period, led by such figures as the American Richard Pipes and the well-named Englishman, Sir Robert Conquest, and many others, who profited from edited collections of Marxist and Soviet writing while the wrote tunnel visions histories of the Soviet experience. They and their contemporary successors, including Michael McFaul, U.S. ambaasador to the "New Russia," remind me most of the Priests of the Teutonic Knights, portrayed so brilliantly in Sergei Eisenstein's film, Alexander Nevsky, as they blessed the troops invading Russia. To be fair, there is an ungoing attempt to develop a serious "post cold war Soviet studies and scholarship

[4] The Sino-Soviet conflict is really well beyond the scope of this essay. However, without going into the divisions and conflicts between the Khrushchev and Mao Tse-tung leaderships and the positions taken by various Communist parties in the world, including the CPUSA, in that conflict, it is important to understand what the Sino Soviet split meant in world affairs. The two great revolutionary powers of world socialism, bordering each other as they spanned Europe and Asia, not only ended their alliance, but became enemies and rivals. Together, they might built the foundation for a socialist economic system that could have resisted the capitalist world economic system, offering both a model for socialist development to people engaged in national liberation struggles and enabling the successful revolutions for socialism and national liberation to take more and more of the world's territory, people, and resourcw out of the capitalist world system. Instead, the conflict led both to seek adjustments to the capitalist world system and at this time has marginalized not socialism, but any serious possibility of a socialist world system at the near future.

[5] There is endless debate on how and why this has happened but no one can deny that it has happened. Some argue that the "Cultural Revolution" with all its negative aspects, undermined much of traditional feudal China and thus set the stage for the achievements of recent decades. Others see the "Cultural Revolution" as a devastating period to both Chinese institutions, the Chinese Communist party and state, a setback to Chinese development from which China has not completely recovered.

[6] Although more and more of this history is known, not that much of has been absorbed in the U.S. nor is it seen as an integral part of the genocidal policies which both Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan advanced in Europe, Asia, and the Pacific. Thanks to a U,S, grant of immunity, the Japanese Emperor and others in the Japanese royal family, who either signed off or played a direct role in the mass murder of soldiers who had surrendered and civilians, the "experiments" in bacteriological warfare, the mass rape of Chinese women, were never prosecuted for these crimes against humanities although a small number of direct military perpetrators were

[7] Interestingly enough, recent scholarship has tried to credit Kuomintang forces for carrying the brunt of the war against the Japanese on the Chinese mainland, an interpretation which would have surprised both the U.S. military in China and the Japanese, whose genocidal "burn all, kill all" campaigns in North China especially were aimed at destroying the revolutionary mobile armies led by the Chinese Communist party, whom they regarded as their main enemies.

[8] Chiang in reality would in his policies by essentially the successor to Yuen Shih-K'ai rather than Sun Yat-sen, a shrewd warlord seeking always to out maneuver his political rivals, clever but without any social vision or policy that would enable him to achieve anything positive for the Chinese people.

Reconciling religion, Sexuality, and Communism

Sat, 18 Aug 2012 11:23:00 +0000

My biggest challenge in my life has been reconciling my faith and my political orientation. Equally a struggle is my sexuality. But at the same time I struggle with being both a Christian and a socialist. The three seem worlds apart when cross compared at first glance.

I can't say it's been easy. I've been subjected to accusations and comments on my blog and Twitter feeds that I am somehow a bad person for holding onto all three identities. But are things really that bad? Maybe it's time to take a second look at these three things which seem irreconcilable.

My faith has always been an important part of my life. I grew up in the Evangelical Church. As I got older I started learning about other forms of Christianity and social justice. I recognized many of the hypocrisies and errors the Church was committing towards the poor, women, racial and sexual minorities and other marginalized groups.

I ended up joining the CPUSA because I found myself agreeing with many of the things they supported. I then faced the daunting task of reconciling those things with becoming a socialist.

I always like reading the CPUSA convention discussion "Religion in the Current Period." I take great comfort that there's resources available like that. This brings me to my next point, we in the CPUSA are particularly lucky to have our own religion commission that works to outreach to people of faith within the party.

I think it's very important that we have this kind of outreach to progressive people of faith like me. The CPUSA is seeking to build and lead a broad based coalition of the working class. Many working class men and women are people of faith. And it's just not Christianity; there also are Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, and other progressive faith communities out there just waiting to be tapped into for support.

I know the history between Communism and people of faith has been rocky, and I also admit I don't have all the answers on what Marxist thinkers like Lenin, said negatively about religion. But I do know that the CPUSA and many progressive peoples of faith have much in common and can learn from each other.

And I also recognize that secular, atheist, and agnostic party members do bring much to the table and that I too can learn from them. I admire their strength on keeping Church and state separate. Not only does this vital separation insure that all regardless of belief are equal under the law and that no faith or church is supreme over others or that church doesn't influence political decisions. It also protects communities of faith from each other and from government interference.

Which brings me to my last point, my faith and sexuality; in my opinion this has been my biggest struggle. It's not easy being gay, and Christian. It was hard enough to come out to my family, although in the end they've been supportive enough to get me through some hard times. Many people ask why? People on the right say it's impossible to be gay and Christian.

People on the left shake their heads in disbelief and ask "Why?"

"Why cling to the very thing that oppresses you?"

My answer: Religion only oppresses when it's in the hands of the oppressors. Of which for much of American Christianity is true. When it's in its pure form, it offers hope and a message for a better tomorrow beyond the hurt and anguish that's so full in this world.

Once again I know what traditionally my faith says on being gay. I know traditionally the Bible is read as saying "You can't be gay."

And I know science says being gay isn't a choice and is as normal as heterosexuality. But I also know that Jesus interacted and liberated all sorts of people that the Bible says were bad originally; the disabled, the sick, the poor, prostitutes, the list goes on and on. I take great comfort in those parables and stories of Jesus defending those who could be considered in modern day terms the "working class."

Because although I may have trouble getting around the passages on being gay, I don't have any trouble on those with Jesus, Jesus didn't condemn and he liberated those who were outcast. I stick with my faith because of that message of hope.

And to me the CPUSA is the best chance for that hope. A party and an organization dedicated to uniting the progressive movement and the working class for a better future.

One day I want to meet another man and form a life partnership with him. I want to build a life together permanently with him. And in the future when we're old and ready to pass on, I want to be able to look back with him on all our accomplishments. And I hope one of those accomplishments is that through the CPUSA we were able to build a better world for everyone who is currently outcast and oppressed or in the working class; a world where my hope is a reality.

Coming to Grips with Zizek

Tue, 07 Aug 2012 21:00:00 +0000

Two new books by Slavoj Zizik (Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, 1038 pp., and Living in the End Times, 504 pp.) have just been reviewed by John Gray ("The Violent Visions of Slavoj Zizek") in July 12, 2012 issue of The New York Review of Books. Professor Gray is to be commended for wading through 1500 pages of undiluted Zizek (and perhaps saving some of us from having to do so). I propose to review Gray's article and thus give a meta-critique, as it were, of some of Zizek's views as presented by Gray. If anyone is stimulated to go on to read Zizek so much the better, or worse as the case may be. You can find Gray's original article here:The Violent Visions of Slavoj Žižek by John Gray | The New York ...…. My reflections are divided into five parts.

1.) Zizek has produced over 60 books in the last two decades or so and has become one of the most famous public intellectuals in the West; propounding a sort of non-Marxist Marxism. The NY Review article has a picture of the philosopher sitting up in his bed in Ljubljana, Slovenia with a framed picture of Stalin on the wall behind him. New Yorkers may remember that he addressed the OWS movement in Zuccotti Park last October.

So what is Zizek's message? At one time he was a member of the Communist Party of Slovenia but he quit in 1988 and has since articulated a critique of capitalist society more influenced by a strange version of Hegel than by Marx. Gray says a CENTRAL THEME of ZZ's work "is the need to shed the commitment to intellectual objectivity that guided radical thinkers in the past." Intellectual objectivity is a BOURGEOIS ILLUSION and most radicals, at least most Marxists, have always been partisans for the working class. Gray should be clearer about what ZZ is trying to express with this criticism.

ZZ wants to, in his own words, "repeat the Marxist 'critique of political economy', without the utopian-ideological notion of communism as its inherent standard." We had better be pretty familiar with, at least, the three big volumes of Das Kapital before we decide on accepting ZZ's "repeat" of Marx's project! ZZ doesn't think the world communist movement was radical enough. He writes, "the twentieth-century communist project was utopian precisely insofar as it was not radical enough." What does this mean? "Marx's notion of the communist society," ZZ writes, "is itself the inherent capitalist fantasy; that is, a fantasmatic scenario for resolving the capitalist antagonisms he so aptly described."

2.) It is all very well for ZZ to put down what he thinks is Marx's notion of communist society, but as a matter of fact neither Marx nor Engels spent much time speculating about a future communist society precisely because they thought such idle speculation unwarranted; they were more interested in dissecting the nature of capitalism and the methods needed to overthrow it. ZZ at least follows their example as Gray points out that nowhere in the 1000+ pages of Less Than Nothing does ZZ discuss what he thinks a future communist society would/should be like.

What he does discuss says Gray (who calls the book a "compendium" of all ZZ's past work) is his new and unique interpretation of Hegel (by way of Jacques Lacan's unscientific reinterpretation of Freud) and its application to a new reading of Marx. In other words, the arch-rationalist Hegel is viewed from the point of view of the irrationalist Lacan and this mishmash of misinterpretation is used to explain Marx to us.

One of Lacan's teachings is that REALITY cannot be properly understood by LANGUAGE. Which, if true, would make science impossible and bar us from ever understanding the nature of the world we live in. But it is language that Lacan uses to tell us something about the nature of reality, i.e., that language can't do that! Lacan also rejected Hegel's view that Reason is imminent in history. Big deal-- Marx and the entire history of post-Hegelian materialism has rejected this notion of Absolute Idealism for the last 150 years or more and no one needed Lacan to tell us about the outmodedness of this Hegelian notion.

But ZZ thinks that Lacan has shown more than just that Hegel was wrong to think that Reason Rules the World. ZZ, says Gray, thinks that Lacan has shown "the impotence of reason." This is a fundamental attack on the legacy of the Enlightenment upon which all attempts to understand the world scientifically and rationally are based; it is ultimately a fascist outlook.

ZZ has also been influenced by the contemporary French philosopher Alain Badiou (who has been himself influenced by Lacan and, shudder, Heidegger and has developed a form of Platonic Marxism). Using some of Badiou's ideas ZZ constructs his own view of "dialectics" as being based, Gray says, on "the rejection of the logical principle of noncontradiction." ZZ imputes this view to Hegel and thus claims Hegel rejected reason. ZZ writes that for Hegel a (logical) proposition "is not really suppressed by its negation." ZZ credits Hegel with the invention of a new type of logic: "paraconsistent logic."

This is really confused. We have to distinguish between FORMAL LOGIC where the law of non-contradiction reigns, and Hegel's metaphysics or ontology of Being where there are different sorts of logic at work-- subjective logic (thoughts) and objective logic (the external world). But even here it is not a question of a "proposition" being suppressed. Hegel says neither things nor thoughts care for contradictions and when contradictions appear there is a movement to overcome and resolve them on higher levels of understanding and reason-- this is the inherent motion driving the "dialectic" a motion to overcome and eliminate contradictions.

Despite these considerations, ZZ forges ahead with his ill conceived "paraconsistant logic." "Is not," he writes, "'postmodern' capitalism an increasingly paraconsistant system in which, in a variety of modes, P is non-P: the order is its own transgression, capitalism can thrive under communist rule. and so on?"

At this point Gray quotes a long passage from Less Than Nothing in which ZZ lays out the main theme of his book dealing with the response needed to "postmodern" capitalism: "The underlying premise of the present book is a simple one: the global capitalist system is approaching an apocalyptic zero-point. Its 'four riders of the apocalypse' are comprised by the ecological crisis, the consequences of the biogenetic revolution, imbalances within the system itself (problems with intellectual property; forthcoming struggles over raw materials, food and water), and the explosive growth of social divisions and exclusions." ZZ misses here the fact that the four horsemen of the capitalist apocalypse are simply four manifestations of the same fundamental contradiction under pinning the entire capitalist system, namely, the private appropriation of socially created wealth.

At this point Gray launches an unjustified attack on ZZ, accusing him of ignoring "historical facts" such as the environmental damage done by the Soviet Union and to the countryside by Mao's "cultural revolution." You can't just blame capitalism since both the SU and China had centrally planned economies. History, Gray says, does not provide any evidence that replacing capitalism by socialism will better protect the environment.

What does "history" really show? Just take the case of the Soviet Union. The soviets tried to build socialism but were attacked by the western capitalist powers from day one. They had to take short cuts to industrialize and fend off the Nazi attack, and then the Nazi successor state as US imperialism took up the anti-communist crusade. China has a similar history. All parties in this conflict were societies still under the rule of the law of value, the reigning economic force in commodity producing economies. Socialism did not thrive (nor could it have thrived) in the primitive backward conditions it developed under in the 20th century. If socialist central planning were to replace the social anarchy of capitalism in the advanced capitalist states of the west (including Japan) where production could be based on need not profit (thus overcoming the law of value) we would be able to reign in our four apocalyptic horsemen and literally save the planet. This is what "history" really suggests and Gray's attack on ZZ on this issue is unjustified.

However, his next attack on ZZ has merit. ZZ's "Marxism" lacks any relation to the actual class struggle and does not reflect Marx's commitment to a materialist dialectic grounded in the empirical reality of day to day economic struggle. Here is what ZZ says: "Today's historical juncture does not compel us to drop the notion of the proletariat, or of the proletarian position--- on the contrary, it compels us to radicalize it to an existential level beyond even Marx's imagination. We need a more radical notion of the proletarian subject [i.e., the thinking and acting human being], a subject reduced to the evanescent point of the Cartesian cogito, deprived of its substantial content."

This is just ridiculous. The worker treated in complete isolation from his/her class and relation to the means of production, treated as an isolated human being, is simply retrograde bourgeois idealism and in no way a more radical conception than that of Marx. It is an abandonment of the concept of the proletariat, or working class, as understood by Marxists.

3.) ZZ in fact abandons objectivity for a completely subjective position. "The truth we are dealing with here," he writes, "is not 'objective truth' but the self-relating truth about one's own subjective position; as such it is an engaged truth, measured not by its factual accuracy but by the way it affects the subjective position of enunciation." In other words, "truth" is what inspires me to feel good about my chosen path-- my "project" and reinforces me in my actions to attain the fulfillment of my "project." ZZ thinks a communist society would be nice but doesn't think its really possible to attain but that doesn't mean we should not act up and agitate against the status quo. ZZ also thinks its ok to engage in terror if it helps my subjective enunciation. He supports Badiou's position in favor of "emancipatory terror" and lauds Mao's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

To top off this witch's brew of petty bourgeois pseudo-revolutionary clap-trap, ZZ, Gray points out, "praises the Khmer Rouge." For all the meaningless killings Pol Pot and his gang indulged in ZZ does not blame their fall from grace as related to their barbarity. "The Khmer Rouge, were," he says, "in a way, not radical enough: while they took the abstract negation of the past to the limit [this is how an "Hegelian" refers to the killing fields!-tr] they did not invent any new form of collectivity." Would a new form of collectivity have justified their actions? [As we shall see ZZ rejects these criticisms by Gray on the grounds that his theory of violence has been misunderstood].

ZZ even goes so far as to call himself a Leninist. Gray gives a quote from a 2009 interview where ZZ remarks that: "I am a Leninist. Lenin wasn't afraid to dirty his hands. If you can get power, grab it." Gray is right to think that Lenin (as well as Marx) would hold ZZ's views in contempt. Lenin recognized the need for violence, it would be forced upon the workers by the ruling class, but he never celebrated it in the manner of ZZ who thinks it should be applied in a terrorist manner as a morale booster for the radical movement even though a successful revolution to get rid of capitalism is impossible. Gray gives another gem from ZZ on this topic: "Francis Fukuyama was right: global capitalism is 'the end of history.'" Very few, if any, people claiming to be Leninists believe that Fukuyama was right; I don't think, based on some of his current writings, that even Fukuyama thinks he was right.

4.) In this section I will deal with some valid points Gray makes against ZZ's fascination with the cult of violence, but points that are tarnished by Gray's own hyper cold war anti-communism and distortion of facts. ZZ does not think class convict has an objective basis, according to Gray, who produces this quote from ZZ maintaining that class war is not "a conflict between particular agents within social reality: it is not a difference between agents (which can be described by means of a detailed social analysis), but an antagonism ('struggle') which constitutes these agents." It is therefore ultimately subjective-- just the opposite of what Marx and Lenin held.

To illustrate his position ZZ discusses the collectivization of agriculture and the struggle against the kulaks in the USSR in the 1920s and 30s. ZZ makes a valid observation that often non-Kulak poorer peasants joined with the kulaks in opposing collectivization. This was a case of false consciousness. Americans are familiar with this phenomenon when they observe working people and minorities voting for the Republican Party and conservative candidates. ZZ says the Kulak non-Kulak boundary was often "blurred and unworkable: in a situation of generalized poverty, clear criteria no longer applied and the other two classes of peasants (poor and middle peasants -tr)

often joined the kulaks (rich peasants- tr) in their resistance to forced collectivization."

ZZ goes on to say, " The art of identifying a kulak was thus no longer a matter of objective social analysis; it became a kind of complex 'hermeneutics of suspicion," of identifying and individual's 'true political attitudes" hidden beneath his or her deceptive public proclamations." This is, by the way, the same "hermeneutics" Americans have to use, following the maxim that "all politicians are liars and say one thing but do another," when they try to figure out what candidates are saying and how they will actually behave once in office.

ZZ is wrong to think of this as a subjective process of self identification. Cases of false consciousness have objective social conditions (miseducation, prejudicial propaganda, poverty, illiteracy) as their causes. Gray is wrong, I think, to call ZZ's view "repugnant and grotesque" because he appeals to hermeneutics and doesn't criticize Stalin for killing millions of people but for using Marxist theory to try and explain what the actions of the USSR were with respect to collectivization. The idea that Soviet policy was to bring about forced collectivization by killing millions of people is a relic of cold war bunko. I recommend Michael Parenti's Blackshirts & Reds: Rational Fascism & the Overthrow of Communism for a balanced discussion of the role of violence in Soviet history.

However, ZZ is to be faulted for rejecting using Marxist theory to understand and explain political actions. He says that a time comes to junk theory because "at some point the process has to be cut short with a massive and brutal intervention of subjectivity: class belonging is never a purely objective social fact, but is always also the result of struggle and social engagement." But you cannot have a successful people's movement (struggle and engagement) without a correct analysis of the purely objective social facts-- otherwise the movement has to rely on spontaneity and no movement has grown and prospered that based itself on spontaneity.

An idea of how far down the wrong road a social theorist calling him/herself a "Leninist" can wander is revealed by ZZ's attitudes towards Hitler and the Nazi apologist Martin Heidegger. Concerning Heidegger, ZZ writes, "His involvement with the Nazi's was not a simple mistake [of course not-- it was the essence of his world view-- tr] , but rather a 'right step in the wrong direction.'" How does ZZ arrive at this? He has a new reading of Heidegger to propose. He says, "Reading Heidegger against the grain, one discovers a thinker who was, at some points strangely close to communism…." Gray points out that ZZ claims that the radically pro-Hitler Heidegger of the the mid 1930s could even be classified as "a future communist." Indeed. What future does ZZ have in mind? Heidegger died in 1976 without ever, to my knowledge, having become any kind of communist.

ZZ thinks Heidegger was wrong, but also kind of right, in being a follower of Hitler, because there was a big problem with Hitler. Here is what it was, according to ZZ's own words quoted by Gray: "The problem with Hitler was that 'he was not violent enough,' his violence was not "essential" enough. Hitler did not really act, all his actions were fundamentally reactions, for he acted so that nothing would really change, staging a gigantic spectacle of pseudo-Revolution so that the capitalist order would survive…. The true problem of Nazism is not that it 'went too far' in its subjectivist-nihilist hubris [ I am tempted to say it takes one to know one- tr] of exercising total power, but that it did not go far enough, that its violence was an impotent acting-out which, ultimately, remained in the service of the very order it despised."

There is so much wrong with this that I hardly know where to begin. In the first place there was only one socio-economic order at any rate that Hitler "despised" and wanted to destroy-- that was order represented by the Soviet Union (he also despised and wanted to destroy the Jews.) Hitler used all the power at his disposal to accomplish his aims. It is impossible to conceive of what destruction Hitler could have wrought if had used (and had) the means to wreak even more violence on the world that he in fact did. He would not have destroyed capitalism as that was the economic order he furthered in Germany-- it was socialism, Marxism that he wanted to destroy. The Nazi's also rejected bourgeois democracy-- but because it was too weak to save the West from the hoards of semi-barbaric Bolshevik Untermenshen waiting to burst out of the Soviet Union and inundate Aryan Europe. If World War II was an impotent acting-out, I shudder to think what Hitler could have achieved if he was on ZZ's political viagra.

But what about the Jews? What about anti-Semitism? Gray suggests that ZZ's attitude towards eliminating anti-Semitism from the world would also involve eliminating the Jews. This may or may not be so but it does not make ZZ an anti-Semite; it only shows, if that is what he means, that he accepts the ultra-right Zionist view that non Jews will always be against Jews and the only solution is an exclusively Jewish state. Well, what does ZZ say about all this?

He states that "The fantasmatic [ZZ's own word for "fantastic"- tr] status of anti-Semitism is clearly revealed by a statement attributed to Hitler: 'We have to kill the Jew within us.'" He continues: "Hitler's statement says more than it wants to say: against his intentions, it confirms that the Gentiles need the anti-Semitic figure of the "Jew" in order to maintain their identity. [Oh my! I hope Herr Hitler is not the representative spokesperson for the "Gentiles." Hitler's statement doesn't confirm anything other than his own personal anti-Semitism-tr] It is thus not only that 'the Jew is within us'-- what Hitler fatefully forgot to add is that he, the anti-Semite, is also in the Jew. What does this paradoxical entwinement mean for the destiny of anti-Semitism?"

Gray admits to having problems trying to figure just what ZZ means (he is too prolix and uses terms out of context from different philosophies to describe his own quite different views) but it seems quite a stretch to suggest that ZZ may be soft on anti-Semitism. ZZ himself has taken great umbrage at Gray's comments in this review and has penned a response that it well worth reading and claims to set the record straight on this issue. [Slavoj Žižek Responds to His Critics]

5.) An example Gray gives of using terms out of context is ZZ's assertion that one may say that Gandhi was more violent that Hitler. Why would anyone want to say that except for "shock value?" ZZ says, in his reply to Gray, that Gray has misinterpreted him. ZZ believes in a type of violence in which "no blood is shed" and then refers to Ghandi's struggles against the British in India-- usually referred to as based on "nonviolence." Since "nonviolence" is a special sort of "violence" it appears that since Ghandi was more nonviolent than Hitler he was more violent than Hitler. This is the "Hegelian" dialectic run amuck.

Here is another example of ZZ, saying nothing according to Gray, engaging in meaningless wordplay. "The … virtualization of capitalism is ultimately the same as that of the electron in particle physics. The mass of each elementary particle is composed of its mass at rest plus the surplus provided by the acceleration of it movement; however, an electron's mass at rest is zero [sic], its mass consists only of the surplus generated by the acceleration, as if we are dealing with a nothing which acquires some deceptive substance only by magically spinning itself into an excess of itself." I'm not sure what ZZ is trying to say here about electrons, let alone capitalism (is surplus value "magical") but I don't think the rest mass of an electron is zero in the first place. For what it is worth Wikipedia says "The electron rest mass (symbol: me) is the mass of a stationary electron. It is one of the fundamental constants of physics…. It has a value of about 9.11×10−31 kilograms or about 5.486×10−4 atomic mass units, equivalent to an energy of about 8.19×10−14 joules or about 0.511 megaelectronvolts."

Granted it is a very small mass, an electron is, after all, a very small particle-- but it is not zero. ZZ expects us to read 1038 pages of this stuff! It might be a good reference book to ZZ ideas-- which don't seem to be very Leninist-- the index has 10 references to Lenin while Lacan has over 2 columns devoted to his views! Gray is a hostile reviewer, but he is also hostile to Marxism, nevertheless, his review calls into question ZZ's basic methods of thinking and expressing himself (Gray says he represents "formless radicalism"). To get some idea of where Gray is coming from (I don't think it's a very nice place since it's anti-Enlightenment) check out the following: John N. Gray - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Well, so much for coming to grips with ZZ-- for more information on Less Than Nothing the next stop is Amazon.com.

Beyond Imperialism? Have We Reached a New Stage of Capitalism?

Tue, 07 Aug 2012 16:40:00 +0000

In 1917 Lenin published a penetrating analysis of the development of capitalism, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. In it he described how the emergence of finance and monopoly capital enabled the great powers to exploit colonial empires, exporting finance capital to the periphery, while super-profits accruing to the capitalist center permitted the bribing of a very narrow labor aristocracy who could divert revolutionary action from the center’s working class along reformist lines.¹ The theory pointed to the emergence of new revolutionary potential in the world classes of the colonial world as they struggled to overthrow both colonialism and the capitalist imperialism underlying it; thus, imperialism contained within it the seeds of its own destruction. This theory fit well the emergence of national liberation struggles in the colonial world through the mid-1970s. However, from 1970 onward we have seen developments in the structure and praxis of capitalism which call into question whether the underlying model fits the current stage of capitalist development. Among these developments four are particularly characteristic: the hyperfinancialization of capital, the fusion of ownership and management at the highest levels of capital, capitalism’s cannibalization of invested public labor through privatization recapitulating key facets of the earlier process of primitive accumulation, and the emergence of external, environmental constraints on capitalism’s ability to accumulate and reproduce.

When Hilferding (1912, 283) and Lenin (1939, 47) emphasized the emergence of finance capital in the late decades of the nineteenth century, they saw it in terms of the transformation of the banking sector into industrial capitalists:

”This bank capital, i.e., capital in money form which is thus really transformed into industrial capital, I call ‘finance capital’…. Finance capital is capital controlled by bank and employed by industrialists.”

However, the first decade of the twenty-first century has witnessed the hyperfinancialization of capital. While there is evidence that this phenomenon began in the U.S. as early as the late 1970s, in 2000 it was dramatically displayed as profits of the finance, insurance, and real estate (FIRE) sector substantially exceeded those of the manufacturing sector. This trend has widened in the U.S. in every succeeding year with the exception of 2008.

This development in the structure and praxis of global capitalism has created a substantial rentier subsector of the ruling class which is especially interested in pursuing policies which extract value from productive enterprises. What Marx described as “fictitious capital” (Marx 1998, 397 passim) has become a key element in the ruling class’ preference for austerity policies. Interest, other forms of debt service, and land rents constitute some of the various forms of fictitious capital; what distinguishes fictitious capital from money-capital per se is that it is not intended to fund the process of capitalist reproduction, but rather to merely be relent to meet or to speculate in the obligations of other fictitious capital. In this respect hyperfinancialization results in a fundamental disconnect between fictitious capital and capitalist reproduction and is qualitatively quite different from previous stages of finance capital. The extent to which the proceeds of the rentier sector are no longer invested to any degree in industrial production is striking.

Austerity policies in the current stage of capital are precisely designed to guarantee that such forms of fictitious capital are privileged over productive capital and that value from productive capital is extracted from the economy to meet obligations to fictitious capital. Reduction of deficits, realization of “sound” deficit-to-GDP ratios, privileging income flows to creditors over other spending priorities, privatization of public assets to extract value for private interests – all of these characteristics of austerity are designed to ensure the flow of rents to the rentier subsector and to make the state and the national economy a more reliable source of such rents.

The rentier subsector’s interest in both the state and the individual becoming more reliable sources of debt-related rents should be obvious from the fact of what Randy Martin (2002) describes as “the financialization of everything”: it takes a lifetime of debt to buy a house to get a place to live; students have to assume decades of debt to get an education in order to get a job, rather than the government funding education freely as was the ideal a hundred years ago; even with health insurance, a single catastrophic illness will burden the victim with a lifetime of yet more debt; credit card debt finances daily life for many people at rates which would have been criminally usurious a hundred years ago. One can go on and on. The amount of debt which ordinary citizens must assume – and the debt service which they must bear – is crushing, and the sovereign debt assumed by states to provide necessary services in a time when the right wing has made the notion of increasing taxes tantamount to political-economic suicide is even more crushing. There is a very real sense in which the cycle of indebtedness represents a second mode of extraction of surplus value from the labor of the working class.

It should take little critical examination of the situation to see that the hyperfinancialization of capital characteristic of the current stage of global capitalism is increasingly inclined to austerity as a buffer against the collapse of the entire system of fictitious capital. It is precisely because hyperfinancialization is less robust against the vicissitudes crises than previous stages of capitalism, as Michael Hudson points out:

”Financial claims rise exponentially, beyond the economy’s ability to pay. Bubble economies try to postpone the inevitable crash by inflating prices for real estate, stocks and bonds by enough to enable debtors to take out higher loans against the property they pledge as collateral. Governments balance their budgets by privatizing public enterprises, selling “tollbooth” privileges on credit to buyers who bid up their prices by debt leveraging. Financial underwriters reap commissions and insiders making a killing as sales prices for stocks are underpriced to guarantee first-day price jumps…. A crash occurs at the point where this disparity is widely recognized. To bankers, the antidote is to lend enough new credit to re-inflate prices real estate and other assets, enabling new buyers to borrow the credit to buy property from defaulters. Rather than scaling back the U.S. economy’s over-indebtedness, for instance, the Treasury and Federal Reserve have bailed out the banks to save them from taking a loss on debt write-downs.  The dream is to keep the compound interest scheme expanding ad infinitum. But the pretense that fictitious finance-capital claims can be paid must be dropped at the point where financial managers desert the sinking financial ship. Their last act before the bubble bursts is the time-honored practice of taking the money and running – paying themselves as large bonuses and salaries as corporate treasuries (and public bailouts) allow” (2010, 25).

           This hyperfinancialization of capital has been accompanied by what David Harvey (2005, 31-38) has characterized as a fusion of the ownership and the management of capitalist enterprises, which is increasingly paid with stock options and other longterm compensation packages² which provide strong incentives to manipulate stock price and make increasing stock price the principal objective of corporate operations.  This second new characteristic also begins to emerge with a vengeance in the 1970s, accelerating through 2005.  The trend seen in 2000-2005 continues, with a small dip in 2008, through 2011-2012 (Hay Group 2012).  Figure 1 tracks this development in terms of median level and mean percent composition of CEO compensation from 1936 through 2005 in the 50 largest firms in the U.S.:²

Figure 1.

Median Level and Mean Percent Composition of CEO Compensation, 1939-2005, in the 50 largest U.S. Firms

Source: Fyrdman and Jenter 2010.

Prior to the 1950 this pattern of executive compensation was virtually unknown in U.S. capitalism. What makes this particularly pernicious is the incentives it provides to senior executives to fixate on stock price performance since it significantly determines compensation levels. Figure 2 maps CEO median equity incentives from 1992 to 2005:³

Figure 2.

CEO Median Equity Incentives: 1992-2005

                                                                                                                  Source: Frydman and Jenter (2010).

The Jensen-Murphy Statistic is the dollar change in executive wealth for a $1,000 change in firm value.  The Equity-at-Stake variable is the dollar change in executive wealth per 1% change in firm value.  Note that both variables increased substantially over the sample period, although the Equity-at-Stake value declined from 2000 to 2002 (this almost certainly reflects recessionary pressures and the traumatic effects of 9/11 on the national economy) while increasing rapidly again in the post-2002 period.  The Jensen-Murphy Statistic increases steadily until 2003, when it begins declining slightly.  Trending out both lines to 2010 indicates continued growth in the value of both variables. This is extremely important: by 2005 the median CEO incentive in terms of Equity-at-Stake was almost $700,000 in compensation for a 1% increase in firm value; in terms of the Jensen-Murphy Statistic by 2005 the median CEO incentive was more than $6.00 per $1,000 change in firm value.  These variables point to the shift from production concerns to financial concerns in all sectors of the economy which has accompanied hyperfinancialization.

             While The Shock Doctrine (Klein 2007) lacked a class perspective and a rigorous economic analysis, it pointed to factors which have increasingly come to be characteristic of contemporary capitalism.  While advocacy of harsh neoliberal policies was not unique to Milton Friedman and the Chicago school – it has increasingly become the orthodoxy of capitalist economists since the Reagan administration – nor was it only occasioned by natural and economic disaster (Harvey 2005; Sanaith 2005), austerity has become the dogma imposed by multinational institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund on developed and developing world alike since the mid-1980s. In particular this has involved privatization of assets developed and hitherto maintained by collective, public investments.

             Virtually the entire public investment of the Soviet Union and the Eastern European socialist bloc has been expropriated by private interests with the assistance of their counterrevolutionary successor regimes. Similar policies have been forced on the developing world wherever there is dependence on IMF or World Bank sufferance. In the United States public utilities and other public investments have been surrendered to private control exploitation.  Repeated attempts by Republicans to privatize Social Security and Medicare are yet more examples.  Similar policies have been forced on European countries, faced by “debt crises” brought on by the excesses of finance capital, like Greece and Ireland.

             It is important, however, to note two aspects of this process.  First, this amounts to making available to capitalist accumulation the collective proceeds of decades of public labor.  In The Accumulation of CapitalRosa Luxemburg discusses precisely how something very similar was a necessary precondition for the successful assimilation of the colonial world into capitalist commodity production:

”Hence derives the vital necessity for capitalism in its relations with colonial countries to appropriate the most important means of production. Since the primitive associations of the natives are the strongest protection for their social organisations and for their material bases of existence, capital must begin by planning for the systematic destruction and annihilation of all the non-capitalist social units which obstruct its development. With that we have passed beyond the stage of primitive accumulation; this process is still going on. Each new colonial expansion is accompanied, as a matter of course, by a relentless battle of capital against the social and economic ties of the natives, who are also forcibly robbed of their means of production and labour power. Any hope to restrict the accumulation to 'peaceful competition,' i.e. to regular commodity exchange such as takes place between capitalist producer-countries, rests on the pious belief that capital can accumulate without mediation of the productive forces and without the demand of more primitive organisations, and that it can rely upon the slow internal process of a disintegrating natural economy. Accumulation, with its spasmodic expansion, can no more wait for, and be content with, a natural internal disintegration of non-capitalist formations and their transition to commodity economy, than it can wait for, and be content with, the natural increase of the working population. Force is the only solution open to capital; the accumulation of capital, seen as an historical process, employs force as a permanent weapon, not only at its genesis, but further on down to the present day” (1951: 370-371).

Luxemburg’s recognition of the vital role of primitive accumulation in creating and perpetuating the imperialist stage of capitalism as it disseminates capitalist production throughout the world marks a significant difference between her theory and that of Lenin, and one which seems better confirmed from economic analysis of the historical course of imperialism.  In the latest stage of capitalism the constant pressure for profit has set capitalism on a similar form of accumulation against public investment.  This accumulation cannot strictly be called primitive – it is accumulation against public investments under conditions of advanced state-capitalism or socialism.  It is a kind of autophagic accumulation – the self-cannibalization of invested labor, of the embodiments of many years of social labor, a retrospective expropriation of collective, public value.  Thus the latest stage of capitalism recapitulates its origins.

             The second factor is no less important than the first: while primitive accumulation is often conducted a gunpoint – a major field for the militarism associated with imperialism -- autophagic accumulation is largely conducted without the use of military force; it occurs under the auspices of capitalist legality, often mediated by international agencies and finance capital. Certainly like all capitalist ownership it is predicated on state power and the military force on which state power rests, but the repressive veneer of legal process only heightens the impression of inevitability and despair.

             Autophagic accumulation is only a relatively short-term remedy for capitalism’s hunger for profits – there is only so much accumulated social labor to be expropriated -- and when the last elements of collective social investment have been consumed, only heightened crisis and increasing contradiction in an environment of highly restricted opportunities can result.  This characteristic of capitalism is importantly self-limiting on capitalism’s ability to accumulate.

             The increasing role of this autophagic accumulation in the general vector of capitalist accumulation is the third major characteristic of the current stage of capitalist development.

             The emergence of stark environmental limitations on capitalist production and accumulation, limitations for which it is difficult to imagine easy or quick fixes arising from new technologies, is the most sobering characteristic of the current stage of capitalism. What was once a rhetorical flourish in the words of Rosa Luxemburg – socialism or barbarism – now presents itself as an existential question for the human species as environmental limitations on capitalism itself reveal themselves.

             Global climate change and peak oil are two such limitations which carry with them profound implications for the future of capitalism.  Global climate change – the climatological effects of increased radiative forcing produced by massive increases in anthropocentric production of greenhouse gases – and peak oil – the point in history at which the world production of crude oil reaches its maximal level and begins to decline as petroleum supplies are exhausted – are scientific facts.  Peak oil has likely been reached already between 2005 and 2011, as reported by various trade analysts and official projections of oil-producing country governments.  The definitive U.N. study of the current state of global climate change science, The Fourth Assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2007), has amassed a wealth of evidence which refutes deniers once and for all.

             All the predictions arrived at by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change show an increase of nearly 2º to nearly 4ºC in global surface warming (the worst case model, A1FI, assumes that anthropocentric production of greenhouse gases remains unabated), shown in Figure 3:⁴

Figure 3.

IPCC Predictions of Global Climate Change: Global Surface Warming

                                                                                                      Source: IPCC,1^st Working Group, 4^th Assessment Report.

These results have catastrophic implications for agriculture, particularly when combined with the results of peak oil.

             It is not possible in a single article to survey all the ways in which environmental limitations increasingly restrain capitalism’s ability to reproduce itself.  However, we can start with what Engels in his eulogy for Marx termed Marx’s discovery of “the law of development in human history”:

”Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.; that therefore the production of the immediate material means of subsistence and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and even the ideas on religion, of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light of which they must, therefore, be explained, instead of vice versa, as had hitherto been the case.”⁵

Man must first eat before he produces.  What, then, is the likely impact of global climate change and peak oil on man’s ability to feed himself?

             Schade and Pimentel (2010) offer a thorough analysis and empirically-sound estimates of potential human carrying capacity of the world’s cropland and food production to 2050.  They estimate that by 2050 worldwide demand for arable land will have increased by 200-750 Mha.  From 1950 to 1995 grain yields have increased by an average of more than 2% per year; since 1995 this growth in grain yields has declined. Under the best case scenario they estimate that an additional 200 Mha. will be necessary by 2050 if per capita consumption does not change and crop yields increase by 0.3%; the under worst case scenario they estimate that 750 Mha. will be necessary by 2050 if per capita food consumption doubles (i.e., as Chinese and Indian diets improve) and crop yields increase by 1% per year.  Table 1 shows the nature of the problem:

Table 1.

Land deficit and human dieback (9.2  billion people projected in 2010)

                                                                  Land                Add. Land    Land                                        Billion people

                                                                    Farmed now    needed          available   Deficit    Deficit     into which

                                                                    (Gha.)              (Gha.)           (Gha.)       (Gha.)     as %         this translates

                                            Best Case           1.5                   0.6                0.5            0.1          5                  0.46

                                            Worst Case         1.5                   1.2                0.3            0.9         33                  3.1

                                                           Source: Schade and Pimentel 2010.

If crop yields continue to increase and rate of consumption remains constant, nearly a half-billion people will starve in 2050. If crop yields continue to increase and the rate of consumption of the newly industrialized nations of Asia begin to mimic those of the U.S. and Europe, more than three billion people will starve in 2050.   None of these estimates take into account the impact of peak oil and global climate change.

             Looking at the resources required per capita per year to sustain the basic human food needs today in Table 2, one can easily see that the disaster predicted by the intersection of global climate change and peak oil dwarfs the disaster predicted on the basis of population growth alone:

Table 2.

Resources used per capita per year in the U.S, China, and the world to supply basic human needs

                                                            Resources                                            U.S.                 China               World

                                                            Cropland (ha.)                                     0.48                 0.08                0.22

                                                            Pasture (ha.)                                        0.79                 0.33                0.52

                                                            Forest (ha.)                                          0.79                 0.11                0.59

                                                            Total  (ha.)                                           2.78                 0.45                1.97

                                                            Water (million liters)                             2.0                 0.46                0.60

                                                            Fossil fuel oil equivalents                  9,500               1,400              2,100

                                                            (liters)

                                                                               Source: Schade and Pimentel 2010.

Per capita world food production has two vulnerabilities highlighted by this table: (1) massive dependence on industrial agriculture, irrigation, and fertilizer which assumes continued access to undepleted fossil fuels, particularly petroleum, in the developed world and (2) the ambient temperature sensitivity of arable land.  Neither is safely assumable under conditions of global climate change and peak oil, and the situation only deteriorates with time under conditions of capitalist production.

             Recent research by Zhang and Cai (2011) suggests that while Russia, China, and the U.S. could see increases in arable land due to global climate change as the northern reaches of those countries increase in average temperature by 2050, South America (-1% to -21%), Africa (-1% to –18%), Europe (-11% to -17%), India (-2% to -4%) will lose substantial amounts of arable land by 2050.   Even the countries identified as small net-gainers of arable land by 2050 begin to rapidly lose arable land as the century moves toward its close, due both to mean temperature and a decrease in water available for irrigation (both because of temperature and the lack of fossil fuels to power pumps).

             Pimentel, et al. (1997) estimate that if the U.S. were required to operate only on domestic sources of petroleum and domestically-produced crops, it would be able to sustain a population of no more than 200 million.  This highlights the scope of the impending crisis: today without imported oil or foodstuffs one third of the U.S. population would starve.  Any significant attrition of arable land, like that projected from 2050-2090, would substantially decrease the human carrying capacity of the U.S.  Further, dependence on fossil fuels for industrialized agriculture and fertilizer presents a serious chokepoint for U.S. food production. Projecting the impact of global climate change and peak oil to approximately 2050 suggests that the estimates of Schade and Pimentel may be as much as 50% too low globally.

             The four new features of the current stage of capitalism – hyperfinancialization, the closer connection between ownership and management and the behavioral incentives it provides, autophagic accumulation in both the developed and developing worlds, and the emergence of carrying-capacity environmental limitations on capitalist accumulation – have intensified capitalism’s contradictions and carry implications for revolutionary struggle as urgent as those of the features of Lenin’s Imperialism.  To mention merely the most compelling: the working classes of the industrialized world are positioned to resume their place at the vanguard of revolution. The immiseration of the working class in the developed world has resumed and heightened under the impact of hyperfinancialization, and the priorities of finance capital have substantially increased the reserve army of labor, which further creates opportunities for proletarian action.  The environmental crises will not touch merely the developing world, but pose survival questions for the advanced working classes of the capitalist center: the effects of climate change on agriculture and the fact that peak oil means that capitalism will not have the necessary resources available under its mode of production to deal with those effects endanger all working people globally.

            Capitalism is again in transition, and with each development has become a more “moribund capitalism” (Lenin 1939, 126).

NOTES

¹While it is the case that Lenin makes an explicit argument about Social Democratic and trade union leaders being bought off by the upper-profits of imperialism, particularly in the preface to the French and German editions of Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, he clearly never asserted that this affected more than a very small element of the top leadership of the working class.  Lenin clearly conceived of the obstacles presented to revolutionary action in the center by such a labor aristocracy as neither insurmountable, nor a reason to abandon the revolutionary potential of the advanced industrial working class.  However, the failure in the advanced West generally to overcome capitalist hegemony, despite the overwhelming majority of workers losing more than it gained under imperialism, remains a conundrum of Marxist theory.  The failure of revolutionary leadership to overcome intense waves of anti-communist repression in the capitalist center no doubt plays a key role here.

²Compensation data is from proxy statements from 1936 to 2002.The S&P ExecuComp database was used to extend the data to 2005 (Fyrdman and Saks 2010).  Depicted are three components of compensation which can be separately tracked over the sample period: salaries and bonuses, payouts from longterm incentive plans (including the value of restricted stock), and the grant-date values of option grants (calculated using Black-Scholes-Merton).  All dollar values are in inflation-adjusted 2000 dollars.

³The Jensen-Murphy Statistic is calculated as the executive's fractional equity ownership [(number of shares held + number of options held * average option delta) / (number of shares outstanding)],multiplied by $1,000. Option deltas and holding were calculated using the Core and Guay (2002) approximation as implemented by Edmans, et al. (2009).  Equity-at-Stake is the product of the executive's fractional equity ownership (defined by the Jensen-Murphy Statistic) and the firm's equity market capitalization.  All dollar values are in inflation-adjusted 2000 dollars.

⁴The A1 model group assumes (a) population growth to 9.2 billion by 2050, then gradual decline, (b) quick spread of new and efficient technologies, and (c) a convergent world in which income and way of life converge amongst regions.  The A1FI submodel  includes an emphasis on continued fossil-fuel extraction well post peak.  The A1 model group projects global surface warming between 1º and 6.4º C by 2100.  The A2 model group assumes (a) continuously increasing population, (b) regionally-oriented economic development, and (c) a world of independently-operating, self-reliant countries.  The A2 model group projects global surface warming between 2º and 5.4º C.  The majority of climate scientists regard a mix of A1FI and A2 outcomes as most likely.

⁵Quoted in Der Sozialdemokrat, 22 March 1883 (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/death/dersoz1.htm).

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