People Before Profit blog

A new marxist iq by Norman Markowitz

Tue, 15 May 2012 15:50:24 -0400

A New Marxist IQ by Norman Markowitz

Here is a new Marxist IQ for today. The correct answers to last week’s Marxist IQ are at the bottom of the page.

1. Karl Marx saw ancient Athens, hailed as

a. The beginnings of peoples democracy

b. The antithesis of Sparta

c. An example of the slave mode of production

d. The center for great philosophy

2. While Barack Obama was the first American American elected President of the U.S the first African American to run on a national ticket for Vice President was

a. Frederick Douglass for the Republican

b. A. Philip Randolph for the Socialist Party

c. James W. Ford for the Communist Party

d. Adam Clayton Powell for the Democratic Party

3. In traditional Marxist-Leninist theory , new developments like “Hedge Funds” are seen as

a. Expressions of free market capitalism

b. New forms of parasitic finance capital

c. The work of stock market crooks

d. A way to protect investors

4. To contemporary Marxists, the working class consists of

a. Industrial workers producing surplus value

b. All workers and poor peasants/farmers

c. All blue and white collar workers , employed and self -employed

d. All workers and employees on wages and salaries

5. In the early years of the Great Depression Communists raised the slogan

a. “the worse the better

b. “Black and White, Unite and Fight”

c. “Brother Can You Spare a Dime”

d. “We’re in the Money”

Correct answers for last week's Iq

1.b

2.c

3.d

4.a

5.c

Greece: Trying to understand SYRIZA

Mon, 14 May 2012 20:52:00 -0400

Economics Editor at BBC Newsnight. Author of "Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere" and the novel "Rare Earth". Also "Meltdown: The end of the age of greed" and "Live Working or Die Fighting: How the working class went global".

This is less of a blog more of a series of notes to try and enhance understanding of who SYRIZA and its leader Alexis Tsipras actually are, and how they might behave if, as polls suggest, they become the winning party in a second Greek general election. I’ve been troubled by the lack of historical depth in most of the profiles published in newspapers; and of course my own knowledge is limited to English sources. I’ve checked this with two authoritative Greek sources. It should go up on my BBC blog soon. Get ready to hear about parties and political currents that most commentators believed were insignificant just a few years ago:

SYRIZA is an acronym signifying “Coalition of the Radical Left”. It’s key component is a party called Synaspismos, itself an umbrella group of the far left in Greece.

Alexis Tsipras is the 38 year old leader of the Synaspismos party, and rose to prominence as its candidate for the mayor of Athens in 2006. Tsipras originated from the youth wing of the Communist Party, the KKE.

Greek communism, like most of western communism after the 1970s, was split into two hostile parties: the KKE of the “interior” and that of the “exterior” – the latter denoting a Moscow-oriented party, the former denoting a Euro-communist, more parliamentary and socially liberal agenda.

Initially Synaspismos was the electoral alliance between the two KKEs. But in the early 1990s the main Moscow-oriented KKE quit the alliance, purging about 45% of its members, who then stayed inside Synaspismos with the Eurocommunists. These included Tsipras.

Synaspismos then evolved in an interesting direction. Reacting to the rise of the anti-globalisation movement, first of all the party itself became a highly diverse left umbrella group: of Eurocommunists, left-social Democrats, far leftists, and ecologists. It played a significant role in mobilizations against summits, beginning in Genoa 2001 and beyond. Meanwhile the main KKE remained a traditional Communist party, rooted in public sector and manual trade unions.

Then, in the 2004 election, Synaspismos came together with other small parties to form SYRIZA. These included a split-off from the British SWP, a split off from the main Communist Party and another group of eco-leftists.

Under Tsipras’ leadership, and invigorated by now including the entire left except the traditionalist KKE, SYRIZA grew the far left’s vote from 3.3% to 5.6% in the 2007 election – giving it 14 MPs.

The crisis which broke out in December 2008, after the police shooting of a 15 year old schoolboy led to two weeks of rioting by the youth and poor of Athens, further strengthened SYRIZA as a left pole of attraction. Though the parties inside SYRIZA remained in the low thousands of members, many young people began to identify with them – above all in a country where Marxism has massive prestige due to its role in both the anti-fascist resistance and in the 1946-49 Civil War. In addition, those migrants with the right to vote, hearing a rising chorus of anti-migrant rhetoric from the centre as well as the right, have flocked to vote SYRIZA.

Once George Papandreou’s PASOK party committed itself to supporting EU-designed austerity programmes, after January 2010, a huge political gap opened up on the left of Greek politics – which arguably forms a natural majority. Only the KKE and SYRIZA were opposed to austerity and of the two SYRIZA had a political leadership of youth, resilience and global vision.

(It is worth noting here the character of PASOK. It emerged in the inter-war years as a split from republican liberalism, and while it became a traditional social democratic party after the fall of the Colonels regime in 1974, its forms of organization, and mass base among civil servants and small business people, lead some to compare it to Argentine “Peronism” – that is left nationalism with a working class base. This affects the political dynamics the moment the PASOK leadership loses its claim to represent “the nation” in conflict with the EU.

As events pulled SYRIZA leftward, and swelled its support, one final split took place that may prove highly significant. Veteran leaders of the old KKE-interior – that is, the Eurocommunists – split from Synaspismos and formed the Democratic Left, led by Fotis Kouvelis – in March 2010. They formed a separate parliamentary group of 4 until the recent election massively swelled their numbers to 19. At the first congress of the Democratic Left, in March 2011, in an extraordinary move, the then serving PASOK prime minister, George Papandreou, attended, sat in the front row of the audience, and applauded.

Now, how to make sense of this, and why does it matter?

The mainstream PASOK party split before the May 2012 election. Six sitting MPs joined the Democratic Left, while others tried to form an anti-austerity left social democratic party, led by charismatic female MP Louka Katseli. The latter disappeared without trace. But the PASOK left and its voters now co-exist with the former Eurocommunists in a fairly moderate, anti-austerity but essentially left social democratic, pro-Euro party – the Dem Left - which now has 19 seats.

SYRIZA massively scooped up the votes of leftist, progressive, socially liberal young people, as well as the trade union voters not specifically aligned with the Communist Party, to gain 52 seats.

The Communist Party itself, while growing its vote, did not break out of its traditional demographic base – manual workers, older lifelong Communists with family loyalty traced back to the pre-war workers’ movement. The KKE gained 26 seats.

In the negotiations to form a government this week the PASOK leader, Venizelos, got the Democratic Left as far as agreeing to a programme to “progressively disengage” from the Troika-imposed austerity. But they could not persuade SYRIZA to join, and without SYRIZA, the Dem Left knew it would be the captive of a PASOK/ND coalition.

As new elections loom, obviously one possible outcome is the return of voters to ND and PASOK. But the latest polls do not signal this. They signal a growth in support for SYRIZA, which is seen as a consistent opponent of austerity on the left, and which has narrative and momentum among the traditional base of all other leftist parties.

If we look at the demographics of the left, there are the following:

anarchist minded youth, living alternative lifestyles among the poor, who will only vote for SYRIZA or not at all. (Anecdotally, even some members of the “black bloc” were reported to have joined SYRIZA, after accepting the futility of constant rioting/counterculture.
Middle-class and professional workers, including many public servants who’ve been hit by tax rises, wage cuts, arbitrary deductions, loss of entitlements and job losses
Private sector trade unionists
Migrants and the urban poor
Small businesspeople who formerly were the base of PASOK but who have been radicalized by the tax rises, tax clampdowns and repeated heavy policing of demonstrations, and who are the most likely to be ruined by any longterm structural reform in Greece.

The success of SYRIZA then seems down to its ability to attract voters and activists from all these groups, eating into almost every part of the left including the old Moscow-style KKE.

In the process of negotiations over the past seven days, Tsipras and his close advisers have further upped their own credibility by being seen to play the game of constitutional negotiations; sticking to their economic rejection of austerity stance, but in general not going out of their way to alienate, rhetorically, natural PASOK, Dem Left or KKE voters.

In the NET poll, taken while Tsipras was making his doomed attempt to form an anti-austerity government of the left, SYRIZA scored 27% - compared to its election showing of 17% - clearly demonstrating that it had created momentum as the pole of attraction for left voters wanting a showdown with the EU. PASOK was losing ground to both SYRIZA and the Dem Left. Some KKE voters were saying they would switch votes to SYRIZA in a second election.

When I spoke to leading members of SYRIZA in summer 2011 they were privately very pessimistic about the possibility of forming a government – even an alliance of all the left including splits from PASOK. At that time they said the most obvious solution would be an above-politics left-nationalist figure, a “Greek Kirchner” or “Greek Morales”, and that the absence of such a figure would make it impossible to form what Marxists refer to as a “workers government” – ie a radical reforming government with the participation of the far left, but limited to parliamentary means.

Now however, the charisma of Mr Tsipras, the fear of a far-right backlash, the depth of the crisis and the seeming inability of PASOK to recover may thrust Tsipras himself into the Morales role. Of all the left party leaders he is the least encumbered by a rigid ideology, because SYRIZA remains highly diverse and internally democratic as a party. And he is tangibly a generation younger than the other leaders. (PASOK’s further problem is that its younger politicians tend to be on the technocratic right of social democracy).

When I interviewed a SYRIZA spokesman earlier this year I explored the problem of a far-left party, which is anti-NATO etc, taking power in a country whose riot police have been regularly clashing with that party’s youth since 2008. The message was that they would be purposefully limited in aim, and that the core of any programme would be a debtor-led partial default – that is, the suspension of interest payments on the remaining debt and a repudiation of the terms of both Troika-brokered bailouts. What SYRIZA shares with the Dem Left and PASOK it its commitment to the EU social model: they are left globalists. Hence they could make any attempt to force Greece out of the Euro look, to the Greek population, like a Brussels/Berlin inititative, no matter how it looks to the rest of the world.

So, for example, speaking on condition of anonymity a one of SYRIZA’s MPs told me today: “The austerity programs don’t work and we have to persuade our European partners about it. SYRIZA is a responsible political force, it’s in favour of a new paradigm without rejecting the Euro. What SYRIZA is rejecting is the actual monetary policy of the Eurozone; we want to reform the ECB. We have to seize the opportunity: in Europe now there are more voices in favour of the need for growth, less austerity; the Hollande election in France may change things, creating a new framework. Greece could benefit from this, but only if there is a government in Athens with the political will to radically change things.”

If, in the next election, SYRIZA scores 26% it would get about the same number of seats, under the vote redistribution rule, as ND got this time – say just over 100. If, on top of that the Dem Left vote holds up, with about 20 seats, and the Communists retain their 26 seats, that is very close to the 150 they would need for a majority.

It is being rumoured that SYRIZA may soon transform itself into a single party and extend membership to a far left group called Antarsia (which gained 1%) and the Louka Katseli group from PASOK which failed to gain seats, and the Eco-Greens, who polled below 3%. That would extend its reach even further both to its right and left.

Even without a majority, a SYRIZA-DL minority could attempt a legislative programme that relied on the abstention of some of PASOK’s remaining MPs, tacit “non-opposition” form the KKE, and, paradoxically, the non-opposition of the right wing anti-austerity party Independent Greeks (conservative nationalist). One current obstacle to this is the KKE’s historic enmity to SYRIZA and indeed the entire rest of the Greek left.

Whatever the outcome, the above explains how a combination of historical factors, the position of the EU and a demographic radicalization of young people propelled one of the furthest left parties in any European parliament to within a few steps of forming a government; and provoking a showdown with the EU that would doubtless see Greece’s suspension or exit from the Euro.

At the same time it explains that the resulting government may, in effect, be little more than a left-social democratic government, despite its symbology and the radicalism of some of its voters. By forcing the mainstream parties into positions where they could not express the will of the majority of centrist voters, the EU may end up destroying the Greek party system as it has been shaped since 1974.

presentation on Animal Rights/Animal Welfare at Brookly Food Conference by Norman Markowitz

Sun, 13 May 2012 15:44:16 -0400

Presentation on Animal Rights/Welfare at Brooklyn Food Conference 5/12/12/ by Norman Markowitz

This Saturday, I participated in workshop at the Brooklyn Food Conference. I was invited by the Animal Issues Working Group of Occupy Wall Street. I write write more for the blog about this fascinationg conference, which brought together a wide variety of people from environmental, peace and other organizations, but right now I am posting a version of my presentation The workshop was titled “The Animal Food Industry” I thank Adam Weissman of Global Justice for Animals and the Environment for inviting me to participate.

We live under a system with dominant social classes, owners and investors, and subordinate classes, workers/employees/consumers. The former seeks to exploit the latter to both produce and consume goods and services for their profit, paying the latter as little as possible for the goods they produce and charging them as much as possible for the goods they consume.

This system is called capitalism, whatever euphemisms its defenders may invent for it—“free enterprise” being the most widely used in the U.S., and it has existed for centuries. It is a world system, and large national and international corporations, large factory complexes, and an increasingly global distribution of labor are but its modern and contemporary manifestations. Technology and mass quantity production have not does not change its essential character, make it better or more humane.

The food industry is one important expression of this global system, whose driving force remains profit maximization. Both animals and humans are in this system essentially commodities to be bought and sold, both as labor and in the case of animals as foodstuffs, to be penned up in wretched conditions, puffed up to increase their value, and slaughtered—essentially the model that Charles Patterson, in his splendid book, Eternal Treblinka, which I recormmend to all, saw for the Nazi slaughterhouse trains, concentration camp conditions, and removal of gold fillings from the teeth of corpses taken from the gas chambers.

While this may seem very harsh, if some species from another planet with large amounts of capital came here to purchase human flesh for their consumption, I have no doubt that some sections of international agribusiness, which currently produces high value crops in poor countries to be sold in the markets of rich countries, would begin to use the rightwing dictatorships and death squad groups that exist in many of their countries to export human flesh to extraterrestrial markets.

We should remember that the international slave trade(in which traders “estimated” the numbers of who perish in the journey across the Atlantic to as part of their net gain, and the international drug trade of the nineteenth century, which was “legal” in regard to exports to countries like China, are examples of what the capitalist market economy has done in the past

The capitalist food industry is incompatible with animal welfare. One can be critical of the practices of existing socialist countries, which have developed up to now in the context of poverty, war, and revolution in a hostile world, in this regard, certainly, but, our task is to deal with the food industry in the capitalist world. Crusading for example against policies of the Peoples Republic of China from Europe or North America does nothing to restrict the food industry in Europe and North America, or aid the peoples of Africa, Latin America, and areas of Asia from the predatory policies of transnational agribusiness

My primary interest is in animal rights/animal welfare and this cannot be separated from the food industry here and abroad and also questions of environment and ecology/ It also cannot be separated a value system that supports the hunting and killing of animals for sport, a desensitized approach to both domestic and non domestic animals, seeing the former as disposable toys and the latter as inferior species to hunted, killed and driven out of habitats based on the whims and for the “greater good” of humans, much like the Hitler fascists proclaimed both the “right and duty of superior, “Nordic Aryan” Europeans to hunt, kill and drive out of lebensraum(living space) Jews, slavs, and others deemed inferior races, while treating Hungarians, Italians, and others as the equivalent of pets in a greater German empire

In this regard we should remember that the Nazis brutalized dogs and used them in concentration camps to terrorize prisoners. On the night of the annexation of Austria(1938) as tens of thousands of people, anti-fascists and Austrian citizens of the Jewish religion were arrested, the Nazis brutally murdered thousands of house pets of their victims. The “master race” was also the “master species.”

Also we should remember that the movement to regulate capital and the movement for animal rights/ animal welfare were both linked to peoples democratic struggles and to the rise of socialist movements, albeit in anumber of cases non Marxist socialists in the U.S. and other countries. The first major modern work, Animal Rights(1892) was the work of the non Marxist socialist Henry Salt. Socialist novelists Jack London and Upton Sinclair and Charles H. Kerr, the leading socialist publisher in the U.S. championed the cause of animal rights, animal welfare. Sinclair who saw industrial capitalism both working workers to death and providing them with a mass produced diet that sapped their healtlh and strength, involved himself in a variety of diet reform and vegetarian groups and actions, which, and here I disagree with some scholars, were not a withdrawal from socialist political struggle but ultimately in enhancement of his understanding, which helped him in his later writing and also in his political action.

Henry Spira was also an animal welfare activist from a socialist political background whose reading of Peter Singer’s animal liberation inspired him to work organize campaigns against both the cosmetics industry, Revlon and Avon, and the conglomma. Ote Proctor and Gamble, against their animal experimentation, and with less success the food and fast food industry,Perdue and MacDonald’s

Let me say that late in life I have become a vegetarian but I am not here to preach the benefits of vegetarianism or to seek in any way to coerce anyone into a vegetarian diet, either on health issues, on moral and ethical issues concerning specism—a concept largely ignored in society, accepted as “normal” and even beneficial, the way racist thinking was used to justify slavery and colonialism as both normal and beneficial. Let me say though that the present transnational food industry destroys animals and wastes large amounts of land and water resources, contributing to malnutrition and outright starvation in poor countries and regions of the world, Africa, Latin America, areas of Asia and the Pacific, and an expensive and unhealthy diet for large numbers of people in the rich countries of Europe, North America, Japan, creating the absurdity that we all live under—organic foods, whole foods, health foods are produced often as “boutique foods” by the artisans of food production, sold at high prices to those who can afford them while the great majority of people go to the supermarkets and purchase produce sprayed with dangerous chemicals, processed foods filled with carcinogenic and other destructive addities, beef pork and poultry injected with hormones and other adulterations—a diet, to use a term that a mother of a friend of mine once used, of “empty calories,” one in which the capitalists make weight reduction into a vast industry to profit from the obesity their food stuffs create in the rich countries while they reduce the consumption of grains and other low profit foodstuffs in poor countries to produce high profit fruits and vegetables, beef, pork, and poultry and even healthy soy products for rich country markets while increasing malnutrition and outright starvation in the poor countries who people cannot afford to buy the foodstuffs they are producing

What can be done. Under an advanced mixed economy system, in a country as rich and developed as the U.S., an “industrial policy” that would reward the producers of healthy nutritional foods and punish the procssors of unhealthy foods

In the rich countries, like the U.S. heavily taxing poor quality processed foods the way alcohol and tobacco is taxed and using the revenues to subsidize nutritionally sound foods in low income areas

A policy of rewarding with financial incentives supermarket chains which market nutritionally sound foods over unhealthy foods. The use of revenues from taxing the industry to develop both in school and mass media campaigns to encourage sound nutritional practices.

The establishment of a national health service, a serious form of socialized medicine, with makes diet and reasonable forms of exercise an important part of its preventive care approach to health and educates and rewards doctors and other health care industry providers for advancing such policies

Serious comprehensive reform and regulation of truth in packaging legislation along with consumer education policies to enable the people to understand what they are eating so they can make rational choices—

For the poor countries, who are at many levels ranging from moderate to destitution poverty , the creation of international authorities(through a United Nations formation like what the Food and Agricultural Organization many hoped would be) which would function to regulate transnational agribusiness to prevent predatory policies that threaten the nutritional and environmental needs of societies. Here and in the rich countries also, moving away from an animal protein based diet is both sound economically and environmentally. Connecting such policies with environmental and wildlife preservation policies is also necessary.

These policies will require a shift away from planning for profits in private markets to using markets one set of mechanisms to plan for the nutritional and environmental needs of all species who inhabit the ecosphere and his interaction and interdependence determines theirs and the ecospheres future.

What we need through the world batalions of Henry Spiras who will through far-reaching economic and political changes, creating new power structures, be able to implement such policies.

Food cooperatives and collectives, groups seeking sanity in world of large corporate insanity, are wonderful, but by themselves don’t usually survive over long periods of time or survive by isolating themselves from the larger society unless the changes that I have discussed do not take place. And it will take broad united fronts of peoples movements on the national and international level to help them take place

Dimitrov, The United Front. Last Installment by Norman Markowitz

Fri, 11 May 2012 17:39:29 -0400

Dimitrov’s United Front: A Last Installment by Norman Markowitz

As for United Front spread, Dimitrov began to use in his speeches people’s front and look with hope to the development of peoples front anti-fascist struggles in France, Spain, China. At the same time he noted the response of fascist states and forces to the Peoples Front, as seen in the Spanish fascist uprising.

Here, Dimitrov stressed that the fascist assault in Spain was the direct result of both the Peoples Front victory and the Hitler’s remilitarization of the Rhineland, Mussolini’s conquest of Ethopia,and “the earlier seizures of parts of China by Japan”{Manchuria}.

All of this, Dimitrov states accurately “took place with the connivance of the bourgeois democratic countries and the league of nations.” Much of this he sees as the result of opportunism by organizational and political leaders seeking to hold unto “their soft seats” in various nominally anti-fascist parties and organizations. Some of it . though,was the habit of seeking a “middle policy” which in this case amounted to a of “leave the beast alone,” of ignoring fascist aggression and crime in the misguided hope that the fascist states would be satisfied with their gains and leave their appeasers alone.

But here, Dimitrov undermined his and the Communist movement’s United Front position by giving unqualified support for the Soviet Moscow trials of former leading Bolsheviks for conspiring with German fascists and Japanese imperialists to overthrow the Soviet State.

The Socialist International and socialists in many countries, the forces with which the Comintern sought to build the organizational United Front. Without going into these trials, it is, for our time particularly, it is significant to note that Dimitrov refers to these former Bolsheviks over and over again as “terrorists” Those who support in any way these “terrorists” are aiding and abetting fascism in Spain and everywhere else.

Once more, without going into the specifics of the Moscow Trials, which the capitalist press in the U.S. called the “purge trials,” Dimitrov’s reference to them as the “trial of the terrorists” established a potentially dangerous precedent.

First, it strengthened the position of anti-Communist socialists that the Communists were doctrinaires who could not to be trusted. Second it called for an allegiance to what were internal Soviet policies on the principle that any failure to give active support to any Soviet policy would undermine anti-fascist unity.

The term “terrorist” was at the time was not widely used. It had been first used ironically in Czarist Russia against various groups who plotted the assassination of the Czar and other prominent leaders. The British had also used it against anti-imperialists using violence in India.

But, by equating the small numbers of Trotskyites who had founded the fourth International with fascists, the Comintern provided ammunition for its enemies in social democratic and left sectarian circles to argue that the Communist parties and the Soviet Union in its policies were like the fascists enemies of democracy and people’s rights.

In the U.S. for example, in response to a rightwing counter offensive against the sit down strikes which saw the formation of the House Un-American activities committee and heightened anti-labor violence in 1938, Peoples Front advocates formed the Lincoln Day Committee for Democracy and Intellectual Freedom, whose most important sponsor was Franz Boaz, the leading anti-racist anthropologist in the world. In opposition, social democratic and Trotskyite opponents of the CPUSA who had been active in the defense of the Moscow Trial defendants and led by the self styled Marxist philosopher, Sidney Hook, formed an American Committee for Cultural Freedom to fight both fascism and Communism, contending that the only way to save democratic forces in labor and in peoples movements was to remove Communists from democratic mass organizations and equate Communists with fascists as enemies of democracy.

A year later, in the aftermath of German-Soviet non aggression Pact, Hook and his supporters were able to remove Communist leader Elizabeth Gurley Flynn from the leadership of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) under the “anti-totalitarian” banner, which also led to the resignation of Dr. Harry E. Ward, founder and longtime leader of the Methodist Federation for Social Action and a major Peoples Front leader in the U.S. among religious social and community groups. The Committee for Cultural Freedom served as a center in the U.S. for the propagation of the totalitarian theory, which challenged the intellectual premises on which united front action was based.

The Committee and similar groups began in their attacks on the United Front to red-bait prominent progressives involved in People’s Front campaigns, in that sense providing grist for the mills of HUAC, various state and local HUAC’s that reactionaries established through the country, and for that matter the FBI and various local “Red Squads” (political police units aimed at the left). After World War the American Committee for Cultural Freedom became both the model and the core organization for the World Congress of Cultural Freedom, established and funded by the CIA through individuals like Sidney Hook to build a global “united front” of the center (including all anti-Communist leftists) against the left

I am not saying that this history would have been different if the Communist movement had spoken against the Moscow trials. I am not even saying that the Communist movement should have spoken against the Moscow trials. But, in developing the Peoples Front strategy, where defense of the trials served no positive purpose, it made much more sense to focus on Soviet aid to the Spanish Republic, Soviet support for collective security against fascist aggression in the League of Nations, Soviet support for workers rights and anti-imperialist movements as the reason for supporting both Soviet foreign policy globally and the construction of socialism in the Soviet Union

These policies were indispensible to the defense of working class rights, and the democratic rights of all people..

Also, while Dimitrov’s language and that of the Comintern generally was both theoretically cogent, forceful and accessible to working class people through the world, the tendency to fall into the Soviet personality cult around Joseph Stalin by referring at points to “the Great Stalin” (although the quotes from Stalin were also cogent and solid) was counterproductive.

It fed charges of Soviet domination of Communist parties, of “Stalinism” as something separate from and an evil force dominating the Communist movement, which would also be used as weapons, first against the anti-fascist people’s front, and then in the U.S. established for the anti-Communist cold war policy.

While I feel that it is important that these criticisms be made today , I don’t see them as at all that significant when compared with the huge positive achievements of the United Front and Peoples Front polices. Before I conclude this review of Dimitrov let me mention those accomplishments.

First, the people’s front campaign saw Communists join with socialists and liberals to bloc fascist movements and parties from coming to power in any other major developed country. People’s front campaigns strengthened trade union movements harmed by the depression and in a number of European countries enacted significant reforms. People’s front organizations and campaigns also provided very practical experience for the anti-fascist resistance forces through Europe and Asia which adopted people’s front concepts and policies to the struggle to defeat the Axis armies, occupiers, and collaborators.

The foreign policy advanced under the banner of the Peoples Front and articulated by Dimitrov and the Comintern, anti-fascist collective security, that is, comprehensive and enforced economic sanctions against Hitler’s rearmament and Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia, join with the Soviet Union in providing military aid to the Spanish Republic, some joint military action of Germany did not withdraw from Austria, and finally France joining with the Soviet Union to honor its treaty with Czechoslovakia rather than joining with Chamberlain and the British Empire to surrender the Sudetenland to Hitler at Munich, did not of course materialize.

But this was completely the fault of the non fascist capitalist states, led by the British empire, who in the language of the French right, “Better Hitler than Blum,” preferred to “leave the beast alone” and in the best case scenario, sic the beast on the Soviet Union, rather than confront the fascist danger, which was also a danger to their national sovereignty

Under those circumstances, Comintern policy and Soviet policy, together offered the only real chance to defeat fascism short of war and helped to set the stage for the anti-fascist coalition that would defeat fascism in the Second World War.

By end of 1937, Dimitrov and the Comintern saw the danger of ongoing and new fascist aggression as a greater threat than fascist victories in capitalist countries. The “Supreme Demand of the present” was to assist the people of Spain and China in defeating fascist and imperialist invasions, assist the peoples of Germany and Italy in freeing themselves from fascist domination; defend “small nations” threatened with fascist aggression and “establish an impregnable barrier against fascist aggression in the East and in the West.”

The formation by the fascist powers of the anti-Comintern Pact, the new threats to small nations like Czechoslovakia are noted, along with the increasingly sinister role of pro fascist reactionaries in European countries, Chinese puppets of Japanese imperialism and interestingly enough “the Hearst press circles in the United States.”(the Hearst press was a sort of predecessor to the global Murdoch media empire today then the most virulent anti-labor, anti New Deal, anti-Communist and national chauvinist news service In the U.S. ).

There were hopeful signs in the French Popular Front government, the British labor movement, and in the U.S. Commenting on the U.S., Dimitrov noted correctly that “for the first time in the history of America, the working class of the United States is displaying its independence as a class, uniting its forces into mass trade unions and actively taking the lead of the democratic and progressive forces in the country against reaction and fascism.” Communists, one might add, had played the central role in bringing about these victories through an informal Peoples Front alliance with the New Deal government.

What can we learn from this classic today? On the surface, we live in a world where the Soviet Union no longer exists, the Comintern is nearly seventy years gone, China under the leadership of the CCP is emerging as a great force in world affairs, and the interdependence of and global power of finance capital is demonstrably far greater than it was when Dimitrov was speaking and writing, and the long period of victories for socialism and anti –imperialism which followed World War II and been challenged by a period of significant defeats. But history is not so easily erased.

First, that it is the working class, through its organizations and actions, which can win, not political parties, or unions or mass organizations by themselves. Unity and breadth and militancy are not opposed concepts. To achieve both unity of action and breadth and militancy, concrete programs must be advanced that the working class can understood—in the U.S. for example, consumer debt reduction(including the more than 1 trillion in student loan debt, the enormous mortgage and general credit card debt) along with public job creation policies which will provide as “social investments” subsidies for working people and tax capital, not vice versa, which has been the policy of U.S. governments since Reagan in an extreme way and which continues thanks to the power of capital and reaction today.

Also, we must “take the flag” away from the reactionaries who have used it as a weapon against our people by exposing the lies that the country was built on “rugged individualism,” free market capitalism,” great “captains of industry and politicians like Ronald Reagan(ironically, the right can’t so readily go back in history to celebrate Polk, Fillmore, McKinley, Taft, Harding, Coolidge, Hoover, Nixon, who would thanks to their words and deeds by their real heroes). People through Europe and Asia learned the very hard way during WWII that Communists and socialists were the real defenders of the best of their national heritage, not reactionaries and fascists serving their exploiters and oppressors).

In foreign policy also, we must advance a consistent peace policy, opposing for example any attack on Iran without supporting or defending the internal policies of the clerical regime; supporting and defending the socialist oriented governments of Venezuela and Bolivia and the socialist government of Cuba; working peace and cooperation with the Peoples Republic of China and seeing it as a major force to build peace.

And as Dimitrov noted in seventy five years ago, the battle for peace is in essence revolutionary; the battle to organize and unify the working class around its national interests is both internationalist and revolutionary.

Dimitrov's United Front after the Seventh Congress by Norman Markowitz

Wed, 09 May 2012 18:56:00 -0400

Dimitrov’s United Front after the Seventh Congress by Norman Markowitz

As the Communist International’s most prominent figure, Georgi Dimitrov represented the International in attempts to implement its policies by reaching out to social democrats and other anit-fascists in the aftermath of the Seventh Congress.

In a letter the Spanish Socialist party in November 1935, he expressed solidarity with the Spanish workers struggle and directly pledged support for a united front of Spanish Socialist, Communist, and Anarcho Syndicalist workers organizations against fascism(In Spain, the anarchists were a significant force in the Spanish workers movement.

Subsequently, this United Front alliance, without the support of the anarchist workers organization leaders but with the support of most of their members defeated a coalition of monarchists, reactionaries, and fascists, which then prompted a military coup and the outbreak of a civil war in Spain which pitted the forces of the United Front against Spanish, German and Italian fascism.

In early 1936, Dimitrov reached out to the French socialist leader Leon Blum, the target of a savage physical assault by fascist hoodlums, and defined the attack as an example of fascist regard for rights and law along with strong support for the strengthening and broadening of a United Front already in development in France. Specifically Dimitrov linked these actions with fascist provocations through the world and called for strong concerted action by the working class and its parties to disarm these criminal groups

Within months, the French alliance, called le Front Populaire(the Popular Front) won a political victory and established, for a brief period, a national government that from the perspective of the French working class, that would enact the most far-reaching pro working class reforms in French history. The popular front came to be the term used in many countries for many of the policies of the United Front

The French Popular Front government was not the revolutionary government of the Paris Commune, but a government that established the 40 hour week and negotiated a national labor contract which compelled French employers to give the majority of French workers significant wage increases, along with a variety of other significant reforms.

In a May Day, 1936 address, Dimitrov addressed the “struggle for peace” by stating “the peace that exists at present is a bad peace.”

Better than war, but a peace that does not confront the danger of fascist aggression, Here Dimitrov looks at Japanese imperialism in China and Italian imperialism in Ethiopia and calls for a real international policy of sanctions and “punishments” against the aggressor nations.

But, while calling for an anti-war policy through the League of Nations (which the Soviet Union was advancing at the time) Dimitrov makes clear that it is the working class both nationally and through international solidarity, that can advance an anti-fascist peace policy, that can wake up capitalist states directly threatened by fascist aggression to act in their own immediate interests rather than appeasing the fascists out of their fear of socialist revolution. This aspect of the United Front would of course not be successful as the European non fascist capitalist states, led by the conservative British Empire government of Neville Chamberlain, would choose pro-fascist and in their own minds anti-Communist and anti- socialist appeasement over an anti-fascist United Front policy.

In an address on the fifteenth anniversary of the formation of the Chinese Communist party (October, 1936) Dimitrov focuses on the struggle of the CCP against “the Japanese fascist military clique” and stresses the importance of this struggle to world affairs.

Specifically, Dimitrov looks to “public opinion” in Britain, France, and the U.S.A, where a Eurocentric mass media has provided limited information on Japanese imperialism to encourage both mass ignorance and indifference, to understand that the Japanese imperialist threat is a central part of the fascist danger, that, as Dimitrov notes prophetically, “the alliance between German fascism and the Japanese military clique, directed toward the dismemberment and enslavement of China and toward unloosing a new imperialist world war.”

The establishment of a Second United Front between what had seemed to be irreconcilable enemies, Chiang Kai-shek’s largely reactionary nationalist Kuomintang party and regime and the CCP would lead the Japanese militarists to launch a full scale, albeit undeclared war in China in 1937, a war that one can see as the real beginning of the Second World War.

Thirteen years after Dimitrov’s address, around its 28^th anniversary, the Chinese Communist Party had led the Chinese people in the struggle against Japanese imperialism and having decisively defeated Chiang’s U.S. armed and supported regime, would establish the Peoples Republic of China in October 1949.

The rest of the Dimitrov’s The United Front, deals with the civil war raging in Spain, the supreme dangers and demands of the new global fascist threat, and the significant attempts to build a stronger and more effective unity of action between Communists socialists and other anti-fascists. We will look at those articles in the next and final installment

A Second Installment on Dimitrov's United Front by Norman Markowitz

Tue, 08 May 2012 16:08:20 -0400

A Second Installment of Dimitrov’s. The United Front by Norman Markowitz

In our first installment of Dimitrov’s main report(which is largely reproduced on our website) I concluded with the specific references to conditions in the U.S. I should have mentioned that the Comintern regarded the anti-fascist struggle in the U.S. of prime importance, in the words of Dimitrov, “as we all know, the United States is not Hungary or Finland, or Bulgaria, or Latvia. The success of fascism in the United States would vitally change the whole international situation.”

Of course the victory of those elements within the Republican Party who are advancing fascist programs would have an even greater destructive effect today.

The rest of Dimitrov’s report deals with the relationship of the united front to “fascist mass organizations,” social democratic organizations, the trade unions, women, youth, and the ideological struggle against fascism, along with the necessity of the unity of theory and practice among the Communist parties and the building of unity within the trade unions and the working class.

Here there are valuable insights for us today.

Where Dimitrov speaks of the necessity of reaching out to workers in fascist controlled countries and organizations under fascist influence, those who did respond to the crisis by supporting fascism, we should look today strategically to those districts of Ohio, Wisconsin, Central Pennsylvania, Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, where the ultra-right “tea party” Republicans tipped the balance to give the Republican control of the House.

The working people in these districts have the right vote, which of course did not exist in fascist dominated countries. They have seen the rightwing politicians they elected attack other basic rights as they seek to destroy public sector unions, enact legislation to restrict the reproductive rights of women, oppress undocumented workers, none of which has done anything to help them.

These voters can be reached with appeals to policies that will deal with the questions of jobs, real incomes, and the crippling debt burden. They can be won from the contemporary versions of fascist demagogues who appeal to their “urgent needs” by directing their anger unto government, public employees, progressive taxation, undocumented workers, away from their exploiters and oppressors since these politicians, Walker, Kasisch, Christie, et al, are advancing policies that are directly harming them in the interests of their exploiters and oppressors.

In dealing with “social democratic governments”(at the time in power in Scandinavian countries) Dimitrov calls upon Communists to move away from the policy of criticizing their general policies and instead look to and seek to advance the programs which they both share with Communists and which they were in many cases elected on---their more advanced programs, as t he basis for united action. Here , while we have no “social democratic government,” we can look for example at the Obama 2008 election campaign not to condemn his administration for failing to deliver on those promises which we support and share but on the need for united political action and struggle to both create the elected majority and the mass organizations that will translate those promises into policy.

In this regard, Dimitrov makes a powerful argument against the left opposition to the united front inside and outside the Communist party. “Self satisfied sectarianism….satisfied with its doctrinaire narrowness, its divorce from the real life of the masses….which professes to know all and considers it superfluous to learn from the masses, from the lessons of the labour movement. In short, sectarianism to which, as they say, mountains are mere stepping stones.”

Today there are those who say that if the trade union movement attacks the Democratic party millions and millions of workers will flock to its banner. If mass struggles are launched against both the Obama administration and the right, great victories will be won—that the masses are being held back by their unions, all of their mass organizations, that, to paraphrase Dimitrov, the whole capitalist institutional superstructure, the mountain of organizational and ideological power, can be jumped over as a launching board or stepping stone if the workers are led to hurl themselves at it directly.

In the U.S. today, such policies of “self –satisfied sectarianism,” taking the form of “we were right about Obama so don’t get fooled again” omits what the last four years under a McCain national administration would have meant and or course what the next four years of a Romney national administration, which such policies would help to bring about, would likely be.

These were the central themes of the main report. In replying to the discussion of the report, Dimitrov summarized many of these themes and added some new insights.

First one should remember that it is the working class(and in the U.S. the overwhelming majority are workers and employees, not farmers, artisans, small business people, self employed professionals) that we are seeking to unite. We must also take seriously their values and perceptions, seeking to build upon that which is positive, the egalitarian traditions, the civil rights and civil liberties traditions, not ignore or mock them. We are struggling to defeat capitalism, not capitalist definitions of democracy which capitalists themselves employ hypocritically.

And, to use Dimitrov’s phrase, we should not be “national nihilists.” The forces of fascism and reaction in the U.S. like those in the fascist states in the 1930s were “rummaging through history” to present a twisted view of the German, Italian, and other peoples as defending great civilizations from inferior savage enemies, undermined by subversive liberals, socialists, and communists in their ranks as they looked toward Hitlers, Mussolinis, Pilsudskis, Francos, et al, as saviors.

Today, we can and must look at the best of U.S. history, Tom Paine, Thaddeus Stevens and Frederick Douglas, Robert La Follette and Florence Kelley, Franklin Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt, Martin Luther King and Anne Braden, as the struggle to make the general welfare clause of the constitution and the bill of rights of the constitution not simply formal rights and freedoms but effective ones. By understanding and identifying with a positive past, we can expose the reactionaries whose use of the “tea party” as a symbol of what they represent is as rational as Sarah Palin’s idiot comment that Paul Revere riding to “warn the British.”

Also, those revolutionaries, while they were not democrats with a small d in any way were not supporters of corporations or laissez-faire capitalism(which was just in its infancy as an ideology) or vigilante militias, and understood the necessity of both taxation and public regulation of economic activity(which, as merchant capitalists, landowners/landlords, and slaveholders, they interpreted in their own class interests) The flag they created and fought under, and the Republic and Constitution that they created, belongs to us, not the reactionaries and contemporary fascists who demagogically use such documents and symbols t o serve and defend the most reactionary sectors of the capitalist class in the service of a finance capitalist dominated system. It is our duty to interpret the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and the role of government in the interests of the working class

In the next installment we will look at Dimitrov’s post Seventh Congress writings on the anti-fascist struggle

A New Marxist IQ for the French and Greek Elections by Norman Markowitz

Mon, 07 May 2012 14:40:16 -0400

The defeat of center and center right austerity governments in France and in Greece, while by no means a clearcut victory for new pro working class policies in these countries, is a defeat for finance capital and their political servants, who thought that they could transfer in the "Euro Zone" the costs of this crisis unto the whole people.

Pundits here are beginnning to say that the French elections particularly constitute a "blow to the U.S." Actually, they are a victory for progressive Americans since the new President, Hollande, representing centrist groupings within the Socialist party has sought to distance himself both from the anti-welfare state austerity policies of Sarkozy and also the support given by Sarkozy for the U.S. NATO bloc, especially in Afghanistan. This is good news for Americans, who bear the great brunt of the costs, both in terms of wasted capital and human lives, for the adventures of the NAT0 bloc.

So, let's have a new Marxist IQ in honor of this electoral victory

1. Many scholars, both Marxists and non Marxists regard the following figure and group or work in the French revolution as a precursor of the Communist movement

a. Maarguis de Sade and his Memoirs

b. Francois-Noel "Gracchus" Babeuf and the Society of Equals

c. Maximilien Robespierre and the Jacobin Club

4. Samuel du Pont de Nemours and the Girondists

2 Which one of these did Marx and Engels not regard as a Utopian Socialist

a. Claude Henri Saint Simon

b. Robert Owen

c. Jeremy Bentham

d. Charles Fourier

3. Karl Marx saw in the Paris Commune of 1871

a. The first socialist government in history

b. a continuation of the capitalist democratic tendencies of the French revolution

c. a government of anarchy and terror

d. the first government in history representing the interests of the working class

4. The first "counter-insurgent" war of the cold war era was funded and managed by

a. the U.S. against Communist led Greek insurgents after WWII

b. The French against insurgents in 1950s Algeria

c. The British against insurgents in 1950s Kenya

d. The U.S. against Communist led insurgents in Vietnam

5. The great radical French man of letters Anatole France in this classic statement summed up many Marxists believe the function of freedom and equality under capitalism

a. From each according to his ability to each according to his work

b. The highest freedom is the freedom to trade

c. the majestic equality of the law...forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, to steal bread

d. I may disagree with what you saw but I will defend to the death your right to say it.

As for last weeks correct answers, check out the commentary which some bright person sent in to the quiz they were all right

Norman Markowitz

P.S. The answers to this week's quizz will be presented next week, barring correct answers in the commentary.

There is another quote from Anatole France which is one of my favorites and while not that well known here may be of great relevance today "It is only the poor who pay cash, and that not from virtue, but because they are refused credit."

The First Installment for Dimitrov's The United Front by Norman Markowitz

Sun, 06 May 2012 18:24:30 -0400

Georgi Dimitrov, The United Front (New York: International Publishers: 1938) remembered by Norman Markowitz

Recently PA posted Georgi Dimitrov’s important address to the Seventh Congress of the Comintern(1935) on the struggle against fascism and the need for a new policy—a broad united front policy of both the divided left and center left to fight "the fascist offensive” In 1938, International Publishers, then and now the publishers representing the CPUSA, issued a collection of Dimitrov’s speeches, reports and commentaries from the Seventh Congress through 1937 when thepolicy had already seen many important developments.

The work was widely read at the time and was influential in the thinking of both U.S. Communists and progressives who were struggling to defeat fascism. Rereading it, I found many valuable insights into both the dangers of fascism and the weaknesses and flaws of the larger left of that time which I believe are of value today. So I decided to write this summary , remembrance, review and analysis of a classic collection, in a few installments. This is the first installment

The first section “The Fascist Offensive and the Tasks of the Communist International “ is the full version of the main report enunciating the united front policy. Presented to the Congress on August 2, 1935 it is ninety three pages long—a lucid summary of the policy which would be advanced in the coming years.

Dimitrov begins by challenging theoretically the main social democratic and liberal analyses of fascism—that it respectively is a petit bourgeois reactionary movement and a mass movement above conventional politics that represents neither the working class nor the capitalist class

Rather, Dimitrov restates the Communist position that it is the dictatorship of finance capital, and adds that the path for its ascent was prepared “the reactionary measures” of capitalist governments

But simply to proclaim that it is the dictatorship of finance capital means nothing unless one fight intelligently against it. To have the right line means nothing if one is merely an observer rather than a committed activist.

Fascism’s appeal to the masses is that “it demagogically appeals to their most urgent needs and demands “ however dishonest and twisted its appeal may be.

Later Dimitrov gives as an example a rally of the unemployed in Berlin which he attended before Hitler came to power. A Nazi speaker denounced the delays and retrials of two prominent stock market swindlers and concluded that they should simply be shot to save the taxpayers’ money which could then be used to help the unemployed—demagoguery that in no way addressed the issue of unemployment(like “tea party” attacks of government spending and waste) but which the crowd cheered. A Communist speaker simply repeated general statements of Comintern positions, and good wishes and his words fell flat. Fascist appeals to end unemployment by expelling foreigners.

Solving the debt crisis by abolishing interest, like rightist schemes for a “flat tax” and campaigns to deport undocumented workers and seal borders today, were and are confidence tricks, pseudo actions feed on masss frustration with govercnnnment inaction. Listening to economists or political analyists on PBS /CNN discuss the economic crisis, even though their position is completely different than the Communist speaker at the unemployed rally in Berlin, equally falls flat to those who are victims of the economic crisis.

Dimitrov then goes forward to see fascism as an international phenomenon which can come to power in any capitalist nation, contending that the view of many Communists that it could not happen in an advanced nation like Germany had been proven completely false.

How did the fascists win out where they won out? Capitalist governments paved the way for them Also, Social Democrats where they had some power in various governments did not take effective actions to both address the economic crisis and to use the state power that they did have against the lawless fascist paramilitary groups.

Nor did they address the class interests of small peasants and agricultural laborers, without the class discipline of industrial workers, who were prime targets for fascist demagoguery and mobilization. One might look today in the U.S. to both the anti-union shop Southern and Western states and the hard hit “de-industrialized” sections of the Middle West to find similar potential mass constituencies.

It did not matter of course that the fascist states in power broke all of the promises to poor peasants to free them from debt, to women to protect the sanctity of the home and family to, youth of a better and more secure life, to the small businessmen and salaried middle classes to protect them from big businessmen and foreign(in Germany Jewish) competition. By then it was too late to resist except through the creation of undergrounds

Fascism, Dimitrov contends is “a ferocious but unstable power.” It is not rooted in capitalist strength but in capitalist weakness and desperation --- a desperation which to fund parties and policies which they themselves in pre crisis times saw as lunatic and criminal. One might compare this with the statements of "tea party" and ultraright Republicans today

Dimitrov then goes on to address the criticisms of the United Front, first from the right. The United Front is a “Communist maneuver.” Let those who take that position join the United Front instead of fighting it and thus “expose” the Communists.” Communists have a different program than Social Democrats and liberals. Communists admit that but pledge not to attack others within the United Front and to work for a concrete anti-fascist policy. The capitalist parties are more trustworthy than the Communists? Look at what happened in Germany when the Social Democrats supported such parties.

Dimitrov also challenges the contentions of British Laborites and others in countries with small Communist parties who argue that the Communists are too insignificant to matter in a United Front. But without the militancy and organizational coherence of the Communists the mass grassroots action necessary to both establish and sustain an effective anti-fascist policy in the face of the fascist offensive would not exist.

Opponents of the United Front also argue that he Communists are for a dictatorship and we are for social democracy. To this Dimitrov answers, without denying or hiding the Communist commitment to a revolutionary “dictatorship” of the proletariat,” that the Communists support concrete democratic struggles of the working class and see in the United Front not a “maneuver” or even a stage on the road to the dictatorship of the Proletariat but a policy to defeat fascist danger, which will liquidate all forms of democracy.

For those today who might argue that Communists are tricksters, seeking to impose their will on others , one can argue that Communists if they were that could not have led in the development of industrial unions, pioneering anti-racist civil rights organizations, peace organizations, peoples democratic movements in the struggles against fascism in the past. The commitment of Communists to democratic struggles and ideals has been expressed in action, not just in words and those who have learned through action and participation in mass struggles understand that.

But what is the content of the United Front? “First, joint struggle to shift the consequences of the crisis unto the shoulders of the ruling class----in a word unto the rich.” This means a government that will act to protect jobs and income, prevent foreclosures of productive and personal property, and to use today’s language, “bail out the people”.

“Second...joint struggle against the destruction of bourgeois-democratic liberties” meaning today in the U.S. the assault on free speech, freedom of assembly, the right to be protected against warrantless searches and seizures, the right not to be held in preventive detention, measures and policy that pave the way for fascism.

“Third, joint struggle against the approaching danger of an imperialist, preparation which will make such a war more difficult.” Given the policies of U.S. governments and its NATO allies in the cold war and “post cold war period” this analysis really needs no updating.

But how to accomplish this? There are many tactics but all call for militant and creative action to defend workers organizations and strikes, to engage in mass political struggles against repressive legislation and to fight to defend women, youth, minorities against both “social reaction” and the fascist assaults. And this must be done at the grassroots level, not bureaucratically by “committees” of Communist and Social Democratic and other anti-fascist parties, committees of various trade union and mass organization groups to form coalitions endorsing policies and candidates for electoral office without programmatic action to win over masses of people to those policies and candidates.

Much of this remains directly relevant as we struggle to organize the working class to defeat the fascist danger, not to elect a political party that we all know is a party of capitalism, but to energize the masses of working people, including the most class conscious workers, minorities and women(a sociological minority given the institutional and ideological exploitation and oppression they face ) who are the mass constituencies of that party which we all know is the Democratic party to use it as far as they can to defend their class interests.

Although I am only on page 41 of the International Publishers 1938 edition, let me conclude this opening blog article on Dimitrov’s main report with a look at one part of the following section “Key Questions of the United Front in Individual Countries.” The first country listed was the United States of America.

Here it is important to understand that the various sections of the report were based on analyses developed by Communist representatives from the various countries and on the various commissions, not from some unseen sinister forces in Moscow, which continues to be the anti-Communist assertion.

Dimitrov makes the point that “in contradistinction to German fascism which operates under anti-Constitutional slogans, American fascism tries to portray itself as the custodian of the Constitution and “American Democracy.”

And in the U.S. there is no “third Reich” to be established, no new Roman Empire, or even a resurrection of Medieval Poland or a Hungary purified of minorities.

Dimitrov looking at the U.S. repeats the CPUSA position of calling for a “Farmers and Workers party” that would not be socialist or Communist but address the “urgent demands” of workers; the fight for land and against indebtedness for “white and negro sharecroppers; equal status for Negroes;” “for genuine social legislation, for unemployment insurance.”

At the time, Dimitrov feared that if such a party were not developed the depression crisis would lead to the creation of a mass fascist “utilizing the discontent of millions with the two Bourgeois parties, Democratic and Republican, to create a ‘third party’ in the United States, as an anti-Communist party, a party directed against the revolutionary movement.”

Of course, things would change rapidly in the U.S. The New Deal government would adopt some of the “genuine social legislation,” including unemployment insurance advanced by Communists and the left as the trade union movement took off, with industrial unions that Communist and socialists had long advocated, playing the leading role.

A third party of reaction, an anti-labor, anti-Communist, national chauvinist/racist party, did not materialize, although fascist demagogues like Father Charles Coughlin and “the Reverend” Gerald L.K. Smith sought to develop such a party around names like “national union” and “social justice.” A conservative coalition of rightwing Republicans and Democrats, primarily Southern Democrats, operating from 1938 to the end of WWII through the House Un-American Activities Committee(HUAC) did serve as a center for the policies that such fascist parties were identified with in Europe, ironically using the language that Dimitrov used when he noted that in America fascists attack all ideologies “imported” from Europe, including fascism, as “un-American.”

Today the forces of fascism do not need a “third party” although the media invented “tea party” inside the Republican party sometimes seeks to portray itself as that. A third party in itself would be divisive. Instead, the immediate task would seem to be to work aid the many millions of progressive citizens and voters of the Democratic party to liberate their progressive candidates, elected representatives, and organizations like Move on from the party power brokers and bosses who at best act like the rightwing social democratic leaders Dimitrov condemned—deferring to the center and the right on everything while presenting themselves as the only alternative to the right.

A New Marxist IQ for May Day by Norman Markowitz

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 18:53:28 -0400

May Day is a great day for a Marxist IQ. The correct numbers for last week's IQ are at the bottom of the page, so here goes.

l. May Day as an international day of worker's actions was established after a conference

a. In the Soviet Union in 1917 following the revolution

b. In China after the Revolution of 1949

c. In Paris in 1889, part of a movement that produced the Second International

d. In the U.S. after the Revolutionary War(1775-1783)

2. May Day's original purpose was

a. to give workers a holiday

b. to have workers demonstrate for the eight hour day and other rights

c. to launch socialist revolutions

d. to help workers join the middle class

3. The original May Day demonstrations were influenced by and in honor of

a. the workers of the Paris Commune of 1871

b. of the British General Strike of 1926

c. of the Chicago Haymarket Martyrs of the Eight Hour Movement in 1886

d. Of the Chinese workers and students slaughtered in the April, 1927 Shanghai Massacre

4. The Song which the May Day demonstrations helped to popularize through the world, making it the most widely translated and sung song in history was

a. Solidarity forever

b. The Battle Hymn of the Republic

c. The East is Red

d. The Internationale

5. Today the slogan the best embodies what May Day is about is

a. all power to the people

b. a world without workers is impossible. a world without capitalists is necessary

c. power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely

d. Read my lips. No new taxes

The correct answers for last week's health care IQ are

1.b

2. d

3. c

4. d

5. c

See everyone next week with the next IQ

'There are Marxists in India?'

Sat, 28 Apr 2012 15:35:00 -0400

Economist Prabhat Patnaik says moving back to an economic 'golden age' is impossible, so we must invent new solutions.

via al Jazeera

Austin, TX - After an engaging half-hour interview with India's pre-eminent Marxist economist during a conference at New York University, I told a friend about my one-on-one time with Prabhat Patnaik.

"There are Marxists in India?" came the bemused response. "I thought India was the heart of the new capitalism."

Indeed, we hear about India mostly as a rising economic power that is challenging the United States. While there certainly are no shortages of capitalists, there are still lots of Marxists in India, as well as communist parties that have won state elections. Patnaik represents the best thinking and practice of those left traditions - both the academic Marxism that provides a framework for the critique of economics, and the political Marxism that proposes public policies - which is why I was so excited to talk with him about lessons to be learned from the current economic crisis.

In the interview, conducted during a break in the NYU Institute for Public Knowledge's "Futures of Finance" conference, I asked Patnaik two main questions: First, is there a "golden age" of capitalism to which we can return? Second, can we ever expect ethical practices from the financial sector of the global capitalist economy? Before explaining why his answer to both questions was "no", some background.

Prabhat Patnaik started his academic career in the UK, earning his doctoral degree at Oxford University and then teaching at the University of Cambridge. He returned to India in 1974 to teach at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi until his retirement in 2010. He's the author of several influential books, including The Value of Money, published in 2008. Patnaik-the-politician served as Vice-Chairman of the Planning Board of the state of Kerala from 2006 to 2011 and is a member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist). He regularly writes on economic issues in the party's journal and addresses trade union meetings.

In the United States, where people believe Marxism was buried under the rubble of the Berlin Wall and communism can only mean Soviet-style totalitarianism, his political affiliations would guarantee a life on the margins. But India's political spectrum is considerably wider, and leftist ideas have a place in the national political discourse there. On the world stage, Patnaik brings an unusual perspective: An experienced economist with a history of political organising; an Indian who is engaged in the political debates of the West; a leftist who is not afraid to critique the weaknesses of the left tradition.

The quixotic quest for a 'golden age'

Ever since the financial meltdown of 2008, there has been more and more nostalgia in the United States - especially among liberals - for the immediate post-WWII period, the so-called "golden age" of capitalism during which profits and wages rose, and unemployment was low. This was the achievement of Keynesianism, the philosophy that unwanted market outcomes can be corrected through monetary and fiscal policy designed to stabilise an otherwise unstable business cycle. Primarily through "military Keynesianism" - massive spending on wars and a permanent warfare state - the US government helped stimulate the economy when it went into inevitable periods of stagnation. That worked until the mid-1970s, when growth started to slow.

Whether or not that system was good for everyone (lots of people in the "third world", for example, were not particularly happy with it), the question remains: Can we go back to that strategy? Patnaik says that golden age was necessarily short-lived, as the pressure for global investment pushed nations to give up the ability to impose controls on capital. This globalisation of finance made national Keynesian policies less relevant. At about the same time, steep increases in the price of petroleum generated even more capital in the oil states, which went looking for investment opportunities around the world.

Globalisation - meaning in this case, the concentration of capital moving freely around the world - meant that no single nation-state could go up against international finance. And with the global flow of goods, the large "reserve army of labour" (the unemployed and under-employed) in places such as China and India meant that workers in the advanced industrial countries had less leverage. So, productivity continued to rise, but wages stagnated. Patnaik said it is important to see the contemporary crisis in that historical context.

"The collapse of the housing bubble in the United States is certainly part of the problem, but not the root cause of the problem today," he said. "The immediate crisis it touched off helps make the underlying problem visible."

If this financialisation of the global economy, which has put so much power in so few hands, is at the heart of the problem, the question is clear: In the absence of a global state, who is going to control international finance capital?

If capital is going to be concentrated, can we at least make it behave?

If the power of finance capital can't be diminished, is there a way to at least make it follow some sane rules to prevent the worst from happening again? Short answer: No.

"It's important to understand that capitalism is a spontaneous system, not something that is always necessarily planned or controlled," Patnaik said. Because the reward for ignoring, evading, or getting around rules is so powerful, the attempts to make capitalism follow ethical norms are bound to fail.

"Keynesianism worked in a specific time and place, but capitalism escaped Keynesianism," he said. New rules will suffer a similar fate, absent a force as strong as international finance capital to enforce the rules.

Although Patnaik often talks in detail about the complex workings of the global economy, he also articulates simple truths when that kind of straightforward analysis is needed. In doing so, he often draws on aspects of Marx's analysis that the world tends to forget.

To make the point about the futility of talking about ethical norms in capitalism, Patnaik pointed to Marx's insight that a capitalist is "capital personified". Here's the relevant passage from the first volume of Marx's Capital:

"[T]he possessor of money becomes a capitalist ... [A]nd it is only in so far as the appropriation of ever more and more wealth in the abstract becomes the sole motive of his operations, that he functions as a capitalist, that is, as capital personified and endowed with consciousness and a will."

What Marx described as "the restless never-ending process of profit-making" and "boundless greed after riches" reminds us that, as actors on the economic stage, we are less moral agents and more "capital personified" - relentless in our restlessness and bound to believe in an illusory boundlessness. Society might be able make some moral claims on people with wealth if they were merely working in capitalism, but it's more difficult to find common moral ground with "capital personified".

What should people fight for?

If we can't go back to business as usual, and there's no reason to expect that new rules will solve our problems, what kinds of solutions are possible? Patnaik said that neither of the two most obvious responses to the financial crisis - creating a surrogate global state to impose controls on finance, or "delinking" a nation's economy from the global finance system - are now on the cards. Even though capitalism is in deep crisis, resistance to capitalism is not nearly strong enough to produce movements that could make that possible.

Given his intellectual roots and political affiliation, it may seem surprising that Patnaik argues for organising to bring back the liberal welfare-state policies that developed in the advanced industrial countries during the postwar period when Keynesian economics ruled.

"That is not about going back, which is impossible," Patnaik said. "We have to go forward with new ideas." The call for a more robust social safety net (protecting workers' rights, unemployment insurance, social security, health insurance, etc.) isn't new, but such policies can be a step towards new ideas, a transitional measure, he explained. Rather than making those policies the final goal, as part of a more-or-less permanent accommodation with capitalism, they should be seen as a stepping stone toward radical change.

"We can work towards a reassertion of welfare state policies, not as an end but as a vehicle toward greater justice, as a way of making visible the inherent limitations of capitalism," he said.

In additions to the limitations of capitalism, there also are ecological limitations we can't ignore, he said, which means the goal can't be raising India and China to the material standards of the United States. Patnaik recognises the need to adjust older socialist goals to new realities.

"The world simply has to be refashioned," both in the "third world" and in advanced capitalist countries, and specifically in the United States, Patnaik said, which means experiments in alternative ways of living that are not based on material measures.

"This really is a spiritual/cultural question, about what it means to live a good life," he said, which should not be seen as foreign to socialism. "Marxism shouldn't be reduced to productionism. The goal of socialism has always been human freedom, which is about much more than material wealth."

"Gandhi talked about the ethical demands of nature, but I don't like that phrase, being a socialist and anthropocentric," Patnaik said with the hint of a grin. "But we do have to live within the limits of nature."

The role of Marxism

It is easy to misjudge Patnaik from first impressions. Unlike many intellectuals, Patnaik does not immediately thrust himself into a discussion, and he's soft-spoken both in conversation and from the podium. But when he does speak, his passion for justice comes through loud and clear. And, while Patnaik identifies very much as a communist, he also is quick to poke at some of the tradition's platitudes.

"I just came from the (Communist) Party Congress, and I keep reminding everyone that they have to give up notions of a one-party State, of democratic centralism (the Leninist notion that party members were free to debate policy but must support the final decision of the party)," Patnaik said. "Democratic centralism always leads to centralism."

If leftists reject the current dominance of finance in the world, Patnaik said that it's important to reject any suggestion that a single perspective or party should dominate.

"The hegemony of finance throttles democracy. The hegemony of finance beats you into shape," he said. If the goal is to resist that kind of hegemony, then the approach of the old communist movement simply isn't relevant, Patnaik said - but socialist principles are more relevant than ever.

"Any resistance has to be about opening up alternatives, opening up critical thinking to imagine those alternatives," he said. "The only way to challenge that global regime is mass mobilisation."

Patnaik has no off-the-shelf solutions to offer, and it's difficult to reduce his thinking to slogans. At the age of 66, when many people hold on tightly to what they believe will work, Patnaik doesn't hesitate to say: "It's time to invent."

Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center in Austin, one of the partners in the community centre "5604 Manor". His latest book is All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice.

Follow him on Twitter: @jensenrobertw

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.

An Owl For The Killing – Why The Left Should Care

Sat, 28 Apr 2012 15:34:00 -0400

“. . .numbers weigh only in the balance if united by combination and led by knowledge.” Karl Marx, Inaugural Address to the International (1864)

Mary Ann Evans, known to the world as George Elliot, wrote many enduring novels. Middle March, considered her signature work, played with a theme that marked much of her writing: the good in the world quite often depends on everyday people involved in unhistorical acts. In other words, individuals come to realize that they must look beyond their everyday lives, relationships, work and troubles, to take action for their class, nation and all people. A new millennial version of this consciousness would also embrace the realization that their self-interest is bound up with the environment and all other beings.

The needs of working people are many. Union jobs are needed to pay for mortgages, for food and for the education of our children. All the gaps, from income to education, between white and black and other people of color, between men and women, between nations, need to be closed. The country needs high-speed rail along with solar, tidal and wind power. The eternal quest for economic growth and the impact of population growth on the economy and the environment needs serious study. Housing, especially housing patterns, need to be rethought, especially to avoid the sprawling out into flood plains, fire threatened areas and wildlife habitat. Taxing the rich and the nationalizing of the energy, insurance and financial sectors are a must. We need to work toward a revolution and the warm sun of socialism to change the culture of profit mania and self-aggrandizement.

So why should we care about a proposal of the US Fish And Wildlife Service to kill owls? Purportedly, this plan in the Pacific Northwest is to save Spotted owls whose old growth habitat are experiencing incursions of the Northern Barred owls from Canada. There is some evidence that the northern species is edging out its southern neighbor. Let’s look at their cynical idea of killing owls to save owls. Will it “work”? In whose interest is this program being initiated? How does it match up with all the stark needs in the laundry list above?

The NATO and US military are in expansionist mode, especially in the Middle East.

Violence is endemic in our capitalist culture today. A culture of violence feeds both the military and our prisons. The USA has more than two million people, especially youth and people of color, in its prisons. This is more than any other country in the world. A quiet desperation is palpable in youth and “gap” statistics. More than one in three young families (37%) with children were living in poverty by 2010. Twenty-three states have drastically cut public education last year. Rick Perry’s Texas alone cut pre-kindergarten programs for 100,000 children, disproportionately impacting people of color.

Violence is implicit in these institutions and gaps. It must be mitigated. In the process of the movements in opposition to racism, the death penalty and for peace, youth, the environment, the all-embracing people’s movement comes in contact with new adherents. The 2008 electoral movement to elect Barak Obama swept together many disparate movements and people. We will need that unity again in 2012 and beyond. The moment demands no less. Those opposed to violence to other beings must also be embraced in this broad front.

Just what is driving the Barred owls thrust into Spotted owl turf? I went to Yale University’s Vertebrate Zoology collection to find out. The significant overall size advantage of the larger Barred owl needed no measuring devise. I did measure the talons of both the Spotted owl and Barred owl. It is the physical structure that makes first contact with prey. The Barred owls had an average 2 mm larger talons that the Spotted owls. Peter and Rosemary Grant, working with the famous Darwin Finches of the Galápagos Islands, taught us what even tiny differences meant.

In the Grant’s study, the birds with a 0.5 mm greater beak depth had a significant advantage eating seeds, particularly during stressful drought periods. They tended to be healthier and procreate. The Barred owl and its closely related cousin, the Spotted owl, are contesting for wood rats, flying squirrels and other prey in the old growth forests— selective advantage to the Barred. They are not an invasive species. They are simply expanding their range. In other words, the Barred owls will keep coming into forests occupied by Spotted owls. Hybrids have already been reported.

We have another self-interest to stop this violent proposal of the government. As owls go, so go the forests. These animals are the canaries in the forest. They are an indicator species for forest ecosystem sustainability. When we don’t pay attention to these upper level predators, bad things happen. Lyme disease started in a number of ways, but consensus science says the killing of predators, such as wolves and mountain lions, caused an imbalance with prey species such as deer. As deer are the final feeding destination of the adult tick that carries the causative agent of Lyme disease, it opened the door to this debilitating disease. So the killing of predators brought about the unintended consequence of ecosystem imbalance and Lyme disease.

Unfortunately, when disease happens that affect our species, people too often look for the quick solution. It is not always, maybe in most cases, the best solution. Take what happened on Monhegan Island in Penobscot Bay, Maine. This mid-coast island, about 14 miles from the mainland, has a long history as an artists’ enclave. When cases of Lyme disease began to escalate, islanders reached for the quick solution. They blamed the other victims of ecosystem imbalance. They killed all the deer on the island.

Corporate sponsors of this owl kill program are already shooting owls. This heinous proposal is in a discussion phase headed by the Interior Department. Its impact was tested, as mentioned above, by a limited kill of barred owls on private land and beginning on our public forests. Are corporate elements seeking to eliminate all owls as indicator species of forest health to open more old growth forests to logging? Logging is actually written in the Interior Department plan to supposedly reduce fires and create jobs. These are the old Trojan horses for private companies to make more incursions into old growth forests on public lands. They care about one thing – profits. The Green Diamond Resource Company killed owls right on its land. Early data confirmed what some of us predicted. Forty nine percent of the Barred owls killed were new arrivals. In other words, the owls keep coming and the gun barrels keep smoking.

People can organize themselves, nature cannot. The Barred owls will continue to come into Spotted owl territory. Owl Armageddon will continue. Insensitivity to state and institutional violence, coupled with mass media preoccupation with group and individual heinous acts, have warped our culture. We can’t let the slide into insensitivity and non-caring continue on any level. It’s time to draw a line, including a green line, in the sand. The best way to defend old growth forests is public involvement. Defend and extent the forests. Killing owls does the opposite.

Some in the environmental movement give up on people and turn their attention narrowly to domestic animals and wildlife. There is an opportunity here for a push in the opposite direction. With left and progressive movements showing sensitivity to animal rights and the defense of wildlife, in short other beings, we broaden the environmental movement with a chance to open dialogues with other peoples’ movements.

The benefits can be mutual and sustaining for defenders of other beings with the environment, women, youth and labor movements, especially the latter. Those whose focus is the quality of life of other beings have a richer understanding of how that quality is connected to people. In turn, the labor movement can enhance the consciousness, in some cases reawaken the consciousness of the defenders of other beings to the plight faced by workers from the struggle to pay rent, mortgages, and medical bills to keeping youth off the streets and in productive channels. The left is needed in both instances with its many lessons in unity across class, racial and ethnic boundaries. The millions of dollars projected for killing owls can be transferred to meet desperate needs of our people and for the environment.

In short, we need to change our culture to one that respects and nourishes life of all peoples and other beings. Rick Perry was questioned in a Republican primary debate concerning the large number of death penalties carried out in his state of Texas during his ten years as Governor. Before Perry could respond, the audience began to cheer that high number. In capsule that moment captured the descent some, especially the Tea Party, in our country would take the rest of us spiraling after them. Do not let them take us there.

The “saving” of Spotted owls by killing thousands of Barred owls is bad science, unsustainable ecologically and indefensible morally. Stop this program now and save old growth forests by protecting them, not killing owls. If your serenity was disturbed by all this, then do as George Eliot exhorted all of us to do. It’s time to look beyond our immediate circumstances. It’s time to take action.

Sign the We The People petition to the President. Send this to ten or more of your most responsible friends. Ask them to do the same. IF WE GET 25,000 SIGNATURES, IN THIRTY DAYS, IT GETS SENT TO GOVERNMENT DEPARTMENTS FOR POLICY REVIEW. Act now.

Krugman on Bernanke

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 09:19:00 -0400

Krugman takes Bernanke to task for a) too little buying of long term assets (thus lowering long term interest rates); and b) not setting a higher inflation target (encouraging corporations to NOT sit on their money)--both policies Bernanke as professor argued were necessary tools to fight depression.

But Krugman, for all his brilliance and talent for reducing complicated ideas to simpler and more comprehensible models, is handicapped here by the classlessness, as Marxists would put it, of his ideology. By contrast, Greg Mankiw of Harvard, as shameless an apologist for the rich as one could find, and a much lesser economist, gets it: “If Chairman Bernanke ever suggested increasing inflation to, say, 4 percent, he would quickly return to being Professor Bernanke.” It would not matter if Ben Bernake were replaced by Karl Marx: All the key public institutions -- the Fed, Congress (with the power to force a Fed Chief out), all the financial regulatory agencies, and the Obama Administration--are heavily populated with and compromised by class interests absolutely opposed to Professor Krugman's enlightened position. When inflation rises, finance capital's profits decline. Period. When public institutions are led, or even more democratically balanced, by representatives of working class, middle class and popular forces, enlightenment will hold sway.

Earth to Ben Bernanke

By PAUL KRUGMAN

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/29/magazine/chairman-bernanke-should-listen-to-professor-bernanke.html?ref=magazine

When the financial crisis struck in 2008, many economists took comfort in at least one aspect of the situation: the best possible person, Ben Bernanke, was in place as chairman of the Federal Reserve.

Bernanke was and is a fine economist. More than that, before joining the Fed, he wrote extensively, in academic studies of both the Great Depression and modern Japan, about the exact problems he would confront at the end of 2008. He argued forcefully for an aggressive response, castigating the Bank of Japan, the Fed’s counterpart, for its passivity. Presumably, the Fed under his leadership would be different.

Instead, while the Fed went to great lengths to rescue the financial system, it has done far less to rescue workers. The U.S. economy remains deeply depressed, with long-term unemployment in particular still disastrously high, a point Bernanke himself has recently emphasized. Yet the Fed isn’t taking strong action to rectify the situation.

The Bernanke Conundrum — the divergence between what Professor Bernanke advocated and what Chairman Bernanke has actually done — can be reconciled in a few possible ways. Maybe Professor Bernanke was wrong, and there’s nothing more a policy maker in this situation can do. Maybe politics are the impediment, and Chairman Bernanke has been forced to hide his inner professor. Or maybe the onetime academic has been assimilated by the Fed Borg and turned into a conventional central banker. Whichever account you prefer, however, the fact is that the Fed isn’t doing the job many economists expected it to do, and a result is mass suffering for American workers.

What the Fed Can Do

The Federal Reserve has a dual mandate: price stability and maximum employment. It normally tries to meet these goals by moving short-term interest rates, which it can do by adding to or subtracting from bank reserves. If the economy is weak and inflation is low, the Fed cuts rates; this makes borrowing attractive, stimulates private spending and, if all goes well, leads to economic recovery. If the economy is strong and inflation is a threat, the Fed raises rates; this discourages borrowing and spending, and the economy cools off.

Right now, the Fed believes that it’s facing a weak economy and subdued inflation, a situation in which it would ordinarily cut interest rates. The problem is that rates can’t be cut further. When the recession began in 2007, the Fed started slashing short-term interest rates until November 2008, when they bottomed out near zero, where they remain to this day. And that was as far as the Fed could go, because (some narrow technical exceptions aside) interest rates can’t go lower. Investors won’t buy bonds if they can get a better return simply by putting a bunch of $100 bills in a safe. In other words, the Fed hit what’s known in economic jargon as the zero lower bound (or, alternatively, became stuck in a liquidity trap). The tool the Fed usually fights recessions with had reached the limits of its usefulness.

That doesn’t mean the Fed was out of options. Not according to the work of a number of economists, anyway, among them a prominent Princeton professor by the name of Ben Bernanke. As noted above, Bernanke was among the economists who took notice, back in the 1990s, of the troubles afflicting Japan — a huge real estate bubble that left behind a legacy of high private-sector debt when it burst and a central bank up against the zero lower bound.

The woes confronting the United States today aren’t identical to those faced by Japan. For one thing, Japanese inflation wasn’t just low; by the end of the 1990s, Japan was actually suffering chronic deflation. For another, Japan’s slump was never as terrible as ours; unemployment, in particular, never became the scourge it has become here. Still, Japan provided an example of how an advanced modern economy could seemingly be caught in an economic trap.

In a hard-hitting 2000 paper titled “Japanese Monetary Policy: A Case of Self-Induced Paralysis?” Bernanke declared that “far from being powerless, the Bank of Japan could achieve a great deal if it were willing to abandon its excessive caution and its defensive response to criticism.” He proceeded to lay out a number of actions the Bank of Japan could take. And he called on Japanese policy makers to act like F.D.R. and do whatever it took: “Japan is not in a Great Depression by any means, but its economy has operated below potential for nearly a decade. Nor is it by any means clear that recovery is imminent. Policy options exist that could greatly reduce these losses. Why isn’t more happening? To this outsider, at least, Japanese monetary policy seems paralyzed, with a paralysis that is largely self-induced. Most striking is the apparent unwillingness of the monetary authorities to experiment, to try anything that isn’t absolutely guaranteed to work. Perhaps it’s time for some Rooseveltian resolve in Japan.”

Bernanke had some specific proposals that could serve as advice for the Fed today. One set of options would have it take a larger role in financial markets. Short-term interest rates may be zero, unable to go lower, but longer-term rates aren’t. So the Fed, which typically buys only short-term U.S. government debt, could expand its portfolio, buying long-term government debt, bonds backed by home mortgages and so on, in an effort to drive down the interest rates on these assets. This is the strategy that has come to be known, unhelpfully, as quantitative easing.

Another set of options involves trying to change expectations about future Fed policy. Right now, investors believe that the economy will eventually recover enough for the Fed to start raising rates again. Such expectations about future Fed plans, in turn, can have an important impact on the economy right now. In particular, beliefs about how long the Fed will wait before raising rates can have a major impact on expectations of future inflation. At the moment, investors assume that the Fed will raise rates enough to keep inflation from rising much above 2 percent. If the Fed were to raise its target for inflation — and if investors believed in the new target — expected inflation over the medium term, say the next 10 years, would be higher. Many economists, ranging from the chief economist of the International Monetary Fund to one of Mitt Romney’s top economic advisers, have argued, as I have, that higher expected inflation would aid an economy up against the zero lower bound, because it would help persuade investors and businesses alike that sitting on cash is a bad idea. Bernanke endorsed the idea in his “Paralysis” paper, suggesting that the Bank of Japan declare “a target in the 3-to-4-percent range for inflation, to be maintained for a number of years.”

So which of these steps has the Fed taken lately? Well, it has bought more than $2 trillion worth of long-term government debt and bonds of government-backed housing agencies. That sounds like a lot, but it’s much less than most analysts think necessary to jump-start economic recovery. The Fed has also tried to influence market expectations about future policy, but only for the fairly near term, declaring that it doesn’t expect to raise short-term rates until late 2014. What’s more, Bernanke has ruled out more ambitious policies. In 2010, for example, he dismissed the notion of a higher inflation target for the United States, arguing that it would undermine confidence and the Fed’s “hard-won inflation credibility.”

In short, Chairman Bernanke’s Fed has been much more passive than Professor Bernanke’s writings would have led us to expect.

Can the Fed Do No More?

Some economists and Fed officials believe that the Fed has already done all it can or should — that, in particular, high unemployment is structural, that it can’t be brought down simply by getting people to increase spending. They also warn that any further efforts by the Fed to boost the economy would simply drive up inflation instead. This is, however, a minority view both among economists and at the Fed.

Most stories about structural unemployment stress a perceived mismatch between the work force and employment opportunities: workers, so the story goes, either have the wrong skills or are in the wrong place. But as Bernanke pointed out in a recent speech, employment looks bad across the board: “The fact that labor demand appears weak in most industries and locations is suggestive of a general shortfall of aggregate demand rather than a worsening mismatch of skills and jobs.” As a result, he declared, the data “do not support the view that structural factors are a major cause of the increase in unemployment during the most recent recession.”

What about inflation? So-called headline inflation, a k a the Consumer Price Index, has fluctuated wildly — deflation during the worst of the recession, annualized inflation hitting a peak of almost 4 percent last September. These big swings are, however, driven mainly by fluctuations in the prices of raw materials, which Fed officials consider poor indicators of underlying inflationary pressures. They prefer, instead, to focus on measures like core inflation, which excludes volatile energy and food prices and which has remained fairly quiescent.

The Fed is right in this. Last year, many conservatives seized on rising headline inflation — driven mainly by increasing gasoline prices — as evidence of a looming inflation tsunami. Representative Paul Ryan, the Wisconsin Republican, for example, pointed to rising prices of raw materials and said ominously, “There is nothing more insidious that a country can do to its citizens than debase its currency.” Fed officials, however, steadfastly predicted that the inflation surge would soon ebb, and it did.

So the Fed doesn’t think there are good reasons for high unemployment and isn’t worried about inflation. Indeed, the minutes from the January meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee, which sets monetary policy, revealed that a majority of members expected an eventual fall in unemployment to below 6 percent, with inflation remaining low.

Think about what this means in terms of the dual mandate. The Fed is supposed to pump up the economy when it’s running too cold, with unemployment high and inflation low. That’s where we are right now, in the Fed’s own estimation. Yet the most recent minutes, from March, show Fed officials unwilling to take any further action to boost the economy.

Why won’t the Fed do more?

Political Bullying

When Fed critics interpreted a brief escalation in raw-material prices as evidence of out-of-control inflation last year, it was unusual only because for once the critics had some actual inflation to talk about. Since 2008, the Fed has faced constant attacks over its supposed inflationary actions, whether or not the actual data indicate the existence of runaway inflation. Some attacks have even bordered on menace, most famously Rick Perry’s warning that Bernanke would be treated “pretty ugly” if he visited Texas.

The effect must be somewhat intimidating. Recently N. Gregory Mankiw of Harvard University — an adviser to Mitt Romney who himself briefly advocated raising the inflation target but went quiet after receiving intense criticism — put it succinctly: “If Chairman Bernanke ever suggested increasing inflation to, say, 4 percent, he would quickly return to being Professor Bernanke.”

Maybe, then, Bernanke still wants higher inflation and other unconventional policies but knows that there’s no point in pursuing or even advocating them. But there are two problems with this supposition. First, that’s not the way the Fed is supposed to work. It’s meant to be insulated from political pressure — so why would people so calmly accept the notion that it could be pressed to avoid doing what it thinks it should do? Second, Bernanke has gone out of his way to insist that his current position reflects an economic judgment, not political compromise — that it’s all about preserving that “hard-won inflation credibility.”

I suspect that the old Bernanke would have scoffed. He would have pointed out that the Fed could still keep inflation within bounds — that 4 percent inflation (which is what we actually had during the late years of the Reagan administration) need be no more unsettling than 2 percent inflation. He would also, I suspect, have argued that the risks of losing credibility pale beside the risks of inaction. Bear in mind, whenever someone invokes the specter of a return to ’70s-style stagflation, when the economy is weak and inflation is high — a greatly overrated risk — that what we are going through now is much, much worse than anything that happened in the ’70s. It takes a certain mind-set to worry more about a hypothetical loss of confidence than about the clear and present suffering of the unemployed — the mind-set, one might say, of a conventional central banker.

The Fed as Borg

Recently Laurence Ball of Johns Hopkins University made waves among monetary economists by looking through Fed minutes to determine how and when Ben Bernanke’s views changed. According to Ball, Bernanke’s big retreat from F.D.R.-like resolve happened way back in 2003, less than a year after he arrived at the Fed. That month, a Fed staff report rejected many of the ideas Bernanke previously supported — and ever since, Bernanke has spoken only of limited responses to the problem of the zero lower bound. What’s puzzling about this apparent conversion is the fact that while Bernanke may have been a newbie at the Fed, he was a towering figure in his field. Why should he have taken his cues from a staff report?

Ball emphasizes both the pressures of groupthink and Bernanke’s shy personality. Without necessarily disagreeing, I’d point to a crucial difference between the policies Bernanke advocated in his pre-Fed days and the ones he has supported since 2003. His Fed-era policies aren’t simply less ambitious than those of his academic era; just as important, Chairman Bernanke’s policy menu, unlike Professor Bernanke’s proposals, has been set up so that the Fed can’t be blamed for failure.

Suppose, for example, that the Fed announces a higher inflation target. It might not work: markets might not consider the Fed’s proclamations credible and believe instead that no matter what the Fed says now, it will return to its traditional focus on price stability. So an attempt to raise expected inflation could lead to an embarrassing failure. When buying government bonds, on the other hand, the Fed can always claim that the policy worked, even if the economy does poorly, because it can insist that things would have been even worse without its actions. So by retreating to a narrow definition of the Fed’s role, Bernanke has also adopted a position that is much more comfortable for the Fed as an institution.

Back in 2000, Professor Bernanke warned against exactly this kind of retreat, harshly criticizing the Bank of Japan’s unwillingness to “try anything that isn’t absolutely guaranteed to work.” But within a year of his arrival at the Fed, he seemed to have been assimilated by the Fed Borg, like Capt. Jean-Luc Picard in a famous “Star Trek” episode, converted into a half-robot servant of a hive-mind.

Bernanke may have pulled back from his earlier activism years ago, but given the scale of our economic catastrophe, he might well have returned to his earlier views if the political climate hadn’t been so hostile. So I wouldn’t fully discount the importance of right-wing bullying. As for his insistence that it’s not about politics — could he really get away with saying, or even hinting, that pressure from the likes of Paul Ryan is keeping him from pursuing full employment?

My best guess is that the disappointing response of the Bernanke Fed represents the effects of both bullies and the Borg, a combination of political intimidation and the desire to make life easy for the Fed as an institution. Whatever the mix of these motives, the result is clear: faced with an economy still in desperate need of help, the Fed is unwilling to provide that help. And that, unfortunately, makes the Fed part of a broader problem.

Consider, if you will, the current state of our nation. Despite hints of economic progress, we’re still in the midst of an immense disaster, in which unemployment and underemployment are devastating millions of American lives. And none of this need be happening! There has been no plague of locusts; we have not lost our technological know-how. Americans should be richer, not poorer, than they were five years ago. Yet economic policy across the board has become almost passive, has essentially accepted this disaster instead of trying to end it.

The Fed under Bernanke is by no means the worst sinner in this failure of intellect and will, and you can argue that Ben Bernanke has done a better job than anyone else who might have held his position. Yet the fact is, he has not done remotely enough. The Fed, under its eminent chairman, was supposed to be an important part of the solution to mass unemployment. That isn’t happening.

This article has been adapted from “End This Depression Now!” by Paul Krugman, to be published by W. W. Norton & Company this month.

Krugman is a Times columnist and winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize in economics.

Education Slowdown Threatens U.S.

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 08:35:00 -0400

The emerging train wreck of US Education is the surest sign that the crisis in US capitalism still underway is far deeper and more fundamental than a cyclical phenomenon. It suggests that, perhaps for the first time in US history, our society is not able to reproduce itself at a higher cultural or economic level. All progress depends on the rising abilities and productivity of our people. The failure of US education is starkly underscored below and betrays the true costs of the refusal of the 1% to invest in the abilities of the people. Inequality is deepening, and this story gives strong evidence that the 99% -- and their children -- will fall even further behind in the coming generations.

Higher education in the U.S. has a problem: More students are getting into college, but they're not finishing. One community college in Maryland has developed a program aimed at getting students to graduation day. WSJ's Neil Hickey reports.

Throughout American history, almost every generation has had substantially more education than that of its parents.

That is no longer true.

When baby boomers born in 1955 reached age 30, they had about two years more schooling than their parents, according to Harvard University economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz, who have calculated the average years of schooling for native-born Americans back to 1876.

In contrast, when Americans born in 1980 turned 30 in 2010, they averaged about eight months more schooling than their parents.

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Michael Friberg for The Wall Street Journal

Alex Gavic, 21, decided not to go to college so he could snowboard full-time in the winter in Park City, Utah. He earns money landscaping in the summer.

This development already has broad ramifications across the U.S. job market: Those with only a high-school diploma had an 8% unemployment rate in March, roughly double that of college graduates, who had a 4.2% unemployment rate. Workers with bachelor's degrees earn 45% more in wages on average than those of demographically similar high-school graduates. And in today's highly automated factories, many manufacturers demand the equivalent of a community-college degree, even for entry level workers.

More serious consequences may be felt in the future. Without better educated Americans, economists say, the U.S. won't be able to maintain high-wage jobs and rising living standards in a competitive global economy. Increasingly, the goods and services in which the U.S. has an edge rely more on the minds of American workers—than on their muscle. "The wealth of nations is no longer in resources. It's no longer in physical capital. It's in human capital," says Ms. Goldin.

The reasons American education levels are no longer increasing as they once did are numerous: Despite years of effort, high-school dropout rates remain stubbornly high. College tuition is rising and the prospect of shouldering heavy debt discourages some high-school graduates from enrolling in college or sticking with it.

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Dan Krauss for The Wall Street Journal

Mary Brown, center, didn't want college debt, so she got an associate degree in massage therapy

There is also growing skepticism among some Americans about whether a college degree actually translates into a well-paying job. Particularly during the recent recession, there have been gluts of college graduates in some industries and shortages in others.

For instance, the typical worker with a bachelor's degree in petroleum engineering earned $120,000 a year and those with a degree in math and computer science earned $98,000, according to 2010 census data analyzed by Georgetown University's Center on Education and the Workforce. In contrast, the median worker with a degree in counseling psychology earned just $29,000 and those with degrees in early childhood education earned $36,000.

"Not all bachelor's degrees are the same," Georgetown University's Center on Education and the Workforce said in an extensive analysis issued last year. "While going to college is undoubtedly a wise decision, what you take while you're there matters a lot, too."

Mary Brown, 25, of Woodland Hills, Calif., saw friends who finished college with massive debts and were unable to find jobs in their fields, if at all. She took a different approach, earning an associate degree and a certificate in massage therapy from Anthem Career College in Nashville, Tenn.

Academics Launch New Efforts to Retain Community-College Students

"I wanted a college that taught me how to do the work, but didn't make me pay to take a lot of other classes in subjects that are irrelevant to my career," she says.

In contrast, her mother, Irena Tolliver, has a bachelor's in elementary education and a master's in reading education. When Ms. Tolliver was growing up, her parents, Belarussian immigrants, told her to "take advantage of the great educational resources that were available," Ms. Tolliver recalls. "That's what America was all about to them."

But Ms. Brown feels differently. After graduating, she landed a $20-an-hour job at a Rockford, Ill., spa, then moved to California but was unable to find a massage-therapy job. So she recently moved back to Illinois.

All but about $5,000 of the $21,000 she borrowed for her 18-month program has been paid back.

Michael Friberg for The Wall Street Journal

Mack Smith dropped out of college and now works at Whole Foods training new hires.

"I was working in a career I loved, making a pretty good living, while a lot of my friends were in college and not loving it so much," she says. "Now they are facing tons of debt and I don't have to worry about that."

Ms. Brown isn't unique. Among Americans who turned 25 in the 1970s, only 5% had less education than the parent of the same sex, according to an analysis by Michael Hout and Alexander Janus, sociologists at the University of California, Berkeley. Among those who turned 25 in the 2000s, 18% of men and 13% of women had fewer years of school than their parents.

There is a limit to how much schooling a person can get and to how many Americans have both the ability and interest in a four-year college degree. But the U.S. is nowhere near that point.

Twenty countries have higher high-school graduation rates than the U.S.—including Slovenia, Finland, Japan, the U.K. and South Korea, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. In the U.S., about one in five ninth-graders drop out before getting a diploma.

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About 30% of American adults have four-year college degrees, and there is little evidence that is a natural ceiling. Thirty years ago, the U.S. led the world in the percentage of 25- to 34-year-olds with the equivalent of at least a two-year degree; only Canada and Israel were close. As of 2009, the U.S. lagged behind 14 other developed countries, the OECD says.

President Barack Obama has vowed to change that. "By 2020," he has said, "America will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world," defining that broadly to include two-year degrees. He has proposed that all states require students to graduate from high school or stay in school until age 18 (as 21 states do already) and pushed successfully for increases in federal student aid.

While not every college grad does better in the job market, statistics consistently show that, on average, the more educated the worker, the better he or she fares in today's job market. For example, 54% of high-school graduates over age 25 were working in March, the Labor Department says, while the rest were either looking for work or out of the labor force altogether. Among those with some college, 64% were working while 73% of those with a bachelor's degree or more were working.

The problem has evolved over the past few decades. Until the mid-1970s, the share of American men and women in their late 20s with four-year college degrees rose steadily, fueled by federal student aid for veterans after World War II and Korea and a further expansion of student aid in the 1960s.

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Michael Friberg for The Wall Street Journal

Alex Gavic with his snowboard in the parking lot of the Canyons Ski Resort in Park City, Utah.

Then something changed, particularly among men. The fraction of 25- to 29-year-old men who had earned four-year degrees began a two-decade-long slide around 1975. After that, fewer young men sought refuge from the Vietnam War draft by going to college. Moreover, a decline in the size of the bonus that college graduates commanded, compared with high-school graduates, provided less reason to go to college.

More men began going to college in the early 1990s. Changes in the economy and technology as well as a shortage of educated workers pushed the wages of college grads well above those of high-school graduates. The fraction of men in their late 20s with four-year degrees has been climbing since 1994, hitting 27.8% in 2010. Despite the uptick, however, that is barely above the 27.5% reported for 1976, according to the Census Bureau.

For women, the trend is strikingly different. While male college-going fell off in the 1970s—in part because men were more likely than women to think they could get well-paid construction or factory jobs without degrees—women kept going. In 2010, 36% of women in their late 20s had earned at least a bachelor's degree, up from 20% in 1976.

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Michael Friberg for the Wall Street Journal

Mack Smith at his home in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Men drag down the average, though. The net result is that a supply of educated workers is rising much more slowly than the apparent demand. Scholars blame leaks and clogs along the entire educational pipeline.

While college enrollment has risen lately—as often happens when people flee a lousy job market—completion rates are disappointing. "We've become very good at getting people to start college," says Harvard's Mr. Katz. "We are not very good at getting people through college."

About 70% of high-school graduates enroll in a two- or four-year college soon after finishing high school, but many never get a degree or any other credential. At four-year colleges, 43% of those who enrolled as freshmen in 2002 hadn't received a degree six years later, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

Mack Smith, 22, whose father has a bachelor's degree in political science, did one semester at Southern Utah University, dropped out, joined the Marine Corps briefly, and then spent a semester at Salt Lake Community College. Today he is working at Whole Foods training new hires in the meat department. He talks about going back to college, though. "I want to be able to take my kids hunting and be able to afford a house and a car," he says. "I'll need more education to get a job like that."

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Dan Krauss for The Wall Street Journal

Mary Brown packs up her belongings in her apartment in Woodland Hills, Calif., as she prepares to return to familiar territory in Illinois.

His dad, Michael Smith, wishes his son had stuck with college. "Sometimes," he says, "it takes kids a while to figure out what they want and then figure out how to get it."

Lately, the rising cost of higher education has emerged as an increasingly visible obstacle to going to—and staying in—college, and the spotlight on the mountain of student debt has discouraged others.

Tuition is up, particularly at public colleges that draw the most students. Over the past 10 years, for instance, average published tuition and fees (not counting room and board) at four-year public colleges rose by 72% to $8,240 from $4,790, adjusted for inflation, according to the College Board. Sticker prices are misleading because student aid has become more bountiful. After grants as well as tax deductions and credits, the average net price rose by a much smaller sum—$1,160—to $2,490 over the decade, but that is still an 87% increase.

Governments and colleges have offered more financial aid, but the complexity of the American system—a dizzying array of grants and loans, tax deductions and scholarships—confuses and sometimes scares off some potential college-goers, says University of Michigan economist Susan Dynarski.

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Dan Krauss for The Wall Street Journal

Mary Brown gets help from her brother, Gregory Tolliver, 12, ahead of the move.

Today, student debt outstanding now exceeds Americans' total credit-card debt. In 2009-10, about 55% of public four-year college students graduated with debt; on average, they owed $22,000, the College Board says.

Alex Gavic, 21, is one of those who don't want to take on college debt. As a teenager, he had fleeting thoughts of studying marine biology in college. Instead, he dropped out of high school—eventually receiving a high-school diploma in a second-chance program at a community college.

Today, he makes $12 an hour at a Park City, Utah, landscaping firm during the summer so he can snowboard daily during the winter.

"The greater society told me I had to go to college if I want to make it in life, but it's not true," said Mr. Gavic, who competes semiprofessionally in snowboarding. "I don't care about making a lot of money because I'm happy. I'm just living the life."

Mr. Gavic said he hopes to have his own landscaping business one day. But in the meantime, he doesn't envy his peers who went to college, many of whom have loans to repay and still haven't found jobs.

"You spend all this time in school, then you are in debt, then you have to find a job to spend 20 years paying it back," he said. "That never made sense to me."

Write to David Wessel at capital@wsj.com and Stephanie Banchero at stephanie.banchero@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared April 26, 2012, on page A1 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Education Slowdown Threatens U.S..

The Dangers of Fascism in Europe Today by Norman Markowitz

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 15:52:21 -0400

There will be a runoff in the French presidential election between Hollande, the Socialist party leader whose party has been associated with very centrist policies and Sarkozy, the president of the Center-Right government which has supported the general "austerity" policies advanced most of all by Germany, the most powerful in terms of industrial and finance capital of the "Eurozone" nations.

The Left Front, with the Communist Party of France as its most important component, received around 12 percent of the divided vote(the last count that I saw) and the Left Front's policies seem already to have encouraged Hollande's campaign to take a stronger stand against austerity in its campaign.

But there is a significant political danger that has also developed in and through the campaign. The "National Front" led by the daughter of its founder, Jean Marie Le Pen, received nearly 19percent of the vote. The "National Front" until fairly recently was a "traditional" European Neo-fascist party, national chauvinist, anti-Semitic, using violence against socialists and Communists. It is still largely that, but new immigration in recent decades to France, from both Africa and especially from islamic countries, has given it a much larger market among those sections of the population who bring with them the baggage of traditional racist prejudices and have been threatened by both de-industrialization and also the demographic shifts that have changed neighborhoods.

In 2002, Le Pen, riding the wave of this "protest vote" actually ran ahead of the Socialist candidate, only to be overwhelming defeated by the conservative Jacques Chirac in the presidential elections

And Le Pen, a literal blast from an ugly and criminal past, is what we would call "a piece of work."

As a teenager from a rightwing Roman Catholic background, he sold the newspaper of the Action Francaise, the organization whose founder and leader, Charles Maurras, has long been regarded by scholars as one of the founding fathers of European fascism. Maurras, whose involvement began in leading rightist thugs against the supporters of the framed French Jewish officer, Alfred Dreyfuss, in the late 1890s and afterwards, developed a fascism rooted in both Catholiciism and a support for monarchy, although his group "pioneered" the street fighting techniques and use of terror agains the left that Mussolini and Hitler picked up in their blackshirt and storm troop groups.

At the time, Maurras was also in prison for his fascist activities during the Vichy regime and the Nazi occupation. Le Pen after selling Action Francaise newsparers then became president of a student group,The association of "corporatist" students of the right"(a "corporate" state had been associated with Mussolini's regime) engaging it street fights with Communists.

Le Pen then joined the French Foreign legion, showing up in Vietnam after the fall of Dien Dien Phu, and in the colonial war in Algeria where, as he later admitted to using torture against independence fights. Le Pen then spent most of the 1960s and 1970s in the sewers of French rightwing politics and personal scandal(one of his ex wives posed naked for the French edition of Playboy). But just as in the U.S., with the present day Koch brothers and many others in the past who give money to both the "respectable right" and the ultras, there were French capitalists who backed him

Le Pen founded the National Front in 1972 and began to run for the presidency beginning in 1974. Although Le Pen got himself into court on a number of occasions for violating both French and German laws by trivializing the fascist mass murder of Jewish people during WWII known as the Holocaust(he called it an insignificant detail of World War II). He also championed the cause of Vichy World War II collaborators as in effect the true "patriots" of WWII

But his party in French began to gain votes in the political international reactionary political climate of the 1980s, blaming economic stagnation on immigrants and the left. While the National Front has never been able so far to gain the strength of even the various fascist leagues in 1930s France, against whom the Popular Front was developed, it has hung around in French politics, profitting from the relative decline of the Communist and left socialist left, the fears inspired by Islamic terrorist groups, and of course the austerity policies of the present French conservative government in the midst of a far-reaching economic crisis.

Perhaps I have dealt with Le Pen's wretched history too long and too much. But it really is important to understand where he, his daughter, and their party are coming from.

He is seventy-seven now, cheering on his daughter-successor, who has like other "traditional" neo fascist parties in Europe, sought to streamline and update the party's image to appeal to the contemporary racist reactionary mass market.

Its danger should not minimized. In 2002 , Le Pen with nearly 17 percent of the vote ran second in a very fragmented and divided field. Earlier this week, although she ran well behind Hollande, the socialist, who ran first, and Sarkozy, Le Pen's daughter did slightly better than that, piggy-backing in a grotesquely ironic way on the fear created by the immigrant who murdered Jewish children and Muslim soldiers of the French military.

Some on the left feel that this vote will actually help Hollande win the runoff by putting Sarkozy in a difficult position. I am not so sure, but more importantly, the presence of these organized fascist political forces, their "hanging around" in the midst of an economic crisis, is a formidible danger. In Germany for example anti-Nazi conservative politicians(not those who sought to use Hitler as an insurance policy against the left) by pursuing fiscal conservative policies("austerity policies of trying to balance budgets and contain debt) in the early depression years helped the Nazis become a mass force.

In France, a major European country, the best hope I believe is a broad front behind both Hollande's campaign and a clear commitment to hold Hollande to an anti-austerity national policy, regardless of the pressures on his government from the "Eurozone." Hopefully, Hollande, if he takes that course, will find a friend in president Obama's administration.

If Sarkozy in France and Romney in the U.S. win, we can expect the former to continue and the latter to launch austerity policies that will worsen conditions and strengthen reaction--although in the U.S. the racist reactionary and clericial forces that support the National Front in France and similar parties in European countries are a powerful force in the Republican party today

On The Absurd and Sinister History of "Corporate Personhood" by Norman Markowitz

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 18:18:32 -0400

The following is an edited text of a presentation that I had planned to give to Rutgers students of NJPIRG on the historical background of the Citizens United case,. The presentation was cancelled before I got the chance to make it. I thought that our readers, here and abroad, might be interested in looking at this ongoing and pernicious oddity of U.S. judical history.

First the United States judicial system at all levels is politicized.is political and always has been political . Judges are and have always been either elected or appointed by political parties/leaders for political reasons. The U.S. Supreme Court is the most powerful court in the world because it has the power to do routinely what no other court in the world has—the power to repeal local, state and federal laws, and directives of mayors, governors and presidents, thus in effect influencing directly policy in all areas of life. That power was not explicitly in the Constitution by it was gained by the Court in an early decision(Marberry v. Madison, 1805) and has been the unchallenged rule ever since.

Through most of U.S. history, the courts, whose members are appointed usually for lengthy terms, and the Supreme Court, whose members are appointed for life (barring impeachment) has been the most conservative branch of a government defined by a divided sovereignty between executive, legislative, and judicial branches.

And it has pursued “activist” interventions in government, declaring against legislation to regulate and tax private business and provide protection and benefits to labor and until the great depression, the upsurge of workers and peoples movements, led the New Deal government of Franklin Roosevelt to foster a great change. First to enact legislation to regulate business and provide benefits for labor and the people and asecond appoint judges to the federal judiciary who would support both such policies and also support a high standard of protection on the question of the civil rights and civil liberties of individuals and minority groups.

Only then did the rightwing begin to denounce “judicial activism” by which they meant court decisions to end school segregation, limit the power of police to search and interrogate citizens, restrict the death penalty, prevent governments from criminalizing abortion, and similar bill of rights related questions.

However, beginning with the Nixon presidency and carried forward under Ronald Reagan and both George HW and George W Bush, a counter-revolution against a judiciary that put the civil and human rights of people before the property rights of corporations and the wealthy has been carried forward. The Citizens United Case is the most recent stark and extreme example of what that counter-revolution is about and what it has already accomplished.

Now let’s look at the history which led to this. When the Civil War ended, radical Republicans—led by prewar abolitionists—had substantial power in Congress. But they faced a president, Andrew Johnson, who was totally opposed to their plans to provide citizenship rights to the four million former slaves and carry out other reforms that would democratize the defeated Confederate States. And they also faced a Supreme Court which was still in the hands of the “ex slaveholders” who eight years earlier had issued an unequivocal defense of the property rights of slaveholders and denial that any Blacks, slave or free, had any citizenship rights , in the Dared Scott Case(1857).

So they transformed into a constitutional amendment what was initially a comprehensive civil rights bill, granting citizenship rights to the former slaves, establishing clearly the supremacy of the federal government over the states on questions of citizenship rights, and denying states the right to abrogate the citizenship rights of all persons without due process.

This fourteenth amendment to the constitution, which was enacted after fierce political struggles, was about the rights of “persons” who had been slave property but were not yet citizens. It had nothing directly to do with the property rights of corporation.

Now we jump ahead to 1873. Rapid industrialization followed the Civil War bringing with it large national corporations led by men who called themselves “captains of industry” but whose critics and victims called them Robber Barons.

Railroads were both essential to this rapid industrialization and along with Steel and Oil the areas of the economy in which the large national corporations were centered. Stephen Field, brother of the inventor and capitalist Cyrus Field and associate of railroad Robber Baron Leland Stanford, had been appointed after the war to the Supreme Court by President Ulysses S. Grant.

It was Field who developed the novel view that businesses were persons deserving of the 14^th amendment’s protections. And he did so in the most fantastic way imaginable.

In Louisiana, then under Radical Republican control, the state legislature passed a law relocating butchers south of New Orleans so that the waste products of their work would not pollute the city’s supply (this pollution had been the source of cholera outbreaks). By a 5-4 decision, the court upheld the law, but Field, writing for the minority contended that the right of a business to pursue its business interests without state interference was “the distinguishing privilege of all citizens of the United States.”

Field continued to push this view without much success for years, even though on one occasion the Chief Justice called upon him to recuse himself because of his involvement with and investments in the companies coming before the court. Field, a Californian, was especially close to Leland Stanford, whose Southern Pacific Railroad was the great economic and political power in California(at one point, it was reported that Stanford offered Field the presidency of the University that he was building in Palo Alto and whose first class would include future president Herbert Hoover)

When Santa Clara county, California, sought to tax the Southern Pacific, the company took its case to the Supreme Court , using as its defense the “corporate personhood or citizenship” argument under the fourteenth amendment which had been developed by Stanford’s close friend Justice Field.

This time the court found 5-4 for the Southern Pacific but on questions concerning the power to tax not on Field’s “corporate personhood” theory.

But the official Court Reporter, John Chandler Bancroft Davis, himself a former railroad attorney and trustees previously caught in a scandal in which he was accused of obtaining most of the railroad’s assets, wrote a commentary on the decision which stated “the defendant Corporations are persons within the intent of the clause of section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the constitution of the United States, which forbids a state to deny any person equal protection of the laws.”

The decision had in reality nothing to do with that issue, and the summary was Field’s and in all likelihood Davis’s “interpretation” was what Field told him to write. And of course, the Court reporter’s summary had no legal standing.

But Field then built a lie upon a lie to cite the summary, claiming he was citing the Santa Clara case, in another case two years later to claim that “a private corporation is included under the designation of ‘person’ in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of t he United States, Section 1.”

That then became the basis for the doctrine of “corporate personhood” which meant corporate citizenship which meant not simply that property rights took precedence over human rights but that the rights of property, of corporate property, were in reality human rights. One might mention that the Court in whom Field now represented a majority was the same Court that was repealing the civil rights legislation passed to protect former slaves by the same Radical Republicans who enacted the fourteenth amendment.

But what did this have to do with campaign financing? Until the late 20^th century, nothing. “Corporate personhood” was one weapon in an arsenal used to prevent the regulation and taxation of private business and legislation to compel private business to recognize and negotiate with trade unions, pay minimum wages, etc. It was in reality less important the doctrine of “freedom of contract” and the Court’s reliance on a narrow interpretation of the Constitution’s clause and blind eye toward the Constitutions’ General Welfare clause in serving as the rationale for the court’s defense of corporate wealth and power from the 1880s to the 1930s, when that wall cracked under the pressure of labor and peoples movements as reflected in the policy of the New Deal government

As money became more important in U.S. political campaigns in the 20^th century with the development of party primaries, and radio and television, there were very limited attempts to regulate the use of money in elections. An early 2oth century law restricting financing in federal elections was updated and upheld in 1970 by what was still a progressive oriented Supreme Court. But subsequent decisions began to chip away at campaign financing legislation s, using both the fourteenth amendment and the free speech provisions of the first amendment to limit the scope of legislation restricting campaign financing.

In 2002, faced with what had been an exponential increase in the use of money by corporations,

Congress passed a very limited Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, popularly known as the McCain-Feingold Act to address the question of money in national politics. In 2010, the Supreme Court, its four ultra-right Justices, Scalia, Thomas, Alito and Chief Justice Roberts, joined by the previously less ultra right California conservative Republican, Anthony Kennedy, invalidated MCain-Feingold on both first and fourteenth amendment grounds.

Kennedy’s fellow Californian, Stephen Field, never went so far as too employ the “free speech” rights of the first amendment to defend corporate personhood (even he make have blushed at the thought that corporations, however much they are people, have their rights to free political speech abridged by limiting their right to spend money in politics)

What can be done? First, we can elect a Congress that will enact serious campaign financing reform that will go far beyond McCain-Feingold in restricting the stranglehold that corporate/finance capital though their lobbyists and their funding of the election and re-election of candidates has over national politics and make that into the model for all politics.

Secondly we must also organize for a new struggle to restore a federal judiciary that will be an aid, not a major obstacle to progressive legislation and policy and democratic with a small d political action. If 2012 see a major progressive victory it will in all likelihood see a struggle over the future of the judiciary of a kind that we have not seen since the 1930s. But that is only possible with a progressive victory. A defeat, especially a defeat in the presidency, will probably enshrine a reactionary majority on the court for an many years, if not decades, to come.

The Return of the Marxist I Q by Norman Markowitz

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 14:25:05 -0400

Back Marxist IQ

When PA went on line a feature that I had develop,Marxist IQ ended. I was told by Joe Sims and others that it was the most popular feature that PA had in its print edition.

Here, after a few years, is the return of the Marxist IQ, five multiple choice questions which hopefully will educate and entertain. Our first is on the issue of health care in the U.S.

1. Systems of National Public Health Care/Socialized Medicine have been established

a. In Communist countries

b. In all developed industrial countries except the U.S

c. Only in poor “third world”countries

d. Nowhere on earth

2. Under the present private insurance-for profit U.S. health care system

a. Americans pay roughly twice as much as citizens in other developed countries for prescription drugs

b. Americans take roughly twice as many prescription drugs as citizens in other developed countries

c. U.S. life expectancy for men and women is below average among developed countries

d. All of the above

3. The first nation in history to establish universal health care as a right of citizens was

a. Canada

b. France

c. The Soviet Union

d. Sweden

4. Like all private insurance based systems under capitalism

a. Health insurance companies support the best care available

b. Health insurance companies stress preventive care

c. Health insurance companies treat all people equally

d. Health insurance companies make profit by giving as little as they can in patient benefits

5. The Obama administration health care legislation is

a. Legislation comparable to health care systems in the rest of the developed world

b. An end to the private insurance based health care system in the U.S.

c. A limited but significant reform that extends coverage and bars private insurance companies from refusing to insure people with prior health conditions

d. An unconstitutional assault upon individual and states rights

The numbers of the correct answers will br presented in next week’s Marxist IQ. Stay tuned and stay healthy so you don’t have to go to an HMO OR THE EMERGENCY ROOM OF A HOSPITAL AND HOPE FOR THE BEST IF YOU ARE ONE OF THE NEARLY 50 MILLION AMERICANS WITH NO COVERAGE OF ANY KIND

"The Great Dictator" of New Jersey by Norman Markowitz

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 17:45:52 -0400

New Jersey has a governor, who, if he didn't exist, the late Charlie Chaplin or perhaps Mel Brooks would have invented him. His name is Chris Christie and he combines the general world view of Archie Bunker with the screaming and yelling and general physical appearance of Ralph Kramden, two classic characters of American situation comedy,

In fact you might say that the people of New Jersey are victims of Bunker-Kramden syndrome, which individually means weight gain and possible high blood pressure, collectively, less teachers, police, fire and other public servants and a government that acts like it has turette's syndrome that is hysterical and sometimes foul mouthed outbursts when confronted with real situations.,

New Jersey has the strongest and most powerful governor's office in the country(changing that, making the office more amenable to the legislature, thus more democratic, is certainly something that would really change things positively).

New Jersey, tradtiionally is an old fashioned liberal labor state, a state with both a clear Democratic majority but also Democratic party machines, especially in the South near Philadelphia, who are blasts from the Tammany Hall past, more at home with Republicans like Christie than with progressive Democrats in their own ranks

I could tell you about all the horrible things that Christie has done and is trying to do---villifying the National Education Assocation and using K-12 teachers as punching bags, attacking publlic employee unions and labor generally even through New Jersey's, even though New Jersey's high per capita income is linked directly to its educated work force and its relatively strong labor movement. I

could mention his campaign to cut the state income by a further ten percent after New Jersey's huge debt crisis, most serious observers believe, stemmed from his Republican predecessor, Christine Todd Whitman's cutting the state income tax by 30% in hte 1990s, and other irrationalities--but what interests me are "polls" that suggest that he is a favorite for the GOP Vice Presidential nomination.

Let me say that many of my friends would love to see CC(lets call him that) on the ticket to get him out of the state but not at the expense of his winning.

Why should Christie be popular even with Republicans, where he has many competitors of both genders who look better. Is it the longterm effects of television sitcoms, the sub-concscious force of Archie Bunker and Ralph Kramden, made eternal by reruns, over the national psyche?. Is it the desire of those who want to go back politically to the 19th century to have political leaders who look like politiicans did in the 19th century.? Is there nostalgia for machine politics?.

I am especially interested in that fact that here in New Jersey the polls(which I know tell us very little) have men in significantly larger numbers supporting Christie. Does this mean that men want to look and act like Christie. Certainly it would mean an end to all self-discipline. Maybe it may even be the longterm negative effects of all the anti-New Jersey portrayals on TV, the expression of an inferiority complex

I say New Jersey is a great state, with all kinds of positive institutions and programs that other states don't have and that CC is an emporer without any clothes(however frightening that may be). I the GOP wants CC as VP they can have him. In a sense, they deserve each other. New Jersey and the nation deserve neither

Congressional Progressive Caucus: Bloice's Quote of the Day

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 18:38:00 -0400

Quote of the Day
April 12, 2012

'We hope the people of Florida's 22nd Congressional District will note that he repeatedly polarizes the American people instead of focusing on their interests. When people like Rep. West have no ideals or principles, they rely on personal attacks. The CPC is proud to stand up for economic equality and civil and human rights for all Americans. Congress is having, and will continue to have, an ongoing debate about job creation, home foreclosures and the issues that concern working families. But we will not engage in base and childish conversations that lower the high level of discourse Americans rightly expect from their representatives.'

Reps. Keith Ellison and Raul Grijalva, co-chairs, the Congressional Progressive Caucus, in response to Rep. Allen West's claim that there are 85 communists in the
House of Representatives and his later contention that he was referring to members of Caucus.

Crew of 42
April 12, 2012

Ozzie Guillen: Dejavu All Over Again and Again by Norman Markowitz

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 16:01:27 -0400

History, Karl Marx said very famously repeats itself but not exactly; the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.

He was writing in the aftermath of the failed French revolution of 1848 before the game of baseball as we know it existed,;half a century before the Spanish-American War, the U.S. "liberation/occupation of Cuba and all that followed--the Platt Amendment giving the U.S. right to intervene in Cuban affairs as it saw fit, the interventions in support of pro business tyrants, Machado, Batista, even the young law student and baseball player Fidel Castro who once had a tryout with the Washington Senators when U.S. corporations and gangsters were in ownership of much of the Cuban economy in the 1950s.

Now we come to Ozzie Guillen, who today pretty literally repeated history as farce. He comes from Venezuela, played in the U.S. major leagues, which Fidel never did, managed the Chicago White Sox to a World Series win, which no one had done since October, 1917(shortly before the Soviet Revolution, a point not yet discussed by major league baseball), and took a job as the manager of the Florida Marlins, an "expansion team" which didn't exist until the 1990s.

Guillen is famous for his emotional outbursts, obscenities, acting often as a caricature of the "hot blooded Latin,' a long established racist comedy relief character in U.S. movies and television. Nothing he ever has ever said though is on a serious topic or question.

He usually responds to criticisms of his wild statements with wilder statements. But not this time

Guillen told Time magazine that he" loved "Fidel Castro--because Fidel has stayed in power for so long after so many attempts to kill him.

In a way I can understand that--it was like what I would expect from the street corner boys of my youth in the South Bronx, a tribute to a tough guy and in this case a tough guy from a Spanish speaking country in a country, the U.S., where people of Spanish speaking background and culture have a long history of oppression. Some of those kids, Puerto Rican kids, would end up in the 41st police precinct for being rowdy and then get pushed around--the police station that came to be known as Fort Apache in the1960s

Ozzie didn't have to worry about that in Florida. But he did have to worry about the ideological blitzkrieg his statement produced As the denunciations exploded, it was a little like a rightwing politician of the 1930s who said "I beleve in free speech but they can't say that."

The organized anti-Castro Cuban forces in Florida, strong supporters of a rightiwng Republican party which advances draconian legislation against undocumented Latino immigrants, suppresses Mexican-American studies programs in Arizona, and crusades for "English only legisation, jumped in to call for Guillen's head.

Talk show people proclaimed that Fidel was "Hitler" to the Cuban-American community and politicians called for investigations and punishments.

Actually, Latin America had been full of "midget Hitlers" as Nation publisher Freda Kirchwey called them in the 1930s, responding to Franklin Roosevelt's comment about one of them that he was a "son of bitch but our son of a bitch." Fidel and the Cuban people overthrow one of those "midget Hitlers" Fulgencio Batista, in 1959, but that has reality, not reality tv.

Ozzie isn't the tough guy he pretended to be. He isn't Paul Robeson who was denounced(in a distorted way) in 1950 by the U.S. press as saying in a Paris international peace conference that "American Negroes" would not fight in a war against the Soviet Union. Robeson made no apologies to the distorters even though it was a factor in his having his passport lifted. Robeson stood for something and believed in something both in the U.S. and globally,

Robeson knew on one level that capitalism, in terms of his successes as an actor ent.rtainer, had been "good" to him, but he also knew but it had not been good to his people in the U.S. or to most of the world's people.

Capitalism has been very good to Ozzie Guillen as an athlete-entertainer(Robeson by the way as a football player at Rutgers has far better than Guillen ever was as a baseball player) but it has not been good to the overwhelming majority of people in Latin America, including those who brought the socialist goverment of Hugo Chavez to power in his Venezuela. These people regard Fidel Castro as a revolutionary hero who challenged a U.S. based imperialism that had supported their local exploiters and oppressors all of their lives and the lives of the parents and grandparents. Large numbers of them love him for what he stood for and what he accomplished

But Guillen groveled this morning to the mass media, saying that what he meant to say, what he was thinking in Spanish, was that he wondered how someone who hurt so many people could stay in power for so long--of course, that makes no sense, since he would not have said that he loved Fidel or mentioned the attempts to kill him(orchestrated by the CIA over many years) if that was what he was thinking in any language, but it didn't matter.

Guillen did a huge disservice to people of Latino background in the U.S, including those Cuban-Americans who are not living in a reactionary past and want to fight the institutional and ideological racism that oppresses all people of Spanish speaking background here and which they anti undocumented worker campaigns have intensified. The poisoned political atmosphere that is a legacy of the cold war and the continued blockade against Cuba and denial of its right to exist as a socialist country. hurts all of us, except those who profit from it politically

The Florida Marlins baseball team, famous for winning two world series and then selling off or trading their good players before they could get more money in the best capitalist tradition, has suspended him for five games for exercising his right of free speech(so much for capitalism and freedom, or rather citizens do have civil liberties and rights before government but not before private businesses). Although I remain personally a Dodger fan(, and in the Marlins division a supporter of the Mets,so this comment may be seen as subjective, maybe they hould change the name of their new stadium to Platt Amendent-Fulgencio Batista Park if they really want to reach out to the supporters of old Cuba and old U.S. gunboat diplomacy in the region.

So far the Marlins of Major League baseball have not demanded that Guillen "name names" of those who put such ideas in his head.

The Republican state government in Florida has not yet called for the establishment of an Un Battista Activities Committee(HUBAC) to punish all those living and dead who ever said or did anything in support of the Cuban revolution, opposition to the Bay of Pigs landing, or even failure to launch WWIII to protect Florida from Soviet missiles and liberate Cuba during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. And there has been no attempt yet to re-open the 1917 World Series Chicago White Sox victory, the subsequent 1919 "Black Sox"(Chicago White Sox) scandal, and connect it with both the Soviet revolution and the fact that President Obama is the number one Chicago White Sox fan in the country.

But it was a farce day in the U.S., as Florida politicians who said nothing about the Trayvon Martin murder called for Guillen's firing,

The history of red-baiting is both sordid and tragic in the U.S.

It has also always served as a distraction from real political and social questions that effect the people. Florida is a cheap labor "right to work" state with a repressive government--a state which made George W. Bush president of the U.S. in what was the most corrupt election in U.S. history. The Trayvon Martin story is what is important in Florida today along with "gun laws" that are a disgrace to the rest of the developed world The fight against laws in Arizona, Alabama, and other states which strike at the civil rights of American citizens of Latino background and undocumented workers is important,

Ozzie Guillen first "loving "and then "hating" Fidel Castro and explaining it all in terms of a language barrier is farce feeding on farce

Ozzie Guillen: Dejavu All Over Again and Again by Norman Markowitz

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 16:00:29 -0400