 |  |  |  |  |  | | | Tuesday, December 6, 2011 2:00 PM | | | Jay | | |  | | | Labels: News |
If its white women he's accused of harassing, I can't think of a better way to discredit him to the Republican rank and file of racists.I recall in 2006 they accused a Black democrat running for office in Tennessee of being "lose with women."They ran a TV ad of white playboy models winking and saying "call me!"Nothing discredited the Republicans more.This could be an internal Republican thing.It could also just be classic "skeletons in the closet" politician stuff.Let's be honest, do we really believe the GOP would run a Black candidate against Obama? It would lose them the racist votes they are depending on.It's all fascinating in light of the ideological right-wing drumbeat though.A lot of talking points among Beck folks are things like:Hitler was a leftist.Liberals want to divide us by saying racism exists.Abortion is a plot to murder Black people for eugenics.It helps to have a Black candidate (other than Alan Keyes, LOL), who can reinforce this new discovery that liberalism is an anti-racist, yet racist plot.
The question that I think needs to be analyzed in this story is , "Why are the Republicans vetting this candidate, even in the presidential primaries, when this bit of history is virtually certain to be exposed and derail his campaign?"What comes first to mind:In general contracting, particularly in Ohio, Black contractors, when their bids are considered at all, are often selectively steered to projects that are expected to fail because of the shoddy, incompetent, nefarious, etc history of earlier contractors (of the "White" persuasion, and who have already sucked up most of the loose cash) on the project. Responsibility for the failure is then shifted to the new Black contractor (who took the wrong end of the stick for small change).So in this case, perhaps the reasoning is that Cain is a safe choice for a Black candidate in that he provides window dressing but can't possibly be elected. His eventual exposure also serves to reinforce the racist stereotypes that have been the fall-back position of Republican presidential campaigns for several decades, i.e., it also supports (from a racist perspective) a narrative such as, "Obama is not fit to govern because he is Black, and therefore morally degenerate."
perry anderson
LUCIO MAGRI
1932–2011
Lucio Magri was a unique figure in the European Left— the only significant revolutionary thinker of his time whose thought was inseparable from the course of the mass movements of the decades through which he lived. He was incapable of a theoretical reflection that was not rooted in the real actions, or inactions, of the exploited and oppressed. That was normal in the generation of Gramsci, of the early Lukács and Korsch, who witnessed the Russian Revolution. In the age of the Cold War, when Magri entered politics, it was virtually unknown. The great Marxist intellectuals of the period—Adorno, Sartre, Lefebvre, Althusser, and so many others—developed their ideas in radical disconnexion from any close contact with popular politics. Italian Communism alone permitted, for a season, a classical circuit between original theory and organized practice, within the framework of a mass party. For a decade, Magri took the political opportunity it offered, before the pci dispensed with his loyalty. Did it ever realize what it lost in doing so? One day in Biella, when he was still a young cadre, after they had spent a night together working on a speech to be given by his superior, Enrico Berlinguer—before he became leader of the party—told him: 'Magri, you have yet to learn that in politics one needs the courage of banality.' Such was the self-awareness of officialdom, at its most lucid. Magri had another kind of political courage: the kind that Gramsci displayed, in notebooks that were never banal.
Born in 1932, and brought up till 1939 as an only child in the Libyan desert, where his father was a colonel in the Italian air force, Lucio Magri cut a singular figure. In appearance as dazzling as any film star of the period—athletic build; strong jaw; regular features; blonde hair tapering to a widow's peak; deep-set, blazing blue eyes; wide smile; large, perfect teeth—and in dress of immaculate informality, he was the picture of spectacular good looks and casual elegance. Skilled at chess and poker, and a first-class cook, he had every outward asset of the man of the world, admired by the opposite sex. But there was something too serious and remote, even abstract, in him to fill the role. He lacked the easy conviviality of many Italians. Trenchant rather than urbane, his metallic voice was closer to that of a caustic preceptor than a seducer. His authors were Lermontov, Fitzgerald, Joseph Roth, the Tolstoy of Father Sergius. In a lighter vein, also—here a touch of the dandy came in—P. G. Wodehouse, in whose honour he liked to say that the Savoy, on the one occasion a parliamentary delegation brought him to London, could no longer boil an egg to satisfy Jeeves. These were not the usual tastes of a militant, or functionary, of Italian Communism. The contradiction of Magri's career and personality is that he was at once more profoundly tied to the social conflicts in his country as the springs of his own thought, yet also more distant in style and character from them, than any of his contemporaries. He had little popular sensibility; low tolerance for commonplaces of any kind; a manner that could be stand-offish, or cutting. But the laws of motion of any radical politics came, and could only come, from the masses, and it was to the strategies at stake in their revolt against the established order that he brought a rare order of analytic intensity and passion.
The condition of this paradox was his experience within the pci. Brought up in a conventional military family, with a brief period of adolescent religious belief, in Bergamo—one of the 'whitest' areas of Christian Democracy's dominance in Italy—he joined one of its youth organizations while still in school, and was active on its left wing, which he quit when its prestigious leader Giuseppe Dossetti was defeated within the party and resigned from it. Together with other young Christian Democrats of the same levy, he then made contact with the pci, working in an independent journal of Communist Catholic opinion, Il Dibattito Politico. At the age of twenty-four he entered the pci. Joining the ranks of communism in the wake of the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Party and the Hungarian Revolt, he did so with eyes more open than was common in the inter-war or Resistance generations. Travelling to the Moscow Youth Festival the following year, he was reading Trotsky on the boat to Odessa. His first significant contribution to the party press, in late 1958, was an essay warning against dismissal of Gaullism as a mere regime of reaction or throw-back to the past, rather than a force capable of modernizing French capitalism. [1] In March 1962 the Istituto Gramsci staged an important conference in Rome on 'Tendencies of Italian Neo-Capitalism'. There Magri argued that Italy as a whole could no longer be regarded as a backward capitalist society, where a democratic revolution—raising no socialist demands—had yet to take place, even if there were regions within it where that was so; rather, it was already experiencing the new contradictions of advanced capitalist society, which required a different strategy from the party. [2]
A major historical reconstruction of successive conceptions of the revolutionary party marked his entry into the innovative theoretical journal of the pci, Critica Marxista, then edited by a fellow independent spirit, Romano Ledda. [3] Soon afterwards, he was transferred from Lombardy to the party headquarters in Rome, working in its mass organizations department under the commanding figure of Giorgio Amendola, the powerful and authoritarian leader of the right wing of Italian communism. A year later, Amendola announced in Rinascita that since neither communist nor social-democratic traditions had succeeded in achieving socialism, the two movements should merge into a new labour party in Italy. A heated debate—in which the most effective reply to Amendola from the left came from Magri—ensued, which the directorate of the pci quickly shut down. [4] Within months, the conflict rebounded with a nuanced but incisive critique by Magri, in the summer of 1965, of the limitations of the Popular Front experiences of the thirties that were an ideological template for the official line of the party at the time. [5] Personal relations with Amendola nevertheless remained good until he succeeded in slipping part of a document he had written into a speech given by Longo, the party's General Secretary. 'You will not hoodwink your elders again,' Amendola told him, 'we are not under bourgeois law here.' For punishment he was put in cold storage, given no work and ignored. After three months, he told Amendola that at thirty-five he was too young to be a pensioner, and asked for any job to which the party might assign him, as third assistant secretary in the backlands of Sicily or wherever else he might be demoted—getting the blunt reply: 'No, if we do that you might quickly end up secretary in Palermo. You must learn discipline.'
Exit from the Party
A year later the Italian 1968 exploded among young workers and students, followed by the still larger French revolt. When Amendola denounced what he saw as the reappearance of the black flag of anarchism, Magri once again wrote the most forceful rejoinder in Rinascita, [6] and soon afterwards a soberly penetrating critique of the French Communist Party's role in the upheaval, Considerazioni sui Fatti di Maggio. For a decade he had argued within the pci that capitalism was both modernizing itself in ways the party was ignoring, and in doing so was generating new needs and forces of rebellion against itself, which required a bolder and more radical strategy than any warmed-over version of the politics of the Popular Front. In late 1969 the pci leadership, disconcerted by the continuing turmoil in factories and universities as the Italian 'hot autumn' failed to die down, purged the left that had formed around the newly created journal Il Manifesto, when it published an editorial by Magri on Husák's 'normalization' in Czechoslovakia, entitled 'Prague Is Alone'.
For over a decade, Magri had worked in the control rooms of an organization of over two million members, the largest mass party in Europe, in close contact with, but never part of, its leadership. He was essentially expelled, along with the rest of the Manifesto group—Rossana Rossanda, Luigi Pintor, Aldo Natoli, Massimo Caprara, Luciana Castellina—for criticizing its inability to respond creatively to a mass upsurge that, for the first time since the war, escaped its directives. Exit from the pci was never part of their intention. But they miscalculated by placing their journal with a small printer in Bari, who distributed it not in bookshops—as they had envisaged—but on news-stands, where it promptly sold 50,000 copies, allowing the pci leadership to treat it as a factional broadsheet. The trigger for the purge came from Pravda's denunciation of the Czech editorial, leading the cupola of the party to fear that if it did not crack down on Il Manifesto, a pro-Soviet tendency in the pci would be fostered by Moscow. But amid the euphoria of the student revolt and the workers' hot autumn, the group was not dismayed, converting the monthly into a daily in 1971, [7] running candidates in the national elections of 1972, and co-founding a party with dissident Socialists in 1974, the pdup.
In this move, the Manifesto group came up sharply against its own limits, and the character of the rebellion on whose energies it had counted in making it. None had any real experience of mass organization. Magri had worked in the central apparatus, Rossanda had been in charge of cultural tasks in the party, Pintor was a brilliant journalist. They had a lot to learn. Magri underwent the most drastic transformation, serving as the leader of the pdup for nine years, in Parliament and as General Secretary, criss-crossing the country from one end to the other, organizing branches, addressing meetings, composing reports, holding congresses. But the party never got more than half a million votes, and its hopes of unifying a new left front in Italy foundered on the deep cultural gulf that divided the Manifesto group, for whom the pci, however aberrant its policies—by the mid seventies the party under Berlinguer had embarked on the futile quest for a Historic Compromise with Christian Democracy—remained an irreplaceable experience and reference, and the revolutionary groups that emerged out of the late sixties, most of them uncompromisingly hostile to the party and contemptuous of its legacy. The tensions between generations and sensibilities eventually split the Manifesto group itself, the daily and the party—Rossanda and Pintor; Magri and Castellina—going separate ways. But when the last expression of a mass politics connected to its moment of formation came, with the peace movement of the early eighties—the Italian demonstrations were the largest in Europe—they were united, Magri responding with one of the most lucid political reflections of, and on them, that the movement produced. [8]
By this time, it had become untenable for Berlinguer to continue the vain pursuit of the Historic Compromise, and the pci was lending a new ear to workers' struggles. In these conditions, reconciliation was possible and in 1984 the pdup voted to dissolve itself into the party. Now, for the first time, Magri entered its leading bodies. His view of Berlinguer was respectful, but critical. A politician of limited imagination, of whom little had been expected on his way up the apparatus, he had gained authority from the party's electoral success in 1976, when it achieved its highest share—some 35 per cent—of the vote, from his relative openness to questions of sexual inequality and the environment, and his personal modesty and probity. By the early eighties, he was conducting a turn in which few of his colleagues had much belief. His dramatic death in 1984, collapsing while giving a speech on a balcony in Padua, was in Magri's eyes a political disaster. He would speak of four strokes of divine malignity: the death of Lenin when he was revising his views on the peasantry; of Gramsci when the Comintern had adopted the Popular Front; of Togliatti when he penned the Yalta Memorandum; and of Berlinguer at the moment of his swing to social struggle and solidarity. For by the time of his death, Berlinguer's popularity and prestige in Italy were enormous because of the contrast between his image and that of Craxi, Andreotti, Forlani and the other rulers of the country at the time. The gigantic popular demonstration at his funeral exceeded even that at Togliatti's—which Magri had helped to organize—when the crowds had been so difficult to control that Brezhnev, jostled and nearly knocked over in the crush, kept exclaiming 'revoliutsiya,revoliutsiya!' in his astonishment at the experience of a march that was not a military parade in Red Square.
After Berlinguer came a steady involution of the pci. Less important than the aimless moderation of its political line, or lack of renewal in its internal structure, was the transformation of its social base, as generations passed, and the party became something else after decades of sottogoverno. Those who had known the Resistance died off, workers dropped away, its functionaries were now mostly self-satisfied regional or municipal office-holders, embedded in dubious local coalitions or presiding over corporatist enterprises. If it was now possible, as it had not been in the past, to present alternative resolutions at party congresses—and there were many who were deeply uneasy about what was happening to the pci—missing was any firm leadership of the opposition to its rightward drift. That should have come from Amendola's historic adversary, Pietro Ingrao—figurehead of the left at the top of the pci in the sixties—who had survived him, and still enjoyed great prestige among militants within the party. But though in character absolutely honest and pure, he lacked any backbone, craving applause but fearing responsibility. Seeming to symbolize a left line, he invariably failed to match words with deeds when the inner-party crunch came. In 1969, though close to the Manifesto group, he gave them no support when they were expelled. Twenty years later, when the pci's new leader Occhetto decided to scuttle its name and nature virtually overnight, Ingrao—after signing a resolution against the dissolution of the party in 1991—remained in the rump formation to emerge from Occhetto's operation, that would soon abandon even the self-designation 'left' as an anachronistic burden.
When the final hour of the pci arrived at Rimini in 1991, a third of the delegates to its last Congress voted against winding it up, and from this opposition came the formation of a successor organization, Rifondazione Comunista. [9] When its first General Secretary subsequently resigned, Magri could have become its leader. But the transmogrification and scission of the pci had been too great a disaster. A party that still numbered 1,400,000 in 1991 lost 800,000 members who joined neither side in the split. The tide of mass politics was going out. By 1993, Magri was too sceptical about the future of a Refoundation to which he was still committed to think he was the right person to lead it. Two years later, when rc declined to support the Dini government, spatchcocked together to deny Berlusconi a victory at the polls, he left it and withdrew from public activity. [10] But it was not quite his final throw. On the eve of the millennium, he revived the journal of which he had been a founder thirty years before, this time regrouping different currents of the left in an ecumenical spirit, to confront the realities of a new age of capitalist triumph, unipolar hegemony and scattered resistance, and develop a project capable of passing beyond them.
To this he brought undiminished gifts of political acuity and synthesis, with a broader international vision than ever before. But analytic achievement had never been enough for him. The purpose of the journal was to help work out a programmatic alternative to the ominous status quo. Yet 'programmes truly develop only through social and political struggles, to which they can offer coherence and vision', and when it became clear these were still wanting—in Italy and at large—he closed the journal he had recreated, at the end of 2004, because there was no longer a movement to which it could relate, with an exceptionally fine envoi—a luminous panorama of the economic and political scenery of the world a year after the invasion of Iraq, and a farewell to the hope that a vision of another order might yet be in sight. [11] The immediate causes for his decision were the myopic tacticism of the various components of the Italian left, and the sudden abjuring of any connexion with a revolutionary past by some of its former lights. But the ultimate reason lay in an intransigent coherence with himself. The unity of theory and practice, once a touchstone of historical materialism, had long since disappeared from the annals of Western Marxism. Magri was the strange exception, who lived by it, and would die from it. Political thought, without a 'real movement' to guide it, could not bear fruit.
Counterfactuals
There remained only one possible task. In his final years, cut off from the popular struggles that were the permanent landscape of his mind, he nevertheless completed—in a tragic personal situation—the only memorial of the communist experience in Italy, and its implications for the world, intellectually worthy of it. He conceived this as a memorial for future generations. In the preceding years, citing Eric Hobsbawm, he had become more and more impressed by the collapse of the older moral supports of capitalism—family, school, church, barracks—and the extent of cultural disintegration that had followed from it. The 'mother of all reforms', he had argued, would be a new educational system, adapted to a time when some of the traditional associations of age and knowledge were being reversed, the young, growing up on the frontiers of technique and science, in advance of their elders, not instructed but instructors of them. Magri, who could not use a computer and scarcely even touched a typewriter, writing everything by hand, was himself an illustration of that. But certain kinds of teaching could, as before, only be a transmission in the other direction.
As in the revolutionary canon of an earlier age, the typical forms of Magri's writing had been the article, the speech, the report, the resolution, the polemic. Books were a comparative rarity in this tradition. Marx only ever published two, Lenin four, out of vast bodies of writing. The Tailor of Ulm, subtitled in Italian 'A Possible History of the pci', and in English, at his request, 'Communism in the Twentieth Century', is a fully meditated and composed book. Calm and balanced, unfailing in its historical intelligence, it is also a work of poignant personal reflection and political imagination. The narrative runs from 1944 to 1991, covering the record of the pci from its rebirth at the end of the Second World War to its dissolution at the end of the Cold War, set against the larger background of the destiny of the world communist movement as a whole.
The join between the two is not perfect. No author escapes local limitations. Culturally, Magri was confined to Italian and French as languages of fluency. Politically, like most Communists in Europe, he was far more familiar with the Russian than the Chinese Revolution, and his handling of each was uneven—too inclined to absolve Stalin from any responsibility for the onset of the Cold War, and to mitigate the costs of the Cultural Revolution launched by Mao, but giving full and accurate weight, as is very rarely done by any camp today, to the fatal consequences of the Sino-Soviet split for everything that followed. In Italy, Magri's treatment of the Historic Compromise, though critical, avoids drawing the obvious conclusion that it was responsible, not only for the 'Leaden Years' of state and anti-state terrorism, but also for the abyss it fixed between the established culture of Italian Communism and the mutant forms of dissident culture—that could be at once radically hostile to capitalism and casually collusive with it—of younger generations: a scission that had direct repercussions in the ranks of the Manifesto itself. A bedrock loyalty to the Communist movement as a collective homeland, to be reproved but not deserted, makes itself felt in such blind spots.
They scarcely diminish the strengths of the book as a whole, where Magri brought together nearly all the themes of his prior writings into a single powerful account of the ways in which a mass party arose and declined, amidst changes in the structure of economy and society, upsurges of social and political struggle, ideological and international collisions, until its impetus finally ran out. Could the peculiar debacle of its end have been averted? Magri suggests that it might. His book ends by reprinting a strategic document he drafted in 1987, before the collapse of the party, as an indication of what kind of alternative there was. But by then the objective correlate on which his thought had always depended had gone. Programmatic ideas without popular forces behind them, he had always believed, were vain. He was by nature a strategist; without an army, there could be no meaningful strategy.
Italian Communism was part of the larger history that gave the title to his book. Half a century earlier, Brecht had ended his poem on the tailor of Ulm—who claimed he could fly and fell to his death from a cathedral—by observing that human beings did eventually learn to move through the air. After 1989, Ingrao quoted the poem in consolation for the failure of Communism. Magri reports that he rejoined: but did the tailor's fall contribute to the development of aeronautics? The reply was in character. He had never believed in automatic progress. He wanted to pass on something of the experience of Communism, he once said in conversation, from a time he was happy to have lived through, seeing that of today. But it would be at least two generations before anything comparable arose again. Revolutions—French, Russian, Chinese—typically accomplish only twenty per cent of what they set out to achieve, at a cost of sixty per cent. But without them there is no leap of society in history.
Not long after he started work on The Tailor of Ulm, his wife, Mara Caltagirone, fell mortally ill, and most of it was written in conditions of private agony. When she died in early 2009, he wanted to accompany her, as André Gorz had done with his wife two years before. But the book was still unfinished, and she made him promise not to kill himself before it was complete. After it finally appeared, to a uniformly respectful reception in Italy, he told those closest to him that he had arranged to put an assisted end to himself in Switzerland. All entreated him not to, and for two years he delayed. But existence had lost its meanings for him. The epigraph to The Tailor of Ulm speaks for the considerable political solitude he felt. It comes from Joseph Roth's novel The Emperor's Tomb, in which the scion of a military family of the Habsburg empire—now vanished—that had believed in Austria as a religion, asks himself on the eve of the Second World War: 'Where should I, a Trotta, go now?' The private solitude he suffered was more absolute. He did not want to repair it. Deep within him was what Luciana Castellina, who had loved him and remained his staunchest friend to the end, called his integralism—an all-or-nothing sense of things, that had repeatedly informed his engagements and disengagements, and finally his exit.
What determined its timing this November can only be surmised. It coincided—pointedly, or otherwise—with the arrival of a bankers' government in Rome, installed by a former Communist president, to the applause of virtually the entire political spectrum; that can hardly have been a discouragement. Fixation on Berlusconi was overblown, in his eyes: not crypto-fascism, but neo-centrism was the drift of the time, of which Berlusconi was one more variant—a point demonstrated still more conclusively by Monti and the consensus around him. It was against this background that Lucio Magri went to his death, in the style of stoic antiquity. The Tailor of Ulm will live on.
[1] 'Ipotesi sulla Dinamica del Gollismo', Nuovi Argomenti, Nos 35–36, November 1958–February 1959.
[2] The proceedings of the debate were published in Antonio Pesenti and Vincenzo Vitello, eds, Tendenze del capitalismo italiano, Roma 1962; Magri then revised his contribution for its French publication: 'Le modèle de développement capitaliste et le problème de l'alternative prolétarienne', Les Temps modernes, Nos 196–197, September–October 1962.
[3] 'Problemi della Teoria Marxista del Partito Rivoluzionario', Critica Marxista, September–December 1963; an English version was published in nlr i/60, March–April 1970, with an important afterword by Magri on the relations between councils and party, the early and the late Gramsci.
[4] For Magri's intervention, see 'Unificazione: su quale Linea?', Rinascita, 6 March 1965.
[5] 'Il Valore e il Limite delle Esperienze Frontiste', Critica Marxista, July–August 1965.
[6] 'Più a Sinistra e Più Unitari', Rinascita, 12 July 1968.
[7] For Magri's view of the Italian conjuncture at this point, see 'Italian Communism in the Sixties', nlr i/66, March–April 1971.
[8] 'The Peace Movement and European Socialism', nlr i/131, January–February 1982.
[9] For Magri's account of this moment, see 'The European Left between Crisis and Refoundation', nlr i/189, September–October 1991.
[10] See his text, written around this time, 'The Resistible Rise of the Italian Right', nlr i/214, November–December 1995.
[11] 'Parting Words', nlr 31, January–February 2005.
This film, put out by the House Un-American Activities Committee, shows how the Communist Party shut down their hearing in Berkeley California, with the IWLU and the student radicals, in 1960.
Beautiful.
The McCarthyists made the movie, but watching it, makes any Communist pumped up and inspired.
It simply shows footage of the heroic disruptions, along with narrator who fingers every Communist Party member, giving a kind of "greatest hits" bio of their past acts of heroism.
Inspiring piece of history.
| | | | | | | | Thursday, December 1, 2011 11:22 PM | | | Jay | | | | | | Labels: News |
10 Ways to Cut the Deficit
1. Save Fuel
An F-15 fighter flames 14,400 gallons of fuel per hour and a non-nuke aircraft carrier burns 100,000 gallons of fuel per day. Several of the US Commanders in Chief have said. or strongly implied, that God is on the side of the US military because they are; after all, only doing a task that G. assigned to them. That being so, they are surely be able to walk on water. I say, "Get to marching." Let the Commander in Chief, Generals, Admirals and the Reichsführer of the Homeland lead the march. Bon voyage!
mike davis
SPRING CONFRONTS WINTER
Editorial
In great upheavals, analogies fly like shrapnel. The electrifying protests of 2011—the on-going Arab spring, the 'hot' Iberian and Hellenic summers, the 'occupied' fall in the United States—inevitably have been compared to the anni mirabiles of 1848, 1905, 1968 and 1989. Certainly some fundamental things still apply and classic patterns repeat. Tyrants tremble, chains break and palaces are stormed. Streets become magical laboratories where citizens and comrades are created, and radical ideas acquire sudden telluric power. Iskra becomes Facebook. But will this new comet of protest persist in the winter sky or is it just a brief, dazzling meteor shower? As the fates of previous journées révolutionnaires warn us, spring is the shortest of seasons, especially when the communards fight in the name of a 'different world' for which they have no real blueprint or even idealized image.
But perhaps that will come later. For the moment, the survival of the new social movements—the occupiers, the indignados, the small European anti-capitalist parties and the Arab new left—demands that they sink deeper roots in mass resistance to the global economic catastrophe, which in turn presupposes—let's be honest—that the current temper for 'horizontality' can eventually accommodate enough disciplined 'verticality' to debate and enact organizing strategies. It's a frighteningly long road just to reach the starting points of earlier attempts to build a new world. But a new generation has at least bravely initiated the journey.
Will a deepening economic crisis, now engulfing much of the world, necessarily speed a global renewal of the Left? The 'bullet points' that follow are my speculations. Designed to instigate debate, they're simply a thinking-out-loud about some of the historical specificities of the 2011 events and the outcomes they could shape in the next few years. The underlying premise is that Act Two of the drama will entail mostly winter scenes, played out against the backdrop of the collapse of export-led economic growth in the bric countries as well as continuing stagnation in Europe and the United States.
1. CAPITALIST NIGHTMARES
First, we must pay homage to fear and panic at the high tables of capitalism. What was inconceivable just a year ago, even to most Marxists, is now a spectre haunting the opinion pages of the business press: the imminent destruction of much of the institutional framework of globalization and undermining of the post-1989 international order. There is growing apprehension that the crisis of the Eurozone, followed by a synchronized world recession, might return us to a 1930ish world of semi-autarchic monetary and trade blocs, crazed by nationalist ressentiments. Hegemonic regulation of money and demand, in this scenario, would no longer exist: the us, too weak; Europe, too disorganized; and China, with feet of clay, too dependent upon exports. Every second-rank power would want its own enriched-uranium insurance policy; regional nuclear wars would become a possibility. Far-fetched? Perhaps, but so is the belief in time travel back to the roaring days of the 1990s. Our analogue minds simply cannot solve all the differential equations generated by the incipient fragmentation of the Eurozone or a blown gasket in the Chinese growth engine. While the explosion on Wall Street in 2008 was more or less accurately foreseen by various experts, what is now rushing toward us is well beyond the prediction of any Cassandra or, for that matter, three Karl Marxes.
2. SAIGON TO KABUL
If the neo-liberal apocalypse is actually nigh, Washington and Wall Street will be seen as the chief exterminating angels, having simultaneously blown up the North Atlantic financial system and the Middle East (as well as scuppering any chance of mitigating climate disaster). Bush's invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan may be seen in historical retrospect as acts of classic hubristic over-reach: quick Panzer victories and illusions of omnipotence, followed by long wars of attrition and atrocity that risk ending almost as badly for Washington as did Moscow's venture across the Oxus a quarter-century before. The United States has been stymied on one front by the Taliban, supported by Pakistan, and on the other by Shiites, supported by Iran. Although still joined at the hip with Israel, able to fill the skies with assassin drones or coordinate a lethal nato assault, Washington has been unable to extract a guarantee of immunity for American forces in Iraq, limiting the number of boots on the ground in a fulcrum Middle East state. The democratic uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt saw Obama and Clinton obliged to politely applaud the beheading of two of their favoured regimes.
The obvious dividend of the pull-back—a more rational equilibration of us military might and objectives to shrinking fiscal resources and global economic economic clout—is still hostage to mad plans hatched in Tel Aviv or a mortal threat to Saudi absolutism. Although Canada's vast heavy-oil reserves and Allegheny gas shales reduce direct us dependence on Middle East fields, they don't unshackle the American economy, as some claim, from world-market energy prices determined by politics in the Gulf.
3. AN ARAB 1848
The unfinished Arab political revolution is epic in scope and social energy, a historical surprise comparable to 1848 or 1989. It is reshaping the geopolitics of North Africa and the Middle East, leaving Israel as an obsolete outpost of the Cold War (and therefore more dangerous and unpredictable than ever), while enabling Turkey, jilted by the eu (not a bad thing, it turns out), to reclaim a central influence in lands once Ottoman. In Egypt and Tunisia, the uprisings also helped to redeem the authentic meaning of democracy from the bowdlerized versions peddled by nato. Provocative parallels can be drawn with 'floral revolutions', past and present. As with 1848 and 1989, the Arab mega-intifada is a chain-reaction uprising against a regional autocratic system, with Egypt analogous to France in the first instance, perhaps East Germany in the second. The role of counter-revolutionary Russia is today played by Saudi Arabia and the Gulf sheikhdoms. Turkey impersonates liberal England as a regional model of moderate parliamentarianism and economic success, while the Palestinians (stretching analogy to the breaking point) are a romantic lost cause like the Poles; the Shias, angry outsiders like the Slovaks and Serbs. (The Financial Times, for its part, recently encouraged Obama to think like the 'new Metternich'.)
It is well worth thumbing through Marx and Engels' voluminous writings on 1848 (as well as Trotsky's later glosses) in search of insights into the fundamental mechanics of such revolutions. One example is Marx's conviction, hardened over time into dogma, that no revolution in Europe—democratic or socialist—could be successful until Russia was either defeated in a major war or revolutionized from within. Substitute Saudi Arabia and the thesis still makes sense.
4. PARTY OF THE PEOPLE
Political Islam is winning a popular mandate as sweeping (although perhaps no more long-lasting) as that given by the events of 1989 to Eastern European liberals. It could not have been otherwise. Over the last half-century Israel, the United States and Saudi Arabia—the first two invading, the third proselytizing—have virtually destroyed secular politics in the Arab world. Indeed, with the inevitable demise of the last Baathist in his Damascus bunker, the great pan-Arab political movements of the 1950s (Nasserism, Communism, Baathism, Muslim Brotherhood) will have been whittled down to the Brotherhood and its Wahhabi rivals.
The Brotherhood, especially in its Egyptian birthplace, is the ultimate spinster of political movements, having waited more than 75 years to take power despite a mass support along the Nile that was already estimated in the several millions during the late 1940s. The perdurance of this veteran, multinational political movement in at least five Arab countries is also one of the key differences between the 2011 uprising and European precedents. In both 1848 and 1989, popular democratic movements possessed only embryonic political organization. In 1848, in fact, there were virtually no mass political parties in the modern sense outside the United States. In 1989–91, on the other hand, the vacuum of political organization and pr savvy was quickly filled by a bullying mob of German conservatives and Wall Street commissars, who pushed aside most of the actual grassroots leadership.
The Brotherhood, by contrast, has silently loomed over the Egyptian scene like the Sphinx. Its mass front organizations, operating in semi-legality, have built impressive elements of an alternative state including crucial welfare networks for the poor. Its martyr rolls (including the 'Islamist Lenin', Sayyid Qutb, murdered by Nasser in 1966) are as familiar to most pious Egyptians as lists of kings to the English or presidents to Americans. Despite its fearsome image in the West, it has evolved to embrace aspects of the free-market Islamism represented by the ruling Justice and Development Party in Turkey.
5. EGYPT'S EIGHTEENTH BRUMAIRE?
Yet as the first stage of Egypt's parliamentary elections vividly demonstrated, the Brotherhood can no longer claim to be the exclusive representative of popular piety. That the makeshift Salafi party Al-Nour could win an estimated 24 per cent of the vote (compared to the Brotherhood's 38 per cent) underscores the turbulence in the grassroots of Egyptian society. Indeed the Salafists, despite their initial abstention from the 25 January revolution, may now constitute the largest cadre organization in the Sunni world. Walking in the Brotherhood's old shoes and handsomely subsidized by Riyadh, they cultivate an ominous vigilante conflict with the Copts and Sufis. The balance of power between the two Islamist camps will likely be decided over the next year by the price of bread and the politics of the army. If the Brotherhood had come to power earlier in the last decade, global growth would have reinforced both the attractiveness and possibility of the Turkish path. But since all weather vanes now point to bust, Ankara's paradigm (like the Brazilian model in South America) may be stripped of economic success and lose considerable regional appeal.
On the other hand, the Salafi public image—incorruptible, anti-political and sectarian—will be automatically magnetized by further misery and perceived threats to Islam. Some element of the Egyptian military has undoubtedly already parsed the 'Pakistani option' of a tacit or formal alliance with the Salafists. Various circumstances might advance this scenario: the continuing resistance of the generals to a substantive handover of power; the Brotherhood's inability to meet the minimum popular expectations of economic welfare; or the liberal-left coalition becoming the arbiter of parliamentary majorities. (Israel, on its side, could destabilize Egyptian democracy with a single airstrike. How would Sunni parties respond to an attack on Iran?)
In the event, the Egyptian left has been studying the Eighteenth Brumaire since Nasser. It knows all about plebiscites, lumpenproletarians, Napoleonic rulers and sacks of potatoes. Its groupuscules and networks, in alliance with workers and youth of all denominations, were sinew to the revolution of 25 January as well as the reoccupation of Tahrir Square in November. Will an Islamic-majority government ensure the right of the new left and independent unions to organize and campaign openly? This will be the litmus test of Egyptian democracy.
6. MEDITERRANEAN BREAKDOWN
Southern Europe, meanwhile, faces the same devastation by structural adjustment and forced austerity that Latin America experienced in the 1980s. The ironies are murderous. Although north-central Europe has suddenly developed an acute case of amnesia, a few years ago the financial press was praising Spain, Portugal and even Greece (plus non-eu Turkey) for their competence in trimming public spending and boosting growth rates. In the immediate aftermath of the Wall Street debacle, the fears of the eu had been principally focused on Ireland, the Baltic and Eastern Europe. The Mediterranean as a whole was perceived as relatively well protected from the financial tsunami crossing the Atlantic at supersonic speed.
On its side, the Arab Mediterranean had little stake in the thrombotic circuits of investment capital and derivative trading, and thus had minimal direct exposure to the financial crisis. Southern Europe, for its part, had generally obedient governments and, in the case of Spain, strong banks. Italy was simply too big and rich to fail, while Greece, if an annoyance, was a Lilliputian economy (barely 2 per cent of the eu gdp) whose misdemeanours scarcely threaten the Brobdingnagians. Eighteen months later, German and Austrian Rush Limbaughs were screaming about the Mediterranean welfare queens blackmailing prudent burghers to surrender their savings and sell their children so that the Greeks can riot all day long and the Spanish can take longer siestas. Yet a more plausible case could be made that German success is in fact wrecking the Eurozone. With its low-cost Mexicos in the East, its incomparable productivity advantages and its China-like fanaticism about huge export surpluses, Germany over-competes with its euro-kin in southern Europe. The eu as a whole, meanwhile, runs its largest relative export surplus with Turkey and the non-oil North African states ($34 billion in 2010), ensuring their dependence upon remittances, tourism and foreign investment to balance accounts. The entire Mediterranean, as a result, is acutely sensitive to cyclical movements of demand and interest rates in the eu; whereas Germany, France, the uk and the other rich northern countries have major secondary markets to act as shock absorbers.
The euro is the fly-wheel of this multiple-speed Grosseuropäische economy. For Germany, the euro functions as a streamlined Deutschmark which, because it is less vulnerable to sudden appreciation, ensures the competitive pricing of German exports while subtracting little from Berlin's de facto veto power inside the eu economy. For southern Europeans, on the other hand, it is a Faustian bargain that attracts capital in good times but abdicates the use of monetary tools to combat trade deficits and unemployment in bad. Now that the Iberian and Hellenic pox has infected Italy and threatens France, a hard-love vision of euro-Europe is emerging from Berlin and Paris: fiscal integration via treaty revision. Having already lost control over monetary policy and been forced to defoliate their public sectors under supervision of eu and imf technicians, the debtor countries are now being asked to accept a permanent Franco-German veto over their budgets and public spending. In the nineteenth century, Britain frequently sent its gunboats to impose such receiverships on defaulting countries in Latin America or Asia. The Allies yoked Germany in a similar fashion at Versailles and thus sowed the Third Reich.
Whether by submission to Sarkozy–Merkel or default and exit from the Eurozone (and perhaps the eu), the Mediterranean economies are being sentenced to years of rot and hyper-unemployment. But their populations will not go gentle into that good night. Portugal and Greece, having come closest to actual social revolutions in the 1970s, preserve the most hardcore left-wing cultures in Europe. In Spain the new conservative government presents a broad and inviting target to a revived United Left and the much larger, but still amorphous, youth protest movement. Indeed, embers of anti-capitalism are likely to be fanned back to flame everywhere in Europe. But the anti-immigrant, anti-Brussels right may gain far more than the left from the break-up of the Eurozone, and the circling of the eu's wagons around the core. As with the Salafists in Egypt or the Tea Party in the United States, the European new-right parties have identity politics and scapegoating rage already packaged for immediate home delivery. An extraordinary ambition for the anti-capitalist left in Western Europe would be the reoccupation of the political space held by the Communists for thirty years after 1945. The movements led by Marine Le Pen and Geert Wilders, on the other hand, have reasonable hopes of mounting a serious challenge for the much larger and well-endowed conservative franchise in their national politics. The far right take-over of the Republican Party in the United States provides them with an inspiring template.
7. ENGINE OF REVOLT
The campus rebellions of 1968 in Europe and the us were spiritually and politically fuelled by the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, guerrilla insurgencies in Latin America, the Cultural Revolution in China and the ghetto uprisings in the United States. Similarly the indignados of the last year have drawn primordial strength from the examples of Tunis and Cairo. (The several million children and grandchildren of Arab immigrants to southern Europe make this connection intimately vivid and militant.) As a result, passionate 20-year-olds now occupy squares on both shores of Braudel's fundamental Mediterranean. In 1968, however, few of the white youth protesting in Europe (with the important exception of Northern Ireland) and the United States shared the existential realities of their counterparts in countries of the South. Even if deeply alienated, most could look forward to turning college degrees into affluent middle-class careers. Today, in contrast, many of the protesters in New York, Barcelona and Athens face prospects dramatically worse than those of their parents and closer to those of their counterparts in Casablanca and Alexandria. (Some of the occupiers of Zuccotti Park, if they had graduated ten years earlier, might have walked straight into $100,000 salaries at a hedge fund or investment bank. Today they work at Starbucks.)
Globally, young adult unemployment is at record levels, according to the ilo—between 25 and 50 per cent in most of the countries with youth-led protests. Moreover, in the North African crucible of the Arab revolution, a college degree is inversely related to likelihood of employment. In other countries as well, family investment in education, when incurred debt is considered, is paying negative dividends. At the same time, access to higher education has become more restricted, most dramatically in the us, uk and Chile.
8. BREADLINES
The economic crisis combines the deflation of popular assets (home values and thus family equity in the us, Ireland, Spain) with steep inflation in essential cost-of-living items, especially fuel and food. In classical theory, where broad price trends are expected to move in unison with the business cycle, this is an unusual bifurcation; in reality, it may be more ominous. The mortgage crisis in the United States and elsewhere is internal to the larger financial crisis, and will either be solved by government intervention or simple destruction of claims to value. The base price of crude oil, in turn, may fall as industrial Asia slows down and production levels rise in Iraq. (The peak oil debate seems to me both indeterminable and interminable.) But food prices appear to be rising as a secular trend, determined by forces largely external to the financial crisis and industrial slowdown. Indeed, a growing chorus of expert voices has been warning since the early 2000s that the global food-security system is collapsing. Multiple causes feed back and amplify each other: diversion of grains to meat and biofuel production; neo-liberal slashing of food subsidies and price supports; rampant speculation in crop futures and prime agricultural land; underinvestment in agricultural research; volatile energy prices; exhaustion of soils and depletion of aquifers; drought and climate change, and so on. To the extent that slower growth will reduce some of these pressures (Chinese eating less meat, for example), the sheer momentum of population increase—another three billion people in the lifetime of today's protestors—will maintain the demand-side pressures. (gmcs, of course, have been promoted as a miracle solution, but more likely for agro-corporate profits than net harvests.)
'Bread' was the first demand of the protest at Tahrir Square, and the word echoes almost as loud in the Arab Spring as it did in the Russian October. The reasons are simple: ordinary Egyptians, for example, spend about 60 per cent of their family budget on crude oil (heating, cooking, transportation), flour, vegetable oils and sugar. In 2008 these staple prices suddenly shot up by 25 per cent. The official poverty rate in Egypt abruptly increased by 12 per cent. Apply the same ratio in other 'medium income' countries and staple inflation erases a substantial fraction of the World Bank's 'emergent middle class'.
9. WAITING FOR CHINA TO LAND
Marx blamed California—the Gold Rush and its resultant monetary stimulus to world trade—for prematurely ending the revolutionary cycle of the 1840s. In the immediate aftermath of 2008, so-called brics became the new California. Airship Wall Street fell from the sky and crashed to earth, but China kept flying, with Brazil and Southeast Asia in tight formation. India and Russia also managed to keep their planes in the air. The resilient levitation of the brics astounded investment advisors, economic columnists and professional astrologers—all of them proclaiming that China, or India, could now hold up the world with one hand, or that Brazil would soon be richer than Spain. Their euphoric credulity, of course, arose from an ignorance of the superb sleight-of-hand techniques used by the Houdinis in the People's Bank of China. Beijing itself, in sharp contrast, has long expressed significant fears about the country's over-dependence upon exports, the insufficiency of household purchasing power, and the existence of an affordable-housing shortage side-by-side with an immense real-estate bubble.
Late last fall, articles of faith from the China optimists suddenly dwindled in editorial pages and the 'hard landing' scenario became the bookmakers' favourite. No one, including the Chinese leadership, knows for how much longer the economy can keep flying in the face of global headwinds. But the unavoidable casualty list of foreign passengers is already compiled: South America, Australia, much of Africa and most of Southeast Asia. And—of particular interest—Germany, which now trades more with China than with the United States. A thoroughly triangulated global recession, of course, is precisely that non-linear nightmare that I alluded to at the beginning. It is almost a tautology to observe that in bric-bloc countries, where popular expectations of economic progress have recently been raised so high, the pain of re-immiseration may be most intolerable. Thousands of public squares may beg to be occupied. Including one called Tiananmen.
Western post-Marxists—living in countries where the absolute or relative size of the manufacturing workforce has shrunk dramatically in the last generation—lazily ruminate on whether or not 'proletarian agency' is now obsolete, obliging us to think in terms of 'multitudes', horizontal spontaneities, whatever. But this is not a debate in the great industrializing society that Das Kapital describes even more accurately than Victorian Britain or New Deal America. Two hundred million Chinese factory workers, miners and construction labourers are the most dangerous class on the planet. (Just ask the State Council in Beijing.) Their full awakening from the bubble may yet determine whether or not a socialist Earth is still possible.
| | | | | | | | Wednesday, December 7, 2011 6:37 PM | | | Jay | | | | | | Labels: News |
In the October issue of Fourth International Li Fu-jen gave a political analysis of the Pearl Harbor reports that incontestably established the following conclusions regarding Roosevelt's policy in the Pacific.
- President Roosevelt, while proclaiming his love of peace and hatred of war, was embarked on a deliberate course of war with Japan long before Pearl Harbor as the conscious policy of his administration.
- Roosevelt systematically exerted diplomatic and economic pressure to force the Japanese imperialists to commit the overt act which would touch off the long-prepared conflict in the Orient.
Since then additional information has been made public showing that Roosevelt was no less consciously preparing to intervene in the impending European war as early as the fall of 1937. These facts, based upon a study of official government documents, were first published by Thomas F. Reynolds in the September 29 Chicago Sun and reprinted in the Congressional Record for October 15. They reveal the inside story of how Roosevelt and his underlings conspired and maneuvered to drag the American people into World War II without their knowledge and against their expressed will.
"QUARANTINE THE AGGRESSORS" The story begins in the fall of 1937 when Roosevelt began his propaganda preparation for the coming bloodbath with his Chicago speech on "quarantining the aggressors." This bellicose proclamation, however, met with an apathetic response. It failed to inflame the people with the required degree of war-fever. Congress refused to vote the huge sums needed for the vast military budget envisaged by the plans of the administration.
Roosevelt, however, was determined to go forward with his projected military program regardless of the sentiments of the nation. Calling together his associates, he discussed with them his plans and perspectives. Here is how Reynolds describes what went on behind the scenes at the White House.
"A careful review of hitherto censored memoranda reveals that the late Herman Oliphant, then general counsel for the Treasury, first sounded the administration alarm on production difficulties inherent in the threat of war which Mr. Roosevelt had pointed out to the nation.
"That was in the spring and summer of 1938 – even before the late Neville Chamberlain, then British Prime Minister, had made his deal for 'peace in our time' with Hitler at Munich. Oliphant was encouraged to put a staff to work on those long range problems by Mr. Roosevelt and the then Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, Jr.
"Key man on this staff was a young lawyer, Oscar Cox, who later was to draft the Lend-Lease Act. In the fall of 1938, Oliphant came up with data to show that if war did break out, this country would have to assume that sooner or later it would be involved. On this data, Oliphant concluded that the only possible insurance policy would be to step up airplane production to 50,000 planes annually.
"THE TIMING WAS WRONG"
"Morgenthau, Oliphant, and Cox, by memoranda and personal conversation, put the 50,000 plane idea before Mr. Roosevelt. He was impressed, and consented to permit work on it to continue. But he told the planners that it would be impossible for him to make any such proposal at that time to a Congress which even then was trimming minor defense appropriations."
"The timing was wrong," he said. Thus the war-mongering Roosevelt was obliged to postpone the realization of his unprecedented arms program until a more favorable opportunity for pushing it through Congress presented itself. He did not find that propitious moment until two years later. Roosevelt hesitated even after the war in Europe had broken out, so powerful was the resistance of the American people to participation in the conflict.
The long-sought-for occasion came with the alarm created when the German Wehrmacht ran wild through France in May 1940. This mounted to panic proportions in America's ruling circles as France capitulated, leaving England open to invasion. Roosevelt extracted the ready-made project for 50,000 planes a year from his portfolio and rushed it through Congress. This and similar measures were pictured at that time by the capitalist press as masterful and ingenious improvisations and sold to the American people on that basis. In reality, however, the military, industrial and financial aspects of US intervention in the European war had been carefully worked out far in advance of the date when they were announced to the world.
The work done by Oliphant's staff formed the genesis of Lend-Lease which was designed to service the Allied powers and build up US military might without open entry into the war. Roosevelt had been Assistant Secretary of the Navy during the First World War and was familiar with the problems his predecessor Wilson encountered in acting as a belligerent while technically remaining "neutral." His subordinates devised Lend-Lease as a means of getting around these legal and financial difficulties.
LEND-LEASE OPENS WAY Oliphant's staff pioneered the way into purchasing by Anglo-French air missions which began buying planes here when the war broke out in September 1939. It went to work on problems of standardization of certain plane models to enable producers to swing toward mass production. It took up the problem of ammunition for small arms.
When Great Britain was in desperate need of arms in 1940 and was running short of dollars to pay for American-made weapons, Cox dug up an old 1892 statute which permitted the Secretary of War to lease certain properties for five years. Although that made certain limited types of war materiel available to Britain, this country's neutral status still blocked the way to large-scale aid.
The State Department ruled that the United States could not provide arms to Britain because this country was still neutral and to do so would violate international law. But the same State Department obligingly pointed out that it was perfectly legal for private firms to sell arms to another country. So the supplies of weapons in the government arsenals were turned over to the munitions corporations who shipped them at a handsome profit to England.
This scheme served additional purposes. Since many of the guns on hand were growing aged, the War Department was pleased to have the material replaced with new ammunition and weapons. The supplies of weapons in the warehouses were therefore traded in to private companies such as United States Steel Export and others, which undertook to replace them for the War Department with new weapons.
US SPEEDED INTO THE WAR This arrangement satisfied everyone concerned. Britain obtained much-needed arms; the War Department 'as enabled to modernize obsolete military equipment; the armament corporations received lucrative new contracts. But even this proved insufficient to meet the demands of large-scale warfare. In the fall of 1940 Roosevelt ordered Morgenthau to move full speed ahead in arming the United States to the teeth and eliminate all remaining restrictions upon the shipment of arms and ammunition.
The original Lend-Lease Act was thereupon drafted in twenty minutes and hurried from department to department by messenger within a few hours in one day.
"Then," relates Reynolds, "it was rushed to the White House. President Roosevelt studied it for ten minutes, then leaned back in his chair and slapped his desk. 'Boy – that's it,' Mr. Roosevelt said."
After all preparations had been made to line up Congress, Roosevelt personally took over the task of selling Lend-Lease to the American people on the false pretext that it was insurance against American participation, although he was well aware it meant complete commitment to the war. In December 1940 he called the correspondents to the White House to launch the final drive which led a year later to full-fledged participation in the world conflict.
This account of steps taken by Roosevelt from 1937 to 1940 – a full year before Japan's attack upon Pearl Harbor – serves to demonstrate how his administration proceeded toward war behind a veil of secrecy in brazen defiance of the people's will for peace. When imperialist purposes dictated, the governmental deputies of Wall Street did not hesitate to violate the laws they had been sworn to uphold or to unscrupulously get around them.
ROOSEVELT BETRAYED AMERICAN PEOPLE These officially verified facts brand Roosevelt as a double-dealer and betrayer of the American people. While he ran for a fourth term in 1940, declaring his hatred of war and promising not to send American boys to fight overseas, he not only knew that full-scale American intervention was inescapable. Since 1937 he had stealthily and steadily steered the United States along the road toward war and by 1940 had already heavily committed the nation to participation in the slaughter.
Roosevelt had to lie and deceive in this fashion in order to overcome the opposition of the American people to the imperialist war and to camouflage its real reactionary and predatory aims with phrases about "the Four Freedoms." Washington propelled the country into World War II under relentless pressure from Wall Street which sought to amass colossal profits, crush its imperialist rivals, and gain mastery over the world and its wealth.
It is true that Hitler, Mussolini and the Mikado dragged their helpless countries into war for equally reactionary ends. But the Allied rulers cannot absolve themselves from their rightful share of war-guilt by unloading all responsibility upon the Axis leaders. The butchers of the second imperialist war will not succeed in transforming Hitler and his gang into scapegoats for their own sins. Both sides were equally responsible for unleashing the bloody conflict. Both must answer to the peoples for their crimes. Not least among the war-conspirators must be placed the arch-hypocrite in the White House who preached peace while preparing for war.
An honest conversation
A dialogue between a capitalist banker (CB) and an unemployed youth (UY) by Caleb Maupin.
CB: Thank you! Thank you!
UY: Why are you thanking me?
CB: Because you are unemployed, and that helps me a lot. Unemployment is a great thing.
UY: Why is that?
CB: For lots of reasons! It lowers wages. People who are desperate for work will accept much lower pay. I can even force the people who already work for me to take a pay cut and “stay competitive.” The more people who are unemployed, the less pay people who have jobs will expect. As long as there are some people out there to keep buying, my profits will go up higher and higher.
UY: So you want me to be unemployed?
CB: Yes! If you are unemployed and a youth, you might go back to school. I can then make loads of money on your student debt payments, while all you get in exchange is “better qualified” for a job that isn’t there in the first place.
UY: Wow.
CB: Better yet, you may even become depressed because you can’t find work to support yourself. I can sell you overpriced drugs to treat this “illness” of being unhappy in a state of permanent joblessness.
UY: Really?
CB: Yes. Maybe you’ll be so desperate that you will resort to crime in order to survive. If you get caught, when they lock you up, we’ll make loads of money. Prisons are quite profitable, you know, since the government covers most of the costs. Through our various investments, we bankers have countless contracts with the “correctional facilities” across the country, making thousands of dollars for each person who gets put away.
UY: But I need a job!
CB: Well, with no jobs, maybe you can join the military. You can get sent to places like Libya, Iraq or Afghanistan and help secure control of those places for bankers like me. Whenever some government around the world stops doing what me and my banker friends want, we can send you in to risk your life so we can stay rich and powerful.
UY: But I don’t want to be depressed, or in huge debt, or in jail, or getting shot at in some foreign country. What should I do?
CB:: That’s not my problem. If things ever go bad for me, I’ve got a cast of hired stooges in Congress who will bail me out with your tax money. They’ve given trillions to us already, and there is no sign of it stopping.
UY: But isn’t there a huge deficit? I’ve heard the government is spending too much money.
CB: Exactly! That’s why we are cutting all the social programs. Schools, food stamps, day care centers, post offices … as long as they don’t cut the Pentagon and keep bailing us out, we bankers are set.
UY: But who’s going to bail me out?
CB: Again, not my problem. But whatever you do, stay away from those crazy radicals down at Occupy Wall Street. Especially this new “Occupy 4 Jobs” thing. Me and my buddies in the 1% find it to be kind of scary.
Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.
The Far-Eastern War
From Fourth International, vol.3 No.2, February 1942, pp.35-38.
Transcribed, Edited & Formatted by Ted Crawford & David Walters in 2008 for the ETOL.
The Successes of Japanese Imperialism in the Far East, Products of Desperation – The "Mistakes" of the Imperialist Democracies Which Dared Not Arm the Colonial Peoples – The Nakedly Imperialist Character of the War – What Opposition to the War Means – The Problem of Winning Over the Masses to the Socialist Revolution
It begins to appear very possible that the two most powerful imperialist countries in the world will be compelled, for this stage of the war, to aurrender their dominant position in the western Pacific and Asia to Japanese imperialism. They have certainly received mighty blows; with the Japanese already in control of the Philippines and Malaya, and holding strong footholds in Burma and the Dutch East Indies, the Anglo-American forces may well be ousted for a time before they succeed in mobilizing their tremendous resources of manpower and armameits.
One could develop some striking analogies between the successes of the Japanese and those of the Nazis, despite the far weaker industrial base of Japan. In both cases "hungry" imperialists, commanding resources inferior to those of their opponents, out of very desperation more than made up for their economic inferiority by new military techniques, superior preparation and by striking the first blows. For the "hungry" imperialists, it was a question of life or death and they embarked on conquest with the desperation of cornered rats. Their wealthy opponents, on the other hand, were weakened by the complacency of their long-continued superiority – the commanders of Pearl Harbor and Singapore were as certain of their invincibility as were the generals of the Maginot Line – and by the fundamental contradictions growing out of their very wealth – unemployment, idle capital, the apathy of the masses of France and its European satellites and of the colonies of the "democracies."
The smug decadence of the American officer caste in Hawaii and of the British overlords in the Far East have become matters of public record. Time magazine (January 12) sighs for "the old robust, acquisitive East" of the conquerors of the Nineteenth Century which has become "an effete, tired, hyper-civilized society." It confesses that the causes of the defeats "lay, deep as marrow" in "super-AngloSaxon complacency." The London Sunday Express, flagellating its own class in bitterness at the defeats, complained: "The rich men again could not bear to see their property destroyed (in Malaya). They toasted the land instead of scorching it." The CBS correspondent in Singapore, Cecil Brown, was expelled for cabling Life: "The atrophying malady of dying-without-death, best known as the 'Singapore mentality,' largely helped to bring the Japanese more than 125 miles inside Malaya. For civilians this walking death is characterized by an apathy to all affairs except making tin and rubber, money, having stengahs between 5 and 8 p.m., keeping fit, being known as a 'good chap,' and getting thoroughly 'plawstered' on Saturday night."
This "self-criticism" even extended to the hitherto unmentionable question of arming the natives. The London Daily Express (January 15) bitterly complained: "We could have had a native defense force in Malaya of even better quality than that which General MacArthur raised in the Philippines. But a pack of whisky-swilling planters and military birds of passage have forgotten this side of the Malayan population. They have handed it over to the Japanese, together with the radio station and stores of Penang." And as the chorus grew, lo and behold, even one of the newspapers of overlords in the colonies, the Singapore Free Press, declared that Singapore Asiatic peoples should be given arms to defend themselves against the approaching Japanese, declaring: "No invader relishes the task of subduing a population plentifully supplied with grenades, rifles, pistols and tommy-guns." The hypocrisy of this belated proposal is not lost on the correspondent who cabled it to the New York Post (January 15); he terms it "unthinkable and certainly unmentioned before the invaders passed Kuala Lumpur," and sardonically notes "But shooting scenes in westerns and gangster films are still censored" – the Asiatics might be inspired to emulate them against their British masters.
From Chungking come bitter indictments of British and American strategy in the Far East; the bitterness seems exacerbated by the thought of the Chinese bourgeoisie: And these are the people who treat us as inferiors! A January 13 United Press dispatch quotes a Chinese newspaper which summarizes the two "vital Allied mistakes" as follows: "First, failure to carry out a true scorched-earth policy, and second, failure to accomplish mobilization of native populations, resulting in most effective fifth-column activity."
These so-called mistakes, however, emanate from the very essence of the character of imperialist rule. The imperialists, of course, have never wanted to arm and train mass armies of natives. That would have been dangerous to their continued rule. The colonial masses certainly cannot be convinced that this is a war for democracy. The ignorant and uneducated natives are not learned enough in logic and casuistry to see black as white and white as black. They look at things as they are and they know from very intimate and practical experience that democracy has nothing to do with this war. Neither do the Malayans, the Filipinos, the Burmese, the natives of the Netherlands Indies, appear to be too perturbed about a change of masters – at least not sufficiently to rouse them to a life and death struggle for one master as against another.
The Imperialist Character of the War
The whole situation in the south-western Pacific is characterized by the fact that the native population, although greater in number than the Japanese, has not been mobilized by the British, Dutch and American warlords. But, we repeat, this is not a "mistake," rather it expresses the nature of imperialist rule, the irreconcilable clash of interests between the "democracies" and their colonial slaves.
We must admit that we are left completely undisturbed at the prospect of seeing the American, British and Dutch imperialists kicked out of the preserves they have for so long marked out as their own. Our regret is that it was not the native population that kicked them out, for we are just as much opposed to Japanese imperialism exploiting the natives as we are to exploitation by the "democratic" imperialisms.
Let bourgeois moralists and hypocrites raise their hands in horror at the infamy of Japan striking at Pearl Harbor and Malaya withoilt due notice. For revolutionary Marxists the aggressor in this war as in all imperialist wars is the imperialist clique that controls every capitalist country. The struggle for colonies, for markets, and for spheres of influence is the aggression that is responsible for this war and that is inherent in imperialism. When the representatives of the imperialist. democracies complain about the "unethical conduct" of the fascist dictatorships, it merely prompts us to recall that they did not acquire the colonies by following the precepts of Christ or the Marquis of Queensbury rules.
Too much has been written by everybody about rubber and tin as the true reasons for the conflict, for the myth to persist that democracy, is involved in the war with Japan. The actual causes of the conflict between Hitler and the "democracies" are. unfortunately not so visible to the broad masses in England and the United States, but in the war with Japan sources of raw materials, colonies, fields of investment, stand out so plainly as the real causes that not even the bourgeois apologists, trouble overmuch to deny the realities.
When Roosevelt indicts Japan because its "scheme of conquest goes back half a century" (speech of January 6, 1942) he certainly treads on dangerous ground for, if age determines the degree of the guilt of an imperialist clique, then British imperialism and the United States are no less guilty than Germany and Japan. And it is the age of British imperialism and the tremendous wealth of American imperialism that give Hitler and the spokesmen of Japanese imperialism powerful arguments with which to sway the minds of their followers. Why should the Japanese and the Germans and the Italians be reduced to the category of poor nations without colonies, without raw materials, without markets, shout the leaders, of these respective imperialist nations? What divine law decrees that Great Britain and the United States should control all the wealth of this world? And to the Italian and German and Japanese people the "democracies" have no effective answer to the Nazi arguments. The four freedoms which Roosevelt claims he is fighting for are abstractions which mean at best, to the masses of Germany and Italy and Japan, a continuation of their miserable existence.
To revolutionary Marxists Roosevelt's claim that he is fighting for the four freedoms is as valid as Hitler's claim that he is the champion of Europe and humanity.
This war on the part of all nations, except the Soviet Union and China, is imperialist in character. That knowledge determines for revolutionary Marxists the attitude they should take to the war, whether they are in the United States or Great Britain or Germany or Japan. It is a reactionary imperialist war on the part of all nations involved except the Soviet Union, a degenerated workers' state, and China, a colonial nation fighting for its independence. This is the primary characteristic of the war; all other factors are secondary and accidental and cannot influence our principled position on the war.
What Our Opposition to the War Means
There follows, from this analysis, the necessity on the part of revolutionary Marxists to oppose the war, to oppose the class in control of all the capitalist imperialist states involved in the war. This correct attitude was taken by James P. Cannon, Secretary of the Socialist Workers Party, in a statement that was published in the January issue of Fourth International. We expected nothing less from a Trotskyist, that is, a revolutionary Marxist.
As we were forcibly reminded by the Minneapolis prosecution of the anti-war principles of the Socialist Workers Party, it is necessary to explain just what is meant. "Oppose the war" does not mean an opposition consisting of acts of sabotage. Opposition to the war is a political concept, synonymous with non-support of the war. It is, of course, an active opposition in the sense that revolutionary Marxists are obligated at all times to explain to the working masses the true nature of the war and what they should do to assure peace for themselves and future generations.
Lenin laid down the fundamental revolutionary principles which must govern the position of revolutionary Marxists in a reactionary imperialist war. He used the terms "revolutionary defeatism" and "the transformation of the imperialist war into a civil war." Correctly interpreted (and a correct interpretation requires not a sentence taken at random from some article written by Lenin but a consideration of his position based on all his writings and taking into account the circumstances under which he wrote the articles), they mean that the revolutionary party. must not support its own government in a reactionary war and must continue during the war the education and organization of the working masses for victory against the capitalist exploiters. Revolutionary defeatism does not mean that we prefer the defeat of our own imperialism at the hand of German or Japanese imperialism, but that we favor the continuation of the class struggle for the purpose of defeating the imperialists by the revolutionary forces of the nation. And since it is certain that the minority of exploiters will forcibly resist any attempt by the working masses constituting the vast majority of the people to introduce a socialist order, it is necessary to state that the imperialist war will be transformed into a civil war if and when the majority decide to take their fate into their own hands.
The nature of the activities of a revolutionary Marxist party during an imperialist war depends, of course, on its strength and on the consciousness of the masses. If it is a small party and has no mass following, its activities are necessarily confined to propaganda and agitation centering around both the nature of the war and the immediate tasks confronting the working masses.
Essentially the task of a revolutionary Marxist party is the same in war as in peace, the gaining of the support of a majority of the laboring masses. The subject matter of the propaganda and agitational material is different, a new approach may be necessary, but the essential task remains the same.
Only ignorant and falsifying prosecutors, and ultra-left sectarians who are satisfied with a phrase and do not take the trouble to analyze its real meaning, will interpret "revolutionary defeatism" to mean anything other than that indicated above.
The Latest Alibi for the Imperialists
We need not argue much against those social democrats who insist that this is not an imperialist war, that this war is a war between conflicting ideologies, a war between fascism and democracy. These social democrats are continuing the line followed by their predecessors of the First World War. They are openly defending the interests of their own imperialist bourgeoisie. They must pretend not to hear when Eden, upon his return from a conference with Stalin, says that there would be no quarrel with Nazism if it only remained within the boundaries of its own country; or when both Hitler and Churchill express the truth that this war is a continuation of the last war. But this type of social-democratic support of the war is not our main concern.
As far as the advanced workers are concerned, the danger (because of the subtle plausibility of their argument) comes from those social. democrats who admit that this is an imperialist war, that the ruling classes of the various imperialist countries are fighting for markets, sources of raw material and spheres of influence. But, they add, it is also a war in which the working masses must give political support to the military efforts of the democratic imperialists against the fascist imperialists.
Their argument can be summed up as follows: A victory for Hitler destroys the possibility of a social revolution for generations while a victory for the imperialist democracies will permit the revolutionary party the freedom necessary for the education and organization of the working masses for the achievement of the socialist revolution.
Thus their policy is based not on the essential character. of the war but on speculation as to the victory of which side will be best for the revolutionary movement. This may be very interesting speculation but is completely useless and dangerous when presented as the motivation for a position on the war by a revolutionary party. It may possibly be that a defeat of Hitler will set into motion revolutionary forces in Europe but is it not just as likely that a defeat of the United States will set into motion revolutionary forces in the most powerful capitalist countries? Is it not likely that a defeat of Great Britain will set into motion revolutionary forces throughout the whole colonial world? The revolutionary party worthy of its salt is interested in accomplishing the social revolution in its own country first, knowing that thereby it best serves the interests of the revolutionary movement throughout the world.
Some of those who argue that the advanced workers give political support to the military efforts of the democratic imperialists admit that a victory of the democratic imperialists will also be followed by fascism unless the socialist revolution intervenes, but they contend that there will be a shorter or longer period after the military victory for the revolutionary movement to organize its forces against the fascist danger within the "democracies."
Even granting that this is the case (though it is by no means certain that the victorious "democracies" would give the revolutionary movement a breathing spell), it still remains a fact that to support the imperialist democracies means to betray the historic interests of the working masses for a few years of grace. As against that possible advantage, the disadvantages of supporting the democratic imperialists are far more serious. For he who supports the democratic imperialists has no right to ask the support of their colonial slaves. What confidence can the enslaved colonial peoples have in a party which makes common cause with their oppressors? He who supports the democratic imperialists has no right to ask the support of the German, Italian and Japanese masses.
The revolutionary party has no alternative but to say: "This is not our war; we shall not assume the slightest responsibility for it."
We dismiss with disdain, the dishonest argument that by our attitude we make it easier for the fascist imperialists to defeat the democratic imperialists. The capitalist interests of this country are in control of the war. So long as we are in a minority we cannot help but go to war ourselves. Revolutionary Marxists are opposed to sabotage. The capitalist government officials know that they need not fear sabotage on the part of revolutionary Marxists and any accusation of sabotage against a revolutionary worker can be nothing but a frame-up.
The Problem of Mass Agitation
Having-settled the fundamental question of principle as to what position to take with reference to the war, there still remains the problem of the method of approach to the masses – what issues to raise and how to raise them.
The problem of legality is, of course, not to be disregarded. The criminal code exists and revolutionary socialists do not disregard it when it comes to questions of tactical approach – what to say and how to say it, in order to be within the law. But that is by no means the important factor. Far more important than the legitimate desire to be within bourgeois legality is the necessity of making contact with the masses by proper slogans.
It has frequently been pointed out that the Russian workers were not won over to Bolshevism by going to the masses with the slogans of "revolutionary defeatism" or of "turning the imperialist war into a civil war." Those were propaganda slogans for the creation of party cadres; they were used by Lenin in their sharpest form in order to create a distinct line of demarcation between the social patriots and the revolutionary Marxists, in order to destroy every remnant of social patriotism in the ranks of revolutionary socialists. But they were not and by their very nature could not be mass agitational slogans.
It is not sufficient simply to say that we follow the principles Lenin taught in the First World War. The present war is not a repetition of the war of 1914-1918; it is only a continuation. Outside of the Soviet Union, the important new factor is the one of fascism. While that factor does not change our principled line it does and must affect our whole line of agitation.
Justifiably fearful of fascism, the masses are naturally anxious to defeat Nazism and see in the military might of the democratic imperialist governments a means to achieve that objective. The fear the masses have for fascism is the most powerful weapon the democratic imperialists and their labor lieutenants have for the purpose of chaining the workers to the war machine. Revolutionists are compelled to meet the question of the threat of fascism and meet it in a manner that the masses can understand and accept.
Suicidal indeed, because so contrary to truth, would it be for a party to say: there is no difference between the democracy that exists in the United States and in England and the fascism that exists in Germany. The workers would not accept a proposition which they know is not true. There are similarities but there are great differences and those differences are important.
It is up to us to convince the workers that only through the socialist revolution can the defeat of fascism be accomplished. Our agitational material must show that the democratic imperialists are not opposed to fascism as such; that they helped Hitler consolidate his power in Germany; that this war is not fought to destroy fascism but to protect the imperialist interests of British and American capitalists against the designs of German, Japanese and Italian imperialists; that a military victory of the democratic imperialists leaves the door wide open to the entry of fascism in the victorious countries. Every argument in our agitational material used with reference to the war must center around the question of defeating fascism. If it does not, then it fails to answer the question uppermost in the minds of the thinking workers.
Sectarians satisfied with what they themselves think and completely indifferent to the thoughts of the more mundane working masses, will call this positive approach contrary to everything Lenin taught. They forget one of the most important of Lenin's teachings: flexibility in application of principle to a given situation.
Many voices have been raised to tell the workers what to do in this war. The social democrats and conservative labor leaders exhort them to fight for the democratic imperialist governments because this is a war for democracy. The Stalinist leaders, guided only by the orders of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union are, for the present, even more violent than the social democrats in their support of the democratic imperialists. The semi-socialist, semi-pacifist, semi-isolationist position of Norman Thomas and his Socialist party has now developed into a position which says that Japanese and German imperialism can be destroyed only by the military might of the democratic imperialists and therefore "critical" support should be given the latter – a capitulation to the support of the democratic imperialists. The sectarians are satisfied with telling the workers that there is no difference between fascism and bourgeois democracy and throwing such slogans at them as "revolutionary defeatism" and "turn the imperialist war into a civil war."
The Trotskyists alone, of all the groups and parties, have made clear and necessary distinctions. They have distinguished between the Soviet Union and China on the one hand, and the imperialist nations on the other. Support the war of the Soviet Union and China; oppose the war of all the imperialist governments. They have also distinguished between a principled position on the war and the application of the principled position in mass agitation.
It is at present too early to state when the masses will begin to listen to the voice of revolutionary Marxism. By and large the masses are not moved by propaganda: they are set into motion by unbearable conditions. When this happens, as it surely will, it is Trotskyism that will lead them in the struggle for peace, freedom and plenty.
| | | | | | | | Saturday, December 10, 2011 9:57 AM | | | Jay | | | | | | Labels: News |
Speakout Press Conference For Dec 12 West Coast Port Shutdown
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jz3fE-Vhrw8&feature=youtu.be
Hegemony and revolutionary strategy
9 April 07Chris Bambery
Lenin, Leon Trotsky, the young Soviet Republic and the Communist International saw Russia’s October Revolution as the prelude to a European revolution. Their hope and attention were focused primarily on Germany, but also on Italy. In April 1920 Giacinto Serrati, the dominant figure in the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), told the French revolutionary Alfred Rosmer:
The towns and countryside are with us; the workers follow our calls. The peasants are no less keen: in many rural communes, the mayors have replaced the portraits of the king in the town halls with pictures of Lenin. We have the strength; we have it so absolutely that no one, friend or foe, would think of disputing it. The only problem for us is how to use that strength. 1
The PSI was the only social democratic party in Western Europe to oppose the First World War and played a key role in organising the Zimmerwald Conference, held in September 1915 to rally the European anti‑war left. It was the first mass party to join the Communist International—the international grouping of parties, usually known as the Comintern, which supported the October Revolution. The impact of the October Revolution was so great that every component of the left and the trade unions felt it necessary to identify with it. In the summer of 1920 they all journeyed to Moscow for the second congress of the Comintern.
The Comintern was prepared to accept the PSI’s affiliation only if it expelled its reformist wing. But Serrati, leader of the dominant group in the party, sought to maintain the party’s unity even though it was cracking open as the revolutionary crisis in Italy developed. The other brooding presence in Moscow was the energetic Neapolitan, Amadeo Bordiga. He wanted to create a ‘pure’ Communist Party, free of any hint of compromise. There was one tendency not represented in Moscow—the grouping around the Turin journal L’Ordine Nuovo, edited by Antonio Gramsci. To the astonishment of the Italian delegates, Lenin delivered a speech that berated Serrati for failing to drive out the party’s reformist wing and creating a genuine Communist Party:
We must simply tell the Italian comrades that it is the line of L’Ordine Nuovo members that corresponds to the line of the Communist International, and not that of the present majority of the Socialist Party’s leaders and their parliamentary group.2
So little was known about Gramsci and his comrades that the Comintern’s leaders had to ask Bordiga to explain their position—which he did in an honest way after stating his disagreements with them. Lenin’s praise for L’Ordine Nuovo was based on an article setting out the need for a party capable of addressing the revolutionary crisis engulfing Italy. Gramsci wrote it after the PSI and the CGL union federation refused to act in support of a crucial general strike in Turin. It carried an awesome warning for the future:
The present phase of the class struggle in Italy is the phase that precedes either the conquest of political power on the part of the revolutionary proletariat…or a tremendous reaction on the part of the propertied classes.
It castigated the PSI for its failure to act as a national force, saying it operated simply as a ‘spectator’ and ‘…continued to be merely a parliamentary party, immobilising itself within the narrow limits of bourgeois democracy’. The cure centred on creating a party of a new type:
A cohesive and highly disciplined Communist Party with factory, trade union and cooperative cells, that can coordinate and centralise in its central executive committee the whole of the proletariat’s revolutionary action, is the fundamental and indispensable condition for attempting any experiment with soviets.3
Gramsci was calling on the vanguard of the Italian working class, the workers’ delegates to the factory councils—in Turin in particular—to form the basis for the leadership of a renewed PSI or, if that could not be achieved, a new Communist Party. Gramsci came late to this position—even as the second congress of the Comintern was coming to a close, the Italian working class was entering on its decisive confrontation, the occupation of the factories in September 1920.
The great strength of L’Ordine Nuovo was that it focused on building the factory councils as the basis of a new workers’ state. Despite their differences Serrati and Bordiga were united in opposing the factory councils. For them the party laid the basis for the new order, not factory councils. Throughout September 1920 Bordiga’s paper, Il Soviet, never mentioned the factory occupations in its editorials. In the following month it published an attack on Gramsci and other ‘heterodox’ Communists who had championed the councils.
Gramsci won Turin’s factory councils to the necessity of revolution, but in Milan and elsewhere the leadership of the PSI and the CGL dominated. A revolutionary party organised on a national basis was needed. However, Gramsci only began organising to create such a party after the revolutionary moment had passed.
Prior to that Gramsci identified with Lenin because he recognised a common concern with the centrality of the Soviets or factory councils. Alastair Davidson has argued that at the end of 1920 accounts of Lenin’s theory of the party were not clear or prevalent enough to make Gramsci reconsider his belief that the Russian’s main contribution was a theory of factory councils. But ‘Gramsci’s own activity during that year’ led him to favour ‘a renewal of the PSI’ and then ‘a split from the PSI and the formation of a Communist Party’. It was when the traditional union and PSI leaders in Turin attacked him, and not before, ‘that he was compelled to embark on a critique, first of the unions, and then of the party’.4
Hindsight is no comfort to revolutionaries. The end of the factory occupations was followed by rising unemployment, victimisations and a fascist counter‑offensive. Gramsci was haunted by a sense of failure. Looking back in 1924 he wrote:
In 1919-20, we made extremely serious mistakes which ultimately we are paying for today. For fear of being called upstarts and careerists, we did not form a faction and organise this throughout Italy. We were not ready to give the Turin factory councils an autonomous directive centre, which could have exercised an immense influence throughout the country, for fear of a split in the unions and of being expelled prematurely from the Socialist Party… The problem is…that of relations between the central leadership and the mass of the party, and between the party and the classes of the working population.5
This became a recurrent theme, which echoes strongly throughout Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks.
The botched birth of Italian Communism
Gramsci’s warning of a ‘terrible reaction’ if the revolutionary moment was missed was almost immediately fulfilled. From November 1920 fascism went on the offensive, initially targeting the agricultural labourers’ unions of north east and central Italy. During local elections held a month earlier, Socialists won majorities in 2,162 out of 8,059 communes, and in 25 of 69 provinces. They broke the control exercised by the landowners in central Italy, who, in their rage, switched in ever greater numbers to the fascists. The fascist offensive began in Bologna where they attacked the Socialist council, beginning a series of such attacks on Socialist local authorities. The lack of any coordinated resistance encouraged them. By the close of 1921 the strength of the fascist squads approached 300,000. In the preceding 12 months they had destroyed 59 case del popolo Socialist centres, 119 camere del lavoro union halls, 107 cooperatives, 83 peasant trade unions and 141 social centres. They had left over 100 dead and thousands wounded, forcing councillors out of office and leftists and trade unionists to flee for safety. The attacks were not just on the left, but even on the most moderate Socialists and on rural cooperatives run by Catholics. Any independent organisations which threatened the dominance of the landowning elite were legitimate targets.
Meanwhile, the overall success of the PSI in the local elections meant that they now ran important local authorities, which had control of public works and could enforce a closed shop for the agricultural labour unions. This strengthened the hand of those who wanted to keep the party united, avoiding a break with the reformists; Serrati was confident of securing a majority of votes at the forthcoming party congress, although some of those in his own Maximalist group were prepared to expel the reformists in order to qualify for membership of the Comintern.
A Communist faction was created in October and November 1920, supposedly aimed at uniting all those prepared to act on the Comintern’s strategic advice. But the driving force in the faction was Bordiga’s followers, who were keen to keep out the left wing of the Maximalists. Lenin’s tactical advice, by contrast, was that the forces of the left should unite with the party’s leadership to oust the reformist right wing of the party; after all, the far left and the Maximalists shared a common fidelity to the Comintern and were fervent supporters of the Russian Revolution.
But things took a different turn in January 1921 at the PSI congress in Livorno. The far left walked out to launch a new Communist Party after securing 58,785 votes to Serrati’s 98,028 and the right wing’s 14,695. The voting figures exaggerated the new party’s strength. Three months later Gramsci estimated it had just 25,000 adherents. Bordiga was the architect of this botched birth, while Gramsci paid for his isolation in Turin.6 He did not speak at the congress, was not elected to the Communist Party’s leadership and was subject to abuse from all the factions for his supposed support for Italy’s entry into the First World War (a canard based on a confused youthful article). As Davidson points out, ‘Gramsci helped to create the sort of party he did not want’.7 It was formed too late to act at the decisive revolutionary moment in autumn 1920. It was too small and too sectarian to meet the danger now bearing down like a locomotive on the Italian working class—fascism.
The confusion was assisted by something else. A section of the Comintern leadership, acting independently of Lenin and Trotsky (who were preoccupied with civil war raging in Russia), had adopted ‘the theory of the offensive’—the notion that if the new Communist Parties in Western Europe adopted a continual insurrectionary approach they could spur the working class to make the revolution.8 Two Comintern emissaries to the Livorno congress—the Hungarian Mátyás Rákosi and the Bulgarian Khristo Kabakchiev—backed Bordiga’s approach. In March 1921 the German Communists, influenced by these ideas, launched an insurrection. It was a disaster, leaving 4,000 Communists in jail and halving the party’s membership of 350,000. Lenin and Trotsky led a full‑scale attack on such adventurism, on the ‘theory of offensive’ in general and on the ‘left’ Communists at the third congress of the Comintern later that year.
Meanwhile the failure of the Italian Communists to galvanise a fighting United Front of resistance to fascism was one for which the Italian working class and peasantry would pay a high price—as would Gramsci. The entire left and working class movement was in retreat. In 1920 the PSI had 216,000 members. A year later the combined membership of the PSI and Communist Party was just 100,000.9 The membership of the CGL fell from two million to one million. The retreat quickly became a rout in the face of mounting unemployment. In spring 1921 Fiat suddenly threatened to sack 1,500 of its 13,000 workers. When the internal commissions moved to oppose this, the company demanded they dissolve themselves, declared a lockout and rushed in troops to occupy its plants. The workers held out for three weeks before agreeing to Fiat’s terms. The factory councils were finished. As the lockout ended, a fascist ‘punitive expedition’ burnt down the casa del popolo. It was their first significant action in Turin.
No faction of the Italian left could offer a practical response to the fascist terror. The reformists and the CGL union asked workers to turn the other cheek, and even signed a truce with fascist leader Benito Mussolini (the truce remained a dead letter). The Maximalists intensified their rhetoric about revolution, acting as if it were still on the immediate agenda, while the Communists retreated into splendid isolation. All three groups turned in on themselves, in denial about the victory nearing Mussolini’s grasp. The new Communist Party turned its back on another piece of advice from Lenin that Gramsci later recalled:
He told comrade Serrati: ‘Separate yourselves from Turati [the leading reformist], and then make an alliance with him.’ This formula should have been adapted by us after the split…though continuing the ideological and organisational struggle…we should have sought to make an alliance against reaction.10
Gramsci denies his instinct
Gramsci was isolated even in Turin as the group around L’Ordine Nuovo disintegrated. Gramsci’s closest collaborator, Palmiro Togliatti, now sided with Bordiga. Gramsci slumped into nervous exhaustion and a breakdown. Yet what is striking about Gramsci’s writings in 1921 and 1922 is that his instinct was almost always correct, but ultimately he always fell in behind Bordiga’s line.
This was shown over the question of the arditi del popolo. These were groups made up of socialist, republican, anarchist, revolutionary syndicalist and Catholic activists. They aimed to fight off fascist attacks. They had close connections with the working class—for example, in Rome they received donations from builders, railway workers and post workers. They successfully prevented fascist squads attacking the working class areas of Livorno, Civitavecchia, Sarzana, Arezzo, Ferrara and Parma. On 9 November 1921 fascist bands from Emilia‑Romagna and Tuscany arrived in Rome for a national fascist congress intent on carrying out another punitive expedition. The arditi del popolo organised to counter them. The battle lasted five days and left seven dead and 200 wounded. The fascists were forced to beat a humiliating retreat from their national conference, burning the theatre they had met in.
Gramsci’s L’Ordine Nuovo had printed a supportive interview with Argo Secondari, a key figure in the formation of the new anti‑fascist movement. Three days later the paper ran a piece by Gramsci himself in which he wrote, ‘Are the communists opposed to the arditi del popolo movement? On the contrary: they want the arming of the proletariat, the creation of an armed proletarian force’.11 Gramsci went on to argue:
In each home in which working class families live, groups of proletarian defence should be formed in which able workers of all parties should participate. Each group, linking with the groups of neighbouring homes, should become an element of the neighbourhood unit… The arditi del popolo could effectively coordinate the workers’ squads, organising them in groups at pre-established points in every neighbourhood to intervene, in case of need…12
Three days later the paper published an appeal for the creation of a single anti-fascist defence force. Turin’s Communists were involved with Socialists, anarchists and a range of the city’s working class organisations in creating a united arditi del popolo group. But the Communist Party leadership issued a circular instructing party members they could only belong to a defence force that was under party control and calling for members to quit the arditi del popolo. Later the leadership under Bordiga went further and denounced the arditi del popolo. Gramsci accepted this line. He not only bowed to the line of the leadership, but repeated the claptrap that fascism was just another form of bourgeois reaction, whose time in power would be brief, and that if fascism destroyed parliamentary democracy this would benefit the left because it would destroy illusions in parliamentary change. Yet he understood that fascism represented a mortal danger to the Italian working class. Later, in 1932, Trotsky recalled that Gramsci was the only Italian Communist who saw the possibility of a fascist victory.
In October 1921, as fascist violence intensified, the CGL announced it was forming an alliance of labour (alleanza del lavoro) with the smaller anarchist and syndicalist union federations, as well the rail workers’ and seafarers’ unions, to fight the fascist onslaught. Gramsci’s initial response was to welcome this as a step forward, which the Communists could develop at grassroots level. Once again, however, he accepted the leadership’s rejection of any such alliance. Later Gramsci explained that he wished to avoid a split with Bordiga.13 Of all the Italian leftists, Gramsci was the nearest to Leninism in theory, but he lacked Lenin’s single‑minded determination and his readiness to take a minority position in the party if necessary.
The Comintern and the debate on revolutionary strategy
Gramsci escaped his political purgatory when he was appointed as the Italian Communist Party’s representative to the Comintern executive committee in Moscow. He left for Russia in May 1922. The stress of acting as a loyal party member while privately disagreeing with Bordiga’s leadership had taken its toll. In Russia he suffered a nervous breakdown. But his experiences in Russia enabled him to mature as a revolutionary. Events in Italy also played no small part.
On 28 October 1922 Mussolini arrived in Rome by sleeper train to be taken to the palace and appointed premier. Only then were the fascist squads allowed to march past their leader and the king, before being hurried on their way home. This was the reality of the ‘March on Rome’. In truth the various fractions of the Italian ruling class, the heads of the security forces and the king had decided to accept Mussolini as prime minister in an effort to secure stable government. As with Adolf Hitler 11 years later, Mussolini initially headed a coalition government in which the fascists held a minority of cabinet positions. Like their German counterparts, the Italian ruling class turned to fascism with distaste, believing they could co‑opt and neuter the upstart they had ushered to power.
The Italian working class was far weaker than the German working class—yet it offered far more spontaneous resistance to fascism. It was badly served by its parties. Days before Mussolini’s appointment Bordiga had penned a circular to party branches denying that fascism could triumph. Palmiro Togliatti, who was allied with Bordiga in the party’s leadership at the time, later admitted:
Right up to the eve of the March on Rome, and even while it was taking place, the Communist Party was denying the possibility and the actuality of the coup d’etat. Immediately after the march on Rome the party’s theoretical journal published an article which maintained that the advent of Mussolini to power would not substantially change the country’s political situation.14
The reality of fascism must have hit home to the exiled Gramsci when, three days before Christmas 1922, fascist squads attacked the capital of the Italian workers’ movement—Turin. The offices of L’Ordine Nuovo were sacked and 12 workers were killed. A fascist bomb exploded in the CGL offices, killing 20 workers. Gramsci grasped that fascism was not simply another form of reaction and that its violence would go far beyond normal means of state repression—destroying all forms of working class organisation and any body independent of the state.
Despite his illness Gramsci was able to participate in the fourth congress of the Comintern, held in November 1922, which centred on a continuing debate about the need to win a majority among Western European workers through the policy of the United Front. Powerful Communist Parties now existed in some Western European countries, but in none did they enjoy the allegiance of a majority of the working class. That honour remained with the reformist parties. Only by struggling alongside the reformists in defensive struggles could the revolutionaries break that hold. The term ‘hegemony’ was employed to explain the domination of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat through the latter’s acceptance of the division between economics and politics:
The bourgeoisie always seeks to separate politics from economics, because it understands very well that if it succeeds in keeping the working class within a corporative framework no serious danger can threaten its hegemony.15
There was still opposition from many ‘left’ Communists who believed that the revolutionary offensive should be continued at all times as the way to waken the working class and break it from reformism. Almost simultaneously Trotsky, as head of the Red Army, was countering those who argued that revolutionary military strategy depended on a permanent offensive theory—a war of manoeuvre. Trotsky argued that all wars require a combination of offence and defence—in other words of manoeuvre and position. Gramsci would have been familiar with these arguments among the leaders of the Red Army.
In Italy the fledgling Communist Party was the primary target of fascist violence and repression. By early 1923 its membership had slumped to around 5,000. Adopting the United Front strategy was now a matter of life and death for a party desperately isolated in the face of massive repression.
Rearming the Communist Party
Victor Serge provides a vivid pen portrait of Gramsci when both were living in Vienna working for the Comintern, in late 1923:
An industrious and Bohemian exile, late to bed and late to rise… His head was heavy, his brow high and broad, his lips thin; the whole was carried on a puny, square-shouldered, weak-chested, humpbacked body. There was grace in the movement of his fine, lanky hands. Gramsci fitted awkwardly into the humdrum of day to day existence, losing his way at night in familiar streets, taking the wrong train; indifferent to the comfort of his lodgings and the quality of his meals; but, intellectually, he was absolutely alive. Trained intuitively in the dialectic, quick to uncover falsehood and transfix it with the sting of irony, he viewed the world with exceptional clarity.
Serge explains Gramsci’s desire to return to fascist Italy:
When the crisis in Russia began to worsen, Gramsci did not want to be broken in the process, so he had himself sent back to Italy by his party; he who was identifiable at the first glance because of his deformity and his great forehead.16
Italy’s fascist rulers were unlikely to have forgotten Gramsci. In a speech in December 1921, Mussolini had attacked a certain ‘Sardinian hunchback and professor of economics and philosophy’ who had ‘an unquestionable powerful brain’.17
From Vienna Gramsci began organising to win the leadership of the Italian Communist Party from Bordiga, who had been arrested and jailed. The first step was to win the support of his old comrades from L’Ordine Nuovo—Togliatti and Umberto Terracini. In April 1923 Bordiga smuggled out a document which was fiercely critical of the Comintern leadership, which he asked other party leaders to sign. Gramsci refused, although Togliatti urged him to sign. This sparked a debate among the old L’Ordine Nuovo comrades. Gramsci wrote to Togliatti, arguing in favour of adopting a United Front approach:
Three years experience has taught us, not just in Italy, how deeply‑rooted social democratic traditions are, and how difficult it is to destroy the residues of the past simply through ideological polemics. An immense and at the same time painstaking political action is necessary, that can break down this tradition day by day, by breaking down the organism which embodies it. The tactics of the International are adequate for this purpose.18
In another letter Gramsci argued that Bordiga mirrored the reformist Second International in preventing individual initiative and leaving party members passively waiting on the party’s leadership, encouraging the idea that the party’s strength and very existence itself would determine the possibility of revolution: ‘The party has not been seen as the result of a dialectical process, in which the spontaneous movement of the revolutionary masses and the organising and directing will of the centre converge’.19 He continued:
In central and western Europe the development of capitalism has not only determined the formation of the broad proletarian strata, but also—and as a consequence—has created the higher stratum, the labour aristocracy, with its appendages in the trade union bureaucracy and the social democratic groups… This makes the action of the masses slower and more prudent, and therefore requires of the revolutionary party a strategy and tactics altogether more complex and long‑term than those which were necessary for the Bolsheviks in the period between March and November 1917.20
By March 1924 Togliatti and Terracini had swung behind Gramsci and the Comintern intervened to impose a new executive committee of the Italian party, including Gramsci. Bordiga and his key supporter resigned from the executive. Gramsci pushed through the creation of a cell structure, with factory groups, which better suited the new political situation (and held out the future possibility of initiating factory councils) and, in February 1924, the launch of a daily newspaper, L’Unità. Gramsci suggested the title and insisted it should involve the supporters of the Comintern expelled from the PSI. He himself edited a new fortnightly L’Ordine Nuovo.21 He stressed a degree of continuity:
The specific aims of the review, in my opinion, should still be the factory and the organisations of the factory… We should seek to reconstruct among ourselves an environment like that of 1919-20 with the means we have at our disposal. Then, no initiative was taken if it had not been tested against the reality, if first we had not probed the opinion of the workers about it in various ways.22
In May 1924 Gramsci finally returned home to Italy after his election to the chamber of deputies gave him parliamentary immunity from arrest.
The search for the United Front
The reorientation of the party came just as Mussolini’s regime was thrust into a crisis that threatened its continued rule. On 10 June 1924 the Socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti was kidnapped on the streets of central Rome after a speech in parliament denouncing electoral fraud and then found murdered. The kidnappers were identified as a fascist squad operating under Mussolini’s control. The reaction to the assassination took Mussolini by surprise: ‘Spontaneous demonstrations in favour of the opposition broke out in the streets, which was something that had not been seen for a long time’.23 Mussolini’s attempted to crush the protests by calling out the fascist militia. But, as Gramsci wrote, ‘The first attempt to mobilise the national minority failed utterly, with only 20 percent answering the call; in Rome only 800 militiamen presented themselves at the barracks’.24 This failure meant that between 14 June and 16 June the anti‑Fascists had a chance to control the streets.
The liberals, republicans and Socialists quit parliament in protest, collecting together in an alternative assembly on Rome’s Aventine Hill. Gramsci and the other Communist deputies joined them, arguing that they should call a general strike and hold demonstrations. An anti‑fascist living in Rome recalled the atmosphere—and the paralysis which infected the opposition:
We went almost every night to a restaurant…with the leaders of the Socialist Party… For a week or ten days there was no sign of the fascists on the streets of Rome. It was known that the people of Trastevere, all republicans, were ready to march with their clubs and revolvers. They only awaited the orders of the Aventine opposition… But no one wanted to give the order.26
The Aventine leaders hoped they could appeal to the king to dismiss Mussolini. But as Mussolini played for time, the fascist squads rallied to him and the king reaffirmed his support for the regime. By the end of 1924 Mussolini was able to unleash the fascist squads again, this time targeting liberal and bourgeois opponents of fascism as well as the left, and establishing a far tougher dictatorship. Looking back Gramsci argued:
If the Mussolini government had fallen, whatever the means which had caused it to fall, an extremely deep political crisis would have opened up in Italy, whose development no one could have foreseen or halted. But the opposition forces too knew this, and they therefore excluded right from the beginning ‘one’ way of bringing fascism down, the only possible way, the mobilisation and struggle of the masses.27
Eventually Gramsci led the Communist deputies back into the chamber, seeking to use it as a platform for their views.
The efforts to create an effective anti-fascist United Front brought into the open the battle with Bordiga inside the party. Gramsci debated with Bordiga in Naples. Here Gramsci argued the necessity for ‘every member of the party’ to be ‘an active political element, a leader’. That required them, ‘each in his own milieu’, being ‘made capable of orienting themselves, of knowing how to derive from reality the elements needed to establish a policy’ so that ‘the working class will not lose courage but feel it has leaders and is still able to fight… Precisely because the party is strongly centralised, a vast amount of propaganda and agitation among its ranks is required. It is necessary for the party in an organised fashion to educate its members and raise their ideological level’.28
The party now experienced substantial growth, with 27,000 members by the end of 1925. The fascist secret police reported that the Communists had survived repression better than any of the other left parties—not only ‘maintaining ties with the masses but…semi-clandestine, it had also partly salvaged the essential structure of its organisation’.29 This was in part due to Gramsci’s insistence on a cell structure, rather than Bordiga’s preferred geographical branches. The factory groups in particular found it easier to hold together.
Gramsci now worked on theses for the party congress due to be held early in 1926 in the safety of Lyon, France. The ‘Lyon theses’ argued that the party had not capitalised on the factory occupations or intervened to attempt to stop fascism’s victory in October 1922:
The defeat of the revolutionary proletariat in this decisive period was due to political, organisational, tactical and strategic deficiencies of the workers’ party…the proletariat did not succeed in placing itself at the head of the insurrection of the great majority of the population, and channelling it towards the creation of a workers’ state… The victory of fascism in 1922 must be seen, therefore, not as a victory won over the revolution, but as a consequence of the defeat suffered by the revolutionary forces through their own intrinsic weakness.30
Gramsci offered his vision of a revolutionary party:
The principle that the party leads the working class must not be interpreted in a mechanical manner… The capacity to lead the class is related, not to the fact that the party ‘proclaims’ itself its revolutionary organ, but to the fact that it ‘really’ succeeds, as a part of the working class, in linking itself with all the sections of that class and impressing upon the masses a movement in the desired direction and favoured by objective conditions. Only as a result of its activity among the masses will the party get the latter to recognise it as ‘their’ party (winning a majority); and only when this condition has been realised, can it…draw the working class behind it.31
Leadership required the party taking up immediate or partial struggles:
The Communist Party links every immediate demand to a revolutionary objective; makes use of every partial struggle to teach the masses the need for general action and for insurrection against the reactionary rule of capital… In every case, the party utilises the experience of the movement in question, and of the outcome of its own proposals, to increase its influence—demonstrating through facts that its action programme is the only one which corresponds to the interests of the masses and to the objective situation—and to transport a backward section of the working class on to a more advanced position.32
The stress on the United Front does not stop Gramsci from continuing to define the ultimate tasks of the Communist Party as:
(a) to organise and unify the industrial and rural proletariat for the revolution; (b) to organise and mobilise around the proletariat all the forces necessary for the victory of the revolution and the foundation of the workers’ state; (c) to place before the proletariat and its allies the problem of insurrection against the bourgeois state and of the struggle for proletarian dictatorship, and to guide them politically and materially towards their solution, through a series of partial struggles.33
The vote at the Lyon congress reflected Gramsci’s rearming and rebuilding of the party—he secured 90.08 percent of the vote.
The road to Calvary
Gramsci had little time left in freedom after the success of the Lyon Congress. In autumn 1926 Mussolini stripped deputies of their parliamentary immunity and Gramsci was arrested on 8 November after being forced by the fascist police to abort a meeting with a Comintern representative. His Calvary at the hands of Mussolini lasted from then until his death. The abortive meeting was to have been with Jules Humbert‑Droz. He had been charged with persuading Gramsci to support Joseph Stalin and his ally at the time, Nicolai Bukharin, in their campaign against the Joint Opposition within the Russian party led by Trotsky, Gregory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev. Gramsci was not a supporter of the Joint Opposition. But in October 1926 he had written to the leadership of the Soviet party stating that this factional campaign was doing great damage at home and abroad and should be halted. Togliatti, representing the Italian party in Moscow, refused to pass on the letter, though he did read it out to Bukharin. Gramsci responded angrily to Togliatti.34 The stage was set for a more serious break with Moscow and with Togliatti. In 1929 Stalin declared that the world had entered a new ‘third period’ in which insurrection was on the cards virtually everywhere and in which the social democrats would help the bourgeoisie turn towards fascism. According to Stalin, the social democrats’ ‘social fascist’ character ruled out any United Front with them. Togliatti, under pressure from a pro-Stalin young guard in the party, agreed that Italy too was on the verge of a revolutionary crisis. Activists were dispatched across the alps to stimulate mass work—in reality returning to arrest and Mussolini’s jails.
Gramsci refused to endorse such lunacy. He had fought hard for the United Front policy against fascism, the strategy now being denounced by Stalin and Togliatti. He challenged the idea that the mass of Italian workers was breaking with reformism, and that the country was approaching a revolutionary situation that would sweep fascism away and install the dictatorship of the proletariat. Instead he pressed for united action with the Socialists and other anti-fascists, and for the raising of a demand for a constituent assembly. He believed that if fascism fell, as a result of the global recession that followed the 1929 Wall Street Crash, for instance, the strongest likelihood was this would be followed by a period of parliamentary rule. In his prison writings he outlined his hopes that this might allow for the reconstruction of the factory councils and that they could prepare the way for a future insurrection. Interestingly, at almost precisely the same time, in May 1930, Trotsky was engaged in a correspondence with some of Bordiga’s sympathisers in the International Left Opposition over their attempt to combine the demand for a constituent assembly with a demand for workers’ and peasants’ committees. Trotsky argued that if fascism fell it might well be superseded by a period of democratic rule, rather than socialist revolution, and argued that revolutionaries could raise democratic demands and ‘invest them with the most audacious and resolute character possible’.35 Gramsci’s argument led to attacks from fellow Communist prisoners, who refused to talk to him, while Togliatti refused to let the wider world know of his criticisms of the new policy.
Gramsci had entered prison a staunch revolutionary. His final speech to the Italian parliament, where the small Communist group of deputies faced Mussolini and the massed fascist ranks with blackshirts guarding every exit, was brave and uncompromising:
We are sure that we represent…the essential interests of the majority of the Italian people. Proletarian violence is therefore progressive and cannot be systematic. Your violence is systematic and systematically arbitrary because you represent a minority destined to disappear.36
But Gramsci’s work as a mature revolutionary has been passed over or bowdlerised by those keen to utilise his name. This process started with the publication of his prison writings just after the Second World War, when Togliatti portrayed Gramsci’s strategy as a precursor for the Italian Communist Party’s decision to rebuild a capitalist Italian republic in alliance with Christian Democracy. The attempt to paint Gramsci as a figure who rejected insurrection and presented an alternative to Leninism continued into the 1970s and 1980s with the Eurocommunists and into the 21st century with today’s neo‑Gramscians.
Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks can only be fully understood as a continuation of his political fight to rebuild and rearm the Italian Communist Party.37 Above all they are a sustained defence of the political strategy he championed during those years and drew heavily on the debates in the Comintern at its third and fourth congresses. Martin Clark points out that ‘Gramsci in prison thought constantly about the “revolution that failed” in 1919-20’ and that the ‘analysis of why revolutions fail is a major theme of the Prison Notebooks,’ providing ‘the stimulus’ for his views on hegemony, political organisations and parties, and intellectuals’.38
One of the key sections of the Prison Notebooks contrasts revolution in Russia and the East with revolution in the parliamentary democracies of the West. It is not to belittle the importance of the Prison Notebooks to point out that this was hardly controversial within the Comintern. Lenin recognised that ‘in Western Europe it will be much more difficult to begin the proletarian revolution than in Russia. But it will be much easier to continue and complete it.’ Bordiga had argued at the Comintern’s second congress for a policy of abstention from parliament and parliamentary elections because conditions for making a revolution were different in the West, where ‘bourgeois democracy has functioned for many years and…the revolutionary crisis will consist simply of a direct transition from that political system to the dictatorship of the proletariat…’ This ‘requires first breaking out of the limits of bourgeois democracy and demonstrating the deceitfulness of the bourgeoisie’s claim that every political struggle should take place within the parliamentary machinery’.39 Accordingly, claimed Bordiga, the experience of the Bolsheviks in the Duma (the assembly established under the Tsar) had no application in the West. Lenin countered:
We are obliged to carry on a struggle within parliament for the destruction of parliament… Can one conceive of any other institution that all classes participate in to the degree they do in parliament? This cannot be created artificially. If all classes are drawn into the parliamentary struggle, it is because class interests and conflicts are reflected in parliament. If it were possible everywhere and immediately to bring about, let us say, a decisive general strike to overthrow capitalism at a single stroke, the revolution would have taken place in a number of countries. But we must reckon with the facts, and parliament is a scene of the class struggle.40
Perry Anderson’s 1976 article, ‘The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci’, written at a time when Anderson broadly identified with Lenin and Trotsky, showed that it is impossible to understand Gramsci’s prison writings outside the context of the debates in the early Comintern:
The theory and practice of the Third International…had been saturated with emphasis on the historical necessity of violence in the destruction and construction of states. The dictatorship of the proletariat, after the armed overthrow of the bourgeois state apparatus, was the touchstone…Gramsci never questioned these principles. On the contrary, when he started his theoretical explanations in prison, he seems to have taken them so much for granted that they scarcely ever figure.41
But the fact that Gramsci took them for granted is no excuse for neo‑Gramscians pretending that he rejected them. The strategic stress on the United Front and the issue of the relationship between party and class were the dominant concerns of Gramsci in his years as an active member of the Communist Party. They remained so in his prison years and they resonate throughout the Prison Notebooks.
Notes:
1: Alfred Rosmer, Lenin’s Moscow (London, 1971), p21.
2: Lenin, Collected works (Moscow, 1982), volume 31, p251. Available online.
3: Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Political Writings 1910-1920 (London, 1977), pp190‑195.
4: Alastair Davidson, Gramsci and Lenin 1917-1922, in Socialist Register 1974, p125.
5: Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Political Writings 1921-1926 (London, 1978), p268. Most of these writings are available online.
6: Gwyn Williams, Proletarian Order (London, 1975), p281.
7: Alastair Davidson, as above, p138.
8: Khristo Kabakchiev made two speeches, the first a violent attack on Serrati designed to win few friends and a concluding speech which announced that all those not voting with Bordiga and his allies would be excluded from the new international. Rakosi would become general secretary of the Hungarian Communist Party from 1945 and also prime minister from 1952 until the 1956 revolution. He described himself as ‘Stalin’s best pupil’. Trotsky described the Bulgarian as ‘a lifeless doctrinaire’.
9: John Cammett, Antonio Gramsci and the Origins of Italian Communism (Stanford, 1967), p153.
10: Antonio Gramsci, Selections from political writings 1921-1926, as above, p381.
11: As above, p56. Available online.
12: As above, pp151-154.
13: Quoted in Alberto Pozzolini, Antonio Gramsci: an Introduction to his Thought (London, 1970), p43.
14: Palmiro Togliatti, ‘The Hegemony of the Working Class in the Anti-Fascist Struggle’, in David Beetham (ed), Marxists in the Face of Fascism (Manchester, 1983), p133.
15: Quoted by Perry Anderson in ‘The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci’, in New Left Review 100, November‑December 1976, p18.
16: Victor Serge, Memoirs of a revolutionary (Oxford, 1975), p186.
17: John Cammett, as above, p138.
18: Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Political Writings 1921-1926, as above, p139.
19: As above, p198.
20: As above, p199.
21: John Cammett, as above, p166.
22: Alberto Pozzolini, as above, p42.
23: Andrew Lyttelton, The Seizure of Power: Fascism in Italy 1919-1929 (London, 1983), p241.
24: Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Political Writings 1921-1926, as above, p259. Available online.
25: Andrew Lyttelton, as above, p248.
26: Stanislao Pugliese, Carlo Rosselli: Socialist Heretic and Anti‑Fascist Exile (Cambridge, MA, 1999), p41.
27: Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Political Writings 1921-1926, as above, p434.
28: As above, p290. Available online.
29: John Cammett, as above, p169
30: Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Political Writings 1921-1926, as above, p349. Available online.
31: As above, p367.
32: As above, p370.
33: As above, p357.
34: As above, p432.
35: Leon Trotsky, letter, ‘Problems of the Italian Revolution’, 14 May 1930.
36: Quoted in Alberto Pozzolini, as above, p75.
37: The party was known as the Partito Comunista d’Italia (PCd’I), or Communist Party of Italy, until 1944 when it was renamed the Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI), or Italian Communist Party.
38: Martin Clark, Antonio Gramsci and the Revolution that Failed (London, 1978), p225.
39: In John Riddell (ed), The Communist International in Lenin’s Time: Proceedings and Documents of the Second Congress, 1920 , volume 2 (New York, 1992) pp434-438.
40: As above, p459.
41: Perry Anderson, as above, p46.
| | | | | | | | Wednesday, December 7, 2011 12:35 PM | | | Jay | | | | | | Labels: News |
There is no reformist way out of the crisis of capitalism
The present economic crisis has been described in various ways by mainstream commentators. All manner of "solutions" have been posed, both by the bourgeois politicians and economists, and by the reformist leaderships of the working class. What these commentators and representatives cannot admit is that this crisis will not be solved by this or that reform. Society is living through a crisis of capitalism and the choice facing mankind is simple: socialism or barbarism.
At the onset of the "credit crunch" in 2007-08, we were told by various commentators that this was simply a financial crisis – a crisis of credit. With the bailing out of the banks and the conversion of private debt into public debt, a series of sovereign defaults and bailouts began, first with the default by Iceland, and then with the bailout of Greece, Portugal, and Ireland. As a result we are now told that the crisis is a sovereign debt crisis and a crisis of the euro. The situation is described by some bourgeois commentators – with the aim of hiding the real nature of the crisis – as being nothing more than a "crisis of confidence".
In turn, other bourgeois commentators now complain that the crisis is one of political leadership. As a result, unreliable and weak representatives of the ruling class such as Berlusconi in Italy and Papandreou in Greece have been cast aside and replaced with "technocratic" governments. Meanwhile, governments that embrace programmes of austerity, such as the coalition government in the UK, are held up as models by the bourgeoisie for the rest of the world, and are rewarded with a triple-A credit rating as a result.
Accompanying these various descriptions of the crisis – as a financial crisis, a crisis of credit, a sovereign debt crisis, a crisis of the euro, a crisis of confidence, and a political crisis – we see these same commentators put forward an array of so-called "solutions". In response to the financial crisis, we are told that we simply need more regulation of the financial industry; to combat the crisis of credit we must restore liquidity. To tackle the sovereign debt crises, the reformist leaders suggest that we "tax the rich", introduce a "Tobin" or "Robin Hood" tax, and "stimulate growth". Meanwhile, to solve the crisis of the euro, we are told either that insolvent countries must leave the euro or that there must be a fiscal union to accompany the eurozone monetary union. Finally, the bourgeois representatives suggest that "confidence" must be restored by cold, impassionate, ruthless governments through "reforms" (i.e. austerity). Where democratically elected governments are unable to do this adequately and reliably for the demands of the markets, then these governments are simply replaced by unelected technocrats in "the national interest" (i.e. the interest of the money lenders).
What all of these explanations and descriptions fail to admit, however, is that these various crises – the financial crisis, the sovereign debt crisis, the euro crisis, and the political crisis – are not the underlying problem, but are, in the final analysis, reflections of the real crisis facing society – the crisis of capitalism. In turn, these respective "solutions" to the various crises that are put forward will solve nothing. These commentators and representatives are all attempting to find a solution under capitalism, but no amount of tinkering with the system will overcome what is fundamentally a crisis of capitalism.
Financial regulation
After the onset of the crisis in 2007-08, all eyes turned towards the bankers and the rest of the financial sector across the world. The crisis was blamed on the greed of the bankers and the laissez-faire attitude of the financial industry. "If only our economies didn't rely on the financial sector so much!"; "If only we had smaller, more regulated banks!" These were the cries that were heard in the wake of the sub-prime mortgage scandal, the collapse of Lehman Brothers, and the subsequent credit crunch.
It may well be true that bankers are all inherently greedy people (some go so far as to call them all psychopaths) and it is a fact that the financial sector holds an enormous sway over the economies of many countries. One must ask, however: who allowed these bankers to take such outrageous risks with the money of ordinary people? Who allowed the financial sector to grow to such large proportions and dominate the economy without any oversight or regulation?
Firstly, it should be highlighted that the dominant role of finance capital in the economy is not new. In Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, written in 1915, Lenin described the growing role of finance in the global economy, whilst Marx wrote about the importance of credit in Capital.
In Britain, the expansion of the financial sector qualitatively changed in the 1980s with the "Big Bang" under the Thatcher government, when, in October 1986, the rules and regulations relating to the London Stock Exchange and banking were relaxed. A similar process developed in the USA under President Reagan. This expansion of the financial sector continued – and was actively encouraged – under New Labour in Britain and Clinton and Bush in the USA, right up until the crash of 2007-08.
The growth of the financial industry from the 1980s onwards was not a random event or chance occurrence. Nor was it simply the result of "neo-liberal ideology", as is often suggested. The ideology of those in power is a reflection of the material interests of the ruling class, which in a time of crisis cannot tolerate niceties for the masses such as welfare and public services. In such times, the reformist leaders – who have been nice and obedient to capital by keeping the labour movement in check – are cast aside, and a more openly confrontational government is demanded by the bourgeoisie.
The growing role of finance from the 1980s onwards can be seen in two interlinked tendencies: on the one hand, the massive expansion of credit; on the other hand, the increasing amounts of capital invested, not into real production, but into speculative activity such as derivatives and other newly invented financial products.
Both of these tendencies were an attempt to overcome the economic crisis of the 1970s. As the trade unions were weakened and wages were pushed down in order to maintain and increase profits, credit was used to artificially expand the market (i.e. effective demand), by lending families and young people money through mortgages, loans, and credit cards. In the UK, for example, wages (as a percentage of GDP) have decreased from 65% in 1973 to 53% today. Meanwhile, average household debt in Britain has increased from a value of 45% of GDP in 1980 to 157% of GDP in 2005.
This cheap access to money was needed to overcome a crisis of overproduction, which arises from the fact that, under capitalism, more value is produced by workers that is paid back in the form of wages. As the Marxists have explained before (Britain: Fighting the Cuts), credit is therefore needed to make up the difference and overcome this fundamental contradiction of capitalism, which arises from the private ownership of the means of production.
The increasing amount of speculative activity, meanwhile, was an attempt to make money out of money, instead of investing in real production, which would only have served to increase productivity and thus increase the amount of excess capacity in the system and exacerbate the crisis of overproduction.
The enormous expansion of credit was actively encouraged by politicians and their economic advisors across the world, not only through financial deregulation, but also by encouraging people to borrow greater and greater amounts of money. In Britain and the USA, for example, families were encouraged to buy homes (through sub-prime mortgages and the cheap selling off of council homes) – the value of which families could then borrow against – whilst student grants were replaced by student loans and increasing amounts of student debt (which now stands at around $1 trillion in the USA – more than credit card debt! [Student loans: The indebted ones].
These attempts to overcome the crisis of the 1970s have, of course, only exacerbated and delayed the crisis, increasing the magnitude of the underlying contradictions, and leading to an even more severe crisis now.
When one blames the current crisis on greedy, risk-taking bankers and the overreliance on finance, one must, therefore, first ask: why has this situation come about and who has allowed for this to happen? To complain that bankers are greedy says nothing new. All capitalists are greedy, because the system that drives them – capitalism – is a system based on an unquenchable thirst for profits; the greed of the bankers and financiers is only a more obvious, open, and naked form of this desire for profits at the expense of all else.
Given that politicians and governments were implicit in this whole process, it quickly becomes clear that we cannot simply appeal to these same governments to handcuff the bankers on our behalf. This highlights that the problem is not just a question of economics, but a political question also of who runs the economy and of how the wealth in society is controlled and distributed.
Since the beginning of the crisis, the call from many has been for more regulation of the financial industry, for the separation of commercial and investment banking, and for a breakup of the big banks. All of these demands have been put forward with the intention of protecting ordinary savers from the gambling of financiers, and to prevent a repeat of the need for the state (and hence taxpayers) to save the banks.
Evidence suggests, however, that such regulatory measures would make little (if any) difference. Take, for example, the separation of commercial and investment banking. Firstly, one can see examples of purely commercial banks, such as Northern Rock in the UK, which still needed to be bailed out (in fact Northern Rock was the first of the banks to be recently bailed out in Britain).
Secondly, it should be noted that the separation of commercial and investment banking is not a new idea, but was in fact implemented in the USA with the Glass-Steagall act in 1933 in an attempt to curb speculative activity (déjà-vu?). Importantly, this act was removed by the Clinton administration in 1999 as part of the general deregulation of the financial industry.
This example shows the limits and redundancy of trying to regulate the financial sector (or indeed any part of the capitalist system). Any regulations that are put in place to "save" the economy are only ever rules on paper under capitalism, which can simply be removed, re-written, or torn apart at the whim of the ruling class. The only way that such rules and regulations can be guaranteed is if they are enacted by a workers' government under the control of the labour movement. And if society was able to go that far, why not carry on going and expropriate the capitalists altogether by nationalising the banks and the other commanding heights of the economy?
The same can be said in relation to all rights and reforms that are won by the working class. Of course Marxists support any genuine reform, right, or regulation that benefits ordinary people – indeed revolutionaries are often leading figures in movements that fight for such demands – but we must also point out the temporary nature of such reforms, which, under capitalism, will simply be taken away when the economy goes into crisis and capitalists seek to restore their profits. The recent removal of democratically elected governments in Italy and Greece under pressure from the market is another prime example of this.
There are also those who seek to regulate the banks by breaking them up into smaller entities, the idea being that a series of smaller banks will be less likely to cause a global financial crisis if one of them goes bankrupt. The people who make such suggestions are like the Utopian Socialists that Marx and Engels describe in the Communist Manifesto:
"This form of Socialism aspires either to restoring the old means of production and of exchange, and with them the old property relations, and the old society, or to cramping the modern means of production and of exchange within the framework of the old property relations that have been, and were bound to be, exploded by those means. In either case, it is both reactionary and Utopian."
These Utopians desire, in effect, to roll back the wheel of history and go back to a time of small producers. But the concentration of capital is an historical fact, as observed long ago by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto. It is now also a recognised scientific fact, as documented in an academic paper highlighted by the New Scientist, which reports that approximately 40% of the wealth in the world economic network is controlled by 147 companies –the vast majority of which are banks and financial institutions.
It is clear that the financial industry has an enormous amount of power and that huge banks dominate and control the global economy. The solution, however, is not to break up these giant entities into smaller pieces or to try and regulate these monolithic financial institutions. Instead, the solution is to seize these companies – which are privately owned and which operate as part of an anarchic worldwide economic system – and to put them under democratic workers' control within a rationally planned economy.
The fact is that the crisis of capitalism cannot be overcome through rules and regulations, but can only be solved by the transformation of society – by the living forces of workers and youth taking economic and political power from the capitalist class and welding this power in the interests of society as a whole.
Taxing the rich
Alongside the call for greater financial regulation, the other most common demand from the reformist camp is to "tax the rich". It is unsurprising that this demand has found an echo amongst such a wide layer of society, especially when the growing disparity of wealth is so flagrantly flaunted by the rich. In Britain, the richest 1000 people increased their wealth by 30% in the last year to an astonishing total of £336 billion, despite the crisis. Meanwhile, the executives of Britain's 100 biggest companies enjoyed an average pay rise of 49% over the past year.
Figures for the tremendous amounts of tax that is avoided and evaded by the rich are commonly cited; for example, the tax collectors' union in the UK, PCS, estimates that over £120bn is avoided, evaded, and uncollected every year. With a budget deficit of around £150bn in the UK, it would seem that cuts and austerity aren't quite so necessary after all.
What's more, certain members of this wealthy elite – realising that there is a limit to how much you can get workers to pay when so much wealth is concentrated in the hands of so few – are even demanding that they be taxed more, with figures such as Warren Buffett, the famous American investor, and Luca di Montezemolo, the chairman of Ferrari in Italy, amongst those who have recently asked their respective political leaders to increase the rate of taxation on the rich.
But, like the issue of financial regulation described above, two questions must be asked: how have the rich been allowed to avoid and evade paying their taxes up until now? And who will tax the rich and make them pay their fair share?
Again, governments have been all too eager to lower (personal and corporate) tax rates for the wealthiest over the past 30 years in a race to the bottom in order to entice the rich to live (and invest) in their country instead of another. For example, in 1974, the UK Labour government introduced an 83% tax rate on the highest earners. By 1988, the Thatcher government had reduced this to 40%, whilst the current 50% rate on top earners (introduced by the previous Labour government) is considered temporary by the current Tory-Liberal coalition government. Meanwhile, over the same period, the main rate of corporation tax in the UK was reduced from 52% to 30%.
Indeed, the vast majority of the capitalist class is not quite as keen as Mr Buffett on being taxed more, since such a tax increase would bite into profits. In general, even the slightest whisper by governments regarding the possibility of raising tax rates for the rich is met with cries of indignation by the capitalists and their mouthpieces in the media, who complain that such taxes will discourage investment and thus stifle economic growth. In effect, these people are holding a gun to the heads of governments, threatening them with a strike of capital.
Meanwhile, the bourgeois politicians and media raise a hue and a cry about anyone who mentions the possibilities of taxing the rich. In the USA, President Obama has been called a "socialist" by the Republicans and the right-wing media, who accuse of him of trying to start a "class war". But as Warren Buffett commented: "there is class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning."
In the USA, the question of taxes on the rich has also become a pivotal issue for the Republican presidential nomination campaign, with candidates stumbling over each other to promise lower and lower tax rates with accompanying catchy titles, as The Economist reports:
Mr Santorum, for example, wants manufacturing firms to pay no corporate tax at all (one of his three zeroes). Ron Paul, a libertarian candidate, wants to do away with federal income tax altogether. Mr Cain denounces the current tax code as "the twenty-first-century version of slavery". There is a consensus among all the candidates that the federal corporate tax rate of 35%, the highest in the rich world, must be slashed. Most candidates would like to put an end to taxes on capital gains and dividends as well."
The Democrats have acted no better, with Obama allowing himself to be held to ransom by the Republicans in negotiations over how to reduce the deficit; the Republicans refuse to budge on their demand for no tax increases, and the Democrats capitulate.
Of course certain concessions can be squeezed from the capitalist class, but only if the fire of revolution is held to their backsides as a warning of what they could potentially lose. But, similarly to the question of regulation and reform, any attempt to tax the rich and make them pay more can only be made permanent if it has the full force of the labour movement behind it, as we have explained elsewhere. And again, if a mass movement of workers and youth is able to achieve such a permanent reform, why not go the whole way and seize the wealth of the rich by nationalising the banks and the other major monopolies?
The reformist leaders sweat and writhe at such a suggestion, creating hysteria and warning that the capitalists must not be provoked, but must be sweet-talked into parting with their money. Such people imagine that you can tame a tiger by slowly removing its claws one-by-one. In any case, if ever there was a case of provocation, it is the massive austerity programmes being demanded by the bourgeoisie, which have unsurprisingly elicited tremendous responses from workers and youth. Even more audacious is the sight of these same members of the bourgeoisie sipping on champagne as the masses protest beneath them (see this video from around 53 seconds in). This is the real provocation!
In addition, it is one thing to talk about getting taxes from the rich in a time of boom when there is more to go around for everyone; it is another thing to try and tax the rich in a time of crisis. Of course, such issues are of little concern to the reformist leaders, who scorn the Marxists for their "idealism", whilst assuring the masses of their "pragmatism". But it is the reformists who are the real idealists, with their utopian suggestions to "tax the rich", and it is this same "pragmatism" that leads the reformists to carry out cuts on behalf of the capitalists once they are in power. This is the nature of reformism in a time of crisis; it turns into its opposite, leaving reformists with nothing but counter-reforms to offer.
This idealism of the reformist leaders is also clearly put on display by their "alternative" to cuts in the form of "stimulating growth". But, as we have explained elsewhere (Marx vs. Keynes), the idea that the economy can be jolted into activity at the click of a button or that capitalists can be encouraged to invest at the whim of governments is utopianism in the extreme. Rather than governments taking such a long-winded, roundabout route to funding public spending – i.e. encouraging capitalists to invest and then pleading with them to hand over some of their profits – why not just expropriate the capital of the 1%, put it under public control, and invest the wealth in society for the needs of society?
There is no reformist way out of the crisis of capitalism – Part Two
Another variation on the demand to "tax the rich" is the call for a tax on financial transactions, otherwise known as a "Financial Transactions Tax" (FTT), "Tobin Tax" (after the Nobel economics laureate, James Tobin, who first proposed the idea in 1972), or "Robin Hood Tax" (i.e. taking from the rich and giving to the poor).
The Tobin Tax
The idea of an FTT has even been proposed recently by high up figures such as Wolfgang Schäuble, Germany's finance minister, and Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who have proposed an EU-wide FTT to curb speculative activity and make the financial sector contribute more for the cost of the crisis.
The idea was instantly rejected by David Cameron and George Osborne, the British Prime Minister and Chancellor respectively, who said that whilst they supported the idea of an FTT "in principle", they did not think it would be implementable in practice unless it was global. It should come as no surprise that Cameron and Osborne would be against implementing a tax that could bite into the profits of their banker friends in The City.
The Buttonwood columnist in the Economist points out the implausibility of a European-only financial tax:
"London is the global centre for foreign exchange trading. This trading is conducted electronically at very low cost; ICAP, the broker, says the cost averages $2 for every $1m traded. A Tobin tax of just 0.01% [the proposed rate] might not sound much but would equate to $100 for the same trade, 50 times as much. Why would anyone want to pay it? Such trades would be routed to New York or Singapore in an instant."
The threat of finance moving its capital is not mere scaremongering, but is an undeniable fact. The Asian economic crisis of 1997-98, which wreaked havoc on the economies of a whole region, showed how easily and quickly capital can be withdrawn from a country, and the devastating effect that such a withdrawal can have.
Some European ministers have proposed that the FTT could be introduced in the eurozone countries only. The Financial Times highlights the problems with this suggestion:
"According to the European Commission's own estimates, roughly 62 per cent of the revenues generated by an EU tax would come from London."
And the Economist continues with the criticism of a eurozone-wide FTT:
"The big flaw in the plan is that taxable transactions are likely to migrate outside the EU. Although the commission bills its proposals as the first step towards a global agreement, it is hard to discern sweeping international enthusiasm for the idea. The commission's own numbers, partly based on an unhappy Swedish experiment with an FTT from 1984-91, suggest that derivatives traders could relocate as much as 90% of their business outside any tax zone..."
"...The commission's own assessment suggests that the FTT could reduce long-run GDP in Europe by anywhere from 0.5% to 1.8%. At a time of economic frailty, that seems perverse."
All available evidence shows that international treaties cannot be implemented on a capitalist basis. With examples such as to the Copenhagen climate summit in 2009, which ended with no binding agreements, and the trade negotiations organised by the World Trade Organisation (WTO), which began in Doha in 2001 and ended in complete collapse in Geneva in 2008, one can see that international treaties or regulations of any kind consistently come up against the contradiction of the nation state, with individual governments doing whatever it takes to protect the profits of the capitalist class in their own country. The implementation of a global FTT would encounter the same barrier, which cannot be overcome on a capitalist basis.
Even if such a tax could, somehow, be implemented at a global level, what is to stop the global financial industry from simply passing this cost on, for example, by reducing the access to credit for small business and families? By passing on the costs, the FTT would end up simply being an additional regressive tax, like a sales tax or a carbon tax, on ordinary people.
The "Robin Hood Tax campaign", a UK-based campaign supported by all manner of well-wishers – from charities, philanthropists, and trade union leaders to bourgeois politicians, economists, and businessmen – provides a number of fairly insubstantial sounding responses to some of the criticisms levelled above, even going so far as to say that Britain could implement such a tax in isolation.
But again, as with the question of financial regulation and any other tax on the rich as outlined above, it must be asked: who will implement such a tax? With Cameron and Osborne in Britain immediately pouring cold water on the idea, evidence suggests that it is complete utopianism to think that a bourgeois government might implement any sort of Robin Hood Tax in a period of crisis. Once again, it is the so-called "pragmatists" and "realists" who are seen to be the most utopian and idealist of all.
The example of Greece – where an austerity programme is being implemented due to pressure from the financial markets and where a democratically elected government has been forced to step down by these same creditors – shows that governments are not able to dictate to the financial sector; in fact, it is the opposite. To paraphrase an old Soviet Union slogan: under socialism, government controls finance; under capitalism, finance controls government.
A recent article in the Economist highlights this point and is worth quoting from at length:
"The Europeans created the euro to prevent the crises caused by currency speculators, only to find themselves pushed around by bond investors...
"...In theory, there is an easy answer. If you don't want to be bothered about the bond markets, don't borrow from them...
"...Countries can escape from the tyranny of the markets by turning to official lenders: other countries, the International Monetary Fund or the European Financial Stability Facility. But such creditors are just as keen on extracting their pound of flesh (in terms of economic reform) as the private sector...
"...Just as voters cannot repeal the laws of gravity, they cannot insist that foreign creditors lend them money...
"...Over the centuries, countries have tried various rules—the gold standard, balanced-budget requirements, independent central banks—in an attempt to limit government profligacy. But when those rules fail, the markets assert their own grim discipline."
In other words, one cannot admonish the financial markets and the bankers and simply try to regulate them or tax them. These bankers and financiers have simply operated according to the laws of capitalism. If one accepts capitalism, then one must also accept the logic and the laws of capitalism. If you say "A", then you must also say "B", "C", and "D".
It must be emphasised, once again, that the only government that could implement such a financial tax would be a workers' government under the control of the labour movement. Even then, such a tax, in order to avoid a strike of capital would – like any financial regulation or tax on the rich – have to be international.
But then why stop at such an international financial tax? Why not put the financial system – which, as the New Scientist article above highlights, is by nature an incredibly powerful international system already – under public, democratic control, so that the wealth within this system can be put to use as part of a rational, international plan?
Put simply, there is no solution on a capitalist or nationalist basis. It is international socialism or nothing.
The euro: to leave or stay?
Some commentators have tried to paint the economic problems in the world as one confined to the highly indebted states within the eurozone. Such people, however, conveniently fail to acknowledge that the first country to default was Iceland, which is not even in the eurozone. In addition, they seem blinded to the austerity that is being implemented across the industrialised world, including in other European countries that are not part of the euro club, including Romania and the UK. Indeed, despite being able to devalue its currency, Britain is not in a particularly advantageous position; according to The Economist, 40% of British exports go to eurozone countries and there is approximately $350 billion of exposure of British banks to debts of Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Spain (PIIGS). It is clear, therefore, that the fate of the British economy is tied by a thousand threads to the fate of the eurozone, despite the UK's independent currency.
It has been proposed by some (from across the political spectrum) that the "solution" for Greece is to leave the euro in a controlled manner. The idea behind such a proposal is that over time the independent Greek currency (the drachma) would be devalued, Greek industries would become more competitive, and increased exports would pull the Greek economy out of its slump.
It is true that an independent Greek currency would be devalued. However, such devaluation would likely happen extremely rapidly, given that the new currency would (rightly) be considered worthless. Meanwhile, proponents of the Greek exits from the Eurozone seem to forget that a rapid devaluation of any Greek currency would (in addition to making exports cheaper) make imports vastly more expensive. The result would be enormous inflation, which would just be austerity for the Greek people by another name.
In addition, it must be asked: which industries in Greece are expected to provide the basis for these exports? And who are they expected to export to? Even Germany, the economic powerhouse of Europe and the second largest exporter in the world, is finding it difficult to find a market for its exports and is consequently experiencing a rapid decrease in its expected rate of economic growth, with just 0.1% growth in GDP between April and June of 2011.
It should also be pointed out that Greek debts are denominated in Euros, whilst any revenue would be in the new (devalued) currency; therefore any departure by Greece from the euro and introduction of a newly devalued currency would see the real price of Greek debt soar, and repayment costs would be impossible to meet. Finally, a Greek exit from the euro would likely be accompanied by a flight of capital from the country and a strike of foreign investment. All of a sudden, a Greek exit from the euro, in and of itself, does not seem like such an appealing "solution". As the Economist put it recently: "Austerity, high unemployment, social unrest, high borrowing costs and banking chaos seem likely either way."
The other alternative, for Greece to default on its debts, is also not a solution if implemented in isolation. By itself, a complete default could be even more painful than austerity for Greece. The country would be instantly cut off from the credit markets, meaning that they would have to eliminate their budget deficit immediately. In addition, much of the Greek debt is in Greek banks, so the government would also have to worry about the possibility of bailing out its own banks.
A Greek default would quickly cause contagion, with banks elsewhere in Europe (which are exposed to Greek debt) going into crisis. These banks, in turn, would be bailed out by their respective states, simply transferring Greek debt onto the balance sheets of other countries' economies in a similar manner to what was seen (on a far smaller scale) when Iceland defaulted on its debt. The final result would be a spread of the austerity that the Greek masses have been experiencing to the rest of Europe and beyond, as governments everywhere carry out cuts in response to their newly inflated public debts.
The other proposal regarding the euro crisis that is commonly cited these days is that of a fiscal union to accompany the eurozone monetary union. This idea comes in a variety of flavours, including: having the European Central Bank (ECB) issue "Eurobonds", jointly underwritten by all Eurozone countries; getting the ECB to provide unlimited funds for the indebted PIIGS countries; or even having what would effectively be a political union, with European authorities in Brussels setting legally binding budgetary constraints.
The first two variations of this proposal amount to the same thing – using the ECB to transfer money from the stronger economies in northern Europe to the weaker, highly indebted countries elsewhere. In reality, this means a massive transfer from Germany to the PIIGS. If it were simply smaller economies such as Greece, Ireland, and Portugal that needed bailing out, then this might be possible; but now Italy and Spain are in the sights of the financial markets, both of which are large economies with even larger debts. And it may not end there; there are also concerns over French banks, and therefore over the French economy in general by association. It is far from certain whether the shoulders of Germany are broad enough to take such a burden.
It must also be made clear that such a transfer of money under a fiscal union would not be a one-off, but would be a continual process, since the main problems (i.e. budget deficits and low economic growth in the PIIGS economies) would not be eliminated. The other question, of course, is: where would all this money in Germany come from? Ultimately, from the German taxpayer, i.e. the German working class. Any transfer of money from Germany to the rest of Europe, therefore, would simply be accompanied by a transfer of austerity from elsewhere to Germany. A United States of Europe on a capitalist basis, therefore, would simply be a United States of Austerity.
Others have suggested that the ECB should simply create money to buy up the debts of Greece, Italy, Spain, etc., but this has been met with disapproval by Angela Merkel and other German politicians, who are (as a result of bad experiences with hyperinflation in the past) instinctively against anything that looks, sounds, or smells of printing money. Indeed, there is no real difference between this and the quantitative easing programmes carried out in the USA and the UK, which have thus far done little to solve the economic woes in these countries, and which in the long run will only lead to inflation and thus austerity for ordinary people by other means.
In terms of the third variation of the "greater European unity" proposal – for a political union with national economic targets decided in Brussels – it should be pointed out that such a proposal has already happened– and failed. When the euro was first created, it came with certain budgetary conditions, defined by the Maastricht Treaty, which had to be met, such as targets for budget deficits and public debts. Countries, including Germany, very quickly broke these targets; and as the Marxists pointed out at the time, such measures were deeply anti-working class, since meeting such targets on a capitalist basis inevitably meant cuts to public services and welfare.
Finally, it must be emphasised that a United States of Europe on a capitalist basis would solve nothing. At heart, this is because the crisis is not simply a crisis of the euro, but a crisis of capitalism, as we have explained previously. One only has to look at the United States of America, which has both a political and fiscal union of fifty different states, to see that a union of capitalist states solves nothing. In the USA, there is a massive debt crisis at both the federal (national) level, and also at the level of the individual states. A "super-committee" of Republicans and Democrats has failed to come to an agreement over how the deficit should be cut; as a result, there will be automatic large cuts to public spending. Meanwhile, the precarious positions of some states' finances have already led to cuts to state expenditure, and in some cases, such as Wisconsin and Ohio, to the state government taking on the labour movement and attempting to take away trade union rights, such as the right to collective bargaining.
Far from moving in the direction of greater unity, Europe is moving in the direction of breaking up. The possibility is now being openly raised of countries voluntarily leaving the euro, which could easily accelerate into a full on breakup of the euro, with countries seeking to get out of the crisis through competitive currency devaluations. But such a move would also be accompanied by protectionism with each country trying to keep out the exports of its neighbours. This would put the whole European Union project – which is built upon the principle of free trade between member states – at risk of falling apart, as The Economist explains:
"The few left in the euro (Germany and perhaps a few other creditor countries) would be at a competitive disadvantage to the new cheaper currencies on their doorstep. As well as imposing capital controls, countries might retreat towards autarky, by raising retaliatory tariffs. The survival of the European single market and of the EU itself would then be under threat."
The fact is that there is no international solution under capitalism. Internationalism on a capitalist basis simply means international austerity. Nor is there any national solution, as has been pointed out above, in relation to Greece and the possibility of departure from the euro. Nor is there the possibility of so-called "socialism in one country", as history has shown. Each and every country is part of a global economic system, and one cannot have an island of socialism in a sea of capitalism. Socialism is international or it is nothing.
Crisis of confidence
Certain bourgeois and reformist commentators, as we have seen, have simply described the crisis as a "crisis of confidence". Such people blame the credit rating agencies and financial speculators for creating fear by downgrading countries' credit ratings and demanding higher interest rates for lending to governments. But such an explanation puts the cart before the horse. The credit rating agencies are only pointing out what is established fact – that certain countries are unlikely to be able to pay back the money they have borrowed due to high levels of debt, budget deficits, and low economic growth. The job of the credit rating agencies is to warn investors of potentially risky assets (such as government bonds) that are worth avoiding. Meanwhile, when creditors demand a higher interest rate, they are simply recognising that there is a greater possibility that they will not be paid back in the future. Blaming credit rating agencies for causing the crisis is a case of shooting the messenger.
It is not the lack of confidence that causes the crisis, but the crisis that causes the lack of confidence. Marx made similar remarks regarding the idea of a "credit crunch", pointing out that is not the lack of credit that causes the crisis, but the crisis that causes a lack of credit; as the economy enters into crisis, creditors began to withhold money, thus causing a further slowdown in production.
The bourgeois politicians see their primary task as restoring confidence to the markets by proving that they are reliable and trustworthy when it comes to carrying out austerity programmes and cutting their debts. Where they wobble, a "crisis of leadership" is quickly proclaimed by the bourgeois commentators, and reliable technocratic governments are installed.
Indeed, the bourgeoisie are facing a political crisis, with no stable or strong governments; but this is only a reflection of the economic crisis (as we have pointed out elsewhere and of their objective weakness as a class – a class that has outlived its historical role and that has become a fetter on the development of society. The technocratic governments of "national unity" (i.e. bourgeois unity) that have been created are governments of crisis, which have no social basis upon which to rest.
In so far as there is a "crisis of leadership", it is a crisis of the leadership of the working class. Across the world, revolutionary movements are developing, but what is seen to be lacking in all instances is a revolutionary leadership of these movements that can unite the various struggles and point out the alternative to the barbarism that faces workers and youth everywhere.
Instead of a revolutionary alternative, all the current leaders of the labour movement are able to offer –as reformists without reforms – are counter-reforms. Over the last twenty years, on the basis of credit-fuelled growth, these reformist leaders were able to benefit from the fact that the boom left room to maintain a certain standard of living for the working class – with many saying that "we are all middle class now". Now, with the crisis, these leaders cling to their reformist ideology, but, without the material basis below to support it, they are forced to carry out cuts.
At the current time, workers are fighting not to gain new reforms, but merely to keep the ones they have won in the past. In countries such as Greece this process is more advanced, and the embryo of revolution is developing across Europe and the USA (not to forget the revolutionary movements in Egypt and the rest of the Arab world). In the course of these defensive struggles, workers will gain a sense of their own power, and these struggles will turn into their opposite and go onto the offensive. Through a series of victories and defeats, workers and youth will realise their potential to transform society.
The crisis of capitalism
The cuts and austerity being implemented are not ideological, but are being carried out across the world in response to a very real crisis – a crisis of capitalism. Presenting the will to carry out cuts and austerity as ideological implies that the bourgeois – and reformist – politicians that carry them out are doing so out of some ingrained prejudice, rather than because within the limits of the capitalist system they are imposed on the situation by the very crisis of capitalism. In as much as one can talk of "ideology", it is in the sense of an ideology that represents a material class interest – the interests of the financial markets, i.e. those who have money to lend, i.e. the capitalist class – which are asserting themselves over the interests of ordinary people – i.e. workers and youth.
The question is not over this or that cut, this or that tax, this or that regulation. Nor is it simply a question of a euro crisis; of whether to stay in the euro or leave the euro. The real question is simple: who pays? Who pays for the crisis – the crisis of capitalism: the 1% (i.e. the bankers, financiers, and the rest of the capitalist class) or the 99% (i.e. the mass of ordinary people)?
The more serious and far-sighted bourgeois commentators understand the real depth of the crisis facing society, and are also very clear about what needs to be done to protect their class interests, as this statement from the Economist expresses in a very lucid and honest way:
"This newspaper's fervent hope would be that Europeans embrace globalisation by at last getting serious about reforming their rigid economies and their welfare states. Indeed, the present crisis has presented them with a unique chance to break apart the political interests that have held them back..."
"...The welfare state, built on postwar prosperity, has become too expensive for these straitened times."
For "rigid economies" read "reforms and workers' rights", and for "political interests" read "the organised labour movement". Put quite simply, the bourgeoisie is demanding that all the reforms, rights, and welfare that the working class has won through struggle in the past are to be abolished in the interests of the capitalist class and their profits.
Now is not the time to regurgitate reformist platitudes that merely suggest tinkering with the system instead of overthrowing it. The role of leadership is to raise consciousness and increase confidence; to point out the next step that needs to be taken. Now is the time for a bold, revolutionary, socialist programme that links the immediate tasks of defending the living standards of the masses to the need for the masses to transform society – the demand, not simply for crumbs from the table, but for control of the whole bakery.
In short, it is time for the ideas of Marxism, which correspond to the objective needs of humankind and the choice that it faces: socialism or barbarism. These ideas, however, do not spread themselves, but require the effort and organisation of the most conscious and determined layers of workers and youth. We invite our readers to join the International Marxist Tendency in this task.
Hung Ho-fung
PAPER-TIGER FINANCE?
After more than thirty years of capitalist transition, and with most of its economic activities driven by the pursuit of profit, few would dispute that the Chinese economy is fully capitalist now. [1] Yet perhaps that label alone is insufficient to capture the many twists and turns of the prc's post-Mao development. Huang Yasheng, for example, distinguished two stages in his acclaimed Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics (discussed in these pages by Joel Andreas, with a reply from Huang). First had come the entrepreneurial capitalism of the 1980s, when growth was driven by the dynamism of rural private enterprise, as well as by collective firms, many of which were private ones in disguise. This had been followed from the early 1990s by a turn to state-led capitalism, with large, urban state-owned enterprises displacing and subjugating the private sector. The soes, no less driven by profit motives, benefited from fiscal, financial and policy advantages offered by the ccp; yet their monopoly status, across sectors from telecommunications to banking, rendered them less efficient than the competitive private sector, Huang argued.
This periodization of the post-Mao era is important, as it shows that many of the features that have intrigued critical political economists in search of progressive alternatives to Anglo-Saxon capitalism have been transient, their reproduction far from guaranteed. One such feature was the early salience of decentralized rural industries, which led Cui Zhiyuan to see a living model of Proudhonian socialism in China; while Giovanni Arrighi suggested it could be fostering a less exploitative, non-capitalist 'market society'. Over the past decade, especially since Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao came to power, some have celebrated and others lamented an apparent reversal of economic liberalization, with increasingly discriminatory policies against private and foreign companies. Is China experiencing yet another shift of development path?
The answer is 'Yes' for Carl Walter and Fraser Howie, whose Red Capitalism details the institutional arrangements underlying China's vertiginous growth from the 1990s to the present day. The authors are veteran investment bankers (Morgan Stanley, jp Morgan) with years of experience in China helping to float major soes in overseas stock markets; both are fluent in Mandarin. In an earlier book, Privatizing China (2003), they charted the development of a national, then international, Chinese stock market, from its origins in local 'street-level' trading in the 1980s. It is unsurprising that their analysis is coloured by a belief that American-style capitalism, as epitomized by giant private corporations, should be the goal of China's capitalist transition. This bias need not prevent others benefiting from the authors' intimate knowledge of the operation and evolution of China's financial system, which has been central to its economic rise. Walter's and Howie's depiction of Deng China in the 1980s does not differ much from Huang's account: market reforms created a successful small-scale private sector which was efficient, export-oriented and open to foreign direct investment. In the 1990s, Jiang Zemin and Zhu Rongji—members of the 'internationalist elite from the great city of Shanghai'—decided that the moribund domestic-oriented soes and state banks that had remained untouched in the 1980s needed to be reconstructed into profitable, internationally competitive corporations. To revamp the state sector, the Jiang–Zhu regime invited us investment banks to restructure some of the biggest state companies along the lines of American corporations. They then floated these restructured firms on the new Chinese stock markets and on those of Hong Kong, London and New York. In the authors' words, 'Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley made China's state-owned corporate sector what it is today.'
Red Capitalism's detailed account of the 'creation' of China Mobile illustrates what soe reform in the Jiang–Zhu era was about. The country's fragmented telecommunications facilities had initially been provided by provincial governments. In the early 1990s Goldman Sachs 'aggressively lobbied Beijing' to create a national telecommunications corporation. Under the auspices of international bankers, accountants and corporate lawyers, China Mobile was formed as a new company from the provinces' industrial assets. After years of American bankers' efforts to build its international image, China Mobile's ipo raised a historic $4.2bn in Hong Kong and New York in 1997, despite the Asian financial crisis. As the authors point out, China Mobile's valuation was not based on an 'existing company with a proven management team in place with a strategic plan to expand operations', but on projected estimates of the future profitability of the consolidated provincial assets, as compared to existing national telecom firms elsewhere in the world. International financiers, as minority stakeholders, and China's central government, as its owner, made a fortune by creating a 'paper company'.
To be sure, these paper companies would turn real once they floated in the stock market. The scale of market capitalization has grown exponentially over the last twenty years, especially since China's entry into the wto. China Mobile is now among the 'National Champions' of central-government-run enterprises and features on the Fortune Global 500 list. soes of this stratum are investors themselves, and were responsible for Shanghai's stock-market bubble in 2007. The regulatory commission permitted these firms to buy blocks of each other's shares at their issue price, prior to the formal launch of deals. Hike-ups were guaranteed, with prices set low while demand was high. Walter and Howie reckon that up to 20 per cent of corporate profits came from stock trading that year. These National Champions get to retain the bulk of their earnings rather than pay dividends to the government.
Red Capitalism does not provide much information about the actual performance of these soes, but even the official data consistently show that they have been trailing the private sector in profitability, despite all the financial and policy advantages they enjoy. In 2004 the average profit rate for soes was 2.4 per cent, compared to 6.7 per cent for private enterprises; by 2009 the respective figures were 2.9 and 10.6 per cent. Since the 1990s, favoured soes have expanded on the basis of virtually unlimited financial resources from the giant state banks, which have themselves undergone the same remodelling after the style of us corporations, but have remained tightly under the grip of the ccp. The Achilles heel of this financial structure is that the Party 'can tell the banks to loan to the soes, but it seems unable to tell the soes to repay the loans'. Lax lending to unprofitable soes led to a surge of non-performing loans in the late 1990s, when the fever of debt-financed investment by local governments and soes ignited by Deng's 1992 Southern Tour had cooled—partly as a result of government efforts to contain inflation and partly due to the Asian financial crisis, which hit China's export sector hard. The pile-up of bad debts eventually exploded on the books of the major state banks. In 1999 the situation was resolved by a government bailout, based on the creation of 'bad banks' in the form of four Asset Management Companies, which took on most of the problem loans from the four leading state banks, which thereby became 'good banks' again, and eventually floated in international markets at good prices.
But the Asset Management Companies were not as well capitalized by the government as many assumed. While the Ministry of Finance had contributed rmb40 bn, the other rmb858 bn of their capitalization came from 10-year maturity bonds, issued to the rescued Big Four. The banks' continued exposure to the non-performing loans, in the form of these bonds, meant that the bailout was in fact little more than creative accounting to postpone an npl-induced financial crisis for another ten years. That was supposed to buy time for the reforms of banks and soes to march ahead. The idea was that the Big Four would improve their transparency, risk-valuation and accountability following their flotation on international financial markets; meanwhile soe reform was supposed to deepen, so that the big firms would finally become profitable and capable of repaying most of their old loans, which had been transferred to the Asset Management Companies.
But rather than following this plan, Walter and Howie suggest, soe and state-bank reform started to lose momentum after 2003, when the Jiang–Zhu regime was replaced by the new leadership of Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao, and had petered out completely by 2005, when they consolidated their power. The authors attribute this to Hu's and Wen's 'weak grasp of finance and economics', as well as their ideological unease with an American-style corporate capitalism that placed profit before employment and workers' well-being. But despite Hu's and Wen's apparently more left-leaning ideology, the termination of soe reform did not revive the system of socialist enterprises which had guaranteed full employment and workers' welfare. Instead, the state sector was 'caught somewhere between its Soviet past' and its presumably 'capitalist future'. The soes grew 'fat, wealthy and untouchable as they developed China's own domestic markets and always with the unquestioning support of a complaisant financial system'. They became 'cash machines' of the oligarchic ccp families, today's ruling elite. Heads of the largest soes are equal in rank to provincial governors and ministers of state; many are members or alternates on the Party's Central Committee.
Nor has this elite been shy about squeezing resources from these companies, which became increasingly unable or unwilling to repay their lingering loans. As of 2006, the Asset Management Companies had only been able to recover about 20 per cent of the non-performing loans, and the cash thus generated could barely pay the interest on the 10-year bonds held by the major state banks. In 2009, it became clear that the Asset Management Companies would not be able to repay their maturing bonds, which constituted up to half the capital of the Big Four. As a remedy, the government extended the amc bonds' maturity for another ten years. This is no more than a further postponement of the crisis. Indeed by 2019 China's financial system will be far more vulnerable: many of the massive loans from the emergency 'Great Leap Forward Lending' in response to the 2008 global financial crisis will deteriorate into a new wave of non-performing loans, much larger than that of the 1990s.
Two central chapters of Red Capitalism are dedicated to the bond markets, or lack thereof. To the extent that a market for bonds exists, it functions as a clearing house to move money from one arm of the state to another, resembling a pyramid scheme with household savers at its base. Rather than raise new capital, Walter and Howie argue, these disguised loans essentially compensate for weak tax collection. The 2009 stimulus package required municipalities to come up with two-thirds of project spending, so they leveraged utilities, infrastructure and assets to borrow from banks and then issue bonds. Still, the bond bonanza was geographically limited to the prosperous coastal regions: three-quarters of the money raised was in Greater Shanghai, Beijing and Guangdong; while Henan, one of the most populous provinces, accounted for a mere 3 per cent. Walter and Howie point to the cyclical nature of the financial system: 'The first decade of the twenty-first century now appears to have ended, just as each of the last three decades of the twentieth did, with China's major banks in desperate need of massive recapitalization.'
The authors suggest that China's authorities could keep sweeping bad loans under the carpet and postponing a financial crisis because of the 'heroic savings rate' of households and of enterprises based in the profitable, export-oriented private sector. But they warn that the country's large savings deposits are set to dwindle in the future, under any imaginable scenario. The savings rate will drop when depositors lose confidence in the state banks, the population ages, the export sector slows, or the government succeeds in rebalancing the economy into a consumption-driven growth model. The bad news is that all of the above are certain to happen, if not already underway. With declining savings deposits as buffers, the coming of a homegrown financial crisis is just a matter of time. Red Capitalism concludes with a warning about China's public debt. The authors calculate that if local-government debt, greatly increased with the stimulus package, and non-performing loans are counted along with the Ministry of Finance's debt obligations, then the figure at the end of 2009 could be at least 76 per cent of gdp (as of 2010 it was 63 per cent for the us). Such a proportion indicates a heavy interest burden, which will eventually limit the state's ability to invest in growth. Thus far the government has been leveraging China's domestic balance sheet, borrowing 'expensive rmb now to build projects' with the intention of making 'repayment at some point in the distant future using inevitably cheaper rmb'.
The book's depiction of the transformation of China's soes—from up-and-coming American-style corporations under Jiang and Zhu, into cash machines of rent-seeking political families under Hu and Wen—coincides with a narrative newly gaining ground within the American business community: that the prc used to be more friendly and open to Western investors and the global economy in the 1990s, but has become increasingly protectionist and hostile to foreign companies over the last five years. The authors' account offers a convincing explanation—as well as a partisan justification—for this view. While Huang Yasheng describes a long rise of state-led capitalism, from the 1990s to the present, Walter and Howie divide this into two distinct periods. During the first, from 1992 to 2003, the prc fostered a 'good' state capitalism, converging with a profitable corporate America. After 2003, this metamorphosed into a 'bad' state capitalism, closer to the insular, opaque, cronyist Suharto model.
Was this changing course of state-capitalist development inevitable or contingent? At points, Walter and Howie attribute the shift to differences in policy orientations and backgrounds between Jiang–Zhu and Hu–Wen. Yet they also hint that the deterioration of 'good' state capitalism into 'bad' was predestined. They note that the Party's nomenklatura had never intended to relinquish their grip on the state sector. 'Given the fragmented structure of the country's political system in which special interest groups co-exist within a dominant political entity, the Communist Party of China', the failure to follow through on state-sector reform may have been inevitable. This second interpretation makes more sense. Given the principle of collective leadership after the passing of Deng, as the last charismatic, first-generation revolutionary leader, it is unlikely that the course of the state sector, a complex edifice enmeshed with vast vested interests, could easily be altered by particular dispositions of individual leaders. The 'good' stage can in fact be seen as a manifestation of the weakness and fragmentation of Chinese state capital in the 1990s, when the ccp elite was dependent on global financial capital to foster the centralization and globalization of soes. Once state capital had been strengthened and expanded within global financial markets, the ccp elite became confident enough to ignore the preferences of foreign capital as to how their companies should be run. The demystification of American-style corporations as solidly profitable, transparent and well governed in the wake of the Enron scandal of 2001 and the financial crisis of 2008 only redoubled the Party's determination to kick away the ladder from American investment banks.
Viewed in this light, what distinguishes these two periods is not the nature of Chinese state capitalism, but its relation to global capital. Subjugated to global capital in the first stage, Chinese state capital became more independent and defiant in the second. This changing balance of forces tallies with the many recent complaints from us corporations about being bullied by the Chinese authorities and discriminated against in favour of native soes. It also sheds light on the recent rise of China's nationalist left, characterized by its pro-state sector and anti-Western stance, which has become increasingly vocal in certain official media outlets such as Global Times. Whereas the prc's state capitalism in the 1990s was a constitutive part of the us-centred neoliberal global order, it underwent a nationalist turn in the early 2000s. The mounting economic conflicts—from us corporations' accusations of stolen patents to American complaints at the wto about Chinese subsidies to soes—can therefore be understood as an incipient inter-capitalist rivalry between Chinese state capital and us global capital. Given all this, we can also understand better why us investment bankers like Walter and Howie would be so nostalgic about the Jiang–Zhu regime and so down on the Hu–Wen era.
Red Capitalism helps to illuminate three stages of Chinese capitalism, in the 1980s, the 1990s and the 2000s. What the authors pay insufficient attention to, however, is the position of private, export-oriented capital in China's political economy today. They seem to assume that the private sector was simply subordinated to the expanding state sector after 1992, asserting that private companies 'will be supported only as long as they are critical as a source of jobs (and hence, the all-important household savings), technology and foreign exchange'; the private sector 'is there to be used tactically by the Party and is not allowed to play a dominant role'.
There is plenty of evidence to support this view. The private sector's well-known difficulty in borrowing from state banks, in contrast to the soes' flood of easy credit, is a case in point. The picture, nevertheless, becomes more complicated if we look from another angle. In the debate about currency policy, the private export sector, together with its coastal-elite hosts, clearly wins the argument each time. Big, domestic-oriented soes have been futilely supporting more drastic appreciation of the renminbi, while China's coastal exporters are the key vested interests that deter Beijing from letting it rise. For example, the heads of Lenovo and Hunan Lengshuijiang Iron and Steel, two major soes, openly urged the Chinese government to end the dollar peg in spring 2010, as a stronger rmb would reduce their import costs and hence increase their profits; to no avail. The influence of the private export sector also explains Beijing's addiction to a ballooning trade surplus and us Treasury bonds. The political competition between China's private, export-oriented capital and its state-owned, domestic-oriented capital, therefore, is far from settled. The former's changing triangular relation with oligarchic state capital and global capital will continue to influence the debate over the prc's development path in the years to come. All these fractions of capital, as well as their ideological representatives such as the nationalist left and the liberals, purport to act in the interests of the people. Whether, when and how China's working classes will become a key political force and assert their own independent voices in actual political struggles remains to be seen.
[1] Carl Walter and Fraser Howie, Red Capitalism: The Fragile Financial Foundation of China's Extraordinary Rise, John Wiley & Sons: Singapore 2011, £19.99, hardback 234 pp, 978 0 470 82586 0
| | | | | | | | Wednesday, December 7, 2011 2:27 PM | | | Jay | | | | | | Labels: News |
By Deirdre Griswold
Published Dec 6, 2011
Andy Stern, former head of the giant Service Employees union in the United States, recently visited China as part of a delegation organized by the China-United States Exchange Foundation and the Center for American Progress. Stern, knowing very well that U.S. workers are in the midst of a long-term crisis of unemployment that shows no letup, was highly impressed with the goals of China's 12th five-year plan, which were explained to the visiting group by high-ranking Chinese officials.
As he wrote in an op-ed column published Dec. 1 in no less than the Wall Street Journal, entitled "China's Superior Economic Model," China is aiming for "a 7 percent annual economic growth rate; a $640 billion investment in renewable energy; construction of 6 million homes; and expanding next-generation IT [information technology], clean-energy vehicles, biotechnology, high-end manufacturing and environmental protection — all while promoting social equity and rural development."
Stern did not scoff at these projections, nor did the pre-eminent newspaper of U.S. capitalism add any skeptical words. They both know from experience that China does not fall below its growth projections. On the contrary, it often exceeds them. Meanwhile, the capitalist world is reeling from crisis to crisis.
Stern said, "Our delegation witnessed China's people-oriented development in Chongqing, a city of 32 million in Western China, which is led by an aggressive and popular Communist Party leader — Bo Xilai. A skyline of cranes are building roughly 1.5 million square feet of usable floor space daily — including, our delegation was told, 700,000 units of public housing annually. Meanwhile, the Chinese government can boast that it has established in Western China an economic zone for cloud computing and automotive and aerospace production resulting in 12.5 percent annual growth and 49 percent growth in annual tax revenue, with wages rising more than 10 percent a year."
Stern knows how difficult it is for U.S. unions to negotiate even a 1 percent raise in the present economic environment. And he knows how every public service and program is being cut back right now.
Stern quotes from Intel chairperson Andy Grove, a big U.S. capitalist, and Asia Society head Orville Schell, a leading bourgeois intellectual, to argue that the "free-market model" so highly touted for years in this country needs "modification." Finally he puts forward his own proposal: "America needs to embrace a plan for growth and innovation, with a streamlined government as a partner with the private sector."
Lack of planning, he says, is the reason the U.S. is falling behind.
By writing this piece for the Wall Street Journal rather than a union or working-class newspaper, Stern is clearly appealing to U.S. capitalists to alter their thinking and embrace government planning for their own good. He even accedes to their demands for a "streamlined" government — meaning layoffs and budget cuts — probably hoping this will help win them over.
Unfortunately, he is spitting in the wind.
What makes planning possible?
It's not that capitalist governments are incapable of planning. Even the U.S. government has an energy plan, a transportation plan, a plan to remodel health insurance, a plan to devise many new weapons systems, a plan to build more prisons, etc. Of course these plans are woefully inadequate when it comes to addressing the huge problems of unemployment, environmental degradation, a crumbling infrastructure and so on.
What the U.S. capitalist government does not have, and cannot have, is an overall plan for the economic development of the country. Yet that is exactly what China does have. So why is China so different from all the capitalist countries now experiencing financial and economic crises?
China allows capitalism to exist — it has stock markets, private ownership of some of the means of production, a growing bourgeoisie, and many social features of capitalism, like a big income gap between rich and poor. But it also has state ownership of the commanding heights of the economy, especially the major banks, as well as the industries vital to China's infrastructure.
That is not the only difference, however. The Chinese state was born out of an earthshaking revolution, led by communists, that continued for decades and mobilized the masses of people to change society on a scale never reached anywhere else. In the 62 years of its existence, this state has been affected by internal struggles, by the growth of the bourgeoisie and also by the pressure of the masses. It has made many accommodations to the "capitalist roaders," but it has not been overthrown or replaced with a capitalist state. Fundamental institutions, such as massive society-wide government planning for human and social need, remain intact.
China can produce a five-year plan that works because it is not a capitalist state. It can in a few years rebuild an ancient city like Chonqing into a huge and mostly modern metropolis the size of Maine, with 32 million people, because it is not shackled with a political structure run entirely by privately owned banks and real estate interests.
Contrast this with New York City, where it has taken 10 years just to begin rebuilding the area of downtown Manhattan destroyed in the 9/11 attacks and where high rents and lack of public housing leave an untold number homeless, especially in the oppressed Black and Latino/a communities. New York has no lack of construction machinery or skilled workers. What it lacks is a government that uses socialist planning to respond to the needs of the people in crucial areas of life rather than to the financiers, the landlords and the speculators.
Profits at highest level ever
The capitalist ruling class in the U.S. has reached a peak in its ability to siphon off the wealth of society. This was illustrated most graphically in new government figures on the economy reported in the Nov. 25 New York Times ("Off the Charts: For Business, Golden Days; For Workers, the Dross").
The figures show that in the third quarter of this year, for the first time ever, the percentage of the Gross Domestic Product that went to companies in the form of after-tax profits exceeded 10 percent.
In the same period, the share of the GDP that represents wages and salaries fell below 45 percent, also for the first time ever. And this decline occurred even though the government lumps together workers' wages with the six- and even seven-figure salaries of the highest executives, which are once again on the rise.
What this shows is that capitalism is working exactly the way it is supposed to: it is accumulating capital in the hands of the already very rich, which means it is extracting surplus value from the hides of the workers as never before. Karl Marx rigorously proved a century and a half ago in his three-volume study of capitalism called "Capital" that the increasing accumulation of profit is rooted in the very essence of capitalist production and cannot be overcome by anything but the organized, militant struggle of the workers themselves.
The workers need a planned economy, not the chaotic and cruel one that capitalism imposes on them, where wars follow recessions and the race for profits never ends. Workers need their talents to be used to build up society, not grow the fortunes of a few. The achievement of a planned economy — a socialist economy — is a job that only they can carry through, not the CEOs of Intel or Chase Manhattan or any other representatives of the exploiting class.
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Income inequality doubled in India in 2 decades
via Sanhati http://bit.ly/vaB2Uf
December 8, 2011
[1] http://www.firstpost.com/india/indias-income-inequality-has-doubled-in-20-years-report-150257.html
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[1]
Inequality in earnings in India has doubled over the last two decades, making it one of the worst performers among emerging economies.
A new report by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) shows that the top 10 percent of wage-earners, earn 12 times more than the bottom 10 percent, compared to a ratio of six since the early 1990s.
The report Divided We Stand: Why Inequality Keeps Rising shows that the benefits of growth in India have been concentrated in the states that are already rich, thus contributing to the widening gap in income compared to the poorest and most populous states — like Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh.
The OECD also says India has the highest number of poor in the world. Not just that, income support is also substantially below the OECD average, with little or no benefits for unemployed in the country.
In both India and Indonesia, informal employment includes a disproportionate number of women, home-based workers, street sellers and workers sub-contracted by firms in the formal sector, says the report.
Although “Brazil, Indonesia and Argentina have recorded significant progress in reducing inequality over the past 20 years”, India, China, The Russian Federation and South Africa have become less equal over time.
The report shows that 42 percent of Indians live below the poverty line, as against the official Indian figure of 37 percent, which means that 42 percent of the 1.2 billion population lives on less than Rs 65 a day.
Recently, the Indian government was criticised for artificially trying to reduce the number of people below the poverty line. The government had said that an individual income of Rs 25 a day would help provide for adequate “private expenditure on food, education and health” in villages. In cities, it said, individual earnings of Rs 32 a day were adequate.
India has also not fared well in poverty reduction, the report says.
A World Bank report in May had said attempts by the Indian government to combat poverty were not working, as its programmes were beset by corruption, bad administration and under-payments.
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[2]
LONDON: India has become “less equal over time” and earnings inequality in the country has increased significantly since the early 1990s, Paris-based think tank OECD said today.
The observations are a part of OECD’s report focusing on inequality patterns and related policy challenges in the emerging economies of India, China, Argentina, Brazil, Indonesia, Russia and South Africa.
The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) is a 34-member grouping of mostly advanced nations, that together account for over 60 per cent of global output.
“Brazil, Indonesia and, on some indicators, Argentina have recorded significant progress in reducing inequality over the past 20 years. By contrast, China, India, the Russian Federation and South Africa have all become less equal over time…,” OECD said.
India is one country that has experienced “significant” increase inequality over time, where the ratio between the top and the bottom deciles of the wage distribution has doubled since the early 1990s.
“The main driver has been an increase in wage inequality between regular wage earners — i.e. contractual employees hired over a period of time,” the think tank pointed out.
However, OECD noted that inequality in the casual wage sector — workers employed on a day-to-day basis — has remained more stable.
Going by the report, India has the highest headcount poverty rate of the seven countries - with about 42 per cent of its population still living on less than USD 1.25 per day.
“During the two decades to 2008, the fall in the extent of absolute poverty was particularly dramatic for Brazil, China and Indonesia, while India and South Africa recorded more modest reductions,” the report said.
Further, OECD noted that bringing down inequality as well as promoting better jobs in these nations would require a multi-pronged approach including better incentives for more formal employment and preparation to finance higher social spending in the future.
In the OECD region, the report said the gap between rich and poor in member nations has reached its highest level for over 30 years.
“… the average income of the richest 10 per cent is now about nine times that of the poorest 10 per cent across the OECD,” it added.
World War II: U.S. expanded, and so, Pearl Harbor
by Vince Copeland
The "sneak attack" or the "stab in the back" as it was then called, created a veritable hysteria and "unified" the country in a war against imperialist Germany and Italy as well as Japan.
Considering the hesitancy of the masses to get into the war, considering that Roosevelt had been elected on a "He Kept Us Out of War" platform and a solemn promise never to "send your sons to die on foreign soil," only something like a tremendous attack on the United States or U.S. citizens could have gotten the U.S. in the war.
So the attack came.
Pearl Harbor, in a military-political sense, was very much like the beginning of the Spanish-American war. The U.S. battleship "Maine" was sunk in Havana Harbor in 1898, and Washington used it as an excuse to declare war on Spain. But Spain needed the sinking of the Maine like it needed the proverbial hole in the head. And U.S. big business needed a war with Spain.
This is not to say that the Dec. 7, 1941, attack was in itself a hoax or that the Japanese did not really kill over 3,000 thousand U.S. sailors by sending them to the bottom of Pearl Harbor. They did.
But some thoughtful people later considered it strange that the Japanese imperialists should have done something so "stupid" as to bring the U.S. into war against them just when they had their hands full in China and had taken over Indochina from the French imperialists — who could do nothing about it — because the Nazi imperialists had taken over France itself. Why on earth would the Japanese want the powerful U.S. to make war on them at just such a time, when they needed U.S. neutrality more than anything else?
A good question.
The fact is that the Japan-U.S. war was inevitable, given the U.S.-Japanese antagonisms over markets, possessions and economic colonies in Asia. But the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was not at all inevitable. It was not the inevitable beginning of the war. On the contrary, this attack was deliberately maneuvered by the politicians of big business, led at that time by Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Between Secretary of State Cordell Hull, Roosevelt and, in fact, the whole top leadership of the U.S. government, Japan was consciously maneuvered into "firing the first shot." And since Japan had to bear the opprobrium of being the "aggressor" it got the most out of its "first shot" by making the action as devastating as possible — crippling the U.S. Navy, so the Japanese forces could take Southeast Asia with impunity.
Roosevelt immediately labeled Dec. 7 as "a day of infamy," and spoke with almost theatrical horror about the event. Even three years later, a movie newsreel showed an officer handing him a captured Japanese flag, which Roosevelt recoiled from even touching.
But it would not be too much to say that Roosevelt was actually thankful for Pearl Harbor. An extreme statement? Let’s see.
Roosevelt"s Secretary of War, Henry L. Stimson, kept a diary. The diary, opened to the public years later, had this notation for Nov. 25, 1941. (Note the date. It is 12 days before Pearl Harbor.)
"Then at 12 o’clock we (viz. Gen. Marshall and I) went to the White House, where we were until nearly half-past one. At the meeting were Hull, Knox, Marshall, Stark and myself. There the President … brought up entirely the relations with the Japanese. He brought up the event that we were likely to be attacked perhaps (as soon as) next Monday, for the Japanese are notorious for making an attack without warning, and the question was what should we do. The question was how we should maneuver them into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves." (Quoted in "President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War," by Charles A. Beard, p. 517.)
It is difficult to convey the enormity of Stimson’s notation to any reader who did not live through the period of the Pearl Harbor attack and experience the wave of hysteria and hear the cry for vengeance that arose at the time.
Franklin Roosevelt, who presided at the meeting described by Stimson, led the chorus by saying: "No honest person today or a hundred years hence will be able to suppress a sense of indignation and horror" at the treachery of the Japanese government. Roosevelt’s friends and relatives who now have $1 billion in direct corporate investments and $4 billion in corporation and government loans to Japan have successfully repressed their "indignation and horror" in much less than a hundred years!
Was Stimson lying to his own diary? Did he, perhaps, believe in peace? Was be anti-colonial or pro-Japan?
No, none of these things.
Stimson himself had excellent credentials with the business community and an intimate knowledge of Asia that Japan was trying to take away from the United States. He had been a governor general of the Philippines. He was first cousin of two Morgan partners, according to the author of "America’s Sixty Families" and had been secretary of state for Hoover and secretary of war for Taft. He was a blue ribbon representative of big business in the government and a "career diplomat" as well.
But he apparently talked too much — not only to his diary, but later to a Congressional Committee of Inquiry on Pearl Harbor in 1946. There he said:
"One problem troubled us very much. If you know that your enemy is going to strike you, it is not usually wise to wait until he gets the jump on you by taking the initiative. In spite of the risk involved, however, in letting the Japanese fire the first shot, we realized that in order to have the full support of the American people it was desirable to make sure that the Japanese be the ones to do this so that there should remain no doubt in anyone’s mind as to who were the aggressors.
"We discussed at this meeting [mentioned in his diary] the basis on which this country’s position could be most clearly explained to our own people and to the world, in case we had to go into the fight quickly, because of some sudden move on the part of the Japanese. We discussed the possibility of a statement summarizing all the steps of aggression that the Japanese had already taken — the encirclement of our interests in the Philippines which was resulting, and the threat to our vital supplies of rubber from Malay. I reminded the President that on Aug. 17 he had warned the Japanese Ambassador that if the steps which the Japanese were then taking continued across the border into Thailand, he would regard it as a matter affecting our safety." (Beard, page 519)
"Thus the war against Japan was in defense of ‘our interests’ and ‘our vital supplies’ — in defense of "Thailand … as a matter affecting our safety."
The masses of the United States might not have been able to translate the word "our" correctly had they heard in 1941 what the little-publicized Congressional Committee heard in 1946. (This was still before the advent of TV.) They might not have understood that both Stimson and the president he quoted were speaking of "our" class — the class of big business, the capitalist class.
But they certainly would not have regarded the matter as a cause for war, in any case. It was only after "letting the Japanese fire the first shot," that they were willing to lay down their lives to defend "our" safety in Thailand.
In Thailand, where "our" safety was, and is, so important, Standard Oil of New Jersey, Union Oil of California, Union Carbide and Kaiser Aluminum are now going strong and quite "safely." Union Carbide is exploit ing the fabulous Thailand deposits of tin. And Kaiser has part interest in an aluminum rolling mill. In Bangkok, of course, these exploiters have a "friend" at the Chase Manhattan Bank.
Altogether, between 1950 and 1965, U.S. investments in Asia were multiplied by 6.5 times, says Victor Perlo. And this does not count Australia where they have been increasing at an even more rapid rate.
Without the defeat of Japan — where U.S. postwar investments are now approaching the billion-dollar mark — all this would have been impossible. So the bankers, of course, consider the loss of life at Pearl Harbor, Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima and Hiroshima as justified and their lies about the war as more than justified.
While the duplicity of the U.S. rulers was far greater at the time of Pearl Harbor than at the time of the "Maine," and the acquisition of the Philippines, the motive for war was exactly the same: to preserve and extend U.S. business interests in the Far East. The determination and need to do this had escalated even more than the lies.
But again, it is not the deceit of the U.S. rulers that is the main point here. The main point is this:
If the billionaire rulers would not retreat in 1900, and leave Asia to its own destiny; if in 1941 they would go so far as to virtually arrange an attack on their own forces to get the masses behind their war; if they now have many times the wealth in the area that they had then — is it any wonder that they don’t want to get out of Vietnam, much less the rest of Southeast Asia?
The Chinese and Vietnamese have used the phrase "bogged down" to describe some of the military aspects of U.S. involvement in Asia today. It is an eloquent phrase. But it is even more applicable to the whole social and political situation. The wealth of the U.S. ruling class is also "bogged down" in Asia.
Only a portion of their colossal holdings is in that continent and its adjoining islands, it is true. But this portion is deeply mired, inextricably stuck where it is — not because it is so important to Asia, but because it is so important to big business in the United States.
If the top U.S. businesses were to lose their vast holdings in eastern Asia and its neighboring lands, many of them would come crashing to the ground in the United States. This is what they mean by "defending the United States in Vietnam rather than Hawaii." This is why young men are dying by the thousands and the beautiful land is being mutilated along with the people — so the fortunes of billionaires will remain intact and the possibilities for more fortunes will remain open.
| | | | | | | | Wednesday, December 7, 2011 2:06 PM | | | Jay | | | | | | Labels: News |
US Air Force Pays SETI To Check Kepler-22b For Alien Life* http://t.co/7O2IJ3xpAbstract:USAF is putting up cash to develop "space situational awareness."* No jobs sighted.
Fresh wave of farmer suicides in India
via Sanhati http://bit.ly/sZeHpe
December 8, 2011
A fresh wave of farmer suicides has been reported in several states, pushing families deeper into poverty. A coalition of farm-sector organisations said it had identified over 700 cases this year, but state government officials said they were still verifying the incidents.
“Vidarbha in Maharashtra has emerged as the epicentre of farmer suicides again. There have been 680 suicides in just 6 districts in 2011,” said Kishor Tiwari of Vidarbha Jan Andolan Samithi, whose organisation has been recording such cases for a decade. The official farmer suicide count for the state in 2010 was 152.
According to the Alliance for Sustainable and Holistic Agriculture (ASHA), over 90 farmers have committed suicides in six districts of Andhra Pradesh in the month during Oct–Nov 2011. “We believe this situation needs national attention,” a spokesperson for the alliance said.
The suicides threaten to undo recent gains from India’s improved farm-credit policy, including the state-sponsored 2008 windfall loan waiver scheme, easier loans and higher floor prices.
“We are investigating the cases. In the past month or so, eight farmers have ended their lives in Wayanad district because of ginger prices crashing,” Kerala farm minister KP Mohanan told HT over phone.
In Andhra Pradesh, deputy chief minister Damodar Raja Narasihma said district collectors were verifying cases.
Causes of such suicides are hotly contested: while governments tend to claim these are largely due to indebtedness unrelated to farming, campaigners blame lopsided policies. However, new triggers are being blamed, such as climate change and inflation. A weakening rupee against the US dollar has led to a Rs 3,500-a-tonne increase in fertiliser prices, according to the Indian Farmers Fertiliser Cooperative Limited.
On the other hand, ginger prices in Kerala crashed from Rs 3,000 a quintal last year to Rs 600 now, according to Kerala’s farm minister.
| | | | | | | | Wednesday, December 7, 2011 5:14 PM | | | Jay | | | | | | Labels: News |
A Statement on the War
James P. Cannon
December 21, 1941
Written: 1941
Source: Fourth International, New York, Volume III, No. 1, January 1942, pages 3-4.
Transcription\HTML Markup: David Walters
Copyleft: James P. Cannon (www.marx.org) 2005. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License
December 22, 1941
The considerations which determined our attitude toward the war up to the out break of hostilities between the United States and the Axis powers retain their validity in the new situation.
We considered the war upon the part of all the capitalist powers involved—Germany and France, Italy and Great Britain — as an imperialist war.
This characterization of the war was determined for us by the character of the state powers involved in it. They were all capitalist states in the epoch of imperialism; themselves imperialist—oppressing other nations or peoples—or satellites of imperialist powers. The extension of the war to the Pacific and the formal entry of the United States and Japan change nothing in this basic analysis.
Following Lenin, it made no difference to us which imperialist bandit fired the first shot; every imperialist power has for a quarter of a century been "attacking" every other imperialist power by economic and political means; the resort to arms is but the culmination of this process, which will continue as long as capitalism endures.
This characterization of the war does not apply to the war of the Soviet Union against German imperialism. We make a fundamental distinction between the Soviet Union and its "democratic" allies. We defend the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union is a workers' state, although degenerated under the totalitarian-political rule of the Kremlin bureaucracy. Only traitors can deny support to the Soviet workers' state in its war against fascist Germany. To defend the Soviet Union, in spite of Stalin and against Stalin, to defend the nationalized property established by the October revolution. That is a progressive war.
The war of China against Japan we likewise characterize as a progressive war. We support China. China is a colonial country, battling for national independence against an imperialist power. A victory for China would be a tremendous blow against all imperialism, inspiring all colonial peoples to throw off the imperialist yoke. The reactionary regime of Chiang Kai-shek, subservient to the "democracies," has hampered China's ability to conduct a bold war for independence; but that does not alter for us the essential fact that China is an oppressed nation fighting against an imperialist oppressor. We are proud of the fact that the Fourth Internationalists of China are fighting in the front ranks against Japanese imperialism.
None of the reasons which oblige us to support the Soviet Union and China against their enemies can be said to apply to France or Britain. These imperialist "democracies" entered the war to maintain their lordship over the hundreds of millions of subject peoples in the British and French empires; to defend these "democracies" means to defend their oppression of the masses of Africa and Asia, Above all it means to defend the decaying capitalist social order. We do not defend that, either in Italy and Germany, or in France and Britain—or in the United States.
The Marxist analysis which determined our attitude toward the war up to December 8, 1941 [i.e. up to the Pearl Harbor raid] continues to determine our attitude now. We were internationalists before December 8; we still are. We believe that the most fundamental bond of loyalty of all the workers of the world is the bond of international solidarity of the workers against their exploiters. We cannot assume the slightest responsibility for this war. No imperialist regime can conduct a just war. We cannot support it for one moment.
We are the most irreconcilable enemies of the fascist dictatorships of Germany and Italy and the military dictatorship of Japan. Our co-thinkers of the Fourth International in the Axis nations and the conquered countries are fighting and dying in the struggle to organize the coming revolutions against Hitler and Mussolini.
We are doing all in our power to speed those revolutions. But those ex-socialists, intellectuals and labor leaders, who in the name of "democracy" support the war of United States imperialism against its imperialist foes and rivals, far from aiding the German and Italian anti-fascists, only hamper their work and betray their struggle. The Allied imperialists, as every German worker knows, aim to impose a second and worse Versailles; the fear of that is Hitler's greatest asset in keeping the masses of Germany in subjection. The fear of the foreign yoke holds back the development of the German revolution against Hitler.
Our program to aid the German masses to overthrow Hitler demands, first of all, that they be guaranteed against a second Versailles. When the people of Germany can feel assured that military defeat will not be followed by the destruction of Germany's economic power and the imposition of unbearable burdens by the victors, Hitler will be overthrown from within Germany. But such guarantees against a second Versailles cannot be given by Germany's imperialist foes; nor, if given, would they be accepted by the German people. Wilson's 14 points are still remembered in Germany, and his promise that the United States was conducting war against the Kaiser and not against the German people. Yet the victors' peace, and the way in which the victors "organized" the world from 1918 to 1933, constituted war against the German people. The German people will not accept any new promises from those who made that peace and conducted that war.
In the midst of the war against Hitler, it is necessary to extend the hand of fraternity to the German people. This can be done honestly and convincingly only by a Workers' and Farmers' Government. We advocate the Workers' and Farmers' Government. Such a government, and only such a government, can conduct a war against Hitler, Mussolini and the Mikado in cooperation with the oppressed peoples of Germany, Italy and Japan. Our program against Hitlerism and for a Workers' and Farmers' Government is today the program of only a small minority. The great majority actively or passively supports the war program of the Roosevelt administration. As a minority we must submit to that majority in action. We do not sabotage the war or obstruct the military forces in any way. The Trotskyists go with their generation into the armed forces. We abide by the decisions of the majority. But we retain our opinions and insist on our right to express them.
Our aim is to convince the majority that our program is the only one which can put an end to war, fascism and economic convulsions. In this process of education the terrible facts speak loudly for our contention. Twice in twenty-five years world wars have wrought destruction. The instigators and leaders of those wars do not offer, and cannot offer, a plausible promise that a third, fourth and fifth world war will not follow if they and their social system remain dominant. Capitalism can offer no prospect but the slaughter of millions and the destruction of civilization. Only socialism can save humanity from this abyss. This is the truth. As the terrible war unfolds, this truth will be recognized by tens of millions who will not hear us now. The war-tortured masses will adopt our program and liberate the people of all countries from war and fascism. In this dark hour we clearly see the socialist future and prepare the way for it. Against the mad chorus of national hatreds we advance once more the old slogan of socialist internationalism: Workers of the World Unite!
New York, December 22, 1941
| Communists and the struggle against imperialism |
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| Only by returning to and uniting around the profound truths contained within the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao can the communist movement gain the strength it needs in the present era of crisis and war. |
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| The most cursory glance at the contemporary international situation shows that imperialism’s inherent tendency to wage wars of aggression has not in any way disappeared. If anything it has become enhanced, notably after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the socialist countries of central and eastern Europe, since when we have seen numerous wars of colonial reconquest, such as those against Iraq, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and, most recently, Libya. Moreover, faced with what is emerging as the gravest economic crisis in the history of capitalism, the pace and intensity of imperialism’s inexorable drive to war is increasing yet further. The imperialist powers are presently at war in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. They are also waging unofficial and proxy wars in Somalia, Pakistan, Yemen and other countries. They are abetting and bankrolling the Israeli zionists’ war against the Palestinian people. This year they have also waged war against the Ivory Coast. And the list continues. Even with war already raging on so many fronts, a further war is now being prepared against Syria, the danger of which grows with each passing day. Syria, in turn, is seen as a stepping stone to an attack on Iran ... and so on. Just as the wars of the 1930s, waged by the fascist powers against Spain, China, Korea, Albania and Ethiopia, paved the way for an attack on the socialist Soviet Union and an all-out world war, so today the imperialists’ ultimate target is the People’s Republic of China, a conflict which, if it came, would once again plunge the whole of humanity into the abyss of war. Response of the communist movement to imperialist expansionism Our party, the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist) has taken a consistent position on all this war-mongering activity of the imperialist powers – a position of absolute and implacable opposition to every aspect of all the wars prepared, instigated and waged by imperialism. And we have called for the victory of all those fighting against imperialism, irrespective of who they are, their social composition or the nature of their programme. Sadly, this clear and straightforward position is far from universally accepted in the working-class or anti-war movements, whether in this country or elsewhere. Indeed, the scoundrels who dominate the leadership of the Stop the War Coalition have attempted to bureaucratically expel us for daring to express our unequivocal support for the government of Libya, whose overthrow was the objective of the vicious and predatory war waged by Nato and our own ruling class against the Libyan people. Such people are incorrigible counter-revolutionaries, heirs, in the main, to a bankrupt ideology, Trotskyism, which has betrayed and sabotaged every revolutionary movement to which it has come within sniffing distance since it first emerged as a discernible political trend in the 1920s. However, the job of extirpating this counter-revolutionary filth from whatever toehold they might gain within the working-class movement would be made immeasurably easier if the whole communist movement was united around a clear and principled line. Sadly, this, too, is far from the case. Around the world, there are a number of basically decent communist parties, some of them with deep roots amongst the working people, many of which are leading and waging principled and courageous struggles for socialism, yet who nevertheless fail to take a consistent anti-imperialist stand. Such parties have, for example, prevaricated in the face of the war against Libya, just as they did in the case of Iraq before, claiming that they could not give unequivocal support to such national-revolutionary leaders as Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi, as they were not communists. Moreover, they have followed the imperialist media’s lead in maligning these leaders as ‘brutal dictators’ when in fact imperialism’s objection to them is that they directed their countries’ resources to developing infrastructure and industry, to lifting their peoples out of poverty, and also supported anti-imperialist struggles in all parts of the world. They died as heroes and martyrs leading their peoples’ struggles against imperialism for sovereignty, independence and control of their national resources for the benefit of ordinary people. Indeed, in these respects, they set examples that many communists could do well to emulate. Some communist parties, in both Latin America and Europe, have also striven to find fault with and to slight the revolutionary governments of Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, which are presently seeking ways to open a road to socialism in their countries. Such mistakes and incorrect stands on the part of those who should be guiding the masses have served to weaken both the anti-imperialist struggle and the struggle for socialism, whose essential unity is encapsulated in the slogan advanced by Lenin and the Communist International (Comintern) long ago: “Workers and oppressed people of the world, unite!” And, since they weaken the struggle of the working and oppressed people, these positions run counter to Marxism Leninism. Marxism Leninism contains a rich body of theory concerning the anti-imperialist national struggles of oppressed peoples, and the attitude that the proletariat should take towards them. This rich body of theory has been derived from the struggles of working and oppressed people around the world, and has been enriched and developed with their blood, making it a sacred and priceless inheritance of our movement. With imperialism’s drive to war becoming ever more frenzied, the international communist movement needs to reaffirm and hold fast to these teachings. If such a vital outcome can be secured then both the anti-imperialist struggles of the oppressed nations and peoples and the proletariat’s struggle for socialism will surely take a great leap forward. The purpose of this article, therefore, is to make a modest contribution to that understanding and rectification by highlighting what is the principled revolutionary position on a number of related questions where presently sections of the communist movement are confused and disoriented, based on some key writings of the five greatest leaders and teachers of the working and oppressed people of the whole world: Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, V I Lenin, J V Stalin and Mao Zedong. Tenets of Marxist-Leninist science Our starting point is that the communist movement is, and has been from its inception, an international one. In the founding document of our movement, The Manifesto of the Communist Party, Marx and Engels wrote: “The Communists are distinguished from the other working class parties by this only: 1. In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality. 2. In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.” As we have noted above, there are still some comrades and parties in the communist ranks who pull back from unequivocal support for the anti-imperialist struggle on the grounds that some leaders of that struggle are ‘bourgeois’. Such a position runs completely counter to that of Lenin, one for which the founder of the first workers’ state in history fought with all his might. Lenin insisted that, “all communist parties must assist the bourgeois-democratic liberation movement in these [oppressed] countries, and that the duty of rendering the most active assistance rests primarily with the workers of the country the backward nation is colonially or financially dependent on”. (‘Draft theses on national and colonial questions for the Second Congress of the Communist International’, Collected Works, Vol 31) In the ensuing debate at that congress, Lenin further explained: “What is the most important, the fundamental idea of our theses? It is the difference between the oppressed and the oppressor nations ... Imperialism is characterised by the fact that the whole world is now divided into a large number of oppressed nations and a very small number of oppressor nations that are enormously rich and strong in the military sense. “The enormous mass, more than 1,000 million, most probably 1,250 million, and thus if we estimate the population of the world at 1,750 million some 70 percent of the world population belong to the oppressed nations, which are either in direct colonial dependence, or appear as semi-colonial states like, for example, Persia, Turkey and China, or which, defeated by a great imperialist army, have fallen into marked dependency after the peace treaties. “This idea of the difference between nations, their division into the oppressed and the oppressors runs through all the theses.” (Minutes of the Second Congress of the Communist International, Fourth Session, 25 July 1920) This approach was further spelled out in the ‘Theses on the eastern question’ adopted by the Comintern’s fourth congress in 1922. Here, the Bolsheviks explained: “The refusal of communists … to take part in the fight against imperialist tyranny, on the pretext of their supposed ‘defence’ of independent class interests, is the worst kind of opportunism and can only discredit the proletarian revolution in the East.” (Alan Adler [ed], Theses, Resolutions and Manifestos of the First Four Congresses of the Third International, 1980) But to listen to some communist parties today, one could be forgiven for thinking that the working-class position is only to support those uprisings and rebellions against imperialism that are clear in their goals and composition, and free of contradictions. Such a view was ridiculed by Lenin, who rounded on the ‘socialist’ critics of Dublin’s Easter Rising of 1916 as follows: “To imagine that social revolution is conceivable without revolts by small nations in the colonies and in Europe, without revolutionary outbursts by a section of the petty bourgeoisie with all its prejudices, without a movement of the politically non-conscious proletarian and semi-proletarian masses against oppression by the landowners, the church, and the monarchy, against national oppression, etc – to imagine all this is to repudiate social revolution. “So one army lines up in one place and says, ‘We are for socialism’, and another, somewhere else and says, ‘We are for imperialism’, and that will be a social revolution! Only those who hold such a ridiculously pedantic view could vilify the Irish rebellion by calling it a ‘putsch’. “Whoever expects a ‘pure’ social revolution will never live to see it. Such a person pays lip service to revolution without understanding what revolution is.” (‘The discussion on self-determination summed up’, Collected Works, Volume 22) Nor did Lenin subscribe to the view that the anti-imperialist struggle of the oppressed occupied a secondary, subordinate position to that waged by the proletariat in the imperialist heartlands. On the contrary, he stated: “The socialist revolution will not be solely, or chiefly, a struggle of the revolutionary proletarians in each country against their bourgeoisie – no, it will be a struggle of all the imperialist-oppressed colonies and countries, of all dependent countries, against international imperialism. Characterising the approach of the world social revolution in the Party Programme we adopted last March, we said that the civil war of the working people against the imperialists and exploiters in all the advanced countries is beginning to be combined with national wars against international imperialism. That is confirmed by the course of the revolution, and will be more and more confirmed as time goes on.” (‘Address to the Second All-Russia Congress of Communist Organisations of the Peoples of the East’, 22 November 1919, Collected Works, Vol 30) In one of his last articles, Lenin went so far as to state: “In the last analysis, the outcome of the struggle will be determined by the fact that Russia, India, China, etc, account for the overwhelming majority of the population of the globe. And during the past few years it is this majority that has been drawn into the struggle for emancipation with extraordinary rapidity, so that in this respect there cannot be the slightest doubt what the final outcome of the world struggle will be. In this sense, the complete victory of socialism is fully and absolutely assured.” (‘Better fewer, but better’, 2 March 1923, Collected Works, Vol 33) As with so many aspects of his work, these teachings of Lenin’s were based on, and developed, the pioneering work of the founders of our movement, Marx and Engels. In ‘The right of nations to self-determination’, Lenin wrote: “The policy of Marx and Engels on the Irish question serves as a splendid example of the attitude the proletariat of the oppressor nations should adopt towards national movements, an example which has lost none of its immense practical importance.” (May 1914, Collected Works, Vol 20) Indeed, a brief review of Marx and Engels’ policy on the Irish question demonstrates that this observation of Lenin’s remains as true today as when he wrote it in 1914. For Marx and Engels, resolute support for the struggle of the Irish people was not only a matter of justice for Ireland, but also something that was in the absolute and essential interest of the British working class. On 9 April 1870, Marx wrote to Sigfrid Meyer and August Vogt as follows: “After studying the Irish question for many years I have come to the conclusion that the decisive blow against the English ruling classes (and it will be decisive for the workers’ movement all over the world) cannot be delivered in England but only in Ireland.” On 10 December 1869, Marx wrote that his paper on the Irish question, to be read at the Council of the First International, would be couched as follows: “Quite apart from all phrases about ‘international’ and ‘humane’ justice for Ireland - which are taken for granted in the International Council - it is in the direct and absolute interest of the English working class to get rid of their present connection with Ireland. And this is my fullest conviction…For a long time I believed that it would be possible to overthrow the Irish regime by English working class ascendancy…Deeper study has now convinced me of the opposite. The English working class will never accomplish anything until it has got rid of Ireland ... English reaction in England had its roots in the subjugation of Ireland.” (Cited in V I Lenin, ‘The right of nations to self-determination’, op cit) Marx therefore held to his view of the importance and necessity of supporting the Irish people’s fight against British rule, irrespective of the forms of struggle adopted or the character of the leadership at any particular time. Yet in contrast to some of his latter-day would-be followers, he did not look at the movement seeking to find what was backward or reactionary but rather to identify its essentially progressive nature. Thus, on 30 November 1867, Marx wrote to Engels that: “Fenianism is characterised by socialist (in the negative sense, as directed against the appropriation of the soil) leanings and as a lower orders movement.” (Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol 42) This profound characterisation by Marx finds its broad analogy in many contemporary national-revolutionary movements, including those that held state power in Libya and Iraq until they were destroyed in genocidal imperialist wars of aggression. But, even though too many communists fail to support anti-imperialist movements that have a clearly progressive social character and content, as was the case with the former governments of Iraq and Libya, along with a host of national-liberation movements from the Sandinistas in Nicaragua to the Irish republican movement, it is essential to grasp that the sole deciding question is not whether the movement in question has such a character, but whether a country, a party, a movement, or a leader is fighting against imperialism. Everything else is subordinate to that overriding principle, including other democratic questions and rights, which again, too many communists raise (and not just where such problems exist but even where they do not) as a pretext for failing to support the anti-imperialist struggle. The genuine communist standpoint on this question was articulated with absolute clarity by J V Stalin as follows: “The revolutionary character of a national movement under the conditions of imperialist oppression does not necessarily presuppose the existence of proletarian elements in the movement, the existence of a revolutionary or a republican programme of the movement, the existence of a democratic basis of the movement. The struggle that the Emir of Afghanistan is waging for the independence of Afghanistan is objectively a revolutionary struggle, despite the monarchist views of the Emir and his associates, for it weakens, disintegrates and undermines imperialism; whereas the struggle waged by such ‘desperate’ democrats and ‘socialists’, ‘revolutionaries’ and republicans as, for example, Kerensky and Tsereteli, Renaudel and Scheidemann, Chernov and Dan, Henderson and Clynes, during the imperialist war was a reactionary struggle, for its results were the embellishment, the strengthening, the victory, of imperialism. “For the same reasons, the struggle that the Egyptian merchants and bourgeois intellectuals are waging for the independence of Egypt is objectively a revolutionary struggle, despite the bourgeois origin and bourgeois title of the leaders of the Egyptian national movement, despite the fact that they are opposed to socialism; whereas the struggle that the British ‘Labour’ government is waging to preserve Egypt’s dependent position is for the same reason a reactionary struggle, despite the proletarian origin and the proletarian title of the members of the government, despite the fact that they are ‘for’ socialism. “There is no need to mention the national movement in other, larger, colonial and dependent countries, such as India and China, every step of which along the road to liberation, even if it runs counter to the demands of formal democracy, is a steam-hammer blow at imperialism, ie, is undoubtedly a revolutionary step.” (Foundations of Leninism, 1924) This Marxist-Leninist understanding was brilliantly applied and further developed by Mao Zedong, who, on this basis, led the Chinese revolution to victory, the second greatest victory of the working class after the October Revolution. Writing in January 1940, in the midst of the bitter war against Japanese imperialism, in which he had skilfully constructed a united front with Chiang Kai-shek, despite the fact that Chiang really was a butcher of communists, workers and peasants, Mao stated: “In this era, any revolution in a colony or semi-colony that is directed against imperialism, ie, against the international bourgeoisie or international capitalism, no longer comes within the old category of the bourgeois-democratic world revolution, but within the new category. It is no longer part of the old bourgeois, or capitalist, world revolution, but is part of the new world revolution, the proletarian-socialist world revolution. Such revolutionary colonies and semi-colonies can no longer be regarded as allies of the counter-revolutionary front of world capitalism; they have become allies of the revolutionary front of world socialism. “Although such a revolution in a colonial and semi-colonial country is still fundamentally bourgeois-democratic in its social character during its first stage or first step, and although its objective mission is to clear the path for the development of capitalism, it is no longer a revolution of the old type led by the bourgeoisie with the aim of establishing a capitalist society and a state under bourgeois dictatorship. It belongs to the new type of revolution led by the proletariat with the aim, in the first stage, of establishing a new democratic society and a state under the joint dictatorship of all the revolutionary classes. “Thus this revolution actually serves the purpose of clearing a still wider path for the development of socialism. In the course of its progress, there may be a number of further sub-stages, because of changes on the enemy’s side and within the ranks of our allies, but the fundamental character of the revolution remains unchanged. “Such a revolution attacks imperialism at its very roots, and is therefore not tolerated but opposed by imperialism. However, it is favoured by socialism and supported by the land of socialism and the socialist international proletariat ... “No matter what classes, parties or individuals in an oppressed nation join the revolution, and no matter whether they themselves are conscious of the point or understand it, so long as they oppose imperialism, their revolution becomes part of the proletarian socialist world revolution and they become its allies.”(‘On new democracy’, Selected Works, Vol 2, emphasis added) Comrade Mao Zedong had no time for those who rejected the united front against imperialism. In ‘On tactics against Japanese imperialism’, he wrote, in words that apply equally to today’s anti-imperialist struggles: “Comrades, which is right, the united front or closed-doorism? Which indeed is approved by Marxism Leninism? I answer without the slightest hesitation – the united front and not closed-doorism. Three-year-olds have many ideas that are right, but they cannot be entrusted with serious national or world affairs because they do not understand them yet. Marxism Leninism is opposed to the ‘infantile disorder’ found in the revolutionary ranks. This infantile disorder is just what the confirmed exponents of closed-doorism advocate. “Like every other activity in the world, revolution always follows a tortuous road and never a straight one. The alignment of forces in the revolutionary and counter-revolutionary camps can change, just as everything else in the world changes. The party’s new tactics of a broad united front start from the two fundamental facts that Japanese imperialism is bent on reducing all China to a colony and that China’s revolutionary forces still have serious weaknesses. In order to attack the forces of the counter-revolution, what the revolutionary forces need today is to organise millions upon millions of the masses and move a mighty revolutionary army into action. “The plain truth is that only a force of such magnitude can crush the Japanese imperialists and the traitors and collaborators. Therefore, united-front tactics are the only Marxist-Leninist tactics. The tactics of closed-doorism are, on the contrary, the tactics of the regal isolationist. Closed-doorism just ‘drives the fish into deep waters and the sparrows into the thickets’, and it will drive the millions upon millions of the masses, this mighty army, over to the enemy’s side, which will certainly win his acclaim. “In practice, closed-doorism is the faithful servant of the Japanese imperialists and the traitors and collaborators. Its adherents’ talk of the ‘pure’ and the ‘straight’ will be condemned by Marxist Leninists and commended by the Japanese imperialists. We definitely want no closed-doorism; what we want is the revolutionary national united front, which will spell death to the Japanese imperialists and the traitors and collaborators.” (Selected Works, Vol 1) Revolutionary and counter-revolutionary patriotism Yet another mistake made by some communists is to excoriate the leaders of the anti-imperialist movement for their patriotism and national standpoint as though this were some sort of crime against the supposed purity of the revolution, rather than a basis of their struggle and a prerequisite of their victory. Marxism Leninism holds that there are, in fact, two types of patriotism, two types of nationalism, that of an oppressor nation, which is reactionary and unjust and that of an oppressed nation, which is progressive, just and revolutionary. In ‘The role of the Chinese Communist Party in the national war’, Mao Zedong addressed this question as follows: “Can a communist, who is an internationalist, at the same time be a patriot? We hold that he not only can be but must be. The specific content of patriotism is determined by historical conditions. There is the ‘patriotism’ of the Japanese aggressors and of Hitler, and there is our patriotism. “Communists must resolutely oppose the ‘patriotism’ of the Japanese aggressors and of Hitler. The communists of Japan and Germany are defeatists with regard to the wars being waged by their countries. To bring about the defeat of the Japanese aggressors and of Hitler by every possible means is in the interests of the Japanese and the German people, and the more complete the defeat the better. This is what the Japanese and German communists should be doing and what they are doing. For the wars launched by the Japanese aggressors and Hitler are harming their own people as well as the people of the world. “China’s case is different, because she is the victim of aggression. Chinese communists must therefore combine patriotism with internationalism. We are at once internationalists and patriots, and our slogan is, ‘Fight to defend the motherland against the aggressors’. For us defeatism is a crime and to strive for victory in the War of Resistance is an inescapable duty. For only by fighting in defence of the motherland can we defeat the aggressors and achieve national liberation. And only by achieving national liberation will it be possible for the proletariat and other working people to achieve their own emancipation. “The victory of China and the defeat of the invading imperialists will help the people of other countries. Thus in wars of national liberation patriotism is applied internationalism.”(Selected Works, Vol 2, emphasis added) Mao’s standpoint here is identical with that of Engels, who in 1882, wrote to Karl Kautsky that: “I therefore hold the view that two nations in Europe have not only the right but even the duty to be nationalistic before they become internationalistic: the Irish and the Poles. They are most internationalistic when they are genuinely nationalistic.” (Letter to Karl Kautsky by F Engels, 7 February 1882) Marxism Leninism is not a dogma but a guide to action. Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao, the great revolutionary teachers, laid out with complete clarity the attitude of the revolutionary proletariat to the struggle against imperialism and towards the national movements of the oppressed. With imperialism convulsed with crisis and hurtling towards new and ever more dangerous wars of aggression, the work of reuniting and reinvigorating the entire international communist movement on this principled and revolutionary basis is one which will brook no further delay. Uphold the revolutionary teachings and example of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao! Victory to the resistance in Libya, Afghanistan and Iraq! Victory to all oppressed peoples fighting against imperialism! Workers and oppressed people of the world, unite! |
| | | | | | | | Monday, December 5, 2011 6:53 PM | | | Jay | | | | | | Labels: News |
The Comintern in 1922: The periphery pushes back
Until recently, I shared a widely held opinion that the Bolshevik Party of Russia towered above other members of the early Communist International as a source of fruitful political initiatives. However, my work in preparing the English edition of the Comintern's Fourth Congress, held at the end of 1922, led me to modify this view.(1) On a number of weighty strategic issues before the congress, front-line parties, especially the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), played a decisive role in revising Executive Committee proposals and shaping the Congress's outcome.
When I translated the first page of this congress, I was not far distant from the view of Tony Cliff, who, referring to the 1921–22 period, referred to the "extreme comparative backwardness of communist leaders outside Russia." They had an "uncritical attitude towards the Russian party," which stood as "a giant among dwarfs," Cliff stated.(2)
Duncan Hallas wrote of the Comintern's failure "to emancipate the pupil from excessive dependence on the teacher."(3) A similar view is advanced by historians hostile to the Comintern tradition, although they regard Bolshevik influence as not helpful but calamitous.
In recent years, a new generation of historians has focused attention on the dynamics of Comintern member parties, stressing the influence of their worker ranks and the parties' relative autonomy. Kevin McDermott and Jeremy Agnew present the view, widely held among these historians, that "strategy was defined in Moscow, but tactics, to a certain extent, could be elaborated on the ground by the parties themselves."(4) However, the record of the Fourth Congress suggests that at least in 1922, the influence of front-line parties was felt in determining not only national tactics but international strategy.
I will review five questions on which this influence is evident:
- Resistance to fascism.
- Transitional demands.
- Workers' and farmers' government.
- The anti-imperialist united front.
- The united front issue as a whole.
Resisting fascism
Five days before the congress began, Fascist chief Benito Mussolini took power in Italy, after a two-year rampage of state-encouraged Fascist violence against the workers' movement. Fascism was something new, but right-wing violence was a familiar threat. Advanced workers in Italy built a promising national movement of defense guards to fend it off, called the Arditi del Populo. Unfortunately, both the Italian Communist and Socialist parties denounced the Arditi and banned their members from taking part. The Italian Communists opposed in principle taking part in defense guards not organized by their own party.
In Moscow, Nikolai Bukharin persuaded the Comintern Executive to write the Italian comrades calling for participation in the Arditi. The Italian party brushed off this advice, however, and Executive dropped the matter. At the Fourth Congress, leading Bolsheviks said nothing about the need to resist Fascist attacks, while Comintern President Gregory Zinoviev hailed the Italian party's conduct as worthy of "the most important chapter" in a "policy manual for Communist parties."(5) This astonishing endorsement confirms Paul Levi's fears when the Italian party was formed: the Executive had indeed become the prisoner of the Italians' ultraleftist course.
It was the German party that took the initiative to correct this error. Two days before the opening session, it adopted a motion instructing its delegation to "urge an international campaign against fascism, in its different forms." This need was raised during the congress proceedings by a number of delegates from Germany, Switzerland, and Czechoslovakia. Yet the discussion was not joined in plenary or commission sessions. It was not until seven minutes before the end of his summary on the Italian question that Zinoviev inexplicably changed course, accusing the Italian party of "gross errors" with regard to fascism.(6) "We must become a vanguard of the entire anti-fascist struggle" and get involved with "confused forces" such as the Arditi, he said. Zinoviev stopped short of endorsing an anti-fascist united front, but the Executive adopted and implemented such a policy soon after the congress.
In summary, the two contending positions on anti-fascist defense were advanced by the Italian and German comrades; the Executive vacillated between one and the other.
Transitional demands
Our second example of front-line party influence, the concept of transitional demands, dominated the congress discussion of program. Transitional demands, as Leon Trotsky later explained, aimed to "help the masses in the process of the daily struggle to find the bridge between present demands and the socialist program of the revolution." The concept was adopted by the Comintern Third Congress in 1921, on the grounds that Communists must offer "more than the bare program of the dictatorship of the proletariat." Typical transitional demands, in the German context, were for a workers' government and workers' control of production.(7)
In mid-1922, the Comintern executive began work to develop a program for the International. Bukharin opposed including transitional demands in the program on the grounds that they concerned merely tactical matters. Czech leader Bohumir Šmeral and Clara Zetkin of the German party argued for their inclusion, and the debate was referred to the Fourth Congress.
At the congress, Bukharin reiterated his view. A second report, by German Communist August Thalheimer, argued for inclusion of transitional demands in the program, stressing the dangers of a "separation of tactical principles from goals," a characteristic of the Second International "that opened the door to their descent into opportunism."(8) A few days later, Bolshevik leaders endorsed Thalheimer's position, as did the congress, with Italian delegates dissenting.
German party leaders had obtained an open repudiation of the position of a leading Bolshevik on a principled issue.
Workers' government
I've written elsewhere of the workers' government demand, so I'll restrict myself here to how it figured in Fourth Congress debates. Going into the congress, two interpretations of this demand were advanced. One, defended by Zinoviev, the Italian leadership, and a minority in the German party headed by Ruth Fischer and Arkadi Maslow, held that the term "workers' government" was merely a pseudonym for a dictatorship of the proletariat similar to that in Soviet Russia. The other, advanced by Comintern leader Karl Radek, the Germany party majority, and its allies in neighboring parties, saw a workers' government as "one of the possible points of transition to the dictatorship of the proletariat," whose tasks could include "arming the proletariat … introducing [workers'] control of production, shifting the main burden of taxation to the shoulders of the rich," and so on.(9)
A parallel debate concerned Zinoviev's notion that a Labour Party in Britain would constitute a workers' government. The German delegation introduced an amendment that sought to refute illusions on this score.
The portion of the Theses on Tactics dealing with these issues was the most frequently and thoroughly rewritten text in the Congress resolutions. The ultimately adopted draft, which has until now not been available in English, reflected the views of the German party majority on the disputed points.(10)
A similar alignment of forces took shape around differences on how to apply the united front policy that the Comintern had adopted a year earlier. The German party majority favored engaging in negotiations, when appropriate, with leaders of the Social Democratic parties and unions. The German minority and its allies were critical of such efforts and stressed the need to build the united front "from below." The Italian, Czechoslovak, Polish, French, British, and U.S. parties were actively involved in the debate. Once again, Radek blocked with the German majority; Zinoviev was closer to the minority's views. The final resolution took an intermediate position, acknowledging points made by both sides.
The anti-imperialist united front
The Fourth Congress also adopted a call for an anti-imperialist united front in the colonial and semi-colonial countries, aimed at "the mobilization of all revolutionary forces," including those based outside the working class, in "an extended, lengthy struggle against world imperialism."(11)
The term was new, but the concept had been endorsed at the Second Comintern Congress in 1920, with its call for support of national-revolutionary forces in the colonies. It was given life at the subsequent Congress of the Peoples of the East in Baku, which responded to moves by national revolutionaries across Asia to link up with the Bolshevik-led revolution in Russia.
At the Fourth Congress, the need for an anti-imperialist united front was first voiced by the Indian delegate M.N. Roy. Tan Malaka, from the Dutch Indies, recounted his party's success in forging such an alliance with Islamic anti-imperialists, and called for the Comintern to endorse engagement with pan-Islamic forces. This call was echoed by Tahar Boudengha of Tunisia, who also denounced the chauvinism of the French party's members in Algeria. Two black delegates from the U.S. called for the building of a revolutionary movement among blacks in every continent. Many delegates from Asia denounced the inadequate attention to colonial liberation in the metropolitan parties and the Comintern congress itself.
The response of Bolshevik delegates was not uniform. G.I. Safarov, a leader of Comintern work in Asia, protested the "passivity" displayed on this question by a "considerable sector" of the Congress, while Radek dismissed complaints, saying, "interest in parties is tied to their deeds."(12)
Congress resolutions incorporated proposals from colonial delegates on several key points.
An alternative interpretation
The facts I have related can be interpreted differently, with Bolshevik leaders seen as the central actors. After all, Bolsheviks gave the main congress reports; Zinoviev and Radek dominated the proceedings. The congress resounded with calls for more centralism, more authority to the Moscow Executive.
Certainly, in all the main discussions, we see an interplay between Bolshevik leaders and spokespersons of front-line parties. Here are four reasons, however, to consider the front-line parties as the more dynamic force in this partnership.
- Comintern leaders almost never refer to Bolshevik experience or quote from Bolshevik leaders in debating political policy. Even when there are obvious precedents for a policy in Bolshevik history, this is rarely mentioned.
- The divisions in the Comintern do not relate to any perceptible differentiation within the Bolshevik party.
- In almost every major debate, the Bolshevik leaders assigned to the Comintern are divided. Moreover, their alignments are not consistent; they shift over time and according to the issue.
- The actions of Moscow Executive, on the issues we have discussed, display what Jean-François Fayet has called "persistent ambiguity."(13)
Much depends on how we interpret Radek's role. Here Fayet, his biographer, sums up his role aptly: Radek defended the authority of the Executive, but politically he upheld the united-front policy developed in collaboration with Paul Levi. As Radek himself said, when Stuttgart workers gave the united front its first formulation, "If I had been in Moscow, the idea would not even have crossed my mind."(14)
Clara Zetkin made much the same point a month later in a well-known letter to Lenin. The ECCI was "far too cut off" to do more than "recognise the broad lines of development," she said. It "cannot possibly survey all the concrete circumstances that must be considered."(15) Surely the conflicting views, for and against the united front, could only have been developed in the heat of the struggle.
A broader pattern
Disagreements related to the united front and related issues can be traced back to 1920, the year that the Comintern truly began to function. During this year, the postwar revolutionary upsurge in Europe began to ebb. Many communist workers believed that a renewed offensive, with greater audacity, could carry the day. This mood was first formulated by Bela Kun and other Hungarian exiles. Others, with Paul Levi in the lead, sought to counter with a strategy that could enable Communists to win the mass support needed for victory. These currents, both endogenous to the workers' movement outside Russia, provided the impulse for the ideas debated in Moscow.
Finally, with regard to our panel today. The main proponents of united front policy in Germany – Levi, Zetkin, Heinrich Brandler, Ernst Meyer, August Thalheimer, Edwin Hoernle, Fritz Heckert, Erich Melcher – had all been comrades of Rosa Luxemburg in the wartime Spartacus League. Their record suggests that, even after the expulsion of Levi, the concern of Luxemburg and the Spartacists to strengthen ties with the broad masses of workers remained a creative force within the Comintern.
This working paper was presented as part of the International Communist Movement stream of the Eighth Historical Materialism Annual Conference in London, England, on November 10, 2011.
References
1. John Riddell, (ed.) 2012, Toward the United Front: Proceedings of the Fourth Congress of the Communist International, 1922 (hereafter TUF), 1922, Leiden: Brill.
2. Tony Cliff, 1979, The Bolsheviks and World Communism, in Lenin, Volume 4, London: Pluto Press, pp. 54–7.
3. Duncan Hallas, 1985, The Comintern, London: Bookmarks, p. 71.
4. Kevin McDermott and Jeremy Agnew 1997, The Comintern: A History of International Communism from Lenin to Stalin, New York: St. Martin's Press, pp. 24–26.
5. TUF, pp. 105–8.
6. TUF, pp. 1053–4.
7. Leon Trotsky 1973, The Transitional Program for Socialist Revolution, New York: Pathfinder Press, p. 75; Comintern 1921, Protokoll des III. Kongresses der Kommunistischen Internationale, Hamburg: Verlag der Kommunistischen Internationale, pp. 475–6; Alan Adler (ed.), 1980, Theses, Resolutions and Manifestos of the First Four Congresses of the Third International, London: Ink Links, p. 286.
8. TUF, 479–80, 497–8 (Bukharin); 510–15 (Thalheimer).
9. Comintern 1922, Bericht über die Tätigkeit des Präsidiums und der Exekutive der Kommunistischen International für die Zeit vom 6. März bis 11. Juni 1922, Hamburg: Carl Hoym Nachf., p. 123 (Zinoviev); TUF 167 (Radek); 1159–62 (resolution).
10. See John Riddell, 2011, "The Comintern's Unknown Decision on Workers' Governments."
11. TUF, p. 1187
12. TUF, pp. 720, 735.
13. Jean-François Fayet, 2004, Karl Radek (1885–1939): Biographie politique, Bern: P. Lang, p. 352.
14. Pierre Broué, 2005, The German Revolution 1917–1923, Leiden: Brill, p. 469
15. Ruth Stoljarowa and Peter Schmalfuss (eds.) 1990, Briefe Deutscher an Lenin, 1917–1923, Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 215.
| | | | | | | | Thursday, December 1, 2011 11:56 PM | | | Jay | | | | | | Labels: News |
....He reportedly ordered prisoners to contaminate food with spit, urine and feces. He punched, slapped and spat on prisoners. He used racist language with abandon.
Original Tweet: http://twitter.com/TheAngryindian/status/145062960073674755
| | | | | | | | Thursday, December 8, 2011 10:38 AM | | | Jay | | | | | | Labels: News |
It is shocking that in a period when there are two major labor union lockouts [American Crystal Sugar and Cooper Tire], and when #ows has shown that some novel initiatives for action and mobilizing workers and their oppressed allies can achieve results, that O4J is resorting to the good old MLK Day demo as a tactic.
Reviewing the pages of WW newspaper over the last few years, we find that there is always a MLK Day demo. Usually around jobs or against war. Every year.
O4J was presented as being somewhat informed by #ows, but more advanced regarding socialism and racism; but this is the same stale "let's call a march and round up the usual suspects" mentality that is long past its expiration date.
What ever happened to the Socialists Unite statement from 2010? Now that was something to build on!
Jay
'Occupy 4 Jobs' day
By Brenda RyanNew YorkPublished Dec 19, 2011
The Occupy 4 Jobs network is celebrating Martin Luther King Jr. Day in New York City with a direct action to demand jobs. The Jan. 16 event will begin at 1 p.m. at Union Square.
"The MLK holiday is the perfect day to do this," said Larry Holmes, a leading organizer of the Bail Out the People Movement, one of the founders of Occupy 4 Jobs. "What most people don't know is that in the last months of his life, King was devoted to opening a struggle for everyone to have a decent-paying job."
In early 1968, before his April 4th assassination, King announced the Poor People's Campaign, which was to culminate in a March on Washington demanding a $12 billion Economic Bill of Rights. The demands of the campaign were jobs, income and housing. The Economic Bill of Rights guaranteed employment to all and an annual income to those unable to work.
Now, 43 years later, people are in desperate need of jobs. More than 30 million people in the country are unemployed and underemployed, and every day more workers are losing their jobs. In New York City alone, 500,000 people are officially unemployed; the figure is probably closer to 1 million when including those who are underemployed or no longer counted on the unemployment rolls.
Occupy 4 Jobs was formed at a People's Assembly in November to demand a massive public works project big enough to provide jobs at union wages for all unemployed and underemployed workers.
Occupy 4 Jobs is also launching a direct action to demand that banks provide money to the community for jobs. Banks are sitting on huge cash reserves and not investing them in job creation. In addition to trillions in bailouts, they also receive tax-exempt bonds from states and cities. The state and city of New York have together given banks $18 billion in these bonds.
Foreclosures, layoffs, and the slashing and eradication of social services, including food stamps and unemployment benefits, have devastated millions of people. There is an urgent need to reignite the campaign that Dr. King launched to fight for jobs for all at a living wage. All out for Jan. 16!
Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.
It is shocking that in a period when there are two major labor union lockouts [American Crystal Sugar and Cooper Tire], and when #ows has shown that some novel initiatives for action and mobilizing workers and their oppressed allies can achieve results, that O4J is resorting to the same old MLK Day demo as a tactic.
Reviewing the pages of WW newspaper over the last few years, we find that there is always a MLK Day demo. Usually around jobs or against war. Every year.
O4J was presented as being somewhat informed by #ows, but more advanced regarding socialism and racism; but this is the same stale "let's call a march and round up the usual suspects" mentality that is long past its expiration date.
What ever happened to the Socialists Unite statement from 2010? Now that was something to build on!
Jay
____________________________________________'Occupy 4 Jobs' day
By Brenda Ryan New YorkPublished Dec 19, 2011
The Occupy 4 Jobs network is celebrating Martin Luther King Jr. Day in New York City with a direct action to demand jobs. The Jan. 16 event will begin at 1 p.m. at Union Square.
"The MLK holiday is the perfect day to do this," said Larry Holmes, a leading organizer of the Bail Out the People Movement, one of the founders of Occupy 4 Jobs. "What most people don't know is that in the last months of his life, King was devoted to opening a struggle for everyone to have a decent-paying job."
In early 1968, before his April 4th assassination, King announced the Poor People's Campaign, which was to culminate in a March on Washington demanding a $12 billion Economic Bill of Rights. The demands of the campaign were jobs, income and housing. The Economic Bill of Rights guaranteed employment to all and an annual income to those unable to work.
Now, 43 years later, people are in desperate need of jobs. More than 30 million people in the country are unemployed and underemployed, and every day more workers are losing their jobs. In New York City alone, 500,000 people are officially unemployed; the figure is probably closer to 1 million when including those who are underemployed or no longer counted on the unemployment rolls.
Occupy 4 Jobs was formed at a People's Assembly in November to demand a massive public works project big enough to provide jobs at union wages for all unemployed and underemployed workers.
Occupy 4 Jobs is also launching a direct action to demand that banks provide money to the community for jobs. Banks are sitting on huge cash reserves and not investing them in job creation. In addition to trillions in bailouts, they also receive tax-exempt bonds from states and cities. The state and city of New York have together given banks $18 billion in these bonds.
Foreclosures, layoffs, and the slashing and eradication of social services, including food stamps and unemployment benefits, have devastated millions of people. There is an urgent need to reignite the campaign that Dr. King launched to fight for jobs for all at a living wage. All out for Jan. 16!
Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.
Occupy Cleveland will probably focus on foreclosure crisis
Published: Saturday, December 10, 2011, 3:00 PM
Although Occupy Cleveland may shift emphasis, many in the group believe having a presence on Public Square is important. These members spent a recent rainy afternoon at the tent on West Roadway. From left are Neil Brooks of Madison, M.J. Muser of Cleveland and a protester from Parma who declined to be identified
The group's tent is likely to remain on Public Square until city permits expire at the end of the year. After that, the group protesting corporate greed might gear up to fight what they consider the related problem of property foreclosures.
They say that little of the $700 billion that banks received as part of the U.S. Treasury Department's Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, resulted in troubled homeowners getting mortgages they could afford. Some members mentioned the $13 billion of income banks received by taking advantage of below-market, short-term loans from the Federal Reserve.
"These giant banks have made off with billions of dollars, crashed the system, got rewarded for crashing the system with billions in bailout funds, and the upshot is that real people are losing their homes," said Ben Shapiro, who helps run a farm in the city's St. Clair-Superior neighborhood.
Occupy Cleveland's first foreclosure "action" occurred in November when some members occupied the backyard of Elisabeth Sommerer's home on West 94th Street in Cleveland, which is in foreclosure. The protesters were prepared to intervene when Cuyahoga County deputies came to evict Sommerer and her two small children. Resistance proved unnecessary. City Councilman Brian Cummins, an Occupy Cleveland supporter, and other public officials helped her get a 30-day extension in Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court.
Though Occupy Cleveland seeks to put down roots, it still shares something with Occupy movements uprooted in other cities: a somewhat strained relationship with City Hall.
The tensions are in no way as explosive as they have been in places like Oakland, Calif., and New York City, where violent clashes ensued as police tore down encampments. But bad blood has existed between Occupy Cleveland and Mayor Frank Jackson's administration since the city arrested 11 protesters in October for breaking a 10 p.m. curfew for Public Square.
Some members sought an injunction in federal court, saying the curfew violated their freedom of speech rights by limiting access to the city park. The suit was dismissed after the city agreed to grant Occupy Cleveland 24-hour access to Public Square, but authorities then began stringently enforcing an ordinance prohibiting camping in city parks.
More recently, friction has revolved around the tent, or canopy. Protesters want the city to grant a permit for a heater. They accuse city officials of trying to freeze them out of Public Square. City officials say they have been reluctant to issue a permit because of safety and liability concerns.
Appealing to mutual concerns
Cummins said the city and Occupy Cleveland shouldn't be at odds.
"There is this mutual lack of respect between the movement and the administration," he said. "There is no time to belittle and disrespect each other when their common goals are very similar.
"We have done a lot in identifying issues and strategies relative to the foreclosure crisis," Cummins said of the city's efforts. "I see this movement as the social consciousness pushing the city to do even more."
On Monday, Cleveland City Council supported Cummins' resolution "recognizing and supporting the principles of the Occupy movement." The nonbinding measure also calls for the council and the Jackson administration to work together to "minimize economic insecurity and destructive disparities." This might include "reviewing apparent inequities many people in Cleveland face when lender foreclosure proceedings occur," the resolution says.
Ken Silliman, Jackson's chief of staff, said the city doesn't want to be at odds with Occupy Cleveland.
"There clearly is a commonality of issues," he said. "I would be hard pressed to find a mayor of a major American city who has been as aggressive in protecting rights of citizens vs. predatory banking practices. As council president, [Jackson] sponsored the state's first ban on predatory lending and when he became mayor, the city sued 21 Wall Street banks.
Cummins, who has offered to be a liaison, said he will continue bringing both sides together because he believes the union could be a formidable force against foreclosure.
Greater Cleveland's foreclosure crisis dates back at least a decade, making it one of the areas in the country that has struggled with the problem the longest. Cleveland-Elyria-Mentor, with an 8.2 percent foreclosure rate, ranked 27th among 100 metro areas, according to an analysis released in August by the nonprofit Local Initiatives Support Corp. Greater Youngstown, with a 9.7 percent rate, ranked 21st. Akron ranked 32nd with a 7.9 percent rate.
Cleveland has been especially hard hit. The city's annual survey of vacant and distressed properties in August showed 7,761 of them, nearly 700 more than the year before.
Officials say that many properties on the list resulted from foreclosure. Since 2007, the city has spent about $76 million cutting grass at, boarding up and demolishing vacant properties, according to city records.
"It is time to put pressure on banks and shame them," said Rebecka Hawkins, a Case Western Reserve University law student and a member of the Occupy Cleveland foreclosure committee.
"It is really shameful what they are doing in our community and in communities across the country. It is bankrupting our cities to maintain and patrol these areas in which we have a bunch of abandoned homes. Property taxes aren't getting paid, which is also having an impact on the schools."
Hawkins said she believed the group's tactics should include educating people about the foreclosure process and holding banks accountable.
Group hopes to tap into public outrage
Occupy Cleveland plans an aggressive, "in your face" approach to protesting foreclosures. Most anti-foreclosure efforts in Northeast Ohio have been more formal, ranging from nonprofits doing foreclosure prevention counseling to the Cuyahoga land bank, which is focused on redevelopment projects using vacant and abandoned properties.
Hawkins said the collective outrage of residents must be harnessed before systemic change can occur.
"The voice of the people can rise above the power of big corporations and banks," she said.
More than a decade ago, Empowering and Strengthening Ohio's People, or ESOP, was one of the first groups to organize against financial institutions that had issued subprime loans. Members' tactics included protesting at the local offices of such lenders, where they often threw plastic sharks at their targets. Current efforts include demonstrating at the homes of investors who bought foreclosed properties in bulk but have failed to maintain them.
Mark Seifert, ESOP's executive director, said he welcomed Occupy Cleveland to become part of the fight against foreclosure, even if the movement's tactics differ from his group's approach.
"Their anger is not a hell of a lot different from anger our people have been expressing for many years," he said. "Where we are a little different is that we try to take the anger and translate it into an organized direction that results in a solution.
"Our organizing tends to be that we drill down on a specific target -- banks, government entities, etc. -- and come up with specific demands, then try to execute those demands," Seifert said.
Responded Tim Smith, a community organizer for social justice and peace issues: "This isn't about demands. It about finding solutions."
Frank Ford, senior vice president for research and development at Neighborhood Progress Inc., also welcomes Occupy Cleveland's entrance into the foreclosure fight. The community development organization has played a major role in the area's foreclosure response, including performing data analysis and funding anti-foreclosure efforts.
"There is plenty of work to be done, so new people wanting to get involved is a good thing," he said. "However, I would encourage them to, as much as possible, collaborate with everyone who has already been working on the issue as to have even a greater impact."
As Occupy Cleveland seeks its position in the foreclosure war, the issue of the tent looms. Silliman, the mayor's chief of staff, said that until the group is able to get liability insurance, it is unlikely the city will issue another permit.
While some members believe the group should take a winter hiatus from Public Square, others believe deserting the post is not an option. Smith said about a dozen regulars man the tent, though the group's membership is more than 60.
"It's a symbol," said Smith, who believes the group should continue to fight for heat. "It says: 'We're still here. We haven't gone away. We're still at this.' "
© 2011 cleveland.com. All rights reserved.
from Товарищ Х
Protesters shut down Washington DC lobbying firms
http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/index.php/content/view/full/112915
Excerpt:
Over 1,000 protesters, including hundreds of trade unionists, unemployed people and clergy, staged the sit-in on rain-sodden K Street at midday to highlight the corrupting influence of big capital on the political process...
"No amount of rain can faze those battered by the storm of economic injustice and corporate greed," the SEIU declared as protesters shut down K Street.
| | | | | | | | Thursday, December 8, 2011 10:54 AM | | | Jay | | | | | | Labels: News |
Occupy Wall Street is moving into your house
Astra Taylor, filmmaker, activist, and co-editor of Occupy!: Scenes from Occupied America, writes for the Nation about the latest sites being occupied: houses and apartments under threat of foreclosure and eviction.
As the Occupy Wall Street movement approaches the three-month mark, encampments in Oakland, Manhattan, Portland, Los Angeles, and around the country have been evicted in a series of coordinated crackdowns. With temperatures dropping and police violence increasing, the movement is seeking out and discussing new strategies and points of escalation. A major tactic that has emerged from these meetings is literally "occupying the home front" by taking over and defending homes under threat of foreclosure and eviction. December 6th marked a national day of action to kick off this new campaign, and Taylor attended an event here in Brooklyn, in East New York:
December 6 was the result of weeks of careful planning and alliance building, a sign in itself that the Occupy movement is evolving in exciting ways. In Chicago, a homeless woman and her baby moved into a foreclosed home with the blessing of the previous owner and the help of over forty supporters; in Atlanta, protesters made an appearance at foreclosure auctions in three counties; in Denver, activists collected garbage from abandoned properties and delivered it to the mayor; in Oakland, a mother of three reclaimed the townhouse she lost after becoming unemployed while another group held a barbeque at a property owned by Fannie Mae. Over twenty cities hosted protests, all told.
In New York, Occupy activists worked with community organizations and other allies to host a foreclosure tour and coordinate the "liberation" and re-occupation of a vacant bank-owned property in a Brooklyn neighborhood where the foreclosure rate is estimated to be five times the state average.
Helping facilitate the actions are various grous like Take Back the Land, who are longtime organizers in the housing rights movement. Predatory lending, exploitative landlords, and evictions have been violent institutions in many low-income neighborhoods and communities of color, so why are occupiers adopting this tactic now?
Though Americans are fed up with income inequality and generally disgusted by the bad behavior of big banks, the task Occupy Wall Street has chosen isn't exactly an easy one. Even though public sentiment on economic issues may align with the movement, organizing against something as abstract as finance capital is a challenge. How do you launch a campaign against something that is everywhere and nowhere? For those who don't live near lower Manhattan, it's not obvious what the proper protest target should be.
This is why focusing on the mortgage crisis-which a recent study suggests is only half over-is a brilliant next step. "To occupy a house owned by Bank of America is to occupy Wall Street," said Ryan Acuff, who has been working with Take Back The Land in Rochester, NY doing these kinds of actions since Sept 2010. "We are literally occupying Wall Street in our own communities." The reclamation of foreclosed homes and defense of individuals facing unfair eviction helps make arcane economic issues like deregulation and securitization, local and personal.
People who previously knew little about eviction resistance are proving to be quick studies—support for direct actions in affected neighborhoods is palpable, with neighbors joining in the occupiers' block party and hanging signs on their windows. Banks, too, are taking notice:
While banks often refuse to negotiate with individuals, taking advantage of those who are intimidated or can't afford legal counsel, they often change their tune when threatened with serious scrutiny. Once a bunch of people show up on a lawn to form a blockade and have a press conference, once intransigent institutions are suddenly willing to compromise. In Rochester, one bank called off an eviction when they got wind of plans for direct action.
This new wave of actions is bringing resistance to folks' front doors, and to the forefront of their political consciousness, as communities begin to self-organize and defend themselves. Like Tasha Glasgow, who recently moved into a liberated home with her two children, says,
"There are a lot of homeless people in the world and hopefully people see this and see that something needs to be done and people will change the world ... I'm no Martin Luther King, but I'm something."
Here is a note I received:
Jay,
I'm glad you asked.
I have privately directed similar criticism, regarding his own writing for the paper, to our .... comrade .... The tack I took with this was, unassailable factual arguments (when they are available) are stronger than emotional arguments.
When the factual basis of writing is weak, an emotional appeal does not make it any stronger. Skilled journalists, outside the tabloid media, seem to understand this well enough.
What is perhaps less well appreciated is that the emotional basis of an argument is weakened when print media veers in the direction of telling the readers what to feel. When the factual basis of an outrageous situation is presented with the precision and control worthy of a laboratory worker, the readers can be trusted to feel their own outrage. While perhaps counter-intuitive, clinical detail (with rare exception that always entails a level of writing skill unavailable to nearly all who practice the craft) numbs the senses of the readers and dampens proper outrage.
I suspect that even as you posted this you were perhaps aware that your critical letter to WW was, in a sense, itself violating the editorial standards (your own as a disciplined writer on the one hand, the paper's on the other) you were advocating for, and that may be why you called for a sanity check.
Each of the things that you called for, and that the WW paper lacks, is needed in a workers newspaper and should therefore not be dragged out in this context. It would have been sufficient to simply state that print media space and readers' attention are finite resources that are in short supply in the revolutionary press-- they should be used with discipline.
While on this subject of what the paper lacks, both the cases that you argue here (i.e., Cottin and Mumia) would perhaps be better placed in a Letters to the Editor section such as that of the Morning Star. That is a proper place for comrades to vent. Editors should require a more disciplined use of limited resources outside that context.
Mumia, both for the merit of his cause and for the best of his writing, deserves the imprimatur of the paper. Who knows, the same may be true of Cottin, though I am ignorant of her other writing. But this does not require that their every jot and tittle should be exempted from editorial discipline. Furthermore, it is precisely in the reporting and analysis of those events replete with the lurid detail that is the stock-in-trade of the capitalist tabloid press that the greatest editorial discipline is required of the revolutionary press. After peeling such an onion there is often very little onion left-- and it is for this reason that I would argue against such an exercise for a revolutionary newspaper.
PS Why not a Just for Us half page for very young readers such as the Daily Worker once had? At the age of 7 I was climbing all over the Old Man to get my hands on the paper every day just to read that part.
What Occupy Wall Street reveals
By Barry Sheppard, San Francisco
December 7, 2011 – Submitted to Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal by the author. It first appeared in Direct Action --
No one predicted the phenomenon that has become known as Occupy Wall Street (OWS), nor could it have been predicted.
A small group of anarchist-minded people in Canada first proposed that there be an attempt to set up an "occupation" near the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street. They were inspired by the tents and encampments set up earlier in the year in Cairo's Tahrir Square and the spread of similar tactics in Spain and other countries.
Their targets were Wall Street itself and the richest 1 per cent. Wall Street is well known as the symbol of US finance capitalism. The 1 per cent were singled out as the people who own and control the economy and the government, the big capitalists. (The actual figure is more like the 0.1 per cent, but that is a quibble.)
But the idea that the enemy of the 99 per cent is the richest 1per cent and the financiers symbolised by Wall Street caught on. From this small spark a conflagration erupted. Occupy Wall Street grew to encompass thousands who participated in marches and other activities centred around the Wall Street encampment.
Then the movement rapidly spread to other cities across the US, larger ones at first and then even into hundreds of small towns. Now it is spreading to many college campuses.
Anti-capitalist
That the thrust of this movement is against Wall Street and the 1 per cent is quite profound. It is an elemental anti-capitalist consciousness. It is rooted in the growing understanding that the economic catastrophe the 99 per cent have been living through since the Great Recession began was caused by the system that serves the 1 per cent. "They got bailed out, we got shut out!" is one of the popular chants.
Paul Krugman, a liberal economist, recently wrote in The New York Times, "As the Occupy Wall Street movement continues to grow, the response from the movement's targets has gradually changed: contemptuous dismissal has been replaced by whining. The modern lords of finance look at the protesters and ask, Don't they understand what we've done for the U.S. economy? The answer is: yes, many of the protesters do understand what Wall Street and more generally the nation's economic elite have done for us. And that's why they are protesting."
Public support
Polls show that tens of millions sympathise with the objectives of the protesters. This is a mighty shift in sentiment by people who have been shoved around by the capitalist politicians and press in the last three years. We were told that it was our fault, that we spent too much money we didn't have, that the only way forward is drastic cuts to our standard of living. The fact that the richest were growing even richer since 2007, while we were growing poorer rubbed salt into the wound.
Interviews with those who have joined in the actions have given a glimpse of the underlying issues. Some say they have joined in because they have been unemployed for a long time. One young woman I saw being interviewed explained that she got her PhD two years ago, and has been unable to find a job. An older blue-collar worker says he has been unemployed for years and has no prospects. Others say they had their home mortgages foreclosed. Many are now homeless, people who never thought they would be on the street.
Blacks and Latinos have been especially hard hit by foreclosures, unemployment, bad schools, homelessness and so forth.
College students are protesting drastic increases in tuition costs, and huge debts they have amassed in student loans. Parents and public school students and teachers see cutbacks to education across the board.
Many older people carry signs about their fear of drastic cuts to social security and the Medicare health scheme that both capitalist parties are saying are necessary.
I have a niece who recently graduated from law school. She owes $90,000 in student loans. Recently married, the house she and her husband live in is "under water", which means they owe more on their mortgage than the current market price of their house.
A raft of headlines and articles have appeared that have helped workers understand the extent of the economic catastrophe. Poverty and near poverty is increasing, we have been told.
But it is not only the increase in the very poor, and an increase in pauperisation. Reuters reported on November 23, 2011,"Nearly half of all Americans lack economic security, meaning they live above the poverty threshold but still do not have enough money to cover housing, food, healthcare and other basic expenses, according to a survey of government industry data ... 45 percent of U.S. residents live in households that struggle to make ends meet. That breaks down to 39 percent of all adults and 55 percent of all children…"
A New York Times article reports, "In a grim sign of the enduring nature of the economic slump, household income declined more in the two years after the recession ended than it did in the recession itself … Between June 2009, when the recession officially ended, and June 2011, inflation-adjusted median household income fell 6.7 percent … During the recession -- from December 2007 to June 2009 – household income fell 3.2 percent." For a total of nearly 10 per cent. And that is median household income. If the top 1 per cent, whose incomes went up, are not included the income of workers has dropped even more.
The news from Europe is threatening. Many fear a new recession is coming, starting from the terrible level most workers are in right now.
I have gone to the occupations in San Francisco and Oakland. But I also went to an action in the small Bay Area city where I live, Hayward. There were about 75 of us, standing on a street corner at a busy intersection during rush hour, holding signs. What struck me was the response from the majority of people driving home from work. We were greeted by cheers and waves, and the honking of horns in support. There was a din of noise over the hour we were there. Around the country there have been many similar smaller demonstrations that don't get reported nationally.
Anger
All this anger has been building up in the depths of society, but it wasn't being expressed. Suddenly, OWS provided the catalyst that crystallised in a leap of consciousness among tens of millions who understood that their private sufferings were shared sufferings, and they knew who was to blame.
The Occupy movement has also given heart to those protesting around other issues. One of these was opposition to a proposed pipeline to carry an especially dirty form of crude oil from Canada down to the refineries in the Gulf of Mexico. The extraction process in Canada itself is very polluting, but the pipeline would also pose a danger to the environment all along its thousand-mile stretch. A planned demonstration at the White House mushroomed into 10,000 people surrounding the presidential abode. President Barack Obama was forced to put off a decision to go ahead with the pipeline for a year. This initial victory was made possible by the spread of the Occupy movement, according to the organisers of the action.
The official labour bureaucracy did nothing to organise the discontent rumbling below, but has come out in support of the Occupy movement, at least verbally. This has also encouraged more left-wing unions to raise their own issues, and to sometimes join the actions.
Police violence
The world has seen the brutal response of most of the city governments and campus administrations, using the police to break up the encampments. Videos have gone viral nationally and internationally of the use of tear gas and other "non-lethal" weapons (one of which almost killed a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War) as well as the beatings, pepper sprayings and mass arrests. These have only increased the anger of, and sympathy with, the protesters, who have gotten hard lessons about the role of the police.
Like in every mass movement, there have been problems and mistakes. But there has also been an outburst of creativity in shifting to new forms of protest, as well as in expressing all the issues that come to the fore in the framework of opposition to the 1 per cent and the centre of finance capital.
Some of this creativity has been quite humourous. One example is the many photos circulated on the internet showing the cop who pepper sprayed non-violent students at a California campus super-imposed on works of art and other pictures, pepper spraying the people picnicking in a Seurat painting, pepper spraying the members of the Constitutional Convention and so forth.
There will be lulls and ups and downs. But already the Occupy movement has introduced into the US national dialog the class question, which was suppressed in the discourse of politicians and the press -- and done so in a powerful way.
One old radical told me "politics is back on the agenda. I've been waiting for this for 40 years".
[Barry Sheppard was a member of the US Socialist Workers Party for 28 years, and a central leader for most of that time. He is the author of The Party: The Socialist Workers Party 1960-1988 -- A Political Memoir.]
| | | | | | | | Saturday, December 10, 2011 1:59 PM | | | Jay | | | | | | Labels: News |
APSP calls African Liberation Movement to task to build revolutionary party!
On February 18-21, 2012 the African People's Socialist Party USA (APSP USA) will hold its National Plenary in St. Petersburg, Florida to define the work of the Party in this period and mark the 40th anniversary of the Party's founding.
For the past 40 years, the APSP USA has been a consistent force providing practical and ideological leadership in the struggle to free African people from the yoke of parasitic imperialism, a system that built and maintains wealth for white people in North America and Europe through the stolen land, labor and resources of Africans and other oppressed people throughout the world.
The National Plenary is a tool often used by the APSP USA between its congresses, the place where the entire organization comes together to establish policy and elect leaders. At the plenary, the Party examines its work since the last congress and assesses the world situation, making any necessary adjustments to its work to meet its objectives.
Plenary happens in midst of imperialist crisis
This particular plenary will occur under political conditions where we see the entire African world under assault. The imperialists recently carried out the brutal murder of Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi through the use of their proxy Transitional National Council. The Egyptian military is murdering African people every day and still, the people keep rising up.
In the U.S., Africans are reeling from the largest loss of African wealth in history through the sub-prime mortgage scam.
There is however, increasing signs of resistance such as that in St. Petersburg, Florida where three colonial cops were killed by Africans within one month's time in early 2011.
The entire imperialist world is in crisis. It is in crisis as a result of the ever-growing resistance of the peoples of the world.
Imperialism's crisis, our opportunity
For the oppressed, this period of imperialist crisis represents great opportunity. It is an opportunity to finally overturn the parasitic relationship that imperialism has imposed on the rest of the world for the past few centuries.
For oppressed African people to take advantage of this opportunity requires recognition of what is necessary to win our freedom. It is no longer enough to be forever tied down chasing single issues unconnected to a general strategy for our liberation.
There are many issues like police brutality, colonial prisons, inadequate housing and a myriad of others that impact on our people, but the fundamental problem which all of these stem from is the fact that our right to power over our own lives was taken from us.
The era of Party-building
The task for African people, if we are to be free, is to win power. In the absence of a struggle to win power in our own hands, our work would be reduced to asking our oppressors to impose a more benevolent oppression and exploitation on us.
To win power requires building an organization, a revolutionary party of dedicated, disciplined forces whose primary objective is winning power in the hands of our people.
This National Plenary will be calling to task our Party and the African Liberation Movement in general to take on this most significant task for our movement in this period. We must build the international African revolutionary party that will lead our struggle to liberate and unite the African nation, which finds itself dispersed all over the world and divided by colonial borders and identities imposed on us by colonizers for their own benefit.
This does not mean that we don't take on issues like police violence and the death penalty. What it does mean, however, is that as we take on these issues, our work is informed by a greater strategy that goes beyond solving a particular incident or issue. Even as we struggle to win victories in these cases, our work will be informed by our task to build an organizational capacity to seize power in our own hands so that there will be no more Troy Davis or Mumia Abu Jamal cases.
Join and become part of APSP's longstanding history!
The African People's Socialist Party USA has recognized this need for many years. Its work and long history of struggle and victories in cases like that of Dessie Woods and Pitts and Lee, its development of the revolutionary theory of African Internationalism, its recognition of neocolonialism long before white power even appeared in the black face of Barack Hussein Obama and its work in the development of the African Socialist International is an indication of this recognition.
The APSP USA calls on all Party members, allies, activists and others who want to seize this time of opportunity and join in the revolutionary struggle for African Liberation to participate in the National Plenary of the African People's Socialist Party USA in St. Petersburg, Florida on February 18-21, 2012. There is no more significant place to be at this time.
Build the Revolutionary Party for African Liberation!
Join the African People's Socialist Party USA!
Build the African Socialist International!
Uhuru!
| | | | | | | | Wednesday, December 7, 2011 5:09 PM | | | Jay | | | | | | Labels: News |
War Guilt in the Pacific
Li Fu-jen
(October 1945)
Li Fu-Jen, War Guilt in the Pacific, Fourth International, October 1945, pp.166-169. [1]
Transcribed by Ted Crawford.
Marked up by Einde O'Callaghan for the Marxists' Internet Archive.
After this article was written, striking confirmation of the author's thesis was given by John Chamberlain, in an article which appeared in the September 21 issue of Life magazine. Chamberlain declared that "long before" the 1944 election Republican Presidential Candidate Thomas E. Dewey learned "that we had cracked the Japanese 'ultra' code some time prior to Pearl Harbor and that Roosevelt and his advisers knew what the Japanese were going to do well in advance of the overt rupture of relations."
But Dewey joined Roosevelt in the conspiracy of silence and deception which made it possible to brand Japan as the – "aggressor" and fasten "war guilt" on the Japanese nation. Had the American people known the full truth, even as late as the 1944 election campaign, the "political impact," as Chamberlain says, "would have been terrific and might well have landed Dewey in the White House." But Dewey, concerned like Roosevelt for the interests of U.S. imperialism, kept silent, and by keeping silent sacrificed the chance to deliver a telling and perhaps fatal blow to his opponent's candidacy.
On August 29, 1945, President Truman released for publication lengthy reports by the Army and Navy giving the facts and circumstances of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor which precipitated the extension of the Second World War to the Pacific area. The lengthier of the two reports, that of the Army Pearl Harbor Board, is dated October 20, 1944, and is accompanied by a statement of Secretary of War Stimson. The other is a fact-finding report of a Navy Court of Inquiry with a statement by the Secretary of the Navy and is dated October 19, 1944.
Why were these reports withheld from the public for almost a year? An attempt has been made to represent the suppression as having been necessitated by considerations of military security, since the war was still in progress. It is true that the reports deal largely with matters of a purely military character.
Yet the principal event to which they relate, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, had occurred almost three years prior to the completion of the reports. What they contain in the way of military information was already stale and musty and had no bearing whatever on the further course of the Pacific war. It is impossible to escape the conclusion that the reports were suppressed for political and not for military reasons. The reports which disclose the policy of the Roosevelt Administration in the chain of events which led to the outbreak of war between the United States and Japan make this absolutely clear.
The Army Board and the Navy Court were charged with the task of ascertaining the facts of the Pearl Harbor disaster and establishing the responsibility therefor. The Army investigation centered on the acts and policies of General Short, who was in charge of the Hawaii Command of the Army. The Navy investigation centered on the acts and policies of Admiral Kimmel, who was commander-in-chief of the Pacific Fleet. These high-ranking officers were removed from their posts after Pearl Harbor and were called upon to defend themselves against charges of incompetence and dereliction of duty. In order to exculpate themselves from blame for the disaster, they were obliged to make reference to the general policies of the Administration by which they were bound, for much more was involved than simply matters of military precaution and preparation. The investigators, too, had to delve into Administration policies, for without doing so there clearly existed no possibility of establishing the full truth or apportioning the blame for what had occurred.
It is precisely here that the reports are highly revealing, for they establish incontestably the following conclusions, even though these conclusions are not drawn in the reports:
- That President Roosevelt, while proclaiming his love of peace and hatred of war, was embarked on a deliberate course of war with Japan (and Germany) long before Pearl Harbor and that this was the conscious policy of his Administration.
- That Roosevelt's policy toward Japan was one of systematic pressure to force the Japanese imperialists to commit the overt act which would touch off a war explosion. Roosevelt was obliged to pursue this strategy in order to be able to brand Japan as the aggressor and stampede the people of the United States into a war to which a majority of the nation had been steadfastly opposed. The peace-loving President had assured the American people that their sons would not be sent to fight in foreign wars. This made it necessary that the United States should be attacked so that the drive of American imperialism for mastery of the Pacific could be presented in the guise of a war of national defense and survival.
When Roosevelt read the reports, he must have realized their explosive political quality. Here, out of the mouths of his own generals and admirals, he was convicted as a war conspirator who under cover of unctuous protestations of his love of peace plotted to plunge the American people into the most terrible of all wars so that the manifest destiny of American imperialism might be achieved. It was, remember – election year! Roosevelt was running for his fourth term. Publication of the Pearl Harbor reports shortly before the election would have furnished the Republican opposition some telling political ammunition. The Republicans could have portrayed Roosevelt (much more effectively than they were in the circumstances able to do) as an arch-hypocrite and.betrayer of the peaceful desires of the people. Without doubt, it was by Roosevelt's command that the Pearl Harbor reports were kept under cover.
War-Making Powers of Congress
The war-making power supposedly resides in Congress. A constitutional provision prohibits the United States from engaging in any hostile military act against another Power unless and until the Congress has declared a state of war. There is, however, no legal bar to prevent the executive arm of government from pursuing policies and taking hostile steps of a non-military character against a Power with which the United States is formally at peace. This was just what Roosevelt did in relation to both Germany and Japan between the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, and the formal American entry into the war with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. First, he had Congress repeal the arms embargo clauses of the Neutrality Act, enabling the United States to supply implements of war to the future military allies of American imperialism. Then he instituted the system of Lend-Lease. Next he authorized the arming of American merchant ships and ordered them and their naval escorts to attack German submarines whether or not they were themselves attacked. He had Congress enact military conscription (Selective Service Act). Finally, in the Pacific, by a succession of acts, he drew a noose of economic strangulation around the neck of Japan.
It was impossible for Roosevelt to gear the country fully to war so long as formal peace prevailed. Military preparations could go so far and no further. Moreover, and more importantly, the imperialist aims of the United States could be realized only through war. Since the imperialist government in Washington did not, as a matter of tactics, intend to take the initiative in formally breaching the "peace," the opponent had to be forced into making the first hostile move. This was Roosevelt's problem. It was necessary for him, however, to surround the steps taken with a typical aura of idealistic and pacifist declarations. Thus in one breath Roosevelt would sonorously proclaim: "I hate war! " In the next he would invoke economic sanctions against Japan, knowing that these would lead ultimately to war.
The situation that prevailed prior to the formal entry of the United States into the war, and the nature of Roosevelt's problem, are well described in the second chapter of the report of the Army Pearl Harbor Board, which it is worth quoting at length:
There existed during this critical period much confusion of thinking and of organization, of conflict of opinion and diversity of views. The nation was not geared to war, either mentally or as an organization. It was a period of conflicting plans and purposes. The winds of public opinion were blowing in all directions; isolationists and nationalists were struggling for predominance; public opinion was both against war and clamoring for reprisal against Japan; we were negotiating for peace with Japan, and simultaneously applying economic sanctions that led only to war; we were arming our forces for war and at the same time giving away much of such armament. The Administration, State, War and Navy departments in their policies, plans and operations were likewise being pushed here and there by the ebb and flow of war events, public reactions, diplomatic negotiations and newspaper attacks.
The War Department by its actions and its organization was still on a peacetime basis; neither its management nor its general staff had perfected its organization for war or for the conduct of a large enterprise. The whole machinery of Government was geared to a different purpose and tempo than war. Valiant and brilliant men were struggling to bring order out of chaos, rather as individuals or as small groups attempting simultaneously both to establish policies and to accomplish practical things. As a result a few men, without organization in the true sense, were attempting to conduct large enterprises, take multiple actions, and give directions that should have been the result of carefully directed commands, instead of action taken by conference. We were preparing for a war by the conference method. We were directing such preparations by the conference method; we were even writing vital messages by the conference method, and arriving at their contents by compromise instead of by command; that was the product of the time and conditions due to the transition from peace to war in a democracy.
Such was the confusion of men and events, largely unorganized for appropriate action and helpless before a strong course of events, that ran away with the situation and prematurely plunged us into war.
A Revealing Passage
Everything in this passage is revealing, including the evident impatience and frustration of the brass hats with a "democracy" that interfered with their preparations for war. The "conflicting plans and purposes" were in essence the conflict between Roosevelt's set course toward war and the restrictions which a state of formal peace necessarily imposed on the war preparations. It was precisely this conflict which created difficulties for General Short and Admiral Kimmel and contributed to the magnitude of the Pearl Harbor catastrophe. Roosevelt was striving to resolve this conflict by "negotiating for peace with Japan, and simultaneously applying economic sanctions that led only to war." When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, he had achieved his purpose. Only from the very limited point of view of military preparedness at the time was the United States "prematurely plunged into war." From the larger point of view of the imperialist destiny of the United States, of which Roosevelt was the most keenly conscious, entry came none too soon. Moreover, as we have already pointed out, further military preparation was possible only on a wartime basis. It is, of course, not true that public opinion was "clamoring for reprisal against Japan." Poll after poll of public opinion showed a tremendous popular opposition to any act that might plunge America into war. The capitalist press – and that is what the brass hats mean by "public opinion" – was indeed clamoring for action against Japan, but this press spoke only for a tiny minority, the imperialist brigands of Wall Street who feared that the rich Far East would come under the permanent domination of their Japanese rivals.
The formula under which military preparations went forward at Pearl Harbor is stated in the Army's report: "... to take defensive measures but in so doing he (General Short) was told not to alarm the population (of Hawaii) nor to disclose intent." The effect of this directive was felt in the thoroughness with which the Japanese accomplished their purpose at Pearl Harbor. The evidence shows that General Short followed the directive. Moreover, he was not kept sufficiently informed as to the critical state of relations with Japan and the imminence of war. Therefore he did not give an all-out war alert as the critical hour approached, but contented himself with an anti-sabotage alert. He was bound by general orders "not to alarm the population nor to disclose intent."
Secretary of State Hull was asked by the Army Board for an expression of the State Department's views touching on the influence of foreign policy upon military directives. Hull replied that "it was not the policy of this Government to take provocative action against any country or to cause Japan to commit an act of war against the United States." But the record is clear: economic sanctions of a most stringent character were imposed against Japan in systematic order, and these, as the Army Board attests, "led only to war." If we were to believe Hull's statement (and we should not forget that he was an imperialist diplomat) we would also have to believe that Hull's chief and mentor, Roosevelt himself, was so stupid as not to understand the provocative nature of economic sanctions and the consequences to which they lead. According to Hull, he must have thought that the Japanese imperialists would tamely submit to economic strangulation and abandon their plans of empire without a fight. But there is nothing to support any assumption that Roosevelt was so stupid. On the contrary, he proved himself a master strategist of imperialist politics. He knew what he was doing and why. He knew the consequences to which his acts would lead. This is not a matter of unsupported assumption. Hull's contention that it was not Washington's policy "to cause Japan to commit an act of war against the United States" is decisively refuted by other testimony written into the report of the Army Board.
The Roosevelt strategy
The Roosevelt strategy of forcing Japan to become the aggressor is revealed unmistakably in that section of the report which relates to messages between the War Department and the Hawaiian Command in the last days before Japan struck. On November 27, 1941, 10 days before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Chief of Staff radioed General Short as follows:
Negotiations with Japanese appear to be terminated to all practical purposes with only the barest possibilities that the Japanese Government might come back and offer to continue. Japanese future action unpredictable but hostile action possible at any moment. If hostilities cannot, repeat cannot, be avoided, the U.S. desires that Japan commit the first overt act.
That Roosevelt himself was the author of this policy was stated by General Gerow of the War Department who testified that the President had definitely stated that he wanted Japan to commit the first overt act. >From desiring the commission of an overt act by Japan it was but a short step to provoking one. This is just what Roosevelt sought to do. The vast economic power of the United States, and the economic frailty of Japan guaranteed the success of Roosevelt's strategy of provoking war by tightening an economic noose around Japan. The sanctions imposed on Japan in 1940-41 are referred to in the Army Board's report. The Army's investigators understood their drastic character and had no doubt that the Roosevelt policy led only to war. The pertinent section of the report reads, in part, as follows:
It was in the fall of 1940 that we cast the die and adopted economic sanctions. And we find it significant that about June 1940 General Herron as Commanding General of the Hawaiian Department upon Washington orders went into an all-out alert into battle positions with live ammunition for six weeks.
In September the export of iron and steel scrap was prohibited. The effect of the United States policy was to cut off from Japan by the winter of 1940-41 the shipment of many strategic commodities, including arms, ammunition, and implements of war, aviation gasoline and many other petroleum products, machine tools, scrap iron, pig iron and steel manufactures, copper, lead, zinc, aluminum, and a variety of other commodities ...
Nor was this all. These disastrous embargoes were supplemented by Washington's abrogation of the U.S.-Japanese Treaty of Commerce and Navigation which deprived Japan of most favored nation treatment in her remaining trade with the United States, and by the freezing of Japanese credits in this country. Among the most important consequences of these moves was the destruction of Japan's lucrative and vital silk trade with this country, upon the proceeds of which Japan largely depended for the financing of her imports. Finally, in August 1941, after Japan had moved troops into southern French Indo-China, thereby flanking the Philippines on the West, Washington and London joined in delivering a warning to Tokyo against new moves of aggression. Roosevelt dispatched a military mission to China. Zero hour was approaching. The imperialist conspirators sat back to await the development of the inevitable, and they were under no misapprehension as to what that development would be.
The effect of their pressure against Japan was reported to Washington by the American ambassador in Tokyo, Joseph C. Grew, who on October 9, 1941, two months before the Pearl Harbor attack, said that the frozen-credit policy of the United States was driving Japan into national bankruptcy and she would be forced to act. Earlier, Grew had stated that:
Considering the temper of the people of Japan (read Japanese imperialists, for that was the circle Grew moved in) it was dangerously uncertain to base United States policy on a view that the imposition of progressive and rigorous economic measures would probably avert war; that it was the view of the Embassy that war would not be averted by such a course ... Finally he warned of the possibility of Japan's adopting measures with dramatic and dangerous suddenness which might make inevitable a war with the United States.
Grew may or may not have harbored the illusion that Washington's policy was intended to avert war. What he thought is of little importance, since he was an executor and not a maker of policy. The important thing is that the high policy makers in Washington, Roosevelt and Hull, working in the closest consultation with the Wall Street barons, had already determined on war and were concerned only to force Japan to commit the first overt act of hostility, while gaining whatever time they could to prepare for war.
They knew Japan was choking in the noose of their sanctions. They knew the Japanese imperialists would try to fight their way out of the noose. They had Grew's warning that Japan would attack with dramatic and dangerous suddenness. In the light of this last fact, especially, it can be said that Roosevelt transcended all bounds of nauseating hypocrisy when he pretended surprise and shock at the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor.
The 10-point ultimatum
The final negotiations for peace before Pearl Harbor put the finishing touch to the plans of the imperialist conspirators in Washington. On Nov. 26, 1941, Secretary of State Hull presented to Japanese representatives in Washington a 10-point proposal as the basis for an agreement. This proposal required Japan to withdraw her armed forces from China and from French Indo-China. In return, the United States would unfreeze Japanese credits, end all other economic sanctions, and conclude a new commercial treaty with Japan. The Japanese imperialists were asked, in effect, to abandon entirely their plan of empire and surrender their position as a Pacific power.
Although the 10-point proposal was not couched in the form or language of an ultimatum, but took the form of a proposed draft agreement, it was understood by Tokyo as an ultimatum and was intended as such by the Washington conspirators. Hull and Roosevelt certainly regarded the proposal as an ultimatum. They knew it meant war. For on the morning of November 27, as the Army Board report states, Secretary of War Stimson called Hull on the phone and Hull told me now he had broken the whole matter off. As he put it, "I have washed my hands of it, and it is now in the hands of you and Knox (Navy Secretary), the Army and Navy."
The Army Board also reports that on the same day (November 26) that the 10-point proposal was delivered to the Japanese representatives, the Chief of Staff (Gen. Marshall) and the Chief of Naval Operations (Admiral Stark) wrote a joint memorandum to Roosevelt, requesting that no ultimatum be delivered to the Japanese as the Army and Navy were not ready to precipitate an issue with Japan. They were apprehensive as they saw the quickening drift toward war. They wanted more time to prepare. But their attempt to check the drift came too late in any event. Hull had already delivered the American ultimatum. He was instructed and guided by Roosevelt who understood better than the generals and admirals that the limits of military preparedness under peacetime conditions had been reached and that further delay in plunging into war could have only adverse effects on the grandiose plans of American imperialism. It was now necessary to effect the sharp transition from "armed neutrality" to active belligerency and to pursue the imperialist destiny of the United States on the decisive plane of military operations. Roosevelt had decided to cut the Gordian knot which tied the country to a peaceful status. While, naturally, he was aware of the military deficiencies of the United States, he knew, too, that the American productive capacity, once fully geared to war, would quickly make good any losses sustained in the initial encounters with Japan. That is why, in asking Congress for a declaration of war on Dec. 8, 1941, he could confidently predict inevitable victory for the United States.
The 10-point ultimatum to Japan reflected the irreconcilable antagonism between American and Japanese imperialism, an antagonism with deep economic roots, an antagonism that could be resolved only by recourse to war. The question of who fired the first shot in the Pacific war has only an episodic interest. The rivalry of the two imperialist Powers was lodged in the contest for trade, for raw materials, for colonies, for spheres of influence, for investment opportunities, for the right to dominate and exploit the teeming millions of the Orient. War between them did not develop suddenly, but over long years. From the beginning, the interests, and therefore the policies, of the two Powers developed in diametrical opposition. The logic of this development made ultimate war between them inevitable.
A consideration of the nature of America's first contact with Japan illumines the whole future course of U.S.- Japanese relations. In the year 1853, under orders from President Fillmore, Commodore Perry sailed an American naval squadron into Tokyo Bay to demand of Japan the opening of her ports to American shipping and commerce. The use of naval power to conduct a seemingly peaceful diplomatic mission is in itself significant. The frightened feudal rulers of Japan acceded to the American demands. Japan's two centuries of isolation from the rest of the world (the Tokugawa seclusion, 1641-1853) was at an end. Perry's mission inaugurated the period of Japan's modernization which was marked by the Meiji Restoration (1868) and set its ruling class on the road of capitalist growth and imperialist expansion.
Historical background
The circumstances dictating the forcible opening of Japan were a signpost pointing to the future imperialist policies of both the United States and Japan and the clashing of their interests in the broad basin of the Pacific. As a result of China's defeat by Great Britain in the Opium Wars of 1839-42(3) and the forcing open of China's ports, a profitable Oriental trade began in which American merchants quickly seized their share. Those were the days of sailing ships. Steam-powered vessels had scarcely begun to make their appearance. Trim clippers sailed out of the ports of New York and San Francisco carrying trade goods to Shanghai and Canton and bringing back the tea, silks, porcelains and spices of the Orient. It was a long voyage. Under favorable weather conditions the trip from New York to Canton around Cape Horn occupied a full five months. The small sailing ships could scarcely carry enough food and fresh water to last that long. It was hard to get crews for this Oriental run because of the fearful hardships often endured on such long and hazardous voyages. Sailors often had to be "Shanghaied" on board the sailing ships.
In order to maintain and develop the Pacific trade route to China an intermediate port of call was required, so that ships could replenish their food and water supplies. Japan lay directly on the sailing route, but Japan was closed and forbidden territory. Seamen unfortunate enough to be shipwrecked off the Japanese coast were frequently put to death by Japan's feudal rulers who had decreed the total isolation of the country. It was Perry's mission to break this isolation and obtain, by force if necessary, the right of American ships to call at such ports as Yokohama and Nagasaki. In subsequent treaties the United States secured extraterritorial rights for its nationals in Japan, as it had already done in China. To Japan's rulers, gazing out for the first time on the outside world, it seemed as if their country was to suffer the fate of nearby China, which had been humiliated and subjugated by the Western Powers and reduced in all but name to a colony. They escaped this fate by feverish modernization and the creation of armed forces to withstand external pressure. The stage was thus set for the progressive development of a rivalry with the Western Powers which reached its denouement at Pearl Harbor.
During the last quarter of the nineteenth century the last vestiges of what has become known as the American frontier were rapidly vanishing. The growth of American capitalism was coming to depend more and more upon foreign trade. The great lands of the Orient, above all China, were the logical scene of American expansion, together with South America. Seizure of the Philippines in the Spanish-American war of 1898 and the annexation of the Hawaiian Islands started American imperialism on its career in the Pacific.
Revivified Japan, meanwhile, had fought a war with and inflicted total defeat upon China (1894-95). Japan annexed the rich island of Formosa off the coast of China and established a protectorate over Korea, formally annexing the latter in 1910. Manchuria had become a sphere of interest of Czarist Russia. Britain and France had established similar spheres in China proper. Washington, highly conscious of America's own destiny as an imperialist power, was alarmed by the piratical freebooting of its rivals. In 1899 John Hay, Secretary of State in the McKinley administration, enunciated the famous doctrine of the Open Door with regard to China. By this doctrine the American imperialists served notice on their rivals that they would not countenance any treaties or agreements which would have the effect of creating closed preserves and denying equal trade opportunities to American capitalists doing business in China.
The Open Door policy was vigorously reiterated during the Boxer Rebellion in China (1900-01) which the rivals of the United States, including Japan, tried to use as a pretext for dismembering China. Again and again in the years that followed, the State Department delivered to Czarist Russia, to Britain and Japan and other powers, reminders that it demanded respect for the Open Door in China. In 1904-05 Japan warred on Czarist Russia and seized the latter's "rights and interests" in Manchuria. At the Portsmouth Conference, where the peace treaty was signed, the United States played the role of mediator and succeeded in limiting Japan's demands.
In 1915, while the Western Powers were preoccupied with the war in Europe, Japan presented her 21 demands to China, threatening to take charge of the whole country. She took over the German sphere of influence in Shantung province. At the Washington Conference of 1921-22, the American imperialists compelled Japan to withdraw from Shantung and from the Soviet maritime provinces. They negotiated the Nine-Power Treaty under which the policy of the Open Door was reaffirmed. All the imperialist powers having interests in China undertook to respect the sovereignty, the independence, and the territorial and administrative integrity of China.
This agreement between the imperialist bandits broke down before the subsequent reality of sharpening antagonism between the Powers. Britain sought merely to maintain the status quo in the Orient, being satisfied with the loot she had already obtained. But Japan, the new and hungry guest at the imperialist table, cast a greedy eye on the trade and possessions of both her British and American rivals and revived her plans for subjugating China. In 1931, Japan's armies moved into Manchuria. Secretary of State Stimson reminded Japan of the Open Door once again and proclaimed the new implementing doctrine of Non-recognition under which the United States refused to recognize any situation, treaty or agreement which Japan might bring about by force of arms.
Six years later, Japanese imperialism moved into China proper. On October 6, 1938, Ambassador Grew in Tokyo delivered a note to the Japanese Government charging Japan with violation of her promises to maintain the Open Door and demanding that these promises be implemented. Japan's answer was to proclaim her immutable purpose to establish a New Order in East Asia. There were other diplomatic exchanges. It is noteworthy that in all of them the expression of American concern for American rights and interests is the motif. The hypocritical pretense that the American imperialists were concerned solely or even mainly with liberating the Orient from Japanese banditry so that the Chinese and other Asiatic peoples might be free, was to come later, after Pearl Harbor, in order to furnish a cover of disinterested idealism for the predatory aims of the Wall Street brigands.
As we have seen, war between Japan and the United States was prepared step by step over a period of half a century. It was not the result of sudden, unexpected aggression by Japan. Pearl Harbor was merely the conflagration point of a long-smoldering antagonism lodged in the development of the two imperialist powers and caused by their greedy appetite for profits. For the right to dominate the Orient and exploit China with its millions of inhabitants, the imperialists on both sides of the Pacific sent their nations' youth to the shambles. They have caused unimaginable destruction, killed millions of people, and brought untold grief and privation to the survivors.
War guilt? Yes! But it rests as heavily on the Wall Street brigands and their government in Washington as it does on the defeated imperialists of Japan.
Note
1. Frank Glass was no longer in China but in the United States at this time.
In 1942 more than 120,000 men, women, and children were incarcerated behind barbed wire in concentration camps euphemistically called "assembly centers." Two-thirds of the evacuees held illegally without trial were citizens of the United States. Their only crime was their Japanese ancestry. And for that they served one to five years. The last camp was not closed until 1946, six months after World War II ended.
"The American camps were not death camps, but they were surrounded by barbed wire and by troops whose guns were pointed at the inmates," Daniels says.
This policy was not a mistake or an aberration, as many would like to believe. Japanese residing in the United States were, because of their race, singled out as a target. But their evacuation and internment was only the most blatant and vicious aspect of a general policy of repression excused by the needs of war.
The East Asian theater of World War II was essentially an interimperialist conflict between two capitalist powers, Tokyo and Washington, for control of markets and natural resources in the Far East. The U.S. ruling class appealed to racist prejudice against Japanese to justify the war and disguise its true character. The creation of racist hysteria against the "sneaky, dishonest, sly Japanese" was necessary for the ruling class to ensure that U.S. workers would fight.
This racist dismissal of the Japanese as less than human reached its logical conclusion when the U.S. government ordered two atomic bombs dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Tens of thousands of people were killed in the blasts and their aftermath. Although President Harry Truman claimed this atrocity was necessary to make the Japanese government surrender, the fact is that before the bombs were dropped Tokyo had already requested to surrender on terms that the U.S. government accepted in September. In reality, Japanese lives were sacrificed to show the world that Washington had emerged as the top imperialist power, unafraid to act ruthlessly to maintain its might.
Racism used to divide working class
Racism has traditionally been used by the U.S. rulers to divide the working class and to consolidate their rule. Japanese in the United States have faced widespread discrimination since they began arriving in the late 19th century. As with the Chinese before them, they could not by law become citizens, buy land, or marry whites. Japanese were denied entry into the United States after 1924, some 42 years after legislation banning immigration of Chinese laborers.
Racist agitation against them reached a crescendo following the Japanese military attack on Pearl Harbor. The U.S. government claimed the mass internment was necessary because it was impossible to distinguish loyal from disloyal Japanese because they all look alike.
General John DeWitt, who was in the Western Defense command of the U.S. Army, said, "A Jap's a Jap...There is no way to determine their loyalty...It makes no difference whether he is an American citizen, theoretically he is still Japanese and you can't change him by giving him a piece of paper."
Daniels examines the U.S. government's justification that internment was a "military necessity" to avoid sabotage and espionage by Japanese Americans. No cases of sabotage or espionage were ever proven against any person of Japanese descent living in the United States.
The Supreme Court upheld the doctrine of the military necessity of the concentration camps. The author points to evidence that came to light 40 years later proving the U.S. government withheld, suppressed, and altered evidence indicating that there had been no military necessity to incarcerate Japanese Americans.
A 1981 report by the Presidential Commission on the Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians concluded that the roundup of Japanese Americans "was not justified by military necessity.... The broad historical causes which shaped these decisions were race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.... A grave injustice was done to American citizens and resident aliens of Japanese ancestry."
With the president, Congress, and Supreme Court joining together at the time to implement and justify internment, it is not surprising that few spoke out for the constitutional rights of the Japanese. The only union to oppose evacuation was the International Longshoremen's and Warehouse-men's Union. Even the supposedly revolutionary Communist Party not only failed to protest the concentration camps but actually supported the internment of Japanese Americans. As one CP member noted in 1972, "Immediately after Pearl Harbor, the People's World [the West Coast daily newspaper reflecting the views of the CP] dismissed its Nisei [U.S.-born Japanese] woman office worker and the Party suspended all Nisei from membership saying that 'the Party was the best place for any Japanese fifth columnist to hide and we don't want to take any chances.' "
This support for internment was an integral part of the CP's policy of subordinating all struggles to the U.S. war effort in compliance with Joseph Stalin's wartime alliance with U.S. imperialism.
In sharp contrast the Socialist Workers Party attacked President Franklin Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066 as "an indiscriminate and brutal witch-hunt ... having the character of a racial pogrom." It criticized the evacuation as a violation of the rights of Japanese Americans --"a repressive measure, based purely on racial discrimination and motivated chiefly by the desire of Big Business for additional profits, which is presented as a necessary part of the "war for democracy.'"
Only 72 hours to pack
With few allies to withstand the power of the U.S. government, the Japanese Americans obediently turned up at train or bus stations as they were instructed to by notices placed on telephone poles and in store windows. They suffered enormous financial losses during the hasty evacuation. Most were given only 72 hours to pack and dispose of their property, including farms, fishing boats, houses, and cars. They could take only what they could carry in two bags per person.
The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco conservatively estimated in 1942 that the total loss to evacuees, not including lost interest, wages, income, and appreciation, was $400 million.
The U.S. concentration camps were not like Auschwitz or Buchenwald; there were no gas ovens, firing squads, or torture chambers. They were essentially prison camps, each relatively isolated on land where no one else chose to live--the desert or swamps. Guarded by armed military police and surrounded by barbed wire, the inmates maintained the upkeep of the camps under the supervision of white personnel.
Most of the evacuees were resigned to their fate, but resistance, both active and passive, did occur--more frequently and significantly than is generally known. Daniels writes that protest rallies, demonstrations, work stoppages, and even general strikes of evacuees took place at all 10 camps around the issues of living conditions--especially food and housing--the availability of employment, wages, and working conditions.
The author effectively summarizes two of the most important controversies in the camps--the loyalty oath all evacuees were asked to sign and the draft resistance at Heart Mountain, Wyoming, which resulted in the largest mass trial of draft resisters in U.S. history. Sixty-three were found guilty, and sentenced to three years in jail.
Altogether 33,000 Japanese Americans served in the U.S. Army in segregated units under white officers during World War II. The most famous formation, the 442nd Combat Team, was the most decorated unit in the U.S. Army during World War II.
In the racist tradition of the U.S. military, however, the 442nd was consistently used as the first wave of assault troops whose bodies paved the way for the white troops following them into battle. They suffered 9,486 casualties, 314 percent of the unit's original strength.
The U.S. armed forces were able to use the 442nd as shock troops by exploiting the Japanese Americans' desire to prove their loyalty. Washington felt confident that there would be no protest from troops who believed that only their blood could win freedom for the Japanese still interned at home.
By the summer of 1943, in response to the critical labor shortage caused by the war, the War Relocation Authority, which administered the camps, began a program encouraging permanent relocation outside the camps. Most evacuees returned to the West Coast several years after World War II, in spite of a campaign of intimidation waged in 1945–6 in Oregon and California by growers in the produce and floral industries, as well as officials of AFL unions like the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, aimed at keeping them away.
In 1948 the government began to adjudicate claims for losses due to evacuation. The payments were stingy--an average of 10 cents per dollar at 1941 values, not including inflation. The average award per claim in one year was $40 while it cost the government $1,500 simply to process a single claim. The final claim was processed in 1965.
Demands for redress and reparation
The redress movement--the term used by Japanese Americans to describe their struggle for official recognition that a grievous wrong was done to them--originated in the early 1970s under the impact of the victorious civil rights movement and growing support for the anti–Vietnam War movement
At first it was raised by only a few activists but soon it gained the support of virtually the entire Japanese American community. In 1978, the community's major organization, the Japanese American Citizens League, passed a resolution calling for an apology by the government and a cash payment. Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1988, which officially apologized to Japanese Americans and provided reparations of $20,000 to each of the 56,000 survivors of the concentration camps. A few days later President Ronald Reagan signed the bill into law.
One of the few weaknesses in Daniels's book is that he focuses only on the legislative and judicial processes that resulted in redress and reparations. He thereby neglects the movement of groups and individuals that organized speakers to reach out to many organizations, like churches and veterans groups; petitions and resolutions by city councils; letter-writing campaigns to legislators and the president; and intensive lobbying efforts. Redress was won by Japanese Americans and their supporters, not simply granted because of a change of heart by legislators.
Were centers 'concentration camps'?
A review that appeared in the New York Times attacked Daniels for daring to use the term "concentration camp" when referring to the internment centers.
Herbert Mitgang, the reviewer, says it is not accurate to equate the U.S. relocation centers--which "resembled American communities" with schools, libraries, hospitals, newspapers and churches--to Nazi "murder factories," which killed 6 million Jews.
Mitgang misses the point. The Nazis did not invent concentration camps. All forms of capitalist rule, from bourgeois democracies to military dictatorships to fascist regimes, have resorted to concentration camps when they felt the need. And more often than not, they have felt the need during wartime.
The term "concentration camp" actually originated during the Spanish attempts to suppress the movement for Cuban independence in the 1890s. The whole population of a district was herded into camps as part of a policy of forcible-pacification. Many died of starvation, disease, and exposure.
Just a few years later, the British government used the term to describe the detention centers it set up in South Africa during the Anglo-Boer War of 1899–1902. Approximately 20,000 Afrikaner civilians and more than 12,000 Africans died in these camps.
The British also set up concentration camps during World War I--for German prisoners of war and temporarily for Russian revolutionaries--in Nova Scotia. The Weimar Republic of Germany set up six state concentration camps to hold thousands in "protective custody."
The fascists under Francisco Franco in Spain incarcerated more than 1,600 people in the Canary Islands from 1936-37 both in prison and in the Gando concentration camp.
When Franco's forces won the Spanish Civil War in 1939, more than 450,000 anti-fascist fighters fled to France. Paris put the 270,000 considered "military personnel" into 16 French concentration camps. They were held in the camps until 1940 when the men were drafted into the French army or were permitted to volunteer for foreign legion units to fight Germany.
Some 8,000 of these veterans had the dubious distinction of being held in concentration camps of two capitalist powers. They were captured by the Nazis and held at Mauthausen concentration camp until the end of the war
During World War II, virtually every imperalist government used concentration camps to hold without trial populations considered to be "politically unreliable." London had at least one concentration camp in Great Britain for politically "undesirable" Europeans who had fled the German fascists.
Paris incarcerated Austrian intellectuals, artists, and literary figures at the Camp des Milles in France. The unoccupied French government built the Montreuil-Bellay concentration camp to detain vagrants and gypsies ostensibly because they were spies.
Austria had two concentration camps for social misfits and gypsies in Weyer.
Tokyo built concentration camps in the Philippines for enemy civilians, as well as in other Asian nations it invaded.
The German government, of course, developed concentration camps the most methodically of all. They had concentration camps for those who were not charged with any specific offense but were considered "politically incorrigible." They had punitive labor camps for those charged with specific offenses, including Russian civilians and soldiers. And they had extermination centers to eliminate the so-called "Jewish problem."
So the U.S. government was not alone or unprecedented in its use of concentration camps for an entire population. While the camps varied from country to country and within each country in terms of starvation, brutality, and torture, the only ones used as extermination centers were run by the Nazi regime.
In short, concentration camps have been endemic in modem times. They have historically been used to hold "undesirables" --unwanted races, political dissidents, immigrant workers, prisoners of war.
After World War II the term became synonymous with the Nazi extermination centers that executed millions of Jews, Russians, gypsies, trade unionists, political prisoners, and others. But even the majority of Nazi concentration camps were not death camps. As Daniels points out Roosevelt, senators, and nationally syndicated columnists publicly used the term "concentration camps" to describe the places where Japanese Americans were sent. Only after the massive publicity surrounding the liberation of Nazi death camp inmates did many shy away from this terminology.
So-called democratic governments have needed to resort to concentration camps particularly during wartime because they need to trample on democratic rights in order to conduct the war. The camps don't only punish their enemies and focus on scapegoats. By their very existence, they terrorize working people and deter them from even contemplating resistance.
During World War II, for instance, "liberal" president Roosevelt initiated an entire program curtailing civil rights and liberties in the United States. He imposed censorship on the media, suspended the right of habeas corpus, arrested and imprisoned leaders of socialist organizations and trade unions who opposed the war.
To his credit, Daniels has a final chapter in his book titled "Could It Happen Again?"
Executive Order 9066, which authorized the camps; was repealed by President Gerald Ford in 1976. The Emergency Detention Act of 1950 that authorized keeping concentration camps in readiness for people who "probably will engage in acts of espionage or sabotage" was repealed in 1971.
But, "Japanese Americans were quick to point out that they had been shipped off to camps in 1942 even without such a law," Daniels says. There was no legislation on the books in 1942, but the president issued an executive order, Congress passed laws to enforce it, and the Supreme Court backed both as constitutional.
As Daniels also points out, the U.S. government has debated using concentration camps several times since World War II. Tule Lake, one of the Japanese American concentration camps, was even reactivated as a standby camp for political dissidents during the height of the Cold War in the 1950s.
The last three presidents have considered mass incarceration of nationalities with whom the U.S. government was in conflict. James Carter considered internment of Iranians in the United States during the overthrow of the Shah of Iran in 1979; Reagan detained Haitian refugees, many in the notorious Krome Avenue camp, after the overthrow of the Duvalier dictatorship; George Bush weighed the incarceration of Arab-Americans before and during the Gulf War of 1990–91.
Daniels concludes, "While most optimists would argue that, in America, concentration camps are a thing of the past ...many Japanese Americans, the only group of citizens ever incarcerated simply because of their genes, would argue that what has happened before can surely happen again."
Given the historical use of concentration camps by imperialist governments, if the U.S. ruling class needs to establish concentration camps again in order to be able to wage war, it will not hesitate to try.
The only force capable of stopping them is the working class. That is why Daniels's book is an important introduction to this subject. By learning the lessons of our past, we will better be able to arm ourselves to fight and take on the new challenges posed in the coming period by depression, wars, and revolution.
Occupy Wall Street has given U.S. capitalists high hopes that clash with the egalitarian goals of the movement's rank and file. The bosses dream most fondly of enlisting OWS in re-electing war-maker Obama, who just upped the likelihood of a new major war by killing twenty-five Pakistani soldiers and opening a U.S. Marine base in Australia, opposite archrival China.
The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), U.S. imperialism's top think tank, gushes that the occupiers "could emerge as a battle-hardened cadre of skilled organizers well-positioned to influence the issues at stake in the 2012 elections" (CFR website, 11/11/11). The CFR thinks that OWS can help sell Obama's push to tax the rich to pay for global war readiness, in the guise of "fairness" and job creation: "Increasing taxes on capital gains and closing corporate tax loopholes would allow renewed investments in critical public goods like roads and railways."
This plan dovetails with the U.S. Army War College's calls for renewing "infrastructure required to effectively project our military forces overseas" (USAWC report, 3/15/06). But many in OWS see through the voting booth farce. At the New York City camp near Wall Street, the idea of voting was highly unpopular. Some protesters sat on voter registration tables set up by Democratic Party flunkies and refused to register.
Bosses Misguide Workers with '99%' Politics
Savvier ruling-class strategists, however, understand that the success of OWS reflects the growing alienation of Obama's base due to widening Middle East wars and a flagging U.S. economy. In the liberal, imperialist, Rockefeller-bankrolled Nation magazine (12/12/11), William Greider wrote, "Many of the young people and minorities who campaigned and voted for [Obama] in 2008 might drift away to Occupy's direct action... [and] may just skip voting in 2012."
On the other hand, Greider sees how his imperialist masters could benefit from the lack of revolutionary, communist leadership within OWS: "Yet this new force can ultimately help Obama if he responds to its message. Led by the young, the movement is aligning with the reviving militancy of labor and other progressive constituencies. The spirit is open-armed and patriotic, not negative and divisive.... [T]his movement is not about electoral politics — not yet, anyway. It is about saving the country."
"Country-saving" boils down to promoting workers' patriotic loyalty to "their" nation, which is controlled top to bottom by the bosses. This translates to all-class unity to support the bosses' imperialist oil wars abroad, and domestic fascism to guarantee control of the working class in the U.S. The chief goal of legislation like the Patriot Act is to intimidate the working class and to cut wages, pensions, Social Security, Medicare and other social services without resistance.
Nicolaus Mills, a Sarah Lawrence professor funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, likened OWS activism to the "youth-inspiring" president who helped launch U.S. genocide in Vietnam. She asserted, "In his Inaugural Address, President John F. Kennedy declared that the torch had been passed to a new generation. A year later, in its Port Huron Statement of 1962, the group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), took Kennedy's generational declaration a step further, insisting that the time had come for America to make a new commitment to social justice. For SDS, an organization dominated by college and graduate students, participatory democracy was a version of Occupy Wall Street's horizontal democracy" (CNN, 10/26/11).
In the 1960s, our Party worked mightily within SDS to expose and attack its class-denying, nationalist politics, and to advance the internationalist idea of anti-racist, anti-imperialist, working-class communist revolution. We forged an anti-racist worker-student caucus that exposed the deadly error of uniting with the liberal Democrats' stand for "negotiations" with the Vietnamese. We stated that there was nothing to negotiate. With U.S imperialism invading Southeast Asia and slaughtering millions, our demand, in the interest of the international working class, was simple: "Get out!" PLP raised this slogan within the SDS and in the shops and unions until it became a nation-wide call.
Today we must combat OWS's misleading 99% formulation (see article, page 8). It denies the Marxist understanding of a working class in a life-and-death struggle with capitalists, and suggests that a wealthy 1% of an otherwise undifferentiated "us" are bad but reformable.
This disguises the class nature of capitalist society. We can't afford to ignore that the 1%, the wealthy, use their lackeys to enforce their profit system: the cops and the courts, national and local politicians, military officers, foremen and supervisors, principals and school superintendents. If they are part of the 99%, we have traitors in our midst.
Oakland Union Hacks Stifle Heroic Workers' Rebellion
While the OWS movement has for the most part followed liberal Democratic politics of "tax the rich, tighten financial regulations and reform the system," some exceptions stand out. While New York demonstrators have kept mainly to public places, for example, activists in Oakland shut down its port and several banks for several hours on November 2. In Occupy Los Angeles, PL'ers led an anti-racist, anti-sexist march to the police station, protesting the cops' brutal attacks on black and Latino workers and youth.
But union hacks are effectively pulling the plug on local Occupy activists' demands for a West Coast dock strike on December 12. Disgracing many decades of communist-inspired militancy, which once organized and led the longshoremen's union in a general strike that won a 30-hour week, these class traitors said, "To be clear, the ILWU, the Coast Longshore Division and Local 21 are not coordinating independently or in conjunction with any self-proclaimed organization or group to shut down any port or terminal…." (Journal of Commerce, 11/23/11). West Coast ports represent a vital interest for the ruling class because they underpin potential U.S. war efforts against China.
Clinton's Labor Secretary Robert Reich, commenting on the economic causes of OWS, foresees a fascist political outcome, a new millennium of class collaboration:
Rather than ushering in an era of political paralysis, the Great Depression of the 1930s changed American politics altogether — realigning the major parties, creating new coalitions, and yielding new solutions. Prolonged economic distress of a decade or more could have the same effect this time around. (NY Times, 11/24/11).
Reich Omits the Suffering and Struggles of the Working Class
Reich goes on to mention three decades of U.S. prosperity following World War II, though he fails to elaborate on how that war is now the model for the next big "new solution." He conveniently forgets the more than 20 million working-class war dead since World War II. He dismisses the millions more who will be the victims of World War III, the inevitable future of inter-imperialist rivalry.
Likewise, Reich ignores the recurring recessions under capitalism that throw millions of workers on the street; the massive big-city rebellions led by black workers in response to racist unemployment and police brutality; the huge strikes by steel, electrical, auto, postal, transit and shipbuilding workers, all of whom missed out on "decades of U.S. prosperity."
Such are the "shared fruits of growth," in Reich's phrase, that the class-collaborationist misleaders of OWS promise under capitalism.
| | | | | | | | Friday, December 2, 2011 9:17 PM | | | Jay | | | | | | Labels: News |
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http://www.cpgb-ml.co.uk/index.php?secName=proletarian&subName=display&art=771
Communists and the struggle against imperialism
Around the world, there are a number of basically decent communist parties, some of them with deep roots amongst the working people, many of which are leading and waging principled and courageous struggles for socialism, yet who nevertheless fail to take a consistent anti-imperialist stand. Such parties have, for example, prevaricated in the face of the war against Libya, just as they did in the case of Iraq before, claiming that they could not give unequivocal support to such national-revolutionary leaders as Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi, as they were not communists.
http://www.cpgb-ml.co.uk/index.php?secName=proletarian&subName=display&art=778
Imperialist warmongers set sights on Iran
Whether or not they are able to drum up much international support for war against Iran, if they remain unable to destabilise the Iranian regime internally, the US and Israel may well feel 'forced' to take decisive military action, with or without a 'coalition of the willing'.
http://www.cpgb-ml.co.uk/index.php?secName=proletarian&subName=display&art=786
:: BRITISH POLITICS ::
Industry matters: 30 November pensions strike
Whatever has been achieved on 30 November will have been in spite of Labour and the TUC, not because of them. Miliband came out against the strike at Labour's conference, also taking the opportunity to pat Liverpool councillors on the head for failing to raise a finger against the cuts. Over at the Tory conference, Brendan Barber was fixed up with an 'impromptu' meeting with ConDem ministers to try to "avert mass strikes".
http://www.cpgb-ml.co.uk/index.php?secName=proletarian&subName=display&art=775
Downton Abbey, the Jolly George and Stop the War
On 10 May 1920 the dockers and stevedores of London refused to load arms and ammunition onto the Jolly George, giving such a lead to the whole working class that it went on to defeat the British bourgeosie's planned invasion of revolutionary Russia.
http://www.cpgb-ml.co.uk/index.php?secName=proletarian&subName=display&art=777
Dale Farm: lessons to be learned
The legal campsite at Dale Farm in 1999 was next to a scrap yard. The problems only started after the travellers bought the scrap yard, cleared it, laid concrete for caravans and chalets and allowed other traveller families to move in. In short, they turned a dump into a place fit for human habitation.
http://www.cpgb-ml.co.uk/index.php?secName=proletarian&subName=display&art=776
Celebrating October: videos, a poem and a letter
Capitalism cannot be reformed, regulated, moderated or otherwise made to serve the interests of working people. It must be overthrown! We must discard all those parties who pretend otherwise, particularly the social-democratic Labour party, and its revisionist and Trotskyite hangers-on, who act as agents of imperialism (misguided or malicious) in the working-class movement. In this as in so many regards, October shows us the way! Watch inspiring speeches from our meeting here.
http://www.cpgb-ml.co.uk/index.php?secName=proletarian&subName=display&art=784
:: AFRICA ::
Editorial: The spirit of Tahrir
Hundreds of thousands of people have returned to Tahrir Square, erected tents and vowed to stay there until the military dictatorship leaves, handing over power to a civilian government. The protesters are committed to rescuing the revolution from the suffocating embrace of the military rulers who promised democracy only to deliver repression.
http://www.cpgb-ml.co.uk/index.php?secName=proletarian&subName=display&art=772
Imperialism steps up its moves to recolonise Africa
The forcible recolonisation of Africa has clearly long been planned, and the barbaric destruction of Libya is undoubtedly intended to establish a bridgehead for further colonial interference on the African continent. While the 'neo-con' George W Bush invented US Africa Command as the new vehicle for projecting US interests onto Africa from the barrel of a gun, it has fallen to the 'progressive' son of a Kenyan, Obama, to show to the world just what purpose Africom is intended to serve.
http://www.cpgb-ml.co.uk/index.php?secName=proletarian&subName=display&art=773
Libya update
Exactly what state of health the progressive forces in Libya are in is beyond the direct knowledge of this newspaper. There are two incontrovertible facts, however, which point to the certainty of massive anti-imperialist resistance. The first is that the vast majority of Libyans were Gaddafi supporters; the second is that Gaddafi was overthrown because he diverted Libya's oil money into providing the Libyan people with a high standard of living and into helping other African countries to escape the worst effects of poverty.
http://www.cpgb-ml.co.uk/index.php?secName=proletarian&subName=display&art=774
:: CULTURE AND LETTERS ::
Film review: The Help
The 1960s were years of turbulence. The bourgeois media talk only about sex, drugs and rock'n'roll, but in reality, the '60s were about resistance to imperialism, with imperialist wars in Vietnam and the rest of Indochina, and social upheaval in the imperialist heartlands. Class and its handmaidens race and gender were under renewed scrutiny, and the latter were undergoing seismic changes.
http://www.cpgb-ml.co.uk/index.php?secName=proletarian&subName=display&art=780
Letter: Solidarity from a Turkish prison cell
I must say that it's of great importance that you raise the red flag of the struggle for equality, freedom and a world without classes and exploitation in the fortress of imperialist capitalism.
http://www.cpgb-ml.co.uk/index.php?secName=proletarian&subName=display&art=779
Letter: The BMA failure to ballot for strike action
Unison's action has been undermined by the vacillation of the BMA (something which, I suspect, has been secretly welcomed by Unison's equally lily-livered leadership). And so, once again, British trade-union leaders throw away the option of meaningful retaliation against the robber barons of British capitalism in favour of wave-your-flag-paint-your-face gesture politics.
http://www.cpgb-ml.co.uk/index.php?secName=proletarian&subName=display&art=785
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Comradely,
Jay Rothermel
| | | | | | | | Wednesday, December 7, 2011 7:37 PM | | | Jay | | | | | | Labels: News |
With all respect, much of this has been known for years - partly even as it occurred. Within one year of the declaration of war Charles Beard wrote "Roosevelt and The Coming of War" thoroughly detailing the method by which Roosevelt and his cronies pushed war feelling and preparation in the Senate, arranged "Lend Lese" so that it would necessitate covnoys and invite acts of war, launched ships into the South China Sea to attract Japanese attack. In fact, he managed to get a couple of American ships sunk in the Atlantic - but that wasn't enough to arouse the American people to war - they underrstood that such risks were entailed in shipping not just arms but a whole reserve fleet to England.
As early as one year after the war began Charles Beard wrote "Franklin roosevelt and the Coming of War" a detailed analysis of how roosevelt and his cronies had manipulated Congress month after month, step after step, arranged provocative acts in the Atlantic - even managing to get a couple of American ships sunk but not succeeding in getting the public aroused enough for war.
Left wing journals of the era all wrote about this as it was happening: Socialist Call (Socialist Party), "The Militant" (Socialisdt Workers Party), "Labor Action" (Workers Party - Shachtman), "The Fighting Worker" (Oehler), Weekly People (De Leonist), Western Socialist (a Boston based sect affiliated with the Socialist Party of Great Britain)j, "Workers Age" (Lovestone), "Modern Quarterly" (independent radical). The point is that it was hardly concealed from anyone who was paying attention. We think too often that only the antecedent sects that gave birth to our younger selves were alert or active in those years. In fact, James Farley, FDR's former Postmaster General and describes in his autobiography the first cabinet meeting and the first question Roosevelt posed on non-domestic issues: "Well, gentlemen, what shall we do about Japan?"
Another recent work that deals with the issue is David Gaddis "The Coming of the Cold War." which deals with Roosevelt's foreign policy from 1941 on.
The Manifesto of the New Jewel Movement
[Administrator's Preface]
The New Jewel Movement Manifesto was issued late in 1973 by the New Jewel Movement party of Grenada. The Manifesto was presented at the Conference on the Implications of Independence for Grenada from 11-13 January 1974.
Many believe the Manifesto was co-written by Maurice Bishop and Bernard Coard. According to Sandford, in August 1973, “the NJM authorized Bishop to enlist the services of Bernard Coard in drafting a manifesto . . .” In 1974 Coard was part of the Institute of International Relations and would not return to Grenada to take up residency until September 1976; nevertheless, he traveled between islands. When an unidentified author was writing on "The Unity Question", that author stated:
Scholar Manning Marable asserts this: “The NJM's initial manifesto was largely drafted by MAP's major intellectual, Franklyn Harvey, who had been influenced heavily by the writings of [CLR] James.” Another influence is attributed to Tanzanian Christian Socialism. Still another influence is TAPIA of Trinidad. Tapia House Printing Company printed the report on the Conference on the Implications of Independence for Grenada from 11-13 January 1974.In October 1973, our "Manifesto for Power to the People", after months of discussions with our Groups and broad membership and after formal approval by our Co-ordinating Council of Delegates, was distributed to the public.
Below is a combination of the text from versions of the Manifesto with keyboarding input and site maintenance, including expenses, by the administrator of http://www.thegrenadarevolutiononline.com,
Preface ©2003-2010 Ann Elizabeth Wilder. All rights reserved.
The Manifesto begins with this introduction:
NEW JEWEL MOVEMENT
FOR POWER TO THE PEOPLE
AND FOR ACHIEVING REAL
INDEPENDENCE FOR GRENADA,
CARRIACOU, PETIT MARTINIQUE
AND THE GRENADIAN GRENADINES (1973)
ALL THIS HAS GOT TO STOP
Introduction
The people are being cheated and have been cheated for too long--cheated by both parties, for over twenty years. Nobody is asking what the people want. We suffer low wages and higher cost of living while the politicians get richer, live in bigger houses and drive around in even bigger cars. The government has done nothing to help people build decent houses; most people still have to walk miles to get water to drink after 22 years of politicians.
If we fall sick we catch hell to get quick and cheap medical treatment. Half of us can't find steady work. The place is getting from bad to worse every day-except for the politicians (just look at how they dress and how they move around). The police are being used in politics these days and people are getting more and more blows from them. Government workers who don't toe the Gairy line are getting fired left and right.
Even the magistrates better look out!"The government has no idea how to improve agriculture, how to set up industries, how to improve housing, health, education and general well-being of the people. They have no ideas for helping the people. All they know is how to take the people's money for themselves, while the people scrape and scrunt for a living.
We believe that the main concern of us all is to (1) prevent the daily rise in prices of all our food and clothes and other essentials (it is unbelievable but that the price you can get for a pound of cocoa can't buy a half-pound of fish) and (2) develop a concrete program for raising the standard of housing, living, education, health, food and recreation for all the people
The present situation we face is that we are forced to live in jammed-up, rundown, unpainted houses without toilet and bath, without running water, very poor roads, overcrowded schools where our children can't get a decent education, and without any proper bus service. There is almost no ambulance service in case of illness. We can't afford the cost of food to feed our children properly and this makes it easier for them to catch all kinds of illnesses. There are very few places near home for recreation. All we have is the rumshop to drown our troubles. It's almost impossible to buy clothes or shoes these days. The prices are ridiculous.
Twenty years of the GNP and the GULP have made us believe that there is no way out of this blasted mess. BUT THERE IS, and the time is NOW to do something about it.
What we want to do in this Manifesto is to give a rough idea of a way out. We can start by looking at some of the ways in which we can set about to wipe out poverty in Grenada.
Thus ends the Introduction to the 1973 Manifesto of NJM. The rest of the document is lengthy. It can be accessed by way of the following links:
Agriculture, Fisheries, Agro-Industries
Carriacou: The Forgotten Island
Building Our National Economy - A quote from this section put many people in a panic - "This means that a first priority must be the complete nationalisation of all foreign-owned hotels as well as foreign-owned housing settlements, such as Westerhall."
People's Assemblies for Power to the People
Regional and International Affairs
Independence - A comment for reparations appeared in discussion of the February 7, 1974 Independence from Great Britain. The Manifesto says this: "Also, in our negotiations with the British on the question of independence, we could have demanded from them an independence payment of at least one hundred million dollars as partial reparation to make up for some of the money stolen from us and the exploitation, human misery, suffering and degradation we have endured at their hands over the last 400 years."
In the Independence part of the Manifesto, the qualities of leadership is discussed; for example - "Leadership instead should regard itself as the servants of the people, and must aim at destroying the relationship of master and slave, employer and employee and of destroying the whole class relationship in our society."
Towards the New Life and New Society - In this closing section, a tentative plan is stated: "The NJM proposes to hold in the near future a National Congress of the People to work out the best strategy for taking power." A change reads like this: "To create the new life for the new man in the society, it is necessary that we reject the present economic and political system which we live under."
The paragraph about democracy in the New Society is as follows:
"The new society must not only speak of Democracy, but must practise it in all its aspects. We must stress the policy of "Self-Reliance" and "Self-Sufficiency" undertaken co-operatively, and reject the easy approaches offered by aid and foreign assistance. We will have to recognise that our most important resource is our people."
| | | | | | | | Friday, December 9, 2011 1:41 AM | | | Jay | | | | | | Labels: News |
New York City Town Hall protest 'Flushes Rush'
| |
An IAC release called Limbaugh "a hate monger … a war monger [who] supported the Pentagon invasions of Afghanistan and Libya," adding that he "constantly ridicules women" and that "defaming lesbian, gay and transgender people is Limbaugh's trademark." Also, though "this multimillionaire radio jerk would starve to death if undocumented workers didn't gather the food for his table," he is "a cheerleader for the fascist anti-immigrant laws in Arizona and Alabama" and "spews hate against immigrants.
"Our greatest weapon is unity. Limbaugh's $38-million-a-year job is to divide us."
Report and photos by John Catalinotto
| | | | | | | | Thursday, December 1, 2011 11:31 PM | | | Jay | | | | | | Labels: News |
| | | | | | | | Thursday, December 8, 2011 10:39 AM | | | Jay | | | | | | Labels: News |
from Товарищ Х
Socio-economic Inequality in India and the World since 1990
http://sanhati.com/excerpted/4338/
November 17, 2011
By Deepankar Basu
Abstract: Income or wealth inequality captures only a narrow slice of inequality in society. Non-income dimensions of inequality in health status and educational attainment are equally if not more important. The two dimensions, income and non-income, could be brought together to define a broader measure of socio-economic inequality. But unavailability of data on the distribution of health status and educational attainment across different sections of society make the construction of a direct measure of socio-economic inequality very difficult. This article proposes a simple and intuitive indirect measure. The indirect measure is used to rank the performance of 98 developing countries for the period 1990-2009. Countries which have aggressively embraced the neoliberal model display large increases in socio-economic inequality. Notable examples of such countries are: China, India, Kenya and Thailand. When compared with its neighbours (Bangladesh, Bhutan, Pakistan, Nepal and Sri Lanka), India emerges as the worst performer in South Asia.
Socio-economic inequality refers to a broad measure of inequality. It tries to capture societal inequality along both income (and wealth) and non-income dimensions. Why should we look at the broader measure of socio-economic inequality? This is because traditional measures that focus exclusively on income (or wealth) inequality capture only a narrow slice of socio-economic inequality since, by construction, they leave out non-income dimensions of well-being like mortality, incidence and burden of common diseases, nutrition, educational attainment and social status deriving from factors like caste, race or ethnicity.
While constructing direct measures of socio-economic inequality is a daunting task because of data problems, it is possible to come up with indirect measures of socio-economic inequality. Recent research that I have undertaken in this area has proposed an intuitive and simple-to-compute indirect measure for tracking changes in socio-economic inequality of over time by using the variation in life expectancy at birth (LEB) across countries [1]. Using this measure we see very vividly that countries which aggressively adopted neoliberal economic policies have witnessed sharp deterioration in socio-economic inequality since 1990. Notable examples of such countries are India, China, Kenya, Thailand, Ghana and Chad. This corroborates the concerns of the critics of neoliberalism who have pointed out, over and over again, that the growth process of the past few decades has been massively disequalizing.
Why indirect measures of socio-economic inequality?
There are at least three reasons that make this indirect measure useful for activists, researchers and policy makers. First, there is a big problem of unavailability of income distribution data for much of the developing world. For instance, between 1990 and 2009, income distribution data was available in the World Development Indicators (the most comprehensive on-line data base on the developing world maintained by the World Bank) between a maximum of 25 per cent of countries in 2000, and a minimum of 6 percent of the countries in 1990. Thus, even in the best case scenario, about 75 percent of developing countries do have income distribution data available.
Second, when data on income or consumption expenditure distribution is available for developing countries its quality is often low and they are beset with well-known problems. Changes in definitions or survey methodology often make comparability over time difficult [2]. It is also well understood that household surveys, the source of income distribution data, suffer from the problems of under-reporting and under-coverage of the richer sections of the population (Banerjee and Piketty, 2005). Even when reliable data on income distribution is obtained, it is not easy to convert that to measures of aggregate inequality like the Gini coefficient.
Third, data on the distribution of non-income measures of well-being are even more difficult to come by. But can we even come up with a simple measure of the distribution of the non-income aspects of well being across the population? Recent research suggests that we can. The idea is the following: while it is difficult to capture all non-income aspects of inequality in one simple measure, life expectancy at birth (LEB) has been proposed by social scientists as a broad social indicator of social well-being that captures many of the important dimensions of living standards that are left out by pure income measures. Ideally, one would like to track improvements in LEB across income classes to get an idea of the evolution of broad socio-economic inequality. Pandey and Nathwani (1997) use LEB data across broad income classes to construct a direct measure of socio-economic inequality; they demonstrate the use of their methodology using Canadian data. But data on LEB disaggregated by income classes is typically not available for most countries, especially poor countries. Hence, one needs to fall back on an indirect method to track changes in broad socio-economic inequality over time in poor countries.
How is the measure constructed?
The construction of the indirect measure of socio-economic inequality starts from the fairly intuitive idea that improvements in LEB (and possibly other indicators of living standard as well) over time for any country can be decomposed into three parts. The first part arises due to increases in per capita income over time, which allows families, on average, to eat better and more nutritious food, live in better houses with better sanitation facilities, purchase better and more effective medical care, etc.
The second part comes from improvements in, and diffusion of, medical technology. This is primarily driven by improvements in, and diffusion of, medical technology that reduce the impact of diseases on the general health of human populations. Improvements in pre and post natal care, access to hospitals (or medical professionals) for childbirth, and availability of generic drugs for dealing with common diseases like diarrhea, malaria, TB and AIDS can have an enormous positive impact on LEB.
The third part can be attributed to the whole complex sets of factors (institutions of governance, public policy stance, effectiveness of public provisioning, status of disadvantaged groups like women and other minorities, etc.) that distribute income growth and access to medical technology across various sections of society. What is the rationale for this assertion? It is the following intuitive idea: once income growth and improvements in medical technology (and other relevant exogenous factors like HIV prevalence) have been accounted for, improvements in LEB is bound to be positively impacted by redistribution towards the poor (broadly defined to include access to public goods like education, and health care) ; on the other hand, redistribution away from the poor, i.e. increase in societal inequality, would have negative impacts on improvements in living standards.
This immediately suggests a method for constructing an indirect measure of socio-economic inequality. To do so, roughly, we compute the average improvement in LEB for countries which have witnessed similar growth of per capita income and have had similar access to medical technology taking account of the fact that the relationship between LEB and per capita income is nonlinear (i.e., we allow for the fact that the marginal improvement in LEB for each unit of real per capita income increase tapers off as per capita income levels rise).
Next we divide the countries into two groups: those that performed better and those that performed worse than average. This division gives us some important information: all those countries which recorded a better-than-average improvement in LEB must have done so because of a progressive redistribution; all those countries which performed worse-than-average must have witnessed a regressive redistribution, where redistribution includes both income and non-income dimensions of well being.
Thus, we arrive at our indirect measure of socio-economic inequality: changes in how much a country under or over performed the average improvement in LEB over a period of time is a quantitative measure of the change in socio-economic inequality during that period. A positive value of the measure suggests a decrease and a negative value suggests an increase of socio-economic inequality over the relevant period.
Before we look at how countries have performed in terms of our indirect measure of socio-economic inequality, let us note an important implication of this methodology. The construction and use of the indirect measure proposed here highlights the important but oft-neglected point that as much as, or probably more than, economic growth itself the nature of that growth matters. High growth which is accompanied by worsening inequality (and reduced access of the poor to public goods) reduces the positive impact of income growth on living standards, especially of the poor. Conversely, even low economic growth that is more equitably distributed can have a significantly large impact on the material conditions of the poor. This means that the growth fetish currently gripping Indian policy circles is not only diversionary, it is patently misleading.
Country performances, 1990-2009
How do countries of the world perform in terms of changes in socio-economic inequality during the last two decades? Which countries show large declines and which show large increases in socio-economic inequality? Table 1 provides a raking of 98 countries from the developing world in terms of the decrease (or increase) of socio-economic inequalities between 1990 and 2009. Among the countries which display the largest declines in socio-economic inequality, according to my measure, are: Rwanda, Botswana, Gabon, Niger, Nepal, Guatemala, and Bangladesh. On the other end of the scale, some of the countries which displayed the largest increases in socio-economic inequality are: China, Republic of Congo, Chad, Thailand, India, and Kenya.
Two countries which have grown very rapidly since the 1990s but have not managed to translate that rapid economic growth into improvements in LEB are China and India. Both countries figure towards the very end of the list of rankings; India is ranked 88 and China 98 among 98 countries for whom the ranking was computed. This indicates that the growth process underway in both countries must have increased socio-economic inequality significantly.
It might be thought that the improvement metric is biased against countries that have registered high growth. This is not the case for two reasons. First, the comparison is made, at each point in time, between countries that have similar per capita income; hence all countries with similar levels of per capita income are treated in the same way. Second, as indicated above, the income-LEB relationship takes into account the inherent nonlinearity involved. Thus, the improvement metric already accounts for the fact that marginal increases in LEB calls for higher income growth as LEB increases.
The fact that the metric is not biased against high growth countries can also be seen from the rankings themselves (in Table 1). Countries with relatively high growth rates which also have shown rapid improvement in socio-economic inequality are: Bhutan, Bangladesh, Mozambique, and South Africa. This is in stark contrast to high growth countries with large increases in socio-economic inequality like China, India, and Thailand. On the other side, there are countries which had low growth in real per capita income and also witnessed increases in socio-economic inequality. Examples of such countries are Central African Republic, Kenya, and Zambia.
To highlight the fact that the metric is not biased against fast growing countries, let us look at the performance of some countries that grew at rates that were comparable to India's growth rate but also managed to improve socio-economic inequality. To choose this group I look at the growth rate of real per capita income between 1990 and 2009. During this period, real per capita income in India increased by 141%. With this benchmark growth rate in mind, I choose the following group of countries (the growth rate of per capita income between 1990 and 2009 is given in parentheses for each country): Argentina (76%), Bangladesh (89%), Bhutan (171%), Botswana (68%), Indonesia (83%), Malaysia (91%), Mozambique (101%), Peru (76%), Uganda (97%). In Figure 1 I plot a metric of over and under performance with respect to average levels of LEB given per capita income, HIV prevalence and medical technology over the period 1995-2009 for all these countries. By construction, all countries in Figure 1, other than India, display an increasing trend in the measure of over/under performance. Since these countries grew at rates that were comparable to the growth rate for India, it must be the case that the metric is not overly biased against fast growing countries.
Figure 1: Time series plots of the a metric of over and/or under performance with respect to average LEB across the world given income, HIV prevalence and medical technology for countries which grew at comparable rates to India between 1990 and 2009. Trends in the metric provide information about the direction of change in socio-economic inequality, an increasing (positive) trend indicating reductions in socio-economic inequality and vice versa.
India is the worst performer in South Asia
How does India compare with its neighbours? Figure 2 plots the same metric of over and under performance (as occurs in Figure 1) over the period 1990-2009 for the main South Asian countries: Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. A positive value of the metric for any year denotes better-than-average performance; a negative value indicates worse-than-average performance. More important than the value of the metric in any year is the trend. An increasing trend indicates steadily improving socio-economic inequality; a declining trend points towards a steady worsening of socio-economic inequalities.
Figure 2: Time series plots of the a metric of over and/or under performance with respect to average LEB across the world given income, HIV prevalence and medical technology for the main South Asian countries (BGD: Bangladesh; BTN: Bhutan; IND: India; NPL: Nepal; PAK: Pakistan; LKA: Sri Lanka). Trends in the metric provide information about the direction of change in socio-economic inequality, an increasing (positive) trend indicating reductions in socio-economic inequality and vice versa.
What does Figure 2 highlight? It highlights the striking differences in the evolution of socio-economic inequalities (as measured by the trend in the metric) for the main South Asian countries. While Nepal and Bangladesh give strong evidence of improvement in socio-economic inequality and access of the poor to basic public goods, Pakistan shows stagnation and Sri Lanka shows worsening over this period though it remains an above-average performer. Bhutan has been a below-average performer all through the period, though its distance from average performance has been declining over time; that indicates some improvement over time.
The big exception is India which shows not only a steady worsening of socio-economic inequality but a switch from an above to a below average performer country. A more detailed historical and institutional analysis of each of these South Asian countries needs to be taken up to understand the reasons behind this divergence. While such an analysis will be taken up in future research, it seems safe to conclude from this evidence in Figure 1 that the effects of rapid economic growth since the 1990s has not percolated down to the poorer sections of Indian society. In fact, it seems to have worsened socio-economic inequality and curtailed access of the poor to essential public goods like health care and education.
Conclusion
Critics of the neoliberal turn to policymaking in India, and the world in general, since the mid-1980s have pointed out that the growth process under a neoliberal regime is inherently anti-poor. Most of the dividends of economic growth is cornered by the already well off. In parallel with an inegalitarian growth process, neoliberalism also whittles down whatever welfare State measures might have been in place before its adoption. Inegalitarian growth and erosion of State assisted welfare provisioning increases socio-economic inequality drastically. Drawing on some recent research, this article has provided empirical evidence in support of such a view.
Two comparison groups provide a powerful and disturbing insight into India's growth process. First, there are many countries which have grown at rates very similar to India's but which have managed to register marked declines in socio-economic inequalities (as captured by the measure discussed in this article). In stark contrast to this, India has witnessed an increase in socio-economic inequality since 1990. Second, in comparison to its close neighbours, with whom India has many geographical, climactic, cultural and social commonalities, India emerges as the worst performer among the South Asian countries.
The implications of this finding are straightforward. The growth process currently underway in India (and China) is inherently biased against the poor, the marginalized and underprivileged. If economic growth is to lead to substantial improvements in the living standards (measured by indicators of well being like life expectancy, literacy, infant mortality) of the vast majority of the world's population, a radically different socio-economic paradigm must be put in place of the currently dominant neoliberal one.
(I would like to thank Debarshi Das and Sirisha Naidu for helpful comments on this article and the original paper on which this article is based. The research underlying this article was spurred by deep and penetrating questions from TVS Prathamesh, Shiv Sethi and Kuver Sinha.)
Notes
1. http://www.peri.umass.edu/fileadmin/pdf/working_papers/working_papers_251-300/WP268.pdf
2. For an introduction to these data issues in the context of India, see Deaton and Kozel (2005).
REFERENCES
Banerjee, A., and T. Piketty. 2005. "Top Indian Incomes, 1922-2000," The World Bank Economic Review, 19 (1): 1-20.
Deaton, A., and V. Kozel. 2005. The Great Indian Poverty Debate. Macmillan India Ltd.: Delhi.
Pandey, M.D., and S. Nathwani. 1997. "Measurement of Socio-Economic Inequality using the Life-Quality Index," Social Indicators Research, 39: 187-202.
| | | | | | | | Monday, December 5, 2011 4:31 PM | | | Jay | | | | | | Labels: News |
Bonn II: A Gathering for Deciding about the Future of the Occupying War against Our People
Ten years ago from now, December 2001, the invading American and British imperialists and their allies, organized the Bonn Meeting to sketch their future war plans against our people and in order to put in place a puppet regime in Afghanistan. In this gathering under the wings of the imperialists a flock of national traitors were brought to assemble the different components of the puppet regime. In this gathering, the United Nations was employed to provide an international and legal façade for the war of imperialist aggression against Afghanistan, under the pretext of "war against terrorism."
According to the official plans devised in the Bonn I, the imperialist occupying war against our people, and finalizing the formation of a puppet regime in Afghanistan should have been completed in three years. However, this process was prolonged, and could not have been otherwise. The three years plan of imperialist war against our people has lasted for ten years, and it is apparent that it will continue until 2014. And thus a three year planned war of aggression and occupation has now lasted for ten years and would continue for another three years and in total would last for thirteen years.
As a matter of fact the first three years of the presence of the occupying American imperialists and its allies in Afghanistan, which according to the plans of Bonn I should have ended then, there did not emerge a significant armed resistance against them. However, with the passage of the first three years, not only the presence of occupiers in Afghanistan continued, but it became clear that they will stay for a long time in this country; therefore, the waves of resistance against them expanded and has continuously increased.
Now once again the imperialist occupiers are gathering in Bonn in order to rearrange the plans for the future of their war against our people. However, this planning is not merely regarding the next three years, but it is a two stage plan of thirteen years. The first stage includes from now until the end of 2014 and the second stage starts from 2014 until the end of 2024. In the first stage though America's allies' and a part of America's forces itself is leaving Afghanistan, thus the military, political and economic strategic agreement between them and the puppet regime has to be formalized, in order to allow to continue with their invasions and military interventions against our country and its people.
It has become apparent that the American imperialists intend to keep tens of thousands of their forces in several key military strategic bases in Afghanistan even after 2014. The ten years extendable strategic agreement between the US and Karzai's puppet regime is supposed to provide the legal framework for the presence of American forces and the establishment of their long-term military bases in Afghanistan. It is designed that the legal basis for the continuation of invasions and military interventions of American imperialist's allies too would be provided through these strategic agreements with the puppet regime. British, German, French, Australian and other imperialists, and the European Union as whole can continue with their aggressions and military interventions against Afghanistan and its people based on these kind of agreements.
The strategic agreement between the expansionist reactionary Indian state and the Kabul puppet regime that was signed a while ago between Manmohan Singh and Hamid Karzai is an essential aspect of the overall strategic agreements signed between the Karzai regime and the imperialist and reactionary powers from the perspective of regional power realignments. India and Pakistan since their "independence" in 1947 from British Empire have fought three wars with each other. As a result of these wars eastern Pakistan seceded from western Pakistan and became an independent country, Bangladesh. Moreover, in Kashmir the war situation between India and Pakistan has continued and the ceasefire between the two sides is being continuously violated. In this context, signing the strategic agreement between the Indian government and the puppet regime is nothing other than the alignment of the Indian state and the Kabul puppet regime against Pakistan. Since the establishment of Pakistan the relation between the central government in Afghanistan and Pakistani state has continuously been tense over the controversial issue of Durand Line and this state of affairs has been the reason for a friendly relations between the central government in Afghanistan and
The emergence of this kind of circumstances would be an important source of regional tensions and conflicts, and would even further ignite the flames of reactionary conflicts that have already engulfed the region. On the other hand a prolonged presence of the American strategic military bases in Afghanistan not only would be a source of serious reservations and worries for other global and regional powers and our neighbors, Iran, China, and Russia but it would be a concern for all nations and peoples of the region. Thus, the continuation of America's and its allies imperialist wars against our country and people, whose central issue is the persistence of the presence of the strategic military bases in Afghanistan, proves and illustrates the following:
The American imperialists and its allies have not come to Afghanistan to fight against terrorism, for promotion of democracy and human rights, women's rights and the rights of oppressed nationalities, and for the social, cultural and economic developments. In reality they are after their regional and global political and economic strategic interests and they do not intend to easily leave our people alone and the peoples of the region and they would not withdraw their occupying forces from Afghanistan. The strategic agreement between the US government and the puppet regime though its term is until the end of 2024, it would for sure be further extended. That is why this agreement is extendable not only for once but for several times.
The Bonn II conference is a gathering for the purposes of the implementation and execution of this plan of the American imperialists and its European and non-European allies. That is why, we view this gathering an event about the future of occupying, aggressive, and interventionist imperialist war against our country and our people and we strongly condemn it.
The Communist (Maoist) Party of Afghanistan that is working towards and preparing for the peoples revolutionary war of national resistance against the occupiers and the puppet regime, strongly believes that the continued presence of the American imperialist occupiers in Afghanistan after the 2014 would increase the pressure of war against our people, but would also ignite and increase other regional tensions. Therefore, the prolonged presence of the strategic military presence of America in Afghanistan would not, only not reduce the resistance against them, but it will even further strengthen and expand the social base of resistance against them. Moreover, the continuation of the American occupiers' crisis-engendering presence in Afghanistan would increase the opposition against them in the entire region. At a time when the entire imperialist world system and specially the American imperialists have been engulfed with a severe economic crisis and the peoples resistance in the imperialist countries is on the rise; moreover, the corruption and rottenness of the puppet regime is incurable, we strongly believe that American imperialists and its national traitor satraps would be defeated in the face of a broad based and prolonged national resistance.
Based on this conviction we have augmented our preparatory efforts for the people's revolutionary war of national resistance and we strive to move from the stage of preparation to the start of the actual war sooner rather then later. Towards this end we are asking from all revolutionary, democratic, and progressive forces and individuals for their assistance and cooperation.
The imperialist plans for the future of the occupying war against our people are doomed to failure!
Forward towards the people's revolutionary war of national resistance!
Communist (Maoist) Party of Afghanistan
November 22, 2011.
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