Sinophobia, Inc.: Understanding the Anti-China Industrial Complex

[PHOTO: ALY SONG/REUTERS]

By Qiao Collective

Republished from the Qiao Collective.

The United States’ alliance is barreling towards conflict with China. In recent months, the U.S. government has taken unprecedented steps to upend normal relations with China: sanctioning Communist Party of China officials, banning Chinese tech companies like TikTok and Huawei, interrogating and surveilling Chinese students and scientists, and even forcing the Houston Chinese consulate to close.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo calls it an end to “blind engagement” with a Chinese state he labels an existential threat to the “free world.” And the other members of the “Five Eyes” intelligence alliance—Canada, New Zealand, and the UK—are by and large caving to U.S. pressure to take parallel measures to isolate China.

Yet the Western policy doctrine of “great power competition” with China has not been accompanied by a robust public debate. Instead, this blustering state rhetoric has coincided with public views of China hitting historic lows. Thanks in part to racist corporate media coverage which blamed China for the spread of COVID-19, unfavorable views of China are skyrocketing.

Pew Research reported in July that unfavorable views of China had reached “new highs” in the U.S.—more than doubling from 35 to 73 percent between 2005 and 2020. Australian trust in their northern neighbors is even worse: in 2020, 77 percent of Australians expressed distrust in China, compared to just 38 percent in 2006.

As the U.S. and other Western nations are mired by the crises of COVID-19, unemployment, wage stagnation, and systemic racism, the fictitious “China threat” should be the least of our worries. After all, China has made clear time and time again that it wants peaceful relations and cooperation with the U.S, and China’s foreign policy principle of a “community of shared future for humankind” is enshrined in the Communist Party constitution. Make no mistake—the New Cold War on China is a one-sided escalation for conflict led by the U.S. and its allies.

The fact that Western public opinion on China is marching in lockstep with the State Department’s call for Cold War aggression reflects the convergence of state, military, and corporate media interests which monopolize our media ecosystem. Behind the State Department’s bluster and the military “Pivot to Asia” exists a quiet, well-oiled machine that is busy manufacturing consent for war on China. Too often, the hawkish policy stances it enshrines are taken as objective ‘truth’ rather than as pro-war propaganda working in the interests of weapons corporations and political elites.

We call it Sinophobia, Inc.—an information industrial complex where Western state funding, billion dollar weapons manufacturers, and right-wing think tanks coalesce and operate in sync to flood the media with messages that China is public enemy number one. Armed with state funding and weapons industry sponsors, this handful of influential think tanks are setting the terms of the New Cold War on China. The same media ecosystem that greased the wheels of perpetual war towards disastrous intervention in the Middle East is now busy manufacturing consent for conflict with China.

By saturating our news and newsfeeds with anti-China messages, this media machine is convincing average people that a New Cold War is in their interests. In reality, the hype of an imagined ‘China threat’ only serves the interests of the political elites and defense industry CEOs who stand to profit from this disastrous geopolitical escalation.

Who’s Who in Sinophobia Inc.

In order to mount a sustained challenge to the New Cold War on China, the anti-war movement must develop a critical media literacy with which to see through this imperialist media machine. A close eye reveals that a handful of think tanks, pundits, and “security experts” show up time and time again in corporate media coverage of China. What’s more, these “independent” experts have explicit ties to the weapons industry and the state departments of the U.S. and its allies.

The Australian Strategic Policy (ASPI) is one such actor. It’s been called “the think tank behind Australia’s changing view of China” and decried by progressive Australian politicians as “hawks intent on fighting a new cold war.” But despite its right-wing slant, ASPI saturates Western media across the political spectrum—from Breitbart and Fox News to CNN and the New York Times. The broad legitimation of think tanks such as ASPI is one factor behind today’s bipartisan support for imperialist aggression on China.

From national defense and cybersecurity to human rights allegations, the China hawks of ASPI weaponize a variety of issues in support of their call for military buildup vis-a-vis China. ASPI and its staff have called for visa restrictions on Chinese students and scientists, alleged a secret Chinese biological weapons program, and claimed China is exploiting Antarctica for military advantages. No matter how outrageous the allegation, ASPI finds warm welcome in a media ecosystem hungry for controversy and a geopolitical climate inching closer to military aggression on China by the day.

When it comes down to it, that’s exactly what ASPI wants. ASPI executive director Peter Jennings unabashedly describes himself as a “national security cowboy,” saying that “Australia needs more cowboy and less kowtow.” As Australian PM Scott Morrison has pushed record defense spending, Jennings called for even higher targets, saying “if we’re sliding towards war, the money must flow.”

This belligerent attitude towards military confrontation makes sense in the context of ASPI’s financials. Despite being cited as a ‘non-partisan expert’ on all things China, when it comes to the profits of war, ASPI has skin in the game.

That’s because ASPI—like many of the biggest players in Sinophobia, Inc—receives major funding from the Australian military and U.S. weapons contractors like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon.

In the 2019-2020 fiscal year, ASPI received 69% of it’s funding—over AU$7 million—from the Australian department of defense and federal government. Another AU$1.89 million came from overseas government agencies—including the Embassies of Israel and Japan, the U.S. Department of Defense and State Department and the NATO Strategic Comms Center. Far from being a non-partisan counterbalance to imperialist state agendas, the same governments pushing geopolitical aggression on China are in fact ASPI’s primary funders.

Disturbingly, another AU$1.1 million came from defense industries and the private sector, including Lockheed Martin ($25,000 for a “strategic sponsorship”) and Northrop Grumman ($67,500 for an “ASPI Sponsorship”).

In a blatant display of their conflict of interest, the same weapons corporations sponsoring ASPI’s anti-China call to arms are also supplying the New Cold War on China. In 2016, the Australian department of defense awarded Lockheed Martin a AU$1.4 billion combat “combat system integrator” contract as part of its Future Submarines program to “stand up” to China. Under the same program, defense contractor Naval Group—which contributed a $16,666.68 “ASPI Sponsorship” in 2019-2020—was awarded a $605 million contract for submarine design.

The scope of potential profit from stoking military conflict with China is enormous. Under the auspices of the “Pivot to Asia,” the U.S. has ramped up arms exports to allies such as Japan and Australia as part of a new anti-China containment doctrine. From weapons exports totalling $7.8 billion to Australia and $6.28 billion to South Korea between 2014 and 2018 alone, to loosened regulations allowing military-drone exports to India, these bloated deals are an absolute windfall for U.S. weapons manufacturers.

Every dramatic report on the ‘China threat’ funnels towards the same result: more warships in the South China Sea, more reconnaissance planes sent into China’s airspace, and more missile and anti-missile stations across U.S. ‘allies’ and client states in the Asia-Pacific. The New Cold War on China means billions in profit for U.S. weapons manufacturers, who quietly fund the ‘research’ that provides the justification for increased military buildup vis-a-vis China.

A cycle of perpetual war

This vicious cycle of the military-industrial complex drives Sinophobia Inc. Having watched this convergence of corporate media, weapons manufacturing, and State Department interests manufacture consent for the disastrous Iraq and Afghanistan wars, we should be able to recognize the pattern. But so far, it looks like the same toolkit is working yet again.

First, ‘independent’ security experts such as ASPI, funded by Western governments and their weapons industries, provide ‘irrefutable’ evidence of the so-called China threat.

Second, these reports are picked up, cited, and amplified by the corporate media and then absorbed by the general public.

Third, Western nations and their allies cite these reports on the ‘China threat’ to justify their own geopolitical ambitions and military aggression towards China.

And finally, defense departments award billion dollar contracts to weapons corporations to equip the militaristic “Pivot to Asia”—completing the cycle by padding the pockets of the very corporations funding the think tanks we started with.

Of course, ASPI is just one of several heavy hitters in the anti-China industry. Stalwarts of the D.C. security realm like the Center for Strategic & International Studies and the Council and Foreign Relations are similarly obliged to their state and military industry donors.

The Center for Strategic & International Studies has been described as one of the most influential think tanks in the world. Its dramatic reports on Chinese military operations and Chinese “foreign influence” campaigns garner headlines in Forbes, New York Times, and even left-leaning outlets like Politico. Bonnie Glaser, director of CSIS’s “China Power Project,” is a particularly sought-after commentator on China. She’s demonized Chinese subsidies to domestic industry, called Belt and Road Initiative a plan to bring countries into “China’s orbit” and “see authoritarianism strengthened,” called to “push back” against China’s foregrounding of Marxism as an alternative to free market neoliberalism, and called “many of the the things the Trump administration has done to highlight the threats that China poses…correct.”

None of these corporate media op-ed features, interviews, and press quotes bother to mention that CSIS counts among its “corporation and trade association donors” Northrop Grumman ($500,000 annual contribution), Boeing, General Atomics, and Lockheed Martin ($200,000-$499,999 annual contribution), and Raytheon ($100,000-$199,999 annual contribution).

Even worse than simply accepting military industry funding, CSIS has held closed-door meetings with weapons industry lobbyists and lobbied for increased drone exports for the products of war manufactured by funders such as General Atomic and Lockheed Martin.

But instead of calling out this conflict of interest, corporate media uncritically lifts up these think tanks as supposedly ‘impartial’ security experts. Only a handful of independent news platforms bother to point out these ‘third-party’ interests in paving the way to perpetual war. Instead, these think tank employees are held up as objective experts and lavished with media attention, making them go-to sources for comments and editorial features on all things China.

According to mainstream media, there’s no conflict of interest: only a pending conflict with China to drum up support for.

A bipartisan revolving door

The incestuous relationship between the Pentagon, security think tanks, and the private weapons sector goes far beyond dirty money. High-level diplomats themselves frequently move back and forth from their posts in the defense department to the boards of weapons corporations and policy institutes, wielding their insider insights to help weapons corporations rake in federal money.

The revolving door of the military-industrial complex crosses party lines. Take Randall Schriver, a China hawk hand-picked by Steve Bannon to serve as the Trump Administration’s Assistant Secretary of Defense for Asian and Pacific Security Affairs. Schriver was the founding president of the Project 2049 Institute, a hardline security think tank funded by weapons giants like Lockheed Martin and General Atomics and government entities including the Taiwan Ministry of National Defense and the National Endowment for Democracy. Predictably, under Schriver’s leadership, Project 2049 called for increased arms sales to Japan and Taiwan while sounding the alarm on the supposed threat of a “flash invasion” of Taiwan or a “sharp war” with Japan.

Not to be outdone, foreign policy veterans of the Obama Administration got rich forming ‘strategic consultancies’ dedicated to leveraging their insider status to help weapons corporations win federal contracts. Michèle Flournoy, a favored pick for a Biden administration’s defense secretary, served as undersecretary of defense for policy from 2009 to 2012 and has overlapping roles as a founder of corporate geopolitics consultant group WestExec Advisors, and co-founder of the Center for a New American Security, a think tank preaching expertise on “the China challenge” and the “North Korea threat” with the help of funding from the usual state and military industry suspects.

Given this resumé, it comes as no surprise that Flournoy has decried the “erosion of American deterrence” and called for new investment and innovation to “maintain the U.S. military’s edge” in Asia, a clear assurance that a Biden administration would mean new and growing contracts to old friends in the security industry.

Enemy number one

The cogs of the military-industrial-information complex have ensured that the debate on China is all but nonexistent. Anti-China posturing has become a defining issue of the November presidential election. But there is effectively zero policy distinction between the approaches espoused by the Biden and Trump camps—only a rhetorical competition playing out in campaign ads and stump speeches to prove who can really be ‘tougher on China.’

The revolving door of Sinophobia Inc. makes certain that whether Republicans or Democrats come out on top in November, the weapons contracts will continue to flow.

Despite incessant fear mongering over the looming threat of ‘Chinese aggression,’ China has been explicitly clear that it does not want conflict with the U.S., let alone hot war. In August meetings with the European Union, Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi called for renewed cooperation, proclaiming that “a Cold War would be a step backwards.” Where the U.S. pursues unilateralism, sanctions, and the threat of military intervention to get its way, China has invested in international organizations, stepped up to fund the World Health Organization in the absence of the U.S., and promoted pandemic aid, cooperative vaccine development, and helped nations suffering under U.S. sanctions fight COVID-19.

Make no mistake: there is no supposed “mutual escalation” or “inter-imperial rivalry” here—U.S. aggression in military buildup, propaganda and economic sanctions is a one-sided push for conflict and war in spite of China’s repeated calls for mutual respect, win-win cooperation, and continued engagement premised on recognition of China’s national sovereignty and dignity.

U.S. political elites have turned to Sinophobia as a bogeyman to distract from the failures of capitalism, neoliberalism, and a violent U.S. empire that invests more in perpetual war than in basic health care and infrastructure for the American people. That’s what makes Sinophobia Inc. so effective: mass discontent fomented by an unresolved pandemic, rising unemployment, and American anxieties over the future can all be shunted onto the ‘real’ threat: China.

Sinophobia Inc. is working overtime to convince average Americans that China—and not white supremacy, capitalism, and militarism—is the ‘real enemy.’ It’s working: 78% of Americans blame China for the spread of COVID-19—more than blame the Trump administration itself for its handling of the pandemic. That’s why Congress has rubber-stamped a record defense budget for 2021 while declining to pass pandemic aid, eviction moratoriums, or other protections for American workers.

As Sinophobia Inc. draws us closer to war on China every day, it’s up to all of us to jam the gears of this war machine. That means a critical eye to the information apparatus busy manufacturing consent for a war that will only serve the bottom line of the American empire and the corporations that it serves.

The self-fueling war machine of think tanks, governments, and weapons corporations is chugging along, convincing the masses that conflict with China is in the national interest. But it’s clearer than ever that it’s the CEOs of Raytheon and Lockheed Martin that stand to profit—at the expense of the rest of us.

The Left, the Election Crisis, and the 'Elephant in the Room'

By Larry Holmes

Republished from Workers World.

The head of the U.S. Postal Service is sabotaging delivery of ballots through the mail. Trump is acting like he won’t step down even if he’s defeated in the elections. And it appears that right-wing and neo-fascist forces, who have guns, are getting ready to go into the streets after the elections to support an attempted coup. Every group and activist ready to fight fascism in the streets should be making preparations right now to intervene in the event of any fascist developments in November.

The political crisis in the ruling class that is playing itself out in the presidential election is not really about Trump, any more than it’s about saving democracy, decency and all the other stuff that Democratic Party leaders are shouting about.

This crisis is about the capitalist system starting to break down and fall apart, and what must be done to rescue capitalism and U.S. imperialism from demise.

This crisis has been building for a long time.  The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the course of the crisis; it’s like pouring gasoline on a burning police station.

What will the working class do?

The working class is the elephant in the room. In the past, when communist and socialist political parties were strong, especially in developed imperialist countries with large working classes, when a political crisis developed in the ruling class, the response by a militant communist would be: “What is the working class going to do about this?”  Communist leaders like Rosa Luxemburg, Antonio Gramsci, or Harry Haywood would ask their comrades: “How can the working class intervene in this crisis to defend its own class interests?”

During the times when these noted revolutionaries were active in Germany, Italy, and the U.S., it was understood by all the cadre and militants in the working class that the working class was ultimately the only class that could change the big equation — and finally, end capitalism. Moreover, it was understood that if the working class did not intervene during a political crisis, something very bad might happen, like the faction within the capitalist class prevailing that was considering the desperate option of turning to fascism.

On the other hand, there was the prospect that if the working class intervened in the political crisis in a correct and strong way, the political crisis could be turned into a revolutionary crisis, meaning that the working class would exploit the differences within the capitalist class, as well as its instability and weakness, to  make a socialist revolution.

The expression “the elephant in the room” means that people are talking around the real issue because they don’t know what to do about that issue. Very few revolutionaries are asking what the working class will do about the current election crisis because the question seems irrelevant.

Notwithstanding the amazing work stoppages that many pandemic frontline workers have engaged in to protect their safety, and the many other signs that militants in the working class are pushing back and carrying out more strikes, the working-class movement as a whole in the U.S. is weak organizationally and politically.

Thus, the expectation is that the working class is not going to intervene in defense of its class interests beyond voting for the Democrats, with some even voting for Trump. Militants should be neither angry nor frustrated with workers for voting for Biden. The way that they see it, they don’t have any other choice.

For revolutionaries, the main political battle regarding support for the Democratic Party is with other forces on the left who say that they are socialists and are opposed to capitalism, but will find some rationale, mostly fear, for supporting the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party’s abandonment of the working class to globalization, austerity and pauperization, paved the way for Trumpism. The Democrats will not change, cannot change, and exist these days mostly to co-opt movements and then kill them.

The only way that the working class is going to find a way out of being held hostage to the Democrats is to begin learning how to organize as a class and act like a class that is independent of the capitalist political parties. This is true, not only in relation to the electoral struggle, but even more importantly, to the full rebirth of the class struggle against capitalism. This rebirth is already underway. However, it will not advance to the next level without the intervention of revolutionary class-conscious militants.

There’s no end to the questions surrounding the election crisis. What’s going to happen before the elections? What’s going to happen during and after the elections? How can progressives and revolutionaries respond to any development? From the perspective of a Marxist-Leninist, the biggest question is still: What can be done to insure that the U.S. working class begins to do all that is necessary to intervene in a crisis? Not now when it’s too weak, but soon, and the sooner the better.

Even in countries where the labor movement is close to one of the capitalist political parties, or there is a social democratic party that mostly supports what the capitalists want it to support, if an attempted coup or a fascist attack occurs the labor movement calls a general strike.

The election crisis should serve as a wake-up call. Yes, the working-class movement is weak. But revolutionaries can no longer afford to use that as an excuse to remove the working class from the discussion. Once we do that, we have surrendered.  Whatever ideas or demands revolutionaries put forward, they are of only symbolic and educational value if there is no army capable of fighting and defeating the enemy. That army is the working class, and the battlefield is the class struggle.

It should come as no surprise that many people, especially women, are saddened by the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and are worried about who Trump will choose to replace her. When the working class is not organized as a class to defend its own class interests, who else can the people turn to in order to defend themselves but politicians and important individuals?

How did this happen to the working class?

Over a long period that began after the U.S. established itself as the dominant imperialist power in the world, generally speaking, the leaders of the labor movement – who were once relatively militant, and some even anti-capitalist — underwent a transformation that rendered them in many cases little more than appendages to the capitalist system.

Explaining how this happened over the course of the past three-quarters of a century is too much to go over here. But make a note:  How this happened should be studied and discussed. It’s important for every militant to know what happened.

Also important to know is that appearing to become an appendage to the system and the status quo is neither a natural nor a permanent state for the organized labor movement. It is an aberration that must — and will – be reversed. The conditions that led to the conservatism of the labor movement no longer exist, and as such, their conservatism is going to be replaced with revolutionary class struggle.

It should be noted that by and large, most of the left, including organizations that consider themselves Marxist and even revolutionary, have tended to base themselves on movements and struggles that were incorrectly seen as separate from the working class and the labor unions. The reason for this is that the labor movement seemed dormant.

Organizing and activity that seemed friendly to anti-capitalist views and organizational recruitment existed in the antiwar movement — and to some extent in the anti-racist movement and the women’s and LGBTQ2S+ movements. In truth, all of these movements are different fronts of the working-class movement, although that is not how they are viewed in most cases.

This unfortunate view is a product of the political weakness of the existing working-class movement. It’s time for such narrow and exclusionary views to give way to more inclusive and revolutionary views of who and what make up the working class today.

To some extent, the origins of these narrow and false ideas about what the working class is and who is in the labor movement are products of a tacit (and sometimes not so tacit) agreement that union officials and leftists made after the anti-communist witch hunt – which forced many communists and socialists out of the unions – began to lift somewhat in the early 1960s.

The agreement was this: Radicals must stay out of the labor unions and refrain from trying to influence the working class with their radical ideas.  In exchange for agreeing to stay away from the working class, progressives and radicals could organize against the war in Vietnam and around other issues, but apart from obtaining some labor endorsements and having a few labor speakers at a rally, antiwar organizers were to stay away from the workers.

Opening of struggle over need for strikes

The examples of professional athletes protesting racism by refusing to play, and health care workers, Whole Foods and Amazon workers, and other workers walking off the job to protest being forced to work in unsafe conditions, has ignited a new struggle within and outside the organized labor movement over the need to carry out more and bigger work stoppages, and bring back the general strike.

Around Labor Day, a group of about 40 regional labor unions representing millions of workers issued a statement calling for conducting mass, nationwide work stoppages in solidarity with Black Lives Matter. While no concrete plans or dates for these actions has been announced, this development is a clear challenge to the conservative top leadership of the AFL-CIO and the unions that formed Change To Win.

This is good news, and it’s about time. These developments in the labor movement must be supported, joined, and pushed strongly by everyone who considers themselves progressive. It is nothing less than scandalous — and unacceptable — that the AFL-CIO’s top leadership has done little more than release a statement or two in response to the worldwide uprising sparked by the police murder of George Floyd in May, and the murders of others like Breonna Taylor and Elijah McClain.

How is it possible that millions of people could be marching in the streets day after day on every continent, and yet the leaders of the U.S. labor movement cannot bring themselves to organize a one-hour nationwide work stoppage in support of this uprising?

A strategy to fuse all movements into a new working-class movement

 The scope of the election crisis is too big.  The scope of the COVID-19 pandemic is too big.  The scope of the capitalist crisis is too big.  And the scope of the racist attacks, whether by the police, FBI, or fascists, is too big to be addressed without a serious strategy towards the development of a revitalized working-class movement.  The attacks on the working class that are already underway — with much more to come — are too big for anti-capitalist radicals not to have such a strategy.

No matter how long it takes, or how many obstacles there may be, it is imperative that a fusion of the mass movement in the streets develop against racism and fascism, and that it include all sectors of the working class that are either not organized or are under-organized: migrant workers, incarcerated workers, gig workers, street vendors, sex workers, the unemployed, people with disabilities, the homeless, the most oppressed people — and the organized labor movement.

It should be understood that the global uprising against racism this past spring and summer was, at its root, a working-class uprising.  The participants may not have  been conscious of this — and the uprising was not called in the name of the working class. But that does not change the fact that it was the multinational working class protesting in the streets. Going forward, future uprisings will be more class-conscious, with more of the many sectors of the working class in motion.

This fusion must come from below, and must not be led by the Democratic Party, or any other organization that is tied to the status quo and is an obstacle to real struggle. It is not necessary, and, in fact, it would be a mistake for the movement in the streets, or any other section of the working class that is not in the organized labor movement, to subordinate itself to conservative labor leaders.

The goal of fusion is to expand the working-class movement, to tear down the boundaries and antiquated conceptions that limit and divide the working class, and to push the entire working class in a revolutionary direction.

The formation of Workers Assemblies and a Workers Assembly movement may prove very helpful in this process

Whatever happens on or after Nov. 3, organizing the working class is the prize we must work for and stay focused on. We should be confident about our victory.

Larry Holmes is First Secretary of Workers World Party.

On the Anti-Racist Economy

By Joshua Briond

In the aftermath of the state-sanctioned executions of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, we have witnessed arguably the largest and most sustained mobilization of protests and political demonstrations across the country in the movement for Black lives. In the midst of an era of drastically increased performative and opportunistic "activism," where "spreading awareness" is prioritized over human lives and dignity—which was helped ushered in by the Shaun King’s of the world—where capital(ism) does what it has done to everything: commodify, celebritize, and corporatize any and everything, by any means necessary. Such has been done for “social justice" rhetoric and activism. We have seen, in real time, Black Lives Matter be co-opted, commodified, watered down, and flat-out defanged in the face of capital, as the simple passivity of the hashtag and movement demands—if you can call it such—has become socially acceptable in the mainstream arena, specifically so in the post-Kaepernick era.

With increasing pressure for bourgeois public figures to “speak out” and “spread awareness” from fans, the sociopolitical moment has forced historically apolitical figures and brands alike to momentarily step outside their bubble of privilege, power, and wealth to release uninspired and bland political statements vaguely condemning violence and pledging their rhetorical support for the Black lives matter movement. Such acts are met with comment sections filled with bleak and dystopian undue and unjust adulation for bare minimum performances of intellectually insulting public political theater—that is yet typical for the celebrity worship present here in the US. As the limits of neoliberal political imagination have once again depicted, in this crucial sociopolitical climate, the best the professional liberal class could offer as a solution to the prevalence of racialized state violence—was not the political interrogation of the white power structure we live under and its constant terror and antagonization to non-white life—but to vote for uninspired Democratic candidates, donate to NGOs and non-profits with zero ties to communities most largely affected by said violence, and read “ally” self-help books, written largely but not exclusively by and for white people.

One of the books in question is Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility. Published the summer of 2018, it went viral during the rise of the protests (stated to have sold at least a million copies in the matter of a few months). Others have grappled with the glaring contradictions and violence inherent to the act of a white person raking in millions under the guise of “anti-racism” and “anti-bias training”—that has been largely proven ineffective; while also charging anywhere from $30,000 to $45,000 on public speaking gigs for corporate conglomerates like Bill Gates and Amazon. So I’m not here to speak on that. Yet, DiAngelo’s public persona and prominence is arguably the perfect depiction of the co-optation of the politics of “anti-racism” into its own industry for corporate diversity initiatives without addressing structural root causes. The issue with books, panels, infographics, and the discourse surrounding race that centers and targets “allies” is that so many of them still fundamentally misunderstand rac[e/ism], whiteness, and anti-Blackness as just a matter of individual feelings, ignorance, and morality—instead of what it is: a structural organizing tool that the US political economy—built on and inseparable from slavery and genocide—necessitates.

“We who were not black before we got here, who were defined as black by the slave trade—have paid for the crisis of leadership in the white community for a long time & have resoundingly, even when we face the worst about our­selves, survived & triumphed over it."

—James Baldwin

How can one be an anti-racist if the historical precedence of race and racialization as a colonial society organizing device and regime isn’t widely understood amongst those who proclaimed to identify or align with anti-racist values? And when the vast majority of this country’s population—including self-proclaimed anti-racists’ understanding of race is wrongly and harmfully understood as that of a biological marking, rather than a sociopolitical tool meticulously and conveniently constructed and manipulated through legislation? As W.E.B. Du Bois, amongst other historians and critical race thinkers have noted: Whiteness, as stated since its historicized legislation, marks power and dominance. Blackness marks the powerless, slave, and dispossessed.

The United States of America, as we know of it, cannot function or exist without the racial regime: whiteness and anti-blackness. The entire economy, politically and otherwise—going all the way back to the cotton industry; which introduced the world to the US as a global imperial-capitalist project—is predicated & sustained through racial violence. The subjugation of imperialized nations and peoples, the dispossessed, and the enslaved, is how America and therefore the American knows that they are free. The coloniality of American freedom and the subjugation of those racialized and colonized nations and peoples cannot be divorced from one another. The entire concept of freedom and democracy—as espoused as principle by the American project—is predicated on the denial of such, of the Other(s).

“Africanism is the vehicle by which the American self knows itself as not enslaved, but free; not repulsive, but desirable; not helpless, but licensed & powerful; not history-less, but historical; not damned, but innocent; not a blind accident of evolution, but a progressive fulfillment of destiny.”

—Toni Morrison

I want to say that when I speak of the “America(n),” I am referring to that of the white. America(n) means white. I would like to also infer that the American, and white identity, ideology, and structure, is founded upon not just the systemic exploitation of the Other, namely the Black or otherwise the slave, the native, the dispossessed, and the colonized—and the moral and political justification of it—but also defined entirely by said positionality of the subjugated. As Toni Morrison has written, “Black slavery enriched the country’s [creative] possibilities. for in that construction of blackness and enslavement could be found not only the not-free but also, with the dramatic polarity created by skin color, the projection of the not—me. The result was a playground for the imagination. What rose up out of collective needs to allay internal fears and to rationalize extemal exploitation was an American Africanism—a fabricated brew of darkness, otherness, alarm, and desire that is uniquely American."

The liberal anti-racist economy is fundamentally unwilling and ill-equipped to grapple with this and racial[ized] contradictions of capital(ism)—the likes of which Black radicals of the Black radical tradition have theorized and highlighted on for decades now. Racism is not just a matter of individual ignorance or feelings that can be changed or eradicated via “understanding,” “diversity and anti-bias training,” “tough conversations,” or a quick fix in morality and finally seeing subjects of its violence as human; as so many prominent “anti-racists” would like to have us believe. The ‘antiracist’ economy, lucrative as may be, is incapable of birthing white ‘anti-racists’ because it refuses to grapple with the inherent racism of the project, or rather regime of race, racialization, capital(ism), and whiteness-as-power, in and of itself. You cannot manufacture solidarity—which a radical anti-racist movement necessitates—on the simple passivity of moral posturing. Solidarity must be built on, not just through shared struggle or basic figurations of empathy, but also on recognizing the humanity of those in which it has been historically denied to and ultimately coming to an understanding and agreement that we are worth fighting for.

“As long as you think you are white, there is no hope for you.” —James Baldwin

To teach white people to be ‘antiracist’ is to teach white people to betray everything that they have ever known about their very existence, the world order, and life itself; it is to quite literally antagonize everything that they are and sense empowerment from. Therefore, you cannot ‘teach’ white people to be ‘antiracist’ through moral and virtue signaling—especially when whiteness itself, as politically constructed, is, has always been, and will always be, immoral. It is why becoming an anti-racist is, or at least should be, a choice one makes through rigorous study of the history of race, racialization, whiteness, and liberation movements, etc. White people cannot be guilted into antiracism—this is why the “spreading awareness” tactic—deployed by Shaun King and his ilk—that bombards people with pornographic visualizations of black terror and death have been largely ineffective but on the contrary quite in fact, historically libidinal—a source of entertainment and collective joy. The politics of moralism has proven futile. You cannot moralize oppression—especially when the source and basis of said oppression is that of capital and whiteness—both of which are categorically immoral.

In a sociopolitical moment where we have seen Donald Trump’s violence exceptionalized; making it out to be unlike anything we have ever seen before—despite his political crimes largely (and simply) being an extension of the order and requirements of the US presidency—by the liberal media apparatus; terroristic political legacies resuscitated, war criminals, regime changers, and COINTELPRO state agents become faces of resistance. All of which depict a moment in which the standard for “good doers,” “morality,” and human rights and social justice advocate is deeper in the gutter than ever before. I’m afraid that the anti-racist economy, the ally industrial complex—as a result of commodification of social justice has ushered in an “anti-racism” and a human right advocacy that is inseparable from the social, political, and economic capital that it often leads to.

I’m afraid the anti-racist economy has, ironically enough, failed to create any substantial “allies” or “anti-racists.” But instead created a culture of unadulterated and uncontested political performativity, groomed more benevolent self-aggrandizing white people—who are smarter, more clever than their forebears at disguising such racism; to avoid backlash, consequences, or even the mildest forms of confrontation; just enough to navigate situations with and around subjects of racial oppression without exposing the psychopathy and immorality of structural and ideological whiteness—but not enough to materially and substantially dedicate themselves to and sacrifice their own power and capital towards an anti-capitalist, anti-racist, and anti-imperialist struggle.

I’m afraid that there has been little to no progress, remorse or lessons learned—on the part of individual whites or the white power structure at-large as evidenced by the continuation of the legacy of colonialism, slavery and historicized violence—as the tactics and acts wielded against the initial racially marked and subjugated would serve as a template of what would occur in the centuries to follow—being exported to other racialized and colonized people domestically and across the globe; while still being enacted on the initially marked, i.e., African, Black, and Indigenous subjects.

I’m afraid with the consequences of slavery, which is that of whiteness-as-power, the racial regime and racism that is inherent to it depict white remorselessness on the part of the perpetuators and continued beneficiaries of the historicized economic industry; to paraphrase one of my favorite James Baldwin quotes from 1970: the very sight of black people in white chains and cages—both proverbial or otherwise—houseless, neglected, and structurally subjugated, and terrorized; would struck such anger, such intolerable rage, in the eyes, minds, and bodies of the American people, that they would themselves spontaneously rise up and strike off the manacles. But instead, as we know of it all too well, the existence of said chains, cages, and racial subjugation, is how the American measures their own safety and sense of comfort. It is how they know they are free.

Triple Crisis in the Anthropocene Ocean

By Ian Angus

Republished from Climate & Capitalism, via Monthly Review.

It is impossible to overstate the importance of the ocean to life on Earth. Covering 71% of the planet’s surface, it contains 97% of the world’s surface water and is central to the great biogeochemical cycles that define the biosphere and make life possible. Marine plants generate half of the world’s breathable oxygen.

Millions of species of animals live in the ocean. Seafood is a primary source of protein for three billion people, and hundreds of millions work in the fishing industry.

The ocean’s metabolism–the constant flows and exchanges of energy and matter that have continued for hundreds of millions of years–is a vital part of the Earth System. As famed oceanographer Sylvia Earle writes, our fate and the ocean’s are inextricably intertwined.

Our lives depend on the living ocean–not just the rocks and water, but stable, resilient, diverse living systems that hold the world on a steady course favorable to humankind.(1)

The living ocean drives planetary chemistry, governs climate and weather, and otherwise provides the cornerstone of the life-support system for all creatures on our planet, from deep-sea starfish to desert sagebrush.… If the sea is sick, we’ll feel it. If it dies, we die. Our future and the state of the oceans are one.(2)

The living ocean is now being disrupted on a massive scale. It has changed before, but never, since an asteroid killed the dinosaurs, as rapidly as today. The changes are major elements of the planetary transition out of the conditions that have prevailed since the last ice age ended, towards a profoundly different biosphere–from the Holocene to the Anthropocene.

We are entering an unknown territory of marine ecosystem change… the implications for the ocean, and thus for all humans, are huge.(3)

Most popular accounts of the relationship between the ocean and climate change focus on melting ice and rising sea levels, and indeed those are critical issues. Greenland alone loses over 280 billion metric tons of ice a year, enough to cause measurable changes in the strength of the island’s gravity. At present rates, by 2100 the combination of global glacial melting and thermal water expansion will flood coastal areas where over 630 million people live today. Well over a billion people live in areas that will be hit by storm surges made bigger and more destructive by warmer seawater. Rapid action to slash greenhouse gas emissions would be fully justified even if rising seas were the only expected result of global warming.

Devastating as sea level rise will be, however, more serious long-term damage to the Earth System is being driven by what biogeochemist Nicolas Gruber calls a “triple whammy” of stresses on the oceans, caused by the growing rift in Earth’s carbon metabolism.

“In the coming decades and centuries, the ocean’s biogeochemical cycles and ecosystems will become increasingly stressed by at least three independent factors. Rising temperatures, ocean acidification and ocean deoxygenation will cause substantial changes in the physical, chemical and biological environment, which will then affect the ocean’s biogeochemical cycles and ecosystems in ways that we are only beginning to fathom.…

Ocean warming, acidification and deoxygenation are virtually irreversible on the human time scale. This is because the primary driver for all three stressors, i.e. the emission of CO2 into the atmosphere, will cause global changes that will be with us for many hundreds, if not thousands, of years.(4)

Other marine ecologists have described ocean warming, acidification and oxygen loss as a “deadly trio,” because when they have occurred together in the past, mass extinctions of animal and plant life have followed.(5)

We will consider the elements of the deadly trio separately, but it is important to bear in mind that they are closely related, have the same causes, and frequently reinforce each other.

Part One: CORROSIVE SEAS

“Ocean acidification … is a slow but accelerating impact that will overshadow all the oil spills that have ever occurred put together.” —Sylvia Earle(6)

Ocean acidification has been called global warming’s equally evil twin. Both are caused by the radical increase in atmospheric CO2, and both are undermining Earth’s life support systems.

There is always a constant interchange of gas molecules across the air-sea interface, between atmosphere and ocean. CO2 from the air dissolves in the water; CO2 from the water bubbles into the air. Until recently, the two flows were roughly balanced: the amount of carbon dioxide in each element has not changed much for hundreds of thousands of years. But now, when atmospheric CO2 has risen 50%, the flow is out of balance. More carbon dioxide is entering the sea than leaving it.

That’s been good news for the climate. The ocean has absorbed about 25% of anthropogenic CO2 emissions and over 90% of the additional solar heat, half of that since 1997. If it hadn’t done so, global warming would already have reached catastrophic levels. As Rachel Carson wrote years ago, “for the globe as a whole, the ocean is the great regulator, the great stabilizer of temperatures…. Without the ocean, our world would be visited by unthinkably harsh extremes of temperature.”(7)

But there is a price to be paid for that service. Adding CO2 is changing the ocean’s chemistry. The formula is very simple:

H2O + CO2 → H2CO3Water plus carbon dioxide makes carbonic acid.

Adding CO2 makes seawater more acidic.

Over the past century, the ocean’s pH level has fallen from 8.2 to 8.1. That doesn’t sound like much, but the pH scale is logarithmic, so a drop of 0.1 means that the oceans are now about 30% more acidic than they used to be.(8) That’s a global average–the top 250 meters or so are generally more acidic than the deeps, and acidification is more severe in high latitudes, because CO2 dissolves more easily in colder water.

The present rate of acidification is a hundred times faster than any natural change in at least 55 million years. If it continues, ocean acidity will reach three times the pre-industrial level by the end of this century.

Impact

Surprisingly, given that scientific concern about CO2 emissions started in the 1950s, little attention was paid to ocean acidification until recently. It was first named and described in a brief article in Nature in September 2003, and first discussed in detail in a 2005 Royal Society report that concluded acidification would soon go “beyond the range of current natural variability and probably to a level not experienced for at least hundreds of thousands of years and possibly much longer.”(9)

Those wake-up calls triggered the launch of hundreds of research projects seeking to quantify acidification more precisely, and to determine its effects. While there are still big gaps in scientific knowledge, there is now no doubt that ocean acidification is a major threat to the stability of the Earth System, one that is pushing towards a sixth mass extinction of life on our planet.(10)

Though formally correct, the word “acidification” is misleading, since the oceans are actually slightly alkaline, and the shift now underway only makes them a little less so. Even in the most extreme scenario, a thousand liters of seawater would still contain less carbonic acid than a small glass of cola.

However, just as raising the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide to 0.041 percent is causing global climate change, so a small increase in the amount of CO2 in seawater poses major threats to the organisms that live in that water. Reduced pH has already significantly changed the habitats that marine plants and animals depend on: a further reduction could be deadly for many of them.

The most-studied casualties of ocean acidification are calcifiers, the many organisms that take carbonate from the surrounding water to build their shells and skeletons. In seawater, carbonic acid quickly combines with available carbonate, making it unavailable for shell and skeleton building. Water with less than a certain concentration of carbonate becomes corrosive, and existing shells and skeletons start to dissolve.

As marine conservation biologist Callum Roberts writes, lower pH is already weakening coral reefs, and the problem will get much worse if CO2 emissions aren’t radically reduced soon.

The skeletons of corals on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef have weakened measurably in the last twenty-five years and now contain 14 percent less carbonate by volume than they did before…. Ocean acidification has been dubbed ‘osteoporosis for reefs’ because of this skeletal weakening.…

If carbon dioxide in the atmosphere doubles from its current level, all of the world’s coral reefs will shift from a state of construction to erosion. They will literally begin to crumble and dissolve, as erosion and dissolution of carbonates outpaces deposition. What is most worrying is that this level of carbon dioxide will be reached by 2100 under a low-emission scenario of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.(11)

About 25% of all fish depend on coral reefs for food and shelter from predators, so the shift that Roberts describes would be disastrous for marine biodiversity.

Other calcifiers weakened by ocean acidification include oysters, mussels, crabs, and starfish. Of particular concern are tiny shelled animals near the bottom of the food chain: if their numbers decline, many fish and marine mammals will starve. In particular:

• Single-celled Foraminifera are abundant in all parts of the ocean, and are directly or indirectly consumed by a wide variety of animals. A recent study compared present day foraminifera with samples collected 150 years ago in the Pacific by the famous Challenger expedition. The researchers found that “without exception, all modern foraminifera specimens had measurably thinner shells than their historical counterparts.” In some types of foraminifera, shell thickness is now 76% less than in the 1800s.(12)

• Pea-sized Pteropods, sometimes called sea butterflies, live mainly in cold water. An article in the journal Nature Geoscience reports “severe levels of shell dissolution” in live pteropods captured in the ocean near Antarctica, resulting in “increased vulnerability to predation and infection.”(13) Since pteropods are food for just about every larger marine animal from krill to whales, “their loss would have tremendous consequences for polar marine ecosystems.”(14)

Interference with shell and skeleton formation may not be the most deadly effect of ocean acidification. The metabolic systems of all organisms function best when the pH level of their internal fluids stays within a narrow range. This is particularly problematic for marine animals, including fish, whose blood pH tends to match the surrounding water. For some species, even a small reduction in blood pH can cause severe health and reproduction problems, even death.(15) A growing body of research suggests that ocean acidification alone will decimate some species of fish in this century, causing the collapse of major fisheries.(16)

Only long-term studies can determine exactly how acidification will affect global fish populations, but waiting for certainty is dangerous, because once acidification occurs, we are stuck with it. A recent study confirmed that “once the ocean is severely affected by high CO2, it is virtually impossible to undo these alterations on a human-generation timescale.” Even if some unknown (and probably impossible) geoengineering system rapidly returns atmospheric CO2 to the pre-industrial level, “a substantial legacy of anthropogenic CO2 emissions would persist in the oceans far into the future.”(17)

Warnings ignored

In 2008, 155 scientists from 26 countries signed a declaration “based on irrefutable scientific findings” about “recent, rapid changes in ocean chemistry and their potential, within decades, to severely affect marine organisms, food webs, biodiversity, and fisheries.”

To avoid severe and widespread damages, all of which are ultimately driven by increasing concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2), we call for policymakers to act quickly to incorporate these concerns into plans to stabilize atmospheric CO2 at a safe level to avoid not only dangerous climate change but also dangerous ocean acidification.…

Policymakers need to realize that ocean acidification is not a peripheral issue. It is the other CO2 problem that must be grappled with alongside climate change. Reining in this double threat, caused by our dependence on fossil fuels, is the challenge of the century.…(18)

In 2009, twenty-nine leading Earth System scientists identified the level of ocean acidification as one of nine Planetary Boundaries–“non-negotiable planetary preconditions that humanity needs to respect in order to avoid the risk of deleterious or even catastrophic environmental change at continental to global scales.”(19)

In 2013, the always-cautious Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) expressed high confidence that absorption of carbon dioxide is “fundamentally changing ocean carbonate chemistry in all ocean sub-regions, particularly at high latitudes.”

“Warming temperatures, and declining pH and carbonate ion concentrations, represent risks to the productivity of fisheries and aquaculture, and the security of regional livelihoods given the direct and indirect effects of these variables on physiological processes (e.g., skeleton formation, gas exchange, reproduction, growth, and neural function) and ecosystem processes (e.g., primary productivity, reef building and erosion).”(20)

The IPCC’s Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere, published in 2019, concludes that “the ocean is continuing to acidify in response to ongoing ocean carbon uptake,” that “it is very likely that over 95% of the near surface open ocean has already been affected,” and that “the survival of some keystone ecosystems (e.g., coral reefs) are at risk.”(21)

Despite overwhelming scientific evidence that acidification is a major threat to the world’s largest ecosystem, the governments of the world’s richest countries remain silent. The word oceans only appeared once in their Paris Agreement and acidification wasn’t mentioned at all. It remains to be seen whether the next UN Climate Change Conference, which has been postponed to December 2021, will respond appropriately–if it responds at all.

Part Two of “Triple Crisis in the Anthropocene Ocean,” will be published in mid-September.

This article continues my series on metabolic rifts. As always, I welcome your comments, corrections and constructive criticism.—IA

Notes:

1. Sylvia A. Earle, The World Is Blue: How Our Fate and the Oceans Are One (Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2010), 20.

2. Sylvia A. Earle, Sea Change: A Message of the Oceans (New York: Ballantine Books, 1995), xii.

3. Jelle Bijma et al., “Summary of ‘Climate Change and the Oceans.’”

4. Nicolas Gruber, “Warming Up, Turning Sour, Losing Breath: Ocean Biogeochemistry Under Global Change,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, May 2011, 1980, 1992.

5. Jelle D. Bijma et al., “Climate Change and the Oceans–What Does the Future Hold?” Marine Pollution Bulletin Sept., 2013.

6. Interviewed in John Collins Rudolf, “Q. and A.: For Oceans, Another Big Headache.” New York Times, May 5, 2010.

7. Rachel L. Carson, The Sea Around Us (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018 [1950]), 163-4.

8. More precisely, there are 30% more hydrogen (H+) ions.

9. Ken Caldeira and Michael E. Wickett, “Anthropogenic Carbon and Ocean pH,” Nature, Sept. 25, 2003, 365; Royal Society, Ocean Acidification Due to Increasing Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide (London: Royal Society, 2005), 39.

10. Some argue that a mass extinction has already begun.

11. Callum Roberts, The Ocean of Life: The Fate of Man and the Sea (New York: Penguin, 2013), 108,110.

12. Lyndsey Fox et al., “Quantifying the Effect of Anthropogenic Climate Change on Calcifying Plankton,” Scientific Reports, January 31, 2020.

13. N. Bednaršek et al., “Extensive Dissolution of Live Pteropods in the Southern Ocean,” Nature Geoscience, (December 2012) 881, 883.

14. Matthias Hofmann and Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, “Ocean Acidification: A Millennial Challenge,” Energy & Environmental Science (September 2010), 1888-89

15. This is also true of humans. Our normal blood pH is 7.4: a drop of 0.2 can be fatal.

16. See, for example, Martin C. Hänsel et al., “Ocean Warming and Acidification May Drag down the Commercial Arctic Cod Fishery by 2100,” PLOS ONE, April 22, 2020. For a summary of research on biological and other effects of ocean acidification, see An Updated Synthesis of the Impacts of Ocean Acidification on Marine Biodiversity, published by the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity.

17. Sabine Mathesius et al., “Long-term Response of Oceans to CO2 Removal from the Atmosphere,” Nature Climate Change, December 03, 2015, 1107-14.

18. “Monaco Declaration,” proceedings of Second International Symposium on the Ocean in a High-CO2 World (Unesco, 2008).

19. Johan Rockström et al., “Planetary Boundaries: Exploring the Safe Operating Space for Humanity,” Ecology and Society 14, no. 2 (2009)

20. Ove Hoegh-Guldberg et al., “The Ocean,” in Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability. (Cambridge University Press, 2014), 1658.

21. IPCC, Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate (2019), 59, 66.

The Protracted Crisis of Capitalism

By Prabhat Patnaik

Republished from People’s Democracy.

THERE is a commonly-held view that the current crisis in capitalism, which has resulted in a massive output contraction and increase in unemployment, is because of the pandemic; and that once the pandemic gets over, things will go back to “normal”.

This view is entirely erroneous for two reasons. The first which has been often discussed in this column, has to do with the fact that even before the pandemic the world economy was slowing down. In fact ever since the financial crisis of 2008 following the collapse of the housing bubble, the real economy of the world had never fully recovered. Small recoveries were followed quickly by collapses; and the low unemployment rates in the United States that had prompted Donald Trump’s triumphalism, were to a very large extent explicable by the reduced work participation rate after 2008. In fact if we assume the same work participation rate in 2020(just before the pandemic), as had prevailed on the eve of the financial crisis, then the unemployment rate in the U.S. was as high as 8 per cent as compared to the less than 4 per cent mentioned in official figures.

This slowing down in turn has been a result of the operation of neoliberal capitalism which has massively increased the share of economic surplus in output, both within countries and also at the world level, by keeping the vector of real wage-rates unchanged, even as the vector of labour productivities has increased; and this increase in the share of surplus, or this shift from wages to surplus, has lowered the level of aggregate demand for consumption goods, and hence of overall aggregate demand, as workers spend more on consumption out of a unit of income than the surplus earners.

The pandemic has occurred in this context, so that even after it gets over, the world will still be stuck with the crisis of over-production which had already engulfed it well before the pandemic. To get out of this crisis it is necessary to use State expenditure, provided such expenditure is financed by either taxes on capitalists or by a fiscal deficit ; State expenditure financed by taxes on workers will not help, since workers consume the bulk of their incomes anyway, so that State demand only substitutes workers’ demand without adding to aggregate demand.

But neither fiscal deficits nor taxes on capitalists are liked by finance capital, so that State expenditure as an anti-crisis measure is ruled out. This means that, even after the pandemic is over,not only will the crisis continue, but it will do so without any counteracting measures, at least as long as neoliberal capitalism lasts. This crisis therefore marks a dead-end for neoliberal capitalism.

There is however a second reason why even after the pandemic gets over, capitalism will still remain engulfed in a crisis; and this has to do with the fact that even if the demand for consumer goods recovers to the level where it had been before the pandemic, investment goods production will still remain below what it had been, and this very fact will also ensure that even the consumer good output does not get back to the level where it had been before the pandemic. This is what happens when an economy receives a major shock, of the kind that the pandemic represents for the world economy.

An example will make the point clear. Suppose before the pandemic the economy was growing at 2 per cent per annum. Then capitalists, anticipating a 2 per cent rate of growth, would have been adding to their capital stock also at 2 per cent. If the capital stock was 500, output was 100, then investment would have been 10, and consumption would have been 90. Let the share of post-tax profits and post-tax wage-bill in total private post-tax incomes be 50:50; and let all wages and 75 per cent of profits be consumed. If government consumption (assuming a balanced budget for simplicity) happens to be 20, then this 90 of consumption would have been divided as 20 by government, 30 by capitalists and 40 by workers.

Now, suppose, for argument’s sake, that after the pandemic, consumption recovers to 90. All of it can be produced by the existing capital stock requiring no additional investment. Moreover, there is no reason why the capitalists should expect output to grow at 2 per cent next year; so they would not add 10 to capital stock as they had done before the pandemic. Let us assume that they add only 5 to capital stock, and wait to see what happens before deciding to add any further to capital stock.

Two things will happen in such a case. First, in the capital goods sector, output will be only half of what it had been before the pandemic; likewise capacity utilisation in the capital goods sector will be only half of what it had been before the pandemic. Second, even the consumption demand of 90 cannot be sustained. Assuming the same ratios as above, an investment of 5, which must equal private savings, will generate a total consumption demand of only 55 (given by 20 of government+15 of capitalists out of total post-tax profits of 20 + 20 of workers). Total output will be only 60, equalling consumption of 55 and investment of 5.

The 90 of consumption therefore, which we assumed the world economy to reach, for argument’s sake, will not even materialise. The consumption goods sector’s capacity utilisation will be 61 per cent of what it had been before the pandemic (55 divided by 90). This will be higher than the ratio of capacity utilisation in the investment goods sector compared to what it had been before the pandemic (in fact it will now be only 50 per cent of what it had been earlier).

Any severe external shock to the capitalist system has this effect, namely that investment recovers only after a long time; and precisely for that reason even the recovery of consumption, though less delayed than the recovery of investment, also takes a fairly long time.

In other words, even if there had been no crisis of over-production engulfing world capitalism before the pandemic, the sheer external shock represented by the pandemic would have kept the system mired in crisis for quite a long time. The existence of an over-production crisis predating the pandemic only makes matters worse.

This is exactly what had happened in the U.S. in the recovery from the Great Depression of the 1930s. The consumption goods sector had recovered relatively faster than the investment goods sector, as a result of Roosevelt’s New Deal which had enlarged government spending. The recovery of the investment goods sector occurred only when there was an increase in armament expenditure in preparation for the war, which is why it is said that the recovery from the Great Depression was made possible by the war.

But the New Deal had meant larger government spending which is why at least the consumption goods sector had recovered somewhat, even before the war. Globalised finance capital today does not even allow larger government spending within any economy, either by taxing capitalists or by enlarging the fiscal deficit, the only two ways that such spending can increase aggregate demand. Therefore even the depression in the consumption goods sector will last much longer that in the 1930s, so that, altogether, world capitalism will remain sunk in a protracted crisis for a very long time.

In an economy like India where the government obeys the dictates of finance capital quite slavishly, the prospects of recovery are even bleaker. None of the measures adopted by the government to revive the economy addresses the issue of demand, because the government does not understand that the crisis is because of insufficient aggregate demand. In fact, the government measures are such that they will only aggravate the deficiency of aggregate demand, thereby worsening the crisis rather than alleviating it. As the crisis gets aggravated, however, the government will resort even more strongly to repression against the working people, and intensify even further its communal agenda.

The Internationalist Lenin: Self-Determination and Anti-Colonialism

By Vijay Prashad

Republished from Monthly Review.

In 1913, Lenin published an article in Pravda with a curious title, ‘Backward Europe and Advanced Asia’.(1) The opening of the article accepts the paradoxical nature of the title, for it is Europe–after all–that has advanced it forces of production and it is Asia that has had its forces of production stifled. The character of advancement and backwardness for Lenin does not only rest on the question of technological and economic development; it rests, essentially, on the nature of the mass struggle.

In Europe, Lenin wrote, the bourgeoisie was exhausted. It no longer had any of the revolutionary capacity with which it once fought off the feudal order; although even here, the bourgeoisie was pushed along reluctantly by the rising of the masses–as in the French Revolution of 1789–and it was the bourgeoisie that betrayed the mass struggle and opted for the return of authoritarian power as long as its class interests were upheld. By 1913, the European bourgeoisie had been corrupted by the gains of imperialism; the rule of the European bourgeoisie had to be overthrown by the workers.

In Asia, meanwhile, Lenin identified the dynamism of the national liberation movements. ‘Everywhere in Asia’, he wrote, ‘a mighty democratic movement is growing, spreading, and gaining in strength…Hundreds of millions of people are awakening to life, light, and freedom’. Until this period, Lenin had focused his attention on the revolutionary developments in Russia, with a detailed study of agrarian conditions and capitalism in his country and with debates over the nature of organisation in the revolutionary camp. The breakthroughs in 1911 that took place in China, Iran, and Mexico with their variegated and complex revolutionary processes, nonetheless struck him. In 1912, Lenin would write on numerous occasions of the peoples of Asia–such as Persia and Mongolia–who ‘are waging a revolutionary struggle for freedom’, and he would push his party to condemn Tsarist imperialist attacks on Persia and the ‘revolutionary struggle of the Chinese people, which is bringing emancipation to Asia and is undermining the rule of the European bourgeoisie’.(2)

Lenin had tracked developed in eastern Asia ever since the Tsarist empire opened hostilities against China by invading Manchuria in 1900 and then against Japan in 1904-05 in Manchuria and Korea. In 1900, Lenin took a strong anti-war position, arguing that even though the Tsar had not declared war in 1900, ‘war is being waged nonetheless’.(3) ‘The autocratic tsarist government’, Lenin wrote, ‘has proved itself to be a government of irresponsible bureaucrats serviley cringing before the capitalist magnates and nobles’; meanwhile, the war resulted in ‘thousands of ruined families, whose breadwinners have been sent to war; an enormous increase in the national debt and the national expenditure; mounting taxation; greater power for the capitalists, the exploiters of the workers; worse conditions for the workers; still greater mortality among the peasantry; famine in Siberia’. ‘The Chinese people suffer from the same evils as those from which the Russian people suffer’, argued Lenin in an early demonstration of his internationalism.

The Tsarist empire, along with the European imperialists, had developed a ‘counterrevolutionary coalition’, Lenin wrote in 1908 in his reflection on the Balkans, Turkey, and Persia. How should the socialists react to this policy of imperialism? ‘The very essence of proletarian policy at this stage’, he wrote in Proletary, ‘should be to tear the mask from these bourgeois hypocrites and to reveal to the broadest masses of the people the reactionary character of the European governments who, out of fear of the proletarian struggle at home, are playing, and helping others play, the part of gendarme in relation to the revolution in Asia’.(4)
Within Europe, the oppressed nationalities–such as the Polish and the Irish–demonstrated the important spirit of democracy that Lenin had detected from Mexico to China. Unlike many other Marxists–such as Karl Radek and Leon Trotsky–Lenin fully supported the Easter Rising in English-occupied Ireland in 1916. It was in this context that Lenin wrote in July 1916, ‘The dialectics of history are such that small nations, powerless as an independent factor in the struggle against imperialism, play a part as one of the ferments, one of the bacilli, which help the real anti-imperialist force, the socialist proletariat, to make its appearance on the scene.’(5) As he studied these movements with more care, the national liberation struggles no longer were seen as mere ‘bacilli’ and not ‘real’, but these movements were themselves partners in a global struggle. Lenin began to conceptualise a strategic unity between the nationalism of the oppressed and the proletariat in the imperialist states. ‘The social revolution’, he wrote in October 1916, ‘can come only in the form of an epoch in which are combined civil war by the proletariat against the bourgeoisie in the advanced countries and a whole series of democratic and revolutionary movements, including the national liberation movements in the underdeveloped, backward, oppressed nations’.(6)

Lenin’s great advance over Second International Marxism is clarified by the centrality he placed of anti-colonial national liberation, of the struggles of oppressed nationalities by the jackboot of imperialism. For Lenin, the democratic struggles of anti-colonialism were lifted to parity with the proletariat struggles inside the advanced industrial states; it was the international cognate of his theory of the worker-peasant alliance.(7)

In 1914, Lenin published a long series of articles on the theme of ‘national self-determination’ in the journal Prosveshcheniye (Enlightenment).(8) These were his longest statements on the topic, even though Lenin was to return to the idea over the next decade. Like much of Lenin’s work, this essay was not written to elaborate on the idea of national self-determination in itself; Lenin wrote the article to answer a position initially taken by the Rosa Luxemburg in 1908-09. In that article, ‘The National Question and Autonomy’, published in Przeglad Sozialdemokratyczny (Panorama Social Democracy), Luxemburg argued against the right of self-determination for the Polish people.(9) Initially, Stalin responded to Luxemburg (in Prosveshcheniye, March-May 1913), but Stalin’s essay did not directly confront Luxemburg’s theses (he was more content to take on Karl Renner and Otto Bauer).(10) It was left to Lenin, the following year, to offer a full critique of Luxemburg.

Lenin argued that an oppressed nation must be allowed its freedom to secede from an oppressor state. Tsarism and colonialism not only crushed the ability of the people of its peripheral states and its colonial dominions to live full lives, but it also contorted the lives of those who seemed to benefit from colonial rule (including workers at the core of the empire). Secession, for Lenin, was a democratic right. If later, because of economic pressures, the proletariat of an independent state would like to freely unite with the proletariat of their previous colonial state that would be acceptable; their unity would now be premised upon freedom not oppression. Over the course of the next decade, Lenin would develop this argument in a series of short essays. Most of the essays, written in German, were translated into Russian in the 1920s by N. K. Krupskaya and published in the Lenin Miscellany volumes, later in the Collected Works. In 1967, Moscow’s Progress Publishers put these essays into a small book under the title, The Right of Nations to Self-Determination (it is available in volume 20 of Lenin’s Collected Works). Their appearance in a book, then, was not intentional since Lenin had never written a book on the subject. This was a collection of interventions and articles that had the gist of his analysis on the question.(11) It is these interventions, however, that allow us to see the richness of Lenin’s argument about anti-colonialism and self-determination.(12)

Bourgeois Nationalism

The question of self-determination came to the fore because of the social forces unleashed by the 1905 Russian Revolution and because of Tsarist expansion into Manchuria and Korea. Different social groups within the Tsarist Empire began to make their own claims for freedom, which had to be represented in the new political parties that emerged on the partly freed up civil arena. The Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) had to, therefore, address the question of national self-determination frontally: how should the various people within the Tsarist empire struggle for their freedom? Must they remain under the yoke of the State, even as this State would be at some point be free from Tsarism? Luxemburg was specially involved in this debate because of her roots in the Polish Social Democratic movement, which had since the 19th century been involved in questions of freedom for Poland from the tentacles of Tsarist power. In the world of international socialism, it was often the Polish parties that made the strongest application of the idea of the right to self-determination. That was the case in 1896, when it was the Polish Socialist Party that called for the independence of Poland at the International Socialist Congress in London. At that Congress, the delegates passed a resolution in favor of ‘the complete right of all nations to self-determination and expresses its sympathy for the workers of every country now suffering under the yoke of military, national, or other despotism’.(13)

Polish social democrats at their own Congress (1903) and at the Congress of the RSDLP (1906) agitated to sharpen Social Democracy’s view on self-determination. Little seemed to divide the position of Luxemburg from Lenin at this time, except that in the hallways of the meetings the Poles did express their reservations against the idea of a right to self-determination. It was the working-class that had rights, Luxemburg wrote in her 1908 pamphlet, not nations. The nub of Luxemburg’s unease with the theory of the ‘right to self-determination’ is captured in a long quotation from her 1908 pamphlet,

The formula of the ‘right of nations’ is inadequate to justify the position of socialists on the nationality question, not only because it fails to take into account the wide range of historical conditions (place and time) existing in each given case and does not reckon with the general current of the development of global conditions, but also because it ignores completely the fundamental theory of modern socialists – the theory of social classes.

When we speak of the ‘right of nations to self-determination,’ we are using the concept of the ‘nation’ as a homogeneous social and political entity. But actually, such a concept of the ‘nation’ is one of those categories of bourgeois ideology which Marxist theory submitted to a radical re-vision, showing how that misty veil, like the concepts of the ‘freedom of citizens,’ ‘equality before the law,’ etc., conceals in every case a definite historical content.

In a class society, ‘the nation’ as a homogeneous socio-political entity does not exist. Rather, there exist within each nation, classes with antagonistic interests and ‘rights.’ There literally is not one social area, from the coarsest material relationships to the most subtle moral ones, in which the possessing class and the class-conscious proletariat hold the same attitude, and in which they appear as a consolidated ‘national’ entity. In the sphere of economic relations, the bourgeois classes represent the interests of exploitation–the proletariat the interests of work. In the sphere of legal relations, the cornerstone of bourgeois society is private property; the interest of the proletariat demands the emancipation of the propertyless man from the domination of property. In the area of the judiciary, bourgeois society represents class ‘justice,’ the justice of the well fed and the rulers; the proletariat defends the principle of taking into account social influences on the individual, of humaneness. In international relations, the bourgeoisie represent the politics of war and partition, and at the present stage, a system of trade war; the proletariat demands a politics of universal peace and free trade. In the sphere of the social sciences and philosophy, bourgeois schools of thought and the school representing the proletariat stand in diametric opposition to each other.

The possessing classes have their worldview; it is represented by idealism, metaphysics, mysticism, eclecticism; the modern proletariat has its theory–dialectic materialism. Even in the sphere of so-called ‘universal’ conditions–in ethics, views on art, on behavior–the interests, world view, and ideals of the bourgeoisie and those of the enlightened proletariat represent two camps, separated from each other by an abyss. And whenever the formal strivings and the interests of the proletariat and those of the bourgeoisie (as a whole or in its most progressive part) seem identical–for example, in the field of democratic aspirations – there, under the identity of forms and slogans, is hidden the most complete divergence of contents and essential politics.

There can be no talk of a collective and uniform will, of the self-determination of the ‘nation’ in a society formed in such a manner. If we find in the history of modern societies ‘national’ movements, and struggles for ‘national interests,’ these are usually class movements of the ruling strata of the bourgeoisie, which can in any given case represent the interest of the other strata of the population only insofar as under the form of ‘national interests’ it defends progressive forms of historical development, and insofar as the working class has not yet distinguished itself from the mass of the ‘nation’ (led by the bourgeoisie) into an independent, enlightened political class.(14)

For Luxemburg, the idea of the nation is an ideological smokescreen utilised by the bourgeoisie to create horizontal linkages against the vertical hierarchies of social life. It is a useful mechanism to build national economies and national polities that benefit the class rule of the bourgeoisie. That is the reason why the idea of the right to national self-determination had to be defeated.

Lenin did not disagree with the spirit of Luxemburg’s analysis. He agreed with her that the bourgeoisie’s own class power is most efficiently wielded through the national container. ‘The economic basis of [nationalist] movements’, he wrote in his 1914 reply, ‘is the fact that in order to achieve complete victory for commodity production the bourgeoisie must capture the home market, must have politically united territories with a population speaking the same language, and all obstacles to the development of this language and to its consolidation in literature must be removed’.(15) Therefore, Lenin notes, ‘the tendency of every national movement is towards the formation of national states, under which these requirements of modern capitalism are best satisfied. The profoundest economic factors drive towards this goal, and therefore, for the whole of Western Europe, nay, for the entire civilised world, the typical, normal state for the capitalist period is the national state’. Here there is no difference between Lenin and Luxemburg, with both in agreement that national movements are along the grain of capitalist development, and that the advantages of nationalism in the European experience are first garnered by the bourgeoisie.

Equal Rights of Nations and International Solidarity of Workers

If this analysis is all that there is to it, and if it is correct, then Luxemburg’s antipathy to nationalism seems more coherent than Lenin’s ambivalence. But this is not all there is to it, at least as far as Lenin is concerned. Luxemburg’s approach to the idea of nationalism, Lenin suggested, reduced the national question to economics and to economic independence. It was not interested in the political question, in the hunger for freedom among people who had been colonised. Capitalism’s tendency to expansion out of the national container contained the seeds of imperialism; at a certain stage of its economic development, the national bourgeoisie sought the advantages of the nation-state; but as its dynamism pushed outwards, this bourgeoisie’s ambitions mimicked the imperial exertions of its aristocratic ancestors. It is to this end that Lenin made a distinction between the nationalism of the oppressors (the Great Russians and the English) and the nationalism of the oppressed (the Poles and the Irish). This distinction, Lenin wrote in 1915, ‘is the essence of imperialism’.(16) The nationalism of the oppressor, of the Great Russians and the English for example, is always to be fought against. There is nothing in the character of its nationalism that is worthy of support. Its chauvinism leads it to world conquest, a dynamic that not only shatters the well being of the oppressed but also corrupts its own citizenry.

On December 10, 1869, Marx wrote to Engels on the Irish question. ‘The English working class will never accomplish anything before it has got rid of Ireland. The lever must be applied in Ireland’, he wrote. ‘English reaction in England has its roots in the subjugation of Ireland’ (Lenin quotes part of this in his 1914 pamphlet).(17) Drawing from Marx, Lenin wrote in his 1915 essay on self-determination, ‘The freedom of [the English] was cramped and mutilated by the fact that it oppressed another nation. The internationalism of the English proletariat would have remained a hypothetical phrase were it not to demand the separation of Ireland’.(18) Much the same kind of logic applied to Russia, whose Social Democrats were urged by Lenin to demand freedom for its oppressed nations. ‘Carried away by the struggle against nationalism in Poland’, Lenin wrote, ‘Rosa Luxemburg has forgotten the nationalism of the Great Russians, although this nationalism is the most formidable at the present time, it is the nationalism that is less bourgeois and more feudal, and it is the principle obstacle to democracy and to the proletarian struggle’.(19) It had to be confronted. Neither Lenin nor Luxemburg thought otherwise.

Their difference was sharp in the second half of Lenin’s distinction. The Great powers not only annex the economies of their subjects, but they also drain their political power. National self-determination of the oppressed contains both the oppressed bourgeoisie’s plans to suborn the economic to their own ends, but also that of the oppressed proletariat’s hope to fight their bourgeoisie over how to organize their nation. ‘The bourgeois nationalism of every oppressed nation’, Lenin argued, ‘has a general democratic content which is directed against oppression, and it is this content that we support unconditionally, while strictly distinguishing it from the tendency towards national exceptionalism, while fighting against the tendency of the Polish bourgeoisie to oppress the Jews, etc., etc’. Lenin carefully worked out the formula for this unconditional support. If the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nation ‘fights against the oppressing one’, then the Social Democrats would support them wholeheartedly. If, however, ‘the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nation stands for its own bourgeois nationalism’, then the Social Democrats stand opposed to them. ‘We fight against the privileges and violence of the oppressing nation, but we do not condone the strivings for the privileges on the part of the oppressed nation’.(20)

To ‘not condone the strivings’ of the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nations sets the Social Democrats and their class allies the crucial task that separates them from the liberals and their class allies. The Social Democrats both stand against the nationalism of the oppressed nation and against the strivings of the bourgeoisie of the oppressor nation to supplant that of the oppressor nation. Workers in the oppressed nation are not to submit to the rule of the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nation, but to confront it with as much determination as they would fight against the imperial bourgeoisie. The fight for national self-determination must not divide workers in the imperial core and in the imperial periphery. Those in the core must fight against imperial nationalism, and those in the periphery must fight against both imperial nationalism and the nationalism of their bourgeoisie. The latter have a double task, formidable for the complexity of strategy and tactics demanded of them. They are to fight both for ‘the absolutely direct, unequivocal recognition of the full right of all nations to self-determination’, and for ‘the equally unambiguous appeal to the workers for international unity in their class struggle’.(21) In other words, Social Democrats are not invested in nationalism as an end in itself. The final goal is internationalism of the proletariat, but it must go through the nationalism of the oppressed. The twin tasks of Social Democracy are then to fight for ‘the equal rights of nations and international solidarity of the workers’.(22)

A Free Union

What are the practical means by which this nationalism of the oppressed manifests itself? Lenin argued that the oppressed regions should secede from the oppressor nations, or, in other words, they need to win their independence. If Social Democracy does not call for the right to secession, its politics would ‘empty phrase-mongering, sheer hypocrisy’.(23) Plainly, the ‘self-determination of nations means the political separation of these nations from alien national bodies, the formation of an independent national state’. But an independent national state is not the end of the process. It is here that Lenin carved out new terrain in the Marxist theory of nationalities and self-determination (although once more drawing from insights in Marx’s letters to Engels on the Irish question). Marxists and Social Democracy recognize the economic and political advantages of bigger geographical entities: they are both able to command more resources and larger markets, and they are less vulnerable to military conquest. The end goal is to form vibrant and genuine unions of large, non-homogenous areas,

We demand freedom of self-determination, i.e., independence, i.e., freedom of secession for the oppressed nations, not because we have dreamt of splitting up the country economically, or of the ideal of small states, but, on the contrary, because we want large states and the closer unity and even fusion of nations, only on a truly democratic, truly internationalist basis, which is inconceivable without the freedom to secede.(24)

In his March 1916, Nine Theses on Self-Determination, Lenin wrote, ‘a free union is a false phrase without right to secession’.(25) Drawing from Marx on Ireland, Lenin wrote, ‘the demand for the right of secession for the sake of splitting and isolated countries’ is not an end in itself; it is towards a process ‘to create more durable and democratic ties’.(26) Further, Lenin wrote, ‘only in this way could Marx maintain—in contradiction to the apologists of capital who shout that the freedom of small nations to secede is utopian and impracticable and that not only economic but also political concentration is progressive—that this concentration is progressive when it is non-imperialist, and that nations should not be brought together by force, but by a free union of the proletarians of all countries.’(27)

To defend this right to secession, Lenin wrote in August 1915, ‘does in no way mean to encourage the formation of small states, but on the contrary it leads to a freer, more fearless and therefore wider and more universal formation of larger governments and unions of governments–a phenomenon more advantageous for the masses and more in accord with economic development’.(28) Capitalism dynamically grew to encompass the planet, and it sought out larger and larger areas of operation. This is the tendency not only for firms to agglomerate toward monopoly control over markets, but also for states to enlarge through imperial or colonial policies (this is the general dynamic identified by Lenin in his 1916 pamphlet Imperialism). ‘Imperialism means that capital has outgrown the framework of national states’, Lenin wrote in 1915; ‘it means that national oppression has been extended and heightened on a new historical foundation’.(29) Monopoly capital flourished in large, imperial states. Imperialism was rooted in the political economy of the time. It had to be confronted not by morality but by the growth of political movements that undermined its power, in other words, by a combination of proletarian movements and movements of the oppressed nationalities. ‘It follows from this’, Lenin argued, ‘that we must connect the revolutionary struggle for socialism with a revolutionary program on the national question’.

Luxemburg fought for the ‘freedom from national oppression’ and not for ‘the right of self-determination of nations’. For her, national oppression was just another form of oppression, and it should be confronted as just another oppressive force. For Lenin, national oppression played a specific role in the operation of imperialism, and it had to be confronted in a specific way, by encouragement of secession of the oppressed nationalities in order not to petrify their national culture as separate from that of other cultures, but to work toward a proletarian internationalist unity of the future. Lenin’s approach was not a moral approach, therefore, but one that emerged out of his analysis of imperialism and the national movements that had emerged in opposition to it. His endorsement of nationalism was not premised on the assumption that the small states would somehow undermine imperialism; it was understood that democratic states, with the proletariat in each making links with each other, would be able to take advantage of the new economic scale to forge a genuine unity.

Nationalism would not, as Luxemburg acidly put it, mean ‘the right to eat off gold plates’.(30) But it would mean, as Lenin noted, part of a three-point agenda:

• Complete equality for all nations.

• The right of nations to self-determination.

• The amalgamation of the workers of all nations.

This is ‘the national program that Marxism…teaches the workers’.

Karl Radek, the Austrian Marxist, waded into the debate in 1915 to argue that the struggle for national self-determination is ‘illusionary’ (‘Annexations and Social Democracy’, Berner Tagwacht, October 28-29).(31) One of Radek’s objections that rankled Lenin was that a truly class project would abjure democratic political demands that do not threaten capitalism. There are some democratic demands that can be won in the era of capitalism and there are others that must be struggled with even in a socialist society, Lenin argued. ‘We must combine the revolutionary struggle against capitalism with a revolutionary program and revolutionary tactics relative to all democratic demands: a republic, a militia, official elected by the people, equal rights for women, self-determination of nations, etc. While capitalism exists, all these demands are realizable only as an exception, and in an incomplete, distorted form’.(32) Social Democracy has to ‘formulate in a consistently revolutionary manner every one of our democratic demands’ because the proletariat must be ‘educated in the spirit of the most consistent and determined revolutionary democracy’. To contest the right of national self-determination for oppressed nations is to deny them their democratic rights and to undermined revolutionary democracy.

In the USSR and in the Comintern

Lenin’s formulation from 1914-1916 enabled a clear position in practice after the Soviet revolution (1917). Two tasks presented themselves along the grain of national self-determination.

• How should the new Soviet state deal with the question of its own nationalities?

• How should the newly created Communist International (1919) confront the nationalist movements in the colonies?

On January 3, 1918, Lenin, as part of the All-Russia Central Executive Committee drafted the Declaration of Rights of the Working and Exploited People. It was subsequently adopted by the Third All-Russia Congress of Soviets as the 1918 Constitution (the essence remained in the 1924 Constitution). The second article establishes that the Soviet Republic is based ‘on the principle of a free union of free nations, as a federation of Soviet national republics’. The Council of People’s Commissars had already proclaimed the independence of Finland, removed Russian troops from Persia and committed itself to self-determination for Armenia. On paper, this was unassailable. The problem is that counter-revolutionary forces in its border states, the very states that had been promised the right to secession, attacked the new Soviet state. The Soviets hastily sought alliances with these states (Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia for instance), in which pro-Bolshevik forces were supported by the Soviets and counterrevolutionaries were defeated. Self-determination of the nation was a formula by which the states were afforded nominal independence if they were not hostile to the Soviets. When Bolsheviks (such as Georgy Pyatakov) in these states did argue for full dissolution into Russia, Lenin called them Great Russians and opposed them. The principle of self-determination was sacrosanct, even when the counter-revolution threatened the new Soviet state (Luxemburg, in her essay on the Russian Revolution identified this weakness, ‘While Lenin and his comrades clearly expected that, as champions of national freedom even to the extent of ‘separation’, they would turn Finland, the Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, the Baltic countries, the Caucasus, etc., into so many faithful allies of the Russian revolution, we have witnessed the opposite spectacle. One after another, these ‘nations’ used their freshly granted freedom to ally themselves with German imperialism against the Russian revolution as its mortal enemy, and under German protection, to carry the banner of counter-revolution into Russia itself’).(33) In 1922, Stalin wished to curtail the rights of the new border-states through a policy called ‘autonomisation’, namely that these states would dissolve themselves into the USSR by gaining nominal autonomy. Lenin was adamantly opposed to this policy. ‘We consider ourselves, the Ukrainian SSR and others, equal, and enter with them, on an equal basis, into a new union, a new federation’.(34) This federation was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the USSR. This principle was already there in the 1918 draft, and in the first Soviet Constitution,

At the same time, endeavoring to create a really free and voluntary, and therefore all the more firm and stable, union of the working classes of all the nations of Russia, the Constituent Assembly confines its own task to setting up the fundamental principles of a federation of Soviet Republics of Russia, while leaving it to the workers and peasants of each nation to decide independently at their own authoritative Congress of Soviets whether they wish to participate in the federal government and in the other federal Soviet institutions, and on what terms.(35)

The logic of the federation within the USSR applied similarly to the colonial question. In the 1918 declaration, Lenin had written that the new state must have a ‘complete break with the barbarous policy of bourgeois civilization, which has built the prosperity of the exploiters belonging to a few chosen nations on the enslavement of hundreds of millions of working people in Asia, in the colonies in general, and in the small countries’.(36)

When the Communist International (Comintern) met for its first meeting in 1919, the jubilation of the Soviet experience combined with the potential revolution in Europe (particularly Germany) and the emergence of working-class and peasant movements in Asia defined its outcome. The Comintern addressed the ‘proletariat of the entire world’, telling them,

‘The emancipation of the colonies is possible only in conjunction with the emancipation of the metropolitan working class. The workers and peasants not only of Annam, Algiers and Bengal, but also of Persia and Armenia, will gain their opportunity of independent existence only when the workers of England and France have overthrown Lloyd George and Clemenceau and taken state power into their own hands’.(37) Nationalism of the oppressed nations barely earned a mention. The defeat of the German revolution and the setbacks in the colonies provoked a more sober tone at the second Comintern meeting (1920). Lenin’s views on the colonial (Eastern) question drew from his more capacious attitude toward nationalisms of the oppressed. It was the presence of the Indian Marxist M. N. Roy that stayed Lenin’s hand and curtailed his more ebullient support for anti-colonial nationalism. The second thesis of the Comintern emerged out of a compromise formulation between Lenin’s own draft and Roy’s emendations (with the Dutch Marxist Henk Sneevliet holding their hands to the same pen),

As the conscious express of the proletarian class struggle to throw off the yoke of the bourgeoisie, and in accordance with its main task, which is the fight against bourgeois democracy and the unmasking of its lies and hypocrisy, the Communist Party should not place the main emphasis in the national question on abstract and formal principles, but in the first place on an exact evaluation of the historically given and above all economic milieu. Secondly it should emphasize the explicit separation of the interests of the oppressed classes, of the toilers, of the exploited, from the general concept of the national interest, which means the interests of the ruling class. Thirdly it must emphasize the equally clear division of the oppressed, dependent nations which do not enjoy equal rights from the oppressing, privileged nations, as a counter to the bourgeois democratic lie which covers over the colonial and financial enslavement of the vast majority of the world’s total population, by a tiny minority of the richest and most advanced capitalist countries, that is characteristic of the epoch of finance capital and imperialism.(38)

Nothing in this thesis contradictions the spirit of Lenin’s own view on self-determination, expect in so far as this makes explicit Lenin’s hesitancy over the character of the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nations. The 9th thesis said that the Comintern ‘must directly support the revolutionary movement among the nations that are dependent and do not have equal rights (for example Ireland, the Blacks in America, and so forth) and in the colonies’.(39) At the same time, the Comintern, in the 11th Thesis noted that it must engaged in a ‘resolute struggle’ against the attempt to ‘portray as communist the revolutionary liberation movements in the backward countries that are not truly communist’.(40) The Comintern supports the revolutionary movements in the colonies ‘only on condition that the components are gathered in all backward countries for future proletarian parties–communist in fact and not only in name–and that they are educated to be conscious of their particular tasks, that is, the tasks of struggling against the bourgeois-democratic movement in their own nation’. What the Comintern ‘must unconditionally maintain the independent character of the proletarian movement, be it only in embryo’.(41) Lenin’s general principles articulated in his essays from 1914 onwards were enshrined in the Soviet Constitution and in the Comintern, with some alterations to fit the new situations and the new class configurations.

No surprise that radicals from the colonised world–such as Ho Chi Minh and José Carlos Mariategui–found Leninism to be the heart and soul of their political outlook. It was this anti-colonial Marxism that drew radical nationalists from the Dutch colonies of Indonesia to the French colonies of West Africa, and it was this strong theory of anti-colonial national self-determination that forged ties for the Marxist left across these worlds.(42) Little wonder then that the tradition of ‘Western Marxism’ tends to ignore Lenin, to jump from Marx to Lukacs and Gramsci, evading the fact that Lukacs wrote a book on Lenin and that Gramsci developed his own thought with Lenin in mind; the leap over Lenin is a leap not only over the experience of the October Revolution but it is a leap past the Marxism that then develops in the Third World, a leap into abstract philosophy with little engagement with praxis and with the socialism that develops–not in the advanced industrial states–but in the realm of necessity, in the former colonised world from China to Cuba. In those outer reaches, where revolutions have been successful, it is the anti-colonial Lenin that guides the way.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He is the chief editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He has written more than twenty books, including The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (The New Press, 2007), The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South (Verso, 2013), The Death of the Nation and the Future of the Arab Revolution (University of California Press, 2016) and Red Star Over the Third World (LeftWord, 2017). He writes regularly for Frontline, the Hindu, Newsclick, AlterNet and BirGün.

Notes

1. Lenin, ‘Backward Europe and Advanced Asia’, Pravda, 18 May 1913, Collected Works, vol. 19, pp. 99-100.

2. Lenin, ‘Draft Resolution of the Tasks of the Party in the Present Situation’, January 1912, Collected Works, vol. 17, p. 456 and ‘Resolutions of the Conference. The Russian Organising Commission for Convening the Conference’, January 1912, Collected Works, vol. 17, p. 485.

3. Lenin, ‘The War on China’, Iskra, no. 1, December 1900, Collected Works, vol. 4, pp. 372-77.

4. Lenin, ‘Events in the Balkans and in Persia’, Proletary, no. 37, 16 October 1908, Collected Works, vol. 15, p. 221.

5. Lenin, ‘The Discussion of Self-Determination Summed Up’, July 1916, Collected Works, vol. 22, p. 357.

6. Lenin, ‘A Caricature of Marxism and Imperialist Economism’, Zvezda, October 1916, Collected Works, vol. 23, p. 60.

7. Vijay Prashad, ‘For Comrade Lenin on his 150th Birth Anniversary’, Lenin 150, New Delhi: LeftWord Books, 2020.

8. All these articles are in Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 20.

9. Horace B. Davis collected the five articles by Luxemburg from her Kraków journal Przeglad Sozialdemokratyczny in The National Question. Selected Writings, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976.

10. J. V. Stalin, ‘Marxism and the National Question’, Collected Works, vol. 2, Moscow: Foreign Language Publishing House, 1953.

11. V. I. Lenin, The Right of Nations to Self-Determination, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1967.

12. Vijay Prashad, ‘Vladimir Ílyiç Lenin/Uluslarin Kaderlerini Tayin Hakki’, Marksist Klasikleri Okuma Kilavuzu, Istanbul: Yordam Kitap, 2013.

13. Luxemburg, The National Question, p. 107. For a critical appraisal of Polish Social Democracy, see Eric Blanc, ‘The Rosa Luxemburg Myth: A Critique of Luxemburg’s Politics in Poland (1893–1919)’, Historical Materialism, vol. 25, issue 4, 2017.

14. Luxemburg, The National Question, pp. 133-135.

15. Lenin, ‘The Right of Nations to Self-Determination’, Collected Works, vol. 20, p. 396.

16. Lenin, ‘The Revolutionary Proletariat and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination’, Collected Works, vol. 21, p. 409.

17. On 24 October 1869, Engels wrote to Marx, ‘Irish history shows what a misfortune it is for one nation to subjugate another. All English abominations have their origin in the Irish pale. I still have to bone up on the Cromwellian period, but it appears clear to me that things in England would have taken another turn but for the necessity of military rule in Ireland and creating a new aristocracy’. Marx/Engels, Collected Works, vol. 43, p. 362.

18. Lenin, ‘The Revolutionary Proletariat and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination’, Collected Works, vol. 21, p. 410.

19. Lenin, ‘The Right of Nations to Self-Determination’, Collected Works, vol. 20, p. 412.

20. Lenin, ‘The Right of Nations to Self-Determination’, Collected Works, vol. 20, p. 412.

21. Lenin, ‘The Right of Nations to Self-Determination’, Collected Works, vol. 20, p. 432.

22. In an early formulation, Lenin argued not for the ‘self-determination of nations’ but for the ‘self-determination of the proletariat’. ‘We on our part concern ourselves with the self-determination of the proletariat in each nationality rather than with the self-determination of peoples or nations’. (‘On the Manifesto of the Armenian Social Democrats’, Iskra, 1 February 1903, Collected Works, vol. 6, p. 327). It appears that this position is close to that of Luxemburg, that nationalism of the bourgeoisie had to be opposed in all respects, and that the Social Democrats must take a class view over a national view. Over the course of the decade, Lenin changed his position–no longer was there the emphasis on the ‘self-determination of the proletariat in each nationality’. Lenin now saw the difference between the oppressor nationality and the oppressed nationality, which nuanced his stand a great deal.

23. Lenin, ‘The Revolutionary Proletariat and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination’, Collected Works, vol. 21, p. 409.

24. Lenin, ‘The Revolutionary Proletariat and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination’, Collected Works, vol. 21, pp. 412-413.

25. Lenin, ‘The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination: Theses’, Collected Works, January-February 1916, vol. 22, p. 143.

26. Lenin, ‘The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination: Theses’, Collected Works, January-February 1916, vol. 22, p. 165.

27. Lenin, ‘The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination: Theses’, Collected Works, January-February 1916, vol. 22, p. 150.

28. Lenin, ‘Socialism and War. The Attitude of the RSDLP Towards the War’, Sotsial-Demokrat, 1 November 1914, Collected Works, vol. 21, p. 316.

29. Lenin, ‘The Revolutionary Proletariat and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination’, Collected Works, vol. 21, p. 408.

30. Luxemburg, The National Question, p. 123.

31. Warren Lerner, Karl Radek, the last internationalist, Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1970.

32. Lenin, ‘The Revolutionary Proletariat and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination’, Collected Works, vol. 21, p. 408.

33. Rosa Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution, and Leninism or Marxism?, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961, pp. 49-50.

34. Lenin, ‘On the Establishment of the USSR’, 26 September 1922, Collected Works, vol. 42, pp. 421-422.

35. Lenin, ‘Declaration of Rights of the Working and Exploited People’, 3 January 1918, Collected Works, vol. 26, p. 425.

36. Lenin, ‘Declaration of Rights of the Working and Exploited People’, 3 January 1918, Collected Works, vol. 26, p. 424.

37. ‘Manifesto of the Communist International to the Workers of the World’, 6 March 1919, Liberate the Colonies. Communism and Colonial Freedom, 1917-1924, ed. John Riddell, Vijay Prashad, and Nazeef Mollah, New Delhi: LeftWord Books, 2019, p. 33.

38. ‘Theses on the National and Colonial Question’, 1920, Liberate the Colonies, p. 94.

39. ‘Theses on the National and Colonial Question’, 1920, Liberate the Colonies, p. 97.

40. ‘Theses on the National and Colonial Question’, 1920, Liberate the Colonies, p. 98.

41. ‘Theses on the National and Colonial Question’, 1920, Liberate the Colonies, p. 98.

42. Vijay Prashad, Red Star Over the Third World, New Delhi: LeftWord Books, 2017.

Under Capitalism Black Lives Are Adrift and Vulnerable

By W. T. Whitney, Jr.

Originally published at Monthly Review.

It’s true. Too often, in too many circumstances, for too long, the lives of Black people in the United States don’t matter. Black people fill prisons; their children fill terrible schools; many are poverty-stricken. But at issue here are the killings and people being left to die.

Post-Civil War arrangements by which the victorious North settled with the defeated slavocracy ensured that many Black people would not matter much and that some would die. A thousand or so were murdered in the South in 1866, reports W.E. B Du Bois. Over 2000 more would be lynched during the Reconstruction years, as documented recently by the Equal Justice Initiative. [1] That organization had already documented and memorialized thousands of lynching deaths occurring between 1877 and 1950.

The police killings of Black people prompted the formation of Black Lives Matter. But they die unnecessarily in others ways. Life expectancy is far shorter and infant mortality far greater for U.S. Blacks, for example, than for white people.

According to journalist Adam Serwer, writing in the Atlantic,

The lives of disproportionately black and brown workers are being sacrificed to fuel the engine of a faltering economy.” Specifically, “workers at the front lines of the [COVID-19] pandemic—such as meatpackers, transportation workers, and grocery clerks—have been deemed so worthless that legislators want to immunize their employers from liability.

Significantly, even white people viewed as worthless may be in trouble. Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick, commenting on the Covid 19 pandemic, told a reporter that “there are more important things than living. And that’s saving this country.” Representative Hollingsworth of Indiana identified Coronavirus deaths as “the lesser of these two evils,” the other being economic collapse.

That white people die because they don’t matter is revealing.  They too may be disposable—if they are unnecessary, in the way, or far off. The victims of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Dresden are remembered, as are indigenous peoples decimated by settlers and invaders, and civilians and combatants dying in U.S. wars. The political powers seem to be at ease presently with the probability that millions will be dying soon due to climate change.

Dan Glazebrook, writing for Counterpunch, is a witness. He asserts that, “one product has defined capitalism above all else: human waste.” Criticizing Britain’s management of the COVID-19 crisis, he notes that,

Superfluous people, not necessary for production, not able to participate in the market, and an ever-present threat to the stability of the system [are] the main output of the bourgeois epoch.…. [S]urplus Europeans were exiled…to the colonies…to continue the process of exterminating surplus non-Europeans.

Glazebrook cites urban theoretician and historian Mike Davis’s observation that up to 3 billion informal workers constitute “the fastest-growing and most novel social class on the planet.” But this “is not a labor reserve army in the nineteenth-century sense: a backlog of strikebreakers. [It’s] a mass of humanity structurally and biologically redundant to global accumulation and the corporate matrix.”

Marxist scholar Andy Merrifield identifies some people as “residues.”

They’re minorities who are far and away a global majority. They’re people who feel the periphery inside them, who identify with the periphery, even if sometimes they’re located in the core. Residues are workers without regularity, workers without any real stake in the future of work…. A lot of these residues know that now work is contingent [and] life itself is contingent.

George Floyd’s life was contingent. The lives of U.S. Black people who don’t matter are residues.

Under capitalism, human beings are valued for their use. Enslaved, Black workers were useful, even essential. Then their agrarian society merged with the larger one embarked upon industrial production and territorial expansion. They acquired a distant master that, like the old one, measured the worth of workers with an economic yardstick.

Black agricultural workers, bereft of education, their ancestors stolen from Africa, didn’t fit the capitalist mold. European immigrants ready to work in factories or to occupy land being opened up by the railroads amply fulfilled capitalist objectives.  From Reconstruction on, Black people were marginalized in a country where social needs are neglected and public attention distracted. Violent thugs threatening them have had free rein.

Du Bois in his Black Reconstruction in America (1935) offers an explanation for how the failure of Reconstruction led to limited political rights for Black people and exclusion from real participation in the larger society. Initially,

the reconstructed states were in the power of the rebels and…they were using their power to put the Negro back into slavery.” But the North “united its force with that of the workers to uproot the still vast economic power of the planters. It hoped…to induce the planter to surrender his economic power peacefully, in return for complete political amnesty.

The northern business class was insecure: “the Republican party which represented it was a minority party.” But “united with abolition-democracy [with its] tremendous moral power and popularity,” the party hoped to “buttress the threatened fortress of the new industry.” Giving Blacks the vote “would save the day.” The Republicans sought to nullify apportionment based on non-voting slaves, as provided for in the Constitution. Southerners had relied on that device to inflate their representation in Washington.

But poor whites in the South regarded Blacks as wage competitors. Landowners proceeded to “draw the color line and convince the native-born white voter that his interests were with the planter class.” Poor whites “thought of emancipation as giving them a better chance to become rich planters, landowners, and employers of Negro labor.” They wanted “to check the demands of the Negroes by any means” and were willing “to do the dirty work of the revolution that was coming, with its blood and crass cruelties.”

In the North, “Abolitionists failed to see that…the nation did not want Negroes to have civil rights and that national industry could get its way easier by alliance with Southern landholders than by sustaining Southern workers.” And so, “labor control passed into the hands of white southerners, who combined with white labor to oust northern capitalists” and themselves manage a southern-style capitalist economy.

What resulted remained for decades. Wages for Black people, initially non-existent or very low, stayed depressed. Aspiring Black landowners met resistance, eventually at the hands even of New Deal officials. Because the methods of exploitation available to southern overlords, sharecropping and the convict-leasing system, were less profitable than those available to northern capitalists, the material value of southern Blacks stayed low.

Most Black people were barred from occupying a sustainable niche in the productive apparatus of the U.S. economy. They’ve verged on the irrelevant, remaining as a “residue,” at risk of being disposed of.

Nevertheless, the U.S. political system has been open enough to allow many Black people to find remunerative work, elevate their social-class status, and be safe. Even Black workers defied expectations: in 1950, 43% of Black men in Michigan were working in the auto industry. [2]

The argument here has centered on social-class difference. But racism, which operates as a means for imposing differentiation among humans, also had a part. The notion of racism elaborated by political scientist Adolph Reed Jr. is relevant. Reed explains that racism showed up historically as a tool devised by oppressors for dealing with social conflict. He claims that white settlers and other exploiters configured differences among humans—physical, cultural, and religious plus others fashioned out of upper-class snobbery—into an all-embracing concept of race. They thus gained the ability to weaponize inequalities within human society, the better to enforce oppression.

One example: southern elites, from Reconstruction on, arranged for Blacks and the white underclass to be at each other’s throats. Their northern counterparts did likewise, leaving it so that Blacks and whites don’t easily unite in common struggle.

Racism serves as an adjunct to classed-based oppression. Causing pain, it works for maintaining social-class boundaries. The combination of the two has resulted in Black people being left with a generally precarious role within U.S. society and with vulnerability to lethal violence.

Some basic ideas, no less true for being platitudinous, may suffice to conclude this effort. One, an injury to one is an injury to all. Two, ruling class prerogatives and oppression travel in the same lane. Three, dedication to equality, radical or otherwise, does matter.

Anti-colonialist intellectual and activist Franz Fanon has the last word: “For my part, the deeper I enter into the cultures and the political circles the surer I am that the great danger that threatens Africa is the absence of ideology.” You need to replace “Africa” with “USA.”

W. T. Whitney Jr. is a political journalist whose focus is on Latin America, health care, and anti-racism. A Cuba solidarity activist, he formerly worked as a pediatrician.

Notes

[1] “Reconstruction in America–Racial Violence After the Civil War, 1865–1876,” Equal Justice Initiative, Montgomery, Alabama, pp. 118.

[2] Victor Perlo, People vs. Profits, (International Publishers, NY, 2003), p. 181.

Why Do Stocks Rise While the Country Burns?

By Contention News

This is a special edition of Contention News, a new dissident business news publication, shared exclusively at the Hampton Institute. You can read more and subscribe here. 

A reader sent us a brief, important request this week: “would like to see more on why markets are up when the world is on fire.” 

This is, in many ways, the theme of almost every edition of Contention, and we’ve pulled it apart a number of times:

• Dire economic straits can be good for big business as workers are less likely to press for higher wages, and competition goes bankrupt.

• Investment prices are all about expectations, and the big losses businesses keep reporting aren’t as bad as predicted.

• Those forecasts aren’t rational, and investors are arbitrarily assuming the worst can’t happen.

• Central bank action is swelling asset prices — not like a bubble, but like a tumor.

But let’s elaborate the reasons for this disconnect yet again, because new explanations emerge all the time. Multiple phenomena are causing this contradiction, all part of the same basic force: state manipulation of markets to protect concentrated wealth.

First, let’s be clear: “markets” are not up in every sense. The major indexes are up: the S&P 500 and Nasdaq are already back at record levels and the Dow is not far off its all-time-high. But this is a reflection of the exceptional performance of very few components in each index, not broad-based gains. As of last week:

• Half of the stocks that make up the S&P 500 are down for the year still, only 4% of its components are driving all the record gains. 

• The digital oligopoly — Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, and Microsoft — are up 37% this year, but without them the S&P 500 is down 6%.

• Fully 64% of S&P 500 components are underperforming the index, and they’re missing it by an average of 22%. 

• All-country stock performance minus the S&P 500 has done nothing this year. 

This international perspective highlights another crucial, largely unreported aspect of the alleged stock rally: pricing the S&P 500 in euros instead of dollars wipes out all of its record performance. 

The bull run is closely associated with the devaluation of the dollar, because inflated liquidity is being blasted directly at equity markets. 

Remember: stock prices reflect discounted future cash flows. Cash flow means income left over after expenses, so if investors have reason to believe that income will increase or expenses decrease in the future, stock prices move up. Monopoly pricing power means higher income, suppressed wages mean lower expenses, so large-scale bankruptcies and unemployment can actually benefit large firms.

Earnings expectation beats have moved stock prices upwards, but only 1% of that outperformance has come from increased income. The rest has come from cutting expenses, i.e. the very layoffs and cancelled purchases that make the rest of the economy miserable.

Because forecasts around cash flows aren’t certain, prices take into account a risk factor closely associated with interest rates. The larger the risk, the bigger the discount for the future cash flows, and the lower the stock price goes.

The Federal Reserve has taken emergency action this year to suppress interest rates. It dropped the rate it charges banks to near-zero levels, but more importantly it bought up trillions of dollars in bonds — including corporate bonds for the first time. 

Bond prices and their interest rates move inversely to one another, so this single-payer bond market bids up prices and sets a ceiling for rates. This squeezes investment out of safe assets, and makes riskier investments — like stocks — artificially more secure-looking. 

The implicit — sometimes explicit — assumption is that the Fed won’t let markets crash for long. We now have central planning for capital, so why wouldn’t you buy? 

But if the cost cuts that drove earnings beats in the last quarter have now hit bone, if failed fiscal stimulus means a big drop in aggregate demand, or if accelerating political chaos raises volatility too much and markets do drop, what can the Fed do? Their only card left may be to intentionally depreciate the dollar in even more aggressive ways. 

That is to say, the most likely outcomes of our present condition are that things keep burning like they are or the people that started the blaze will throw gasoline on it. Either way Contention will be here to sound the alarm. 

For more anti-imperialist business analysis, subscribe to Contention. 

A Marxist Vision for the Post-Sanders American Left

[Pictured: Members of the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) in NYC}

By Matthew John

As a socialist writer who has been regularly producing political commentary for the last three years, I’ve made some observations about the state of the American Left and it’s potential future prospects. Though my political education began with reading authors like Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn nearly two decades ago, I have more recently evolved in my political tendency and now consider myself a Marxist-Leninist. With the advent of Bernie Sanders and the prospects for social democracy in the United States, I was both inspired and frustrated during recent years.

My political views changed significantly over the course of the tumultuous four-year period that included both of Bernie’s presidential runs. But it wasn’t all at once, like a “Eureka!” moment. There was considerable overlap between my espousal of Marxism and my naïve hope in a Sanders-led push toward social democracy. I believe my political trajectory is far from unique and I believe others can change their minds, just as I did. After all, there is a vast population of disgruntled American progressives who recently watched their dreams of a “democratic socialist” presidential administration dashed before their eyes by a relentless, neoliberal, ruling-class institution; the Democratic Party.

Although I am somewhat new to Marxism-Leninism, I have recently read Lenin’s “State and Revolution,” Michael Parenti’s “Blackshirts and Reds,” Walter Rodney’s “The Russian Revolution: A View from the Third World,” and Douglas Tottle’s somewhat obscure “Fraud, Famine and Fascism.” I am currently reading Vincent Bevin’s “The Jakarta Method,” and have many more books on communism and socialism in my queue. These texts and other sources of information (such as online publications and the Revolutionary Left Radio podcast) have allowed me to refine my views on socialism and consider what might be the best path toward this daunting task of reconstructing society. My recent trip to Cuba then provided tangible inspiration in this pursuit.

The goal, simply put, is for the working class to gain control of the political system and the economy so that industrial production is harnessed primarily for human need and public good. Once the “means of production” are decidedly seized, universal human flourishing can then be persistently pursued. Under capitalism, things like housing, healthcare, food, and education are largely commodified. Assuming adequate resources exist, socialists like myself believe these services should be human rights. Building class consciousness, political education, the capacity for community defense and mutual aid, and developing socialist political parties are some of the major projects that await us. But a primary barrier to these prerequisites is a ubiquitous Western phenomenon: anti-communism.

There are certain postures Bernie Sanders himself adopted that not only fall into the category of “left anti-communism” (such as the demonization of socialist projects of the Global South like Venezuela and Cuba), but also contributed to his demise (such as Russiagate). Whether or not Sanders personally believes in all of his public stances is another issue all together. But speculation could lead us to surmise that Sanders felt the best political calculation was to lean into the anti-communist rhetoric; after all, most of the American political landscape is still saturated with evidence-free, McCarthyist stereotypes of Marxism and Actually Existing Socialism (many of which originated with conservative — or in some cases fascist — sources; a fact all self-proclaimed “progressives” should care about).

In addition to recognizing the fabrications and McCarthyism of tactics like Russiagate, we need to continue exposing voter suppression, the corporate nature of the two-party system, and the problems with bourgeois democracy more broadly. We also need to re-examine imperialist lies beyond just the Cold War variety (many of which Sanders and other progressives utilize in their rhetoric). And we need to recognize the glaring omission of the entire topic of Western imperialism and neo-colonialism within the rhetoric of “democratic socialism”, especially in terms of the foreign resource extraction required of an empire like the U.S. and the related culpability of a hypothetically successful progressive presidential administration.

A larger theme in this discourse is the progressive push for Medicare for All, tuition-free college, housing reform, and other such policies. These and similar initiatives are consistently implemented by socialist countries, as they are in the material interests of the working class. Of course, this is yet another element of Western anti-communism; the whitewashing and omitting of the actual, tangible accomplishments of socialism (which Parenti and others have elucidated). It is important to explore this topic in general, but also to point out the inherently white supremacist, colonialist nature of such omissions, as they discount and marginalize the vast accomplishments of the anti-colonial and socialist movements of the Global South. This phenomenon can be witnessed pretty much any time American “progressives” share information about how all other “industrialized” nations have some form of universal healthcare, yet they consistently fail to mention Vietnam, the DPRK, Cuba, Venezuela, etc.

Speaking of Venezuela, there should also be a discussion of this oil-rich, Latin American nation as a modern example of Actually Existing Democratic Socialism, including the inherent challenges in such a path. These include far-right political parties and their violent sabotage in coordination with the still-existing bourgeoisie, specifically large companies hoarding food, right-wing protesters burning food, etc. — phenomena practically unheard of in countries that have taken a more Marxist-Leninist path. A major lesson from this particular discussion, once again, is that these progressive social programs have already been successfully enacted by revolutionary socialist governments around the world — not just by Western bourgeois welfare states. We therefore have numerous historical models regarding how to accomplish this outside of the false notion of socialism that has found its way into American political consciousness (which is essentially just social democracy accompanied by vaguely socialist rhetoric).

The progressive movement centered around the presidential candidacies of Bernie Sanders has certainly had a far-reaching and positive impact. If nothing else, this effort accurately described the desolate material conditions in the “land of the free”, proposed reasonable solutions, and paved the way for future socialists to become involved in American politics. Possibly most importantly, Sanders has softened the blow of the “S” word, especially with Millennials. (Due to the vestiges of Cold War propaganda and McCarthyism, socialism has largely been portrayed as some sort of cartoonish “evil” in Western discourse.)

Bernie’s “Political Revolution” unfortunately failed, but if it had succeeded, the success might have only been temporary. When social democratic reforms (like the New Deal) are implemented, those gains can be — and usually are — rolled back significantly by the tenacious forces of capital, which are allowed to continue operating under capitalism and within bourgeois democracy. In short, not only are the reforms themselves compromises with the ruling class (and therefore watered-down half measures), but they are subject to the whims of the ruling class, which has not been overthrown. In addition to our own New Deal legislation being gradually decimated by neoliberalism, things could end up even worse, as Chileans tragically learned in 1973.

Despite the momentary setbacks experienced by the progressive Left, I find myself optimistic that, when properly introduced to the ideas of Marxism, it is often the case that “non-sectarian” progressives and leftists will respond positively and openly. It happened to me, it has happened to acquaintances and many social media users I have interacted with, and it can happen to others as well. Learning about anti-communist propaganda and the rich, global history of socialism can be a very rewarding and liberating process, and those who have a pre-existing distrust of major Western institutions are inherently more receptive to this type of information. The failures of the attempted “progressive insurgency” within the Democratic Party and the subsequent widespread disillusionment should also serve as catalysts for American progressives who are seeking new analyses and visions for a future socialist reality. We must learn from these domestic failures and look to the infinitely demonized, yet successful global socialist triumphs of history.

It is time for progressives and working-class Americans of all stripes to unite and chart a path toward true socialism and human liberation. As Marx said, “You have nothing to lose but your chains!”

"It's A Class Struggle, Goddammit!": A Speech by Fred Hampton (1969)

The following is the full transcript of a speech delivered by Fred Hampton at Northern Illinois University, November, 1969

What we're going to try to do, is we're going to try to rap and educate. We're glad to try to throw out some more information. And it's going to be hard to do. The Sister made a beautiful speech as far as I'm concerned. Chaka, the Deputy Minister of Information, that's his job--informing. But I'm going to try to inform you also.

One thing Chaka forgot to mention that Brothers and Sisters don't do exactly the same. We don't ask for any Brother to get pregnant or anything. We don't ask no brothers to have no babies. So that's a little different also.

After we get through speaking, for those people of you who don't think you understood all of the ideology exposed here so far, and the ideologies that I will espouse, we will have a question and answer period. For those people who have their feelings hurt by niggers talking about guns, we'll have a cry'in after the question and answer period. And for those white people that are here to show some type of overwhelming manifestation of guilt syndromes, and want people to cry out that they love them, after the cry-in, if we have time, we'll allow you all to have a love-in.

So now we'll get down to business. First of all, about what some people call the TRIAL. We call it a HECATOMB, we call it a hecatomb. That's spelled h-e-c-a-t-o-m-b. And I know there's enough dictionaries floating around up here to probably fill the room up, so you can check that out. It means a sacrifice. It usually means a sacrifice of an animal. So we'd like you, if you'd like to do that, so people ask you "Have you been to the trial," tell them that you've been down or heard about the hecatomb, because that's what it is. It's a public sacrifice. It's a situation where they're trying to unjustly, illegally try our Chairman.

We look at it as a 1969 manifestation of the Dred Scott Decision. We look at Chairman Bobby as being the manifestation of Dred Scott in 1857. And we look at Judge Hoffman as being a manifestation of Judge Taney in 1857. Because in 1857 Dred Scott was a negro, a former slave--he was still a slave, because we're slaves--who went into court and evidently had some type of misunderstanding about what he was in American society, where he fit in.

So he went to the Supreme Court to have Judge Taney answer him and try to clear up some mistaken ideas that he had floatin' around in his little old head. Ang Judge Taney did just that. Judge Taney explained to him very clearly that, "Nigger, you're nobody, you're property, you're a slave. That the systems--the legal system, the judicial system--all types of systems that are functioning in America today was set up long before you got here, brother. Because we brought you over to make money to keep what we've got going, these avaricious, greedy businessmen, to keep what we've got going, going on."

And Dred Scott couldn't understand this. There was a big rebuttal. And at that time, Judge Taney made a statement that has become famous. And that statement, maybe not in the same words but through actions ant through social practice, is being manifested down at the New reigstag Building at Jackson and Dearborn. It's being manifested through Judge Hoffman by saying the same thing that Judge Taney said in 1857. When he told Dred Scott that "Nigger, a black man in America has no rights which a white man is bound to respect." And that's the same thing that Judge Hoffman is telling our Chairman every day.

And we understand. You know a lot of people have hang-ups with the Party because the Party talks about a class struggle. And the people that have those hang-ups are opportunists, and cowards, and individualists and everything that's anything but revolutionary. And they use these things as an excuse to justify and to alibi and to bonify their lack of participation in the real revolutionary struggle. So they say, "Well, I can't dig the Panther Party because the Panthers they are engrossed with dealing with oppressor country radicals, or white people, or hunkies, or what have you. They said these are some of the excuses that I use to negate really why I am not in the struggle."

We got a lot of answers for those people. First of all, we say primarily that the priority of this struggle is class. That Marx, and Lenin, and Che Guevara end Mao Tse-Tung and anybody else that has ever said or knew or practiced anything about revolution, always said that revolution is a class struggle. It was one class--the oppressed--those other class--the oppressor. And it's got to be a universal fact. Those that don't admit to that are those that don't want to get involved in a revolution, because they know that as long as they're dealing with a race thing, they'll never be involved in a revolution. They can talk about numbers; they can hang you up in many, many ways, but as soon as you start talking about class, then you got to start talking about some guns. And that's what the Party had to do.

When the Party started to talk about class struggle, we found that we had to start talking about some guns. If we never negated the fact that there was racism in America, but we said that when you, the by-product, what comes off of racism, that capitalism comes first and next is racism. That when they brought slaves over here, it was to take money. So first the idea came that we want to make money, then the slaves came in order to make that money. That means that capitalism had to, through historical fact, racism had to come from capitalism. It had to be capitalism first and racism was a by-product of that.

Anybody that doesn’t admit that is showing through their non-admittance and their non-participation in the struggle that all they are, are people who fail to make a commitment; and the only thing that they have going for them is the education that they receive in these institutions—education enough to teach them some alibis and teach them that you’ve gotta be black, and you’ve gotta change you name. And that’s crazy.

The minister of education of the Party, Raymond “Masai” Hewitt, and Chief of Staff, David Hilliard, just got back from Africa visiting Eldridge Cleaver. And they said niggers over there never will be wearing the type of garb that some of these Africanized fools over here wear. They’re wearing rags or either they’re wearing nothing. And if you want to dress like some African people, then you oughta dress like the Angolans or the people in Mozambique. These are the people that are doing something. You need to dress like people that are in liberation struggles. But nah, you don’t want to get that Africanized, because as soon as you have to dress like somebody from Angola or Mozambique, then after you put on whatever you put on, and it can be anything from rags to something from Saks fifth Avenue, you got to put on some bandoliers and some AR-15’s and some 38’s; you’ve got to put on some Smith and Wessons and some Colt 45’s, because that’s what they’re wearin’ in Mozambique. And any nigger that runs around here tellin’ you that when your hair’s long and you got a dashiki on, and you got bubus and all these sandals, and all this type of action, then you’re a revolutionary, and anybody that doesn’t look like you, he’s not—that man has to be out of his mind.

Because we know that political power doesn’t flow from the sleeve of a dashiki. We know that political power flows from the barrel of a gun. And that’s true. It has to be true. We know that in order to be able to talk about power, that what you’ve got to be able to talk about is the ability to control and define phenomena and make it act in a desired manner. That means that if you can’t control and define phenomena and make it act in a desired manner, then you don’t even have any dealings with power, you don’t know and you probably never will know what power is. And we know what power is, and we know who’s doing harm to the people—the enemy.

And everybody wants to talk about…the pork chops will tell you in a minute “The pigs don’t want you to get black. They don’t want you to get no black studies programs. They don’t want you to wear dashikis. They don’t want you to learn about the motherland and what roots to eat of the ground. They don’t want that—because as soon as you get that, as soon as you go back 11th century culture, you’ll be alright.”

Check the people who went back to 11th century culture. Check the people that are wearing dashikis and bubus and think that that’s going to free them. Check all of these people, find out where they’re located, find out the addresses of their office, write them a letter and ask them if in the last year how many times their office been attacked. And then write any Black Panther Party, anywhere in the United States of America, anywhere in Babylon, and ask them how many times the pigs have attacked them. Then when you get your estimation of both of them, then you figure out what the pigs don’t like. That’s when you figure out what the pigs don’t like.

We’ve been attacked three times since June. We know what pigs don’t like. We’ve got people run out of the country by the hundreds. We know what pigs don’t like. Our Minister of Defense is in jail, our Chairman is in jail, our Minister of Information’s in exile, our Treasurer, the first member of the Party, is dead. The Deputy Minister of Defense and the Deputy Minister of Information, Bunchy, Alprentice Bunchy Carter, and John Huggins from Southern California, murdered by some pork chops, talking about a BSU program. We know what the pigs don’t like.

We said nobody would shoot a Panther but a pig, because Panthers don’t pose a threat to anybody but pigs. And if people tell you that Panthers pose threats, then ask them what kind of sense it would make, unless it’s to get up at 5 o’clock in the morning to feed somebody’s son and then at 3 o’clock that afternoon shoot him—save a meal. We don’t need to do that. What sense does it make for us to open up a free health clinic where the only prerequisite that you got to have to receive free medical aid is the prerequisite that you be sick. And we’ve got students who jiving themselves and running around playing, talking about they doin’ something for the struggle, and I want to know what more could you do? And you all people come from Chicago.

People talking about the Party co-opted by white folks. That’s what that mini-fascist, Stokely Carmichael said. He’s nothing but a jackanapes. As far as I’m concerned, he’s a jackanapes, cause I’ve been knowing him for years, and that’s all he could be, if he go around murder-mouthin’ the Black Panther Party.

If we’re co-opted by white people, then check the locations of our offices, our breakfast program, our free health clinic is opening up probably this Sunday at 16th and Springfield. No does everybody know where 16th and Springfield is at? That’s not in Winnetka, you understand. That’s not in Dekalb. That’s in Babylon. That’s in the heart of Babylon, Brothers and Sisters.

And that free health clinic was put there because we know where the problem is at. We know that black people are most oppressed. And if we didn’t know that, then why the hell would we be running around talking about the black liberation struggle has to be the vanguard for all liberation struggles? If there’s ever going to be any liberation in the mother country, ever gonna be any liberation in the colony, then we got to be liberated by the leadership of the Black Panther Party and the black liberation struggle. We don’t negate that fact.

We’re not hung up in anybody’s not a Panther. We don’t want to get you thinkin’ that, because we can dig Fred, I mean Everett, we can dig him. But we can’t dig Ron Karenga and LeRoi Jones. We can’t dig that. We can’t see any social practice on the part of them Brothers. We know that they both have names longer than my arm. And both of them supposed to be so intelligent and so smart. And that’s the problem right now.

We’re talking about destroying the system, and they have hang-ups doing that because they’re constantly buying property within the system. And it’s kind of hard to burn up on Tuesday what you bought last Monday. Because they’re a bunch of unrepentant capitalists. They’ll never repent. And they know better. We try to make excuses for them—“Maybe they’ll have to go through stages, Fred.” No, that’s not it. Because they’re much older than we are—I’m 21. We’re all young. So stages, they don went through them. Ron Karenga has more degrees than a thermometer. That’s right, he has more degrees than a thermometer and he continues to do what he’s doin’. And how do they fool you? Because they pick the leaders they want. And they put those people up there and portray them as being your leaders when, in fact, they’re leaders of nobody.

…we call the oppressed apologists. Because after something’s happened, all they can do is apologize for it. Look in the papers. Now they’re drawing pictures of the Chairman chained and gagged. Don’t you know that if the news media, the established press, had moved before this, that they could have stopped this rising tide of fascism years ago. But they endorsed, they joined, they supported what fascists were doing at the time. And now it’s being heaped down upon all of the people.

And a lot of people think now that their hands are getting dirty. We call them ideological servants of United States fascism. And that’s what they are, because they serve fascism by doing nothing about it until the law goes over and then they apologize for it, they get apologetic. But we say it’s the same press that we’ll look at and believe and think is bona fide; the same press that talked us into believing that we was somebody when in fact we were nobody.

I don’t think there’s anything more important. I think that what Malcolm says is important. Now think back. Those students were laughing at Malcolm. Can you dig it? They were laughing at Malcolm. Why? Regis Debray, he says the revolutionaries are in the future. That militants and pork chops and all these people, radical students, are in the present, and that most of the rest of the people try to remain in the past. That’s why when somebody comes that’s in the future of a lot of us can’t understand him. And the same thing that you don’t understand Huey P. Newton now, you didn’t understand Malcolm when he was living. But we know that when Malcolm left, the well almost ran dry. You don’t miss the water til the well runs dry, and it almost ran dry.

Huey P. Newton got to reading, and he’s not like a lot of us. A lot of us read and read and read, but we don’t get any practice. We have a lot of knowledge in our heads, but we’ve never practiced it; and made any mistakes and corrected those mistakes so that we will be able to do something properly. So we come up with like we say more degrees than a thermometer, but we’re not able to walk across the street and chew gum at the same time, because we have all that knowledge but it’s never been exercised, it’s never been practiced. We never tested it with what’s really happening. We call it testing it with objective reality. You might have any kind of thought in your mind, but you’ve got to test it with what’s out there. You see what I mean?

They talked us into buying candy bars and throwing the candy away and eating the wrapper. They’re the only people in the world, you understand, that’s right, that can sell ice boxes to Eskimoes. They can sell natural wigs to niggers that’s got natural hair already. And see, this is a shame. They can sell a one-legged man probably 24 tickets in a asskicking contest, and he knows he has no business being there. See, these are the things they can do to us and then they have us believe that what they’re tellin’ us is right, it’s bona fide, it’s justified. We say that’s wrong, that’s incorrect, that Malcolm, when he spoke to students, and you probably heard that record, he speaks to some Jews, some slick people, and he told them.

You might say, “Well, the way I feel, people ought to be able to walk around naked because rape is love.” That’s idealism. See what I mean? You’re dealing in metaphysics. You’re dealing in subjectivity, because you’re not testing it with objective reality. And what’s really wrong is that you don’t go test it. Because if you test it, you’ll get objective. Because as soon as you walk out there, a whole lot of objective reality will vamp down upon your ass and rape you of whatever you have. So whenever this happens, this is when people get a whole lot of mistaken ideas. That’s why a lot of you can’t understand and can’t agree with a lot of what we said. You’ve never tried it.

You don’t know whether people relate to the breakfast program, because you’ve never fed anybody. You don’t know anything about the free health clinic because you never asked anybody. You don’t know anything about the good that a gun does you, because you never tried one. And we say that if you was born and if you said you didn’t like pears and you never tasted pears, you’d have to be a liar. You don’t know whether you like pears, but you can’t claim that you don’t like pears. The only way that anybody can tell you the taste of a pear is if he himself has tasted it. That’s the only way. That’s the objective reality. That’s what the Black Panther Party deals with. We’re not metaphysicians, we’re not idealists, we’re dialectical materialists. And we deal with what reality is, whether we like it or not.

A lot of people can’t relate to that because everything they do is gagged by the way they like things to be. We say that’s incorrect. You look and see how tings are and then you deal with that. We runnin’ around talking about “We gonna love all black people. We have an undying love for all black people.” And you know what? That if Malcolm came back, he’d walk pas a million Klansmen to get to Stokely and whoop his motherfuckin’ ass. Because Malcolm was standing right like this in a room, where white people weren’t even allowed. You hear me? They wouldn’t allow no white people in there. But Malcolm’s dead. Now what happened? What’d that fool’s name, James Whitmore. Didn’t he do his little skin?

Because they had names with 37X, 15X, blacker than black, and they were able to sneak in because of this ignorant potient #9 that these maniacs are trying to whoop on us—“We gonna love all black people because every Negro is a potential black man.”

The man that testified against Chairman Bobby in the Conspiracy Trial down in Chicago was a black man. The man that has Chairman Bobby on a murder trial in Connecticut is a black man. The man who murdered Malcolm X is a black man. The judge that denied Eldridge Cleaver bond after a white man had granted him bond—a nigger who investigated on his own and said, “Nigger, I don’t think you ought to be on the street,” was a black man, Thurgood Marshall, Thurgood NOGOOD Marshall, that the NAACP put in. That’s one of the things about sittin’ in and dyin’ in and waitin’ in and cryin’ in got us. If Thurgood Marshall hadn’t been there, then Eldridge Cleaver would probably still be here with the people.

He’s a nigger, a bootlicker, a tonto, a jackanapes. You understand? Goin’ “I don’t think you should be on the streets.” And we runnin’ around lettin’ niggers tell us we got to love all black people.

You heard about the conspiracy trial on the West Side that they were able to win, with Doug Andrews and Fat Crawford, when they had the big burn on the West Side in the Martin Luther King riot? Ask ‘em! Brothers, what’s wrong with you, Brothers and Sisters? Ask ‘em was that a white man. No! Because Doug and them they criticized us for our liberal stand. They call it liberal. So they let nobody in their hood but black people. But they didn’t know. Anybody ever hear about Gloves on the South Side of Chicago? He’s not white. [Glove Davis was later on one of the Chicago policemen that participated in Fred’s assassination.] Did you think Buckney was white? Buckney, who’s taking all of your Brothers and all of your little Sisters and all of your little cousins and nephews, and he’s gonna continue to take ‘em. And if you don’t do anything, he’s gonna take your sons and your daughters. And a lot of niggers is going to school now trying to make a name. We don’t hear nobody running around talking about “I’m Benedict Arnold, III,” because Benedict Arnold’s children don’t want to talk about they his children. You hear people talking about they might be Patrick Henry’s children—people that stood up and said “Give me liberty or give me death.” Or Paul Revere’s cousin. Paul Revere said, “get your guns, the British are coming.” The British were the police.

Huey said “Get your guns, the pigs are coming.” Same thing. There’ll be a lot of Newtons running around. A lot of your kids will be calling themselves Huey P. Newton, III. They won’t be calling themselves Ooga-Booga or Karangatang Karenga, or Mamalama Karenga—none of that shit. They won’t be calling themselves that. You see, ask the pigs in California. Ask them! You see that? Hand me one of them posters, Brother. The one right there. Now if you think I’m lying, look at this. Take a look at this. Now all you Sisters here, tell me what looks better—a nigger runnin’ around in a robe and a staff pole, lookin’ like Moses, or these bad—these are the baddest lookin’ …. You might think, you might say you’re chauvinistic, organizational chauvinistic you might call it. You might call me wrapped up in the Party’s own ego. But I’m wrapped up in the truth. And I think the Sister can verify that these are the baddest. These are the movie stars for Babylon, Godamnit. Huh? Fuck John Wayne and all this other shit.

Alright. But you see, if you look at that, that’s what we look good in. We don’t care if niggers wear dashikis. You understand? That’s not gonna mean anything in the final analysis. But we’re saying that you need some tools.

You ever had the occasion to have a doctor come to your house, or a plumber comes to your house? Suppose a plumber came to your house, he opened up his bag and he had stethoscopes and thermometers and hypodermic needles and syringes. You’d say “You came to fix the plumbing? Brother, you got the wrong tools. Something suspicious is going on because you don’t even have the proper tools.” Ain’t that right?

Suppose somebody came to deliver your baby and he had plumber's tools? I know you Sisters would scream bloody murder. No but you’d say, “This is not right, Brother. We can’t have this. You got to, you understand, you gotta come a little easier, you got to show me something better. You got to have some tools that are more appropriate for the occasion, you understand, because I don’t have any runny faucets or anything.”

So when people come into our community with tanks, when they come into Babylon or Warsaw, or whatever you want to call it, like they did into Henry Horner Projects—and that’s a manifestation of, a very clear manifestation of what’s happening in Babylon. When they do that, when they come in there with tanks and those tanks are tools, those tanks are tools of war, they’re declaring war on the community. And if you, when they come into the community with tanks, you come out with dashikis and nothin’ but dashikis, bubus and nothin’ but bubus, sandals and nothing but sandals, then you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong people. You’d better go back in the house, if you have to strip buck naked, if you got to get asshole naked, put you on even if it ain’t nothing but a holster and a gun and some ammunition. Take your bear ass, you understand, and they won’t consider you being naked. Nobody will try, you understand, to whistle at you, or anything. Cause this will be gone from the minute …any kind of sexual attraction you had will be gone. Cause they will be looking at Mr. and Mrs. Colt .45, Mr. and Mrs. .357 Magnum. And the shapes on them are the best shapes we have in Babylon to deal with. And you Brothers holdin’ a .357 Magnum in your hand, there ain’t nothin’ that feels like a .357 Magnum, except one of these beautiful black Sisters. But we need them.357 Magnums also.

When we go out there, we’ll be able to protect ourselves. Huey P. Newton issued a mandate a long time ago. It was executive Mandate #3. It said we need to draw the line of demarcation. And when pigs move on our cribs, we have to protect our crib with gun force. Pigs don’t move on Panther cribs. When they move on Panther cribs, they make sure the Panther’s out of town. We had a situation where they moved on a Panther crib and they had three helicopters above his crib. I’m serious, I’m serious. See, they come prepared. Because they know when they comin’ to a Panther’s crib that we might talk a lot of rhetoric, but we deal with the same basic jargon that the people in Babylon deal with. It takes two to tango, motherfucker. As soon as you kick that door down, I have to kick it back to you. We don’t lock our doors. We just get us some good guns and leave them motherfuckers open and when people come in there we put something on them that will make them go to the hardware, buy a lock, come back, pull the door closed, lock it and stay their ass outside!

We’re gonna move as quickly as we possibly can for the people with the questions and answers and the people with the guilt syndrome and the people that have been embarrassed and shamed and disgraced. And we’ve talked about their leaders like LeRoi Jones and Mamalama Karangatang Karenga, a big bald-headed bazoomie as far as we’re concerned. That’s what he is. And we think that if he’s gonna continue to wear dashikis, that he oughta stop wearin’ pants. Cause he’s look a lot better in miniskirts. That’s all a motherfuckin’ man needs in Babylon that ain’t got no gun, and that’s a miniskirt. And maybe he can trick his way out of somethin’. Cause he not gonna shoot his way outta nothin’. He won’t fight temptation, but he never killed anybody but the Black Panther member. Name somebody. Name me a time you read about Karangatang’s office being attacked. The only time he ever had the occasion to use a gun was on Alprentice Bunchy Carter, a revolutionary. This Brother had more revolutionary poetry for a motherfucker than anybody. Revolutionary culture. John Huggins. The only time they lifted a gun was against these people.

As Huey says in prison when they lifted their hands against Bunchy and when they lifted their hands against John, they lifted their hands against the best that Babylon possesses. And you should say that. You should feel anytime when revolutionary Brothers die. You never heard about the Party going around murdering people. You dig what I’m saying? Think about it. I’m not even gonna tell you. You think about it for yourself.

We started the Black Panther Party in 1966. I’m gonna tell you the whole story in a minute. We started dealing with pigs. You think we scared of a few karangatangs, a few chumps, a few male chauvinists? They tell their women “Walk behind me.” The only reason a woman should walk behind a faggot like that is so she can put his foot knee deep in his ass.

We don’t need no culture except revolutionary culture. What we mean by that is a culture that will free you. You heard your Field Lieutenant talking about a fire in the room, didn’t you? What you worry about when you got a fire in this room? You worry about water or escape. You don’t worry about nothin’ else. If you say “What’s your culture during this fire?” “Water, that’s my culture, Brother, that’s my culture.” Because culture’s a thing that keeps you. “What’s your politics?” Escape and water. “What’s your education?” Escape and water. When people ask us about our culture, we say our culture’s guns, baby. Our culture’s revolutionary art, like that. And when you see those two Brothers who picked up them guns and went out into Babylon in ’66 when a lot of us were scared to do anything except lock ourselves up in the closet and listen to Coltrane—ain’t that something for woopin’ a motherfucker’s ass. And this turned us on and this made us black enough that we were bad. Then this made us black enough to get out and launch a blanket indictment at the murder-mouthin’ rest of the black people. Nigger, you ain’t got no natural. Nigger, how come your name ain’t changed? Ask the pigs in California. Ask ‘em. “Who do you fear most? Ron Mamalama Karenga, or Huey P. Newton, who is named after a demagogic, lyin’ politician, Huey P. Long?” And pigs don’t care about that. Because you don’t have to call, if your shotgun’s a Browning, you don’t have to give it no African name, because believe me, it shoots the same. You understand? It shoots the same….

Changing your name is not gonna change our set of arrangements. The only thing that’s gonna change our set of arrangements is what’s gotten us into this set of arrangements. And that’s the oppressor. And it’s on three stages, we call it the three-in-one: avaricious, greedy businessmen; demagogic, lyin’ politicians; and racist, pig fascist, reactionary cops. Until you deal with those three tings, then your set of arrangements will remain the same. The only difference will be that you’re still under fascism, but instead of Fred being under fascism, I’ll be Oogabooga under fascism. But I’ll feel the same. Instead of me goin’ to the gas chamber, I’ll go to an African section of the gas chamber. We so Africanized over here that if Africans came over here, you’d have to give them a catalogue to find out what the fuck they were buyin’. That’s right, you’d have to give them a catalogue to find out what the fuck they were buyin’. You got posters and pictures and names, we’re namin’ things and namin’ ourselves names they never even heard of. And we call ourselves Africanized. And ain’t that somethin’? You understand?

If you’re racist, let me tell you somethin’. Or if you’re a reactionary nationalist. White folks run it. Go to south Africa and ask ‘em. Go ahead. If you want an example of cultural nationalism, the best one I can give you is Papa Doc, Duvalier. In Haiti, all the black people, “We need some black-ness” Papa Doc—naw, Duvalier said “Right on, we need some blackness. Let’s get all the white folks out of here.” Got all the white folks out, and now he’s oppressing all the black folks. When the black folks complain about it, he says, “Well, godamn; what you all complainin’ about now? I’m black. I can’t do nothin’ wrong brother. We already qualified that.” That’s why these apologists like Wesley South come on the air, and to rap that sophistry that the Sister was talkin’ about. Talkin’ about, they’re ballyhooing, really. Just rappin’ about nothin’ because they’re jackanapes in our community allowed to remain there only because of their skin complexion. And we ought to drive them out. Think about it.

You’ve got Bobby Seale chained and gagged at the Federal Building. You’ve got James and Michael Soto who was murdered in two days. By the way, for all you white folks who claim you’re radicals, that claim you’re gonna support the Party. We move in and we’re saying that there’s no better, there’s no higher Marxist than Huey P. Newton. Not Chairman Mao Tse-Tung or anybody else. We’re saying that unless people show us through their social practice that they relate to the struggle in Babylon, that means that they’re not internationalists, that means that they’re not revolutionaries, truly Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries. We look at Kim Il Sung. We look at Comrade the Marshall, Marshall Kim Il Sung of Korea as towering far and high above in his social practice as Mao Tse-Tung. If you can relate to that, cool. If you can’t relate to that, walk out with your as picked clean like the chickens do, you dig? If you can’t relate to that. And we’re tellin’ you that.

And you motherfuckers who think you’re so radical that you’re trying to radicalise everything in Washington. And I don’t know what the fuck you could radicalise, because you ain’t gonna do nothing but walk between the bodies of two dead men, Lincoln and Washington. And I know you’re not gonna stand up and gain no redress. And there’s just as much chance for Nixon giving you some redress. If you can’t get 200,000 people to march on Washington for something that’s in Vietnam, why the fuck can’t you get 200,000 people to come to Jackson and Dearborn, the Federal Building, and march for the Chairman of Babylon, the man who did more for Babylon, and more for Vietnam than you marchin’ maniacs will ever do. Because you’re not doin’ nothin’ for nobody but Florsheims and Stetsons or Stacy Adams and anybody else, because you’re gonna wear your soles out—your metaphysical souls and the soles on your shoes. And we say if you can’t relate to that, then fuck you.

Because our line’s been consistent. We know the Marxist-Leninists. People who might not want to dig on it, they say Marxist-Leninist they don’t curse. This is something we got from slave masters. We know niggers invented the word motherfucker. We wasn’t fuckin’ nobody’s mother. It was the master fuckin’ people’s mothers. We invented the word, you dig? We relate to that. We Marxist-Leninist niggers, and we some Marxist-Leninist cussin’ niggers, and we gonna continue to cuss, godamnit. Cause that’s what we relate to, that’s what’s happening in Babylon. That’s objective reality. Don’t nobody be walkin’ around in Babylon spoutin’ out at the mouth about a whole lot of academic bullshit, intellectually masturbating, catching diarrhea of the mouth. We say to those motherfuckers if you want to catch a mouth disease, you come and talk that shit in a community where the Panthers are at, and you’ll get a mouth disease alright. You’re gonna get hoof-in-mouth; Panther hoof-in-mouth. So if you radicals can’t relate to that, then fuck you, because we know what Chairman Bobby did for the struggle.

And we know that the people in Vietnam, they know that peace, just like Huey P. Newton tells about our motto, that we are the advocates of the abolition of war. We do not want war, but we understand that war can only be abolished through war. That in order to put down the gun, make a man get rid of the gun, it’s necessary to pick up a gun. And you motherfuckers that’s for peace in Vietnam, the Black Panther Party is for victory in Vietnam. We say that they’re aggressors, they’re a bunch of lackey running dogs, that they’re imperialists. They’re a bunch of Wall Street warmongers. And they need to be driven out of there.

And the only way that the liberation of the oppressed people Vietnam or the oppressed people of Babylon’s freedom can be founded, it has to be founded on the land that is fertilized by the bones and blood of these aggressive pig dogs that come into our communities and occupy our communities like troops occupy a foreign territory and go into Vietnam and fight and struggle relentlessly against the people in Vietnam to have a right to self-determination. We don’t care whether anybody likes it or not. That’s our line. It’s a Marxist-Leninist line. It’s consistent. It’s going to remain that way, and it’s been that way.

If you can’t get 200,000 people to come see about Bobby, then we say you’re counter-revolutionary. That what you’re doing is you’re taking some kind of route from DeKalb where you’re going to get to Vietnam without even passing the Henry Horner Projects on the West Side of Chicago. That’s impossible. You think Vietnam is bad? Check the laws. In Vietnam if you lose one son they allow you to keep the other one. They say, “Here, mother dear, hold him—hold him tight.” He can stay at home, you understand. If you have two in there and one dies, they’ll ship him back. They’ll ship him back and get him out of the war where there’ll be no chance of him dying, because “Miss, this war is not going to take both of your sons.” And then you’re marchin’ on this cruel war in Washington, all you radicals, and what about Mrs Soto, who lost two sons in one week? That proves to us through historical fact that Babylon is worse than Vietnam; we need to have some moratoriums on the black community in Babylon and all oppressed communities in Babylon.

And Charles Jackson, from Altgeld Gardens. Last week a 14-year-old boy throwing rocks. The pigs told him to halt, and the motherfucker shot and murdered him. Murdered him in cold blood. And then you motherfuckers got the nerve to go tramping off to Washington, marching between two dead motherfuckers. The Panther Party is going to criticize you motherfuckers. We gonna criticize you out open because we believe in mass revolutionary criticism. We’re gonna tell you that you’re wrong, because we done had a lot of criticism levelled at us for fucking around with you. You will either be part of the problem or you’re gonna be part of the solution. And if we find out you motherfuckers is part of the problem, we’re gonna start turning the guns on you crazy motherfuckers.

We’re gonna have some questions and answers. We’re gonna do one thing, too. And this is another thing out of sight to show the people where we come from. We come from Babylon. The Black Panther Party’s ran solely by black people. If you get a chance—I don’t think it’s gonna be this Sunday, but we taped this Sunday and shown next Sunday, I’m almost sure. It’s gonna be taped this Sunday and shown next Sunday. There’ll be a big round table discussion that’s gonna be on “For Blacks Only”, any you can check the thing and see what it is. And either myself or Chaka will be there. We’ll be presenting the Black Panther Party. And if you get a chance, why don’t you look at it.

If you wanna do something for me, we’d like to do something for Chairman Bobby, if you just clap your hands for me. This is what we call—you don’t have to clap to loud—this is what we call the people beat. It’s a beat that was started in 1966 by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale. It’s a beat that never stops because it’s the beat they got because they knew it couldn’t be stopped. It’s the beat that manifested in you, the people. Chairman Bobby Seale says that as long as there’s black people, there’ll always be the Black Panther Party. But they never can stop the Party unless they stop the beat. As long as you manifest the beat, we can never be stopped. You think the beat is dangerous? We know it’s dangerous. Because when the beat started out on the West Coast, the chief pig out there, Mafioso Alioto, said to the rest of his people that helped him with his fascism out there, he said, “Listen to those people beat. Hey, they’re beating much to fast. Why don’t they go back home where they belong.” When that beat started last November a year ago in Chicago, Illinois, at 2350 W. Madison, when me and Chaka and Bobby Rush and Che and some more Brothers and Jewel got together and said we’re gonna start a Black Panther Party right here. Because this is part of Babylon; the Party exists tight here too. That we might be in school now, might think we’re on the mountain top, but we’re gonna come down to the valley, because people in the valley, commitment’s in the valley, oppression’s in the valley, aggression, repression, fascism, all exists in the valley. No matter how nice it might be on the mountain top, we’ve got a commitment, so we’re going back. We got to go back to the valley.

And when we did that, even Daley and Hanrahan and Judge—we call him Adolph Hitler Hoffman—the chief fascist who knows the art of tapista, the art that Mussolini was supposed to have mastered. We say that Hoffman is better at the art of tapista than Mussolini ever was, because we know what the art of tapista is: it’s an art of good timing. And when we started that beat, Judge Hoffman and Mayor Daley and hammerhead Hanrahan said, “Hey, listen to the people. It’s Chicago beat. Politically they are even beating beating much too fast. Why don’t they go back home?” To live with all black people where they belong, to live in dashikis and bubus and to be porkchop nationalists and cultural nationalists. Why don’t they go back home to thinkin’ what you’re wearin’ is going to change you? Why don’t they go back to “Political power flows from the sleeve of a dashiki.” And we said, No!” As long as that beat continues, we continue, because it gives us in the Party a type of intoxication, that it let’s us understand… we’re so revolutionary proletarian intoxicated that we cannot be astronomically intimidated.

Don’t worry about the Black Panther Party. As long as you keep the beat, we’ll keep on going. If you think that we can be wiped out because they murdered Bobby Hutton and Alprentice Bunchy Carter and John Huggins, you’re wrong. If you think that because Huey was jailed the Party’s gonna stop, you see you’re wrong. If you think because Chairman Bobby was jailed the Party’s gonna stop, you see you’re wrong. If you think because they can jail me you thought the Party was gonna stop, you thought wrong. Because they can “Rage”, Eldridge Cleaver out of the country…you’re wrong. Because we said it before we left and we said it today. That you can jail a revolutionary, but you can’t jail the revolution. You can lock up a freedom fighter like Huey P. Newton, but you can’t lock up freedom fighting. You might hire some pork chops like Mamalama to murder Alprentice Bunchy Carter, a liberator, but you can’t murder liberation, because if you do, you come up with answers that don’t answer, explanations that don’t explain, conclusions that don’t conclude.

We say that if you dare to struggle, than you dare to win. If you dare not to struggle you don’t deserve to win. We wouldn’t go into the ring with Muhammad Ali and not fight and wonder why we lost, would we? If you don’t fight, then you don’t deserve to win. If you don’t move on these fascists, then you’re crazy. We say it’s no longer a question of violence or non-violence. We say it’s a question of resistance to fascism or non-existence within fascism. We say let’s stop the war in Vietnam. Let’s stop it by acquiring victory for the spirit of Ho Chi Minh. We say let’s stop the war in Babylon. Let’s initiate the decentralization of the police….

The only real thing is the people, because pigs bite the hand that feeds them and they need to be slapped. And like Chaka said, when you catch them in you’re house, hit ‘em with anything. You shouldn’t argue about whether to hit ‘em with a chair or a table, because they’re out of order from the start. We say that the oppressor—fuck Judge Taney—the oppressor has no rights which we, the oppressed, are bound to follow.

If you get a chance, come see about Bobby. You oughta come see about Bobby because Bobby came and saw about you. You oughta come see about Bobby because in 1966, when we didn’t even think we were important enough to protect ourselves, Bobby and Huey got their guns and went into the community. They left college. They where pre-engineer students, that was Bobby, and Huey was a pre-law student. And what they read they put into practice. You oughta come see about Bobby because Bobby came and saw about you. I’m gonna see about Bobby and if you have anything to say you’ll come see about Bobby. Come down to Jackson and Dearborn and see about our Chairman, because he’s the Chairman of Babylon. He’s the father and the founder of the breakfast programs and the free health clinics, and there’s nothing wrong, nothing in the world wrong with that.

All power to the people. Northern Illinois power to the people that go here to Northern Illinois University.

We say that we need some guns. There’s nothing wrong with guns in our community, there’s just been a misdistribution of guns in our community. For one reason or another, the pigs have all the guns, so all we have to do is equally distribute them. So if you see one that has a gun and you don’t have one, then when you leave you should have one. They way we’ll be able to deal with things right. I remember looking at T.V. and I found that not only did the pigs not brutalize the people in western days, they had to hire bounty hunters to go arrest them. They shoot somebody with no intention of arresting them. We need some guns. We need some guns. We need some force.

Thank you. I’m going to call Chaka end Sister Joan back up here to deal with any questions that you want answered, because we have plenty of time to spend; we don’t have any time to waste. As the sister said, “Time is short, let’s seize the time.”

Thank you.