One Hundred Years of Indian Communism

By Prabhat Patnaik

Republished from International Development Economic Associates.

A theoretical analysis of the prevailing situation, from which the proletariat’s relationship with different segments of the bourgeoisie and the peasantry is derived, and with it the Communist Party’s tactics towards other political forces, is central to the Party’s praxis. A study of this praxis over the last one hundred years of the existence of communism in India, though highly instructive, is beyond my scope here. I shall be concerned only with some phases of this long history.

While the Sixth Congress of the Communist International (1928) analysed the colonial question, advancing valuable propositions like “Colonial exploitation produces pauperization, not proletarianization, of the peasantry”, it put forward a line of action for Communist Parties that was sectarian in character; indeed the period following the Sixth Congress, often referred to as the Third Period, is associated with sectarianism. It was at the Seventh Congress in 1935, in the midst of the fight against fascism, which had claimed Ernst Thaelman, Antonio Gramsci and many others among its victims, that this sectarianism was rectified and the need to form united fronts was emphasized. The Seventh Congress tendency was translated into the Indian context by the Dutt-Bradley thesis calling for the formation of an Anti-Imperialist People’s United Front.

The economic programme suggested for such a front included the right to strike, banning reductions of wages and dismissals of workers, an adequate minimum wage and 8-hour day, a 50 per cent reduction in rents and banning the seizure of peasant land against debt by imperialists, native princes, zamindars and money lenders.

Communists being clandestine members of the Congress (the Indian case differed from South Africa in this respect where dual membership, of the SACP and ANC, was possible), and working in cooperation with the Congress Socialist party, were the outcome of this understanding.

This phase came to an end with the German attack on the Soviet Union. The Communist Party’s understanding that the nature of the war had changed because of this attack, though striking a sympathetic chord among many leading Congressmen, was officially rejected both by the CSP and the Congress, which actually launched the Quit India movement at this very time (in which many Communists who had been members of the Congress were also jailed for long periods).

With independence, the question of the nature of the new State and the relationship with the bourgeoisie came to the fore. It caused intense inner-Party debate and ultimately divided the Party. The CPI(M)’s theoretical position, enshrined in its programme, took off from Lenin’s position in pre-revolutionary debates within the RSDLP, a position that was to underlie, one way or another, all third world revolutionary programmes in the twentieth century. Lenin’s argument had been that in countries where the bourgeoisie came late on the historical scene, it lacked the capacity to carry through the anti-feudal democratic revolution, for fear that an attack on feudal property could well rebound into an attack on bourgeois property. It therefore could not fulfil the democratic aspirations of the peasantry. Only a revolution led by the working class in alliance with the peasantry, could carry the democratic revolution to completion, by breaking up feudal property, smashing feudal privileges, and redistributing land. This, far from holding back economic development, would in fact make it more broad-based by enlarging the size of the home market through land reforms, and also more rapid, by accelerating the growth of agriculture.

The post-independence Indian State’s eschewing of radical land redistribution, and its encouraging feudal landlords instead to turn capitalist on their khudkasht land, along with an upper stratum of the peasantry that acquired ownership rights on land from large absentee landlords, was reflective of the bourgeoisie’s entering into an alliance with landlords. Since it was a bourgeois-landlord State under the leadership of the big bourgeoisie, that was pursuing capitalist development, which in the countryside entailed a mixture of landlord and peasant capitalism, the task for the proletariat was to replace this State by an alternative State formed by building an alliance with the bulk of the peasantry, and to carry the democratic revolution forward, eventually to socialism. While the bourgeoisie had ambitions of pursuing a capitalist path that was relatively autonomous of imperialism, it was, the Party noted, collaborating increasingly with foreign finance capital.

Two aspects of this characterization deserve attention. First, it recognized that while capitalist development was being pursued, it was not under the aegis of imperialism. The bourgeoisie was by no means subservient to imperialism, a fact of which the use of the public sector against metropolitan capital, economic decolonization with the help of the Soviet Union, in the sense of recapturing control over the country’s natural resources from metropolitan capital, and the pursuit of non-alignment in foreign policy, were obvious manifestations. Developing capitalism at home in other words did not mean for the post-independence State joining the camp of world capitalism.

Second, the State, while it manifested its class character in defending bourgeois and landlord property and ushering in capitalism, including junker capitalism, did not act exclusively in the interests of the bourgeoisie and the landlords. It appeared to stand above all classes, intervening even in favour of workers and peasants from time to time. Thus while it presided over a process of primitive accumulation of capital, in the sense of the landlords evicting tenants to resume land for capitalist farming, it prevented primitive accumulation in the more usual sense, of the urban big bourgeoisie encroaching on peasant agriculture or artisan production. On the contrary, it not only reserved a quantum of cloth to be produced by the handloom sector, but also intervened in agricultural markets to purchase produce at remunerative prices, an intervention of which the agricultural capitalists, whether kulaks or landlords, were by no means the sole beneficiaries. Likewise, a whole array of measures for agriculture, such as protection from world market fluctuations, subsidised inputs, subsidized institutional credit, new practices and seed varieties being disseminated through State-run extension services, though they conferred the lion’s share of benefits on the emerging capitalist class in the countryside, also benefited large numbers of peasants.

The capitalist development that was pursued was thus sui generis. It was a capitalist development from within, not necessarily with the blessings of imperialism, and, notwithstanding increasing collaboration, often even at the expense of metropolitan capital. Because of this peculiar character, it did not cause an unbridgeable hiatus within society, i.e. within the ranks of the classes that had fought imperialism together during the anti-colonial struggle. Put differently, while the bourgeoisie betrayed many of the promises of the anti-colonial struggle, such as land to the tiller, it did not as long as the dirigiste regime lasted, betray the anti-colonial struggle altogether. This is also why the Party while putting itself in opposition to the regime, supported many of its measures, such as bank nationalization, the development of the public sector and its use for recapturing control over natural resources from metropolitan capital, FERA, and others.

This sui generis character of the capitalism that was being developed has misled many into thinking that it was an “intermediate regime” that presided over it and not a bourgeois-landlord State; but this mistake itself is testimony to its sui generis character. This development could not last for at least four reasons: first, the collapse of the Soviet Union that had made such a development trajectory at all possible; second, the fiscal crisis that the post-independence State increasingly got into inter alia because of massive tax evasion by the bourgeoisie and the landlords; third, the formation of huge blocks of finance capital in the banks of the advanced capitalist countries, especially after the “oil-shocks” of the seventies, which went global after the overthrow of the Bretton-Woods system (itself partly engineered by this finance capital), and which took advantage of the fiscal crisis to push loans to countries like India; and fourth, the fact that the dirigiste regime could not garner the support of the poor, notwithstanding its many pro-poor achievements compared to the colonial period.

The neo-liberal regime under the aegis of the now globalized finance capital represents the pursuit of capitalism of the most orthodox kind, as distinct from the sui generis capitalism of the dirigiste period. The State under neo-liberalism promotes much more exclusively the interests of the ruling classes, especially the corporate-financial oligarchy that gets closely integrated with globalized finance capital, and directly also of globalized finance capital itself (owing its fear that there may be a capital flight otherwise). An unbridgeable hiatus now develops within the country, with the big bourgeoisie aligning itself much more closely with metropolitan capital, having abandoned its ambition of relative autonomy vis-à-vis imperialism.

The neo-liberal regime withdraws to a large extent the support it extended to petty production and peasant agriculture, making it much more vulnerable. A process of primitive accumulation of capital is unleashed upon peasant agriculture not from within the rural economy (through landlords evicting tenants) but from agri-business and big capital from outside; likewise the neo-liberal State facilitates an unleashing of primitive accumulation upon the petty production sector, for instance through demonetization and the shift to a GST regime. Reservation of products for this sector is abandoned. The displaced peasants and petty producers move to towns in search of employment, but employment becomes increasingly scarce because of the abandonment of all constraints on technological-cum-structural change in the economy which the system of licensing had imposed earlier. The swelling reserve army of labour worsens the lot of the organized workers. The fate of the peasants, the agricultural labourers, the petty producers and organized workers get inextricably linked, and this fate worsens greatly, leading not only to a massive widening of economic inequality but also to an accentuation of poverty.

At the same time however neo-liberalism has entailed the shift of a range of activities, especially in the service sector (IT-related services) from the metropolis to the Indian economy which inter alia has increased the growth rate of GDP in the economy. This poses a fresh challenge before the Party because of the following argument.

Marx in his Preface to A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy had talked of a mode of production becoming historically obsolete when the relations of production characterizing it become a fetter on the development of productive forces. A conclusion is often drawn from this that as long as productive forces continue to develop, that mode of production continues to remain historically progressive. An obvious index of the development of productive forces is the rate of growth of the GDP, whence it follows that as long as this growth remains rapid, opposing a regime in the name of its inequity and exploitative character is historically unwarranted. The Communists on this argument should not oppose neo-liberal globalization, but should join other political forces in accepting it, albeit critically.

This argument however cannot stand scrutiny. Economic historians agree that Russia before the revolution was experiencing unprecedented rates of economic growth, especially industrial growth, and the advanced capitalist world as a whole had witnessed a prolonged boom; yet Lenin had no hesitation in calling capitalism of that time “moribund”. In short to take GDP growth as the marker of the historical state of a mode of production is a form of commodity fetishism; it seeks to locate in the world of “things” phenomena that belong to the world of “relations”.

While other political forces accepted neo-liberal globalization, the Party accordingly steadfastly opposed it. It, along with other Left political forces, stood by the workers and peasants who are victims of neo-liberal globalization instead accepting it as a sign of progress, as many Left formations in other countries have explicitly or implicitly done.

This has brought practical problems. Under the dirigiste regime one measure that separated Communists from others was land reforms. When a Communist government came to power, its task was clear, namely to carry out land reforms. But when land reforms have been completed to a significant extent, the next task is not clear. While industrialization is required, what form it should take and in what way it should be effected, are matters on which the state governments (where Communists are typically located) have very little say within a neo-liberal regime. Hence, Communist state governments within such a regime are often forced to mimic, to their cost, other state governments for effecting industrialization. This is an area where much more thinking and experimentation needs to be done.

Neo-liberal globalization itself however has reached a dead-end, a symptom of which is the mushrooming of authoritarian/fascist regimes in various parts of the world, for the preservation of moribund neo-liberal capitalism, through a combination of repression and of distraction of attention towards the “other” as the enemy. Overcoming this conjuncture is the new challenge before Indian Communism in its centenary year.

"It is Totally Naive to Want to Humanize Capitalism": An Interview with Frei Betto

[Photo: Frei Betto meets with Fidel Castro in the 1990s]

By Barbara Schijman

Originally published at Internationalist 360.

Carlos Alberto Libanio Christo, better known as Frei Betto, is a recognized Latin American progressive reference and one of the main figures of the Theology of Liberation. A writer, journalist and Dominican friar, he was imprisoned for four years during the military dictatorship in Brazil, which he opposed with body and soul. During his work as a friar he met, in the favelas of Sao Paulo, the former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, of whom he was an advisor, and in whose government he participated in the Zero Hunger program. He has written more than 60 books, including Fidel and Religion. Conversations with Frei Betto (1985); Mysticism and Spirituality (1997); The Artist’s Work. A Holistic Vision of the Universe (1999); and The Lost Gold of the Arienim (2016).

What thoughts does this pandemic world open up for you?

I believe that the pandemic is nature’s revenge, resulting from years of human domination and devastation. Absolutely everything that we have been doing for the last 200 years, the search for profit and the maximum exploitation of nature’s resources without any care for environmental preservation, results in a lack of control of the chain of nature, which is completely disrupted by human intervention. Many speak of the “anthropocene”, that is, the era of total human intervention in nature; but I prefer to call this situation “capitalocene”. In other words, the total hegemony of capital, of the search for profit, for gain; all of which causes a total imbalance in the natural environment.

This whole process of environmental devastation is the fruit of private capital gain. The problem is not the human being; the problem is neoliberal capitalism. And we must remember that nature can live without our uncomfortable presence; we cannot, we do need nature.

How do you analyze the situation in Brazil?

In my country, the situation is catastrophic because we have a neo-fascist government. I call President Jair Bolsonaro, the “Bagman”, I even gave him this nickname before the Economist Magazine did. Brazil is in a total fire, in the Amazon, and in other areas, and the president has no interest in improving the situation or changing the course of what we are experiencing. Everything that means death suits him. We are living under a genocidal and lying government.

He is so brazen that in his last speech at the UN he said that the culprits for the fires in the Amazon are the peasants, the small farmers of the area and the indigenous people. For this reason there is no doubt that here in Brazil we are living a catastrophic situation managed by a neo-fascist government, which is using more and more religious fundamentalism to legitimize itself. Health matters as little as education. Bolsonaro knows very well that an educated people is a people that has a minimum of critical consciousness. And so it is better for him that the people have no education at all so that they can continue as guides to an ignorant mass. Of course not because of the masses themselves, but because of the conditions of education that are not properly offered to the people. As if all this were not enough, we are now back on a map of hunger, with a tremendous number of people who do not have the minimum necessary of the nutrients provided by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). In short, we are in a tremendous situation. We’ll see what happens in the municipal elections in November.

What scenario do you envision?

I think the elections will be an interesting thermometer to evaluate how our people look at it. But the truth is that, in this, I am not very optimistic. The pandemic has helped a lot so that Bolsonaro has the hegemony of the narrative, because public demonstrations do not exist, they are prohibited, or they are not convenient, so only the voice of the government is heard.

By voting in favor of the political trial against former President Dilma Rousseff, Bolsonaro dedicated his vote to the memory of the Army torturer, Colonel Carlos Brilhante Ustra. His behavior should not be surprising. But what explains that he still maintains a considerable level of popular support?

I have two explanations for this situation. First, the right wing has mastered the electronic system of digital networks, which I prefer not to call “social” because they do not necessarily create sociability. I believe that many people on the left, progressive, have not yet mastered this mechanism. And also, since the owners of these platforms are favorable to sectors close to the government, many use algorithms and other devices to disseminate fake news and all kinds of lies. This has a lot of force because today people find out much more about the news and facts through the digital networks than through the traditional press. This is the first factor. The second factor is related to the mobilization of the poorest people by conservative evangelical churches. And then there are people who have abdicated their freedom to seek safety. That is the proposal of the global right: that each person should abdicate his freedom in exchange for his security.

In the face of the latter, and the hegemonic narrative it describes, what about the voices of the left?

On this we, these who feel part of the left, have a certain responsibility because we have abandoned the work of the base. We have abandoned work with the poorest people in this country. In the thirteen years that we have been in government we have not increased that base work, and this space has been occupied by those evangelical churches and some conservative fundamentalist Catholic sectors. These churches have made a lot of progress. And this also has to do with a project of the United States intelligence since the 1970s. In two conferences that took place in Mexico, the CIA and the State Department already said that the Liberation Theology was more dangerous than Marxism in Latin America and that a counteroffensive had to be made. This counteroffensive comes from the appearance of these electronic churches that were exported to Latin America, Africa, Asia, and other places.

Religion is the first system of meaning invented by the human being. There is no other sense more powerful and globalizing than religion. That is why so many people today are seeking to master this system. And we, who are progressives of the Theology of Liberation, have done here in Brazil an intense and very positive work at the base between the 70’s during the military dictatorship and also during the 90’s, but after that have come two very conservative pontificates, those of John Paul II and Benedict XVI. These were 34 years of demobilization of the basic church, of that church of the basic ecclesial communities; they were 34 years of prejudice against the Theology of Liberation. All of this opened space for this counteroffensive by the evangelical right.

Do you argue that “there is no future for humanity outside of socialism?” How do you build socialism at this juncture?

We must not wait for the end of capitalism to build socialism. We have to build socialism within the capitalist system, that is, to begin popular initiatives of economic solidarity, of sharing goods, of strengthening popular bases. That is where we are starting, there is no other way. We cannot return to the Leninist concept of an assault on the Winter Palace. We have to denounce the capitalist system but create effective alternatives to this system, as far as possible from the popular bases. In that way I believe that we can manage to break this system in the long term, but we have to have initiative and pressure and political forces. This is a long-term, essential task, and I don’t see any other way out at this juncture.

What examples of these initiatives do you claim?

There are many initiatives from popular sectors in different places. In Brazil, the Landless Movement has initiatives that are typically socialist. Recently, with the tremendous rise in the price of rice in Brazil, the MST, which is a big rice producer, has not raised its prices and had a terrible sale. Many people were able to discover the advantages of their family farming, where services and profits are shared among the families that are settled or camped. They are small initiatives that we have to strengthen, and look for spaces in the governments again, because it is very important and immense to work from the government, as we have done during the presidencies of Lula and Dilma.

Unfortunately, we have not taken advantage of all the possibilities, and above all, we have not done work, which for me is fundamental, that has to do with the political literacy of the people. We should have invested much more in that. If we have another opportunity to return to the government we will have to face that work, which is fundamental. If on the one hand the thirteen years of the Workers’ Party government promoted many social advances in Brazil – and they are the best in our republican history – but on the other hand, we have not worked on the political literacy of the people, the strengthening of the popular movements, and the democratization of the media.

There are those who argue that capitalism must be humanized. Is that possible?

It’s a totally contradictory idea. Humanizing capitalism is the same as taking the teeth out of the tiger, thinking that this will take away its aggressiveness; it is totally naive to want to humanize capitalism. There is no possibility of that; capitalism is intrinsically evil. Its own endogenous mechanism is a necrophiliac mechanism. It is a system that feeds on those who work, on those who consume, on the poor. It is a question of arithmetic: if there is not so much wealth there is not so much poverty; if there is not so much poverty there is not so much wealth. It is impossible to humanize capitalism; it is a very naive postulation and unfortunately there are still people who believe in this myth.

How do you generate democratic awareness? How do you work on the democratization of society in times like these?

By means of communication systems -digital, printed, audiovisual, etc.-, translating into popular language many of the concepts disseminated in the mass media. Simple people often do not understand concepts such as public debt, foreign investment, exchange rate fluctuations, and market mechanisms. This requires methodology – which Paulo Freire teaches – and popular education teams.

Can you imagine Lula being the president of Brazil again?

Maybe he will have the opportunity because they are reviewing his judgments and convictions, filled with so many prejudices. Hopefully, he will have the possibility to be a candidate again; it is our hope here.

Can you imagine a less conservative Catholic Church, attentive in fact to the proclamations it defends?

As I said, the Catholic Church has spent 34 years of conservative pontificates that have demobilized much of that popular work of the ecclesial base communities, the raw material of Liberation Theology. This does not come from the heads of theologians, it comes from the bases. All of this has been demobilized. It may be different times since the changes proposed by Pope Francis, but still the intermediate hierarchy between the bases and the people who have power in the church has not been totally changed. We still have a large number of bishops and priests who are very conservative and who do not want to get involved in the popular struggles, are afraid or in search of their comfort, their convenience, and do not want to put themselves at risk. There is a lot of work to be done, but there are sectors of the Catholic Church and of Latin America that are very committed to these struggles for the defense of the rights of the poorest, of human rights; this is very strong in many sectors.

How do you think about the immediate future?

I believe that in the immediate future there is going to be an exacerbation of individualism. The pandemic has required cutting off face-to-face relationships, so people are going to be increasingly isolated, with fewer opportunities to connect with each other and to come together in the streets, in the unions, in the social movements, at least until a vaccine comes to take us out of this situation. And here again the importance of knowing how to manage the digital networks appears. We, the progressive left, have to learn more and more to manage these networks and to change them, because we know that many of them are there only to favor consumption or even linked to services of espionage, intelligence, control of the people. There is a lot of struggle to be done around this because it is a factor that came to stay. Many people are informed through these digital networks. We have to create groups with the ability to dominate these networks, to disprove the fake news and disseminate the truth, the real facts. This is the only way we can do a virtual job of political education.

Is there a Liberation Theology today?

Yes, of course. Liberation Theology has opened its range to other topics that are not only social struggles, but also addresses the issue of ecology, questions of nanotechnology, astrophysics, cosmology, and bioethics. The problem is that we have rather lost the popular foundations, which were the basis of the Theory of Liberation. These foundations have been lost during these 34 years of conservative pontificates. Our main task is to return to the bases, to return to the slums, to return to the peripheries, to return to the poor people, to the oppressed, to the excluded, like black people, the indigenous, the LGBT. We all have to be in this struggle; that’s where we have to walk.

Are you optimistic?

I have a principle and that is we have to save pessimism for better days. We can’t play into the hands of a system that wants us to be quiet, depressed, discouraged; we have to keep fighting. History has many twists and turns. I have been through a lot of things, some very tremendous, others positive. The prison under the Vargas dictatorship, the strength of the popular movements, the election of Lula, the election of Dilma… I am optimistic, yes. We cannot consider any historical moment as definitive.

Translation by Resumen Latinoamericano, North America Bureau

The Austerity Election

[Photo: Morry Gash-Pool/Getty Images]

By Ezra Brain

Republished from Left Voice.

As the 2020 presidential election is approaching its climax, both Joe Biden and Donald Trump are continuing to try to sell this election. For Biden and his supporters, this election is about rescuing democracy from the creeping authoritarianism of Donald Trump. For Trump and his supporters, this election is about continuing the “great American comeback” and fighting back Biden’s supposed “radical socialism.” However, as we enter the final stage of the election, we should be very clear what this election is actually about for the capitalists: deciding which of the candidates will be better at demoralizing and attacking the working class through the implementation of austerity.

It’s The Economy, Stupid

James Carville’s famous 1992 saying that “it’s the economy, stupid” in regards to the Bill Clinton campaign rings more true today than ever. The full impact of the current economic crisis is still unknown. What is generally understood is that Trump’s promise of a “V-shaped recovery” — a recovery where the economy recovers as fast as it crashed — is not happening. In an October 3 article, the New York Times declared that while the “pandemic depression” is over, the “pandemic recession” is beginning. 

In that article, Neil Irwin points to the deep ongoing unemployment crisis, writing, “[the jobs numbers imply] that even as public health restrictions loosen and as vaccines get closer, the overall economy is not poised for a quick snapback to pre-pandemic levels. Rather, scarring is taking place across a much wider range of sectors than the simple narrative of shutdown versus reopening suggests.”

Even this statement could be overly optimistic. In a September 30 article for the Financial Post, David Rosenberg argues that “We are in a depression — not a recession, but a depression. The dynamics of a depression are different than they are in a recession because depressions invoke a secular change in behavior. Classic business cycle recessions are forgotten about within a year after they end. The scars from this one will take years to heal.”

The current crisis is the deepest in decades as successive waves of mass layoffs have left millions without work. Indeed, many of these layoffs were due to industry-wide shutterings such as in airlines, hospitality and the arts. It is unclear if some of these jobs will ever return, adding to the scars of the crisis In addition, an untold number of small businesses have closed due to this crisis as even major corporations filed for bankruptcy. For a period during the height of the first wave of the pandemic, the capitalists were in bad shape.

This crisis isn’t just limited to the United States. In recent weeks, the New Zealand economy has shrunk more than it has any time since the Great Depression, and the European recovery has become a “summer memory,” in the words of the New York Times. In Argentina, about half the country is in poverty as Latin America experiences their worst economic contraction ever. 

In short, the impacts of the crisis are deep and on-going. Add to this the very likely fact that another shutdown could be looming on the horizon, and it becomes clear that whoever occupies the White House next will be principally tasked with addressing the economic crisis before essentially anything else. The next president will be the “Pandemic Recession President.”

Austerity on the Horizon

Given that either Trump or Biden will be charged with addressing the current crisis, it is important to understand that — on economic matters — they are largely unified. Both men support bailouts for big business and austerity for the working class. Indeed, in the current moment, the bailouts for businesses are even larger than they were in 2008, there’s been essentially no oversight on how businesses use this money, and it’s all funded with taxpayer dollars. So, essentially, the government is fleecing the working class, who are deeply struggling, in order to funnel more money to the capitalists. They will then throw up their hands about the deficit and how we need to decrease spending, and rather than stop writing corporations blank checks, they will “balance the budget” through cutting programs for the most vulnerable. 

This is what austerity is:  the government slashes government spending (almost always on social services), ostensibly in order to get out of an economic crisis. However, austerity is really just an excuse for capitalists to find ways to grow their profits through increasing exploitation of the working class. Unsurprisingly, under austerity, it is the working class and the most vulnerable who disproportionately pay the price. 

Austerity was most famously in the news during the economic crisis of 2008. Europe specifically was devastated by austerity imposed by politicians of both the Left and the Right. As an example, the United Nations expert on extreme poverty wrote a report about the impact of austerity on the UK. The report says:

It thus seems patently unjust and contrary to British values that so many people are living in poverty. This is obvious to anyone who opens their eyes to see the immense growth in foodbanks and the queues waiting outside them, the people sleeping rough in the streets, the growth of homelessness, the sense of deep despair that leads even the Government to appoint a Minister for suicide prevention and civil society to report in depth on unheard of levels of loneliness and isolation. And local authorities, especially in England, which perform vital roles in providing a real social safety net have been gutted by a series of government policies.  Libraries have closed in record numbers, community and youth centers have been shrunk and underfunded, public spaces and buildings including parks and recreation centers have been sold off.  

That’s just a taste of the wreckage that austerity brings. It destroys the social safety net in the midst of an economic crisis that plunges millions into poverty. As more and more people are thrown into precarious situations, things like health, education, and retirement become underfunded and overburdened. The results are disaster and despair. 

Both the Democrats and the Republicans are unified behind austerity. We can see this in the fact that the bailouts passed so far have bipartisan support. Another example is how, in their recent city budget, the almost entirely Democratic New York City Council voted for a devastating austerity budget. Indeed, we too soon forget that the crippling austerity that was forced upon Puerto Rico was done under Obama. 

Both Trump and Biden will oversee deep cuts to the practically non-existent social safety net of the United States. Education will be gutted, and so-called “entitlements” programs may be privatized. Any bailout money that comes will continue to be funneled into the pockets of big capital.  

Biden is the Man for the Job? 

While the race for president is far from over — and if 2016 taught us nothing else, it taught us not to call the race before it’s over — the chance of Biden taking power is seeming increasingly likely. He’s ahead by an average of 10.8% nationally and is leading in most swing states. In addition, Biden has more support among billionaires and sectors of the capitalist class than Trump does and is raising significantly more money from Wall Street than Trump.

The answer to why Biden is drawing this support from capital is clear: they think that he will be the best at implementing austerity. The rich and big businesses want to ensure that there is a smooth implementation of austerity so that they are able to continue to enrich themselves off of our labor without pushback. Their hypothesis that Biden is the man to do that certainly has precedent.

In the UK, Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair was able to continue the devastating policy of Thatcherism and use his “left” trappings to solidify it. Indeed, Blair didn’t just continue Thatcher’s austerity; he added to it. Two months after promising during the election to not introduce university tuition fees, he did — marking the first time that British universities had tuition fees since 1962. While Blair faced some pushback for his austerity, because he was a member of a supposedly left-wing party, he didn’t face nearly the amount of public pushback that Thatcher did before him. 

In the United States, Bill Clinton was able to escalate Reaganism and deepen the neoliberal offensive but faced little public backlash because, as a Democrat, he had a shield against criticism. Thomas Frank put it best when he said: “Bill Clinton was not the lesser of two evils, he was the greater of them. The magic of him being a Democrat was that he did things that Republicans could have never accomplished. Welfare reform, the crime bill, NAFTA—things that injured members of his coalition. Clinton got done what Reagan couldn’t do and what Bush couldn’t do.”  

However, we don’t just need to look to past examples to see that Biden intends to be no friend to the working class in the current crisis. Biden’s website touts his experience running the “recovery” in 2009, but for working people, there never really was a recovery. Instead, an entire generation was forced into precarious labor and crippling student debt while millions lost their homes. That is the legacy of the Obama-Biden “recovery.”  And Biden is proud to have overseen it. Obama was an austerity president, and Biden will be the same. 

Frank’s words have a disturbing resonance in the current moment. As Biden is leading a coalition that includes most of the Black Lives Matters movement, much of the organized left, and all of the progressive wing of his party, what will he be able to do with them as a shield? Capital is supporting him for a reason. What will he be able to do that Trump can’t? 

We’ve been down this road before, and we cannot go down it again. We cannot — we must not — give our faith and support to a candidate who promises his capitalist donors that “nothing [will] fundamentally change.” We are in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, and both Biden and Trump are going to ensure that there is more money for big business and more austerity for the working class. 

However, it is important to note that the current moment is very different from the 1990s. The global capitalist crisis is deeper, and years of neoliberalism have begun to polarize people to the left. Additionally, Biden’s control over his coalition is much weaker than Clinton’s was. Indeed, while the prevalence of lesser evilism is helpful for whipping votes for Biden but it does lead to a large sector of Biden’s electoral base who disagree with policies. This could result in him being in a very weak position as president as his coalition is held together by opposition to Trump, not support for Biden. All in all, the task seems much harder for Biden than it did for Blair or Clinton.

In addition, if Trump is able to pull out a win, we should be very clear that he will also bring crippling austerity. His first term has already shown him to be a tireless ally of capital — especially given that many of his policies seem intended to specifically enrich himself and his family personally — and he is already withholding aid as part of a political tactic. However, Trump’s instability is leading him to be a more erratic ally to capitalists than Biden would be. Especially in the face of both the pandemic and the uprisings against police violence over the summer, Trump showed that he was not able to calm the situation, leading to frequent crashes in the market. While it is not set in stone yet, it does seem like a growing sector of capital is done with Trump and have decided to put their eggs into Biden’s steadier basket.

To resist the coming austerity, we must mobilize and organize to resist the coming onslaught of austerity. The only way to do this is through using the power of the working class to attack the capitalists and their politicians where it hurts: we need to withhold our labor through strikes and work stoppages. The capitalists are counting on the fact that Biden will be a more stable servant of capital who will receive less resistance as president when he implements austerity. We have to prove them wrong. Biden or Trump, we must be ready to fight back every single time the capitalists try to make us pay for their crisis.  

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.

Their Violence and Ours

By Nathaniel Flakin

Republished from Left Voice.

Capitalist politicians of all stripes are condemning “violence.” But they never mean the daily violence committed by the police. They are condemning resistance against state violence.

Bourgeois society has a very funny way of talking about violence. In the aftermath of the police murder of George Floyd, as thousands poured into the streets to demonstrate their anger and demand justice, the bourgeois press was publishing articles with headlines like this: “Violence erupts in Minneapolis following black man’s death in police custody.”

What a strange formulation! Not only does the headline conceal how this “death” happened. Apparently it is not “violence” if a state functionary chokes a restrained man to death. No, “violence” only began after that. 

This bias underscores the way that bourgeois society operates. A Black man being murdered by the state is just a normal day; but people taking things from a Target store without paying is a catastrophe. People are expendable; but property is sacred. 

Indeed, capitalist society treats all kinds of systemic violence as so completely natural that it does not even deserve the term. A police murder in broad daylight might, if there are sufficient protests, be condemned as “excessive force.” But what about when police do follow all rules and regulations? When they evict a family from their home, for example — is that not violence? What about a store preventing hungry people from getting food? What about a government allowing 100,000 people to die of a pandemic? Is that not violence?

The German communist poet Bertolt Brecht put it succinctly: “There are many ways to kill. They can stab a knife in your guts, take away your bread, decide not to cure you from an illness, put you in a miserable house, torture you to death with work, take you to war, etc. Only a few of these are forbidden in our state.”

In response to the protests, bourgeois politicians are speaking out against violence. But of course they do not mean the daily violence committed by the police. They are not referring to the massacres committed by the U.S. military or the economic havoc wreaked by American corporations. No, their main concern, almost inevitably, is property damage.

The U.S. Representative from Minneapolis, the progressive Democrat Ilhan Omar, for example tweeted out on Thursday: “We should and must protest peacefully. But let us end the cycle of violence now.” Atlanta’s Democratic Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms said: “This is not in the spirit of Martin Luther King Jr.”

But what was the spirit of Martin Luther King Jr.? He was not a socialist, but he understood that oppressed people must stand up to their oppression. For this, he was condemned by the powers that be for his supposed “violence.” On April 12, 1963, a group of eight clergymen called on King to cancel planned demonstrations for civil rights in Alabama. They called demonstrations “unwise and untimely” because they  “incite to hatred and violence, however technically peaceful those actions may be.” They denounced the mobilizations as “extreme measures” and proposed that Black people should “peacefully obey” while relying on courts.

King, of course, did not follow this advice. He defended riots as “the language of the unheard” and went on to denounce the U.S. government’s horrific violence in Vietnam. It was only after his murder that King was transformed into a harmless icon — an angelic figure who supposedly preached nothing but passive resistance

Progressive Democrats like Omar are not calling for peace — they are calling on people to peacefully obey the system that is murdering them. Omar wants the U.S. federal government to investigate police murders. Yet decades of police “reforms” have only shown that this institution cannot be reformed. The Minneapolis Police Department is headed by a Black cop who once sued the department over its racist practices. And yet: the capitalist police, even with the most enlightened leadership, can have no other function than protecting capitalist property. This means oppressing the poorest sectors of the working class, especially Black people.

As socialists, we do condemn violence — we condemn the violence that the capitalist system commits against billions of people every day. We do not condemn it when working-class and poor people begin to defend themselves against the system’s violence.

A riot serves to get the attention of the ruling class. It might even force them to make concessions. But a riot cannot end the system of oppression and exploitation. For that, we need to combine the rage on the streets of Minneapolis with socialist organization. Democratic Party politicians (even the ones that call themselves “socialists”) will always call on people to accept the institutions that oppress them. Real socialists, in contrast, want to build up organizations that are independent of the ruling class, their state, and all their parties.

A tiny minority of capitalists exploits the labor of the huge majority of people. In order to maintain their rule, they maintain an enormous repressive apparatus, including police, jails, armies, judges, etc. — that is their state. The capitalists are driving our entire civilization to a catastrophe. But they will never relinquish power voluntarily. Throughout history, no ruling class has ever given up without being toppled. As Karl Marx wrote, “Violence is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one.” This is why the working class needs to confront the capitalists’ bodies of armed men.

When working people set fire to a police station, the capitalists’ media will call this “violence” — but it is nothing more than self-defense against the daily violence perpetrated by capitalism. We must get rid of the capitalists’ state, and replace it with a society run by working people themselves. That is the essence of socialist revolution. And the fires on the streets of Minneapolis show that the deepening crisis of capitalism is pushing U.S. society just a little bit closer to that end.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the Limits of Neoliberal Feminism

[Photo credit: Danita Delimont Photography/Newscom]

By Matthew John

Republished from dialogue & discourse.

On September 18, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died from complications related to pancreatic cancer. She was 87 years old and was surrounded by loved ones at the time of her death. Thousands attended a vigil outside the Supreme Court building and innumerable additional events took place in her honor throughout the country. Ginsburg was the second woman to serve on the Supreme Court and became known as a feminist icon and a pioneering advocate for women’s rights due to her dissenting opinions in cases like Gonzales v. Carhart, Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., and Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores. An email I received from Black Lives Matter Global Network the following day concisely encapsulated public sentiment:

“Last night, we lost a champion in the fight for justice and gender equality: U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Justice Ginsburg was a giant in the fight for equality and civil rights — she embodied everything that our movement stands for. We stand on the accomplishments of her life’s work that have continued to amplify the need to protect and expand equal rights for women and underserved communities. And we celebrate women having a voice in the workforce while also having the ability to make decisions for their own health and wellbeing because of the work of Justice Ginsburg.”

In the wake of this national tragedy, Ginsburg’s life and legacy took center stage in political discourse and rampant speculation ensued regarding how this event might influence the nation’s future. Democratic campaign contributions skyrocketed and Republican leaders began calculating and scheming to fill the vacant court seat. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that Ginsburg would be the first woman to lie in repose at the Supreme Court and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced that the state would erect a statue in her honor. Politicians and pundits memorialized the fallen titan, who had become a cultural icon known fondly by the moniker “Notorious R.B.G”, while others found inspiration in idiosyncratic elements of Ginsburg’s persona.

As is the case with other beloved American heroes, the national discourse surrounding the death of Ginsburg included every detail imaginable other than her cumulative record in public service. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court tenure of Ruth Bader Ginsburg encompassed more than just pussyhats and rainbows. As with any prominent figure, we must account for the “problematic” aspects of Ginsburg’s legacy as well. These include her disparaging statement regarding Colin Kaepernick’s racial justice efforts, her positive statement regarding former colleague Brett Kavanaugh (who was credibly accused of rape), her designation of flagrant reactionary Antonin Scalia as her “best buddy”, and her final case on SCOTUS, in which she agreed with the decision to fast-track President Trump’s deportations. In terms of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s comprehensive legacy on the Supreme Court, the well-known, progressive dissenting opinions are dwarfed by her extensive résumé of anti-indigenous, anti-worker, pro-cop, and “tough on crime” decisions. (Unless otherwise noted, the following bullet points are quoted or nearly quoted from this Current Affairs article, which I’d recommend reading for more details and context.) For instance:

• In Heien v. North Carolina, the court held that the police may justifiably pull over cars if they believe they are violating the law even if the police are misunderstanding the law, so long as the mistake was reasonable.

• In Taylor v. Barkes, the Court held that the family of a suicidal man who was jailed and then killed himself could not sue the jail for failing to implement anti-suicide measures.

• In Plumhoff v. Rickard, the court held that the family of two men could not sue the police after they had shot and killed them for fleeing a police stop.

• In Samson v. California, the Court decided the issue of whether police could conduct warrantless searches of parolees merely because they were on parole. Instead of joining the liberal dissenters, Ginsburg signed onto Clarence Thomas’s majority opinion in favor of the police.

• In Kansas v. Carr, the Kansas Supreme Court had overturned a pair of death sentences, on the grounds that the defendants’ Eighth Amendment rights had been violated in the instructions given to the jury. SCOTUS informed Kansas that it had made a mistake; nobody’s Eighth Amendment rights had been violated, thus the defendants ought to have continued unimpeded along the path toward execution. The Court’s decision was 8–1, the lone dissenter being Sonia Sotomayor. Ginsburg put her name on Justice Scalia’s majority opinion instead.

• In Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation, the court ruled against the Oneida Tribe over a dispute regarding its territorial claim. Ginsburg’s majority opinion stated, “We hold that the tribe cannot unilaterally revive its ancient sovereignty, in whole or in part, over the parcels at issue.” Ginsburg referenced the Eurocentric, racist, and colonialist “Doctrine of Discovery” in her comments. (Source)

• In Salazar v. Ramah Navajo Chapter, Ginsburg dissented, disagreeing with the ruling that that the United States government, when it enters into a contract with a Native American tribe for services, must pay contracts in full, even if Congress has not appropriated enough money to pay all tribal contractors. (Source)

• In Kiowa Tribe v. Manufacturing Technologies, Ginsburg once again dissented, opposing the ruling, which stated that the Kiowa Tribe was entitled to sovereign immunity from contract lawsuits, whether made on or off reservation, or involving governmental or commercial activities. (Source)

• In Inyo County v. Paiute-Shoshone Indians, the Bishop Paiute Tribe of California asserted that their tribe’s status as a sovereign nation made them immune to state processes under federal law and asserted that the state authorized the seizure of tribal records. Ginsburg joined the majority in dismissing the tribe’s complaint. (Source)

• In Alaska v. Native Village of Venetie Tribal Government, the court unanimously ruled against a tribal council that wanted to collect a tax from non-tribal members doing business on tribal lands. The Court claimed the land (which was owned by the tribe) was not subject to the tribal tax because it was not part of a Native American reservation. (Source)

• In C & L Enterprises, Inc. v. Citizen Band, Potawatomi Indian Tribe of Oklahoma, the court held that the tribe waived its sovereign immunity when it agreed to a contract containing an arbitration agreement. (Source)

• In Navajo Nation v. United States Forest Service, the court ruled against the Navajo Nation, who have consistently protested the encroachment of a ski resort on Navajo territory (San Francisco Peaks). In short, the decision upheld the Ninth Circuit Court’s ruling that the use of recycled sewage water was not a “substantial burden” on the religious freedom of American Indians. (Source)

• In Integrity Staffing Solutions, Inc. v. Busk, the court ruled that workers didn’t deserve paid compensation for being required to watch theft security screenings. (Source)

• In Brogan v. United States, the court ruled that the Fifth Amendment does not protect the right of those being questioned by law enforcement officials to deny wrongdoing falsely. (Source)

• In Chadrin Lee Mullenix v. Beatrice Luna, Ginsburg sided with the majority opinion which granted immunity to a police officer who unnecessarily shot and killed a suspect. (Source)

• In Bush v. Gore, the contentious decision that decided the 2000 presidential election, Ginsburg’s draft of her dissent had a footnote alluding to the possible suppression of Black voters in Florida. Justice Scalia purportedly responded to this draft by flying into a rage, telling Ginsburg that she was using “Al Sharpton tactics.” Ginsburg removed the footnote before it saw the light of day.

• In Davis v. Ayala, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote a lengthy concurrence condemning solitary confinement. Most notably, Justice Kennedy made no reference to any particularly vulnerable group, instead suggesting that long-term solitary confinement may be unconstitutional for all. Justice Ginsburg did not join the concurrence.

• Scott v. Harris involved a motorist who was paralyzed after a police officer ran his car off the road during a high-speed chase. Ginsburg concurred with the majority that deadly force was justified. (Source)

• In Rumsfeld v. Forum for Academic & Institutional Rights, Inc., Ginsburg approved allowing the government to threaten the withdrawal of funding in order to punish universities that ban discriminatory job recruitment by the military.

The list goes on. Of course, no one is perfect. Everyone has flaws. However, when evaluating any prominent or powerful individual, it seems the proper outlook is to weigh the harm inflicted by their actions against the positive results of their actions. For instance, Abraham Lincoln’s passage of the Emancipation Proclamation helped end the most prominent form of slavery in the U.S. (but not all forms), and because of this, many Americans are willing to forgive his racist views and perceive his overall contributions positively. By this measure, it is dubious at best to suggest that Ginsburg’s full record contains more — simply put — good than bad. That is to say, it seems that her career as a whole caused more harm to vulnerable people than any positive impact her rare instances of dissent may have had.

The simple aforementioned formulation — cumulative good vs. cumulative harm — may be a bit naïve when compared to the manner in which most citizens evaluate public figures and the process by which these figures are often lionized despite their substantial misdeeds. The cult of personality surrounding Ruth Bader Ginsburg is certainly a notable phenomenon that can be explored in sociological and cultural contexts, but the whitewashing of her record is a crucial aspect of this process that is worth analyzing.

This unfettered, liberal adulation of Ginsburg can stem from a conscious attempt to conceal the unsavory aspects of her record, from plain ignorance, or from a third, more insidious place: acquiescence to the brutality that is “baked into” the American political system and our nation’s history more broadly. This is a system founded by white supremacists who enslaved and tortured Africans on stolen, blood-soaked land — a system by and for economic elites. In this sense, Ginsburg’s consistently anti-indigenous voting record might be perceived by liberals as a “necessary evil” — a simple extension of the settler-colonial mentality and the vestiges of “Manifest Destiny.” The same critique applies to her conservative rulings that harmed immigrants, people of color, and the working class in general.

Beyond Neoliberal Feminism

It is usually the case that about half of any large population is comprised of women. When speaking of feminism, we often forget that universal issues are also women’s issues; healthcare, housing, and wages, for instance. Under neoliberalism, exploitation, austerity, vicious imperialism, and state violence are systemic aspects of daily reality. We must remember that this includes the experiences of women, and often to a greater degree. Why don’t we take into account the indigenous women, or the immigrant women, or the women experiencing poverty when discussing Ginsburg’s record or government policy more broadly?

Let’s break this down even further. Recognizing these demographics, is it “feminist” to continue displacing and attacking the sovereignty of native women? Is it “feminist” to rule in favor of employers rather than female employees? Is it “feminist” to deport women back to countries we destroyed with sanctions and military coups? Just as the lofty, foundational American ideals were designed by and for white, property-owning men, this elite notion of feminism only applies to certain groups of women under certain circumstances. This superficial feminism is a far cry from a Marxist feminism that seeks a more holistic approach to liberation and empowerment. As Martha E. Gimenez wrote:

“As long as women’s oppression and other oppressions occupy the center of feminist theory and politics, while class remains at the margins, feminism will unwittingly contribute to keeping class outside the collective consciousness and the boundaries of acceptable political discourse. To become a unifying, rather than a divisive, political and ideological force, twenty-first-century Marxist feminism needs to become an overtly working-class women’s feminism, in solidarity with the working class as a whole, supporting the struggles of all workers, women and men, and gender-variant people of all races, national origins, citizenship statuses, and so on, thus spearheading the process toward working-class organization and the badly needed return to class in U.S. politics.”

American Institutions and Systemic Violence

Deifying political figures like Ginsburg not only whitewashes their crimes against marginalized people — it also further legitimizes a fundamentally elitist, unjust, and undemocratic political system. As political scientist Rob Hunter wrote, “The Supreme Court is a bulwark of reaction. Its brief is to maintain the institutional boundaries drawn by the Constitution, a document conceived out of fear of majoritarian democracy and written by members of a ruling class acting in brazen self-interest.”

A sober analysis of Ginsburg’s rulings clarifies that America has never strayed from its roots as a genocidal, hyper-capitalist, white supremacist, patriarchal settler-colonial project with economic elites running the government and blue-clad henchmen violently enforcing this agenda through state-sanctioned terror. Some wonder if it has always been this way. Has it gotten better? Worse? Has slavery just been repackaged? What’s clear is that the advent of neoliberalism has heightened the perilous and precarious conditions of this crumbling society while technology has allowed strangers to share the visceral horrors contained therein.

It is time to stop normalizing this barbarism. Performative identity politics and the ubiquitous brand of white, neoliberal feminism are façades used to conceal the profound violence of a dying empire and to paint the “moderate” wing of capital as somehow more humane and enlightened. A society founded on land theft, on commodifying basic human needs, on exploiting, enslaving, and brutalizing the vulnerable, is a society that should not be celebrated. And it is a society where the realization of true feminism has — thus far — proven to be out of reach. As Thomas Sankara once said, “The status of women will improve only with the elimination of the system that exploits them.”

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.

Unifying Organized Labor and Organized Religion

By Werner Lange

A union of progressive forces, one with the potential to transform America as well as defeat the Trump regime, announced its long overdue arrival in late summer of this turbulent years. On the 57th anniversary of the barbaric murder of four African-American girls by white supremacists at a Baptist church in Alabama, faith and labor leaders joined together in a nationwide AFL-CIO broadcast, as expressed in its title, “to forge partnership for social, racial and economic justice.” That is, of course. a vitally important goal, and all the expected calls for massive voter mobilization along with condemnations of institutionalized racism were invoked passionately, but the question remains as to why organized labor and organized religion in America have not yet forged an effective and enduring alliance to overcome the myriad institutionalized evils and social sins plaguing our deeply troubled society for so long.

The very mention of social sin provides part of the answer. For most religious folks, even liberal ones, sin is something committed by individuals, not institutions. It took hundreds of years for a paradigm shift from the seven deadly sins[1] of the medieval church to the seven deadly social sins[2] of a modern-day Gandhi to be announced, but most religious folks did to get the memo or make the shift.  Similarly, labor, especially in its non-union form, typically restricts its thought and action to improved working conditions rather than a radical transformation of society. Both worship and work, still mostly locked into a cave of individuality and false consciousness, deny themselves their natural unity and potential power for radical social transformation.

The September 15th broadcast may, however, mark the dawn of a new day, one that can finally unleash a united front of organized labor and religion potent enough to soundly defeat the Trump regime in November but, more importantly, forge an enduring social base for justice “in itself” to an enlightened one “for itself” so that the looming threat of fascism never again rears its ugly head in America. For that to happen it is necessary for both organized labor and organized religion, especially Christianity, to fully recognize and objectively embrace the inherent commonality of their social theory and praxis. Similarly, it is necessary for the Left to overcome long-standing prejudices against religion as a progressive force, potentially and materially.

Given the utterly obnoxious extent to which right-wing evangelicals have hijacked Christianity and operationally allied it with fascist forces, it is understandable that many on America’s Left view religion not only as the opiate of the masses, but as  a deadly toxin threatening us all. However, authentic Christianity from its very origin has manifested itself to be a potent stimulant of progressive social movements, a fact recognized by none other than Frederick Engels.[3] In modern times the revolutionary potential inherent in authentic Christianity emerged as the Social Gospel and Liberation Theology.

In his classic work, A Theology for the Social Gospel, Walter Rauschenbusch succinctly summarizes the nature of the social order based upon Christian ideals:

“Our chief interest in any millennium is the desire for a social order in which the worth and freedom of every least human being will be honored and protected; in which the brotherhood of man will be expressed in the common possession of economic resources of society; and in which the spiritual good of humanity will be set high above the private profit interests of materialistic groups. We hope for such an order for humanity as we hope for heaven for ourselves”[4]. Jon Sobrino, one of the founders of Liberation Theology, echoes that call with a more theological focus on the resurrection of a crucified people: “Jesus’ resurrection, understood as the first fruits of the universal resurrection, would sure be an apt candidate for the function of the ultimate symbol. It is absolute fulfillment and salvation, and thereby absolute liberation - liberation from death. It is the object and pledge of a radical hope, a death-transcending , death-defeating hope…Thus, we can say that the resurrection of Christ is not only a revelation of the power of God over nothingness, but a ‘partial’ partisan hope -although one that can thereupon be universalized - for the victims of this world, the crucified (like Jesus) of history”[5]. Another Liberation theologian, Elsa Tamez, explains that “when the element of hope is present, even though oppression may be at its most intense, there is the expectation of the emergence of a new humanity. Yahweh is revealed as hope which makes possible the struggle for a new order of things.”[6]

That emergent expectation of a new humanity and new order to things is embraced with the current anticipated liberation from the Trump regime, so much so that it has become a material force. For as a young Marx insightfully articulated, “ruling ideas are nothing more that the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships”, and once ideas grip the mind of the masses they become material forces[7]. Likewise, Engels expressed a favorable view of early Christianity with its partisanship towards the poor (Liberation Theologians would later call it a “preferential option for the poor”), and called attention  to the commonality of early Christianity and modern labor movements.[8]  Furthermore, Engels notably highlighted “the essential feature that the new religious philosophy [i.e. Christianity] reverses the previous world order, seeks its disciples among the poor, the miserable, the slaves and the rejected and despises the rich, the powerful and the privileged”[9]. And in one of his last publications, Engels makes a striking comparison between the historical experience of early Christians with the labor movements of his day seeking socialism:

“The history of early Christianity has notable points of resemblance with the modern working class movement. Like the latter, Christianity was originally a movement of oppressed people: it first appeared as the religion of slaves and emancipated slaves, of poor people deprived of all rights, of peoples subjugated or dispersed by Rome. Both Christianity and the workers’ socialism preach forthcoming salvation in a life beyond, after death, in heaven; socialism places it in this world, in a transformation of society. Both are persecuted and baited, their adherents are despised and made the objects of exclusive laws, the former as enemies of the human race, the latter as enemies of the state, enemies of religion, the family, the social order. And in spite of all persecution, nay, even spurred on by it, they forge victoriously, irresistibly ahead.”[10]

In this context of an underlying unity of thought between labor and religion, it is very revealing that in his September 15th presentation, AFL-CIO Trumka explicitly cited a notable biblical passage from Matthew 25, one that is inscribed on the stained glass of the church in which the Black girls were murdered: “For whatever you did unto the least of these brothers [and sisters] of mine, you did unto me”. A full exegesis of this remarkable passage reveals that the Son of Man, the eschatological Christ, is incarnated today in the community of need, the poor and imprisoned and marginalized. That is a revolutionary revelation, one that, if ever fully known, has the potential to turn this moribund and immoral society of ours upside down, “so that the last shall be first and the first will be last” (Matthew 20:16), and help create the new social order prophetically announced by the mother of Jesus: “He has filled the hungry with good things but has sent the rich away empty” (Luke 1:53) . If and when that ever happens the 11th thesis by Marx on Feuerbach[11] will be as commonly known as John 3:16, the favorite verse of evangelicals often displayed these days on sheets behind football goalposts, a symbolic tribute to the success of a viable and vibrant unity of organized labor and organized religion determined to liberate the oppressed from false consciousness and false prophets.

Notes

[1] pride, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, sloth.

[2] politics without principle; wealth without work; pleasure without conscience; knowledge without character; commerce without morality; science without humanity; worship without sacrifice.

[3] “Christianity, like every great revolutionary movement, was made by the masses.” Frederick Engels from “The Book of Revelation” in “Marx and Engels on Religion”, Progress Publishers, 1957, p. 184.

[4] “A Theology for the Social Gospel” by Walter Rauschenbusch,  Westminster John Knox Press, 1997, p. 224.

[5] “Central Position of the Reign of God in Liberation Theology” by Jon Sobrino, in “Systematic Theology: Perspectives from Liberation Theology”, Orbis Books, 2001, p. 41.

[6]”Bible of the Oppressed” by Elsa Tamez, Orbis Books, 1982, p. 27.

[7] “German Ideology”, originally 1846; “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right”, originally 1844, in “Essential Writings of Karl Marx”, ed. by David Caute, Collier Books, 1967, p. 89-92.

[8] “On the History of Early Christianity” and “Bauer and Early Christianity”, orig. 1885, 1882, cited by Herbert Aptheker in “From Hope to Liberation” Towards a New Marxist-Christian Dialogue”, ed. by Nicholas Piediscalzi, Fortress Press, 1974, p.31.

[9] “Bruno Bauer and Early Christianity” by Frederick Engels, in “Marx and Engels on Religion”, Progress Publishers, 1957, p. 175

[10] “On the History of Early Christianity” by Frederick Engels, originally 1884, in “Marx and Engels on Religion”, Progress Publishers, 1957, p. 281.

[11] “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”

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.