As the Global Hegemon Collapses, Can Private Property Be Far Behind?

[PHOTO: Al Drago/Getty]

By Steven Miller

Tuesday’s Presidential debate showed the world how the politics of collapse are determining the election of the next President of the US. It was reminiscent of the Roman Senate when the Goths sacked Rome in 410 AD. Senators gathered in the Forum, protected by the Praetorian Guards. Suddenly one Senator would leap up and cry, “I propose a law making sacking the city illegal.” Everyone voted and the resolution passed unanimously.

The world was watching Tuesday and was shocked at how low the politics have sunk in the US.

There are actually real issues these days — COVID, systemic economic collapse, institutional racism, rampant police murder. But instead we saw the leadership of the most powerful country in the world, the global hegemon for the last 70 years, collapsing in real time right there on television. The candidates could not have an intelligent discussion of the tremendous issues that face the country. No vision, no ideas, no dialogue, no programmatic solutions. The Democrats, of course, agree with Trump on 80% of the issues and therefore dare not make programmatic attacks. The debate proved nothing more than the old adage that when you lay down in the gutter, you do not wind up smelling like a rose.

Meanwhile the organs of the State are fighting themselves. This is characteristic of an objectively revolutionary situation. The FBI openly counters and reports to the American people to disprove the President. The President constantly usurps authority he does not legally have, including creating his own private police force aided and abetted by the most privatized elements of ICE and Homeland Security. The CDC, the Post Office and the Justice Department, every organ of the State, are politicized and coerced into being part of Trump’s election campaign.

The Senate and the House are in stalemate and cannot figure out how to help the American people now that 50 million are unemployed, have lost their healthcare, and are facing a looming Rent Apocalypse. Paralysis is another characteristic of an objectively revolutionary situation. The Republicans are risking losing the Senate as they try to jam through a new Supreme Court Justice before the election. People are beginning to see that these “honored institutions of democracy” are far from neutral.

Twenty-six million people hit the streets in righteous wrath over the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and so many others. Their demands crystalized around defunding or abolishing the police, which acts like an occupying army in a country that treats non-violent civilians with the tactics of the War of Terror, while white supremist vigilante gangs stalk them in the dark.

The institutions of the US State were forged in slavery and infused with structural racism. One of these, the Electoral College, was established to prevent the popular vote from determining the President. It will begin to tear itself apart after election day on November 3. No one knows whether or how the institutions of government will hold up in the coming months before a President is inaugurated on January 20… or after.

A major indicator of how things are going will be the actions of the corporate media industrial complex, perhaps the most sophisticated thought-control apparatus ever devised. These corporations have given Trump billions of dollars of free advertising, and give credence to his slightest whim. They now work in tandem with social media, which openly operates with malign intent to confuse the situation even more. It was therefore significant that one day before the debate, the New York Times, released information about Trump’s taxes that reveal he doesn’t pay any.

Property Depreciation as a Legal Invention

Now the political exposures are beginning to enter the sacred zone of private property, an issue the capitalist class prefers to keep in the dark. The very State, legal system and tax code that is coming under public scrutiny is designed to give uber privileges to private property. This is what the Trump crime family exploits, as does every corporation in America.

Tax laws allow tangible private property, used for business, to be depreciated. Personal property, like a home, cannot be depreciated, but a landlord can depreciate rental property because the theory is that tangible property is “used-up” over time, so the property owner can “depreciate” it.

But depreciation is simply a legal figment. How do we know? When an owner sells business property, the depreciation starts all over again from the top! And anyone who is forced to rent knows quite well that the value of property appreciates and gets more expensive over time. It doesn’t depreciate at all.

Then the property owner gets to deduct the cost of maintaining the property, so s/he gets a double dip. And since depreciation is a business expense, it is a deduction from business income. The law allows the owner to get cash generated in the current year without paying any tax on an amount of income equal to the amount of depreciation.

The legal scam then is elaborated. Trump (and every corporation) borrows money to purchase property, like a golf course, say for $100 million. They take the depreciation of course. Then they get an appraisal of the property that claims the property is actually worth $300 million. The appraisal, say, is three times what it should be, but the inflated appraisal can be used to provide collateral for additional loans.

In other words, the happy capitalist buys property with other peoples’ money, gets paid in tax breaks, ie public money, to depreciate it, and then falsely appreciates the value, to borrow more money to buy more property, etc etc. What a deal!

Inanimate private property in itself has these rights, not people. They are not the rights of the owner, because if the owner sells the property, they no longer get the privilege of depreciating it. So private property is a legal entity that has far more rights than human beings, just because the law says so. OMG – if ordinary citizens can challenge a system of legal institutions that are infused with systemic racism, how far can they go? That is part of the transformative power and the danger to the capitalists of this moment.

Alone in the world in its COVID response, the US put private property in control of the emergency. America is learning the hard way that there are issues that absolutely need a federal government to take control, propose a single strategy and coordinate resources. This is something that private property can never do.

Extractive Capitalism

Since the capitalist system collapsed in 2008, it has been sustained on life support by public money. US corporations, especially the financial sector, have received $25 trillion to $39 trillion in direct payments (David Sirota, Jacobin, “We've Always Had the Money for Medicare for All - We've Just Given It to Corporations Instead”, 18 June 2020). Capitalists got to onshore $23 trillion of profit two years ago. Add in direct subsidies through the military budget of $1+ trillion a year and massive billion-dollar subsidies to the petroleum and pharmaceutical industries.

Yet the economy collapsed after the advent of the virus in one week, the biggest collapse in history. Add in the actions of a criminal President and suddenly the wheels are coming off the bus. Or are they?

Is it really true that the most powerful capitalist class in history, with an unsurpassed military and three centuries of experience in maintaining its rule both legally and illegally, is so inept that they can do nothing about an unpredictable leader that destabilizes everything?

The government is clearly the last profit center left in capitalism. Just as with depreciation, the actions of government alone can create the legalities that create markets for private property. Hence the battles within the government and the State apparatus. The various capitalist gangs do not have real strategic differences, but they certainly differ tactically on whether to maintain bourgeois democracy to achieve their goals.

Corporations merged with the government long ago; now they are rapidly merging with the State, as the provision of police services are increasingly under the control corporations. Since 2003, the Department of Homeland Security has been spending billions a year to affect this change. Private property is unified in the vision of disaster capitalism: take advantage of the situation to re-organize society to augment private profits. They are not moving slowly. They are re-creating the economy as an extractive industry.

Trump’s Secretary of the Treasury, Steve Mnuchin, for example, was instrumental in creating the “rentership society”. After 2008, financiers understood that there could never be broad home ownership again in the United States. So they evicted millions from their homes, while graciously letting some stay as long as they paid rent, a sum that was dramatically higher than what they paid before. These policies drove millions out of the communities they had lived in for decades even as large amounts of new housing was built. But that housing was built to be empty, to be speculative property that supported hedge funds and not people. That is an extractive industry that sucks wealth out of communities, just as petroleum corporations extract wealth out of the ground.

US capitalism has big plans to transform other branches of the economy into an extractive machine. Constant privatization of every aspect of life is the method. Serious observers of England’s Brexit insanity recognize that when the dust settles, US-style privatized health care intends to invade and try to take over. Trump’s new Supreme Court nominee will likely vote to end Obamacare, and eliminate health care for another 25 million people or so. What can possibly arise to fill the void? What can allow US corporations to further invade public European health care systems?

Maybe it’s the new Apple watch?

Apple released the latest device during all this turmoil, and proudly stated that it was after long discussions with their “partners” in the insurance industry. Why? Could it be because the insurance industry is the main organizer of health care in the US? What is the connection here?

Haim Israel is a strategic director of Bank of America and head of the report, “The World After Covid Primer.” (www.bofaml.com/.../the_world_after_covid.pdf)

The report notes that 1/3 of the world’s data resides in the healthcare industry. It notes that value of data to the economy will increase from 30l billion euros in 2018 to 829 billion euros in 2025.

“We found that while the data generated is rising exponentially, just 1% of it is analysed or monetised effectively. The post Covid era could benefit technology companies who can analyse and monetise such data, but adoption is likely to vary by region owing to privacy concerns and regulations.”

And..  

“Big Government: a new social contract -- Growing surveillance, inequality and the current inadequacy of some healthcare systems versus others highlighted by the current crisis will act as a catalyst for change in politics, furthering populism trends and increasing the risk of social unrest. Covid-19 has handed governments a new social mandate to protect their citizens. Governments will exert greater influence on businesses with shareholder supremacy potentially eroding in favour of stakeholders. Further, this crisis has made the technology industry useful – if not vital – for implementing government power. We think this is unlikely to reverse…”

How far can this go? Vandanta Shiva reports in her article, “The Pandemic Is a Consequence of the War Against Life” (September 21, 2020):

On March 26, 2020, at a peak of the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic and in the midst of the lock­down, Microsoft was grant­ed a patent by the World Intel­lec­tu­al Prop­er­ty Orga­ni­za­tion (WIPO). Patent WO 060606 declares that ​“Human Body Activ­i­ty asso­ci­at­ed with a task pro­vid­ed to a user may be used in a min­ing process of a cryp­tocur­ren­cy system….”

The ​“body activ­i­ty” that Microsoft wants to mine includes radi­a­tion emit­ted from the human body, brain activ­i­ties, body flu­id flow, blood flow, organ activ­i­ty, body move­ment such as eye move­ment, facial move­ment, and mus­cle move­ment, as well as any oth­er activ­i­ties that can be sensed and rep­re­sent­ed by images, waves, sig­nals, texts, num­bers, degrees, or any oth­er infor­ma­tion or data.

Intellectual property rights, which is what a patent is, are just as much a creation of government as depreciation. It is another form of privilege for private property.

This step turns health care based on bio-data, especially privatized health care, into an extractive industry. We see this approach as well as corporations racing to develop vaccines. Corporations have long developed vaccines for pets and farm animals, but have resisted developing human vaccines, since they do not produce much profit as compared to “treatments” that you pay for across your lifetime.

One reason that government becomes the market of last resort is because economic production is increasingly done by computer systems and robots. As machines replace human labor, that labor cannot be exploited, which is the source of capitalist private profit. But maybe monetized data and data devices allow humans to be exploited for their information, not dissimilar to the exploitation of animals.

So — given these very real developments, with future potential for private profit, is it really likely that the financial industry, which is the major shot-caller in capitalist planning, going to put up with an incompetent, narcissistic, erratic fool for a US President? These boys have run the world since the advent of the Marshall Plan that re-built Europe after World War II. Are they going to give up now? Without even hardly trying?

Unlikely.

The battles we are living through today are a prelude to the battles that will ensue, regardless of who wins the election. The capitalist agenda will remain on the table. They fully intend to culminate their strategy of total privatization. But the story is not over, and the man behind the curtain is private property. The US hegemon is truly fumbling. The rising global popular movement to hold government accountable for public safety and the basic necessities of life in a time of collapse may be diverted for a bit, but it cannot be stopped.

All it requires is class consciousness and abandoning the notions that the status quo will maintain, that incrementalism and piecemeal solutions work and that we can reform our way into a world that puts healing at the top of the agenda.

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.

Remembering Guaidó’s Last Stand

[Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty Images]

By Matthew Dolezal

Originally published at the author’s blog.

The year of our Lord 2020 will likely go down in the history books as one of the most existentially ridiculous years ever. It began with President Donald Trump belligerently assassinating Iranian General Qassem Soleimani, who was on a peace mission in Iraq. Unlike many controversial Middle Eastern figures, Solemani was universally beloved in Iran and played a leading role in the defeat of ISIS in Syria. Shortly thereafter, Chinese officials isolated a novel coronavirus strain noticing a strange influenza-like ailment afflicting residents in and around the city of Wuhan weeks earlier. Needless to say, the coronavirus behind what is now referred to as Covid-19 has led to a massive global pandemic. On May 25, with said catastrophe in full effect, a white Minneapolis police officer lynched an unarmed, nonviolent black man named George Floyd, causing nationwide rebellions and calls to defund/abolish the institution of American policing. And that’s just the tip of the quickly melting iceberg.

It has certainly been a hell of a year. But there’s a special little story that may have barely registered on the radar of all but the most avid connoisseurs of current events. During the first week of May, a ragtag gang of mercenaries launched from Colombia and was quickly apprehended by Venezuelan forces and socialist fishermen after attempting to invade the neighboring country via the coastal La Guaira State and the peninsula of Chuao. In the wake of this misadventure, news broke that two of the approximately sixty combatants were in fact American citizens and former Green Berets Luke Denman and Airan Berry. This embarrassingly botched mission, coined “Operation Gideon”, was quickly revealed to be yet another coup attempt against democratically-elected Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and the Bolivarian government more broadly. A leaked contract described tactics that included captures, assassinations, drone strikes, and even death squads in order to “liberate” the oil-rich nation.

The lead planner behind the foiled operation was none other than Silvercorp CEO Jordan Goudreau. Gourdreau's Florida-based private security firm was contracted for $212.9 million, yet only offered the aforementioned mercenaries between $50,000 and $100,000 each for their life-threatening services. Silvercorp USA initially began with hopes of converting military veterans into school security personnel — theoretically to protect students from school shooters for a small subscription fee — but the scheme appears to have been shelved. Gourdreau, himself a U.S. Army veteran, teamed up with retired Venezuelan General Cliver Alcala, who had previously been involved in various coup plots, often with assistance from the right-wing Colombian government. This was supposed to be Silvercorp’s big break.

As journalist Lucas Koerner summarized, “Jordan Goudreau, 43, was responsible for training a contingent of 300 Venezuelan army deserters in Colombia, who were to penetrate Venezuela in a heavily armed caravan and seize the capital of Caracas within 96 hours.” These details and more had been laid out in the aforementioned contract, which, thankfully, also contained an equal opportunity employment clause, promising to be inclusive “across gender, ethnicity, age, disabilities and national origin…”

One of the most notable aspects of the contract, however, is the fact that it named Juan Guaidó as the operation’s “Commander in Chief.” Guaidó, who initially denied any involvement, is a disgraced Venezuelan politician who clumsily declared himself “interim president” of the Bolivarian republic early last year and has since become embroiled in a corruption scandal.

The political trajectory of Guaidó is fascinating in its own right. In 2007, after graduating from Andrés Bello Catholic University in Caracas, Guaidó moved to Washington, D.C. to study under neoliberal economist Luis Enrique Berrizbeitia at George Washington University. Later that year, he took part in anti-government rallies after the Venezuelan government declined to renew the license of Radio Caracas Televisión (RCTV) — a privately owned station that played a prominent role in the 2002 coup attempt against then-president Hugo Chávez (an event chronicled in a documentary entitled, "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised"). And thus began Guaidó’s tumultuous tenure in the realm of Venezuelan politics.

The young Guaidó continued taking part in anti-government demonstrations with “Generation 2007” youth activists, and, in 2009, helped establish the Popular Will Party with infamous right-wing political figure Leopoldo Lopez. During the subsequent years, Guaidó met with various regime change specialists and wealthy business owners, and even participated in the violent guarimbas in 2014, which aimed to destabilize and ultimately overthrow the government. The emerging political figure then proceeded to publicly whitewash the deadly tactics used by right-wing protesters, presenting himself as a polished and professional advocate for democracy.

Guaidó also participated in Venezuela’s National Assembly, spending many years as an alternate deputy, until the 2015 elections when he narrowly secured a seat on the governing body. The opposition-dominated National Assembly eventually selected Guaidó as its president — a position that is awarded on a rotating basis. This new development made Guaidó the perfect candidate for Washington’s regime change efforts. Despite still being unknown to 81% of Venezuelans, Guaidó declared himself “interim president” on January 22, 2019 with the full support of the Trump administration. What followed was a series of Western media misinformation campaigns, bungled coup attempts, and, after all else failed, a new wave of U.S. economic sanctions that killed an estimated 40,000 Venezuelans in just one year.

After losing his National Assembly seat in early January, 2020, Guaidó staged a childish scene in which he attempted to climb over the fence surrounding parliament. The floundering politician then faded from the spotlight until the recent failed incursion. Indeed, Operation Gideon — also referred to as “Stupid Bay of Pigs” — appears to have been a pathetic, last-ditch effort to install Guaidó as Venezuela’s president and implement a program of neoliberal “shock therapy”, primarily focused on privatizing the country's vast oil reserves.

Though appearing exotic on its surface, this quaint anecdote also fits into the “bigger picture” of 2020’s troubling zeitgeist. As part of its long-standing policy of violent imperialism throughout Latin America, the U.S. government funded the aforementioned 2002 coup attempt in Venezuela, hoping to oust popular president Hugo Chávez. Despite its consistent two-decade commitment to disrupting the progressive Bolivarian Revolution, the world’s only remaining empire has evidently failed miserably. This defeated regime change effort mirrors other recent U.S. foreign policy failures, such as that of the devastating Syrian proxy war. In keeping with its increasingly desperate imperial ambitions, the U.S. has now lashed out against China — its main competitor on the global stage and a nation that has aided Venezuela amid the aforementioned brutal sanctions. The epic downfall of Juan Guaidó is not only a tale of personal and professional shortcoming, but could also symbolize a decline in the neoliberal global order more broadly, with new possibilities on the horizon.

Conspiracy Theory vs. Socialist Logic

Originally published by Socialist Standard.

Conspiracy-theory, or conspiracism, has it that much of the world today is to be understood in terms of ‘conspiracy’ be it by scientists, extra-terrestrials, masons, or whoever.

Currently gaining credence among many is the idea that all accepted science is a conspiracy, for relativity theory and quantum physics are specialised subjects. Einstein is difficult to understand and the majority of us are not astrophysicists, or other types of scientist, but that is no reason to dismiss these theories.

Many in society seek solace in pseudoscience, and therefore in conspiracism, whereby they can feel in control over what they cannot understand. Conspiracism absolves you from having to undertake painstaking research where you are not willing to trust those who actually have expertise in a difficult subject. Conspiracism attracts people from an entire spectrum, eager to feel that they belong to something: right or left in their leanings, dependent on what they were before becoming conspiracist. The phenomenon appears to attract ‘truthers’ – those who know the ‘truth’ despite the facts. Some are avowedly Christian, others not. Some dally with other rehashed mythologies, interpreted to fit in with their modern conspiracism. Many are, in fact, as members of the working class, confused and vulnerable, and want to feel significant; which they feel modern scientific thinking cannot help them with.

It is tempting to draw some similarity in all of this to the declining years of the Roman Empire, so brilliantly shown in the film Agora, about the last days of the great Library of Alexandria. Science and learning were then the property of a privileged few, and this is largely how they are seen today by many attracted to conspiracism and ‘truthism’. Today we are bombarded, flooded, with ideas and theories via the internet, whilst actual reading has declined.  Some conspiracy theorists tend to deride books which contradict them, dismissing them as the propaganda of those ‘in on’ the ‘great conspiracy.’ Book-learning becomes associated with closeted academia and so is deemed irrelevant. So refutation of a conspiracist’s ideology from facts outlined in books is futile.

With many people feeling disenfranchised from intellectual life, as they are in fact disenfranchised economically (being born in the wage-slave class), old and new-style forms of fanaticism win converts. Conspiracism is an obstacle to socialist awareness. Vital to the spread of socialist awareness is the materialist conception of history and recognition of human scientific progress.

Marx knew this when he wrote welcoming and applauding the publication of Darwin’s The Origin of Species, recognising science as the necessary ally of socialism. Above all, the scientific study of history is vital and paramount, as history is an evolutionary process.

Capitalism is not a conspiracy. It is a system that evolved through social and economic processes, just as socialism will have done. Capitalism, and class societies as a whole, do by definition encourage ‘conspiratorial’ behaviour, but they are historically, not ‘conspiratorially’, produced.

Everything grows from an antecedent and does not appear out of the blue.

Conspiracy theory backs up the bourgeois myth of an evil human nature (‘Original Sin’ rehashed for the modern age). To paraphrase Karl Marx, the morality of a given age is the morality of its ruling class. The cut-throat values of the capitalist class have us believing in a human cut-throat nature in which everyone is a potential conspirator, a potential thief, a potential brigand. Thus an ideology of brigandage, sustained by the viciously competitive nature of capitalism, leads people to see their fellow beings as either real or potential brigands.

Conspiracism reduces everything to a school playground view wherein everything is viewed as the machinations of some cartoon-like gang independent of history. Those who attempt to spread conspiracy theory do a disservice to the cause of achieving a better world, by further confusing already confused workers and by giving ammunition to those who label socialists as cranks and claim capitalism to be the end of history.

We urge our fellow workers to face reality, embrace knowledge, and recognise for what it is the ridiculous zealotry known as conspiracy theory. Emancipation from the system of wage-slavery, poverty, prices and profits requires a grasp of social history and of social and natural realities.

Imperialist Propaganda and the New Cold War With China

PHOTO CREDIT: FOREIGN POLICY ILLUSTRATION/MADOKA IKEGAMI-POOL/GETTY IMAGES/DREW ANGERER/GETTY IMAGES

By Matthew Dolezal

Originally published at the author’s blog.

On January 24, a headline in the right-wing Washington Times read, “Coronavirus may have originated in a lab linked to China’s biowarfare program.” The claim was largely debunked and ignored. However, the story was then notably resuscitated by Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin in April. By the end of the piece, Rogin admitted, “We don’t know whether the novel coronavirus originated in the Wuhan lab.” Shortly thereafter, the claim spread to Fox News and other mainstream outlets. Soon enough, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and President Trump publicly promoted the unfounded conspiracy theory.

According to prominent sources within the scientific community, the virus in question almost certainly has natural origins. For instance, an article featured in the prestigious scientific journal Nature explained:

“Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus. […] Instead, we propose two scenarios that can plausibly explain the origin of SARS-CoV-2: (i) natural selection in an animal host before zoonotic transfer; and (ii) natural selection in humans following zoonotic transfer. We also discuss whether selection during passage could have given rise to SARS-CoV-2.”

Furthermore, The Lancet published a letter signed by 27 public health scientists from eight countries who “strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.” The letter continues by clarifying that “scientists from multiple countries have published and analyzed genomes of the causative agent, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), and they overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife, as have so many other emerging pathogens.”

In short, the sensational claim that the virus originated in a Chinese lab has absolutely no supporting evidence. This specific case of anti-China propaganda is simply fuel on the pre-existing fire of unfounded Western smears against this rising power in the East. For instance, in August of 2018, prominent Western news media outlets began claiming that the United Nations had compiled reports of Chinese government “internment camps” in which as many as one million ethnic Uyghur Muslims were being held. However, upon further inspection, the claim deteriorated. It turned out that the U.N. as a whole had made no such statement, and that the explosive assertion came from a single individual, Gay McDougall, who was the sole American member of the independent Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.

According to the Associated Press, McDougall “did not specify a source for that information in her remarks at the [U.N.] hearing.” Despite the complete absence of evidence for this serious charge, more propaganda subsequently surfaced from other dubious Western sources, including a U.S. government-funded “activist group” called the Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD). According to The Grayzone, “ the board of the organization is a Who’s Who of exiled Chinese anti-government activists.” The CHRD has even endorsed Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, a neoconservative who has expressed racist views toward Chinese people and supports colonialism.

During his recent trip to China, journalist Danny Haiphong didn’t see “internment camps” in Xinjiang Province. Haiphong further explained that “it is difficult to walk more than a mile without running into a mosque. Every street sign in the city is translated in both Mandarin and Uyghur languages. Security is more plentiful in Ürümqi than in Beijing or Xi’an, and for good reason. Most Westerners are unaware that Xinjiang Province is the site of numerous terror attacks that have taken the lives of hundreds of people.” Due to the ongoing threat of Islamist terrorism, Xinjiang “has set up vocational and training centers in accordance with the law to provide courses on Mandarin, laws, vocational skills and deradicalization programs for people influenced by religious extremism and terrorism.”

Nevertheless, relying heavily on unsubstantiated Western propaganda of the aforementioned variety, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act late last year. The bill, which includes additional economic sanctions, is part of a larger pattern of new Cold War-style escalations between the two powerful nations. With these tensions comes a surge in Sinophobic hate crimes buttressed by bipartisan, racist rhetoric from American politicians, replacing the hysterical Russophobia of yesteryear. As noted in the New York Times, this onslaught is “reminiscent of the kind faced by American Muslims, Arabs and South Asians in the United States after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.”

After its “breathtaking” response to the recent coronavirus outbreak, China has found itself further entrenched in a hybrid war with the American empire. As journalist Pepe Escobar explained, “For the first time since the start of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms in 1978, Beijing openly regards the U.S. as a threat…” It is certainly true that China is undermining America’s global hegemony by engaging in international solidarity efforts with nations that have historically been in the crosshairs of U.S. imperialism (Venezuela, Iran, Cuba, North Korea, etc.). Due to the evident domestic decline of American society, this ongoing cooperation between those consistently demonized, sanctioned, invaded, or otherwise targeted by the West could become a model for a multi-polar global future. 

On October 10, 1990, a shocking testimony was given to the Congressional Human Rights Caucus by a 15-year-old girl named Nayirah. The distraught teenager recounted an event she said she had witnessed as a volunteer at a Kuwaiti hospital after the Iraqi invasion earlier that year. “While I was there I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators and left the children to die on the cold floor. It was horrifying,” the girl proclaimed. Although it was partially used to justify the Gulf War, the story turned out to false, just like the narrative that was used to justify the subsequent 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. 

Iraq is not unique. Imperialist lies have also been used to justify American aggression in Libya, Syria, Venezuela, and countless other sovereign nations around the world. Even the justification for the Vietnam War turned out to be fabricated. Such falsehoods have allowed the American empire to violently ravage the globe for decades to protect its so-called economic interests. Now that “socialism with Chinese characteristics” is providing a viable alternative to the battle-scarred neoliberal capitalist model, the imperfect, yet successful economic power that lifted 800 million people out of extreme poverty is being maligned with spurious propaganda. Don’t believe the hype.

The Colonial Gaze in Overdrive: The Latest Rumors and Allegations About the DPRK

Photo: KIM WON-JIN / Contributor / Getty Images

By Derek R. Ford

After weeks of wild speculation about his health, which began as rumors that he was undergoing surgery and escalated into claims that he had in fact died, Chairman Kim Jong Un visually appeared in the media at a ribbon cutting ceremony for a new fertilizer plant. It was yet another case of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s (DPRK, or North Korea) magical ability to raise someone from the dead.

All of the think tank experts and media outlets are now struggling to confirm their initial theory by comparing the movement of Chairman Kim’s legs before his “disappearance” and during the ceremony and by ruminating on a “mysterious mark” on his wrist.

Lest the rumors die, on May 03 the South Korean military reported that four bullets fired from the north hit the wall of a South Korean guard post along the Demilitarized Zone. In response, troops in the south fired 20 warning shots.

A Joint Chiefs of Staff officer said the shots were unintentional, as conditions were foggy and the shots came when Korean People’s Army soldiers typically change shifts and check firearms. US Secretary of Defense Mike Pompeo agreed with the assessment. Given the highly sensitive nature of the situation, the DPRK hasn’t formally responded at this point, and there hasn’t actually been any evidence confirming that the shots came from the north, let alone from the Korean People’s Army.

Despite this, speculation abounds that it was intentional. The most quoted source is Choi Kang, vice president of the Asan Institute for Policy Studies, who told Reuters: “Yesterday, Kim was trying to show he is perfectly healthy, and today, Kim is trying to mute all kinds of speculation that he may not have full control over the military.”

Dr. Choi’s hypothesis might make sense if the DPRK’s military consisted of a few guys with guns. Maybe then it could be an assertion of control. But the country has an incredibly sophisticated military, and firing four rounds of ammunition isn’t much of a statement.

It might make sense if the DPRK had absolutely anything to gain from such an action. They don’t. In fact, such an action could only hurt them insofar as it is treated as a “provocative” action by the US. Whenever the DPRK does basically anything, from testing missiles to launching communications satellites, they’re quickly and routinely—and uniquely—condemned. This is an unjust situation, but one of which the North’s leadership is acutely aware. And now the United Nations Command is investigating to determine whether the shots violated the armistice agreement signed in 1953 to end—or pause—the US-led war against Korea.

It might make sense if the DPRK was looking to antagonize their fellow Koreans in the south. But that’s not the case. In April 2018, Chairman Kim and South Korean President Moon Jae-in signed the historic Panmunjom Declaration, the second point of which was to eliminate military tensions. Since then, the two states have made tremendous strides in doing so by removing landmines and dismantling guard posts. US war exercises have continued, although they have been significantly scaled back.

If you’re not visible, you don’t exist

More problematic with Choi’s assertion, however, one that accords with the rumors of Chairman Kim’s death, is the idea that Chairman Kim and the DPRK have something to “prove” to the West. The logic and force of the West’s colonial gaze is in full force here. Chairman Kim is injured or dead simply because he isn’t visible to the West, and the longer he isn’t visible the more likely it is he is dead. Now he’s “trying to show us” he has control of the military.

The colonialist framework holds that the colonized subject exists only insofar as they’re recognized by the colonizing power. This is the framework under which it’s logical for the colonizer to “discover” a land inhabited by people for centuries. After “discovery,” colonialism demands the constant visibility and transparency of the colonized. Any retreat from visibility into opacity is an affront to the colonial power. This explains the constant outrage from the West that the DPRK is “shrouded in secrecy” or a “hermit kingdom: because the West can’t have unfettered access, because they have to deal with assertions of national sovereignty, because they can’t send in weapons inspectors at the will.

The US is, for obvious reason, a significant factor in North Korea’s actions and policies. But as I heard Ri Ki Ho, representative of the DPRK’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations in NYC, say at the 2019 Global Peace Forum on Korea: “we’re not obsessed with the US.”

Ri was speaking in the context of the nuclear talks between the US and DPRK, saying that whatever the US did or didn’t do, the DPRK would continue along the path it set forward. It makes perfect sense, but only if we divorce ourselves from the colonialist gaze.

My own take is that the rumors and accusations are primarily intended to halt inter-Korean cooperation. Thus, it’s not a coincidence that the rumors of Chairman Kim’s health coincided with the April 15 legislative elections in South Korea. The ruling Democratic Party and its allied Platform Party (which might be absorbed within the DPK) won a resounding victory, capturing 180 out of the 300 available seats in the National Assembly. The far-right, represented by the Unified Future Party, performed worse than they had in 60 years.

The election was partly a referendum on the Moon government’s engagement with the DPRK, which has encountered obstacle after obstacle primarily in the form of US sanctions and the domination of the US over South Korea’s military. The result was a clear affirmation of engagement, peace, and reunification with their fellow Korean people in the north.

The rumors and accusations, then, can be seen as an attempt to disorient and disillusion the hopes of the South Korean people, and to present these aspirations within Korea as an impossibility to the people of the world. They have the added benefit of obstructing any remaining possibility of a rapprochement between the US and DPRK under the Trump administration. Further, depending on the UNC findings, the accusations of gunfire may result in still more sanctions or something even worse.

Regardless of whatever rumors are flying, whatever allegations are in the air, whatever demonization campaign is circulating, the refrain of everyone interested in peace and justice is the same: The Korean people—in the southern and northern parts of the peninsula and in the diaspora—have the rights to peace, liberation, and self-determination, and we will do whatever we can to help them realize those rights.

Derek R. Ford is an educator and organizer, whose latest book is Politics and Pedagogy in the “Post-Truth” Era (Bloomsbury, 2019).

Donald Trump Is Going To Win. Now What?

By J.E. Karla

If we have a scientific view of history we can make confident predictions about the world of politics. It was easy to predict that Bernie Sanders would lose, and even an unrivaled crisis of capitalism couldn’t save his “movement.” Here’s another safe bet: Donald Trump is almost certainly going to be re-elected in November. We know this the same way we know how the coronavirus spreads — with a principled observation of material conditions.

This is depressing, but knowing that Trump has a nearly unbeatable edge frees us up to work on something more useful than the same “lesser evil” strategy we’ve been duped into over and over again.

We are prone to getting duped because most political observers in the US are liberals with an idealist outlook as superstitious as a creationist or fortune teller. Many of them suspect the truth about Trump’s impending victory, but they think it’s because Fox News and other right wing media have somehow hypnotized “working class” voters into ignoring their true self-interest.

The truth is actually the complete opposite. Right wing ideology secures political unity among its subjects precisely because Donald Trump best serves their interests. Hannity, Limbaugh and the rest broadcast alibis for his supporters — highlighting the roles played by non-Trump actors in the coronavirus crisis, for example, a disaster caused by every part of the ruling class, including Trump. The alibis, however, are secondary to the material interests at play, and if Fox and their friends didn’t exist, some other voices would step in to justify reactionary rule.

The basic interests at hand are settler colonialism and white supremacy. The liberal system that the elections ratify actually invented the white middle class — small-scale white capitalists and landowners, managers, technicians, professionals, functionaries, and favored workers. Europe industrialized, destroyed its peasantry and found itself with more people than it could feed. Its ruling class armed this excess population, shipped them to the “New World” and empowered them to secure their existence by expropriating Native people and the enslaved. The resulting political surplus granted to even the poorest “white trash” was both the cheapest social program ever launched and a chief obstacle to any mass mobilization against the large bourgeoisie.

But falling rates of profit have eroded the surplus that made the order work, and the white middle class has been in big trouble since at least 2008. Middle-aged white men have experienced an unprecedented increase in mortality since then, driven by drug overdoses, alcoholism, and suicide. They got laid off from managerial positions or bankrupted during the last economic crisis and never got those jobs or businesses back. Where they didn’t swell the growing ranks of the homeless they landed in dead-end service-industry jobs, took up gig economy piecework, or ended up dependent on disability checks and the painkiller prescriptions that come with them.

Donald Trump’s appeal — Make America Great Again — has always been an unsubtle promise to restore that white supremacist premium. As soon as white voters bought into the plan, he had a nearly insurmountable advantage in the Electoral College — an institution explicitly designed to favor white supremacist parties. Only a nominee that swamps him in popular support could overcome this structural advantage.

Instead, the Democrats are going to nominate Joe Biden. It seems like a blunder on their part, but let’s take a materialist look at this decision too. Between tax cuts, canceled environmental protections, attacks on labor, and gutted social programs Donald Trump has done gangbusters for the bourgeoisie. They made trillions before the coronavirus struck, and they know that he’s the guy most likely to let them kill as many people as they need to for the stock market to get going again.

Most of the liberal class shares these interests; they too benefit from a Trump victory. That’s why they have only opposed him with conspiracy theories or West Wing-style bullshit about “America’s place in the world.” They even downplay the very real harms of his racist policies — they don’t want to stir up the people under attack, their class enemies. Fox News gives viewers a reason to stick with Trump, MSNBC gives viewers arguments they know won’t stick. Liberals don’t really mind if he’s in charge, he just embarrasses them.

The best irony of all: they ended up with the one nominee more embarrassing than Trump.

So the system is doing exactly what it’s designed to do, and its major players are acting like they’ve always acted. We can anticipate that it will keep rolling right along no matter how many doors we knock on or how many of us hold our noses and vote for the other rapist. Biden’s long history of reactionary corruption is the only source of any real uncertainty about November’s outcome, as maybe the ruling class will decide to switch horses — they are both going the same direction, after all.

One thing we do know for sure is that the bleeding won’t stop until we cauterize the wound. We can’t heal our disease until we cut the capitalism out of us once and for all. Anything else is superstition, and we now have experimental proof — again — that electoral politics is the worst kind of faith healing, at best.

Capitalist Disinformation: The Inherent Contradictions in Profit-Based "Journalism"

By Marcus Kahn

When you work as an employee, you do what your boss tells you to do. If you didn’t, you’d get fired. You occupy a specialized niche tied to the actual production process, while your boss manages multiple projects and employees from above. Unlike you, who will often only see a sliver of the larger priorities and direction of these projects as it pertains to you executing your function, your boss has access to a broader picture. Your boss’s boss (the owner) gets an even larger picture than that. 

As you move up the ladder priorities change. As an employee, your highest aspiration might be to fulfill your position to an admirable degree with the aim of acclaim and eventually promotion. Your boss might want to see their projects executed successfully and have an incident-free, productive staff. And the owner is concerned with the overall profitability of the company, aka their own pockets. Actions performed at your level and your boss’s level reflect the immediate goals of the individual in that specific role, as it relates to the larger priorities of the owner. And the owner can act purely in their own interests, though the pattern of profit-seeking is decently predictable. You on the other hand, only get to perform as well as you can in the role you’ve been designated, allowed to continue in this role so long as you contribute to the overall profitability of the company through your continued labor (*you’ll probably get paid the same amount no matter how much you produce). 

This is an obvious abstraction of common corporate business models, but the structure is essentially the same across the board. Employees take their directives from managers (an elite and highly stratified subset of employees), who take their orders from owners. The totalitarian, elite-oriented structure of large privately owned companies is either the world’s worst kept secret and everyone passively accepts it, or the best kept secret because elites have managed to subdue our awareness of its existence through various iterations of capitalist ideology. In either case, this structure is ubiquitous in the corporate world. If we apply these principles of hierarchy, domination, and control over production to media corporations, we would expect to find a similar elite-orientation in the behavior of employees (corporate journalists)  and consequently their products (news). 

Take every instance of ‘you’ in the first paragraph and swap it with ‘corporate journalists’, ‘boss’ with ‘editor’ and you have a good sense of the implicit structural pressures facing journalists in large media conglomerates. It’s easy to forget that these media giants are still corporations at their core, and not bastions of objectivity. While the journalists (employees) focus on crafting their story (product), they often have no sense of the larger objectives of their piece due to inadequate information and the ideological constraints on their perspective that likely qualified them for the job in the first place. The distance between the implicit (and perhaps explicit) directives of the executives to editors and the execution of an article in the newsroom and on the ground allows journalists to maintain a cognitive dissonance between the ethical standards and motivations they claim, and the journalistic bias they reproduce.

Though they are often sincere in their commitment to journalistic integrity, journalists’ claims of objectivity are irrelevant given their limited view of the larger corporate entity, and the journalist’s ultimate lack of control over content and direction. Media giants are profit-seeking entities directed by owners and governing boards concerned with the bottom line not only for their name-brand media outlet, but also for a litany of closely associated corporations. By virtue of their vertical command orientation, they will ultimately produce a media product and accompanying ideology that is designed to increase profitability for the owners rather than promote general welfare, in the same way a Big Mac is formulated with profit in mind rather than nutrition or consumer health.

The news we’re getting isn’t good for us, but corporate journalists continue to operate regardless of the dangerous contradiction between their self-image and the impact of their product.

Bernie and Bloomberg Lost the Same Way

By J.E. Karla

It is ironic that both Michael Bloomberg and the “democratic socialists” pushing for Bernie Sanders made the same basic mistake in their failed presidential campaigns. In both cases they made the error of believing that subjective forces were the primary factor in political change -- a voluntarist neglect of objective conditions which they could never overcome. This is a consequence of their shared idealism, the philosophical foundation of all petit-bourgeois politics.

For the Sanders socialists, led by activists in the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), their assumption was that grassroots mobilization tactics -- notably door-to-door canvassing -- would activate enough poor people, young people, and leftists to overwhelm the Democratic Party. They argued that a set of tactics expertly deployed would be enough to awaken a dormant objective force that could upend US politics.

They have instead falsified their own hypothesis, demonstrating that either no such force exists in the United States, or that it is not available to these political aims. Had they not blown off their own theoretical development they might have maintained a materialist analysis which would have kept them from wasting millions of dollars in donations and labor time in such a fruitless pursuit. 

They would have started with the premise that the primary objective factor in all historical change is the class struggle. From there they would have investigated the class character of the United States -- an imperialist settler state, the hegemonic power of global capitalism -- and recognized that the primary purpose of its political system is the continued suppression of colonized people inside and outside its borders. They could then have seen that there is not a single aspect of the elected machinery of the US state that is governed by simple majority rule -- that from the Iowa Caucuses to the Democratic National Convention to the Electoral College to the US Senate and gerrymandered House of Representatives, to unelected and lifetime-appointed judges, conservative minorities have the structural advantage over more progressive majorities. 

They would know that internal colonies within the US are the only domestic forces with an interest in fighting the system of value extraction that underwrites the ruling class, the middle class, and the labor aristocratic “working class.” They could then empirically verify that not only do large majorities of these colonized communities refuse to participate in the electoral system obviously rigged against them, but that there are centuries of well-established efforts to exclude them from the system -- mass incarceration, reduced polling places, privately-funded political campaigns which exclude candidates drawn from these communities, even “common sense” obstacles such as voter registration, exclusion of immigrants and youth from the electorate, and artificially-limited voting locations and periods. 

These communities also know that every time they do start to gather momentum towards mass enfranchisement their leaders are harrassed, intimidated, and killed by the very FBI liberals have learned to love in the era of Trump. Knocking on their doors and politely asking them to ignore all of this is actually insulting, exposing a glaring blind spot in the Sanders movement. 

It is true that objective historical forces created problems for the status quo, too. The dismantling of liberalism after the last crisis has left young people, in particular, declassed and open to social democracy. It promises to restore their former imperialist subsidy now being hoarded by the bourgeois elite. But that elite has a class fraction within it dedicated to cultural production, and this cultural production fraction has an allied element of the petit bourgeoisie -- the liberal political class, with the press at their vanguard. They objectively control the Democratic Party, and had Bernie kept winning, had moderate candidates kept splitting the vote, etc. some other tack would have been taken to deny Bernie the nomination -- they openly discussed many of them on cable news and on Op-Ed pages. 

There was never any chance that Bernie could win, and there isn’t any now. 

The silver lining comes from Bloomberg’s version of this error. Not only did Mike Bloomberg lose, which is wonderful in its own right, but his error stems from a failure to appreciate the bottom-line objective factor in politics: the masses make history. He believed that they were instead a passive substance that he could shape to his own ends with the application of money and professional political communications. But even in their inchoate condition, even with the distortions laid upon their subjective capacities through generations of bourgeois political violence, those hundreds of millions of expertly placed dollars could not budge them whatsoever in the direction of such an obvious fiend. 

Bloomberg’s voluntarism reflected his class position, just as DSA’s did theirs -- the bourgeois billions versus the petit bourgeois begging. The way forward out of this mess is a refusal to play objectively rigged games and to build institutions of mass political power that fundamentally reject ruling-class systems, elections, NGOs, and thus social democracy. Those are the subjective forces that have the potential to seize upon the objective advances of the class struggle and guaranteed crises of capitalist contradiction to come, especially if they are built to fight the attacks that will come early in their development. 

It remains to be seen how many of Bernie’s true believers are actually committed to revolution, and how many just wanted a few new benefits extracted from the very masses they tried -- and failed -- to speak for.  

Sorry to Bother You with Twelve Theses on Boots Riley's "Sorry to Bother You": Lessons for the Left

By Bryant William Sculos

Originally published in 2019 in Class, Race and Corporate Power.

1.   Films thus far have merely interpreted the world; the point however is to change it….

This would be more appropriate as thesis eleven, but it is a crucial starting point for what follows. No matter how radical, no matter how popular, a critical film is, a film by itself, not even one as prescient and valuable as Sorry to Bother You is, is enough to change the world. Not that anyone would suggest that it could be, but radical films can serve important purposes in the struggle against capitalism and various forms of oppression. A good radical film can inspire and even simply entertain those engaged in struggle—or those thinking about becoming more active. Sorry to Bother You will not change the world, but it can be an important basis for motivation, critical conversation, and necessary enjoyment for those in struggling to do just that.

2.   Tactics should always be informed by an organized strategy.

Sorry to Bother You highlights the difference between pure subversive tactics and an organized strategy for resistance. In the film there is a group of anarchist-types, of what size or of what degree of organization the audience never sees, whose primary role in the film is to highlight the impotence of pure tactics (in this film, this amounts to clever vandalism) disconnected from a coherent strategy for organized opposition. Juxtaposed to these tactics we see the hard work of organizing a workplace and an eventual strike. While the strike may not have heralded the end of capitalism, the audience bears witness to the clear difference in results (including both the response of the capitalist class and their police force as well as the ability of the strike to bring new layers of people into struggle).

3.   As important as the superiority of tactics informed by an organized strategy is, it is perhaps as important how those on the left address their internal disagreements about strategies and tactics.

There is a subtle scene between Squeeze (the labor activist attempting to organize the workers at the telemarketing firm, played by Steven Yeun) and Detroit (perhaps the best radical feminist of color ever seen in a popular US film, played superbly by Tessa Thompson). Squeeze becomes aware that Detroit is part of the anarchist group doing the anticapitalist vandalism and instead of criticizing Detroit’s tactics, Squeeze takes the opportunity to appreciate that they are both on the same side of the struggle. This solidaristic interaction serves as the basis to build deeper, more active solidarity in the future (some of which we see later in the film). It is often difficult for those on the left to ignore or at least put aside disagreements over tactics and strategy, and sometimes it is important that the Left not leave disagreements unaddressed, but Sorry to Bother You provides some insight into how the Left can deal with internal, and interpersonal, disagreements in ways that do not further alienate us from one another. After all, the Left needs all the comrades it can get. What makes someone a comrade is a contentious issue to be sure, but it is an important one that the Left should continue to reflect on.

4.   Solidarity across identities is crucial.

Perhaps one of the most obvious—though no less important—lessons from Sorry to Bother You, with its awesome diverse cast and characters, is that class has colors and genders and a variety of other identities that come with their own unique oppressions that condition the experience of class in diverse ways. Not only does the film illuminate the intersections of racism and capitalism (the “white voices” are the stuff of film legend here), but we also see cross-racial, cross-gender, and even cross- (fictional) species solidarity. If Sorry to Bother You does one thing well (and it does way more than just one thing well), it is expressing the importance of building this kind of intersectional solidarity, as well as how the variable experiences of class can be navigated without chauvinism or exclusion. While the treatment of non-fictional racial and gender solidarity is powerful in its own right, Boots Riley’s use of the (for now…) fictional equisapiens drives the point home. Ending the exploitation of some group at the expense of others can never be an acceptable Left position.

5.   Art can be radical, but not all subversive art is radical, at least not on its own.

Detroit, in addition to her day job as a sign twirler and then as a telemarketer, is an artist. Beyond the politics of Sorry to Bother You, the film also delves into the difficulty of being a subversive artist within the confines of capitalism, which demands that all art be commodifiable in order to be of any value. Despite Detroit’s best efforts to resist this pressure, we see her engage in a powerful and uncomfortable piece of performance art where her audience is asked to throw things at her, including broken electronics and blood-filled balloons. The scene is a bit of a parody of ostensibly “radical” art that is consumed by a primarily bourgeois audience. Subversive art that challenges the commodity-form can itself become commodified, but it can still be useful as a foundation to challenge artistic norms and social conventions, break down the barrier between performer and audience. However, even at its best there is no guarantee that anything will fundamentally change because of these dissensual elements. Sorry to Bother You is a better example of what radical, subversive art can be than the artistic performances it portrays—though neither one is the basis for revolutionary activity. While the critical theorists and postmodernists of the late twentieth century are right to emphasize the importance of aesthetics in radical politics and resist the temptation, embodied most noticeably in socialist realism, to use art strictly instrumentally, art disconnected from organized struggle is bound to be as ineffective as any tactic disconnected from organized struggle. Sorry to Bother You does not provide a clear alternative, but it does provide a powerful basis to think through the question of how art can relate to radical politics, and radical politics to art, effectively.

6.   Material conditions are shaped by ideological conditions, which in turn affect our psychologies.

As the protagonist Cassius “Cash” Green (portrayed by Lakeith Stanfield with incredible complexity and skill to make the audience cringe in every instance they are supposed to) moves up the ladder at the telemarketing company, after living in poverty for years, his perspective on poverty and the plight of workers shifts in perverse but predictable directions. Consciousness is never one-to-one with class position, something that is perhaps still too obvious for the Left to effectively grapple with, but the radical beauty of Sorry to Bother You is how well Boots Riley is able to show how consciousness changes as wealth (though not always identical to class position) increases. Capitalism as a whole dehumanizes even those who benefit from it, though workers and the poor and oppressed should have little patience or sympathy for those who benefit unequally from the exploitation they reproduce. As difficult as it is, it is important to remember this, that even as capitalists and the defenders of capitalism come to personify the evils of capitalism, they too are driven by the heinous psycho-social incentives of the system. While this is, in itself, important to be cognizant of, it is more important to be aware of the process through which this happens to middle class people, and even workers fortunate enough to escape the dregs of poverty wages.

7.   Contacting your elected officials is not nearly enough and can actually be demoralizing and demobilizing.

One of the best scenes in the film, enhanced by the speed with which is begins and ends, is when Cash decides to make public the genetic alteration plans of Steve Lift (CEO of the Amazon-like WorryFree, played by Armie Hammer). Cash goes on an absurd reality TV show and various news programs to tell the world about the equisapien experiments and implores people to contact their elected officials. The montage ends with WorryFree’s stock rising and the general public excited about the new technological developments. Nothing changes. The lesson here is that Cash was relying on the representatives of the system that encourages the kinds of perversity that Steve Lift represents to solve the problem. Cash encouraged people to place their hope in decrepit politicians. The audience experiences the results too quickly. The montage is powerful as it stands, but it is worth questioning whether the full range of critical points here might be lost on even a well-focused self-reflective audience (though I noticed so perhaps I’m the one being too cynical). Cash placed his hope in the automatic negative reactions of people—people who have been conditioned by capitalism to view all technological developments as progressive and liberating—to resist those changes. Back in the real world, while there are some instances where outrage may seem (or even actually be) more or less automatic, there is often unseen or unacknowledged organizing and propagandistic work being done to produce an effective public reaction. The best recent example of this is from the 2017 airport protests/occupations in reaction to President Donald Trump’s Muslim ban. While some of the people showed up at the airports spontaneously, there were also a number of left-wing groups, of diverse politics, working to make these actions effective. It is likely we would not have witnessed the positive results we saw from these actions had it not been for the quick, organized work of activists on the ground. And yet, it all appeared rather spontaneous.

8.  The truth is not enough, and it will not set us free. Truth is not irrelevant, but it is not enough for the Left simply to be “right.”

Related to thesis 7, Cash relies on his exposing the truth to the world to be the catalyst for widespread resistance to the practices of WorryFree. Mind you, this is all taking place in a world where all of the other dehumanizing practices of WorryFree, such as: lifetime contracts for workers, with all room and board provided but without pay, are deemed acceptable. Why would artificially producing human-horse hybrid workers be any different? While there is a vital educational role for the Left to play in providing the factual basis for the need for organized resistance and building an alternative to racist, patriarchal, imperialist capitalism, these facts are not enough. Facts can be interpreted in various ways and perverted by the mouthpieces of capitalism, often most egregiously by the ostensibly liberal vanguard of “progressive” capitalism. The Left needs to not only be “right” but it also needs to provide deeper context and present viable options to pursue. Put differently, in addition to having the truth on its side, the Left needs to be persuasive.

9.   Automation is complicated and likely will not take the forms or have the effects the public are often led to believe it will have.

The world has been browbeaten into thinking that the worst consequences of increased automation in the twenty-first century will be mass unemployment. Sorry to Bother You, believe it or not, provides a glimpse at one more realistic alternative—as well as a basis for a more honest look at the effects of automation. First, as we have seen throughout the history of capitalism, workers themselves, both physically and psychologically, are made into automatons. Second, the worst consequences of automation is not joblessness but deskilling. Part of the automation of human beings is the decreased cognitive and creative labor that more and more jobs will require or allow. Companies, whether it is WorryFree or Amazon, would much prefer the less expensive route of encouraging society, primarily through culture and schooling, to produce less thoughtful, more compliant workers, rather than spend huge sums of money on automation technologies that could become obsolete within a few years. Automation technology under capitalism is expensive. On the flipside, people under capitalism have been made to be quite inexpensive. Maybe we all will not be turned into human-horse hybrids, but given the trajectory of undemocratic automatic in the early years of the twenty-first century, we will not likely be looking at a Jetsons-esque lifestyle for everyone. People will likely continue to be subjected to intense pressures to physically, psychologically, and chemically alter themselves in order to acquire even slightly higher wages.

10.  People, especially workers within capitalism, are willing to accept very little money or benefits in exchange for their labor and even their lives.

Capitalist exploitation and oppressions degrade people. Capitalist ideology convinces people that they are merely worth whatever some boss is willing to pay them—and they are fortunate to have what little they have. After all, there are plenty of people with less. This reality puts impoverished workers in a terrible situation when bosses try to buy them off to undermine labor organizing or threaten a worker with firing for talking about politics at work. This reality is also part of the root cause of conservative labor union practices, which often sacrifice anything beyond moderate gains in wages and benefits for worker compliance. The promise of a more lavish lifestyle, new clothes and a new car (or really just a car that is reliable) is what motivates Cash to sell-out. Scabs may indeed be the scum of the Earth from a labor organizing perspective (and there’s no reason to think otherwise), but they are motivated by the very same things that motivate workers to sell their labor for a wage in the first place. So really, besides the immediacy of the betrayal, what is the difference between a scab and worker who refuses to join their union or a worker who does not vote to support a strike? The results and the motivations are fundamentally identical. This is not a defense of scabbing (as if such a defense were actually possible), but it is a lesson that needs to be learned. Capitalist ideology is extremely powerful, and it compels us all in various ways to become subjects of our exploitation and the exploitation of others. Scabs and other types of non-class-conscious workers are as much a product of capitalism as the credit card is.

11.  Sorry to bother—and even betray—you, but apologies and forgiveness matter.

Even after Cash betrays his fellow-workers and friends by crossing their picket lines multiple times, once he realizes his grave error and is determined to join them in struggle, his friends forgive him. They accept his apology. The apology does not change what Cash did, but it reflects his commitment to doing the right things moving forward. This might be one of the hardest lessons for the Left to learn from this movie. How does one forgive someone who has betrayed them, especially when it was not just a friendship that was betrayed but an entire movement? However, put differently, how can the Left ever be successful moving forward without the capacity to forgive and work alongside those who have actively worked against the Left in their past? Where is the place for former liberals (or even former conservatives or reactionaries)? Where is the place for former scabs? Sorry to Bother You argues that despite the awfulness of one’s past positions and actions, the answer to these two preceding questions is: among the Left. Very few people are born into radical politics, and almost no one holds the right views from the start, and so people need time to learn and grow. Sometimes it is a very longtime filled with egregious beliefs and behaviors—but if the Left is to ever be effective, it will be populated mainly by these kinds of people.[1]

12.  The first win (or loss) is only a beginning…

Sorry to Bother You ends with a victory of sorts. A small one. Without spoiling too much, the lesson here is that strikes, whether successful or not, can only ever be the start of a revolutionary movement. Same for protests. Protests in and of themselves are not going to bring down a government or a political-economic system. Strikes will not either. There is plenty of debate on the Left about whether a mass general strike could do that, but even with something as powerful as a general strike (which is really only practically imaginable with preliminary strikes and protests preceding it) it would be unlikely on its own to replace capitalism with socialism (or whatever your preferred label for a democratic, egalitarian form of postcapitalism is). Revolutionary transformation is not something that can be won or lost overnight, with one victory—nor can it be lost with one loss, by one strike that fails or never happens, by one protest that has low turnout or fails to motivate further actions. Hope is crucial, but it must be tempered by a realistic pessimism regarding the struggle ahead. There will be many loses and hopefully many more wins—but the struggle continues. Even if capitalism were successfully dismantled, what replaces it will also be an object of struggle, one that will require that we learn as much as we can from all the struggles that precedes it.

Bryant William Sculos, Ph.D. is Visiting Assistant Professor of global politics and theory at Worcester State University. He was formerly a Mellon-Sawyer postdoctoral fellow at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and 2019 Summer Fellow at the Institute for Critical Social Inquiry at the New School for Social Research. Bryant is the Politics of Culture section editor for the open-access journal Class, Race and Corporate Power and contributing editor for the Hampton Institute. Beyond his work for the aforementioned outlets, his work has also appeared in New Politics, Dissident Voice, Truthout, Constellations, Capitalism, Communication, & Critique (tripleC), New Political Science, and Public Seminar. He is also the co-editor (with Prof. Mary Caputi) of Teaching Marx & Critical Theory in the 21st Century (Brill, 2019; paperback forthcoming July 2020 with Haymarket Books).

Notes

[1] Although she was writing about how socialists should deal with liberals at Women’s Marches, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s writings served as crucial inspiration for this point. See: “Don’t Shame the First Steps of a Resistance” in Socialist Worker, Jan. 24, 2017. Available online at: https://socialistworker.org/2017/01/24/dont-shame-the-first-steps-of-a-resistance.