One Hundred Years of Indian Communism

By Prabhat Patnaik

Republished from International Development Economic Associates.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Barbara Schijman

Originally published at Internationalist 360.

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

What thoughts does this pandemic world open up for you?

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

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

How do you analyze the situation in Brazil?

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

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

What scenario do you envision?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What examples of these initiatives do you claim?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can you imagine Lula being the president of Brazil again?

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

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

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

How do you think about the immediate future?

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

Is there a Liberation Theology today?

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

Are you optimistic?

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

Translation by Resumen Latinoamericano, North America Bureau

The Austerity Election

[Photo: Morry Gash-Pool/Getty Images]

By Ezra Brain

Republished from Left Voice.

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

It’s The Economy, Stupid

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

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

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

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

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

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

Austerity on the Horizon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Biden is the Man for the Job? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Socialism's Increasing Popularity Doesn't Bring Media Out of McCarthy Era

By Joshua Cho

Republished from FAIR.

Ever since the Great Recession in 2008, and accelerating with Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential run, there has been a resurgence of popularity and interest in socialism in the US, and an increasing skepticism of capitalism. A 2019 Pew poll (6/25/19) reported that 42% of respondents had a favorable view of socialism, with particular sympathy shown among people who are Black (65%), Latino (52%), have family incomes below $30,000 (50%) or are between the ages of 18-29 (50%). In a 2019 Gallup survey (12/18/19), 38% saw socialism positively—more than the 34% who identify as conservatives (Gallup, 7/27/20). Gallup (11/25/19) noted that Millennials were especially attracted to socialism, with slightly more viewing socialism positively than capitalism.

Democrats across the country view socialism more positively than capitalism, with a large majority willing to vote for a socialist as president. Despite questions of what the term “socialism” means to Americans, this growing interest has provoked articles decrying the “problem” that socialism doesn’t freak out Democratic voters the way it does other Americans (Slate, 2/24/20). The Columbia Journalism Review (5/8/18) noticed that while “the radical left in the U.S. has felt invigorated in recent years,” it still hasn’t “earned left-wing voices column inches in most mainstream outlets,” with coverage limited to being “about those voices, rather than by them.”

Looking at the representation of socialism among the hundreds of pundits in corporate media, one can be forgiven for almost thinking socialist pundits don’t exist.

The New York Times opinion writer Elizabeth Bruenig appears to be the only pundit employed by corporate media who both explicitly identifies as a “socialist” and makes arguments for some form of socialism in the U.S. (Washington Post, 3/6/18).

Laurence O’Donnell, host of MSNBC’s Last Word, identifies as a “practical European socialist,” and argues that “we’re all socialists now,” because even Bill O’Reilly is in favor of “socialist programs” like Social Security and Medicare. The MSNBC host claims to “embrace” the label in order to “counterbalance” the excessive influence of McCarthyism in the U.S. (LA Times, 3/16/13), but it’s difficult to discern a distinctly socialist perspective in his commentary.

Straightforward advocacy of socialism is something you very rarely see in corporate media (Washington Post, 3/6/18).

The Hill’s Krystal Ball (2/17/19), cohost of the show Rising, criticized Trump’s remarks claiming that “America will never be a socialist country” for presenting the false dichotomy of “smash-and-grab capitalism” or “what’s happening in Venezuela.” The class-conscious commentator described Sanders and other democratic socialists like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as “messengers for a compelling message with an actual vision.” Although she seems not to explicitly embrace the “socialist” label like Bruenig or O’Donnell, it may be fair to describe her as a democratic socialist pundit, because she often speaks favorably of the ideology, and provides a friendly platform to socialists on her show.

It appears corporate media give some degree of space for pundits to call for replacing capitalism with a new system, so long as they don’t identify themselves or that new system as “socialist.” Times columnist Michelle Alexander hasn’t explicitly identified as a socialist, but has argued (6/8/20) that “transforming our economic systems” is necessary to achieve “racial justice” and a “secure and thriving democracy,” while approvingly citing figures like W.E.B. Du Bois, Albert Einstein, Hellen Keller and Paul Robeson, all of whom argued that the U.S. “must move toward some form of socialism.” The Post’s Katrina Vanden Heuvel also hasn’t called herself a socialist, but has argued (12/10/19) that “capitalism is broken,” and that we need a “new system to better serve the common good,” without describing this new system as “socialism.”

Although CNN’s Van Jones was involved in the early 1990s with Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement (STORM), a defunct Maoist Bay Area group, since 2000 or so, he’s identified with the “green capitalist” movement instead (Green America, Fall/2007).

“Socialism” itself is a very contested term, and many self-described socialists may not consider some or all of these pundits to be genuine socialists. Conservatism is also a broad range of ideologies, not all of which are consistent with each other, which also has self-identified conservatives who denounce others as unworthy or inconsistent with the label (New York Times, 1/14/15; The Hill, 12/16/19). Conservative audiences are not expected to approve of all pundits who identify as conservatives, or who speak favorably of conservatism. Likewise, while some socialists may be unsatisfied with these figures, it is still significant that there are pundits who embrace being labeled a “socialist” and explicitly call for alternatives to capitalism within the US.

Venezuelan opposition figure Juan Guaidó has remarked that “socialist” figures like Ocasio-Cortez would be considered social democrats in his own country (New Yorker, 6/10/20). The Times’ Paul Krugman (2/13/20) is no socialist, but he has criticized Bernie Sanders for presenting himself as a “socialist,” rather than a “social democrat,” making himself “an easy target for right-wing smears.”

It’s more common to see criticism of capitalism (New York Times, 12/4/17)—but still not very common.

One can find criticisms of capitalism in corporate media, but that is ideologically consistent with liberals or progressives who call for government intervention to deal with market failures. Columnists like the New York Times’ Michelle Goldberg (12/4/17), who noted that “capitalism looks like the god that failed” to young people because of the “increasingly oligarchic nature of our economy,” and the Times’ Nicholas Kristof (5/23/20), who condemned “dog-eat-dog capitalism for struggling workers and socialism for the rich,” are critics of capitalism in corporate media who aren’t necessarily calling for socialism.

Other pundits have normalized socialism by claiming it already exists in a limited form, because they conflate all government spending on social programs with socialism—not advocating for socialism so much as claiming that it already exists in the US. Thus the Times’ Roger Cohen (3/8/19) and the Post’s Catherine Rampell (3/21/19) argue that “Europe” demonstrates how “socialism and the free market are compatible,” and dismiss the capitalist/socialist dichotomy as not being a “meaningful binary,” because “all modern countries have elements of capitalism and socialism.” These pundits make arguments similar to O’Donnell’s, defending a socialism that’s hard to distinguish from liberalism, though without identifying with the label as O’Donnell does.

A few other commentators have praised socialism and defended figures who identify as socialists. MSNBC’s Chris Hayes defended Bernie Sanders from McCarthyite criticisms, and praised the Democratic Socialists of America. MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle has made remarks on-air that appear to defend democratic socialism, in addition to explaining why it is a more desirable alternative to communism (NBC News, 2/27/20). The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson has written several columns urging Democrats to embrace the party’s more progressive base (7/2/18, 7/1/19), and described “democratic socialism” as something that is “perfectly appropriate” for Ocasio-Cortez’s district, in addition to endorsing (1/15/15) Martin Luther King, Jr.’s call for “economic equality”—which King suggested could be called “democratic socialism” (In These Times, 1/15/18).

Like Hayes and Ruhle, Times’ columnists like Jamelle Bouie and Farhad Manjoo have published numerous columns that appear to praise socialism or policies associated with socialists, but that appears to be the farthest they can go, as neither of them have ever embraced the label (New York Times, 2/6/19, 2/14/19, 10/22/19, 3/11/20).

“Open advocacy of socialism is now a normal part of our political discourse,” writes the Washington Post‘s E.J. Dionne (2/10/19)—but it’s still not a normal part of our media conversation.

When socialism or socialists are discussed favorably, or at least not adversely, it’s often in opposition to revolutionary socialist ideologies like Marxism-Leninism (the official ideology of around 20% of the world’s population, and of the US’s greatest geopolitical rival). Democratic socialism is often contrasted with socialist states of the Global South, whether Communist countries like China or Vietnam, or multi-party systems like Venezuela or Nicaragua, which are frequently presented by even the left-most pundits as justifiable targets of imperialism. Instead, wealthy, predominantly white Scandinavian countries like Denmark and Norway are often upheld as the preferable socialist ideal (New York Times, 4/27/19).

Although the Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne Jr. (2/10/19) argued that Trump and the Republican Party’s attempts to tar all Democrats as “socialist” and antithetical to “American values” will fail because “open advocacy of socialism is now a normal part of our political discourse,” it’s quite clear that McCarthyism is still constricting political discourse in the US. While socialism is being discussed more often, there’s a huge disparity between its acceptance among the U.S. population and the representation of socialists among pundits at the biggest news outlets in the country. There are almost no pundits employed in corporate media who feel comfortable openly identifying as a socialist and calling for socialism as an alternative to capitalism.

Perhaps it’s no surprise that corporate media outlets owned by oligarchs and the investor class are hostile to socialism, but when socialist pundits are virtually nonexistent at these agenda-setting outlets, despite 76% of Democrats being willing to vote for a socialist, it’s clear that these institutions are intended to propagandize the U.S. population into accepting the status quo. Even when politicians and policies often described as “socialist” are presented in a positive light, the fact that these journalists are uncomfortable embracing the label is evidence that McCarthyism still exercises a formidable restraint on the U.S. political imagination and discourse.

Why is the World Going to Hell? Netflix's 'The Social Dilemma' Tells Only Half the Story

By Jonathan Cooke

Republished from the author’s blog.

If you find yourself wondering what the hell is going on right now – the “Why is the world turning to shit?” thought – you may find Netflix’s new documentary The Social Dilemma a good starting point for clarifying your thinking. I say “starting point” because, as we shall see, the film suffers from two major limitations: one in its analysis and the other in its conclusion. Nonetheless, the film is good at exploring the contours of the major social crises we currently face – epitomised both by our addiction to the mobile phone and by its ability to rewire our consciousness and our personalities.

The film makes a convincing case that this is not simply an example of old wine in new bottles. This isn’t the Generation Z equivalent of parents telling their children to stop watching so much TV and play outside. Social media is not simply a more sophisticated platform for Edward Bernays-inspired advertising. It is a new kind of assault on who we are, not just what we think.

According to The Social Dilemma, we are fast reaching a kind of human “event horizon”, with our societies standing on the brink of collapse. We face what several interviewees term an “existential threat” from the way the internet, and particularly social media, are rapidly developing.

I don’t think they are being alarmist. Or rather I think they are right to be alarmist, even if their alarm is not entirely for the right reasons. We will get to the limitations in their thinking in a moment.

Like many documentaries of this kind, The Social Dilemma is deeply tied to the shared perspective of its many participants. In most cases, they are richly disillusioned, former executives and senior software engineers from Silicon Valley. They understand that their once-cherished creations – Google, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Instagram, Snapchat (WhatsApp seems strangely under-represented in the roll call) – have turned into a gallery of Frankenstein’s monsters.

That is typified in the plaintive story of the guy who helped invent the “Like” button for Facebook. He thought his creation would flood the world with the warm glow of brother and sisterhood, spreading love like a Coca Cola advert. In fact, it ended up inflaming our insecurities and need for social approval, and dramatically pushed up rates of suicide among teenage girls.

If the number of watches of the documentary is any measure, disillusion with social media is spreading far beyond its inventors.

Children as guinea pigs

Although not flagged as such, The Social Dilemma divides into three chapters.

The first, dealing with the argument we are already most familiar with, is that social media is a global experiment in altering our psychology and social interactions, and our children are the main guinea pigs. Millennials (those who came of age in the 2000s) are the first generation that spent their formative years with Facebook and MySpace as best friends. Their successors, Generation Z, barely know a world without social media at its forefront.

The film makes a relatively easy case forcefully: that our children are not only addicted to their shiny phones and what lies inside the packaging, but that their minds are being aggressively rewired to hold their attention and then make them pliable for corporations to sell things.

Each child is not just locked in a solitary battle to stay in control of his or her mind against the skills of hundreds of the world’s greatest software engineers. The fight to change their perspective and ours – the sense of who we are – is now in the hands of algorithms that are refined every second of every day by AI, artificial intelligence. As one interviewee observes, social media is not going to become less expert at manipulating our thinking and emotions, it’s going to keep getting much, much better at doing it.

Jaron Lanier, one of the computing pioneers of virtual reality, explains what Google and the rest of these digital corporations are really selling: “It’s the gradual, slight, imperceptible change in your own behaviour and perception – that is the product.” That is also how these corporations make their money, by “changing what you do, what you think, who you are.”

They make profits, big profits, from the predictions business – predicting what you will think and how you will behave so that you are more easily persuaded to buy what their advertisers want to sell you. To have great predictions, these corporations have had to amass vast quantities of data on each of us – what is sometimes called “surveillance capitalism”.

And, though the film does not quite spell it out, there is another implication. The best formula for tech giants to maximise their predictions is this: as well as processing lots of data on us, they must gradually grind down our distinctiveness, our individuality, our eccentricities so that we become a series of archetypes. Then, our emotions – our fears, insecurities, desires, cravings – can be more easily gauged, exploited and plundered by advertisers.

These new corporations trade in human futures, just as other corporations have long traded in oil futures and pork-belly futures, notes Shoshana Zuboff, professor emeritus at Harvard business school. Those markets “have made the internet companies the richest companies in the history of humanity”.

Flat Earthers and Pizzagate

The second chapter explains that, as we get herded into our echo chambers of self-reinforcing information, we lose more and more sense of the real world and of each other. With it, our ability to empathise and compromise is eroded. We live in different information universes, chosen for us by algorithms whose only criterion is how to maximise our attention for advertisers’ products to generate greater profits for the internet giants.

Anyone who has spent any time on social media, especially a combative platform like Twitter, will sense that there is a truth to this claim. Social cohesion, empathy, fair play, morality are not in the algorithm. Our separate information universes mean we are increasingly prone to misunderstanding and confrontation.

And there is a further problem, as one interviewee states: “The truth is boring.” Simple or fanciful ideas are easier to grasp and more fun. People prefer to share what’s exciting, what’s novel, what’s unexpected, what’s shocking. “It’s a disinformation-for-profit model,” as another interviewee observes, stating that research shows false information is six times more likely to spread on social media platforms than true information.

And as governments and politicians work more closely with these tech companies – a well-documented fact the film entirely fails to explore – our rulers are better positioned than ever to manipulate our thinking and control what we do. They can dictate the political discourse more quickly, more comprehensively, more cheaply than ever before.

This section of the film, however, is the least successful. True, our societies are riven by increasing polarisation and conflict, and feel more tribal. But the film implies that all forms of social tension – from the paranoid paedophile conspiracy theory of Pizzagate to the Black Lives Matter protests – are the result of social media’s harmful influence.

And though it is easy to know that Flat Earthers are spreading misinformation, it is far harder to be sure what is true and what is false in many others areas of life. Recent history suggests our yardsticks cannot be simply what governments say is true – or Mark Zuckerberg, or even “experts”. It may be a while since doctors were telling us that cigarettes were safe, but millions of Americans were told only a few years ago that opiates would help them – until an opiate addiction crisis erupted across the US.

This section falls into making a category error of the kind set out by one of the interviewees early in the film. Despite all the drawbacks, the internet and social media have an undoubted upside when used simply as a tool, argues Tristan Harris, Google’s former design ethicist and the soul of the film. He gives the example of being able to hail a cab almost instantly at the press of a phone button. That, of course, highlights something about the materialist priorities of most of Silicon Valley’s leading lights.

But the tool box nestled in our phones, full of apps, does not just satisfy our craving for material comfort and security. It has also fuelled a craving to understand the world and our place in it, and offered tools to help us do that.

Phones have made it possible for ordinary people to film and share scenes once witnessed by only a handful of disbelieved passers-by. We can all see for ourselves a white police officer dispassionately kneeling on the neck of a black man for nine minutes, while the victim cries out he cannot breathe, until he expires. And we can then judge the values and priorities of our leaders when they decide to do as little as possible to prevent such incidents occurring again.

The internet has created a platform from which not only disillusioned former Silicon Valley execs can blow the whistle on what the Mark Zuckerbergs are up to, but so can a US army private like Chelsea Manning, by exposing war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, and so can a national security tech insider like Edward Snowden, by revealing the way we are being secretly surveilled by our own governments.

Technological digital breakthroughs allowed someone like Julian Assange to set up a site, Wikileaks, that offered us a window on the real political world – a window through we could see our leaders behaving more like psychopaths than humanitarians. A window those same leaders are now fighting tooth and nail to close by putting him on trial.

A small window on reality

The Social Dilemma ignores all of this to focus on the dangers of so-called “fake news”. It dramatises a scene suggesting that only those sucked into information blackholes and conspiracy sites end up taking to the street to protest – and when they do, the film hints, it will not end well for them.

Apps allowing us to hail a taxi or navigate our way to a destination are undoubtedly useful tools. But being able to find out what our leaders are really doing – whether they are committing crimes against others or against us – is an even more useful tool. In fact, it is a vital one if we want to stop the kind of self-destructive behaviours The Social Dilemma is concerned about, not least our destruction of the planet’s life systems (an issue that, except for one interviewee’s final comment, the film leaves untouched).

Use of social media does not mean one necessarily loses touch with the real world. For a minority, social media has deepened their understanding of reality. For those tired of having the real world mediated for them by a bunch of billionaires and traditional media corporations, the chaotic social media platforms have provided an opportunity to gain insights into a reality that was obscured before.

The paradox, of course, is that these new social media corporations are no less billionaire-owned, no less power-hungry, no less manipulative than the old media corporations. The AI algorithms they are rapidly refining are being used – under the rubric of “fake news” – to drive out this new marketplace in whistleblowing, in citizen journalism, in dissident ideas.

Social media corporations are quickly getting better at distinguishing the baby from the bathwater, so they can throw out the baby. After all, like their forebears, the new media platforms are in the business of business, not of waking us up to the fact that they are embedded in a corporate world that has plundered the planet for profit.

Much of our current social polarisation and conflict is not, as The Social Dilemma suggests, between those influenced by social media’s “fake news” and those influenced by corporate media’s “real news”. It is between, on the one hand, those who have managed to find oases of critical thinking and transparency in the new media and, on the other, those trapped in the old media model or those who, unable to think critically after a lifetime of consuming corporate media, have been easily and profitably sucked into nihilistic, online conspiracies.

Our mental black boxes

The third chapter gets to the nub of the problem without indicating exactly what that nub is. That is because The Social Dilemma cannot properly draw from its already faulty premises the necessary conclusion to indict a system in which the Netflix corporation that funded the documentary and is televising it is so deeply embedded itself.

For all its heart-on-its-sleeve anxieties about the “existential threat” we face as a species, The Social Dilemma is strangely quiet about what needs to change – aside from limiting our kids’ exposure to Youtube and Facebook. It is a deflating ending to the rollercoaster ride that preceded it.

Here I want to backtrack a little. The film’s first chapter makes it sound as though social media’s rewiring of our brains to sell us advertising is something entirely new. The second chapter treats our society’s growing loss of empathy, and the rapid rise in an individualistic narcissism, as something entirely new. But very obviously neither proposition is true.

Advertisers have been playing with our brains in sophisticated ways for at least a century. And social atomisation – individualism, selfishness and consumerism – have been a feature of western life for at least as long. These aren’t new phenomena. It’s just that these long-term, negative aspects of western society are growing exponentially, at a seemingly unstoppable rate.

We’ve been heading towards dystopia for decades, as should be obvious to anyone who has been tracking the lack of political urgency to deal with climate change since the problem became obvious to scientists back in the 1970s.

The multiple ways in which we are damaging the planet – destroying forests and natural habitats, pushing species towards extinction, polluting the air and water, melting the ice-caps, generating a climate crisis – have been increasingly evident since our societies turned everything into a commodity that could be bought and sold in the marketplace. We began on the slippery slope towards the problems highlighted by The Social Dilemma the moment we collectively decided that nothing was sacred, that nothing was more sacrosanct than our desire to turn a quick buck.

It is true that social media is pushing us towards an event horizon. But then so is climate change, and so is our unsustainable global economy, premised on infinite growth on a finite planet. And, more importantly, these profound crises are all arising at the same time.

There is a conspiracy, but not of the Pizzagate variety. It is an ideological conspiracy, of at least two centuries’ duration, by a tiny and ever more fabulously wealth elite to further enrich themselves and to maintain their power, their dominance, at all costs.

There is a reason why, as Harvard business professor Shoshana Zuboff points out, social media corporations are the most fantastically wealthy in human history. And that reason is also why we are reaching the human “event horizon” these Silicon Valley luminaries all fear, one where our societies, our economies, the planet’s life-support systems are all on the brink of collapse together.

The cause of that full-spectrum, systemic crisis is not named, but it has a name. Its name is the ideology that has become a black box, a mental prison, in which we have become incapable of imagining any other way of organising our lives, any other future than the one we are destined for at the moment. That ideology’s name is capitalism.

Waking up from the matrix

Social media and the AI behind it are one of the multiple crises we can no longer ignore as capitalism reaches the end of a trajectory it has long been on. The seeds of neoliberalism’s current, all-too-obvious destructive nature were planted long ago, when the “civilised”, industrialised west decided its mission was to conquer and subdue the natural world, when it embraced an ideology that fetishised money and turned people into objects to be exploited.

A few of the participants in The Social Dilemma allude to this in the last moments of the final chapter. The difficulty they have in expressing the full significance of the conclusions they have drawn from two decades spent in the most predatory corporations the world has ever known could be because their minds are still black boxes, preventing them from standing outside the ideological system they, like us, were born into. Or it could be because coded language is the best one can manage if a corporate platform like Netflix is going to let a film like this one reach a mass audience.

Tristan Harris tries to articulate the difficulty by grasping for a movie allusion: “How do you wake up from the matrix when you don’t know you’re in the matrix?” Later, he observes: “What I see is a bunch of people who are trapped by a business model, an economic incentive, shareholder pressure that makes it almost impossible to do something else.”

Although still framed in Harris’s mind as a specific critique of social media corporations, this point is very obviously true of all corporations, and of the ideological system – capitalism – that empowers all these corporations.

Another interviewee notes: “I don’t think these guys [the tech giants] set out to be evil, it’s just the business model.”

He is right. But “evilness” – the psychopathic pursuit of profit above all other values – is the business model for all corporations, not just the digital ones.

The one interviewee who manages, or is allowed, to connect the dots is Justin Rosenstein, a former engineer for Twitter and Google. He eloquently observes:

We live in a world in which a tree is worth more, financially, dead than alive. A world in which a whale is worth more dead than alive. For so long as our economy works in that way, and corporations go unregulated, they’re going to continue to destroy trees, to kill whales, to mine the earth, and to continue to pull oil out of the ground, even though we know it is destroying the planet and we know it is going to leave a worse world for future generations.

This is short-term thinking based on this religion of profit at all costs. As if somehow, magically, each corporation acting in its selfish interest is going to produce the best result. … What’s frightening – and what hopefully is the last straw and will make us wake up as a civilisation as to how flawed this theory is in the first place – is to see that now we are the tree, we are the whale. Our attention can be mined. We are more profitable to a corporation if we’re spending time staring at a screen, staring at an ad, than if we’re spending our time living our life in a rich way.

Here is the problem condensed. That unnamed “flawed theory” is capitalism. The interviewees in the film arrived at their alarming conclusion – that we are on the brink of social collapse, facing an “existential threat” – because they have worked inside the bellies of the biggest corporate beasts on the planet, like Google and Facebook.

These experiences have provided most of these Silicon Valley experts with deep, but only partial, insight. While most of us view Facebook and Youtube as little more than places to exchange news with friends or share a video, these insiders understand much more. They have seen up close the most powerful, most predatory, most all-devouring corporations in human history.

Nonetheless, most of them have mistakenly assumed that their experiences of their own corporate sector apply only to their corporate sector. They understand the “existential threat” posed by Facebook and Google without extrapolating to the identical existential threats posed by Amazon, Exxon, Lockheed Martin, Halliburton, Goldman Sachs and thousands more giant, soulless corporations.

The Social Dilemma offers us an opportunity to sense the ugly, psychopathic face shielding behind the mask of social media’s affability. But for those watching carefully the film offers more: a chance to grasp the pathology of the system itself that pushed these destructive social media giants into our lives.

Battling Racism Beyond the Election

(Photo: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP/Getty Images)

By Robert Bohm

Originally published at Real Progressives.

Not surprisingly, the recent non-indictment of the police who killed Breonna Taylor provoked angry sometimes violent protests. This shows us once again how systemic racism works. It kills blacks and other people of color, as it has done for centuries, and then, when community members and their supporters express outrage, despair or aggressive grief, the protesters are the ones who are castigated for expressing their dissatisfaction in “improper” ways. 

All this comes in the wake of months of unprecedented demonstrations against systemic racism. Yet, as the go-home-free verdict for Taylor’s killers shows, the mass movement’s work is far from done, since it hasn’t yet created the groundbreaking structural changes the country needs.  

Hence, the following—a series of thoughts pertaining to the issue of what kind of revolutionary (as opposed to reform) consciousness is required to destabilize and remove white supremacy, in all its systemic forms, from the nation’s institutions.   

Biden, the presidency and protests

Trump’s white supremacism and the anti-scientism of his responses to climate change and Covid-19 already have had catastrophic impacts on the nation. As have many of his other actions. It seems clear he should be replaced. But by what? I will examine here only one aspect of this complicated question—If Biden wins, what will happen to the protest movement against systemic racism?

On August 3rd, Joe Biden gave a speech in Pittsburgh in which he clarified, along with other points, an issue Democratic strategists were eager for him to speak on publicly—his take on the interconnection between peaceful demonstrations against systemic racism and the flare-ups of illegal acts (looting, arson, etc.) which sometimes accompany them.

In his Pittsburgh speech, the Democratic candidate announced the following, which he since has repeated in slightly reworded form many times:

I’m going to be very clear about all of this, rioting is not protesting. Looting is not protesting. Setting fires is not protesting. None of this is protesting. It’s lawlessness, plain and simple. And those who do it should be prosecuted.

(Biden 2020)

Biden’s meaning is clear. He believes in peaceful protests but has no sympathy for violent ones. Furthermore, he wants those involved in illegal acts charged with crimes. 

Many Democratic Party (DP) insiders greeted this statement with applause, since they didn’t want Biden pigeonholed by Pres. Trump’s accusation that their candidate had no respect for law and order. 

Not only DP leaders but also many media outlets were pleased by Biden’s remarks. NBC, for instance, noted approvingly that Biden had gone on record as “strongly condemning a spate of recent violence in multiple U.S. cities.” (Edelman 2020)

Unfortunately, neither Democratic insiders nor the positive media reviews got it right analytically. Their cheers were ideological, not ethical. They believed Biden had strengthened his campaign by making the necessary practical move required to win—i.e., to state unequivocally that only orderly protests were acceptable and deviations from this rule would be met with appropriate police measures by a Biden presidency. 

In pushing this philosophy, Biden and his applauders rejected as irrelevant the fact that Biden made no effort to place recent US protests against police brutality and systemic racism in historical context. Yet by not doing this and instead offering only anti-violence platitudes, Biden demeaned and distorted the very US history which he claimed to be protecting when he declared, without nuance, that when it comes to “rioters” breaking the law in Kenosha and Portland or anywhere else, “None of this is protesting.”

I’m sorry, but this is bullshit. I say this not because I think protesters should loot stores or set cop cars ablaze but because what Biden omitted from his statement defines the statement’s character more than what he included in it. 

If alive today, Martin Luther King, Jr., whom Biden misleadingly quoted in his speech, would have similarly indicted Biden—for being overly judgmental and not examining the situation in all its complexity. 

How do we know this? Because of King’s own testimony as he struggled with similar issues. Although a nonviolence advocate, King eventually concluded that the heart of the looting/rioting/violence matter resided in the fact that in a time of white supremacist anti-black violence, a riot on the part of the targeted “is the language of the unheard” (King 1967) and therefore must be approached as such—i.e., with respect and an attempt to understand.

King’s message was simple: One didn’t have to like this particular “language” but one nonetheless had to listen and learn from it, rather than reflexively condemn it, since in the end the oppression which foments rioting is more a bludgeoning of decency than the riots. 

In the same speech, King made this abundantly clear directly after making his “unheard” statement. 

And what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality, and humanity. And so in a real sense our nation’s summers of riots are caused by our nation’s winters of delay. And as long as America postpones justice, we stand in the position of having these recurrences of violence and riots over and over again. Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention.

(Ibid.)

Unfortunately, Biden couldn’t bring himself to say anything this astute. Instead, he stuffed his few words about protest-related violence into a terse series of campaign phrases designed not to shed light on the US’s struggle with white supremacy, but merely to win campaign points by countering Trump. 

Clearly, Biden doesn’t have it in him, or isn’t knowledgeable enough about the issue, to clarify that racial oppression is the culprit here, the ultimate systemic promoter of violence. Consequently, unlike King, he doesn’t realize that until systemic racism is defeated once and for all, public outbursts of violence such as looting and arson will continue. King may not have liked this, but he faced up to it, understood it and factored it into his analysis. Instead of showing this kind of grit, however, Biden strikes out.

His refusal to confront this dilemma head-on incarnates the formula for how to fight racism “diplomatically,” without being too “disruptive”— i.e., to go slowly, not rock the boat. 

History is real, but first you have to find it

As with the George Floyd protests, political agitation and struggles for justice are never easy. They’re always complicated by interactions between multiple factors. 

Given such complexity, the idea that protesters’ efforts (demonstrations, acts of civil disobedience, boycotts, declarations of purpose, losses of temper, etc.) can be summarized accurately by platitudes and ad-speak rather than with analysis is ludicrous. Yet sometimes such triteness seems seductive. After all, such responses require so little thinking and therefore so little time. The easy answers are so easy.

In terms of the US love for easy answers, we need no further proof of this than our nation’s central myth: our fairytale of the American Revolution with its supposedly sacred Founding Fathers supported by throngs of liberty lovers. According to the story, all of these folks, Founders and throngs alike, were guided by the same perfectly working moral compass as they marched toward Democracy while singing “Yankee Doodle Dandy” in harmony.

So, since the American Revolution is the beginning point of our mythicized history, let’s look at a few of the protests during the two decades prior to that event and see how they compare to Biden’s definition of what divides “real” protests from lawlessness. Also, what do they reveal about the dissenters’ character and the divisions among them? Finally, what do they say about the evolution from reformist demands to revolution: seceding from Britain and becoming an independent nation in charge of the continent’s colonization?

One thing the colonies’ protests show is how untidy such dissenting actions can be. This was illustrated in the heated differences among colonists over how protests should be conducted. Some of the most robust of these arguments took place between the wealthy on one side and artisans, laborers, free blacks and other so-called low-class persons on the other. As historian Gary B. Nash has written, “For those in the lower echelons of colonial society, elementary political rights and social justice, rather than the protection of property” (Nash 2006, 94) were their primary political concerns. 

This divide between rich and poor protesters unfolded prior to the revolution in tactical collisions between the two groups. 

One tactic that unnerved wealthy colonists sprang from the outrage felt by colonial inhabitants against England’s practice of inflating costs for British-made products by forcing colonists to pay extra taxes on them. In retaliation, many colonial merchants united under the banner of a non-importation agreement––i.e., a collective refusal to buy British products or to sell England colonial goods. This agreement, however, soon became more complicated when members of the so-called rabble decided to police shopkeepers to ensure their fidelity to the accord. If they found one who’d wavered, a small band of rebels would break into the owner’s shop, then vandalize it as a warning that no slacking was allowed. 

Even anti-British property owners disapproved of such behavior. They reasoned that if common folk were willing to destroy alleged traitors’ property, they also might turn someday on wealthy protesters. The affluent’s fear of this stemmed from the poor’s resentment of them for passing local laws which restricted wages, criminalized poverty, and banned unemployed persons in search of work from entering towns. (Quigley 1997, 114-115)

As tensions between pro-British Tories and more seditious colonists grew, rowdy insurgents patrolled their communities in search of spies suspected of informing officials about residents who operated smuggling rings in order to circumvent British duties. Although alleged spies were given a variety of possible punishments––e.g., stripped naked and paraded through the streets, tarred and feathered, thrashed by rebel gangs, etc.––one type made the “more refined” cringe. Rebels “painted” the outside of the suspected traitor’s house with a foul gunk made from a variety of stomach-turning ingredients including human body waste. 

Another penalty imposed on monarchy loyalists was home invasions. One famous instance of this occurred in 1765 when protesters broke into the home of Thomas Hutchinson, the Lt. Governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, who was a known British sympathizer. The invasion was a spinoff of rioting earlier that night in the wake of England’s passage of the Stamp Act, which mandated that colonists use only printed materials published on special highly taxed paper manufactured in Britain and marked with a government stamp. 

Hutchinson later described in a letter to a friend how a subgroup of the rioters “fell upon my house with the rage of devils, and in a moment with axes split down the doors and entered. (Hosmer 1896, 92)

Once inside, the protesters went on a wrecking spree. They knocked down all the interior walls, stole whatever they wanted, climbed to the roof and toppled the house’s cupola to the ground. At dawn, the rampagers finally fled. Not only was Hutchinson’s home in ruins but, he wrote, “The garden-house was laid flat, and all my trees, etc., broke to the ground.”

(Ibid.)

Another form of protest entailed rebels’ destruction of symbols of British rule like coats-of-arms, effigies of loyalists, British patrol ships in search of smugglers, etc. An additional example of symbol demolition occurred in New York after a public reading of the Declaration of Independence five days following its signing. Subsequent to the reading, a mob, including colonial soldiers, toppled a lead statue of King George III, then smashed it to pieces. Later, the fragments were melted down to make bullets for use against the British in the unfolding war. (D’Costa 2017)

This act proclaimed that no matter what English law said they should do, they instead chose to ignore the law, destroy the old political system and take their destiny into their own hands.

Although there were certainly peaceful protesters during the pre-revolutionary period, I gave these examples of protesters’ excesses to make a simple, but important, point: the Biden statement quoted at this essay’s beginning isn’t merely wrong, it purposefully distorts our history. This falsified version of our past is a type of distemper vaccine designed to fog people’s brains, depower us. It’s what political insiders call upon when they want to stir our patriotism and convince us to adopt so-called traditional values. They’ve institutionalized this mirage history so we can’t find the lessons in our real history. 

One such lesson is that there are sometimes good reasons for lawlessness. For instance, during the decades prior to the revolution, Britain’s relentless repression of the colonies without regard to how restrained many protesters were, created a combustible environment in which everything occurred at a higher fever-pitch than normal and consequently serious conflicts ensued. 

But those conflicts weren’t only between the colonies and the British. They also included class conflicts within the growing numbers of those who supported independence. Additionally, there were what we might label the silent collisions between the very idea of freedom and its realization, collisions which most whites didn’t yet possess the courage, cultural introspection, goodness or intelligence to articulate—e.g., the need for full equality for African slaves and the indigenous. 

All freedom and justice battles—whether the American revolution or the fight today for systemic change regarding racism—contain such volatile ingredients. Therefore, those who claim to support such revolutions and battles, but only if those movements adhere to strict rules of decorous behavior, are anti-change. They’re the kind of people who, after placing a pot of water on a stove turned to high, badmouth the water’s “violent propensities” if it boils. 

This doesn’t mean we can’t keep our movement today as peaceful as possible—we can. However, we shouldn’t let Biden and others sucker us into forgetting Rev. King’s warning that no true racial peace will be achieved until systemic racism is permanently laid to rest. It’s not the protesters, but the attempt to repress them and the movement they’ve built, which sparks the violence.

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.

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

By Larry Holmes

Republished from Workers World.

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

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

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

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

What will the working class do?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How did this happen to the working class?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Opening of struggle over need for strikes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Larry Holmes is First Secretary of Workers World Party.

Their Violence and Ours

By Nathaniel Flakin

Republished from Left Voice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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