Corporate Personhood, Monopoly Capital, and the Precedent That Wasn't: The 1886 "Santa Clara" Case

By Curry Malott

Republished from Liberation School.

Editor’s note: Beginning with overturning Roe v. Wade, the ultra right-wing Supreme Court continues to attack hard-won and elementary democratic rights in the United States, from affirmative action to the Indian Child Welfare Act. The following article is the third in our series “Crimes of the Supreme Court,” which demonstrates the fundamentally reactionary and anti-democratic nature of the Supreme Court. By examining key decisions in the Court’s history, we explain their historical and political context, the legal concepts and frameworks used to justify their decisions, and lay out their implications for later cases. This entry focuses on an 1886 Supreme Court ruling that is often cited as the precedent guaranteeing corporations the same protections as “natural persons,” although it did no such thing. Nonetheless, this case and several preceding ones demonstrated how the struggle for corporate personhood—particularly under the “Equal Protection Clause” of the 14th Amendment—was intimately bound up in the transition to U.S. monopoly capitalism.

How do the actual people in charge of corporations manage to remain protected from the consequences of the countless crimes they commit year after year? How is it that when CEOs make clear and obvious decisions that habitually violate every existing worker-won regulation, from the Clean Air Act to the Civil Rights Act, with very few exceptions, they charge the corporation—the “artificial” or “unnatural” person—instead of the CEO—the actual, “natural person” who made those decisions?

The legal grounds that corporations have the same protections and rights as “natural persons” is commonly justified by the 1886 Supreme Court ruling in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company. As we’ll see, the Court’s decision in the case didn’t establish any precedent for corporate personhood, nor did the Court make any ruling on it. To the extent that the Supreme Court even debated “artificial,” “corporate,” and other kinds of personhood, they did so to facilitate the transition from “free competition” to monopoly capitalism in the country.

In this article, we explore the Santa Clara case before turning to debates within the institutions of power in the U.S. over the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. These debates can only be understood if situated within their historical, political, and economic context: the transition to monopoly capital in the U.S. To conclude, we explore the case’s destructive legacy, or the way it was illegitimately used to set precedent for the growth of monopoly capital.

The facts and outcome of the case

During the 1878-79 California Constitutional Convention, the state enacted a new tax code that, in part, prevented railroad corporations from factoring existing debts and mortgages into their total taxable value. The Southern Pacific Railroad Company, along with the Central Pacific Railroad Company, refused to follow the new code. They did not pay the additional tax, nor did they pay the back taxes they subsequently owed.

The first point of contention were back taxes—including the interest on them—that railroad companies refused to pay in California, specifically the taxes being levied on the fencing along the railroads’ right-of-way. Among the handful of complaints brought forth, lawyers representing the railroads argued that it was the county and not the state that should have assessed the value of the fencing. As Thom Hartmann points out, “the railroad was refusing to pay taxes of about $30,000,” which is “like having a $10,000 car and refusing to pay a $10 tax on it—and taking the case to the Supreme Court” [1].

Faced with the loss of revenue, a number of counties in California, including San Mateo County, filed suit against the railroad companies in an attempt to collect the taxes that the railroads refused to pay. According to Southern Pacific’s executives, they were being treated unfairly relative to “legal” or “natural” persons who could deduct debts and mortgages from their taxable income or value. The cases were consolidated before reaching the California Supreme Court, which ruled mostly in favor of the counties and against the railroad companies. The one exception concerned the fences constructed around the railroads. The Court affirmed that the fences “were improperly included by the State Board in its assessments” and, as a result, there was no legal basis for the counties to collect additional taxes [2].

The origins of corporate personhood?

Interestingly, however, the Santa Clara decision is rarely remembered for the issue of taxation and, more specifically, the role of railroad monopolies, and is instead mostly cited as the first instance of the Supreme Court upholding “corporate personhood.”

One of the railroad’s defenses at the Supreme Court hearing included arguing that the “Equal Protection Clause” of the 14th Amendment applied to corporations, so therefore the state couldn’t tax them differently from other citizens. Yet this was only a minor point among the six arguments presented by the railroads.

Moreover, it seems Chief Justice Morrison Waite quickly dismissed the argument in the case by stating that it is a general, agreed upon principle that the clause applies to corporations.  According to the ruling’s “headnote,” Waite stated the Court would not even consider “whether the provision in the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does” [3].

Did the Supreme Court, then, establish a legal precedent that corporations have the same legal protections as natural persons? Despite the Supreme Court citing it as precedent for a century, and despite that it was routinely taught to law students as precedent, the ruling did no such thing.

Waite’s comment above was not part of the official ruling. Instead, it was included in a headnote written by the Court’s Reporter of Decisions, journalist J.C. Bancroft Davis, former president of the Newburgh and New York Railway Company. Headnotes are introductory summaries of cases added to Court rulings to make it easier for legal professionals and others to sift through cases.

Headnotes, therefore, are not legally-binding and hold no legal authority. It wasn’t until the 1906 ruling in United States v. Detroit Lumber Co. that the Supreme Court officially ruled in its majority opinion that headnotes aren’t part of the Court’s rulings or findings. As then-Chief Justice David Brewer wrote, “the headnote is not the work of the court, nor does it state its decision… it is simply the work of the reporter, gives his understanding of the decision, and is prepared for the convenience of the profession in the examination of the reports” [4]. This, however, hasn’t prevented the U.S. courts in general, and the Supreme Court in particular, from citing the headnote as precedent.

The headnote is significant in a few ways. First, the report of Waite’s comments didn’t include any legal or constitutional justification; it was a mere assertion. As a result, since 1886 the status of corporations as “people” protected under the Constitution has been a source of controversy. Moreover, “the concept of the corporate person lacks a principled definition and, therefore, seems to expand, or contract, depending on the circumstances and on the personal predilections of the speaker” [5].

The headnote is especially significant because of Waite’s sweeping acceptance that corporations are protected by the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. This differs from a previous Court ruling in the 1873 Slaughterhouse Cases that made their way to the U.S. Supreme Court after an 1869 Louisiana legislature decision to issue a charter confining slaughterhouse operations in New Orleans to a single corporate entity, the Crescent City Live-Stock Landing and Slaughter-House Company.

Crescent City’s charter required the company to run its waste downstream, ordered other slaughterhouses, most of which were much smaller, to close, and forbid the establishment of any new slaughterhouses in the area for the next 25 years. In effect, the legislature produced a monopoly on slaughterhouses for the time period. This meant that all workers, including butchers, had to work for Crescent or find work elsewhere. As a result, hundreds of members of the Butchers’ Benevolent Association, which represented smaller or independent slaughterhouses, filed suit in the Louisiana Supreme Court on the basis that the monopoly violated the 13th and 14th Amendments by forcing butchers into “involuntary servitude” and taking away their property without compensation or due process.

When the U.S. Supreme Court took up the cases, the majority opinion explicitly stated that the Amendments did not apply in this instance. The dissenting opinion by Justice Stephen Field proposed a broad definition of the Amendments at stake, one that would become more expansive as the overthrow of Reconstruction solidified. The crucial issue, he stated, was “whether the recent amendments to the Federal Constitution protect the citizens of the United States against the deprivation of their common rights by State legislation.” Field closed the dissenting opinion by asserting that the 14th Amendment applies to corporations and monopolies. He wrote that the Amendment “does afford such protection, and was so intended by the Congress which framed and the States which adopted it” [6].

Between his time on California’s Ninth Circuit Court and the Supreme Court, “Field worked tirelessly to expand the 14th Amendment to include the rights of corporations.” He was driven by careerism and a desire to reach the country’s highest court and maybe even the presidency “with the support of railroad money” [7].

In his dissenting opinion in a related railroad case, Fields expressed his outrage that the Court was neglecting the crucial question, which was if “an unlawful and unjust discrimination was made . . . and to that extent depriving it of the equal protection of the laws” [8].

Whether or not the original drafters of the post-Civil War amendments explicitly considered if and how the 14th Amendment—or the 13th— could apply to corporations or any group other than Black people is unclear. Based on available records, some argue that Congress may indeed have considered or intended for corporations to be included in the 14th Amendment, as the original drafters “were inundated with petitions from insurance companies and railroads complaining about protectionist state measures” [9]. That the 14th Amendment makes a distinction between “persons” and “citizens” is also significant, as the former “are entitled to due process and equal protection” while the latter are only “guaranteed the privileges and immunities of national citizenship” [10].

What is certainly true, however, is that almost none of the 14th Amendment cases heard by the Supreme Court concerned the rights of Black people. The Supreme Court itself affirmed this in 1938. In his dissenting opinion on Connecticut Gen Life Ins C. v. Johnson, Justice Hugo Black cited Miller’s majority opinion in the 1873 Slaughterhouse cases, doubting that the 13th and 14th Amendments would include anyone except Black people. “Yet,” he continued, “of the cases in this Court in which the 14th Amendment was applied during the first fifty years after its adoption, less than one-half of 1 per cent. invoked it in protection of the negro race, and more than 50 per cent. asked that its benefits be extended to corporations” [11].

Further, recent history affirms that the U.S. ruling class considers and treats corporate entities much more humanely than they treat Black people.

Corporate personhood and a new phase of U.S. capitalism

The period leading up to the 1886 case was characterized by monumental shifts in the political, social, economic, and racial order of the U.S. This included the heroic Reconstruction era as well as its tragic defeat and the rapid growth of monopoly capital in the country.

In the decade leading up to Santa Clara case, railroad barons emerged as a new faction of the capitalist class that provided the model for monopoly capital. This is why, just before the 1878-79 California Convention, California allowed the Southern Pacific Railroad Company to absorb several other corporations. Prior to that, Congress granted 11 million acres of land to Southern Pacific, although for their expansion the company acquired additional debts through a mortgage on its construction, equipment, railcars, and so on. Southern Pacific was also granted the legal authority to construct a line connecting San Francisco to Texas.

The trend toward monopoly predated the Civil War and coincided with the ongoing conquest of the continent. Large corporations, with state funding, facilitated the expanding interstate commerce through railways and canals, which in turn led to a larger and more integrated national economy. Federal and state legislatures promoted this centralization of capital insofar as it took the economic burden off the state while still allowing the state to use the new networks for postal and military purposes.

The pressing question for the U.S. ruling class was whether or not the government-backed monopolists would ultimately represent a unique and temporary phenomenon or provide a model for capital as a whole.

There was a clear struggle between the ideologues of small enterprises that formerly dominated the economic landscape and operated similarly to the idealistic “free competition” phase of capitalism and those of monopoly capital, where the various enterprises dispersed throughout different entities were consolidated into large ones.

As Morton J. Horowitz details in his account of how legal structures raced to keep up with the latest changes in capital, in the 1880s there wasn’t any precedent about “natural” or “corporate” persons because these categories threatened individualism and free-market competition. By the turn of the century, however, the struggles over “political economy between small entrepreneurs and emergent big business over the legitimacy of large scale enterprise” erupted [12].

The debates taking place within the ruling class had to do with whether or not there was an inherent tendency for capital to centralize. At the time, most political economists didn’t give credence to the inevitability of monopolization, seeing the railroads as exceptional. It didn’t take long until politicians, bourgeois economists, and others rightly interpreted the railroad’s economic trajectory as a precursor to a coming phase of industrial monopolization.

There was a shift in power and influence within the capitalist class from the old “free enterprise” capitalists to the new monopolists:

“By the late nineteenth century in America, fundamental changes had already taken place in the legal treatment of the corporation. First, and by far the most important, was the erosion of the so-called ‘grant’ or ‘concession’ theory of the corporation, which treated the act of incorporation as a special privilege conferred by the state for the pursuit of public purposes. Under the grant theory, the business corporation was regarded as an ‘artificial being’ created by the state with powers strictly limited by its charter of incorporation. As we shall see, a number of more specific legal doctrines were also derived from the grant theory in order to enforce the state’s interest in limiting and confining corporate power” [13].

From this point of view, the rise of monopoly capitalism, or the centralization of larger and larger sectors of the means of production into fewer and fewer hands, is driven by the self-expansive and competitive nature of capitalist production. The Supreme Court provided the legal grounds for facilitating this transformation.

Legacy of the case

In the immediate aftermath of Santa Clara, “the Court did away with 230 state laws that had been passed to regulate corporations” [14]. It was clear evidence monopoly capital was in control of politics. Supreme Court decisions in the years between 1908 and 1914, often citing corporate personhood, struck down minimum-wage laws, workers’ compensation laws, utility regulation, and child labor laws—every kind of law that a people might institute to protect its citizenry from abuses” [15].

For over a century now, the state has continued to take power and rights away from working and oppressed people and transferred it to capital. They have even perverted the hard-won gains won by people’s movements into justifications for increasing corporate power, perhaps none more disgusting than the misuse of the 14th Amendment.

While even to this day there is no clear legal basis for corporate personhood, that hasn’t stopped the Supreme Court from waging class war against the people on behalf of corporations. Because the nine unelected judges determine the law, they can legally justify whatever tactics they deploy against us.

The misuse of Santa Clara’s headnote has not only severely inhibited the ability to regulate corporations, but it has created a space for CEOs and shareholders to operate with near impunity. For example, Joel Bakan notes that “corporate illegalities are rife throughout the economy…By design, the corporate form generally protects the human beings who run corporations from legal liability, leaving the corporation, a ‘person’…the main target of criminal prosecution” [16].

The Supreme Court was created to serve the interests of the capitalist class. Its very existence stands as a barrier to the working and oppressed peoples’ desire for a true democracy. As the Supreme Court unleashes its most current wave of attacks on our basic democratic rights, we will continue to fight for a new system.

References

[1] Thom Hartmann,Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became People–and How You can Fight Back(San Francisco: ‎ Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2010), 18.
[2] Santa Clara County. v. South Pacific Railroad, 118 U.S. 394 (1886), 411. Availablehere.
[3] Ibid., 396.
[4] United States v. Detroit Lumber Co., 200 U.S. 321 (1906). Availablehere.
[5] Malcolm J. Harkins III, “The Uneasy Relationship of Hobby Lobby, Conestoga Wood, the Affordable Care Act, and the Corporate Person: How a Historical Myth Continues to Bedevil the Legal System,”Saint Louis University Journal of Health Law & Policy7, no. 2 (2014): 204.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Nicholas S. Paliewicz, “How Trains Became People: Southern Pacific Railroad Co.’s Networked Rhetorical Culture and the Dawn of Corporate Personhood,”Journal of Communication Inquiry43, no. 2 (2019): 204-205.
[8] Cited in Ibid.
[9] Matthew J. Zinn and Steven Reed, “Equal Protection and State Taxation of Interstate Business,”The Tax Lawyer41, no. 1 (1987): 89-90.
[10] Ibid., 90.
[11] Connecticut General Life Ins. Co v. Johnson, 303 U.S. 77 (1938). Availablehere.
[12] Morton J. Horowitz, “Santa Clara Revisited: The Development of Corporate Theory,”West Virginia Law Review88, no. 2 (1986): 187.
[13] Ibid., 181.
[14] Howard Zinn,A People’s History of the United States(New York: Perennial Classics, 1980/1999), 261.
[15] Hartmann,Unequal Protection, 24.
[16] Joel Bakan,The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power(New York: The Free Press, 2004), 75-79.

Currency Crisis In The West (1965)

By Hsiang Chung

Republished from Black Agenda Report.

Editor’s Note from BAR: This 1965 essay appeared in Kwame Nkrumah’s journal, The Spark. If it were around today, The Spark would probably carry a warning in the US that it was “state-affiliated media.” Its editors probably wouldn’t care. The Spark was published by Kwame Nkrumah’s Bureau of African Affairs and its explicit mission was to build socialism in Ghana and to aid in fomenting working-class revolution throughout Africa.

The Spark’s content reflected this mission. The weekly paper ran essays articulating the theory of Nkrumaism and published detailed analysis of neocolonialism and imperialism, and of socialism and development. It considered the class struggle in Africa and examined anti-colonial struggles across the continent. In its pages appeared statements of solidarity with Cuba, Algeria, and Black America, and contributions from Amilcar Cabral, Fidel Castro, and Che Guevera. When W.E.B. Du Bois passed away in 1963, an issue appeared in his honor.

For the US State Department, The Spark represented a dangerous tendency within Nkrumah’s Ghana.  In January, 1964 the US Central Intelligence Agency issued a classified report titled “The Leftward Trend in Ghana .” The report noted that the US Embassy in Ghana had characterized a recent speech of Nkrumah’s “as perhaps his most extreme anticapitalist and revolutionary performance.” The speech, according to the CIA, “included [Nkrumah’s] first known specific use of such phrases as ‘class interests’ and ‘class politics,’” it criticized the US “as the citadel of reactionary opposition to progressive forces everywhere,” and it aligned Ghana with “the international ‘socialist’ fraternity.” “Subsequently,” the report continued, “[Nkrumah]  has increasingly tended to mouth the Communist-derived jargon appearing continually in The Spark.”

In their summary of the situation in Ghana, the CIA concluded that, “Barring a successful coup against his regime, it will probably be increasingly difficult for the West to maintain an effective presence in Ghana.”

Nkrumah was overthrown by a CIA-backed military on February 24, 1966.

Below we reprint an article from The Spark titled “Currency Crisis in the West.” Its author is Hsiang Chung, a Chinese economist of whom, we admit, we know little more than his name. Even so, the essay has a crystalline analysis of how monetary policy has been used as a tool of imperial and neocolonial rule. Moreover, in charting the historical reasons for the rise of the dollar’s global supremacy in the twentieth century, it establishes the historical conditions precipitating the dollar’s imminent twenty-first century fall. This is being republished for both historical perspective and relative analysis to the current state of the US dollar. It is important to note that much has changed since this was written in 1965, most notably the varying methods of imperialism/colonialism that have developed by the US and West, the fall of the USSR, and the abandoning the gold standard in 1971.

***

Hsiang Chung, “Currency Crisis in the West,” The Spark: A Socialist Weekly of the African Revolution, January 29, 1965.

The imperialist scramble for world domination is usually marked by a struggle for financial supremacy, for monetary policy is one of the heavy weapons of the imperialist countries in their drive, for expansion--a weapon they use to strangle their rivals and extend their spheres of influence.

In the struggle for monetary supremacy, an imperialist country invariably uses its political and economic power to establish a monetary bloc in which its own currency is made to take a leading position while the currencies of its colonies and dependencies as well as other states associated with it are reduced to a subordinate status.

It has to link to currencies of the monetary bloc members with its own, and at the same time to make them keep their gold and foreign exchange reserves in its central bank to be used by them for “unlimited buying and selling” on foreign exchange market at fixed rates. Consequently, its commodity in capital exports will not have to suffer from the fluctuation of the currency of the monetary bloc members and it will not have to pay more for raw material imports because of the devaluation of its own currency.

Moreover, since the gold and foreign exchange reserves of its monetary bloc members are deposited in its own central exploitation, and this leads to the formation of a financial centre within its own sphere of influence over which it is able to establish its financial supremacy. That is why currency warfare in capitalist international finance is an important means in the imperialist scramble for markets, outlets, for investment and sources for raw materials, as well as an indispensable factor in their constant redivision of the capital of this world.

The Monetary System Crisis Sharpened

The deepening of the general crisis of capitalism, especially the emergence of the crisis in the capitalist monetary system, has intensified the monetary warfare among the imperialist powers. As a result of the world economic crisis of 1929–33, normal financial relations among the capitalist countries were disrupted as never before; the gold standard completely collapsed, and the monetary system of the capitalist countries became chronically unstable.

From that time onwards, in their efforts to maintain currency stability, and to ward off the crisis in the monetary system, monopoly capitalist groups in the imperialist countries were compelled to resort to government intervention on a larger scale than before and adopt such measures in the field of international finance as  moratoria on foreign debts currency depreciation, foreign exchange  restrictions and control etc., in order to consolidate their position in the better struggle for markets and spheres of influence. However, all the steps, which were designed to shift the crisis onto others failed to extricate the imperialists from their plight, but instead made the struggle still sharper and more complicated.

Following the end of World War II, as a result of the formation of the socialist camp and the upsurge of the national liberation movement the areas dominated or exploited by the imperialist countries have become smaller and smaller. In this predicament, the inter-imperialist struggle for markets and spheres of influence has become more acute and currency has been used on a still larger scale as an instrument in defeating their adversaries. Not only have they subjected the currencies of their colonies and dependencies to their own as in the past; they have also exerted great efforts to make their own currency the dominant one within the shrinking imperialist camp. At the same time, the deepening of the general crisis of capitalism has been accomplished by an intensified crisis in the monetary system, and the imperialist countries have been forced to take further steps to intervene in various forms in the field of international finance. However, whenever they are taken by the strong to bully the weak or the weak to counteract an adversary’s pressure, the steps are bound to aggravate the imperialist monetary struggle, and make it more severe than was the case before World War II.

Domination vs Independence

The characteristic of postwar inter-imperialist relations is that US imperialism has increasingly endeavored to consolidate and extend its dominant position while the other imperialist powers refused to reconcile themselves to US control from which they have done all they can to free themselves. This rivalry between US imperialism and the other imperialist powers struggle between domination and independence— is also reflected in capitalist, world finance.

During World War II, US imperialism amassed enormous wealth and greatly expanded  its productive capacity and export trade. In the early post-war years, Washington took advantage of the temporary disappearances of three fascist countries, Germany, Italy, and Japan from the capitalist world arena of competition and of the heavy destruction suffered by the two old imperialist powers, Britain and France; it went all out for economic expansion abroad and consequently had a huge surplus in its balance of international payments and piled up vast gold reserves. In 1938 the US gold reserves amounted to $14,594 million or 56.1 per cent of the gold reserves of the capitalist world. In 1948, they jumped to $24,399 million, or 70.3 per cent of the capitalist world’s total. During this period, the other capitalist countries incurred huge deficits in their international accounts with the United States, resulting in a serious “dollar shortage” and massive gold outflows to the United States.

In the decade between 1938 and 1948, the gold reserves of Britain, the sterling area and the West European countries dropped from $9,511 million to $5,707 million, and their share of the capitalist world's gold reserves fell from 36.6 per cent to 16.4 per cent. At that time the disruption of domestic production, the heavy increases in budgetary deficits, and the impact of deficits in the payment of international payments brought about serious currency depreciation in most of the capitalist countries except the United States. Under the circumstances, the governments of these countries were constrained to their foreign exchange restrictions and controls to achieve, and to stabilize the value of their currencies by artificial means. The result was that they’re currencies became “soft”, i.e., could not be freely converted into other foreign currencies, they were in no position to compete with the dollar, a hard currency which was freely convertible.

Shift in Economic Power

This shift in economic power was much to the advantage of US imperialism in its greedy bid for world leadership. It has made every effort to form a big dollar bloc to dovetail plans to build an unprecedentedly big empire in the world. In addition to adopting political, military, economic and other measures, US imperialism, in order to fulfill this grandiose plan, must take the following steps in the monetary field. On the one hand, it needs to consolidate the external value of the dollar and maintain its “free convertibility” so that fixed exchange rate between the dollar and other currencies can be preserved, and the dollar can have the same status as gold in the capitalist world's current reserves.

This would provide favourable conditions for New York to become the capitalist world’s sole international financial centre.

On the other measures both at home, and in the currency blocs, they control in order to check economic penetration by their competitors. US imperialism therefore found it necessary to do the utmost to intervene in their international financial policies and foreign exchange systems, thus enabling it to maintain normal trade relations with them, and paying the way for its further economic expansion.

In effect, this US imperialist rapid plan is nothing but a refurnished version of the currency blocs established by Britain, France, and other old imperialist powers in their colonies and spheres of influence. But in order to ward off the strong opposition of other imperialists, the United States had to resort to more covert and slyer tactics in pushing forward this plan in the capitalist world.

Price of Gold Kept Down

In the first place, relying on its substantial gold reserves, US imperialism artificially kept down the price of gold in its dealings with other governments or their central banks. It is common knowledge that as early as 1934 the US government prescribed the external value of the dollar, i.e., the parity between the dollar and gold, at $35 an ounce. But since the latter part of the 1930s and particularly since World War II, the value of the dollar has been frequently devalued internally because of inflation. In 1948 the purchasing power of the dollar was only 57.8 per cent of what it was in 1939. In 1963 it further dropped to 44 per cent. In order to stabilize the external value of the dollar by artificial means, the U.S. government, irrespective of the frequent devaluation of the dollar internally, has always exchanged it for gold at the official rate of $35 percent ounce in its dealings with other countries. And so the external value of the dollar has long been out of tune with the extent of its internal devaluation while the price of gold has been greatly kept down.

Other capitalist countries were then suffering from a widespread “dollar shortage” and they virtually had very little or no dollars with which to buy US gold. Therefore, keeping the price of gold down actually meant compelling other capitalist countries to sell gold cheaply to the United States in order to make good their dollar deficits. This increased the surplus in the US balance of international payments, and gave it the opportunity to rake in gold at a low price made it difficult for the latter to relieve their “dollar shortage”. And this also became a pressure under which they had to accept the Marshall plan and other types of “aid,” and thus subject themselves to enslavement by US imperialism.

Another major aim of US imperialism in keeping down the price of gold is to irrigate the same role as gold to the dollar, whose external value was artificially stabilized, and serving as a world currency. Since the currencies of most other capitalist countries were unstable and their foreign exchange reserves, along with, and in preference to pound sterling. This facilitated US imperialism control of their currencies in one way or another, and it’s becoming the biggest International exploiter in capitalist world finance.

Washington’s Building Tactics

In the second place, in the early post-war years, Washington spread such false ideas as “the elimination of foreign exchange control,” “the stabilization of exchange rates,” and “avoidance of competitive currency depreciation.” These were designed to compel other countries to abandon their foreign exchange restrictions and controls, and relatively stabilize their exchange rates in a way advantageous to the United States. It pushed this policy in order to ensure that the proceeds of America commodity exports and the remittance to the United States of profits from overseas investment may be protected from other countries’ foreign exchange restrictions.

It is true that US imperialism, at least on the surface, has not imposed downright control over the currencies of its “allies.” In reality, however, it did all it could to achieve this purpose by bullying tactics and cajolement. As mentioned above, Washington compelled the recipients of its “aid“ to accept such terms as the introduction of free convertibility within a certain period of time and the scrapping of their foreign exchange controls and restrictions.

A notable example of this took place when Britain received a big US loan amounting to $3,750 million in 1945 and two years later was compelled to introduce free convertibility for the pound sterling, which lasted for only five weeks. Of great importance is the fact that the International Monetary Fund set up in the early postwar years— a major instrument of US imperialism in the international monetary field— dangled the bait of short term loans before member states in order to induce them to accept conditions involving the loss of national sovereignty. These included the abolition of foreign exchange, controls and restrictions, the definition of the foreign exchange value of a currency in terms of the dollar containing a specific weight of gold and the obligation to obtain the funds agreement to specific changes in foreign exchange rates.

Struggle Between Dollar and Pound

All these measures were naturally resented by other imperialist powers. However, West Germany and Japan were then dominated by Washington, and it was on the basis of formulas prepared by the US government that the exchange rates for the West German mark and the Japanese yen were established. Inflation of considerably serious proportions and a rapid deterioration in the balance of international payments overtook France and Italy; the franc and the lira were frequently devalued; it was difficult for them to compete with the dollar. Only the pound sterling could initiate limited counter- offensives against it. Although Britain’s power has declined since World War II, it still has the backing of the sterling area in international finance, the pound remains the reserve currency of sterling area countries and a number of other capitalist countries in the world network of overseas banks, which was set up by Britain in the last century, retains considerable influence. In these circumstances, the struggle between the dollar and the pound was naturally the most prominent one in the imperialist currency warfare.

The comprehensive system of foreign exchange restrictions and control set up by Britain in the sterling area was a powerful fulcrum strengthening British imperialist exploitation of the commonwealth countries and checking US economic penetration. And it was a serious handicap to US imperialist expansion in the capitalist world.

In the first few years since World War II, by means of loans, “aid” and pressure by different US controlled international organizations, Washington devised every possible means to compel Britain to open the door to the sterling area, and restore the free convertibility of the pound so as to pave the way for the control of the whole sterling area, including Britain itself. For a time British imperialism refused to take orders from Washington and adopted delaying tactics. But in 1949 a pound was devalued by 30.5 per cent against the dollar, followed by a corresponding currency to valuation by 35 other capitalist countries–to a large extent the result of pressure from Washington.

Nevertheless, Britain and other imperialist powers, wherever possible, dealt Washington’s high-handed policy, a rebuff. The sterling area and the currency blocs of other imperialist countries—such as the franc bloc—clung stubbornly to their spheres of influence. Moreover, on the question of the price of gold, because gold produced in the sterling area makes up more than 70 per cent of the total annual production of the capitalist world, Britain and South Africa have more than once battled for a rise in the gold price as a countermeasure to US control. They eventually succeeded in wrestling some concessions from Washington and were permitted to sell their gold for industrial purposes on the free market at a higher price than the official US price of $35 per ounce. The International Monetary Fund's demand for the abolition of foreign exchange controls, and for the institution of a fixed parity between the dollar and other currencies were ignored by many countries. France and Italy, for instance, did not institute fixed exchange rates until the mid-1950s. This shows that, despite Washington’s desperate efforts to put the capitalist world's monetary system under its control, other imperialist powers have been unwilling to accept permanent subordination, they have exerted every effort to free themselves from the claws of the dollar. With the shift in the balance of forces between the United States and other imperialist powers, both Washington’s efforts at domination in the monetary field, and the other imperialist’s resistance are growing more intense.

No More Dollar Dominance

With the advent of the 1950s and the aggravation of the uneven development of capitalism, new changes have taken place in the balance of forces among the imperialist countries. Propped up by the United States, West Germany, Italy, and Japan, have recovered from their position as defeated countries. The power of France has steadily increased, enabling it gradually to speak on equal terms with the United States. Although it keeps getting weaker, Britain too has no desire to be at the mercy of Washington. US dominance, which was attained during and immediately after World War II, has begun to falter.  

This shift in the balance of forces which is unfavorable to US imperialism is also reflected in international finance. After the war of aggression against Korea broke out in 1950, deficits began to appear in the US balance of payments and outflow of gold started, because its policies of war and aggression made it increasingly difficult for its trade surplus and proceeds from overseas investment to meet its huge military expenditures, foreign “aid” commitments and private capital export.

A similar situation recurred during US economic crisis of 1953–54. After 1956, taking advantage of the Anglo-French aggression against Egypt, the United States sold a large amount of oil and cotton to Western Europe, and this helped to bring about a turn for the better in the US balance of payments. However, from 1950 to 1957, the US gold flow to other countries amounted to $1,700 million. Added to this were mounting short term debts, and the annual rate of deficit in its balance of payments averaged about $1,200 million. During the same period the gold reserves of other capitalist countries increased by $3,700 million and their dollar reserves by $6,400 million. By the 1950s, the widespread “dollar shortage” of the early posts were years had virtually become a thing of the past.

A New State

After 1958, a new state was reached in the struggle between the United States and other imperialist powers to strengthen their respective positions in world finance. On the one hand, as a result of its intensified policies of war and aggression, US imperialism had to spend on an average more than $10,000 million a year for its overseas military expenditures, foreign “aid” and private capital export. This led to an increase in the serious dollar crisis, which was manifested in the form of balance of payment deficits, and of gold outflows. The dollar crisis and the recurrent economic crisis erupted either simultaneously or alternately.

Whatever methods it uses, it is impossible for US imperialism to prevent a continual deterioration in the position of the dollar. On the other hand, with the rapid growth in their political and economic power, the tremendous improvement in the balance of payment, and the big increase in their gold reserves, other major capitalist countries, and particularly several of the Common Market Six with France and West Germany as their nucleus, were able greatly to strengthen their currencies on the international finance market. From 1958 to 1962 the gold flowing from the United States to other countries totaled $6,800 million. These rises in the short term debts owed to other countries made for an average annual rate of deficits of about $3,000 million from 1950 to 1957. At the same time, the increase in the gold reserves of other capitalist countries amounted to $8,700 million. If increases in foreign exchange holdings are added to this the total increase in their gold and foreign exchange reserves during the period was $14,500 million. Most of these increases went to West European countries. France’s increases amounted to $3,400 million, Italy’s $2,200 million, and West Germany’s $1700 million. Next came Britain, the Netherlands and Belgium.

Dollar Crisis— Incurable Disease

By 1963, the incurable disease of the dollar crisis remained serious. The deficit in the US balance of payments in that year still stood at $3,000 million. At the end of December, its gold and foreign exchange reserves totaled $32,179 million, of which gold accounted for $19,790.million, or 47% of the capitalist world's total. Thus US gold reserves are far below their pre-war level while those of the West European countries are far above it.

A Fraternal Hand: The American Tradition of Socialist Democracy and Chinese Socialism

By Carlos Garrido

Republished from the Midwestern Marx Institute.

​There is a glaring paradox at the core of the American project. On the one hand, it proclaims its national self-determination with the values of life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, right to revolution, and to a government of, by, and for the people. On the other hand, the rights to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness have never been guaranteed for anyone but the white, male, capitalist class (which is slowly being racially and sexually diversified). The leading thinkers of the American project, from Jefferson to Martin Luther King Jr., have warned about the corrupting influence the interests of capital can play in preventing the concretization of these rights.

Thomas Jefferson, for instance, understood that the ‘enormous inequality’ in property relations was the cause of the ‘misery [of] the bulk of mankind,’ and that, as Herbert Aptheker notes, this concentration of capital was ‘the central threat to democratic rights.’[1] In noticing how the interest of capital can turn a government of, by, and for the people into a government of, by, and for big business, Jefferson would go on to draw a distinction between the democratic man and the aristocratic man. The former, he argued, trusts the people’s will, the latter distrusts it and turns towards big business elitism. Jefferson believed the aristocratic man, if he came to dominate the American government, would undermine the ideals of the 1776 anti-colonial revolution. The first generation of home-grown socialists, flowering in the 1820s and 1830s, saw Jefferson’s prediction actualize itself in the embryonic industrialization period of the US. In the face of growing inequalities and disparities, thinkers like Langdon Byllesby, Cornelius Blatchley, William Maclure, Thomas Skidmore and others, developed the ideals of the declaration of independence into socialism, what they considered to be its practical and logical conclusion.

Throughout the ages, generations of American socialists have appealed to the declaration of independence to argue for socialism in a way that connects with the American people’s common sense. Leading historians and theoreticians of the American socialist tradition, thinkers like Staughton Lynd, Herbert Aptheker, W.E.B. Dubois, Eugene Debs, William Z. Foster and others, have elaborated on the subject, noting that regardless of the limitations encountered in the founding of the American experiment, it was a historically progressive event, whose spirit should be carried forth today by socialists and communists.

As the US is increasing tensions against China, leading to what many consider a ‘new cold war,’ it is important to look back at the values the American people accept, to the thinkers the American people consider their own, and to consider how different China’s practices – which our ruling class and its media constantly estrange to the American public – are from the ideals which founded our country. What we will find, I believe, is the values prioritized by the leading thinkers of the American experiment, from Jefferson to Dewey to Martin Luther King Jr., are best embodied today in Chinese socialism. This truth, in my view, should be brought forth to the American people. No longer should their consent continue to be manufactured to fight against peoples whose practices align with our ideals more than those we encounter in our own country.

John Dewey (1859-1952), known as ‘America’s philosopher of democracy,’ wrote that we must stop thinking about democracy as something ‘institutional and external;’ instead, we should treat democracy as a ‘way of life,’ one governed by the ‘belief in the common man.’[2] For Dewey, genuine democracy is a consistent practice; it has less to do with showing up to a poll every two to four years and more to do with the ability of common people – what in Spanish we call el pueblo – to steadily exert their collective power over the affairs of everyday life. Dewey understood that this genuine form of democracy was largely inexistent in the US, where the democratic spirit is reduced to voting every four years in political elections which, as he argued, function more as a ‘shadow cast on society by big business.’[3]

In line with the long tradition of home-grown American socialists, Dewey would conclude that the ideals of the founders – especially the radical flank commonly known as the ‘dissenters’ – would be realized ‘only as control of the means of production and distribution is taken out of the hands of individuals who exercise powers created socially for narrow individual interests.’[4] In the context of the US, Dewey held that this required ‘a radical change in economic institutions and the political arrangements based on them.’ ‘These changes,’ said Dewey, ‘are necessary in order that social control of forces and agencies socially created may accrue to the liberation of all individuals associated together in the great undertaking of building a life that expresses and promotes human liberty.’[5] For Dewey, in short, only socialism could make actual the radical, and for its time, deeply democratic, spirit of the declaration of independence.

A similar sentiment can be found in Martin Luther King Jr., the only American to have his own holiday (every third Monday of January). In one of his last sermons, whilst reflecting on the rights upheld in the declaration of independence, King would note that ‘if a man doesn’t have a job or an income, he has neither life, nor liberty, nor the possibility for the pursuit of happiness. He merely exists.’ America, for King, had desperately failed to fulfill its promise, not just for the black souls it kept enchained for more than two centuries, but for all poor and working people who continued to ‘perish on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.’[6] This division was representative of what King called the ‘two Americas,’ the America of the poor working majority and the America of the few owners of big capital.[7]

Like Dives in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, King held that ‘if America does not use her vast resources of wealth to end poverty and make it possible for all of God’s children to have the basic necessities of life, she, too, will go to hell.’[8] The stranglehold monopoly capital has over the American state turned the American dream – that is, the individual’s quest for life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness in harmony with the human community – into the American nightmare. No number of victories in the sphere of civil rights could change, in King’s view, the fundamentally polarizing character of the system. As King would argue years after the victories of the civil rights movement: ‘I have found out that all that I have been doing in trying to correct this system in America has been in vain… I am trying to get at the roots of it to see just what ought to be done… The whole thing will have to be done away with.’[9] For all its claims of being a beacon of democracy, for King, as Cornel West argues, ‘America’s two main political parties, each beholden to big money, offer merely alternative visions of oligarchic rule.’[10] Like Dewey and many others within the tradition of American socialism, King considered the values of the declaration of independence to only be universally applicable if America is able to move beyond the capitalist mode of life.

The American ruling class ignores and/or sanitizes this tradition of home-grown socialism which permeates even through the most universally admired of American figures. It wishes to hide the working class’s and oppressed people’s history of struggle in our country, for only in doing so can it perpetuate the McCarthyite lie that socialism and the values the American people accept are wholly incompatible. The truth is that, on the contrary, it is on the basis of the values the American people already accept that American socialism has developed. By showing the American people the positive role socialism has played in their national past – and how these struggles have seen themselves as continuations of the revolutionary tradition of 1776 –  the similarities in Chinese socialist construction and this unique tradition of American socialism become apparent. 

Martin Luther King Jr., for instance, found it condemnable to sustain poverty amidst material abundance; the rights to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness require the abolition of poverty for their genuine fulfillment. In just 40 years, Chinese socialism has been able to lift more than 800 million people out of poverty, abolishing that horrendous condition the capitalist mode of life makes necessary for the vast majority of people. While building a poverty-free world with common prosperity, China has been able to realize a condition for its people which looks a lot more like what the leading American minds (like Dr. King) stood for than what can be found in America itself.

As we approach the 55th anniversary of King’s assassination (which the FBI helped orchestrate), we should ask: has America – which celebrates King once a year – heeded to King’s concern for poverty and the condition of the working class? The answer is a resolute No! In no state of the US, for instance, is the federal minimum wage ($7.25) enough to survive; even if it is raised to $15 – as the democratic socialists and other progressives have called for – the minimum wage would still not be enough for a working class family to survive anywhere in the country. With stagnant wages and inflation at a 40 year high, almost 60% of Americans are currently living paycheck to paycheck. Many of these people are on the brinks of joining the 600,000 homeless people wandering around in a country with more than 17 million empty homes. It is not surprising, in a country where there are 33 times more empty homes than homeless people, that 34 million people, including one in eight children, experience hunger while 30-40% of the U.S.’s food supply (40 million tons of food) is wasted every year. For all the tokenization of King we find in America’s political circus, we can say that after 55 years since his state-sanctioned death, America has still not listened, and much less realized, the demands of Dr. King. However, China has!

Likewise, Dewey, perhaps the most prominent philosopher America has produced, felt that to carry forth today the democratic creed of the declaration of independence, we must deepen our understanding and practice of democracy. A mode of life where the same small group of monopolists owns most of the property, controls most of the media, and decides who gets elected and what they do when elected, can hardly be called democratic. For Dewey, we are not living up to the democratic creed if ‘democracy’ only matters every two to four years when elections come about and working people are bombarded with reasons why they should vote for one puppet of the ruling class over another. Dewey would wholeheartedly agree with Xi Jinping in asserting that ‘democracy is not an ornament to be used for decoration; it is to be used to solve the problems that the people want to solve.’ As Xi has noted,​

If the people are awakened only at the time of voting and go into dormancy afterward; if the people only listen to smashing slogans during election campaigns but have no say afterward; if the people are only favored during canvassing but are left out after the election, such a democracy is not a true democracy.

​One could see words like these coming out of the mouths of a John Dewey or a Martin Luther King Jr. These ideas governing China’s socialist whole-process people’s democracy should seem anything but foreign to Americans – it is what our leading democratic theorists hoped the US system would develop into. If Americans are faithful to the democratic creed of the declaration of independence, and to the leading theorists of our country who’ve developed these into notions of socialist democracy with American characteristics, then we should be praising China for how incredibly comprehensive their socialist democracy (which is still humbly considered a work-in-progress) is. Far from thinking about democracy in the reductive, election-only sense, China’s system of socialist democracy is embedded in ‘seven integrated structures or institutional forms (体制tizhi): electoral democracy; consultative democracy; grassroots democracy; minority nationalities policy; rule of law; human rights; and leadership of the Communist Party.’ A comprehensive study of this whole-process people’s democracy would lead any unbiased researcher to the conclusion Roland Boer has (along with a plethora of Chinese scholars) arrived at: namely, that ‘China’s socialist democratic system is already quite mature and superior to any other democratic system.’
​
Not only does the US lack this seven-tiered democratic system, but even in the one realm it does have, namely, electoral democracy, the results it produces could hardly be called ‘democratic.’ For more than a decade studies from bourgeois institutions have themselves confirmed what Marxists have known since the middle of the 19th century, namely, that the essence of capitalist ‘democracy’ is ‘democracy for an insignificant minority –  democracy for the rich.’[11] The U.S., which spreads its blood soaked hands around the world plundering in the name of democracy, has been outed as a place where the dēmos (common people) do anything but rule (kratos). As a Princeton study headed by Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page shows,

In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule—at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagree with economic elites or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.[12]

​In societies divided by class antagonisms we can never talk about ‘pure democracy,’ or abstract democracy in general; we must always ask - as Lenin did - ‘democracy for which class’?[13] The ‘democracy’ and ‘democratic freedoms’ of capitalist to exploit and oppress will always be detrimental to working and oppressed peoples. Only an all-people’s democracy (a working and popular classes democratic-dictatorship) can be genuinely democratic, for it is the only time ‘power’ (kratos) is actually in the hands of ‘common people’ (demos).
​
To claim – as American capitalists, their puppet politicians, and their lapdog media does – that the US is a ‘beacon of democracy,’ and China an ‘authoritarian one-party system,’ is to hold on to a delusional topsy turvy view of reality. Only by holding explicitly the idea of democracy as democracy for the rich – an oxymoronic truth which they must continue to conceal from the American public – would any part of their assessment contain truth. If democracy is considered from the standpoint of the capitalist’s ability to arbitrarily exert their will on society at the expense of working people and the planet, then, of course, the US is a beacon of this form of so-called ‘democracy,’ and China an ‘authoritarian’ regime. If instead, democracy is considered from the standpoint of common people’s ability to exert their power successfully over everyday affairs, that is, if democracy is understood in the people-centered form it etymologically stands for, and in the way leading American thinkers like Jefferson, Dewey, and Dr. King understood it, then it would be indubitable that China is far more democratic than the US (and any other liberal-bourgeois ‘democracy’).

As the US increases its anti-China rhetoric and actions – a symptom of its empire’s moribund stage – it becomes an imperative for all sane people to counter the propaganda setting the stage for, at best, a new cold war, and at worst, a third world-war. As Julian Assange – whose treatment reminds us everyday of how much the West cherishes its so called ‘individual rights’ to speech and press – once eloquently stated: ‘if wars can be started by lies, peace can be started by truth.’

It is the duty of American communists, socialists, and progressives, to show the American people the truth; to show them that China is not the enemy of the American people, that the real enemy of the American people are those who would like us to see China as an enemy. It is not China who has our country surrounded by military bases. It is not China who is funding and inciting separatist movements in our autonomous regions. It is not China who is slandering us with baseless accusations of the most heinous crimes of genocide humanity can imagine. It is not China who is creating international military alliances a la global NATO to militarily threaten us. It is the US empire who is doing this to China. The only interests which China threatens are those of our finance capitalists, who have spent the last century impoverishing both our people at home and our brothers and sisters in the global south. China is a friend of the American working men and women; just like it is a friend of the African peoples, and the peoples in the Middle East and in Latin America, whose win-win, mutually beneficial relations in international trade with China have afforded them the ability to turn away from predatory neoliberal debt-trapping loans which have been systematically forced on them for half a century by the capitalist West.

In sum – to be faithful to the democratic creed of the declaration of independence and of the greatest minds our country has produced, we must realize today that China is not our enemy; instead, it is the place wherein the ideals which guide this democratic creed are best embodied. Instead of buying into the easily confuted lies of Western pundits, who hope we are foolish enough to accept them and dance to the drums of a war to sustain Western capitalist-imperialist hegemony, we must learn from China and work together to build a peaceful, cooperative, and ecological shared future for mankind.

References
​
[1] Herbert Aptheker, The American Revolution: 1763-1783 (New York: International Publishers, 1960), 105.

[2] John Dewey, The Collected Works of John Dewey, 1882-1953, ed. by Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967-1990), LW 14:228.

[3] Dewey, LW 6:163.

[4] Dewey, LW 11:28.

[5] Dewey, LW 11:28.

[6] Martin Luther King Jr, The Radical King, ed. and introduced by Cornel West (Boston: Beacon Press, 2015), 246- 247. 248.

[7] King Jr, The Radical King, 236.

[8] King Jr, The Radical King, 248.

[9] King Jr, The Radical King, xi.

[10] King Jr, The Radical King, xiii.

[11] V. I. Lenin, Collected Works Vol. 26 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977) 465. 

[12] Gilens, M., & Page, B. (2014). Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens. Perspectives on Politics, 12(3), 564-581. doi:10.1017/S1537592714001595
​
[13] V. I. Lenin, Collected Works Vol. 28 (Moscow: Progress Publishers,1974), 249.

Carlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American PhD student and instructor in philosophy at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale (with an M.A. in philosophy from the same institution). His research focuses include Marxism, Hegel, early 19th century American socialism, and socialism with Chinese characteristics. He is an editor in Midwestern Marx Institute for Marxist Theory and Political Analysis and in the Journal of American Socialist Studies. Carlos edited and introduced Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview: An Anthology of Classical Marxist Texts on Dialectical Materialism (Midwestern Marx Publishing Press, 2022). 

Our Freedoms Shrink as Our Military Expands

By Brad Wolf

Republished from Counterpunch.

The Merchants of Death even own our sidewalks. That’s what we were told when we arrived at Raytheon Technologies in Arlington, Virginia, on Valentine’s Day, February 14th, to issue a “Contempt Citation” for Raytheon’s failure to comply with a subpoena issued last November by the Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal, a People’s Tribunal scheduled for November of 2023.

Raytheon knew we were coming. The police were waiting and would not permit us to enter the enormous building even though other businesses and a public restaurant resided inside. “You’re not allowed in,” the police said. “The owner of the building said no to you.” Others were free to enter for lunch or to conduct business. The officers were polite. Respectful. “We are only doing our job,” they said, seeming more like a hired corporate police force than a public police force.

“And you cannot remain on the sidewalk,” the police said. We responded that it was a public sidewalk. “Not anymore,” the police said. “Raytheon bought the sidewalk. And the sidewalk across the street.” When asked how a private corporation can buy a public sidewalk, the officers shrugged not knowing the answer. “You can move down there,” they said, pointing to a corner across the busy street.

We asked to see a deed proving this bizarre acquisition of public property. Lo and behold, the police dutifully produced a deed stamped by the recorder of deeds office indicating Raytheon did in fact own the sidewalk all the way to the street.

Using US tax dollars, including the dollars of those of us who stood there, Raytheon bought up the very freedom they claim they’re building weapons to defend. Freedom of speech and assembly is drastically reduced when corporations as powerful as Raytheon control the halls of Congress, the Pentagon, the White House, and our corporate media.

In fact, in the belly of the beast of the Raytheon building was the corporate media itself, an ABC television affiliate which refused to talk to us last November. When we had approached an ABC spokesman outside, they refused to admit they worked for ABC despite wearing ABC attire. From corporate wars to corporate police to corporate media, all in one monstrous, taxpayer-funded building.

In 2023, approximately $858 billion will be taken from the paychecks of US citizens to help squelch our most fundamental Constitutional rights of privacy and assembly.

Across the street from Raytheon, we unfurled our banners and carried our signs. We held Raytheon in contempt for refusing to comply to a subpoena issued by the people of the world. We noted their shame of their own corporate behavior such that they purchased police and public sidewalks to keep public scrutiny away.

A young woman approached, noticing our signs. She was an Afghan refugee who had been there during the invasion. She and her family had suffered immensely from the US bombing. Her father barely made it out alive. She was crying as she spoke. Off to the side, a man in a suit carefully took pictures of each of us. We were photographed everywhere we went this Valentine’s Day.

To evidence Raytheon’s complicity in war crimes, we read the names of the 34 victims—26 of them schoolboys—killed in the horrific 2018 bombing of a school bus in Yemen. The bomb, a 500-pound Paveway laser-guided bomb was made by Lockheed Martin while Raytheon was responsible for the infrared system which targeted the bus.

Under the careful eye of our National Security State, we traveled to the Pentagon to deliver a subpoena compelling Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to testify before the Tribunal. Mr. Austin, before being Secretary of Defense was, of course, on the Board of Directors at Raytheon. This, after retiring from the military.

Mr. Austin had cashed in at Raytheon and was now in the catbird seat at the Pentagon sending billion-dollar contracts to his former employer. He is certain to cash in a second time when he leaves his current office. And so, we had a subpoena asking Secretary Austin to speak about these allegations epitomizing the “Revolving Door” between the military, defense contractors, and public office.

A dozen police waited. They counted the number in our group making hand signals between themselves. “You’ve just come from the Raytheon building,” they said to me. “And you plan on spending one hour here. And then you’re going to the Hyatt Hotel for a protest.” I asked how they knew that, especially the information about the Hyatt Hotel since that had not been made public, and the police officer smiled and said, “We have our ways.”

We were told we could protest in a small, fenced-in grassy area away from the metro stop, out of sight from most. We, the people, had been corralled behind a fence in a small grassy patch to peacefully exercise our freedom of speech as the billion-dollar behemoth of war and death, surveillance and repression, stood before us.

Similar actions of subpoena delivery had been carried out the same day in San Diego, California; Asheville, North Carolina; and New York City. Surveillance and corporate resistance had occurred at each location.

Valentine’s Day, this day meant for the opening of hearts, was one of recognizing the Orwellian state in which we live, funded by our own dollars. Our military not only consumes our money, but our freedoms as well.

We again read the names of the dead, sang, some prayed. As we were leaving, one of the police officers cheerfully said, “It’s 64° outside and a beautiful day. Why not enjoy it and go play golf.” A frightfully common thought in such perilous times.

Brad Wolf is a former prosecutor, professor, and college dean.  He is the Executive Director of Peace Action Network of Lancaster and writes for numerous publications.

Biden/Harris: Climate Hypocrites

By Juan Gonzalez Valdivieso

Republished in modified form from The Michigan Specter.

On Thursday, January 12th, Vice President Kamala Harris visited the University of Michigan’s Rackham Auditorium for a conversation on her administration’s “commitment to tackle our climate crisis.” The event specifics were largely concealed in the runup, with the university not confirming the exact time and location until the day before. Local news even hesitated to cover the proceedings until after their conclusion.

When coverage did break, however, its tune was unmistakably celebratory. The Michigan Daily, for example, highlighted the vice president’s nods to intersectionality while discussing environmental justice. This point and others apparently resonated, as MLive reported that the audience “embraced… Harris’[s] call for urgent climate action.”

But that call rings utterly hollow upon closer examination. When it comes to environmental issues, the Biden-Harris administration’s hypocrisy seemingly knows no bounds. They claim to care about climate change, yet fund and diplomatically support Israel — an apartheid regime infamous for, among other things, gross acts of environmental devastation.

Students Allied for Freedom and Equality (SAFE) — the University of Michigan’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter — highlighted this contradiction. The group organized a large demonstration outside of Rackham during Harris’s event. Speeches and chants recounted Israel’s horrid environmental record.

The country has a monstrous ecological footprint, making it one of the most unsustainable places on Earth. Israel’s nominally high levels of development — which are themselves built on colonialism — appear rather unimpressive when adjusted for ecological overshoot. It ranks well within the bottom quintile of the Sustainable Development Index. Even the United Kingdom looks green by comparison.

These statistics, though jarring, still do not fully capture the extent of Israel’s environmental destruction. Israeli authorities have “uprooted hundreds of thousands of trees to date, including olive, citrus, date, and banana.” They also regularly pollute Palestinian resources. This takes multiple forms. Not only does Israel knowingly use pesticides that contaminate the soil and harm various bird species, but the country is also notorious for poisoning freshwater reserves. Israeli settlements in particular are prominent sites of toxic dumping. As if that wasn’t enough, Israel consistently denies Palestinians access to sources of renewable energy, preventing the people they colonize from developing more sustainably.

Despite these undeniable facts, Israel goes to great lengths to cultivate an environmentalist image for itself. Against all available evidence, Israeli state officials frequently tout the country’s commitment to green ideals. This “greenwashing” is nothing more than a shoddy attempt to obscure Israeli crimes.

During their demonstration, SAFE called attention to this brutal reality. Above all, the group’s direct action made one thing crystal clear: true environmental consciousness necessitates absolute opposition to Israeli apartheid. Any project that aims to green the world while presupposing the validity of Zionism is not only incoherent but doomed. Until political leaders like Kamala Harris take heed, the discountenanced masses will continue to air their grievances and foment unrest.

Juan Gonzalez Valdivieso is a Colombian organizer, writer, editor, and undergraduate studying music and history. He serves as Editor-in-Chief of The Michigan Specter, the University of Michigan’s premier socialist publication.

In Brazil's Class War, Will Lula Fight Back?

[Photo credit: Pedro Vilela/Getty Images]

By Bernardo Jurema

It’s not an exaggeration to say that, with Lula da Silva's razor-thin victory over incumbent President Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil dodged a bullet. As it has in other countries like Hungary or India, another term of far-right rule would have meant a more reactionary police and military, accelerated environmental destruction, further evisceration of individual rights, and a serious blow to the prospects for restoring democracy. It’s also fair to say that the world dodged a bullet, given the Bolsonaro government's fervent support for mining and other extractive activities that threaten the Amazon rainforest, a crucial link in the global climate system. 

Although the final result was very close, with Lula at 50.9% and Bolsonaro at 49.1%, Lula won by a large margin among the poorest segments of the population. The former president carried 977 of the 1,003 least developed cities. And a poll right before the second round of voting showed Lula winning the lowest income bracket with 61% to Bolsonaro’s 33%.

Lula shied away from presenting a clear economic program during the campaign, explaining that “we don’t discuss economic policies before winning the elections.” He made vague promises to increase public spending, with a focus on infrastructure and social welfare. His main pledges were directed toward the segment of society that supported him most heavily. Lula called for removing Brazil from the Hunger Map, increasing the minimum wage, boosting employment, and improving access to healthcare. 

The challenges Lula now faces cannot be overestimated. He will take office on January 1st, 2023 under circumstances remarkably different from those of twenty years ago when he began his first term. With a global recession on the horizon, interest rates are on the rise worldwide and Brazil's largest trading partner, China, has seen its demand for commodities subside. On top of that, the outgoing Bolsonaro leaves in his wake "shaky public finances, with debt projected to reach almost 89 per cent of gross domestic product next year, and an economy forecast to slow sharply."

How will Lula address this poor state of affairs? A cursory look at his economic transition team raises some red flags. The team was led by Vice President-elect Geraldo Alckmin, a former rival of Lula’s Workers' Party, who is socially conservative, economically liberal, pro-police, and anti-labor. He was handpicked by Lula in a clear nod to Faria Lima (Brazil’s Wall Street), signaling to the market and conservative voters that "there would be no radical economic measures." As Glenn Greenwald noted in 2018, "For the powerful, it is impossible to dream of a better guardian of the status quo [than Alckmin].” 

Other members of the transition team included André Lara Resende, who headed Brazil's public investment bank under the center-right government of Fernando Henrique Cardoso. Resende infamously played a key role in repressing the 1995 oil workers' strike. He served on the transition team alongside Pérsio Árida, a longtime economic advisor to Alckmin who, in 2018, supported then-President Michel Temer’s radical neoliberal government. Árida has publicly opposed taxing large fortunes, instead backing privatization and neoliberal reform efforts. 

These neoliberals were counterbalanced in the transition team by members of a  "developmentalist" profile, who favor state planning and expanding public spending. Guilherme Mello, a professor at the University of Campinas Institute of Economics (known as the main intellectual hub of dissent against neoliberal orthodoxy), was one of them. Mello has since been appointed as the new Secretary of Economic Policy at the Ministry of Finance. Another developmentalist member of the transition team was Nelson Barbosa, who served as Minister of Finance from the end of 2015 into the first months of 2016 under the Rousseff government.

Most members of the transition team will not go on to become ministers or even occupy government posts. But the team nonetheless helped set the terms of political possibility, offering a choice between neoliberalism and developmentalism. While such a choice is hardly auspicious in the face of the climate crisis, Brazilians can at least be cautiously optimistic that developmentalists in the administration will pursue redistributive policies. 

Thanks to an historic commodities boom, redistribution efforts during Lula’s first two terms in office passed with relatively little friction. But what if the extractivist pie stops growing? These days, any redistributionist policies will almost certainly require some degree of confrontation. From the transition team, there is no clear vision of what must be done in terms of economic policy. As Roberto Andrés, an urban planner at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, has rightly pointed out:

“There will hardly be a favorable economic scenario for a new stage of inclusion without class struggle. It will be necessary to take from the richest to raise the level of the poorest. A tax reform that corrects the unfair Brazilian taxation may be the first step. To do so, the new government will have to face the dissatisfaction of the privileged classes, who will lose income. If it fails to do so, it runs the risk of not delivering the improvements it promises to the poorest."

On December 9th, Lula announced Fernando Haddad as his finance minister. Haddad previously served as Lula’s Minister of Education from 2005 to 2012. In that role, Haddad’s signature achievement was the PROUNI program, which expanded scholarship opportunities for poor students. This policy is a microcosm of Haddad’s conciliatory politics. While PROUNI helped disadvantaged pupils access higher education, the influx of government money was a major boon to private universities. 

For his second stint in a Lula administration, Haddad looks set to continue placating private interests. Recent comments suggest he’s open to privatizing airports and highways, saying that public-private partnerships “have to get on the agenda.” Despite this pro-business rhetoric, the markets reacted negatively to Haddad’s appointment. As one financial analyst explained, worries abound that Haddad will work to expand public spending and increase the national debt. In an attempt to quell these fears, Haddad recounted his time as Mayor of São Paulo, during which he reduced municipal debt and strengthened the bond market.

The new finance minister’s agenda appears syncretic, embracing the full spectrum of beliefs found in the transition team, from mild center-left Keynesianism to hardcore neoliberalism. Similarly mixed are the plans of Bernard Appy, the new special secretary for tax reform. While Appy seeks commonsense adjustments to Brazil’s notoriously anti-poor tax structure, his fixation on taxing consumption promises to preserve substantial regressivity.

There are also concerns to be had about Gabriel Galípolo, who will serve as the executive secretary of Lula’s economic ministry. Previously a professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Galípolo is close with corporate interests. In the past year, he has served as a mediator between the Workers’ Party and big business.

Galípolo won’t be alone in representing the financial sector within Lula’s economic ministry. O Globo, a Brazilian daily newspaper, reports that “at least one more member of Faria Lima” will receive an appointment. A countervailing influence, however, takes the form of Aloízio Mercadante. A close Lula ally and noted center-left Keynesian, Mercadante has been nominated to chair the National Bank for Economic and Social Development, a key instrument for long-term financial planning.

In addition to internal ideological disputes, the incoming Lula administration also faces external constraints. As journalist Diego Viana explains, the government will be “under siege by the Right, who are ready to pounce at the first sign of weakness.” This leaves little room for radical experimentation. It is mostly likely, Viana says, that the administration will “insert some distributive policies within an essentially traditional political economy.”

Seeking compromise has been a Lula trademark ever since his days as a union organizer in the 1970s. With Brazil now at a crossroads, it remains to be seen how much longer this balancing act can persist. Given the combination of the climate crisis, the rise of the far Right, and a looming global recession, only bold action is commensurate with the urgency of the moment. But that not only goes against Lula’s realpolitik penchant; it also would not be consonant with the balance of power, whereby the reactionary forces of agribusiness and finance are very strong, while working-class social movements find themselves demobilized, demoralized, and under constant attack.

Such a context calls for measured and realistic goal-setting. According to Viana, “What Lula needs to deliver, first and foremost, is to not be succeeded by another fascist like Bolsonaro. In addition, the coalition that elected Lula expects stability in employment, prices, and exchange rates. That can be achieved. But is it enough to obtain the most important outcome?”

Maybe not. But, to paraphrase Peggy Lee, that's all there is for today. 

Bernardo Jurema is a Brazilian political scientist based in Germany. He earned his PhD from the Free University of Berlin and has worked for international organizations and think tanks throughout Latin America and Europe.

Revisiting Eric Williams' 'Capitalism and Slavery' and Dismantling the Accepted Narratives of History

By John Burns

Republished from Monthly Review.

When British capitalism depended on the West Indies,” Eric Williams wrote in 1938,

they ignored slavery or defended it. When British capitalism found the West Indian monopoly a nuisance, they destroyed West Indian slavery.

Williams had no time for sentimental views on the abolition of slavery. The history he dealt in was more honest, more straightforward, and unafraid to confront the accepted narratives, wherever these might be found.

And confront he did. His 1945 work, Capitalism and Slavery, systematically destroyed the traditional, rose-tinted views of abolition in the UK, replacing the cozy and humanitarian with the cold and pragmatic, substituting empathy and egalitarianism with hard economic necessity. In Williams’s view, the United Kingdom reaped the immense benefits of slavery—for centuries, in fact—and dropped the practice only when it no longer served its lucrative purpose. To look at the facts in any other light is simply a pretense.

There are voices of humanitarianism within Williams’s work. There are voices of empathy, of egalitarianism. There are people whose consciences are clear, who’s hearts are true, people who fought against slavery and the British Empire’s grim association with it. There are all of these things because there were all of these things in real life. These voices existed in Georgian and Victorian Britain, and so they are present in Williams’s writing. It’s just that these voices, these notes of discord, were lost in a far larger choir. Those making all the noise—those who truly influenced governors and policymakers—were motivated by very different factors, such as economics, geopolitics, imperialism, and capitalism.

Williams received his early education in his native Trinidad and Tobago, then still part of the British Empire. As a student, he was awarded a scholarship to Oxford University, where he excelled as a student and refined many of ideas that would characterize his later work. In 1956, Williams formed the People’s National Movement (PNM), becoming the Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago that same year, and eventually led the country to independence in 1962. He continued to serve at the helm of the new nation right up until his death in 1981 at age 69, in the nation’s capital, Port of Spain.

His achievements as a freedom-minded politician and global head of state may have overshadowed his earlier work in academia, but these two aspects of his career cannot be separated. His clear-eyed and honest approach to history, and to his own people’s place within that history, shaped the path he would take in the following decades. By deconstructing UK attitudes to the slave trade, and its eventual abolition, Williams laid the foundations for dismantling British imperialism in the Caribbean. His contribution to our historical understanding, and to nationhood for Trinidad and Tobago, are inextricably linked.

Williams’s ideas are not new anymore. Capitalism and Slavery was written largely as a doctoral thesis in 1938, refined and published in 1945, and has been discussed for decades since. But Penguin’s relaunch of the book in 2022 is the first mass-market edition of the work to hit the shelves in the United Kingdom. It has, deservedly, become a bestseller.

But why does this matter now? Because we are still in danger of falling under the sway of accepted truths and fantastical narratives of history. The book is a timely reminder that history is a science that helps us better understand the culture and politics of our own age—it is not sculptor’s clay, ready to be molded into whatever shape or form best suits our own blinkered, and often prejudiced, aesthetic vision. History does not owe us anything. It is not ours to manipulate or distort.

In June 2020, the statue of enslaver Edward Colston was toppled by demonstrators in Bristol—a city that appears again and again in the pages of Capitalism and Slavery, thanks largely to the profits from the trade in sugar and enslaved people that flowed across its docks. This trade was so lucrative that Bristol became the Crown’s “second city” until 1775. It was men like Colston who helped achieve this status—hence the statue.

Colston had been, but his work as a merchant, slave trader, and subsequently, a Member of Parliament is etched into the stone upon which Bristol stands. He was almost three centuries dead by time his bronze likeness was lobbed into the Bristol Channel, and he likely had very little opinion on the matter.

Fortunately for Colston, there were plenty of people in 2020 who did have opinions on the matter. History—their history—they cried, was being erased. The “armies of wokeness” and “politically correct groupthink” were destabilizing the proud heritage of the United Kingdom, they claimed. Sure, Colston traded in slaves, but it was a different time, and Colston was a great man—a true hero of the city and its people—not to mention the criminal damage, public order offenses, or the rights of the sculptor himself.

This is an example of historical distortion and manipulation at work, pursuing ends that are nothing short of racist. History has provided us with a figure—Colston—whose great wealth led to the rise of one of the UK’s most important cities. History has provided us with the facts regarding the sources of that wealth—the slave trade; the theft of dignity from our fellow human beings. History does not provide us a way with which we can separate the two—we cannot have one without confronting the other. Erecting a statue to Colston—celebrating Colston for his efforts and his achievements—means erecting a statue to the slave trade, too.

Nor does history provide us with icons who are beyond reproach. By searching history for unimpeachable icons—symbols of a particular set of values or ethics—we are destined only for failure. If, in response to our disappointment at finding flawed human beings in lieu of the pristine icons we seek, we resort to mythologizing and hagiography, we play a very dangerous game, indeed. In another of the twentieth century’s great social texts, Women, Race and Class, Angela Y. Davis examines the relationship between feminist heroes Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and the “women first, negroes last” policies of Democratic politician Henry Blackwell.

Blackwell spoke in support of women’s suffrage in the South, asserting that “4,000,000 Southern women will counterbalance 4,000,000 negro men and women”, retaining the “political supremacy of the white race.” Davis writes about the “implicit assent” of Anthony and Stanton to Blackwell’s racist logic as she explores the troubling and complex nature of women’s suffrage during its gestation.

Like Williams and his deconstruction of accepted beliefs regarding abolition, Davis’s analysis of racist attitudes in the women’s suffrage movement leads to an awkward confrontation. Stanton and Anthony made incredible contributions to the rights of women in the United States, and this should never be forgotten—but to turn a blind eye to the gross inequality that formed the backdrop to the movement is to deny this injustice altogether, leaving us with a flawed and incomplete understanding of our own history.

This approach—this honesty, this meticulousness—is found within the pages of Capitalism and Slavery, too. This is not simply an attack on the white establishment of the United Kingdom and their forbears in the heyday of the empire; this is a methodical analysis of the key drivers behind the rise and fall of the British slave trade. Williams’s work is certainly not an attack on abolition—a critical moment in establishing of a better world for all human beings—but neither does it seek to perpetuate false ideas of who and what made the moment of abolition a reality.

Two centuries before the slave trade reached its peak, the very concept of slavery was decried by the uppermost echelons of power in the British Empire. Queen Elizabeth I herself said that enslavement would “call down the vengeance of heaven,” and yet, by the eighteenth century, all sorts of mental gymnastics were deployed to justify the trade. Church leaders, Williams said, proposed that slavery could bring “benighted beings to the chance of salvation,” while conservative thinker Edmund Burke—himself a rigorous supporter of religion’s place in society—expounded on the slaveholder’s right to maintain ownership of “their property”, that is, the human beings they had paid for. It seems ethics and morality are not absolutes, and can be manipulated to support economic prosperity.

When such leaps of logic and desperate justification can support the rise of the slave trade, why should these moral contortions suddenly cease? Why should the voices of humanity win the day, defeating the barbarism of trans-Atlantic slavery and achieving a resounding—if delayed—moral victory? The answer is simple: they didn’t. Williams foreshadows the eventual collapse of the trade by presenting the views of contemporary economists Josiah Tucker and Adam Smith, who declared the trade to be expensive and inefficient. In the end, it would be economics, not ethics, that would defeat the United Kingdom’s plantations and slave ships.

If the going was good, the slave trade would continue, no matter how many horrific acts were perpetrated on the shores of Africa and on the islands of the Caribbean. When the market stopped being profitable—when the fiscal engine driving slavery forwards started to cough and sputter—the trade would cease. The laws of business and enterprise, as cold and inhuman as they are, were far stronger than any moral outrage.

More than eight decades have gone by since Williams completed his doctoral thesis, and it is pleasant to think that we have moved on a great deal since those days. After all, Williams was then a subject of the British Empire. Now, the citizens of Trinidad and Tobago—along with the citizens of other former colonies—are free to determine their own path in the world. In 1965, the United Kingdom passed the Race Relations Act, outlawing discrimination on the “grounds of colour, race, or ethnic or national origins”—a positive step towards a better, more welcoming nation.

But we should not wrap ourselves too tightly in this comfortable blanket of pleasant thought. In 1968, three years after the Race Relations Act was passed, Enoch Powell made his rivers of blood speech in Birmingham. Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, division and discrimination led to violent flashpoints as riots ripped through urban centers. In 1993, the tragic murder of Stephen Lawrence exposed the systematic racism at the core of UK policing. In 2018, the so-called Windrush Scandal, overseen by then-Home Secretary Theresa May, saw immigrant UK citizens stripped of their rights and their dignity. The fight against discrimination and prejudice is far from over, and no amount of historical airbrushing can compensate for this.

This is why Williams’s work is so relevant today: It reminds us to question the comforting and convenient narratives of accepted history. Twisting historical narratives to fit our own agenda—to reflect our own view of what Britain represents—is deceitful at best, and dangerous at worst. A more critical, clear-eyed, analytical approach to the past is necessary if we are to truly understand the challenges of the present.

John Burns is a freelance writer and editor from Nottingham in the United Kingdom, now residing in Yunnan, southwest China.

Sources

• “Collections Online: British Museum,” Collections Online | British Museum. Accessed October 31, 2022.

• Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race & Class (New York: Vintage, 2020).

• Samuel Earle, “‘Rivers of Blood’: The Legacy of a Speech That Divided Britain,” Atlantic, April 20, 2018.

• “Edward Colston Statue: Four Cleared of Criminal Damage,” BBC News, January 5, 2022.

• “Eric Williams,” Encyclopedia Britannica. Accessed October 31, 2022.

• Chris Matthews, “Purge of Edward Colston’s Name in Bristol Continues,” Daily Mail Online, April 27, 2022.

• Matty Edwards, “‘A Monumental Moment in History’: Cable Readers React to the Colston 4 Being Cleared,” Bristol Cable, April 22, 2022.

• “Race Relations Act, 1965.” Legislation.gov.uk. Queen’s Printer of Acts of Parliament. Accessed October 31, 2022.

• Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (London: Penguin Books, 2022).

Whose lessons? Which direction?

[Pictured: Poster, 1962, by Nina Vatolina. The text reads: 'Peace, Labor, Freedom, Equality, Brotherhood, Happiness.']

By Jodi Dean

Republished from Liberation School.

As obituaries for neoliberalism pile up on our nightstands and Antonio Gramsci’s adage that the old is dying and the new cannot be born appears newly profound, we turn to the past for direction. What successes should guide us? What can we learn from our failures? If we are to advance politically in the twenty-first century, we need to learn the correct lessons from the twentieth. But what are they?

For some on the left, the problems we face today are as they have ever been failures of organization and collective commitment. A disciplined and organized working class could do more than compel concessions from capital; it could transform society. What’s needed is the revolutionary party. Others on the left blame labor’s political weakness on refusals to compromise. Militant organizations aren’t solutions. They’re errors. Only when unions and left parties accept capitalist social property relations do workers earn their seat at the table and engage in the bargaining that increases their share. Communist parties hinder such acceptance.

Forty years of neoliberalism reveals the bankruptcy of the latter perspective. Capital makes concessions only when it has no other choice. Ruling classes across the Global North have dismantled public sectors and decimated middle classes rather than provide the tax support necessary for maintaining social democracy. They’ve rolled back hard-won political and social gains, treating basic democratic rights as threats to their power. While strong tendencies on the right recognize radicalization as necessary for politics in a period of uncertainty and double down on their various illiberalisms, opponents of revolution insist that the lesson of the twentieth century is the necessity of compromise. Presuming there’s no alternative to capitalism, left Thatcherites declare that progress depends on leaving behind our communist baggage.

One instance of this perspective is Jonah Birch’s “The Cold War Made it Harder for the Left to Win” [1]. Criticizing Gary Gerstle’s argument in The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, Birch rejects Gerstle’s claim that it was the communist threat that made significant reform possible in the twentieth century [2]. With homogeneous Sweden as his example of social democratic success, Birch asserts that conditions were worse for labor in countries with large communist parties. He concedes that the socio-economic context that led to economic growth after World War II is unlikely to reappear. Nevertheless, Birch advises the left to accept the lesson that communists hurt the working class.

The struggle against white supremacy and fascism is class struggle

Birch’s deeply conservative message moves to the right of mainstream liberal recognition of the impact of the court of world opinion during the Cold War. It is widely accepted that competition with the Soviet Union for hearts and minds pushed the U.S. to take steps toward the abolition of Jim Crow apartheid and institutionalized white supremacy. The denial of voting rights and violent repression of activists damaged the country’s reputation as democracy’s global defender. As soon as one acknowledges the multiracial and multinational character of the working class, one realizes how the Swedish fantasy operates (even in Sweden, as Tobias Hϋbinette demonstrates in a recent piece in the Boston Review) to make a small subset of struggles—the wage struggles of white workers—stand in for the broad array of struggles of the diverse multinational working class [3].

In the U.S., for example, communist involvement in the fight against lynching, segregation, and Jim Crow was more than a propaganda point in the Cold War’s great power conflict. From its early years, the Communist Party recognized that workers would only prevail if they were united. So long as Black workers were paid lower wages than white workers and so long as Black workers excluded from unions were available as strikebreakers, the position of all workers was insecure. The struggle against white supremacy was thus central to building the collective power to win the class struggle. This analysis of the national composition of the working class under conditions of white supremacy and racism committed communists to deepening engagement in “Negro work” in multiple arenas. These arenas included organizing agricultural and domestic workers, taking on legal campaigns on behalf of the falsely accused, and drawing out the connections between the conditions facing Black people in the U.S. and oppressed and colonized people all over the world. Even more broadly, the Party demonstrated how anti-fascist, anti-colonial, and anti-imperialist movements for peace were indispensable to class struggle insofar as they all took aim at U.S. monopoly capital [4].

Communists were at the forefront of the struggle against fascism and its doctrine of Aryan superiority. Birch treats the French and Italian Communist Parties as divisive organizations. He blames them for splitting the labor movement in their respective countries, thereby marginalizing the left and isolating the working class. On the one hand, Birch’s charges are belied by his own evidence: in both countries the communists regularly won around twenty percent of the national vote in elections, hardly an indication of marginalization and isolation. Multiple localities and municipalities had communist leaders. On the other hand, Birch’s myopic focus on the expansion of social programs as the single measure of political success leads him to neglect central communist contributions. The partisans who gave their lives in the war against European fascisms, the thousands who carried out a heroic resistance in occupied countries, are erased from view. Surely their achievements are as noteworthy as the collective bargaining institutions, and generous social services that preoccupy Birch. And since Birch concedes that the economic conditions that prevailed in the post-war heyday of social democracy are unlikely to appear again, what is the political cost today of failing to acknowledge and learn from the courage of communist resistance?

Internationalism as the ground of struggle

The significance of the communist contribution continues to expand as we zoom out from a narrow focus on Europe. No one can deny the role of communist-led national liberation movements in the colonized world. In virtually every liberation struggle Marxist-Leninists played an indispensable part. Angola, Mozambique, Vietnam, Korea, Cuba, Congo-Brazzaville, Ethiopia, Indonesia, and China are not insignificant data points just because they are not from Europe.

For decades critics of colonialism and neocolonialism have pointed out that the capitalist class has been able to secure the political passivity or even support of a large layer of the working class in the imperialist core through benefits accrued from the global exploitation of Black and brown people. These critics continue a line of argument already prominent in Lenin’s analysis of the enormous super-profits generated by imperialism. That capital is international and the struggle against it must be as well is a lesson from communists in the twentieth century that remains indispensable in the twenty-first. Workers couldn’t afford nationalist myopia then and surely cannot in today’s setting of global supply chains, mass migration, and climate change.

In the U.S., Black women in and around the Communist Party in the first half of the twentieth century demonstrated the practical implications of internationalism in their organizing. As early as 1928, Williana Burroughs emphasized concrete tasks related to engaging foreign-born Black workers in the U.S. (West Indies, South America, Cape Verde Islands, Africa) and using anti-imperialism as a point of connection (“Thousands of Negroes from Haiti, Cuba, British possessions, Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico have felt the iron heel of British or American Imperialism”) [5].

The Party took the view that Black workers in the U.S. were an oppressed national minority with a right to self-determination. While controversial within and without the Party, this line constituted a fundamental ground for unifying Black and white workers because it recognized the centrality of the struggle for Black liberation. Organizing Black workers meant organizing Black women because most Black women worked for wages to support their families. Organizing Black women meant organizing immigrants and farm workers and attending to the housing, education, and neighborhood conditions impacting workers’ lives. Organizing immigrants and farm workers meant building an understanding of the patterns of oppression and resistance facing all workers. Internationalism was more than an expression of solidarity. It was a principle with repercussions for domestic organizing.

Claudia Jones’s famous International Women’s Day speech from 1950 described the global peace movement and signature campaign against the A-bomb, Marshall Plan, and Atlantic war pact. Jones noted women’s organizations’ opposition to NATO, “which spells misery for the masses of American women and their families.” She advocated rousing the internationalism of American women in protest against “Wall Street’s puppets in Marshalized Italy, in fascist Greece and Spain.” And she linked the Justice Department’s attack on the Congress of American Women as “foreign agents” with the group’s long-standing advocacy of women’s equal rights, Negro-white unity, and child welfare and education [6].

The resolute internationalism of communists in the twentieth century was indispensable to confronting imperialism and colonialism. We build the power of the working class by emphasizing the patterns of oppression and resistance, linking struggles, and targeting capitalism as the system to be defeated.

Anti-communism is the enemy

Over the last decades of neoliberalism, the right has advanced. In the U.S., UK, Brazil, Hungary, India, Israel, Italy, Poland, Sweden, and elsewhere, conservative parties use nationalism to reach out to those left behind by globalization. When socialists take as their measure of success the wages of an outmoded, masculinist, and Eurocentric image of the working class, they undermine their capacity to build mass unity, strengthening the hand of the right. Insistence on the multinational composition of the labor force of all the so-called developed countries gives the lie to nationalist and isolationist fantasies as well as to the patriarchal conceptions of the family that support them.

A component of right-wing advance has been its relentless assault on communism. Thirty years after the defeat of the Soviet Union, conservatives attack even the most common sense of public measures as communist plots. More subtle but no less reactionary are the epistemological dimensions of anti-communism, what Charisse Burden-Stelly theorizes as intellectual McCarthyism [7]. Anti-communism persists today in the suppression of knowledge of the continuities between anti-capitalist, anti-racist, anti-colonial, and anti-imperialist struggles. Instead of the site where those struggles were unified, communism is treated as a dangerous and alien ideology. Its role in the fight against white supremacy domestically and internationally is buried.

For anti-communists disorder is foreign—the refugee, the immigrant, the Black, the Muslim, the Jew. Anti-communists disavow the capitalist disorder of competition, markets, innovation, dispossession, foreclosure, debt, and imperialist war. Dramatic changes in the character of work, communities, and life that accompany disruptive and ubiquitous technology; urbanization and rural depopulation; shifts from industry and manufacture to services and servitude; the intensification of competition for decreasing numbers of affordable houses and adequately compensated jobs—these all congeal into a disorder to be dealt with by the assertion of police, family, church, and race. Anti-communism remains the lynchpin of this assertion.

The fear that anti-communism mobilizes is a fear of loss, a fear that what you have will be taken from you, what Slavoj Žižek refers to as the “theft of enjoyment” [8]. Marx and Engels call out this mobilization of fear in The Communist Manifesto when they address charges that communists want to take people’s property. They write, “in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths” [9]. The anti-communist mobilization of fear conceals the absence of property, wealth, job security, success, sovereignty, and freedom. It posits that we have them by positioning them as stolen. Communism is what prevents you from being rich, widely admired, having lots of sex, and so on. The “theft of enjoyment” fantasy obscures the fact that under capitalism a handful of billionaires have more wealth than half the planet. By positing communism as a source of deprivation, as an ideology based on taking something away, anti-communism conceals that we don’t have what is ostensibly being stolen.

Anti-communism is not confined to the political right. It often seeps into progressive and self-described socialist circles. Left anti-communists proceed as if communism were the barrier to workers’ success, as if we would all live in a Swedish social democratic paradise but for those damned communists. Not only does this deny the multiracial and international reality of the working class, but it conceals broader left political division and weakness. Virtually nowhere does the left face the choice of reform or revolution. Virtually nowhere is the left in a position where class compromise is on the table. Anti-communism obscures this basic fact.

Communism is that modern political ideology always and everywhere on the side of the oppressed. When labor begins to appear strong, when those who have been racially, sexually, ethnically, and colonially oppressed become more visible, more organized, and more militant, anti-communism intervenes to set up barriers. On the left as well as the right, anti-communism attempts to structure the political field by establishing the terrain of possibility: which political paths are available, which are unthinkable. Even in settings where communism is dismissed as itself impossible, anti-communism mobilizes social forces to oppose it. This fight against the impossible is an ideological signal: the discussion isn’t aimed toward seriously evaluating lessons and goals. It’s about shoring up the status quo, disciplining working-class imagination by preemptive arrest of any challengers to capitalist social property relations.

The political and economic situation that prevails today differs significantly from the postwar era. The U.S. has lost both its preeminent economic status and the moral position it assumed following the end of WWII (a position always fragile and contested given the U.S.’s use of atomic weapons, backing of dictatorships, imperialist and neocolonial foreign policy, and domestic police state). Unions have lost their prior bargaining power and workers their hard-won rights and benefits. Today the issue is building organizations and movements with power sufficient to compel the socialist reconstruction of the economy in the context of a rapidly changing climate. This fight is multinational and international or it is lost.

References

[1] Jonah Birch, “The Cold War May It Harder for the Left to Win Social Democratic Reforms,”Jacobin, 15 November 2022. Availablehere.
[2] Gary Gerstle,The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order(Oxford University Press, 2022).
[3] Tobias Hϋbinette, “Race and Sweden’s Fascist Turn,”Boston Review, 19 October 2022. Availablehere.
[4] See the contributions toOrganize, Fight, Win: Black Communist Women’s Political Writing, ed. Charisse Burden-Stelly and Jodi Dean (London: Verso, 2022).
[5] Williana Burroughs, “Negro Work Has Not Been Entirely Successful,”  inOrganize, Fight, Win,21-25.
[6] Claudia Jones, “International Women’s Day and the Struggle for Peace,” inOrganize, Fight, Win,181-197.
[7] Charisse Burden-Stelly, “OnBankers and Empire: Racial Capitalism, Antiblackness, and Antiradicalism,”Small Axe24, no. 2 (2020): 175-186.
[8] Slavoj Žižek,Tarrying With the Negative(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 200-237.
[9] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels,The Communist Manifesto, trans. S. Moore (New York: Penguin Books, 1988/1967), 237.

Women, Capitalism, and the Ongoing Attacks On Bodily Autonomy and Reproductive Rights

By Karina Garcia

This article was originally published in the Autumn 2019 issue of Breaking the Chains magazine, titled “Not a Moral Issue.”

Thirteen years ago, a speaker at a meeting, addressing the right-wing attacks on women’s rights in the context of the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, emphasized how important it was to elect pro-choice Democrats. The speaker gave no further explanation to the attacks.

At the time, the right-wing was attacking the ACA because it would expand abortion and contraception access. A couple years after it became law, the Supreme Court had already restricted access to birth control to “respect the religious beliefs” of corporations vis-a-vis reactionary owners. And to pass the ACA, the Democrats gladly compromised on reproductive rights. Obamacare ultimately continued to deny federal funds for abortion coverage and required that every state offer at least one insurance plan that did not cover abortions.

At the meeting, a young socialist woman spoke from the floor and criticized the speaker for not raising the “systematic” explanation. She said that capitalism was behind these patriarchal policies. She said that the bosses—the capitalists—want to restrict birth control and abortion because they want the working class to produce more workers and thereby drive down wages. On top of that, they want to pay less in healthcare costs to cover their employees. I remember nodding in the moment that indeed there must be a deeper cause. I knew capitalism as a system was implicated. What she was saying had a logic to it. But when I went home it started to make a lot less sense.

Do the capitalists really need more workers? Millions of people are unemployed as it is and they are incarcerating the “surplus” population. Is it really possible that the capitalists would conspire in this way to restrict abortion rights, but none of them would ever slip up and admit it? Why is it that some Democrats support abortion rights then? They too represent the capitalist class’s interests. It can’t just be about forcing women to produce more workers.

And as for costs and profits, the Affordable Care Act was going to make insurance companies, the healthcare sector, and the banks mega-profits with or without abortion coverage, so why try to tank the bill on that basis? It wasn’t really only about profit either.

She was right that the attack was “systematic” and that these sexist policies are linked to capitalism, but there seemed to be more to the answer than she’d presented. I dove into the Marxist and historical writing about the anti-abortion movement because I wanted to understand this and be able to explain it—for myself and others.

The Marxist approach to women’s oppression and liberation is often misunderstood or mischaracterized. In university settings it is portrayed as “economic determinism” or “reductionism” — asserting that Marxists reduce every issue to economics. In a way, that’s what the socialist speaking from the floor was doing in that meeting. But that’s not an accurate description of the Marxist method.

It is true that Marxists emphasize the importance of the economic system, in that the mode of production plays a critical role in shaping the economic system and the structures of society. Marxists start by looking at how a society produces and reproduces itself and the norms, laws and relationships under which production and reproduction take place. That is what “economics” really means anyway. At its base, every society is engaged in producing and reproducing.

The ideas, laws, formal institutions, religions that justify, strengthen, and stabilize those underlying processes and relations at the base of production and reproduction is what Marx called the superstructure.

The capitalist mode of production and the family

So for instance, under capitalism, there are some people who own the means of production (land, factories, technology, etc.), while others go to work every day and work on those means of production. They generate profits that go back to the owners. That exploitation is at the base of society. But that arrangement would not last a single day if it was not backed up by the laws, the courts and the police—which protect the owners and landlords—and by the schools, media, politicians, and religious institutions that have taught us since day one that this is the normal and perfectly natural way of things.

The capitalist mode of production developed historically out of previous modes of production, including slavery and feudalism. Capitalism represented a major change in the dominant form of property and labor and many other things changed as a result of that. Racism and white supremacy are part and parcel of the foundation of modern capitalism. In the case of the United States, colonial dispossession and racialized chattel slavery are the foundations for the accumulation of wealth within the capitalist mode of production.

Capitalism did not simply erase the pre-existing world and start with a blank slate. Patriarchy has existed since the dawn of class society and is part of the fabric of the capitalist system. In pre-class society, before private ownership of property there was a much more diverse set of family arrangements and women generally played a leadership role for the community as a whole.

After those pre-class modes of production were overthrown, and eventually the forms of social and family organization alongside them, women were held in a subordinate position and male supremacy became the law. For thousands of years, women’s basic conditions and status were confined to the home. Law, custom, and ideology held women to a dependent status and entirely subject to the whims of the leading male in the family. Housework and child rearing, in addition to ongoing work in the fields (in the case of agricultural societies), were delineated as “women’s work.” This was a central element to modes of production based on private property.

In the United States, today, the capitalist mode of production has changed in many ways, as has the shape and detail of the superstructure. Yet core historic features persist. While women can enter the wage workforce and women can legally own property and have independent political and civil rights, the basic unit of what has been called social reproduction is the nuclear family. In that family, women carry out the vast majority of the labor in the household, in child rearing, and in elder care. Because this family form has been carried over in its essential characteristics, all the values, traditions, and cultural norms that developed to explain and justify male supremacy have been largely carried over, too.

While capitalism has broken down many of the economic relationships that were at the heart of a nuclear family, the family has not been abolished or collapsed entirely. The family unit has changed, but the precarious existence of workers under capitalism makes it necessary for most workers to have a family to survive. One income is not enough. Take, for example, the conditions of so many LGBTQ youth who have been rejected by their families. To not have a family is, in these instances, to be subjected to the worst forms of deprivation, homelessness, and brutality that capitalism has to offer.

For the purposes of the capitalist system, the family unit is highly valuable—especially as it relates to the reproduction and caring for the next generation of workers. Lisa Vogel highlights this in her social reproduction theory [1]. Others have taken it in different directions, highlighting the other forms of labor that are often unpaid or underpaid, but are nonetheless essential for reproducing a workforce that is healthy and stable enough to continue to come into work.

Reactionary worldview explains economic shifts

How does this relate to the attacks on women’s rights and attacks on women’s growing assertiveness in challenging sexual violence and sexist rhetoric? These don’t present themselves as issues of the basic functioning of the mode of production. They can appear distinct and separate, so people fighting for women’s rights on these fronts might not see the linkage to capitalism. And yet more and more activists are talking about systemic patriarchy. The Party for Socialism and Liberation banners, “The whole system is sexist! Fight for socialism!” have been very popular in these movements.

Here we are talking about struggles in the world of politics and culture, the superstructure [2]. They appear as fights within capitalism—in the sense that you should be able to fight for and achieve full abortion rights and other reproductive services under capitalism. In some countries that already exists. You should be able to reduce sexual harassment or violence or eliminate it altogether under capitalism. At least, in theory, it is not pivotal to the mode of production.

But if that is the case, why are those gains so hard to win? Why do socialists insist a revolution would be necessary to really achieve them? It’s because the domination of women remains a pillar of the U.S. capitalist class’s form of rule.

Abortion access became a major political issue starting in the late 1970s as a cornerstone of an emerging reactionary trend. A reactionary is someone who says that things were better in society before they changed. “Make America Great Again” is a true reactionary slogan. It implies we should return to the past. Big sections of the ruling class turn to a reactionary agenda when they feel that their social control is slipping in the face of a powerful social movement, or when capitalism itself has destabilized the economy and when life seems more uncertain for big sections of the population.

In the late 1970s, both were happening in the United States. The mass uprisings of the 1960s and early 70s with the struggles for women’s liberation, Black liberation, LGBTQ liberation, and the anti-war movement were powerful challenges to the U.S. capitalist status quo. The Vietnamese anti-colonial resistance defeated U.S. imperialism, dealing it a major blow while imperialism was engaged in constant heated confrontation with the socialist bloc.

The U.S. economy also went into a period of recession during which layoffs and unemployment increased, consumer spending decreased. Capitalist recessions are cyclical and occur regularly because of overproduction. From 1979 to 1984, approximately 11.5 million workers either lost their jobs or shifted to lower-paying service jobs. Most of the jobs that were lost were in manufacturing industries such as steel, auto, mining, electronics, and more.

The reactionaries have a very powerful appeal and socialists should understand how it works. They say essentially, “Your life used to be better, right? You’re feeling less sure about your future right? Well, that’s understandable because look at how much has changed. We’ve lost our way. And now we’re going to hell in a hand-basket unless we turn back.” Then they link that to whatever issue, whether it be abortion, sex education, gay rights, and so on. The reactionaries sometimes blame the “weak” government, which has bent to pressure and refused to defend “our values, while at other times attacking the government for being “too big.”

Another example is how the economic ravaging of whole Black communities is laid at the feet of Black women for “having too many children out of wedlock,” or at the feet of “absent” Black males. This reactionary worldview builds upon the extreme racist character of the U.S. capitalist system along with thousands of years of ingrained cultural indoctrination that with a “strong” family—that is with men and women in their “proper place”—everything will be fine.

This sort of reactionary worldview offers an all-purpose explanation for general problems or unsettling changes. Politicians then conveniently avoid discussion of the actual causes of social and economic distress, i.e., capitalist instability. It furthermore coincides with and makes use of the explanations being cultivated in conservative religious institutions, which tend to focus on going back to a more moral time, and theorize the problems of modern society as a reflection of an absence of godliness and values. So these ideas and theories are already circulating and can easily be picked up on by a politician who wants to present himself as a champion of “family values” while not actually doing anything to change families’ material conditions.

And so the “New Right,” ascending in the Republican Party in the late 1970s, started to really focus on abortion in the 1980s and 1990s. Abortion rights were identified as a weak spot for the women’s movement because it had been secured in the Supreme Court in Roe v Wade, not via legislation. There was existing opposition on religious grounds that they could mobilize, and there were big parts of the country where abortion rights had become law but the movement was weak.

Evangelical mega-churches and televangelists were entering politics in a big way—most famously in the “Moral Majority”—and eventually became significant power-brokers that handpicked and groomed elected representatives. They delivered considerable resources and a captive audience to enterprising politicians, as long as they took on their issues and their framing. The whole Moral Majority movement became a target base of support for hard-right capitalists who personally did not care much about abortion or other moral issues, but who wanted to turn back government regulations, social spending, and the power of labor unions. Over time, this relationship produced a major pipeline of campaign funds and airtime.

In short, abortion became a preferred electoral issue, quickly moving from local and state to federal politics. Right-wing politicians could portray pro-choice Democrats as ‘baby killers’ and link them to the “decline of the family.” It is not so much that these issues in and of themselves threaten capitalists profits, but that they offered a way for one sector of the capitalist class—leaning on the powerful institutions of the superstructure in their areas to consolidate political legitimacy—to distract constituents from social and economic concerns that the politicians have no desire to address.

It became a central political strategy for the conservative right. The Republican Party used to be considered just the “pro-business” and “law-and-order” party. Some were actually liberal on “social issues.” But as the party moved further to the right, that has changed.

In the United States, where money controls so much of politics, the agenda is set by the highest bidder. With the near obliteration of campaign finance laws, this has become more overt. A few billionaires could say, “These are my political interests, these are my priorities and I’m gonna throw my money around only to those who take on my agenda and my interests.” When Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote that “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, they meant that ruling-class ideas were dominant because the ruling class “has the means of material production at its disposal” and therefore “has control at the same time over the means of mental production” [3]. Today ruling-class ideas become dominant because of the direct and explicit intervention of the most powerful capitalists and their politicians. In the absence of a fight-back movement, the reactionary obsessions of some really rich men can set the tone of politics, and actually can determine major issues for hundreds of millions of working-class women in the United States and worldwide.

The anti-abortion billionaires are not spending their money because it will help their immediate profits. If anything, they are spending significant parts of their fortunes on these right-wing causes. That is where capitalism comes back in at the systematic level. It is not as a conspiracy for profits, but as a form of political rule based on disciplining and intimidating one section of poor and working people, distracting and confusing others, and finally winning over and satisfying other layers.

True rights attainable only with a new mode of production

No mode of production based on extreme inequality and exploitation would be able to last long if it did not have ruling institutions, political systems, ideas, traditions, and so on, that protected and rationalized those economic processes. The ruling class does not just get to extract wealth; it also has to find stable ways to rule.

Forms of patriarchy operate powerfully at the base of capitalism, in how the system produces and reproduces itself on a daily basis. It also is a cornerstone at this superstructural level, and in particular, as a central element of the reactionary agenda. So how could patriarchy be ended under capitalism if it is so embedded at every level of the capitalist system? It is impossible.

Socialism, by contrast, eliminates the economic dependence on the family unit. Simply by changing who controls and owns the vast means of production, every person can now be guaranteed housing, food, healthcare, childcare, retirement, and other human needs as guaranteed rights. The gender pay gap and undervaluing of “women’s work” could essentially be overturned overnight. A government in the hands of class-conscious workers would also remove from power the lackeys of the billionaire bigots, and instead launch bold initiatives to advance women’s equality and liberation in the world of culture, ideology, education and politics.

This would be an ongoing process, of course, but it would be fundamentally different from the battle for women’s rights under capitalism. In the present, we fight for rights inside a system that reproduces patriarchal economic relationships daily, and under a ruling class that defaults to a reactionary agenda as a way to protect its exploitative rule. That is why “smashing the patriarchy” often feels so impossible. Under socialism, by contrast, the battle will be to win an egalitarian superstructure that will harmonize with a new economic system based on meeting the needs of all.

References

[1]See Dickinson, Hannah. (2019). “Social reproduction: A theoretical framework with organizing potential.”Breaking the Chains4, no. 1.Also availablehere.
[2] Ford, Derek. (2021). “The base-superstructure: A model for analysis and action.”Liberation School, November 22. Availablehere.
[3] Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. (1964/1978). “The German ideology: Part I,” in R.C. Tucker (Ed.),The Marx-Engels reader, 2nd ed.(New York: W.W. Norton & Company), 172.

Lula’s Victory Means Relief for Venezuela

By Joseph Lobodzinski

Lula's victory on October 28th was an electoral win for leftists both in and outside of Brazil. The pink tide that has swept many right-wing leaders across Central and South America from power once again crested to wash out the crazed fascist Jair Bolsonaro. 

There are many reasons to celebrate this triumph. Lula has pledged to end the Bolsonaro administration’s massive deforestation efforts, promising to protect the rights and livelihoods of the millions of indigenous peoples who call the Amazon their rightful home. Lula’s pledge will also prevent approximately 100 billion metric tons of carbon being released into the Earth’s atmosphere.

However, there is reason to temper hopes. Despite Lula’s win, Brazil’s right wing secured a majority in the national congress and have vowed to block any of his progressive policies. The Vice President-elect of Brazil, Geraldo Alckmin, is a social democrat who has been labeled as a “pro-business centrist,” highlighting the fact that the incoming presidential administration will take a more “pragmatic” and “means-tested” approach to governance.

Despite these issues, Lula's win is another step in the beginning of a new era — one in which Brazil and other Latin American countries will begin normalizing relations with Venezuela.

The recent pink tide has brought forth more leaders who are either actively advancing diplomatic relations with Venezuela, or who are — at the very least — open to doing so.

In Colombia, leftist President Gustavo Petro, elected earlier this year, has taken the most ambitious approach toward working with President Nicolás Maduro and Venezuela. In late September, the two countries reopened cargo trade, and their borders, for the first time in seven years. A few weeks later, on November 1st, Maduro welcomed Petro in Caracas, inaugurating the reactivation of flights between the two countries.

In Mexico, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who hosted Maduro in Mexico City for his 2018 presidential inauguration and has refused to recognize opposition leader Juan Guaidó, recently urged the United States to restore relations with Venezuela. Since the decision by the US to impose draconian sanctions, Venezuela’s economy has collapsed, creating a massive humanitarian catastrophe. Unable to obtain housing, food, and medical care, hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans have left the country, triggering a migration crisis that has left thousands stranded in Mexico as they seek entry into the United States. While the US agreed to take in 24,000 asylum seekers, last month, the Department of Homeland Security inexplicably deported 1,700 Venezuelans back to Mexico.

Lula’s victory, however, may facilitate the amelioration of this dire situation. Like in other countries, Brazil’s executive office holds significant power to shape foreign policy and direct trade agreements. Not only should Lula’s administration be able to reverse the diplomatic approach of its delusional predecessor; they should be able to convince other nations — specifically, the United States — to normalize relations with Maduro and lift sanctions through appropriate avenues of economic leverage, such as placing an exports tax on some of the $31.3 billion of goods shipped to the US from Brazil.

The timing could not be any more relevant. With relations between the United States and Saudi Arabia souring after the latter seemingly convinced other OPEC members to follow its lead in cutting oil production as an act of retaliation for Western opposition to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the US has now been left scrambling to find an alternative source of crude oil.

This has led all eyes to fall on Venezuela.

Both Biden and Maduro have supposedly signaled their openness to normalizing relations, whether by directly stating it or by opening certain diplomatic avenues. 

Maduro has been forward, auctioning off some of the 300 billion barrels of oil in his nation’s reserves to the West, including a three-million barrel sale to Italy earlier this year, leading to global leaders such as France’s Emmanuel Macron meeting with Maduro at COP27 to begin “proposing dialogue” between their countries.

Earlier this year, US senior officials began negotiating with Maduro over the possibility of relieving sanctions. Now several months into the process, the prospect of reaching an agreement seems increasingly likely.

In exchange for cash and sanctions relief, all Maduro has to do is agree to a “clean” presidential election in 2024 and return to stalled negotiations with the Unitary Platform, his liberal-democratic opposition.

However, this is all tentative. As history shows, the US will do anything to obtain the natural resources it needs to drive its economy. In the case of Venezuela, if throwing the opposition under the bus or launching another imperialist coup provides access to their oil reserves, either may happen.

Then there’s Lula.

Lula’s established relationship with both Maduro and countries such as the United States makes him the best mediator for a decent deal.

Lula has had solid diplomatic relations with Maduro dating back to his initial presidency from 2003–2011, and both have already agreed to resume a “cooperation agenda” between their two countries. Lula’s respect among Western powers like the United States is also quite notable. This relationship was recently exemplified by the Biden administration’s immediate recognition of Lula’s electoral victory.

What all of this ultimately means is that Lula can lead the charge of providing sanctions relief for Venezuela, as well as restarting their economy through the oil sector. Lula can influence the United States to begin lifting sanctions and reversing some of its hostile diplomatic stances toward the Maduro government. In return, Maduro would take steps toward “free” elections and resume oil sales to the United States, giving him the money he needs to rescue his country.

Regardless of how this diplomatic situation plays out, it is important to remember that the people of Venezuela need to be alleviated of their current strife. After years of trade embargos that have caused poverty to skyrocket, creating a massive humanitarian crisis, any means of bringing this to an end should be considered.

And while it looks like the US is once again getting away with geopolitical hostage-taking by placing another country with leftist sympathies under the gun of despotic sanctions, we should be cautiously optimistic that Venezuela — with the help of Brazil — may be able to lift the imperialist boot from its neck.

Joseph Lobodzinski is a University of Michigan alumnus and leftist writer covering international politics, American social movements, labor, and the environment.