On Capitalism's Co-optation of Black Liberation: An Excerpt From Jared Ball's "The Myth and Propaganda of Black Buying Power"

By Jared Ball

The following is an excerpt from Jared Ball’s upcoming book, "The Myth and Propaganda of Black Buying Power” from Palgrave Pilot/Palgrave Macmillan (May 2020), republished from the author’s personal site.

The book will be released on May 25, 2020. Pre-order it here.

The Myth and Propaganda of Black Buying Power demonstrates:

• The claim that African America has roughly $1 trillion in “buying power” is popularly repeated mythology with no basis in sound economic logic or data. While the myth has a longer history it is today largely propelled by misreadings and poor (false) interpretations of Nielsen surveys and marketing reports produced by the Selig Center for Economic Growth at the Terry College of Business housed in the Bank of America Financial Center in Athens, GA. and where, as their website explains, their bias and purpose is in their founding mission. The center was, “Created to convey economic expertise to Georgia businesses and entrepreneurs, the Simon S. Selig, Jr. Center for Economic Growth is primarily responsible for conducting research on economic, demographic, and social issues related to Georgia’s current and future growth” (emphasis added).

• “Buying Power” is a marketing phrase that refers only to the “power” of consumers to purchase what are strictly available goods and is used as a measurement for corporations to better market their products. Most of the contemporary and popular understanding of the myth of buying power is derived from, and maintained by, a commercial Black press whose own commercial interests (attracting advertising dollars from the largest White corporations) supersede any journalistic mission to properly inform. “Power” here has nothing to do with actual economic strength and there is no collective $1+ trillion that Black people have and just foolishly spend ignorantly to their economic detriment.

• The myth of “buying power” functions as propaganda working to deny the reality of structural, intentional and necessary economic inequality required to maintain society as it is, one that benefits an increasingly decreasing number of people. To do this the myth functions to falsely blame the poor for being poor. Poverty, the myth encourages, is the result of the poor having little to no “financial literacy,” or as resulting from their bad spending habits, when in reality poverty is an intended result of an economic and social system.

Anyone at all familiar with any part of the Black public sphere will have heard one form or another of the following: “If we just used our money like other communities… If we didn’t spend so much on hair, cars and weed… we could make our dollar circulate like ‘they’ do and be far better off!” More specifically, those familiar with like-spaces would have heard reference to “the numbers,” that “Black America’s economy makes it among the most powerful national economies in the world…” and that “… we have a $1+ trillion that we just misuse…” From the most isolated and forcibly marginalized radical activist spaces to the most commonly populated spheres of Black public discourse the refrain is consistent and always suggests the same; that at least a solid portion of the Black oppressive political pie is comprised of a financially illiterate backwards mass incapable of correcting itself to take proper advantage of a freedom which waits just slightly beyond their feeble grasp. The suggestion that Black people lack “financial literacy” and, therefore, ignorantly refuse existing opportunities to advance economically obliterates the realities of capitalism as an economic and social system or conditions that system creates.

The idea is as simple as it is wrong but is masked by a surrounding powerful and heavily propagated mythology. The “buying power” of Black America, it is often repeated, now said to have crossed $1 trillion annually, is foolishly squandered but with some unity could be harnessed to overturn the centuries-old and eerily consistent economic deprivations suffered still. However, “buying power,” as a concept popularly held, is entirely misunderstood and has been by so many for so long that it continues to confound and inhibit conversations about economics in general, the specifics of the Black economic condition, and what might be done about it. And while all communities, all segments of all communities, businesses, municipalities, etc. have their “buying power” assessed it is only in relation to Black America that the concept becomes truly mythologized. Beyond that, the myth is politically weaponized with a very particular perniciousness and pervasiveness metastasized to the “conceptual original sin” of American racism (Downing and Husband 2005). The misunderstanding and misapplication of the concept of buying power, by those both friendly and hostile to the Black community, is unparalleled anywhere in political, economic, or media analyses.

Black America does not have an annual $1+ trillion that is collectively, by some choice, spent frivolously rather than harnessed to the betterment of the collective. Here we must develop upon the difference between power as economic strength as is conventionally understood and buying power, a concept developed by business, advertising, marketing, and government interests and where power is defined only as a group’s ability to enrich those interests. Genuine economic strength is measured in wealth, assets, land, stock, etc. and with a clarity in the differences between wealth and income, the latter being what one earns in exchange for labor, the former being income earned from the labor of others.

“Power” in the phrase “buying power” does not mean what many assume is a kind of genuine wealth, sovereignty, or autonomy. Once consigned to the phrase “buying power” that latter term loses all popularly (rightly)-held assumptions of its meaning and becomes something very different, almost dangerously different in terms of how that difference is carried to, and with what impact it has on, various audiences, and Black America specifically. In the form of its association with the word “buying” power means only the ability to spend what available money (or credit) is available on only the specific goods similarly made available for purchase. Having access to rims, fronts, hair or weed is one thing, while access to capital, stock, land, expanding business, etc. is quite another. Black people can buy marijuana just not the increasingly legal dispensaries emerging into a multi-billion dollar almost exclusively White industry (Ross 2018).

Buying power, spending power, or purchasing power are all interchangeable and applied to nearly every possibly grouped segment of society and are also applied to corporations and local, state and even national governments. But the concept, or more appropriately said, the marketing formula, is used with a particular pernicious effect, when it comes to Black America and, as such, deserves this special focus and attempt at dispelling. Nowhere else, for no one else, is buying power used as a bludgeon with such regularity and persistence within communities, both in terms of media attention and as a method of “political organization,” as is the case with Black America. For solutions to come it is true that those spaces where Black politics are most often discussed and where the futures of Black people are most seriously considered must rid themselves of this and other mythologies related to the economy of the United States and the role Black people play within. This would include challenging the prevailing wisdom, as it applies to this subject only, of past and present luminaries.

Capitalism is an Incubator for Pandemics. Socialism is the Solution.

[Image: Antonio Calanni/AP]

By Mike Pappas and Tatiana Cozzarelli

Republished from Left Voice.

A new coronavirus called “SARS-CoV-2” — known colloquially by the name of the disease it causes called “coronavirus disease 2019” or “COVID-19” — is wreaking havoc around the world. In Italy, the death toll has risen to 366 today and the country just extended its quarantine measures nationwide. In China, production has shut down at factories across the country. According to the WHO, over 100,000 cases have been confirmed in over 100 countries and the death toll is now up to 3,809 as of this writing. The stock market in the U.S. fell by 7% today and  we may be headed towards another 2008-like recession.

Reports range from 200-400 (213 per WHO and 434 per NBC News) confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the U.S., but there are likely many many more that have not been detected, as health facilities still do not have a readily available rapid test for diagnosis. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) botched a first response, sending out faulty testing kits that required a recall. At this point in the U.S. the CDC is refusing to report how many have been tested, but we know the number tested in the US is extremely low largely due to the immense hurdles government officials have put in place. The FDA recently announced over 2 million tests should be shipped to labs by Monday with an additional 4 million by the end of the week. This could lead to a great increase in confirmed cases around the country. We are also seeing reproduction of racist, xenophobic tropes and attacks as fear of the epidemic grows. 

The spread of the coronavirus is exposing all of the contradictions of capitalism. It shows why socialism is urgent.

Coronavirus in Capitalism

It is only going to get worse. The spread of the virus is impossible to stop — and this is due to social reasons more than biological ones. While doctors recommend that people stay home when they are feeling sick in order to reduce the possibility of spreading the virus, working-class people just can’t afford to stay home at the first sight of a cough. 

Contrary to Donald Trump’s recent suggestions that many with COVID-19 should “even go to work,” the CDC recommends that those who are infected by the virus should be quarantined. This poses a problem under capitalism for members of the working class who cannot afford to simply take off work unannounced. New York City Mayor, Bill de Blasio recently suggested avoiding crowded subway cars or working from home if possible, but many rely on public transit. Suggestions from government leaders show their disconnect from the working class. 58% Americans have less than $1,000 in their savings and around 40% of Americans could not afford an unexpected bill of $400. So for many, staying home or not using public transit is simply not an option.

Even more people avoid the doctor when we get sick. With or without insurance, a trip to the hospital means racking up massive medical bills. The Guardian reports that 25% of Americans say they or a family member have delayed medical treatment due to the costs of care. In May 2019, The American Cancer Society found that 56% of adults report having at least one medical financial hardship. Medical debt remains the number one cause of bankruptcy in the country. One third of all donations on the fundraising site GoFundMe go to covering healthcare costs. That is the healthcare system of the wealthiest country in the world: GoFundMe.

Clearly, this is a very dangerous scenario. Already, people are being saddled with massive bills if they seek tests for the coronavirus. The Miami Herald wrote a story about Osmel Martinez Azcue who went to the hospital for flu-like symptoms after a work trip to China. While luckily it was found that he had the flu, the hospital visit cost $3,270, according to a notice from his insurance company. Business Insider made a chart of the possible costs associated with going to the hospital for COVID-19:

Of course, these costs will be no problem for some. The three richest Americans own more wealth than the bottom 50% of Americans. The concentration of wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer capitalists is part of capitalism’s DNA. But as Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkson highlight extensively in their book The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, people in more equal societies are healthier. They live longer, have lower infant mortality, and have high self-ratings of health. Inequality leads to poorer overall health.

So how does this relate to COVID-19? The main theory for these outcomes is that inequality of wealth and power in a society leads to a state of chronic stress. This wreaks havoc on bodily systems such as the cardiovascular system and the immune system, leaving individuals more susceptible to health problems. This means as societies become more and more unequal, we will see individuals more and more susceptible to infection. Capitalism’s inequality puts us all at greater risk as COVID-19 spreads.

Coronavirus (COVID-19) In Socialism

COVID-19 highlights the need for socialism to face epidemics like these. And by socialism, we don’t mean Medicare for All or New Deal liberalism. Medicare for All is not enough to face pandemics like the coronavirus. We mean a society in which human needs govern production, not the drive for profit. It’s a society without capitalists, where production and reproduction is democratically planned by the working class and oppressed. In this kind of society, we would be able to respond to the COVID-19 infinitely better than in capitalism. 

In a socialist society, both prevention and responses to outbreaks of illness would change drastically. Supplies such as hand soap, hand sanitizer, and surface sanitizing wipes or sprays are in extremely high demand at this time. We are already seeing shortages of key supplies around the world. The need for profit maximization under capitalism has led companies to drastically raise their prices in this time of high demand. For example, the Washington Post has reported drastic increases in prices of products such as Purell Hand Sanitizer. Under capitalism, scarcity leads to greater profit.

Capitalism has led to a globalized system of production containing industries at disparate ends of the globe that truly depend on each other to function. This allows for a capitalist’s exploitation of a worker in a factory in China producing iPhones that goes unnoticed by an Apple customer here in the U.S.. It also allows corporations to drive down costs in one area of the world that may have weaker protections for workers. While this is beneficial for capitalists, outbreaks of illnesses such as COVID-19 highlight clear weaknesses in this system. A large portion of the basic materials used to make new medicines come from China. Since industry is so affected by viral spread, production of supplies has been drastically cut. This delays the ability for a rapid response in other countries such as the U.S.. 

A central aspect of socialism is a democratically run planned economy: an economy in which all resources are allocated according to need, instead of ability to pay. Need is decided democratically by both producers and consumersWith the means of production under workers’ control, we would be able to quickly increase production of these products in an emergency. 

Furthermore, with the elimination of the barriers between intellectual and manual labor, increasing numbers of workers would be familiarized with the entire production process and ready to jump in where needed. In worker cooperatives within capitalism like MadyGraf in Argentina and Mondragon in Spain, workers already learn all aspects of production. This allows workers to shift to areas where extra effort is needed. 

Socialism cannot exist in only one country, so a global planned economy would be key in these moments. If one country is experiencing a shortage, others would have to make up for it. This is key for reigning in global epidemics like the coronavirus: it will only be stopped if we stop it everywhere. In a global planned economy, this would be a much easier task. 

Staying Home

If one does get sick, making a decision to protect oneself and others by taking time off should never lead them to have to worry about losing their job, paying their rent, putting food on the table, or being able to provide for their children. Under capitalism services such as housing and healthcare are reduced to commodities. This often presents people with the ultimatum: work while sick and potentially expose others, or stay home and risk losing your job.

Under socialism, the increased mechanization of production and the elimination of unnecessary jobs — goodbye advertising industry! goodbye health insurance industry! — would already drastically reduce the number of hours that we would need to work. We would be spending vast hours of the day making art or hanging out with friends and family. 

During disease outbreaks, we would be able to stay home at the first sign of a cold, in addition to getting tested right away. In a planned economy, we could allocate resources where they are most needed, and take into account a decrease in the workforce due to illness. 

Where Are the Coronavirus Therapies?

Currently, multiple for-profit companies are attempting to test (sometimes new, sometimes previously rejected and now recycled) therapies to see if they can treat or prevent COVID-19. While there are attempts to produce a COVID-19 vaccine, this vaccine would not be ready for testing in human trials for a few months according to Peter Marks, the director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research. Yet even last week, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar refused to guarantee a newly developed coronavirus vaccine would be affordable to all stating, “we can’t control that price because we need the private sector to invest.” The statement is ironic to say the least coming from the former top lobbyist to Eli Lilly who served at a time when the company’s drug prices went up significantly.

Companies such as Gilead Sciences, Moderna Therapeutics, and GlaxoSmithKline all have various therapies in development. Each company’s interest in maximizing profits around their particular COVID-19 therapy has kept them from being able to pool their resources and data to develop therapies in the most expeditious manner possible. The state of COVID-19 research exposes the lies about capitalism “stimulating innovation.”

It is also important to note that much of the drug development deemed “corporate innovation” could not have been possible without taxpayer-funded government research. Bills such as the Bayh-Dole Act allow for corporations to purchase patents on molecules or substances that have been developed at publicly funded institutions such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH), then jack up the prices to maximize profits. A study conducted by the Center for Integration of Science and Industry (CISI) analyzed the relationship between government funded research and every new drug approved by the FDA between 2010 and 2016. Researchers found “each of the 210 medicines approved for market came out of research supported by the NIH.”

Expropriation of the capitalists would mean the public would no longer have to subsidize private corporate profits. The nationalization of the pharmaceutical industry would allow for both intellectual and financial resources to be pooled to tackle the globe’s challenges, instead of focussing on blockbuster drugs that benefit only a few. In the case of COVID-19, we would see a mass mobilization and coordination of the world’s greatest minds to pool resources and more quickly develop effective therapies. In fact, there would likely be more doctors and scientists as people who want to study these fields are no longer confronted with insurmountable debt

Health Care in Socialism

Under socialism, the entire healthcare industry would be run democratically by doctors, nurses, employees, and patients. This would be drastically different from the current system in which wealthy capitalists make the major decisions in hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, device manufacturing firms, and insurance companies (the key players that make up the “medical industrial complex”). In the case of the COVID-19, health care would be a human right, and not a means to make money. This would allow for every individual concerned to obtain testing and treatment without fear of economic ruin. If hospitalization or quarantine was needed, a patient and family would be able to focus on what was best for their health instead of worrying whether a hospital bill would destroy them economically.

The purview of what is considered “health care” would also need to expand. An individual’s overall living situation and social environment would be key to addressing their health. This would mean a health system under socialism would address issues such as pending climate collapse. While a connection between COVID-19 and climate change has yet to be established, rising global temperatures — largely driven by 100 largest corporations and the military-industrial complex — will increase the emergence of new disease agents in the future. Shorter winters, changes in water cycles, and migration of wildlife closer to humans all increase the risk of new disease exposure.

Capitalism created the conditions of the epidemic. Capitalist “solutions” are insufficient and exacerbate the crisis, meaning more sickness and more death. Capitalism has been an incubator for the continual spread of the coronavirus. Health care under this system will always be woefully inadequate in addressing epidemics. The coronavirus highlights the fact that we must move to a more social analysis of health and well-being. We are all connected to each other, to nature, and to the environment around us. Socialism will restructure society based on those relationships.

At the same time, socialism is not a utopia. There will likely be epidemics or pandemics in socialism as well. However, a socialist society — one in which all production is organized in a planned economy under workers’ control — would best be able to allocate resources and put the creative and scientific energy of people to the task.

Bernie Sanders and "Playing the Game" of Bourgeois Politics

Bernie's raw assessment of the US in 1978 was right on. Bourgeois politics are a funny thing. As someone who has become a career senator of this very state of "poverty, wage slavery, and mind-destroying media and schools," you have to wonder how much he has either (1) compromised his principles, or (2) changed his views to maintain this career. 

Is he the best of the rotten bunch? Clearly. Does he still seek some justice for the US working class? Of course. Does he hammer away at corporate corruption and excess? Absolutely. But what price has he paid and continues to pay along the way? Enabling and supporting imperialism, endorsing a power-hungry crook like Hillary Clinton, inevitably endorsing a belligerent Joe Biden, backing the racist & classist Democratic Party, calling Hugo Chavez a dictator, belittling Cuba as an evil dictatorship, playing into the Russiagate nonsense, etc.

Is he playing the power game? Perhaps. Are these "necessary evils" the price of admission? Probably. But at what point does playing this game start to mock the importance of principle and integrity? What does it say about someone who is able and willing to play this game? And what effect does this spectacle have on the much-needed formation of a class-conscious proletariat?

Bernie and Bloomberg Lost the Same Way

By J.E. Karla

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Coronavirus: A Potential Disaster of Capitalism's Making

By Ben Hillier

Republished from Red Flag.

What to do if confronted with an extremely contagious virus that medical experts say they have not seen before and don’t understand, and which is fast spreading and killing hundreds of people? a) Take precautionary measures to stop the virus spreading and prepare the health system for a potential shock? Or b) Ignore it, blithely assert – without any evidence – that it is little different from the common flu, accuse your adversaries, who are taking it more seriously, of scaremongering for political gain and then, when a pandemic is imminent and doctors still can’t say exactly how bad the virus is, tell everyone that everything’s under control despite little to nothing having been done to prepare for a local outbreak?

If you are the current president of the United States, it’s been choice “b”. Aside from temporarily denying entry to foreign nationals who visited China prior to their arrival, any talk about the US facing a problem was, in Donald Trump’s mind, a Democratic Party and fake news media conspiracy to undermine his presidency and bring down the stock market. He was backed, of course, by right wing media whose main concern is to overhype the threat of immigration and combat threats to the president rather than threats to national health. For a period, Trump’s position was also echoed by writers in outlets normally critical of the White House. An early February Washington Post headline read: “Get a grippe, America. The flu is a much bigger threat than coronavirus, for now”. “Don’t Worry About the Coronavirus. Worry About the Flu”, offered BuzzFeed a few days earlier.

From the beginning, medical experts were clear that they simply did not know how bad or otherwise the virus was, yet many non-experts seemed to have an opinion. “Why so many journalists must act like propagandists rather than independent thinkers is a question for another time”, Vanity Fair contributor T.A. Frank aptly wrote in a mid-February response, before noting that the mortality rate is believed to be about 20 times that of the flu – about the same as Spanish flu, which killed tens of millions in 1918-20. And, as Frank also noted, unlike the flu, the rate of critical cases is high enough to overwhelm emergency departments.

When the pressure to take action became too great, Trump appointed vice president Mike Pence to oversee the US response, which tells us a lot about the seriousness with which the outbreak was being taken. Pence is known for a certain “anti-alarmism” when it comes to public health crises. When running for Congress in 2000, he wrote such credible lines as: “Despite the hysteria from the political class and the media, smoking doesn’t kill” and “Global warming is a myth ... CO2 is a naturally occurring phenomenon in nature”. As governor of Indiana from 2013 to 2017, he oversaw an HIV epidemic linked to needle sharing among opioid addicts, having cut funding for the last HIV tester in the county where the epidemic exploded, and having resisted calls for needle exchanges. “Sadly, this outbreak was preventable, given all that we know about HIV and its links to opioid addiction, yet adequate treatment resources and public health safeguards were not in place”, the National Institute on Drug Abuse wrote at the time.

The same thing could have been written about the coronavirus, which is reaching pandemic proportions. Adequate treatment resources and public health safeguards were issues in Wuhan, China, where the outbreak began, and will be issues in many places as the virus spreads. According to several witness accounts, and the evaluation of medical observers, the initial response from those in power in China was denial, which led to a failure to prepare an adequate health system response. Authorities in Wuhan were too concerned about an upcoming political conference and celebration to allow doctors’ warnings to spoil the party (sounds eerily like Trump). After several weeks, when the epidemic became too big to ignore, denial was replaced by panic. The largest quarantining experiment in human history followed, but the health system was unprepared and totally swamped. Who knows how different the course of the outbreak would have been if, in those first crucial weeks after the virus was discovered, authorities had acted decisively to contain the outbreak and prepare the medical system?  

The ruling Communist Party imposed a massive lockdown on hundreds of millions of people to stop the contagion. Those in Hubei have suffered enormously for the authorities’ botched response. The World Health Organization’s Bruce Aylward, who led an international mission to China, told Science magazine that the aggressive containment bought time for other provinces to prepare and prevented “probably hundreds of thousands” of cases across the country. Yet, instead of doing all it could to avoid a repeat of Wuhan by using the time to prepare the US health system, the White House was thinking of the economic opportunities China’s crisis was offering. Commerce secretary Wilbur Ross said the outbreak “will help to accelerate the return of jobs to North America”, while the president’s trade adviser Peter Navarro said that there would be no tariff relief even if the Chinese economy began to tank because of the epidemic. Reportedly, officials have been leaning on US companies with operations in China to repatriate them to the US as part of Trump’s “America First” nationalist project.

By the end of February, the virus had breached all of China’s internal containment lines, and the US and most of the world seem ill-prepared. The US opened quarantine sites at Travis Air Force Base and March Air Reserve Base in California for US citizens returning from China. But a whistleblower filed a complaint alleging that protocols were lax and staff were put at risk. “I soon began to field panicked calls from my leadership team and deployed staff members expressing concerns with the lack of ... communication and coordination, staff being sent into quarantined areas without personal protective equipment, training or experience in managing public health emergencies, safety protocols and the potential danger to both themselves and members of the public they come into contact with”, the whistleblower wrote. Soon after, the New York Times reported on the first US case in a patient with “no known contact with hot zones or other coronavirus patients” emerging near Travis Air Force Base.

Jason Schwartz, an assistant professor at Yale School of Public Health, recently told the Atlantic’s James Hamblin that authorities should have been preparing since the SARS outbreak of 2003. “Had we not set the SARS-vaccine-research program aside, we would have had a lot more of this foundational work that we could apply to this new, closely related virus”, he said. A vaccine is at least 12 months away, underlining the point Hamblin, also a lecturer at Yale School of Public Health, went on to make: “Long term government investments matter because creating vaccines, antiviral medications, and other vital tools requires decades of serious investment, even when demand is low. Market-based economies often struggle to develop a product for which there is no immediate demand and to distribute products to the places they’re needed”.

The US health system is the embodiment of market-based capitalist logic: for-profit, user-pays and dominated by the pharmaceutical and private insurance industries. It is the only major developed economy without guaranteed paid sick leave and universal health care. That makes it probably the most ill equipped of all countries in the developed world to deal with an outbreak. How on Earth are infected people to self-isolate for 14 days if they live paycheck to paycheck without leave entitlements? How are they supposed to be diagnosed if they have to pay more than $3,000 to be tested – which is what happened to a Florida man who returned from China in February, according to the Miami Herald. How will an epidemic be contained if half the people infected can’t afford medicines or hospital care?

That’s the question facing the US. As Western governments defund public health systems, give subsidies to the private health sector to move to user- and insurer-pays systems, and attack workers’ rights and conditions of employment, it’s increasingly a question facing even those countries with good public health records, which are likely to be relatively unscathed by this coronavirus. It doesn’t bear thinking about the carnage that could unfold in countries with worse health systems than China if they too are faced with an epidemic. With more than 3,000 people dead, many countries are instituting or extending containment measures.

“At some point the expectation that any area will escape effects of COVID-19 must be abandoned”, Hamblin concluded. “The disease must be seen as everyone’s problem.” Yet it’s reasonable to assume that those with economic resources – multi-millionaires, executives at insurance and pharmaceutical companies, politicians – won’t see it quite that way if the pandemic is particularly vicious. More likely it will be poor and working class people shunted into inadequate, hastily constructed mass quarantines away from the better care of private clinics catering to the wealthy.

And working class people will face stark choices that those with money will not: the choice between poverty and risking infection. Casualisation and short term contract work – precariousness – are a feature of a large section of the workforce in every country. Those people already go to work with the flu and other illnesses every year because they can’t afford not to. Often, they live in apartment blocks or shared accommodation. They don’t have the money to pay for other family members to ship out to a hotel for a week or two if one of them gets sick. By contrast, those with resources have greater flexibility to take time off work. They have the means to sustain themselves in isolation and hire people to do chores for them. They live in large houses rather than cramped apartments, so are naturally more quarantined from human contact when needs be.

Like every other recent health crisis, there is nothing about the coronavirus pandemic that will likely change many establishment minds about the need for workers and the poor to have more rights and more resources – universal and free health care, a month of paid sick leave every year and so on – let alone a world run to satisfy human needs rather than expand the egos of political leaders or the bank accounts of health industry executives.

Ruling-Class Fears of an Inevitable Communist Resurgence in the U.S.

By Rainer Shea

Republished from Rainer’s blog.

The more the popular backlash against neoliberalism develops, the more apparent it becomes that American society is heading towards a resurgence in pro-communist sentiments and organizing. The current presence of this Red revival is hard to see on the surface, since Bernie Sanders’ FDR liberalism is still the main American political faction that’s associated with the term “socialism.” But as the class struggle continues, an actual manifestation of socialism and communism will begin to enter the mainstream.

The rise of communism in a highly unequal, post-recession American economy will be inevitable because whenever discontent grows around the miseries of capitalism, communism enters the conversation to some degree. There’s a lasting power to an idea that’s based in an irrefutable analysis of how capitalism perpetuates oppression and inequity, and that presents a tried and proven solution to capitalism.

From my perspective as a fairly well learned Marxist-Leninist, the only reason why not all poor and working class people embrace this idea is because of how good capitalism is at marketing “solutions” which reinforce the current system. Over 40% of Americans now favor socialism over capitalism, but the first political strain they encounter that associates itself with the word “socialist” isn’t Leninism, Juche, or Maoism. It’s Bernie Sanders’ vision for a capitalist welfare state that continues the American imperialist project under a vaguely “socialist” banner. One doesn’t encounter actual socialism until they enter the somewhat fringe realm of anti-capitalist organizing, and they aren’t willing to embrace factions like Marxism-Leninism until they’ve unlearned the propaganda about the existing socialist states.

Yet the more these disaffected people grope for answers to our capitalist crisis, the more accessible communism becomes. “People are willing to listen and they ask what socialism is,” the American Marxist leader Gloria La Riva said in 2016. “This year we have seen the fog of anti-communism being lifted from the minds of many, after more than 70 years of exclusion.” The factor behind this cultural shift in communism’s favor wasn’t so much that Sanders had brought socialist terminology into the mainstream, but that widespread angst over inequality had led many people to question old narratives.

Again, it was inevitable that this opening for communism would appear in the 21st century, because our neoliberal order was designed from the start to create major contradictions within capitalism. The last half-century’s paradigm of privatization, austerity, deregulation, and regressive taxation has been possible only through thoroughly dismantling the centers of social cohesion and pro-labor organizing. The crushing of unions throughout this time, precipitated by the decades-long American campaign to suppress and malign communists, pushed the left to the margins during the 1980s and onward. In the 90s, the Democratic Party was turned solidly towards a corporatist agenda, correlating with the fall of the Soviet Union and the subsequent weakening of the global socialist movement.

It was because Western society had committed itself to growing highly unequal that this post-Cold War capitalist triumph would soon be undone. The income gap in America has since risen to its highest level ever recorded, and the eight richest people now own as much wealth as the bottom half of the global population.

The latter statistic relates to the development of neoliberalism in the other core imperialist countries, and in the Third World countries where the U.S./NATO empire has carried out neo-colonialism. This extreme global inequality is why poor and working class people in Haiti, Honduras, Iraq, Lebanon, Chile, Ecuador, and Argentina have been protesting against neoliberalism during the last year. It’s why anti-austerity protesters in France have been sustaining civil disobedience efforts since October of 2018. Despite the relative apathy of Americans so far, there’s also been a vast uptick in American strikes during the last two years. After decades of declining living standards, the backlash from the masses is growing.

In America and abroad, the capitalist power establishment is responding to this social discontent by trying to divert its energy away from class struggle. The efforts from Washington to turn the Lebanon protests into an anti-Hezbollah campaign are an example of how bourgeois propaganda is seeking to distract people from actually moving towards revolution. Something similar has happened in Hong Kong, where the recent protests that have gained traction because of economic discontent have been turned into violent anti-communist demonstrations by relentless U.S. propaganda and organizational manipulation.

This is how the capitalist state has long strangled the emergence of an effective class revolt: co-optation, infiltration of movement leadership, and narrative management. During the era of the Black Panthers, which is arguably the last time communism entered the American mainstream, the government went so far as to assassinate the Black Panther Party’s leaders. The capitalists will do anything necessary to safeguard against a revolution, including mass executions of communists like the ones that took place under Pinochet.

In recent years, the ruling class has been waging a war on dissent in response to the last decade’s rise of class consciousness and online alternative media platforms. There have been unprecedented censorship measures from tech companies, the U.S. government has been forcing outlets like RT to register as foreign agencies, and an atmosphere of McCarthyism has re-emerged amid paranoia about foreign agents and “Russian propaganda.” In the last year, the president of Veterans for Peace has been violently arrested for aiding anti-imperialist protesters at the Venezuelan embassy, and the anti-imperialist journalist Max Blumenthal has been detained on false charges. These attacks on dissent, as well as the anti-BDS laws and the campaign to prosecute Julian Assange for exposing government crimes, show how the system will respond when communism gains further prominence.

BDS, the journalism of WikiLeaks, the efforts of anti-war activists, and the other recent sources of opposition to global capitalism and imperialism represent seeds for the coming Red surge. While communism and its staunch anti-imperialist principles aren’t supported by everyone involved with these anti-establishment strains, there’s a potential for a lot more people to join the efforts of the most committed class insurrectionists. This is why the political and media class recently made a hysterical effort to vilify Cuba, and why Trump vowed in his second state of the union address to defeat socialism in Venezuela and elsewhere. There’s more cause for ruling class alarm the more that class consciousness advances around the globe.

At least among the liberal capitalists, there’s a desire to return society to its post-Cold War state so that the neoliberal order will become stabilized again; this is what the Bloomberg/Biden faction of the Democratic Party is frantically trying to accomplish by beating back at the populist Sanders faction. But the center was never meant to hold, because neoliberalism is designed to perpetuate a cycle of increasing inequality and inequality leads to instability. Some individual capitalists seek to reverse this process of inequality by adopting Sanders’ vision for a welfare state, but the capitalist class is overall determined to preserve the neoliberal order.

They’re determined to preserve neoliberalism because it’s the system that’s for so long allowed the corporatocracy to produce meaningful profits. Neoliberalism was adopted because capitalism was experiencing a recession during the 1970s, when the welfare state was last in a dominant form. Since then, neoliberalism has bought the capitalist class four decades of stability.

Yet in accordance with Marx’ prediction about capitalism being destined to consume itself, that orderly period is now on the verge of ending. The looming economic crash could be the catalyst that makes anti-capitalist civil unrest break out not just in France and much of the Third World, but throughout the rest of the imperial core. Welfare statists like Sanders won’t be able to turn this collapse around; the political future of the capitalist world is fascism, where the state cracks down in a desperate attempt to prevent revolution.

The more traction that communism gains, the more the capitalist class will resemble Jair Bolsonaro, the fascist Brazilian president whose state of mind Eric Nepomuceno recently described as follows: “The basic mission of the Brazilian right-wing extremist [Bolsonaro] is to give final combat to a communism that he detects, hiding everywhere even in his fridge every time he looks for cold water, and that makes him sleep very few hours every night, and always with a gun on his bedside table.”

Pete Buttigieg and the Folly of Identity Politics

[Photo Illustration by Kristen Hazzard/The Daily Beast / Photo Getty]

By Ezra Brain

Republished from Left Voice.

n the campaign trail, Pete Buttigieg can often be heard sharing his coming out story. An evocative speaker, he paints a beautiful picture of his life from when he was in the closet to eventually finding love in his partner, Chasten Buttigieg. Like others in the crowded Democratic primary race, Buttigieg is trying to be a first for this country — the first openly gay President. At other similar events, Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar, two women running to be the first female President of the United States, share their own stories of hardship they’ve faced as women in politics. While their stories are personal, their political strategies remain the same: to lean in on their respective identity groups to give their campaigns a boost. The strategy isn’t new. After all, it worked wonderfully for Barack Obama in 2008, catapulting him into the White House as the first Black President. Hillary Clinton did the same in 2016. Although she eventually lost to Donald Trump, the story of her loss became deeply personal for large groups of women across the country. Propelled by media narratives, the operative idea here is that, by electing a member of an oppressed group, you’re electing an ally to all oppressed groups who can effectively erase all oppression.

To see the logical fallacy of this argument, one only has to examine the platforms and records of these candidates. Kamala Harris, who dropped out in December 2019, had made a career out of oppressing the very identity group she leaned on. Warren has supported military budgets that have been used to bomb women and children in the Middle East. Klobuchar, similarly, has been a staunch supporter of American military intervention in Libya and Yemen. But the problem with this phenomenon is less about the failings of a handful of politicians, and more about identity politics as an organizational theory, which fails to recognize the vastly different material conditions and, therefore, interests of those who claim to represent them. It is not enough to have the next female, Black, queer, or disabled leader of the biggest capitalist country when capitalism and the state that props it up are at the heart of such oppressions.

The Roots of Identity Politics

The term, “identity politics” dates back to the 1977 manifesto of the Combahee River Collective (CRC). Founded in 1974, the CRC was a radical Black feminist organization formed as a response to the underrepresentation of Black women in the overwhelmingly white feminist movement and the overwhelmingly male Civil Rights Movement. The CRC was also an alternative to the National Black Feminist Organization, formed to create dialogue over racism within feminist organizations, arguing that simply identifying racism was politically insufficient as a plan of action. By describing the lived experience of black women as one of “interlocking systems of oppression,” they highlighted that the oppression of Black women couldn’t just be contained within the singular categories of sexism, racism, or of homophobia experienced by Black lesbians. It was, in reality, a result of the combination of all those identities. The women of the CRC fully recognized that Black liberation wasn’t one that could be achieved under capitalism and recognized the need to reorganize society based on the needs of the most oppressed. In their pamphlet, they say, “We are not convinced, however, that a socialist revolution that is not also a feminist and anti-racist revolution will guarantee our liberation.”

The CRC coined the term “identity politics” to characterize these tensions. In their formulation, they provided an analysis that drew from the lived experiences of Black women. The material lives of black women — who were (and continue to be) disproportionately affected by poverty, violence, and lack of healthcare and, as a result, are overrepresented in the working class and poor — made them particularly distrustful of capitalism. By recognizing that there was no liberation under capitalism for Black people, and much less for Black women, the CRC proposed a program to transform Black women into political agents who could ensure not just their freedoms, but the freedoms for all people.

The Problem with Postmodernism

In the decades that have followed, however, the term “identity politics” has been bastardized and stripped of any class analysis. Now, identity politics reflects a shift away from materialism to postmodernism and represents little more than token representation.

Born out of the “disappointed revolutionary generation of 1968 and the incorporation of many of its members into the professional and managerial ‘new middle class,'” postmodern philosophy posits that there is no idea of “truth” and gives primacy to relativism. It emerges from a rejection of oppression and a mistaken interpretation of Marxist determinism (the belief that an economy has to pass through phases before achieving socialism), treating truth and reason as “myths” that are designed to uphold existing hierarchies.

While postmodernism recognizes materialism, it only considers it to be a part of, and secondary to, larger ideas like society and culture. Under capitalism, however, the oppressive character of “culture” is deeply tied to the material need to oppress communities.

Capitalism lives on its ability to maintain a steady stream of cheap, waged labor — one that it sustains through the oppression of class, racial and gender minorities the world over. Whether through the exploitation of Black people through history, or through the exploitation of undocumented immigrant labor now, capitalists have long benefited by dividing the working class to drive down wages and used race, ethnicity, religion, gender and sexuality to foster prejudice and division. In times when workers’ unity and collective action is weak, workers are also forced to compete among themselves for better pay and opportunities that can alleviate their conditions, leading to some workers using these divisions to advance their own interests. 

Today, minority and oppressed groups are discriminated against irrespective of their class reality because capitalist expansion has exacerbated, normalized, and codified this discrimation, making oppression a part of the cultural hegemony. In other words, capitalism relies upon the oppression of marginalized groups. The ruling classes use their influence to manipulate the culture of society to establish an oppressive status quo that is treated as natural and inevitable, and create the necessary conditions for their sustenance. 

Discrimination, therefore, is not just a matter of character; it’s a result of the material interests of the ruling classes. To erase such an analysis is to strip away the real intent of the ruling classes and reduce oppression to only a moral barrier that can be overcome without threatening capitalism itself.  

Such is the case of identity politics in the postmodern era, which becomes dissociated from the material relationships between people and society. Instead, it places importance on individual successes and identity performance. In this new era, as Asad Haider writes in Mistaken Identity, “the framework of identity reduces politics to who you are as an individual and gaining recognition as an individual, rather than your membership in a collectivity and the collective struggle against an oppressive social structure.” Success of some members of oppressed groups under capitalism becomes akin to the liberation of all people. The belief is that, by “breaking the glass ceiling” and rising in ranks of capitalism, members of minority groups can use their influence to alleviate the suffering of others like them. What’s missing is how the ability to rise in those ranks and, more importantly, maintaining it requires exploiting members of the same groups they’re supposed to emancipate.

This trick has worked magnificently. While the radicalism in the streets during the 60s was successful in winning key equal rights laws, it died down over the following decades as key leaders of these movements made alliances with the bourgeoisie or were given token leadership positions in the offices of capital. While “equal rights” is law, systemic discrimination and violence remain facts of life for oppressed communities.

The proponents of identity politics promote the idea that simply diversifying the highest offices of imperial powers will alleviate oppression and can successfully challenge and bring down capitalism. As was the case with the first Black president, electing the first gay president or the first female president will bring no respite for the oppressed because, as leaders in capitalism, it is against their material interests to do so.

Dangers of Identity Politics Today

As Nancy Fraser writes, in the decades that followed the CRC, there was an unprecedented growth of progressive neoliberalism — an alliance between the increasing financialization of the economy and the new social movements that stressed on diversity. In this era, Fraser importantly points out, “the progressive-neoliberal program for a just status order did not aim to abolish social hierarchy but to ‘diversify’ it, ‘empowering’ ‘talented’ women, people of color, and sexual minorities to rise to the top.” 

Take, for example, the election of Barack Obama. Many, including some of the left, rallied around Obama’s 2008 candidacy both because of his rhetoric of “change” and because of the symbolic significance of his campaign. After he was elected, America was labelled “post-racial” because a Black man was finally president. Rooted in identity politics, it was widely believed that Obama, as a Black man, would understand and could then ease the oppression of Black and other minority communities.

Nothing, however, could have been further from the truth. Under Obama, the U.S. expanded the drone program — which almost exclusively targets people of color in the Middle East — and deported more immigrants than under any other president up to that point. Anger within the Black community at home grew under the Obama presidency, with the explosion of the Black Lives Matter movement. In the face of this public outcry against systemic racism within the state, Obama was relatively inert. He made emotional speeches about Trayvon Martin and held some roundtable discussions in the White House about “criminal justice reform,” but did nothing to attack the carceral state. Young Black men continued to be far, far more likely to be killed by the police, and Obama opposed reparations. This is not (just) because of some grand moral failing on the part of Obama, but because as the President of the United States, he had to oversee the most racist entity in the world: U.S. imperialist capitalism. Without attacking that entity — something he was unwilling to do — there is no way to combat the institutional racism present in the United States.

The contradictions of identity politics can be seen in the U.S. and the world over. In the Democratic primaries, Buttigieg, as the first openly gay candidate, is increasing in popularity among the party’s liberal wing. However, anyone who believes that Buttigieg would commit himself, if he became president, to defending the rights of LGBTQ+ people is deluding themselves. Buttigieg will not combat capitalism — because he is committed to capitalism, as his willingness to get in bed with corporate donors already shows — and without combating capitalism, there is no way to resolve the oppression of LGBTQ+ people, or racism, or sexism, or any other form of specialized oppression.

This is a real danger in viewing oppressed groups as a monolith. By giving crumbs to some members of these groups, capitalism has formulated them into multi-class groups, wherein the material conditions, and therefore the material interests, vary vastly among their ranks. The lives and motivations of Roy Cohn or Peter Thiel or Milo Yiannopoulos, all gay men who helped Donald Trump get where he is, therefore, are very different from that of the vast numbers of trans* youth who experience homelessness.

The systematic corporatization of queer liberation, as has been the case with other liberation movements, refocuses the demands away from liberation towards representation, gay marriage, and other marginal demands. While these demands are not unimportant — and some, such as ensuring gender confirmation medical treatment, are potentially life-saving — they cannot be mistaken for the final goal. When the basic democratic demands of a movement become the total demands of the movement, it is easy for politicians to position themselves as allies in order to gain support. Such a politics allows for candidates like Joe Biden, who has a long history of opposing LGTBQ+ rights, to posture as an ally and go to Stonewall by offering late apologies and support to basic demands. 

Opportunists within oppressed groups have long exploited their identities to gain in the ranks of capitalism. Minority capitalists like Jay-Z exploit the working class — many of whom are Black — to enrich themselves and sell it as “representation.” But we don’t care for another Black or queer or female capitalist who’ll exploit us while they pretend to be our friend. We want the end of the capitalist system altogether.

None of Us are Free until All of Us are Free

There is no single person who can be elected, made a CEO, enriched, or placed in any other form of capitalist “representation” in order to singularly liberate all oppressed peoples. Such a liberation is only possible through the organization of the working class. In multi-class minority groups, the bourgeoisie with their unlimited means will constantly monopolize the conversation to further their material interests. While marches like the Women’s March or candidacies like Buttigieg’s and Warren’s can rally high numbers, they are severely limited in their ability to bring forth any material change because of their programs are in line with the interests of capital and are thus subservient to the ruling classes. On the contrary, a diverse working class coalition representing the most oppressed within its ranks can strike at the heart of all oppression and bring it crashing down. As Marx writes in the Communist Manifesto, “the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons — the modern working class — the proletarians.”

Today, capitalism is sustained by a global proletariat. Unlike the lies peddled by the ruling classes that are meant to divide us, the working class isn’t just made of straight white men, but is Black, brown, trans*, queer, disabled, female, and international. Racism, sexism, xenophobia, etc. are tools of the ruling classes to divide the working class and keep it weak. A diverse, organized working class must take up the fights of specialized oppression.

Such alliances are not a pipe dream. In MadyGraf, a factory in Argentina, workers went on strike to protect a trans co-worker who was being denied her rights by management. They put forth clear, uncompromising demands for LGBTQ+ rights, challenged capitalist production, and won. But, fighting against trans prejudice also strengthened the unity of the workforce and prepared the workers for the fight against the mass layoffs that came three years later — one that they won by taking over the factory.

To gain real victories under capitalism, we have to strike similarly at the heart of capital. Take for example the recent Fuck the Police protests in New York City. These protests were organized in response to increased police presence and their targeting of racial minorities in the subway.. Imagine if, in addition to militant activists, there was also an organized group of transit workers who could have gone on strike until the movements’ demands were met. Today, in France and in Chile, activists have joined with the working class to do exactly that and are organizing mass strikes that are challenging capital and winning many of the movements’ demands.

We should not be fighting and settling for crumbs. The fight for the liberation of all oppressed groups is one that is deeply linked to the fight against capitalism. One cannot occur without the other. By fighting for the rights of the most oppressed, the working class can draw deep conclusions not just about their collective power, but also about how capitalism thrives on dividing and isolating them. Such fights act as schools of war for the coming revolution and directly challenge the foundations of capitalism. 

Token representatives like Buttigieg, or Warren, or even Obama are not our allies in the fight for queer liberation, or women’s liberation, or Black liberation. As leaders of the world imperialist project, their goals, irrespective of their intent, are diametrically opposite of the interests of the most oppressed within their communities. We cannot fall into the trap of identity politics and start supporting members of the ruling class just because they are a member of this or that oppressed group. Only a diverse, organized, and militant working class can bring about the world that we want.

Iran 1953: How the CIA Orchestrated an Imperialist Coup

By Salvador Soler

Republished from Left Voice.

Escalating tensions between the U.S. and Iran have brought the complicated relationship between the two countries to the forefront. One of the most crucial events in the timeline of U.S.–Iran relations was the CIA-orchestrated coup in 1953 that deposed Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh at the behest of U.S. interests. By looking back at this instance of imperialist intervention, socialists can draw conclusions for defeating imperialism as well as the reactionary regime of the ayatollahs.

The end of World War II established a new world order under U.S. hegemony. The colonial order built by the British and French Empires began to break down, and their weakness opened the way for the emergence of national liberation movements in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. These conflicts were framed in an unprecedented global situation of tension between two superpowers, the USSR and United States during the Cold War.

The Middle East—as the West likes to call it—has experienced mass anti-colonial struggles in the last century. In Egypt, King Farouk was overthrown in 1952. In Iraq and Syria, the Ba’ath Party emerged as the main opposition to the Sykes–Picot Agreement, which allowed England and France to draw the borders of the countries that would be made out of the former Ottoman Empire on a napkin. Particularly in Iran, the National Front was born out of the masses’ drive to nationalize oil. The leader and founder of this political organization, Mohammad Mossadegh, posed a threat to the power of the U.S.-sympathizing Mohammad Reza Shah due to a nationalist discourse against imperialism.

Reza Shah and World War II

Mohammad Reza Shah’s predecessor, his father Reza Shah, took power in Iran and established the Pahlavi dynasty in 1921 and 1925, respectively. Backed by the British, the coup of 1921 was an attempt to curb Bolshevik influence. The new Shah surprised the British when in 1932 he began to slash some of the oil concessions awarded to the Anglo-Persian Oil Company that dominated oil exploitation in the Persian Gulf, while opening the door to German capital. By 1939, at the outset of World War II, the Third Reich was overtaking England as Iran’s main trading partner. The Allies needed Iran to get hold of the oil and the huge trans-Iranian railway linking the Persian Gulf to the Caspian Sea to supply the USSR with weapons. For this reason, in 1941, 15 divisions of the British Navy and the Red Army crossed the Iranian borders, motivated by the Shah’s admiration for Adolf Hitler.

The 1943 Tehran Conference—the “prequel” to the pacts from the Yalta and Potsdam Conferences—brought together Josef Stalin, Winston Churchill, and Franklin Roosevelt to discuss the sharing of the world after the impending German defeat in the war. The setting for the conference was no coincidence, as it was necessary for the world powers to define who would dominate a vital resource like oil. Roosevelt asked Churchill about the Shah’s situation and he told him that the Abwehr—the German military secret service—was influencing the Shah to the extent to which he was considering breaking neutrality and joining the Axis with Hitler. The British could not afford to allow oil to fall into Nazi hands, and the USSR would have a strategic problem with another enemy lurking on its borders. Churchill concluded his conversation with Roosevelt by saying: “We brought him, and we took him,” referring to Reza Shah Pahlavi.

The Post-War and the Cold War

Since the British Crown needed a puppet to replace the Shah, they let his docile yet influential son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, take over. The young Shah would seal an alliance with the British, while maintaining a weak balance with the USSR (which demanded oil concessions). It also meant an alliance with socialists, liberals, and conservatives. Among them were the Tudeh, founded during the occupation in 1941 by the former militants of the Communist Party of Persia (the largest in the Middle East) of a Stalinist tendency, which had mass influence and led large unions; the National Front with Mohammad Mossadegh at its head, founded in 1949; and the conservative sector that synthesized the famous alliance between the Bazaar and the Mosque, that is, between the sector of the financial bourgeoisie and the Shiite clergy. The new regime included a parliamentary monarchy, political parties, and the legalization of the press, which led to a process of enormous politicization among the population.

The war had devastated the Iranian economy. The precariousness of life led to large workers’ strikes led by Tudeh. The province of Khuzestan housed the main industries and the largest oil well in the world at the time, held by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC). The workers on strike not only demanded better living conditions, but also that the labor laws be under Iranian and not British jurisdiction. To settle this strike that lasted long months, the Crown hired thousands of strikebreakers and placed two destroyers aiming at the oil tankers that occupied the well. The conflict culminated in the submission of the AIOC to Iranian law.

Despite the hundreds of deaths and injuries, the workers had left behind the idea of the need for oil nationalization as a path to national liberation, unleashing a widespread movement.

After those strikes, the Shah not only banned the Tudeh and the unions, but also extended oil concessions to the British in exchange for minimal royalties for the country by allowing the British Crown to empty the Iranian wells. Massive opposition to this measure led to the founding of the bourgeois nationalist party, the National Front, whose top figure was Mossadegh. It was composed of professional sectors trained in Europe and different parties, some secular like the Workers’ Party of Iran, and Islamists like the Mujahideen-e Islam.

Mossadegh gained a lot of prestige within Iranian society for confronting the English by obtaining better income distribution agreements. The National Front gained a majority of seats in parliament and enormous mass support. As part of Stalinism’s post-war policy, the Tudeh supported the policies of the National Front by sealing the alliance of the labor movement with the national bourgeoisie and clerical sectors. The Tudeh pressed the Shah to appoint Mossadegh prime minister in 1951 after he presented the bill to nationalize oil to the Majlis. Within days, Iran came to dominate 100% of the oil industry.

British imperialism could not allow the world’s largest reserve to be nationalized and possibly fall under Soviet control. To exert pressure, they withdrew all their engineering personnel and sent warships to harass Iranian-flagged oil tankers, while calling for an international boycott.

The United States initially remained neutral. President Harry Truman let the nationalist movements run with the prospect of them favoring world trade by dynamiting Britain’s colonial relations. However, in January 1953, the Dwight Eisenhower administration opted for an aggressive international policy toward the USSR, positing the hypothesis that Iran could fall under the Iron Curtain (despite the fact that the Tudeh defined itself as a “patriotic democratic front” and had abandoned all socialist perspectives). Thus began the collaboration between the MI6 (British secret service) and the CIA to orchestrate the coup d’état in 1953.

Operation TPAJAX

The plan to overthrow Mossadegh surpasses fiction. It was divided into three overlapping phases: a permanent campaign of ideological propaganda through mercenary journalists; an extended network of military officers to lead the coup; and the purchase of parliamentarians to ensure a legislative body opposed to Mossadegh, as well as recruiting Islamist clerics and convincing the Shah to assume absolute power.

Mossadegh’s popularity pitted him against the power of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, who was seen even by the clerical sectors as a foreign agent. Mossadegh, remaining faithful to his class, was able to use this popular support together with the Tudeh, which provided the strength of the strategic unions as a base to maneuver, to undermine the Shah’s power, and to increase his share of power as a minister. This set him against the Islamists within the National Front who were aiming to Islamize the nation. That internal political dynamic opened the way for the imperialist intelligence services to gain influence over a famous Ayatollah, Ghasem Kashani.

This approach was decisive in confronting a sector of the impoverished population that was being impacted by the economic stagnation against Mossadegh. In this way, religious sectors began to collaborate with imperialist forces and the Shah.

Mossadegh was then faced with an attempted coup in which the Shah removed him from office, but was alerted by the intelligence networks of the Tudeh, and managed to survive. This failure forced the Shah to flee from Iran to Rome, which provided an impetus to the masses, who aspired to get rid of the monarchy and to stop the coup, to take several government buildings and flood the streets.

Mossadegh tried to hold onto power by seeking support from Eisenhower—who accused him of being a communist—in The Hague by denouncing the conspiracy in international court. Mossadegh had the option to hold onto power by sustaining the power of the masses who were rapidly advancing to confront imperialism. Instead, he feared that the masses would surpass his own power, and in order to defer to the U.S., he decided to fiercely repress the masses with the army.

With this choice, Mossadegh himself opened the door for Kermit Roosevelt—Franklin Roosevelt’s grandson—in command of Operation TPAJAX (the coup operation), to begin a bombardment of false decrees by the (exiled) Shah to influence public opinion against the prime minister. On August 18, there was a demonstration organized by the opposition (including clerics collaborating with the CIA) against Mossadegh and destroying Tudeh headquarters. But the Tudeh orders its militants to stay in their homes without intervening.

On August 19, Iranian army general Fazlollah Zahedi, a CIA agent, surrounded Mossadegh’s house with 35 Sherman tanks. After a nine-hour battle, Mossadegh was captured and sentenced to life in prison. The Shah took over within days and enacted unparalleled repression against the National Front, but even more repression against the Tudeh leaders. 5,000 people were imprisoned and executed, while others went into exile. Britain and the U.S. were rewarded with a renegotiation of concessions to their oil companies: 40% and 60%, respectively.

Mohammad Reza Shah would go on to be the absolute ruler of the country until he was overthrown in 1979 by the Iranian Revolution that established the current Islamic Republic.

It was not until 2000 that the U.S. revealed the intelligence reports showing their joint activities with MI6 in Iran. In 2009, almost 60 years after the coup, Barack Obama admitted U.S. participation in the coup as a conciliatory gesture to start discussing the nuclear agreement that would limit Iranian aspirations.

It is important to draw conclusions from the processes that took place in the Middle East in 1953 in order to address the current developments in class struggle that are challenging the various reactionary regimes since the Arab Spring. The regime of the ayatollahs that has ruled Iran since 1979, although allied against U.S. policy, is by no means anti-imperialist. Only the self-organization of the masses that defeats this reactionary regime can generate the basis for expelling imperialism from the Middle East. In our next article, we will analyze the 1979 Iranian Revolution.

A version of this article originally appeared in La Izquierda Diario.

Revolutionary Struggle With the New Afrikan Black Panther Party: An Interview with Kevin “Rashid” Johnson

Kevin “Rashid” Johnson is Minister of Defense for the New Afrikan Black Panther Party. He carries out his duties while imprisoned in the US. This interview originally appeared on his website.

What can we learn from the history of revolutionary struggles about the transition from bourgeois forms of security and policing to proletarian forms of state security

As a class question, we must of course begin with distinguishing between bourgeois and proletarian forms of state power. The state is nothing but the organization of the armed force of one class over its rival class(es). The bourgeoisie, as a tiny oppressor class that exploits or marginalizes all other classes to its own benefit, organizes its institutions of state power (military, police, prisons), that exist outside and above all other classes, to enforce and preserve its dominance and rule over everyone else.

To seize and exercise state power the proletariat, as the social majority, must in turn arm itself and its class allies to enforce its own power over the bourgeoisie.

Which brings us to the substance of your question concerning what lessons we’ve learned about transitioning from bourgeois state power (the capitalist state) to proletarian state power (the socialist state). In any event it won’t be and has never been a ‘peaceful’ process, simply because the bourgeoisie will never relinquish its power without the most violent resistance; which is the very reason it maintains its armed forces.

Well, we’ve had both urban and rural models of such transition. Russia was the first urban model (although subsumed in a rural society), China was the first successful rural one. There were many other attempts, but few succeeded however.

What proved necessary in the successful cases is foremost there must be a vanguard party organized under the ideological and political line of the revolutionary proletariat. This party must work to educate and organize the masses to recognize the need, and actively take up the struggle, to seize power from the bourgeoisie.

In the urban context, (especially in the advanced capitalist countries), where the bourgeoisie’s armed forces are entrenched, this requires a protracted political approach focused on educating and organizing the masses and creating institutions of dual and alternative collective political and economic power, with armed struggle prepared for but projected into the distant future (likely as civil war).

But in the rural context, where revolutionary forces have room to maneuver because the bourgeoisie’s armed forces are much less concentrated, the masses may resort to relatively immediate armed struggle, with political work operating to keep the masses and the armed forces educated and organized, and revolutionary politics in command of the armed struggle. This was Mao Tse-tung’s contribution to revolutionary armed struggle called Peoples War, and with its mobile armed mass base areas these forces operated like a state on wheels.

But the advances of technology since the 1970s, have seen conditions change that require a reassessing of the earlier methods of revolutionary struggle and transition of state power.

The rural populations (peasantry) of the underdeveloped world who are best suited to Mao’s PW model have been shrinking, as agrobusiness has been steadily pushing them off the land and into urban areas as permanent unemployables and lumpen proletarians, where they must survive by any means possible. Then too, with their traditional role as manual laborers being increasingly replaced by machines, the proletariat in the capitalist countries in also shrinking, and they too are pushed into a mass of permanent unemployables and lumpen.

So the only class, or sub-class, whose numbers are on the rise today are this bulk of marginalized largely urban people who don’t factor into the traditional roles of past struggles, with one exception. That being the struggle waged here in US the urban centers under the leadership of the original BPP, which designated itself a lumpen vanguard party. As such the BPP brought something entirely new and decisive to the table.

As the BPP’s theoretical leader, Huey P. Newton explained this changing social economic reality and accurately predicted their present development in his 1970 theory of “Revolutionary Intercommunalism,” and met the challenge of creating the type of party formation suited to meeting the new challenges of educating and organizing this growing social force for revolutionary struggle.

The BPP was able to create a model for developing institutions of dual and alternative political and economic power through its Serve the People programs creating the basis for transition of power to the marginalized under a revolutionary intercommunalist model instead of the traditional national socialist model.

The challenge in this situation where such work has been met with the most violent repression by bourgeois state forces is developing effective security forces right under their noses to protect the masses and their programs.

This is the work we in the NABPP are building on and seek to advance.

What has your experience of being a hyper-surveilled, incarcerated revolutionary taught you that is broadly applicable to the secure practice of revolutionaries in general

For one, the masses are our best and only real protection against repression. So in all the work we do, we must rely on and actively seek and win the support of the people, which is the basic Maoist method of doing political work and is what the imperialists themselves admit makes it the most effective and feared model of revolutionary struggle.

I’ve also learned that a lot of very important work fails because many people just don’t attempt it, due to policing themselves. Many fear pig repression and think any work that is effective must necessarily be done hidden out of sight, fearing as they do being seen by the state.

Essentially, they don’t know how to do aboveground work, and don’t recognize the importance of it, especially in these advanced countries. They think for work to be ‘revolutionary’ it must be underground and focused on armed struggle. And even those who do political work they stifle it by using an underground style which largely isolates them from the masses.

I think Huey P. Newton summed it up aptly when he stated,

“Many would-be revolutionaries work under the fallacious notion that the vanguard party should be a secret organization which the power structure knows nothing about, and that the masses know nothing about except for occasional letters that come their homes in the night. Underground parties cannot distribute leaflets announcing an underground meeting. Such contradictions and inconsistencies are not recognized by these so-called revolutionaries. They are, in fact, afraid of the very danger they are asking the people to confront. These so-called revolutionaries want the people to say what they themselves are afraid to say, to do what they themselves are afraid to do. That kind of revolutionary is a coward and a hypocrite. A true revolutionary realizes if he is sincere, death is imminent. The things he is saying and doing are extremely dangerous. Without this … realization, it is pointless to proceed as a revolutionary.

“If these impostors would investigate the history of revolution they would see that the vanguard group always starts out aboveground and is driven underground by the oppressor.”

Do you see it as a vulnerability to have our leaders organizing from prison? Some comrades refuse to engage in party/mass organizational work if it is conducted from prison. Don’t we sacrifice our best leadership if we don’t work directly/organizationally with our incarcerated leaders?

It can be a disadvantage, because it slows down development. But it is also an advantage, and our party is an example of this.

Historically, most revolutionary parties began on the outside and ended up targeted with repression, which included imprisonment of its cadre and supporters — fear of repression served as a deterrent for many would be revolutionaries as it was intended to do. For the NABPP, we developed in exactly the opposite direction. We began inside the prisons and are now transitioning to the outside.

Our cadre are getting out and hitting the ground going directly to work for the people. Look at our HQ in Newark, NJ where our chairman got out and has in less than a year led in developing a number of community STP programs, organizing mass protests that have shut down a prison construction project, given publicity and support to the people facing a crisis with lead in the water systems, etc.

So unlike the hothouse flower we’re already used to and steeled against state repression. The threat of prison doesn’t shake us — we’ve been there and done that. Like Huey asked, “Prison Where is Thy Victory?,” and John Sinclair of the original White Panther Party said, “prison ain’t shit to be afraid of.” And it was Malcolm X who was himself transformed into the great leader that he was inside prison who called prisons, “universities of the oppressed.”

All of my own work has been done from behind prison walls, and I have the state’s own reports and reactions of kicking me out of multiple state prison systems to attest to the value of what I’ve been able to contribute.

So, I think that, yes, some of our best leadership is definitely behind these walls.

Consider too that some of our best leaders developed inside prison: Malcolm X, George Jackson and Atiba Shanna aka James Yaki Sayles, for example. Which is something our party has factored into its strategy from day one. We’ve recognized the prisons to be potential revolutionary universities. Since our founding the NABPP has actively advanced the strategy of “transforming the prisons into schools of liberation,” of converting the lumpen (criminal) mentality into a revolutionary mentality.

In fact we can’t overlook remolding prisoners, because if we don’t, the enemy will appeal to and use them as forces of reaction against the revolutionary forces. Lenin, Mao and especially Frantz Fanon and the original BPP recognized this. What’s more, with the opposition’s ongoing strategy of mass imprisonment, massive numbers of our people have been swept up in these modern concentration camps. We must reach them with the politics of liberation. They are in fact a large part of our Party’s mass base.

How do you vet leadership and cadre? On what criteria to you make your judgement? Organizationally and personally.

Ideally this is determined by their ideological and political development and practice. But we expect and give space for people to make mistakes, although we also expect them to improve as they go. So we must be patient but also observe closely the correlation between their stated principles and their practice.

How should underground work relate to aboveground? How can the masses identify with the work of underground revolutionaries without compromising the security of the clandestine network?

Underground work serves different purposes and needs. One of which being to protect political cadre and train cadre to replace the fallen. Also to create a protective network and infrastructure for political workers forced to go to ground in the face of violent repression.

In whatever case the aboveground forces should actively educate the masses on the role, function and purpose of underground actions while ensuring that the clandestine forces consist of the most disciplined and politically grounded people. It must also be understood that these elements do not replace the masses in their role as the forces that must seize power.

In your assessment, has the balance of forces between the police and the potential of revolutionary mass action fundamentally shifted over the past 5 decades? How does this affect our ability to form organs of political power among the masses?

What shifted, but I don’t think is generally recognized by many, is the PW theory is today too simplistic. Today we must organize and create base areas under the nose of the bourgeoisie with the growing concentration of marginalized people in impoverished urban settings. As I noted earlier the traditional mass base of rural peasants who feature in the PW strategy is shrinking. And Maoist forces in rural areas have been pushed to the furthest margins of those areas unable to expand.

There is little opportunity for New Democratic revolution in these countries, which calls for alliances with the native national bourgeoisie who are now being rendered obsolete by the rise and normalization of neocolonialism and virtual elimination of nation states.

***

BOOKS BY KEVIN “RASHID” JOHNSON:

PANTHER VISION

Panther Vision: Essential Party Writings and Art of Kevin "Rashid" Johnson, Minister of Defense New Afrikan Black Panther Party

"The original Black Panther Party for Self-Defense challenged the prevailing socio-political and economic relationship between the government and Black people. The New Afrikan Black Panther Party is building on that foundation, and Rashid’s writings embrace the need for a national organization in place of that which had been destroyed by COINTELPRO and racist repression. We can only hope this book reaches many, and serves to herald and light a means for the next generation of revolutionaries to succeed in building a mass and popular movement.” --Jalil Muntaqim, Prisoner of War

Available from leftwingbooks.net, AK Press, and Amazon

DEFYING THE TOMB

Defying the Tomb: Selected Prison Writings and Art of Kevin 'Rashid' Johnson
With Russell 'Maroon' Shoats, Tom Big Warrior & Sundiata Acoli

PLEASE NOTE THAT DEFYING THE TOMB IS NOW AVAILABLE FROM AMAZON AS AN EBOOK

"Your mission (should you decide to accept it) is to buy multiple copies of this book, read it carefully, and then get it into the hands of as many prisoners as possible. I am aware of no prisoner-written book more important than this one, at least not since George Jackson s Blood In My Eye. Revolutionaries and those considering the path of progress will find Kevin Rashid Johnson s Defying The Tomb an important contribution to their political development." --Ed Mead, former political prisoner, George Jackson Brigade

Available from leftwingbooks.net, AK Press, and Amazon

WRITE RASHID

Rashid has been transferred out of state yet again, this time to Indiana. He is currently being held at:

Kevin Johnson
D.O.C. No. 264847
G-20-2C
Pendleton Correctional Facility
4490 W. Reformatory Road
Pendleton, IN 46064

Capitalism's Overproduction Problem: A Primer

By Prabhat Patnaik

Republished from Monthly Review.

It is in the nature of capitalism to have “over-production crises”, i.e., crises arising from “over-production” relative to demand. “Over-production” does not mean that more and more goods keep getting produced relative to demand, so that unsold stocks keep piling up. This may happen only for a brief period in the beginning; but as stocks pile up, production gets curtailed, causing recession and greater unemployment.

“Over-production”, in short, is ex ante, in the sense that if production were to occur at full capacity use (or at some desired level of capacity utilisation), then the amount produced could not be sold because of a shortage of demand. But it manifests itself in reality in terms of recession and greater unemployment.

It is a mistake to believe that such crises are only cyclical in nature, i.e., that they get automatically reversed after a certain period of time. On the contrary, the Great Depression of the 1930s, which was a classic over-production crisis, lasted nearly a decade and was finally overcome because of the war, or, to be precise, because of military expenditure in preparation for the Second World War.

Since 2008, there has again been an over-production crisis that has persisted with varying intensity right until now. There is, thus, no question of an over-production crisis under capitalism automatically disappearing. But what was striking about the erstwhile socialist economies of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe is that they were free from over-production crises. The question is why?

Over-production crises under capitalism arise because of two main reasons. One, investment decisions under capitalism depend upon the expected growth of demand, for which the current growth of demand is taken as a clue: if demand slows down then investment gets restrained. Two, whenever investment gets restrained, so does consumption and hence total income (this is called the “multiplier” effect of investment).

Both these factors were eliminated under socialism. Investment was undertaken according to a plan and not the dictates of profitability; hence, there was no question of investment being curtailed when the growth of demand slowed down for any reason. This is not to say that there were no fluctuations in the level of investment. These fluctuations, however, arose not in response to profit expectations, but for entirely exogenous reasons, of which, two in particular were important.

One was agricultural output fluctuations. In years when the agricultural output went down for weather-related, or some other, reasons, investment was cut, in order to prevent excessive upward pressures on food prices; correspondingly when agricultural output revived, so did investment. These investment fluctuations, however, had nothing to do with any calculations of profitability on investment; they were unavoidable even in a planned economy.

The second reason was the operation of “echo effects”. Suppose, for instance, that a whole lot of new investment had been installed in a bunched manner at a certain date, say the beginning of the planning period. These pieces of equipment would become due for retirement again in a bunched manner around the same time some years later, which would, therefore, push up the investment plan, and hence the real gross investment around that time, so that both net investment and replacement needs are accommodated. The investment figure, therefore, would not show a steady growth but would exhibit fluctuations. But these fluctuations again had nothing to do with any calculations of profitability; they arose because of past investment history.

But even when such investment fluctuations occurred, socialist economies ensured that they did not lead to fluctuations in consumption and income, i.e., those economies snapped the multiplier relationship that necessarily characterises capitalism. This is because all firms in the economy were asked to produce to their capacity, and, if demand was low because of investment being curtailed, then they were asked to lower their prices until whatever they produced got sold.

At these “market-clearing” prices, some firms would make losses, while others would still make profits; but this would not matter since both the profit-making and the loss-making firms belonged to the State, which could, therefore, cross-subsidise the loss-making ones from the profits of the profit-making ones. And taking both groups of firms together, there would always be positive net profits as long as investment was positive (even if lower than would have been otherwise).

This was a remarkable break from what happens under capitalism, and provides a clue to why output and employment fall in a crisis there. Under capitalism, a firm does not produce when prices do not cover costs; and when demand is low, prices do not fall, because they are “administered” through collusion among the oligopolistic firms. Instead, output, and hence employment, fall in order to equate supply with demand, and to eliminate stocks which might have got built up briefly.

The matter can be looked at somewhat differently. A fall in price, with money wages and employment given, which is what happened under socialism, meant a rise in the share of wages in total output; income distribution in short shifted in favour of the workers. Since workers more or less consume their entire wages, such a shift in income distribution in favour of the workers raised the share of consumption in total output. Thus, socialist economies never experienced over-production crises because even when investment fell for some reason, output was kept unchanged and the share of consumption rose to compensate for the fall in investment (through a rise in the workers’ share in output).

This, however, can never happen under capitalism because capitalists would never voluntarily agree to a lowering of their share in output and a corresponding increase in workers’ share, even in a situation of inadequate aggregate demand. This is why capitalism experiences over-production crises: income distribution here is a matter of intense class-struggle where there is no question of capitalists agreeing to lower their own share and correspondingly raise workers’ share for the sake of overcoming a situation of over-production.

The “multiplier” that operates under capitalism, whereby a reduction in investment causes a reduction in consumption and hence total output, occurs because of income distribution not being adjustable. The “multiplier”, in other words, is predicated upon the relative shares among capitalists and workers being given.

In fact, under capitalism, far from the workers’ share rising to offset the problem of insufficient demand, the tendency in periods of crisis is the exact opposite, namely, to cut wages and raise the share of profits, which, in a situation of reduced investment that brought about the crisis in the first place, actually compounds the crisis. A 10% fall in investment in such a situation does not just bring about a 10% fall in output, as the “multiplier” analysis would suggest, but a more than 10% fall in output, say a 15% fall, because an additional squeeze on consumption through a fall in workers’ share (via the wage cut) is further superimposed upon the reduction in investment.

The fact that the relative share of the workers is not allowed to increase in order to offset the tendency towards over-production, which is a basic characteristic of capitalism, also shows its supreme irrationality as a system. It shows that the system would rather have larger unutilised capacity and unemployment, i.e., a sheer waste of productive resources for lack of demand, than produce as before by avoiding this waste through giving more to the workers. From its point of view, wasted resources are preferable to using these resources to improve workers’ consumption. True, not being a planned system, it does not make such calculations consciously; but that is what its immanent tendencies amount to. Socialism avoids any waste or slack, such as is caused by a crisis, by raising the consumption of workers appropriately to avert it.

As the collapse of the Soviet Union recedes further into history, people increasingly forget that a system had existed there, which, notwithstanding its many limitations and defects, had nonetheless been free of unemployment, of over-production crises and of the irrationality of capitalism.

Prabhat Patnaik is Professor Emeritus at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. His books include Accumulation and Stability Under Capitalism (1997), The Value of Money (2009), and Re-envisioning Socialism (2011).