Reviving the Brazilian and Bolivian Left

By Yanis Iqbal

Left-wing politics has experienced a stratospheric decline in Brazil and Bolivia. In Brazil, the democratically elected president of Worker’s Party (PT) was ousted through a parliamentary coup in 2016. After this, a right-wing extremist named Jair Bolsonaro has assumed the presidency and has mercilessly blemished the healthcare through his bluff and bluster. This has led to more than 200,000 cases, 15,000 deaths and already 2 health ministers have resigned due to Bolsonaro’s adamant insistence on the use of hydroxychloroquine. Similarly, Bolivia has also seen the ouster of Evo Morales in November, 2019 through a rightist-military orchestrated coup which has led to the appointment of Jeanine Anez as the president who is an ardent catholic and racist. Anez has unleashed the “Bolsonarofication of Bolivia” in the Covid-19 crisis which has caused the erosion of the Unified Health System, the banishment of Cuban doctors and the reduction of myriad health and cash transfer programs.

The dramatic deterioration of the left in both the countries is causing an unprecedented damage to the people living in these countries. With the astronomic rise of the right-wing bloc, full-fledged neoliberalism has again dug its fiendish claws in the flesh of Brazil and Bolivia. A catastrophic situation like this necessitates the re-establishment of a new left-wing politics that is capable of waging a counter-war against the overtly barbarous and crudely capitalist right-wing camp. For this to happen, we need to critically analyze the previous structure of leftist governments and highlight its weaknesses and pro-corporate proclivities so that a truly revolutionary architecture can be built.

Throughout their existence as a prominent political-electoral force, the Brazilian and Bolivian left have been characterized by a neo-developmentalist statist agenda. This type of political project is foundationally a reformist program which fundamentally aims to reconcile antagonistic classes through the conquest of the state.

 The discursive construction of non-antagonistic class relations in a reformist leftist politics is regulated through the use of the state. State starts serving as the site of class unity where irreconcilable demands are negotiated and an unstable equilibrium is maintained through the concessions which the bourgeoisie is willing to grant to the working class. These class compromises are made to co-opt the working class into the restricted rationality of neoliberalism. The bourgeoisie not only co-opts the working class but also reformulates their demands through new anti-revolutionary perspectives and creates the intelligible terrain on which economic-political demands are made. Through the assimilation and reformulation of anti-capitalist forces, a polyclassist pact is produced which is presented by the state as a “revolutionary measure”. Therefore, the definitive role of the state in a neo-developmentalist system consists in its ability to cooperate with the capitalists and to set up itself as the mediating agent in the class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.  

Due to its status as a moderator of class struggle, the state has to follow the rules of the global market and has to repeatedly constrict the social movements when they cross the thresholds defined by neoliberalism. Along with constriction, the state also enables a market ideology by generating a consumerist culture and encouraging possessive individualism. In this process of constriction and enablement, we need to highlight two important tactics.

(1) The first tactic of neo-developmentalist state refers to its attempts to help in the proliferation of a market-centric ideology through amorphous political lexicon. For example, the Brazilian state under the PT administration was increasingly adopting a class-insensitive political system by lumping together the working class in the category of the “poor”. This was done indiscriminately in the 2010 election campaign of Dilma Rousseff in which she was presented as the “mother of the poor”. Notions like these facilitated the erasure of the class combativeness of the working class by interpellating them as “impotent individuals” who could be rescued by the welfare policies of state. Along with the introduction of the category of the poor, the Brazilian state also added a consumerist tinge to its programme of fragmenting the working class. In a video released by PT in 2013, it was said that “college education, vacations, air travel, a home, a car, meat on the table and shopping are today a right for all”. The depiction of poverty reduction in terms of different possessions surreptitiously inserts a market logic in which economic status is measured in terms of access to specific goods and not on the basis of the ownership of means of production. The Worker’s Party has partly replaced the concept of the poor with the equally amorphous concept of nation and in a statement given by it in 2017, it said that “our experiences and formulations are not the property of the Worker’s Party; they belong to the heritage of the Brazilian people”.  This statement reflects the hesitance of PT to combatively confront the bourgeoisie of Brazil.

(2) The second tactic involves the direct efforts of the neo-developmentalist state to subvert class-based social movements. In this aspect, Bolivia serves as a paradigmatic example. In the December 2005 elections, Evo Morales had secured a majority with 54% of the votes and decided to build a constituent assembly which would encapsulate the popular will of the suppressed and indigenous people. Surprisingly, in September 2006, MAS (Movement Towards Socialism), the party to which Evo Morales belongs, decided that social movements could not send their representatives to the constituent assembly and only political organizations were allowed to do so. This decision was momentous because it came during the time of an aggressive class war in which the capitalists of the Media Luna (Half Moon) of the eastern lowlands, who owned the oil and gas industry, were belligerently trying to weaken the strength of the indigenist-leftist bloc by capturing state power. Therefore, the decision to debar social movements from joining the constituent assembly implicitly indicated the capitalistic tendencies within the Morales government. But this decision soon had to be revoked in April 2009 due to the opposition presented to it by the social movements.

Through the two statist tactics of constriction and active facilitation, the Brazilian and Bolivian states were able to contain the radicality of left-wing politics. By pursuing a regressively reformist policy stance, a newfangled marketized-welfare state was created which embroidered the unvarnished mechanism of capitalism with a left-progressive ideology. For example, Brazil was able to utilize the commodity boom of the 2000s to institute some welfare policies like the Bolsa Familia which benefitted 12 million families. There was also a 50% increase in the minimum wages and higher education was also made accessible. Along with the instauration of these programmes, there was also the concealed and simultaneous reprimarization of economy and the enhancement of a neo-extractive, agro-export economic infrastructure. This was the result of the supposed global market integration of Brazil which increased the economic dependency of Brazil on other countries. Brazil, under PT, also witnessed the construction of new dams such as the Belo Monte dam, Madeira river dams and 4 dams on the Teles Pires River. The increasingly export-oriented, environmentally damaging and extractive economy of Brazil was also obscured by the “democratization drive” in which participatory institutions such as the Participatory Budgeting (PB) was introduced. These democratic platforms actually professionalized the civil society, statified resistance movements and only allowed for “friendly dialogue” rather than serious power sharing.

A similar situation was seen in Bolivia during the question of oil nationalization. During the politically turbulent time in which the question of the nationalization of oil was gaining prominence, Morales had temporarily adopted a centrist position in which he supported Carlos Mesa’s soft-neoliberal decision to raise the level of royalties paid by oil corporations. But the adverse effects of this diluted neoliberal position were clearly shown by the mere 18% percent of vote which MAS garnered in the 2004 Municipal Elections. Morales had to reverse his position due to this electoral setback and in 2006 he announced the nationalization of Bolivia’s oil. This nationalization too was not complete because it did not expropriate these companies but increased the stakes of the state and raised the royalties and taxes. An incomplete Nationalization of oil was not the only measure which contradicted the post-neoliberalism of Bolivia. The presence of Chinese and Japanese mining companies on the salt flats of Altiplano, the increase in foreign direct investment from 278 million dollars in 2006 to 1.18 billion dollars in 2013 also questioned the growing economic independence of Bolivia.  But due to the commodity boom between 2006 and 2014, Morales’s Bolivia was able to increase its revenues and alleviate poverty from 64% of the population in 2002 to 36.3% in 2011. Extreme poverty too was reduced to approximately 17%. This compensated for its capitalistic economic edifice which remained intact despite these progressive measures.

Due to an unstable compromise which the Bolivian and Brazilian governments had to maintain between the bourgeoisie and working class, there emerged certain cracks in the thinly veiled capitalism of both these countries. In 2015, Brazil saw the neoliberal re-adjustment of the economy in which unemployment rose by 38%, extreme poverty increased from 7.9% to 9.2% and there was 4.6% increase in self-employed workers, signifying the informalization of labor. These measures were enacted due to the decline in the windfall from the commodity boom which the Lula administration had utilized by exporting some major commodities to China such as iron ore, raw sugar and soybeans. But now the Dilma government had to mould its economy according to the rules of the global market which was experiencing a contraction. Bolivia too saw the emergence of economic – political fissures in which the Morales government started diluting and de-intensifying its revolutionary proclamations. From 2006 to 2013, the percentage of primary product exports as a share of total exports increased from 89.4% to 96%. This denotes the extractivist economic structure of Bolivia in which soybean production has increasingly assumed a major role. In Santa Cruz, large landowners and soy producers represent only 2% of the farm units but own more than 70% of land. Land ownership concentration is not only restricted to Santa Cruz but is rather the integral part of Bolivian economy in which the soy complex is the most prominent. In the capitalist circuit of soy complex, agro-chemicals and machineries are imported and these are then distributed to the agribusiness oligarchy of Bolivia which exacerbates the economic existence of small soybean producers by making soybean production a capital-intensive process.

Gradually, the fissures of reformist capitalism started widening and these ultimately prepared the fertile ground for the growth of a fascistic right. The right was able to expand its social base by re-articulating the various weaknesses of the weakly socialist governments. In Bolivia, for example, the right highlighted the transition of Evo Morales from a Mallku and a supporter of cabildo abiertos (open councils) to a caudillo or strongman. By portraying Evo Morales and his socio-economic system as authoritarian, the right paved the way for an extra-institutional paradigm of mobilization which used the idiom of leftist mass-based activism to unleash violence. Brazilian right also reaped the growing discontent of the masses and this was most visible when Jair Bolsonaro was touting himself as an anti-system presidential candidate who could change everything. This anti-system position then metamorphosed into an anti-democratic agenda which countered the meek reformism of the neo-developmentalist left with cultural-symbolic combativeness.

The unpropitious circumstances in Brazil and Bolivia are politically incapacitating the left. It seems that the left-wing camp in both these countries is still not adopting a new strategy and wants to rehash its hackneyed program of weak socialism. But it should now acknowledge that its dime-store developmentalism and unimaginative cesspool of socialist state conquest is based upon a fundamental misreading of Marxism. The Bolivian and Brazilian left apprehended the state as a pivotal instrument in the entire power project of leftism and ignored what Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin had said. In Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx had said that the state is the “committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie”. Similarly, Lenin had said that bourgeoisie state, “whatever their form, in the final analysis are inevitably the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie”. Bolivian and Brazilian leftists made their first fundamental mistake by misunderstanding the state as a universal apparatus which could guarantee the peaceful living of all the people. By universalizing the state and understanding it as an arbitrator above the class relations, the Bolivian and Brazilian left got ensnared in the vortex of bourgeoisie ideology which obviates the emergence of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Dictatorship of the proletariat is of utmost necessity because it involves the exterior dictatorialization of the bourgeoisie and the internal democratization of the organization of living. This internal democratization is diametrically opposed to the democratic drivel of the capitalism which is restricted to formal parliamentarianism and is fearful of genuine mass based activism. Therefore, the Brazilian and Bolivian left has to undauntingly espouse the strategy of the dictatorship of the proletariat which alone can guarantee the complete annihilation of the bourgeoisie cultural-legal state apparatus and its replacement by a new revolutionary state which in unwilling to make invisibilize class struggle.

The second mistake made by the Brazilian and Bolivian state follows from the first one. By not smashing the old state apparatus and refusing to support the dictatorship of the proletariat, the Brazilian and Bolivian state discarded the concept of communism and substituted it with socialism. Dictatorship of the proletariat is only present during the phase of socialism which Lenin defined eloquently as “a period of struggle between dying capitalism and nascent communism”. In this situation of socialism, the socialist state has to establish itself and the dictatorship of the proletariat with the objective of constantly decentralizing its power and always working towards the goal of communism or classless society. But the Bolivian and Brazilian states did not regard socialism as a goal towards communism but as a destination in-itself. Due to the erasure of communism, both the states instituted socialism not as a contradictory and tensional period of continuous class struggle in which the state is present to empower grassroots movement, but as a period of “class collaboration” in which different classes live as unified individuals under the state authority. This entrenchment of class collaboration is quite similar to the idea of the 1936 Soviet constitution in which Stalin had anointed Soviet Union as the “State of the whole people”. Brazilian and Bolivian left can navigate their way through their Stalinist embroilment by reinstating communism as the primary objective and seeing socialism as a period of intense class struggle and devolution of power.

The two remedial measures mentioned above can greatly facilitate the construction of a new revolutionary strategy which is politically potent and economically exhaustive. These stratagems can be crafted only if the reformist left of Bolivia and Brazil admits that there is no alternative to class struggle and produces a cohesive communist campaign which openly opposes the peremptory pronouncements of neoliberalism.

Here Comes the Second Wave

By Andrew Gavin Marshall

Originally published at Empire and Economics.

As the pandemic spread across the world, unprecedented lockdowns followed. Now, as many of those countries are in the early weeks of lifting restrictions, we see signs of what may be the start of the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. And we cannot rule out a second wave of lockdowns.

The spread of the viral pandemic resulted in one country after another beginning the process of shutting down its society. It began in Asia, spread to Europe, then to North America and across much of the rest of the world. By early April, half of humanity was living under lockdown.

The lockdowns were incredibly controversial. This time period will be seared into the collective human memory for as long as we all live. Its significance to our societies, our economies, our political systems and our own individual experiences cannot be overstated.

People have grown tired of the lockdowns, and understandably so. But business leaders and politicians feel worried about the economy most of all, and want to reopen in order to revive the economy.

Countries in Asia began the process of lifting the lockdowns last month. With the earliest cases of the pandemic and some of the more effective means of handling it, everyone was keeping a close eye on these countries as they emerged from restrictions.

South Korea marked the ending of the most strict social distancing measures last week. Within days, numbers of the infected began to spike. The spike in South Korea’s numbers resulted entirely from one man’s night out going to clubs. South Korean President Moon Jae-in warned Koreans to “brace for the pandemic’s second wave.”

The Chinese province of Wuhan, where the COVID19 outbreak first began and where the lockdown ended the previous month, experienced its first cluster of new infections.

Iran – one of the early epicentres of the epidemic – had lifted its lockdown. But on May 10, Iran put a region of the country under a second lockdown after a sharp increase of cases in the province.

Lebanon, after emerging from the virus and the restrictions nearly two weeks ago, has put the entire country again under a lockdown as infections started to spike. Just ten days after reopening, Lebanon announced a four-day lockdown of the country, prompting grocery stores to once again be quickly emptied of essential items. This is all taking place in the midst of the country experiencing a brutal economic and financial crisis, one which began prior to the pandemic, and resulted in massive protests and social unrest that began late last year and continued even in the midst of the pandemic, as hunger and desperation spread. (Meanwhile, many Americans were protesting because they want haircuts, to go golfing, and for their favourite restaurants to be opened again.)

Europe followed Asia’s example in the lifting of restrictions and ending of lockdowns. This is a slow process that looks different in different countries. Ultimately, however, it follows the same course of slowly removing restrictions and opening public spaces, schools, businesses and borders, and incrementally easing social distancing measures.

At the start of April, virtually all of Europe except for Sweden was under lockdown. By the second week of May, most of the continent had started easing restrictions. The United Kingdom was the only large European country to not be easing (as it was one of the last to impose a lockdown).

Last week, the World Health Organization (WHO) warned about proceeding “extremely carefully” in seeking to emerge from the lockdowns in order to avoid another spike in infections.

“The risk of returning to lockdown remains very real if countries do not manage the transition extremely carefully and in a planned approach.” – WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus

“If lockdown measures are lifted too quickly, the virus can take off.” – Maria Ban Kerkhove, WHO epidemiologist

Within days of Germany starting the process of easing restrictions, cases began to spike. Not only the largest country in Europe (by population, economic weight and political power), Germany is also one of the more successful models of countries in dealing with the pandemic. Despite its size, deaths from the virus in Germany were fractions of those witnessed in Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom and France. Thus, with German infection rates starting to increase, fears grow of a second wave.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel warned, “We always have to be aware that we are still at the beginning of the pandemic… And there’s still a long way in dealing with this virus in front of us.”

The United States, with the most known cases of COVID19 in the world, has witnessed many individual states begin to reopen their societies in the past weeks. As businesses opened and people started to go to public places, infection rates began to spike in multiple U.S. states. The actual effects of reopening will take weeks to know, however. Though various official models suggest that we can expect a spike in cases and deaths over the coming weeks as a result.

Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, one of the leading experts in the fight against COVID19 in the United States, warned on May 12 that if U.S. states reopened too quickly and ignored guidelines from public health authorities, “you will trigger an outbreak that you might not be able to control,” which would lead “to some suffering and death that could be avoided.” But, he added, “that could even set you back on the road to try to get economic recovery.” Doing so, he added, “could almost turn the clock back rather than going forward.”

A research paper from a Harvard economist examined the past Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, looking at the various successes and failures of lockdowns and openings. He concluded that an assortment of restrictions and lockdowns failed to save as many lives in the past because the duration of the lockdowns was for too short a period: four weeks (one month), on average. The lesson from this, he concluded, was that restrictions and lockdowns “have to be maintained for substantially longer than a few weeks. Most likely, 12 weeks work much better than 4-6 weeks.”

People have entered into a state of mental lockdown. Many have shut down to the overconsumption of information and simply grasp onto the hope that things seem to be opening and that, therefore, the worst is behind us and the future is simply a slow decline from present extremes. This is a very hopeful – and one might say naive – perspective. It is fine to hope for miracles, or even to wish them into being, but misguided to plan for them.

Instead, we should mentally prepare ourselves for a second wave of the pandemic and the potential for future lockdowns as a result. South Korea and Germany are among the most successful and advanced nations in dealing with the pandemic, and when their leaders are saying to “brace for the pandemic’s second wave” and that “we are still at the beginning,” we should take these claims seriously.

We are still in the early stages and months of this pandemic and in understanding the virus itself, so nothing can be said of the near and medium-term future with any certainty. Well, except for one thing: the virus is here now.

“Exactly how long remains to be seen… It’s going to be a matter of managing it over months to a couple of years. It’s not a matter of getting past the peak, as some people seem to believe.” – Marc Lipsitch, infectious disease epidemiologist at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health

One wave of lockdowns and social distancing is not going to be enough in the long term. Thus, it is important to manage our expectations and understandings. The virus comes in waves and so we must become like liquid, more able to adapt to the contours of the wave and outlast its peaks and crashes.

Our societies must also become more adaptive. This means that we will need to be more willing to spend and support large segments of the population for extended durations of time. If our politicians and leaders do not meet these standards, widespread (unnecessary) suffering will result. But we can and we must adapt to the necessities and realities of the pandemic.

The pandemic does not have to be hopeless. We can and will get through this. But it is a test of our society and our civilization as to how we get through it. Do we prioritize reopening economies or do we prioritize keeping people safe? If we maintain or return to lockdowns, how do we address and meet the needs of the population confined to their homes? How do we meet the needs of those who don’t have the option to stay home?

There is hope in how we answer these questions and how we move forward through the pandemic and emerge from it. But it is important to not waste our hope on the empty notions that this is over or near its end. We are still in the beginning. There is more to come. Prepare yourselves mentally, arm yourselves intellectually, and plan accordingly.

Put your hope in the right places. But plan according to reality. Yes, we all want haircuts and to spend time with our friends and go out for a drink (or ten). But if the cost of that is to see tens of thousands more infections and thousands more deaths, I can make peace with some out-of-control hair. This “sacrifice” is nothing compared to the lives that will be sacrificed from reopening too early.

This is still the beginning. Plan accordingly.

Socialist Revolution, Women’s Liberation, and the Withering Away of the Family

By Tatiana Cozzarelli

Originally published at Left Voice.

In college, I read a lot of theorists who called Marxism “class reductionist.” They claimed that socialism only attacks economic problems and ignores oppression. But, as I began to study Marxism, I found these oft-repeated tropes about Marx only addressing class are far from the truth. 

From the very beginning, Marxists have taken up the question of gender oppression — sometimes with more clarity, sometimes with less, but always discussing it. A brief overview: In 1879, August Bebel wrote Woman and Socialism. In 1884, Friedrich Engels wrote The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State in which he traces the roots of gender oppression to the creation of private property. He argues that there is nothing biological about patriarchy, monogamy, or the two-parent family unit. Later, Clara Zetkin was the editor of the German Social Democratic Party’s women’s newspaper Equality. She fought for women to become subjects of the struggle against capitalism and patriarchy. 

But for me, it is the Russian Revolution that best illustrates Marxist ideas made reality in relation to the fight against sexism and for women’s rights. It demonstrates that for leading Marxist thinkers such as Lenin and Trotsky, revolution alone was insufficient to rid society of patriarchy. Rather, revolution was just the beginning of a profound social transformation of women’s role in society, as well as a transformation of all social values and culture. This is demonstrated by the laws enacted by the Bolshevik Party that led the revolution, as well as the broad debates about women’s rights within the party. 

Yet, as Lenin put it, equality in law does not mean equality in life. As a result of the civil war that followed the revolution, and the international isolation of the first workers’ state, the economic conditions for women’s equality did not exist. Under these dire circumstances, Stalinism took hold, erasing workers’ victories and especially women’s victories won in the Russian Revolution. The emergence of Stalinism created the false idea that Marxism, and socialism more broadly, are unconcerned with sexism and patriarchy. 

Women as the Spark for the Russian Revolution

The context of the Russian Revolution of 1917 is one of complete misery for the country and its people. Russia had gone through a series of wars: with Japan in 1904-05, a failed revolution in 1905, and World War I in 1914. During the World War, prices went up 131% in Moscow and women spent hours waiting in the biting cold for basic necessities like wheat and sugar. 

Marx believed that the socialist revolution would begin in advanced industrialized nations. Russia, however, lagged far behind the economic and productive power of countries such as Germany. Peasants made up 80% of the population — mostly illiterate and isolated from the political debates in the cities. Peasant life was based on a strict division of labor and women were taught to be obedient to their father and later their husband. It was only after 1914 that women were allowed to separate from their husband, but only with a man’s permission; likewise, women could only get a passport or a job with a man’s permission. 

There was a small but strong proletariat in Russia’s cities. World War I played an important role in increasing the weight of women workers in the Russian proletariat: as men went off to war, more and more women joined the workforce. Women made up 26.6 percent of the workforce in 1914, but nearly half (43.4 percent) by 1917. On top of the miserable working conditions, women industrial workers also faced gendered inequality. They earned lower wages and were not allowed to organize in the same unions as their male colleagues.

However, women were the spark that ignited the Russian Revolution which would topple the Tsar and create the conditions for the Bolsheviks to take power. In late February 1917, the women in Petrograd factories left their workplaces, going to neighboring factories calling on the men to also leave their jobs and join the strike. The Bolshevik newspaper Pravda stated, “The first day of the revolution — that is the Women’s Day, the day of the Women’s Workers International! All honor to the International! The women were the first to tread the streets of Petrograd on that day!”

After the February Revolution, workers organized delegate assemblies, called soviets, to make decisions about the burgeoning movement. Women participated in the soviets, although to a lesser degree than men. The Bolshevik paper Rabotnitsa (The Woman Worker) was relaunched in May 1917 and discussed equality of the sexes, as well as the need for the state to provide communal facilities for taking care of household chores, traditionally imposed on women. 

The stage for the October Revolution, which ended the provisional government and brought about the world’s first workers’ state, was prepared by women’s radical activism. It was the tireless organizing work of Bolshevik women such as Alexandra Kollontai that allowed the Bolsheviks to win over the majority in the soviets and take power in the October Revolution. Women also participated in the October Revolution by providing medical help and even joining the Red Guard. 

What Did the Bolsheviks Think About Women’s Issues? 

The Bolsheviks saw women’s role in a given society as a measure of the society as a whole; it wouldn’t be until women had achieved full equality that they could consider the socialist revolution ultimately successful. After the revolution, immediate measures for women’s liberation were taken. The Bolsheviks put forward four primary means to support women’s equality: free love, women’s participation in the workforce, the socialization of domestic work, and the withering away of the family.

The Bolsheviks believed that women should not be coerced to marry or to remain in a marriage as a result of family obligations or economic pressures. Relationships should be based exclusively on love, not social coercion. The Bolsheviks did not believe that they could immediately take up the task of building new types of relationships, recognizing that the revolution alone would not do away with centuries of patriarchal traditions, beliefs, and morals. Rather, they sought to destroy the  social basis of the bourgeois family and the inherited beliefs that keep women oppressed. Furthermore, they believed that women should have complete equality with men in the workplace and encouraged women to organize, vote, and run for positions of leadership in unions and soviets. 

Long before the Wages for Housework campaign, a global feminist movement that grew out of the International Feminist Collective in Italy in 1972, the Bolsheviks argued that there was nothing natural or biological about women doing domestic work or even raising children. This was an ideology perpetuated by capitalism that had no place in a socialist society. Liberating women from “domestic slavery” was a central discussion within the party. Trotsky writes,

The revolution made a heroic effort to destroy the so-called “family hearth” — that archaic, stuffy and stagnant institution in which the woman of the toiling classes performs galley labor from childhood to death. The place of the family as a shut-in petty enterprise was to be occupied, according to the plans, by a finished system of social care and accommodation: maternity houses, creches, kindergartens, schools, social dining rooms, social laundries, first-aid stations, hospitals, sanatoria, athletic organizations, moving-picture theaters, etc. The complete absorption of the housekeeping functions of the family by institutions of the socialist society, uniting all generations in solidarity and mutual aid, was to bring to woman, and thereby to the loving couple, a real liberation from the thousand-year-old fetters. 

Unlike the Wages for Housework campaign, the Bolsheviks sought to take housework out of the hands of individuals and put it in the hands of the workers state. The Bolsheviks did not want to maintain domestic work in the realm of the household, equally dividing those banal tasks between men and women. Rather, they wanted to divorce these tasks from the family unit and socialize domestic labor. In this way, the family and women in particular would shed much of their “reproductive” role. 

Equality in Law

The Bolsheviks put ideas into practice. In 1918, less than a year after the revolution, the Family Code was passed, which historian Wendy Goldman calls the “most progressive family legislation ever seen in the world.” It took the church out of the business of marriage and made matrimony a civil affair. It not only legalized divorce, but made it accessible to every married person without requiring a reason. The code ended centuries-old laws that assigned all property to men and provided equal rights to children born outside of a registered marriage. If a woman did not know who the father of her child was, all of her sexual partners would share responsibilities for child support. Importantly, it made women equal to men in law. A law as progressive as this has not been won to this day in the United States, as the Equal Rights Amendment was not confirmed by enough states. The author of the family code, Alexander Goikhbarg saw this law as transitory —it was not meant to strengthen either the state or the family, but to be a step towards the extinction of the family. 

In 1920, abortion was legalized, making the Soviet Union the first country in the world to do so. Prostitution and homosexuality were no longer banned in the USSR either. Additionally, the Bolsheviks opened public cafeterias, laundromats, schools, and day care centers as a step towards the abolition of women’s double shift at the workplace and at home. It was a step towards socializing domestic work, liberating individual women from the responsibility. 

Furthermore, the Bolsheviks saw women’s political participation as central to the advancement of the Soviet Union. They organized Zhenotdel, the women’s section of the party, made up of workers, peasants, and housewives who organized women at the local level. Delegates from Zhenotdel were elected for internships in the government as well. As Wendy Goldman argues, it was an important way for thousands of women to get involved in the party, as well as in politics more broadly. 

Equality in Life

Although the Bolsheviks made major advances by passing laws, they were very conscious that this was insufficient to guarantee true equality. Lenin says,

Where there are no landlords, capitalists and merchants, where the government of the toilers is building a new life without these exploiters, there equality between women and men exists in law. But that is not enough. It is a far cry from equality in law to equality in life. We want women workers to achieve equality with men workers not only in law, but in life as well. For this, it is essential that women workers take an ever increasing part in the administration of public enterprises and in the administration of the state… The proletariat cannot achieve complete freedom, unless it achieves complete freedom for women.

Although the Bolsheviks stressed the material basis for inequality, they also knew that a profound personal change would have to occur in members of the new Soviet society. However, this change in people’s ideas was not divorced from the changes in the organization of society — a social reorganization won by proletarian revolution. In this sense, it is a reminder to us that simply changing people’s ideas is insufficient to create true equality. Sexism does not only exist in people’s minds, but in institutions and the organization of society. 

The Struggles of a Young Worker’s State

The young workers’ state faced considerable challenges in its first years. It was attacked by 14 imperialist armies and survived because of sacrifices made by workers and peasants in the Red Army. After a world war and then a civil war, the people of the Soviet Union faced starvation and high unemployment. 

Women suffered the most under these conditions. Although under explicit orders not to do so, women were laid off before their male colleagues. The 13th Congress of the Bolshevik Party discussed this problem explicitly, making new regulations to protect women’s employment. They said, “that the preservation of women workers in production has political significance.” 

A tenet of communism — to each according to his need and from each according to his ability — can only work in a society of plenty. Advanced capitalist mass production provides such a basis. However, when there isn’t enough, a select group will decide who has and who does not — a bureaucracy. This is why Lenin and so many other Bolsheviks placed their hopes in a German revolution, which would ensure that the USSR would not remain isolated. It would put German industry and the goods it produced under the control of the working class. However, the German revolution was squashed, leaving the Soviet Union to fend for itself. It is from the conditions of scarcity that the counter revolutionary Stalinist bureaucracy emerged, reversing the advances made during the early years after the Russian Revolution. Stalinism went on to play a counterrevolutionary role around the world, based on the theory of “socialism in one country.”

Stalinist Counterrevolution and Women’s Rights

The Stalinist bureaucracy staged a counterrevolution which murdered the Left Opposition inside the Bolshevik Party, locking up, exiling, or killing those who attempted to carry on the legacy of the 1917 revolution. Theorists who wrote about the withering away of the family such as Nikolai Krylenko were arrested and murdered, while the author of the 1918 Family Code was imprisoned in an asylum. 

At the same time that Stalin began to put forth the idea of socialism in one country, he also re-criminalized homosexuality and prostitution. In 1936, Stalin ended women’s right to an abortion, with Stalinist leaders arguing that women had the “honorable duty” to be mothers.

In order to put forward such reactionary ideas about gender, Stalin squashed the women’s department within the Central Committee of the Communist Party, as well as all women’s organizing on the local level. His government campaigned to bring back traditional gender roles, the very gender roles that the Bolsheviks had worked to break with. By 1944, Stalin had organized awards for women based on how many children they had. The “Order of Maternal Glory” was created for women with seven to nine children, and the title “Mother Heroine” for those with ten or more. 

The Left Opposition and the Bolshevik Legacy

As Stalin continued to play a counterrevolutionary role around the world, Trotsky created the Fourth International, a grouping of communists dedicated to the legacy of the Bolsheviks. The Fourth International was against the Soviet bureaucracy and for power to the working class, not just in one country — as Stalin wanted — but around the world. 

The Transitional Program, which laid out the tasks for the Fourth International, argues that women’s rights are central for the socialist revolution. Trotsky says, 

Opportunist organizations by their very nature concentrate their chief attention on the top layers of the working class and therefore ignore both the youth and the women workers. The decay of capitalism, however, deals its heaviest blows to the woman as a wage earner and as a housewife. The sections of the Fourth International should seek bases of support among the most exploited layers of the working class; consequently, among the women workers.

Far from any class reductionism, Trotsky sees the organization of women in a revolutionary party as a central task for communists.

What Can We Learn?

One hundred years have passed since the Russian Revolution and it has been decades since a revolution has been able to shake capitalism. Some believe that revolution is impossible. Others believe that a workers’ revolution will create laws based on the racist, sexist, or homophobic attitudes that some workers hold today. Many equate Marxism with the struggle against exploitation, not the struggle against oppression. 

Yet when the Bolsheviks took power and immediately made laws supporting women’s rights, they knew the revolution did not and should not stop there. They had no illusions about even the most progressive gender legislation in the history of the world, on its own, ending patriarchy. The Bolsheviks knew that these laws created the foundation for liberation, but were not libration in itself. Instead, they had lively debates about how to organize the material conditions of the new society to root out oppression against women. They wanted to make sure women had full participation in work, education and politics— but not by taking on a double or triple burden of housework, childcare and paid work. They discussed socialized childcare and domestic work, as well as the withering away of the family as an organizing unit of society. Even the young workers’ state did not yet have the material conditions to realize this dream, but they took real and substantive steps in that direction. Stalinism put an end to all these dreams, reverting the Soviet Union to patriarchal norms. 

It’s been a long time since the Russian Revolution. There are a lot of thinkers who have made key contributions to socialist feminist thought since then, especially in the realm of sex, sexuality and queer theory. Social reproduction theory builds on key Marxist ideas, and there have been huge developments in a discussion of desire, sexuality and queer theory. These are all important to thinking about a socialist revolution in the 21st century, which would create the material foundations for the liberation of gender and sexuality. 

But we cannot leave the legacy of Marxism to those who pervert its meaning to crude class reductionism. We cannot allow Marx’s legacy to be mired by Stalinism and the patriarchal, counterrevolutionary view of gender and society that it upheld. We should draw lessons from the Bolshevik’s revolutionary tradition for women’s liberation. 

Chicago’s Unemployed Rebellion

[Artwork by Mara Garcia, @magavitart]

By Eric Kerl

Originally published at Rampant Magazine.

he social, political, and economic crisis currently unfolding, shaped by a global pandemic, is a damning indictment of modern capitalism. In its first two months, more than 30 million people in the United States have lost their jobs. While business leaders cavort with the Trump administration and right-wing states’ rights advocates demand to reopen the economy, the crisis will only deepen. Indeed, many economists predict that the fallout will be the worst since the Great Depression.

The crisis of the 1930s culminated in the rise of fascist power in Europe. In the United States, it ushered in the New Deal coalition and the expansion of the welfare state. But, by the end of the decade, only the slaughter of World War II finally jumpstarted the global economy through sheer barbarism and unrestrained weapons production.

Like Donald Trump and the rest of today’s ruling class, leading capitalists of the 1930s had little to offer the majority of people after the stock market crashed in 1929. Unemployment, poverty, hunger, and homelessness mushroomed. As the crisis deepened, the industrial overlord, notorious anti-Semite, and failed presidential hopeful Henry Ford advised poor people to take up sharecropping to feed themselves. With paid advertisements in newspapers across the country Ford claimed, “Stocks may fail, but seedtime and harvest do not fail.”[1] Meanwhile, ecological catastrophe devastated the dustbowl-ravaged Great Plains and displaced more than 3.5 million people. By 1934, the Yearbook of Agriculture announced:

Approximately 35 million acres of formerly cultivated land have essentially been destroyed for crop production. . . . 100 million acres now in crops have lost all or most of the topsoil; 125 million acres of land now in crops are rapidly losing topsoil.

While millions went hungry, Ford partnered with the growing Nazi war machine. During the first six months of 1932, Ford’s meagre operations in Germany struggled to make money. Although the plants were ridiculed as “foreign” by the wave of German nationalism, Ford swooned over Hitler’s new plans to shift automobile manufacturing into overdrive, fueled by government cash.  By 1937, Ford was a certified manufacturer of trucks and cars for the Nazi regime’s military.

Back in the United States, Ford summoned the police and National Guard against unemployed workers. During the spring of 1932, three thousand unemployed workers protested outside Ford’s behemoth River Rouge complex in Detroit demanding relief. Police attacked the protesters, injuring dozens. Four workers were shot and killed, including Joseph York, a twenty-three-year-old unemployed worker. The following day, York’s girlfriend, Mary Grossman, faced down the murderous cops:

Yes, I was there. I’m not sorry. I did it for starving millions. Blame capitalism which is the cause of all suffering. Now don’t talk to me![2]

Similar protests erupted in cities around the world, often organized and led by Communist Party members and other radicals. Politicians and media outlets routinely decried the reds and riots of unemployed. International headlines of the time read: “Spanish Jobless Riot,” “Canadians Attack City Hall,” “British Hunger Army Ready to Invade Commons,” “Police Battle Reds with Tear Gas at Detroit Factory,” “Police Protect President from Hunger Parade,” “German Jobless Charge Cabinet, Plunder Dole,” “Red Rebellion Flares in Spain,” and “Batons of Police Halted Red Mob in Washington Riot.”

Yet, as the American Civil Liberties Union noted at the time, “It is a matter of common knowledge among relief workers that vigorous demonstrations—so-called ‘riots’ by the unemployed, produce an almost miraculous effect in loosening the public purse-strings.”[3]

Chicago’s Unemployed Rebellion

During the first month of 1928, nearly two years before the stock market crash of 1929, the entertainment industry magazine Variety expressed its anxiety for Chicago’s theater business. Unemployment, the article noted, was the highest since 1922. And theater-goers had reason to be uncomfortable: “The horde of ’boes and panhandlers infesting the Loop makes New York Times Square parasites seem like a coterie of philanthropists in comparison.” Still, the article remained naively optimistic. “Because of sound financial qualities, it is believed by authorities here the unemployment wave will be relieved considerably this year.”[4]

Instead, the number of unemployed Americans surged from 3 million to 15 million. By 1932, half of Illinois’s workers were jobless. In Chicago, where 60 percent of the state’s unemployed lived, a deep social crisis was underway. One report noted at the time,

There are several Chicago garbage dumps, some of which are under city supervision and some private. About a dozen places where garbage is dumped were visited by different members of the committee; and in every place where “soft” garbage, such as the remains of food, were found, people were reported to be picking it over and eating from it at the dump or taking it home to cook.[5]

The influence of communists and revolutionaries helped galvanize the unemployed into a fighting force, and authorities grew panicked about the increasing militancy and organization of the movement. While cops beat marchers in Detroit and New York City, Chicago police ransacked offices of unemployed and radical organizations throughout the city. Despite the repression, 50,000 workers mobilized in Chicago streets on March 6, 1930, for a national day of action billed as International Unemployment Day.

Less than a week later, three policemen were shot and eleven “communists” were arrested at the north end of Michigan Ave during a “riotous demonstration.” Those arrested included Bryan Moss, Ben Koblentz, Mrs. Anna Rejba, Martin Rich, Evelyn Weiner, William Bart, Frank Cordisco, William Bart, Morris Krivin, Anna Grossman, and Ida Mittelman. Their defense lawyer was Albert Goldman, an antifascist organizer who later emerged as a leader of the fledgling US Trotskyist movement, lead counsel for the Teamsters during the 1934 Minneapolis strike, and a mayoral candidate in Chicago. Ultimately, a “communist parade” preceded their acquittal, “in which several thousand men and women, half of them Negroes, participated.”[6]

The following July, the Communist Party’s Trade Union Unity League initiated a call for a national conference of unemployed councils.[7] More than 1,300 delegates from CP-affiliated organizations and unions met in Chicago. Black workers comprised an important number of the representatives and the conference highlighted racial justice demands in the unemployed movement.

As unemployed workers flooded into Chicago from the Midwest and South in search of jobs, unemployed councils blossomed in neighborhoods across the city. Rent strikes, anti-eviction blockades, and street mobilizations occurred across the city and demonstrations targeted the role of cops in carrying out the evictions and repression. One Chicago Tribune article described a typical action;

300 men and women gathered outside the stations. Policeman Dominick Varsetto, assigned there, closed the door. Members of the group pounded upon it until they broke the glass, but no further damage was done. At that moment Liet. Make Mills of the industrial squad and Capt. Phil Parodi of the Maxwell street stations arrived with eight police squads. Leaders of the crowd made soapbox speeches before the gathering dispersed. Liet. Mills arrested five alleged ringleaders: Joseph Shoster, no address; Edward Van Horn, 642 Liberty street; Joseph Bebko, 1717 West Madison street; and James Adams, no address.[8]

Still, aid to one hundred and forty-three thousand Chicago families was cut by 25 percent, and perishable food supplies were slashed by half in 1932.[9] In neighborhoods across the city, Chicago’s poor rebelled in a firestorm of organizing and riots.

On a cold, rainy Halloween, 2,500 unemployed gathered at the corner of 22nd and Wentworth. On the city’s West Side, 3,000 gathered at Union Park. In Washington Park on the South Side, 2,000 protesters gathered. Along with thousands from other parts of the city, they converged in the Loop, wearing red armbands, red dresses, and carrying red umbrellas and red flags. One journalist reported,

As the singing, shouting, hunger armies moved toward the meeting place from north, west and south, their forces were constantly increased. Detachments joined on the end of the lines until, by the time the three groups were a few blocks apart in the loop, a total of some 15,000 persons was moving.[10]

Military veterans carried a banner that read, “Wilson’s heroes; Hoover’s hoboes.” Other contingents included a group of Italian antifascists and “a platoon of children, 7 to 10 years old, carrying empty milk bottles.” Unemployed Black workers highlighted the case of Scottsboro and pressed the issue of racial justice.

Less than a month later, “a genuine united front of working class organizations was constituted” in Chicago to fight the 50 percent reduction of relief. Unemployed organizations from across the city, along with the Communist Party, Socialist Party, and the Workers League, organized the event. As one participant described:

The call for the conference signed by the three organizations met with a huge response everywhere. The masses reacted as never before, and the conference bore testimony of this fact. 750 delegates representing 350 organizations made up the conference. Included in the conference were over 40 church organizations composed entirely of unemployed workers, the Farmer-Labor Party, the A.F. of L., fraternal organizations, the TUUL.[11]

The city’s authorities responded with a wave of repression, arrests, and deportations of unemployed and radical organizers. While the Chicago Police Department flaunted its racism and brutality routinely, the frequent deployment of cops also provided opportunities to exhibit their bumbling idiocy. On a Saturday afternoon in 1934, just four days before Thanksgiving, four thousand Chicagoans marched to City Hall with demands for unemployment and relief benefits. Nearly two hundred cops were stationed inside the building “in case trouble developed.” When none developed, one of the jackass cops “tossed a few firecrackers under the feet” of a Black cop. A frenzy of gunfire erupted inside the building and seven cops were shot in the barrage of friendly fire.[12]

Winning relief

Like Henry Ford’s sharecropping schemes, government and business leaders had no genuine relief to offer millions of poor and hungry workers. Genuine programs, of course, were organized and advocated by the unemployed themselves. In Pennsylvania, insurgent rank-and-file coal miners pressed their demands for the Workers’ Unemployment Insurance Bill.[13] In Charlotte, North Carolina, the unemployed council organized militant, interracial demonstrations in support of the bill.[14] In Chicago, hundreds of delegates from the Illinois Workers Alliance, Emergency Workers Union, and other organizations of the unemployed—representing about 750,000 workers—endorsed the bill in the fall of 1934.

The Workers’ Unemployment Insurance Bill was unveiled by the Communist Party in the summer of 1930 and quickly won the endorsement of three thousand five hundred local unions. As Chris Wright described the bill,

In the form it would eventually assume, it provided for unemployment insurance for workers and farmers (regardless of age, sex, or race) that was to be equal to average local wages but no less than $10 per week plus $3 for each dependent; people compelled to work part-time (because of inability to find full-time jobs) were to receive the difference between their earnings and the average local full-time wages; commissions directly elected by members of workers’ and farmers’ organisations were to administer the system; social insurance would be given to the sick and elderly, and maternity benefits would be paid eight weeks before and eight weeks after birth; and the system would be financed by unappropriated funds in the Treasury and by taxes on inheritances, gifts, and individual and corporate incomes above $5,000 a year. Later iterations of the bill went into greater detail on how the system would be financed and managed.[15]

The bill was eventually co-opted and presented to Congress by the self-described “La Follette Republican” Ernest Lundeen of the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party, a rabid isolationist and Nazi sympathizer.[16] Like the homegrown fascist radio personality Father Charles Coughlin he railed against the crimes and inequality of capitalism. But his neck swelled over the threat of communism and its advocacy for racial justice.

Nevertheless, the groundswell of action and organizing by socialists, communists, and unemployed workers—Black and white—ensured that Lundeen’s bill would “extend to all workers, whether they be industrial, agricultural, domestic, office, or professional workers, and to farmers, without discrimination because of age, sex, race, color, religious or political opinion or affiliation.”[17] Indeed, a New York Post poll showed that 83 percent of its readers preferred the more radical Lundeen bill over the Social Security Act.

The strength and popularity of the unemployed movement and genuine relief coincided with a massive strike wave that reached from San Francisco to Minneapolis, Toledo, and the textile mills of the South. While sectarian squabbles often counteracted the potential for solidarity in other areas of work, the Communist Party and Socialist Party both appealed for common, united front approaches to unemployment. For the CP, their united front demands included:

1. Decisive wage increases and reduction in hours, supporting a bold strike movement to win them

2. For the immediate enactment of the Workers’ Unemployment Insurance Bill

3. For the immediate enactment of the Farmers’ Emergency Relief Bill to secure for the farmers the possession of their lands and tools, and to provide abundance of food to the masses

4. For the immediate enactment of the Bill for Negro Rights

5. For the united struggle against war and fascism

6. For the broadest possible united action in localities, in factories, in trade unions, and on every question affecting the workers and toiling masses, to win better conditions[18]

Ultimately, the Workers’ Unemployment Insurance Bill was defeated in favor of Roosevelt’s watered-down policies of the second New Deal. But it was not a foregone conclusion that something more radical—genuine relief—was within the grasp of the unemployed movement.

And, the current crisis of unemployment and poverty will not be magically solved by today’s politicians. Only our own self-activity can win genuine relief from this most recent and profound crisis of capitalism.

Notes

[1] “Henry Ford on Self-Help,” advertisement prepared and paid for by the Ford Motor Company as a contribution to public welfare, Chicago Tribune, June 1, 1932, 14.

[2] “15 Arrested After Police Slay Four in Unemployed Riot,” The Pantagraph, March 8, 1932, 1.

[3]  Quoted in Edgar Bernhard, Ira Latimer, and Harvey O’Connor, Pursuit of Freedom: A History of Civil Liberty in Illinois, 1787–1942 (Chicago: Chicago Civil Liberties Committee, 1942), 158, accessed at: http://hdl.handle.net/10111/UIUCOCA:pursuitoffreedom00chic.

[4] “Chicago’s Heavy Breadline Tells of Unemployment,” Variety, February 1, 1928, 12.

[5] Quoted in Edgar Bernhard, Ira Latimer, and Harvey O’Connor, Pursuit of Freedom: A History of Civil Liberty in Illinois, 1787–1942 (Chicago: Chicago Civil Liberties Committee, 1942), 157, accessed at: http://hdl.handle.net/10111/UIUCOCA:pursuitoffreedom00chic.

[6] “Jurors Acquit 11 Alleged Reds; Fired by Judge,” Chicago Tribune, April 20, 1932, 19.

[7] Solomon, Mark, The Cry Was Unity: Communists and African Americans, 1917-1936 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998), 148.

[8] “Seek to Raise Cash Pending U.S. Relief Loan,” Chicago Tribune, July 21, 1932, 2.

[9] “Relief to 143,000 Chicago Families Is Cut 25 Percent,” Alton Evening Telegraph, October 27, 1932, 1.

[10] Robert T. Loughran, “Radicals Parade under Guise of ‘Hunger March’,” Freeport Journal-Standard, October 31, 1932, 1–12.

[11] Albert Glotzer, “Stalinists Make Right About Face in Chicago Unemployed United Front,” The Militant, Vol. V, No. 28 (November 26, 1932), 1–2.

[12] “Hunger March is Peaceful but 7 Policemen Hurt,” Jacksonville Daily Journal, November 25, 1934, 8.

[13] Walter Howard, Anthracite Reds Vol. 2: A Documentary History of Communists in Northeastern Pennsylvania During the Great Depression (iUniverse, 2004), 152.

[14] Gregory S. Taylor, The History of the North Carolina Communist Party, University of South Carolina Press, 2009, 73–74.

[15] Chris Wright, The Hidden History of American Radicalism: The Campaign for the Workers’ Unemployment Insurance Bill” Counterfire, April 25, 2020, https://www.counterfire.org/articles/history/21138-the-hidden-history-of-american-radicalism-the-campaign-for-the-workers-unemployment-insurance-bill.

[16] B.W. Hart, Hitler’s American Friends: The Third Reich’s Supporters in the United States (New York: St. Martin’s Publishing Group, 2018).

[17] M. Poole, The Segregated Origins of Social Security: African Americans and the Welfare State (Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 22.

[18] United States Congress House Committee on Un-American Activities, Hearings before the Committee on Un-American Activities, House of Representatives, Eighty-Fourth Congress, Second Session (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1956), 231.

See ME and Not Just Stereotypes: Perceptions of Black Women Travelers

By Cherise Charleswell

I’ve always had a great interest in cultural anthropology, history, human evolution, and geography, and this has led me to travel to over 30 countries in the world; mostly solo. And, I have to admit that the greatest challenge and impact that the COVID-19 pandemic has had on my life is the fact that it has left literally grounded and stuck in the United States; the country with the highest rates of COVID-19 infections and deaths (See here for a running count), the result of a delayed, disjointed, and failed response to this global pandemic. This pandemic couldn’t have struck the United States at a worse time. The country is led by a Presidential administration that chooses to politicize this public health crisis, bully, intimidate,  silence, and dismiss well respected scientists and public health officials, and have a President who is so much of a compulsive liar that he has no credibility when he speaks.

And many of us wish that he would step back, stop speaking, and allow the experts to do that.  Instead he is disgruntled and combative; holding press conferences where he attacks members of the press for asking basic questions — you know, simply doing their job; and he shows the most contempt for women of color. Examples here, here, here, and here.

All of this is deeply depressing for an avid traveler like myself, who actually NEEDS to take constant breaks from the United States. The reality is that I now live in a country that is the global hotbed for this disease, and that means that it may be quite some time before anyone will be able to embark on international travel from the United States. For a country that likes to rank others and post travel     advisories the United States is now the focal point of many travel advisories. The greatest example of this was an Advisory Facebook post made by The Norwegian University of Science and Technology, where the following was stated, “In accordance with the recommendations from the Ministry of      Foreign Affairs (UD), NTNU strongly recommends that all NTNU students who are outside Norway return home,” the message read. “This applies if you are staying in a country with poorly developed health services and infrastructure and/or collective infrastructure, for example the USA. The same applies if you do not have health insurance.”

The shade was real and well deserving!

And I’ve had much time to think about all of this, after watching all four seasons of Netflix’s The Last Kingdom in a matter of days, and adhering to Federal, state, and Los Angeles’s county’s Shelter-At-Home directives. I’m actually enjoying the peace, quiet, and solitude. If I’m going to be stuck here, this is how I prefer to spend my days.

And I’m always asked about whether or not I get lonely or find traveling alone to be difficult.

The answer is always – NEVER! I’m a “people watcher” and despite being a bit of an introvert, when traveling I find myself more open to engaging and speaking to people, and while I’m observing others, I certainly pay attention to who and how others are observing me.

I realize that for some people that I come across as an abnormality or something that is different and exotic in every way It may be their first time seeing a woman who looks like me: amber colored     sun-kissed brown skin, afro texture hair, tall, unaccompanied by a male, and completely unapologetic about taking up space, up close. Unfortunately, many who observe me have often already been     exposed to stereotypes and misconceptions about Black women, and all of this shapes how they see me.

So, what are these stereotypes?

Within the United States social scientist often reference jezebel, sapphire, & the mammy when        explaining historical stereotypes about Black women. These and other stereotypes about Black women are so embedded in the U.S. that a major movie studio green-lighted the production of “Loqueesha”, a film that resolves around a white male radio Dj pretending to be a “ghetto” Black woman after he couldn’t find work due to stations in his area practicing affirmative action & wanting to only hire non-white people.

Yes! This is actually the basis of an actual movie that was slated for release in the Summer of 2019.

However, similar stereotypes about Black women being masculine and more aggressive,                 hypersexual, and untrustworthy are seen in other parts of the world. One only has to look at the racist, or more appropriately misogynorist portrays of Serena Williams, arguably one of the best athletes in history, to see examples of how these stereotypes continued to be used against Black women, regardless of socioeconomic status and celebrity.

The truth of the matter, and something that I have certainly noticed in every country that I have     traveled to, is that just about every country in the world has been impacted by the notion of white   supremacy and the belief that whiteness/European features is the standard of beauty. This may of course be the remnants of European colonialism, imperialism, and the transatlantic slave trade. I noticed this while watching telenovelas in Panama where all of the actresses were fair skinned “white” Latinas– in a country where the population mostly consists of people are varying shades of brown, including those who were as brown as or much darker than me. I recognized this as child listening to Caribbean men speak about their love of “clear, red, Frenchie, and brown (meaning light) women. I was reminded about this while on a crowded bus in Milan Italy when two West African women were attempting to squeeze past my mother and I. Their blotchy, discolored bleached, and mutilated skin made me recoil. And I couldn’t help shaking-my-head and laughing with others while on the beach in Mykonos Greece, while watching Chinese tourists who were so fearful of the slightest tan, marched around the beach with umbrellas, never removing their wide brim hats, and wearing long-sleeved shirts down to their wrists. They simply rolled up the bottom half of their pants – to wade briefly in the water, and remained like this on the beach for over an hour.

In a 2019 Huffingpost article, “I’m a black woman living in Asia. This is what it’s like to date”, writer, Niesha Davis, shared the following regarding her experiences with white beauty ideals in Asia, and how that impacts her dating life:

“Dating locals hasn’t been very fruitful for me either. South Korean and Chinese cultures both seem to worship all things having to do with whiteness, from skin bleaching to double eyelid surgery. As a black woman, I don’t fit into either society’s standards of beauty.”

As a globetrotting Black woman it is impossible for me to ignore these things, and I realize that there is no place in the world, not even on the continent of Africa, where I will not come across or experience anti-Blackness, racism, colorism, and/or misogynoir. And because other nations and regions of the world have bought so deeply into white supremacy, one may come across the greatest challenges with anti-Blackness outside of Europe.

It could be the concierge of a Caribbean hotel or an African safari operator ignoring and catering to the needs of White travelers instead of you, due to lingering stereotypes and effects of white supremacy. It could be coming across the 2015 posters for Star Wars: The Force Awakens and realizing that they went to great lengths to remove the image of John Boyega who happens to be Black and one of the stars of the film.

Despite the influence of reggae, dancehall, hip hop, and other forms of Black music in the Middle East and Asia, which is certainly seen with K-Pop bands, the region continues to retain a degree of anti-Blackness, and stereotypes about Black womanhood, particularly those about hyper-sexuality, being sexually available & crass, which have unfortunately been bolstered by misogynoir-laden hip hop videos that often reduce Black women to body parts. This is why it is not unusual to hear Black expats lament about not being able to find a job in certain countries or regions, because job posts specifically state “No Blacks” in countries like Vietnam. These reasons are also why I constantly had to endure being referred to as a “Real Housewife” throughout the United Arab Emirates. All this, despite the fact that absolutely nothing about my dress, speech, and demeanor comes close to what is exhibited on a show like Real Housewives of Atlanta, but for an international audience, that is often their only reference point; and it is one steeped in stereotypes. And now during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, which started in China, Black Africans have shamefully been targeted and discriminated against; and this again comes with great irony, considering the fact that countries in Africa have some of the lowest rates of infection, and once again the pandemic began in China!

THE EFFECTS

I often think about the effects of these stereotypes, and how they may help to bolster the fascination and at times fetishization of my Black body, as well as the fixation on my curves, complexion, and full features. I have no problem with being seen as exotic, because the connotation includes the notion that something is unique, rare, and thus more desirable. I have posed for pictures with so many people around the world, and I would really like to know what they are doing with my pictures. I’ve even had an indigenous woman in Peru hand me her baby for a photo-op. In Singapore I readily understood why so many women flocked to my brown body while at a night club: touching me, trying to grind on me, and trying to impress me with their dance moves. We were listening to Black music. They’ve seen all of the videos, and here was there chance to twerk and grind on a real front-to-back shaped, thick thighs, small waist, full chest, thick lips, and round-ass having Black woman!! I understood the excitement, and made a point to not disappoint; accepting and killing the challenge to their little “dance off”.

Did I mention that I’m an African-Caribbean Latina? As such, I’ve been dancing since I learned to walk.

However, I still cringe when I come across people in the U.S. or abroad who feel the need to “pet me” by randomly touching my hair, or those who touch me without permission and run their hands across my brown body, as if they think that my color may magically rub off on them. I realize that the melanin that I possess is poppin’, but I still do not appreciate being stroke and being made to feel like “The Other”.

The most troublesome effect of these stereotypes is that they present real safety concerns for Black women. One of the most recent incidents that stands out in mind for me, occurred during a Spring 2019 trip to Hungary. While boarding the Line 1 train in Budapest headed towards Vörösmarty tér, a young man promptly entered the train after me, and upon seating he positioned his body right in front of mine, in a manner that left our feet entangled. This all occurred during an early morning ride where there were many available seats. In fact there may have been only 3 or 4 of us in the subway car that we were occupying. This man stared at me and was trying to be discreet about it, but he was also photographing me. I started to snap photos of him in return, to let him know that I noticed, and because I was thinking that I may have to gather evidence about the stalking and harassment.

When we came to my stop, I shook free of him and quickly exited the subway car, but he was on hot pursuit. His English was quite limited but he managed to state that I was “so beautiful” and then he touched himself and signaled for me to touch him too. All of this at the exit of a metro station! I said no, shook my head, and kept walking—quickly. And he followed! He caught up to me and presented money and again touched me, and I yanked my hand away from him, as he tried to kiss me, saying please. At this point, I really had enough, and began screaming at him to get away from me. I began scolding him like a child and he scurried away.

The entire time that my ordeal began with him, no one even bothered to “bat an eye” or come to my defense. And by the time that I was crossing a wide boulevard for a tram car, he re-appeared and kept repeating “please” and begging for a kiss. I was beyond livid and made even more of a scene that caused him to flee after an older woman finally stopped to ask if I was ok, and stated something to him in Hungarian.

This young man, who was closer to my baby sister’s age was not only disrespecting me, but he made the assumption that I was a prostitute or so sexually accessible to him that all he had to do was wave money in the air, and I would perform a sex act on him — a complete stranger at the exit of a metro station.

Unfortunately, being mistaken for or treated like a prostitute is not a rare occurrence for Black women, especially those of us who travel solo.

In the 2018 article, “20 Euros for Prostitution”, Karen Safo, Founder of the Black Voyager shared her horrific experience in Chatillon, a town on the outskirts of Paris France. After getting into a taxi she was informed that the the price would be much greater than what she expected, and with only 30 Euro remaining, she asked to get out of the car, but the driver refused. She eventually jumped out with her carry on bag and was followed by not only the taxi driver, but others who assumed that her Black body running from the cab, was the body a prostitute (Any another conversation I can unpack the problem of stigma and the dehumanizing women who have experienced commercial sexual exploitation):

This driver caught up with me and had recruited a group of men who grabbed me and my suitcase and screamed prostitute, prostitute ,prostitute you need to pay! My phone smashed, suitcase broken. They were punching me and I was punching them. The people in the town stopped and starred. I wasn’t embarrassed, I was disappointed. Nobody helped me. They believed the stereotype. Sniggering, disgusted and laughing.

After getting away from her attackers and boarding a bus she shared:

An Australian lady who understood English and French and a Black woman came and consoled me. They told me that that’s how the town are towards some black women and I shouldn’t worry. I then went to report it to the police station before my flight. It painted a bad picture of my trip. My mum said for 20 Euros you suffered this ordeal, why didn’t you just give it to him. But it’s the principle, and people cannot get away with such disgusting behavior. What would I do differently? Nothing. Stereotypes cause so much confusion and misunderstanding. This made me realize how dangerous the media is in creating stereotypes of different races. It’s time to create our own narrative.

In the article, “In Spain, I’m a prostitute”: Challenging the perception of black women who travel”, traveler and author Jeta Stephens shared this story:

I stood near the busy Puerta del Sol in Madrid, waiting to meet a  friend. Somehow, a man approached me, out of everyone in the area, and asked, “Are you selling something?” Initially, I thought he meant drugs, but when he invited me to a nearby brothel, I realized what he was actually soliciting was sex, and I quickly walked away. Prostitution isn’t illegal in Spain. However, the women on the prowl are usually dressed in miniskirts and go-go boots. My outfit of the night was a three-quarter-length pea coat and sneakers.

SEE ME

I’ve come to the understanding that when I travel that I have to engage, educate, and force the people that I come across to not only see ME, but to see Black women in a manner that moves beyond the stereotypes and the harmful images of us that have been projected around the world.

I plan to continue to travel near-and-far, across continents, in order to  help dismantle stereotypes, and force those that cross my path to not only recognize the fullness of Black women’s features and bodies, but the fullness of our womanhood. And I plan to do this as soon as The Outside finally reopens.

Beneath Conspiracy Theories, the Class War

[Illustration by Anastasya Eliseeva]

By Aragorn Eloff

It is unsurprising that, as we confront the black swan event of the global pandemic, there has been an upsurge in the spread of conspiracy theories. Historically, narratives around malevolent, all-powerful forces controlling reality in various ways have often emerged in times of social unrest and uncertainty, where large numbers of people find themselves socially adrift or unable to control fundamental aspects of their lives.

While the typical response to conspiracy theories is to view them as the product of ignorance or delusional thinking, this is complicated by the fact that history is full of many real instances of powerful people colluding in secret at the expense of society. The numerous price-fixing scandals uncovered in South Africa in recent years surely also constitute conspiracies, as do corporate cover-ups around the world, many of which we know about only as a result of people questioning the presentation of reality and correctly connecting the dots to map out underlying truths.

It is clear though that what we more commonly describe as conspiracy theories – exemplified in the current period by the linking of 5G networks to Bill Gates, vaccination and microchip implants, for instance – are markedly different from these real-world examples. As social and psychological research has shown, conspiracy theories of this kind are not amenable to empirical enquiry and subsist for long periods of time in the absence of any reasonable evidence. Those adhering to such theories tend to exhibit little interest in testing their underlying claims and will often simultaneously believe in conspiracy theories that outright contradict each other.

As The Conspiracy Theory Handbook published by George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communication observes, this suggests that conspiracy theories function in a similar way to ideology, with belief being more a case of underlying psychological motivators – dealing with feelings of powerlessness, coping with threats or explaining confusing events – than the result of careful research and reflection. If this is true, it becomes important to understand these drives and the social contexts within which they tend to arise. This is especially vital when we acknowledge that many conspiracy theories contain, albeit figuratively, a kernel of intuitive truth.

Indeed, as Marxist group Aufheben writes in an article titled “The rise of conspiracy theories: Reification of defeat as the basis of explanation”, conspiracy theory, like left politics, often has a sense “that the world is structured by unequal power relations, and that the powerful act in their own interests and against the interests of the majority”. Distinct from the kinds of concrete political analyses that are able to explain these unequal power relations in terms of complex dynamics involving myriad social, political, economic and historical forces, however, conspiracy theories operate with a highly simplified understanding of these aspects of social reality, turning social forces into individual Bond villains and systemic conditions into cabals of all-powerful evildoers. This simplified narrative structure, which tellingly reflects dominant modes of subjectivity and the cult of the personality that has arisen under neoliberalism, also partly explains the appeal of conspiracy theories for large numbers of people looking for a stable foothold in an increasingly complex world.

As simplistic as they may be, it is through empathetic and nuanced engagement with conspiratorial narratives that we can perhaps best grapple with, and nurture meaningful collective responses to, the problems conspiracy theories suggestively outline. For instance, while casting Gates as an evil billionaire who wants to control people with 5G networks via microchips implanted in their bodies through mandatory vaccination is clearly absurd, there are many legitimate reasons to be concerned by the technocratic and paternalistic approach of the Gates Foundation towards addressing malnutrition, malaria and viral pandemics in Africa and, more broadly, the lack of control we have over the actions of the plutocrat class.

Anxieties around being controlled by technology may also be based on intuitions about the extent to which states and big technology companies – Google, Microsoft, Amazon and so forth – have infiltrated, influenced and benefitted from our private lives while remaining almost entirely unaccountable, something researcher Shoshana Zuboff explores in her book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.

Similarly, the recent fears expressed by people who are convinced that the Covid-19 pandemic is part of a nefarious plot by global leaders acting in unison to push agendas that diminish our freedoms have at least some basis in what Naomi Klein calls disaster capitalism. Here, we would be quite unreasonable if we weren’t acknowledging that numerous states and corporate actors have leveraged the crisis to push forward anti-social agendas, the recent spate of illegal evictions of shack dwellers across South Africa and the loosening of environmental laws around the globe being just two examples.

Covert agendas

More broadly, we can discern the vague stirrings of a genuinely radical politics in some conspiracy theories. As Aufheben observes, these theories often express a genuine sense of estrangement from – and dissatisfaction with – capitalism, the state and other dominant social forces. While the world is not, of course, completely controlled by the Illuminati, the Rothschilds or lizard people, it’s not difficult to see the hints of a class analysis here. And when the staggering inequalities of wealth and power in the contemporary world have allowed the ruling class to live fantasy lives so utterly alien from our own, is it any wonder some of us have come to see them as almost inhuman?

Whatever truths they may loosely allude to, however, it remains the case that conspiracy theories, whatever short-term existential relief they may provide by assuring us that everything is easily understandable and under control, even if not in our interests, are deeply disempowering. If we set out with an incoherent understanding of how the world works, we quickly find ourselves unable to take much effective action to tackle its fundamental injustices or equalise its vast disparities of power, which is why the spreading of conspiracy theories usually results in apathy and fatalistic resignation.

More concerning, the same psychological drivers that make conspiracy theories so appealing also leave people susceptible to the influence of anyone – fascists, sociopaths, corporations and insincere spiritual gurus among them – offering an easy, comforting narrative that explains how things are and what we can do to make them better, usually in ways which, ironically, serve covert agendas.

Our approach to conspiracy theories should therefore be at least twofold. On the one hand, we can gently challenge the fallacious elements of conspiratorial thinking and encourage a more thorough interrogation of those aspects that correctly intuit real problems in the world. In practice, this takes the form of political outreach and radical pedagogy, the creation of collective spaces of learning and teaching through which we can tackle the problems we face at their roots without becoming tangled in them. The more we empower ourselves and each other with knowledge about how science, medicine, technology, politics and so forth function, the more we simultaneously hone our critical thinking skills, in turn cultivating personal agency – the sense that we can be meaningful participants in creating social change.

On the other hand, there is the more difficult task of offering assurance and support to those who find themselves drawn to conspiracy theories to make sense of a reality that seems to be slipping through their fingers. Here, we need to develop frameworks that offer sustainable forms of material, psychological and spiritual care. That the world is increasingly complex and uncertain means that very little is, or ever could be, orchestrated in the contrived ways conspiracy theorists propose, but it also means we have to become better equipped to deal with that complexity and uncertainty. While this may seem like a relatively solitary existential pursuit, a genuine sense of security is grounded in healthy, thriving communities of friends, lovers, families and comrades.

Building such communities is no simple task: they are at odds with the alienated and impoverished forms of social belonging that have become so prevalent in capitalist society and they require patient and careful interpersonal and political work. However, if we commit ourselves to learning more and communing more, we can slowly build herd immunity to the impoverished thinking of the present, whether it takes the form of conspiracy theories or dominant ideologies, and begin to cultivate something stronger than the multiple pandemics we currently face.

Covid-19 is a virus that attacks the lungs and many of those infected with it struggle greatly to breathe. Capitalism is an economic relation that attacks the social body and most of us forced to participate in it struggle greatly to live. The deep sense of existential disempowerment wrought by these conditions, especially when experienced together, renders us highly susceptible, however rational we think we are, to conspiratorial thinking and noxious ideologies.

When those around us fall prey to these insidious but increasingly endemic forms of magical thought we should, instead of ridiculing, judging or chastising them, remind ourselves that the word “conspiracy” comes from the old Latin term conspiraire, which means, simply, to breathe together. Breathing together, conspiring, we can create something far better than what currently passes for life.

This article was originally published at New Frame.

Profitability, Investment, and the Pandemic

[Photo Credit: REUTERS]

By Michael Roberts

Originally published at the author’s blog.

Last week’s speech by US Federal Reserve Chair Jay Powell at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, Washington was truly shocking.  Powell told his audience of economists that “The scope and speed of this downturn are without modern precedent”. One shocking fact that he announced was that, according to a special Fed survey of ‘economic well-being’ among American households, “Among people who were working in February, almost 40% households making less than $40,000 a year had lost a job in March”!!!

Powell went on to warn his well-paid audience sitting at home watching on Zoom that “while the economic response has been both timely and appropriately large, it may not be the final chapter, given that the path ahead is both highly uncertain and subject to significant downside risks”. Indeed, if the continual downgrading of forecasts of global growth are anything to go by, then the number of optimists about a V-shaped recovery are beginning to dwindle to just the leaders of governments and finance.

Another study projects that US GDP will decline by 22% compared to the pre-COVID-19 period and 24% of US jobs are likely to be vulnerable. The adverse effects are further estimated to be strongest for low-wage workers who might face employment reductions of up to 42% while high-wage workers are estimated to experience just a 7% decrease.

And Powell was worried that this collapse could leave lasting damage to the US economy, making any quick or even significant recovery difficult.  “The record shows that deeper and longer recessions can leave behind lasting damage to the productive capacity of the economy.”, said Powell, echoing the arguments presented in my recent post on the ‘scarring’ of the economy.

Powell reckoned the main problem in achieving any recovery once the pandemic was over was that “A prolonged recession and weak recovery could also discourage business investment and expansion, further limiting the resurgence of jobs as well as the growth of capital stock and the pace of technological advancement. The result could be an extended period of low productivity growth and stagnant incomes.”  See here.

And there was a serious risk that the longer the recovery took to emerge, the more likely there would be bankruptcies and the collapse of firms and eve n banks, as “the recovery may take some time to gather momentum, and the passage of time can turn liquidity problems into solvency problems.”

Indeed, last week, the Federal Reserve released its semi-annual Financial Stability Report, in which it concluded that “asset prices remain vulnerable to significant price declines should the pandemic take an unexpected course, the economic fallout prove more adverse, or financial system strains re-emerge.”  The Fed report warned that lenders could face “material losses” from lending to struggling borrowers who are unable to get back on track after the crisis. “The strains on household and business balance sheets from the economic and financial shocks since March will probably create fragilities that last for some time,” the Fed wrote.  “All told, the prospect for losses at financial institutions to create pressures over the medium term appears elevated,” the central bank said.

So the coronavirus slump will be deep and long lasting with a weak recovery to follow and could cause a financial crash.  And working people will suffer severely, especially those at the bottom of the income and skills ladder. That is the message of the head of the world’s most powerful central bank.

But the other message that Jay Powell wanted to emphasise to his economics audience was that this terrifying slump was not the fault of capitalism.  Powell was at pains to claim that the cause of the slump was the virus and lockdowns and not the economy. “The current downturn is unique in that it is attributable to the virus and the steps taken to limit its fallout. This time, high inflation was not a problem. There was no economy-threatening bubble to pop and no unsustainable boom to bust.  The virus is the cause, not the usual suspects—something worth keeping in mind as we respond.”

This statement reminded me of what I said way back in mid-March when the virus was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organisation. “I’m sure when this disaster is over, mainstream economics and the authorities will claim that it was an exogenous crisis nothing to do with any inherent flaws in the capitalist mode of production and the social structure of society.  It was the virus that did it.”  My response then was to remind readers that “Even before the pandemic struck, in most major capitalist economies, whether in the so-called developed world or in the ‘developing’ economies of the ‘Global South’, economic activity was slowing to a stop, with some economies already contracting in national output and investment, and many others on the brink.”

After Powell’s comment, I went back and had a look at the global real GDP growth rate since the end of the Great Recession in 2009.  Based on IMF data, we can see that annual growth was on a downward trend and in 2019 global growth was the slowest since the GR.

And if we compare last year’s 2019 real GDP growth rate with the 10yr average before, then every area of the world showed a significant fall.

The Eurozone growth was 11% below the 10yr average, the G7 and advanced economies even lower, with the emerging markets growth rate 27% lower, so that the overall world growth rate in 2019 was 23% lower than the average since the end of the Great Recession.  I’ve added Latin America to show that this region was right in a slump by 2019.

So the world capitalist economy was already slipping into a recession (long overdue) before the coronavirus pandemic arrived.  Why was this?  Well, as Brian Green explained in the You Tube discussion that I had with him last week, the US economy had been in a credit-fuelled bubble for the last six years that enabled the economy to grow even though profitability has been falling along with investment in the ‘real’ economy.  So, as Brian says, “the underlying health of the global capitalist economy was poor before the plague but was obscured by cheap money driving speculative gains which fed back into the economy”.  (For Brian’s data, see his website here).

In that discussion, I looked at the trajectory of the profitability of capital globally. The Penn World Tables 9.1 provide a new series called the internal rate of return on capital (IRR) for every country in the world starting in 1950 up to 2017. The IRR is a reasonable proxy for a Marxian measure of the rate of profit on capital stock, although of course it is not the same because it excludes variable capital and raw material inventories (circulating capital) from the denominator.  Despite that deficiency, the IRR measure allows us to consider the trends and trajectory of the profitability of capitalist economies and compare them with each other on a similar basis of valuation.

If we look at the IRR for the top seven capitalist economies, the imperialist countries, called the G7, we find that the rate of profit in the major economies peaked at the end of the so-called ‘neoliberal’ era in the late 1990s.  There was a significant decline in profitability after 2005 and then a slump during the Great Recession, matching Brian’s results for the US non-financial sector.  The recovery since the end of the Great Recession has been limited and profitability remains near all-time lows.

The IRR series only goes up to 2017.  It would be possible to extend these results to 2019 using the AMECO database which measures the net return on capital similarly to the Penn IRR.  I have not had time to do this properly, but an eye-ball look suggests that there has been no rise in profitability since 2017 and probably a slight fall up to 2019.  So these results confirm Brian Green’s US data that the major capitalist economies were already significantly weak before the pandemic hit.

Second, we can also gauge this by looking at total corporate profits, not just profitability.  Brian does this too for the US and China.  I have attempted to extend US and China corporate profit movements to a global measure by weighting the corporate profits (released quarterly) for selected major economies: US, UK, China, Canada, Japan and Germany.  These economies constitute more than 50% of world GDP.  What this measure reveals is that global corporate profits had ground to a halt before the pandemic hit.  Marx’s double-edge law of profit was in operation.

The mini-boom for profits that began in early 2016 peaked in mid-2017 and slid back in 2018 to zero by 2019.

That brings me to the causal connection between profits and the health of capitalist economies.  Over the years, I have presented theoretical arguments for what I consider is the Marxian view that profits drive capitalist investment, not ‘confidence’, not sales, not credit, etc.  Moreover, profits lead investment, not vice versa.  It is not only the logic of theory that supports this view; it is also empirical evidence.  And there is a stack of it.

But let me bring to your attention a new paper by Alexiou and Trachanas, Predicting post-war US recessions: a probit modelling approach, April 2020. They investigated the relationship between US recessions and the profitability of capital using multi-variate regression analysis.  They find that the probability of recessions increases with falling profitability and vice versa.  However, changes in private credit, interest rates and Tobin’s Q (stock market values compared with fixed asset values) are not statistically significant and any association with recessions is “rather slim”.

I conclude from this study and the others before it, that, although fictitious capital (credit and stocks) might keep a capitalist economy above water for a while, eventually it will be the profitability of capital in the productive sector that decides the issue. Moreover, cutting interest rates to zero or lower; injecting credit to astronomical levels that boost speculative investment in financial assets (and so raise Tobin’s Q) and more fiscal spending will not enable capitalist economies to recover from this pandemic slump.  That requires a significant rise in the profitability of productive capital.

If we look at investment rates (as measured by total investment to GDP in an economy), we find that in the last ten years, total investment to GDP in the major economies has been weak; indeed in 2019, total investment (government, housing and business) to GDP is still lower than in 2007. In other words, even the low real GDP growth rate in the major economies in the last ten years has not been matched by total investment growth.  And if you strip out government and housing, business investment has performed even worse.

By the way, the argument of the Keynesians that low economic growth in the last ten years is due to ‘secular stagnation’ caused by a ‘savings glut’ is not borne out.  The national savings ratio in the advanced capitalist economies in 2019 is no higher than in 2007, while the investment ratio has fallen 7%.  There has been an investment dearth not a savings glut.  This is the result of low profitability in the major capitalist economies, forcing them to look overseas to invest where profitability is higher (the investment ratio in emerging economies is up 10% – I shall return to this point in a future post).

What matters in restoring economic growth in a capitalist economy is business investment.  And that depends on the profitability of that investment.  And even before the pandemic hit, business investment was falling.  Take Europe. Even before the pandemic hit, business investment in peripheral European countries was still about 20 per cent below pre-crisis levels.

Andrew Kenningham, chief Europe economist at Capital Economics, forecast eurozone business investment would fall 24 per cent year on year in 2020, contributing to an expected 12 per cent contraction in GDP. In the first quarter, France reported its largest contraction in gross fixed capital formation, a measure of private and public investment, on record; Spain’s contraction was also near-record levels, according to preliminary data from their national statistics offices.

In Europe, manufacturers producing investment goods — those used as inputs for the production of other goods and services, such as machinery, lorries and equipment — experienced the biggest hit to activity, according to official data. In Germany, the production of investment goods fell 17 per cent in March compared with the previous month, more than double the fall in the output of consumer goods. France and Spain registered even wider differences

Low profitability and rising debt are the two pillars of the Long Depression (ie low growth in productive investment, real incomes and trade) that the major economies have been locked into for the last decade.  Now in the pandemic, governments and central banks are doubling down on these policies, backed by a chorus of approval from Keynesians of various hues (MMT and all), in the hope and expectation that this will succeed in reviving capitalist economies after the lockdowns are relaxed or ended.

This is unlikely to happen because profitability will remain low and may even be lower, while debts will rise, fuelled by the huge credit expansion.  Capitalist economies will remain depressed, and even eventually be accompanied by rising inflation, so that this new leg of depression will turn into stagflation.  The Keynesian multiplier (government spending) will be found wanting as it was in the 1970s.  The Marxist multiplier (profitability) will prove to be a better guide to the nature of capitalist booms and slumps and show that capitalist crises cannot be ended while preserving the capitalist mode of production.

Conspiracy Theory vs. Socialist Logic

Originally published by Socialist Standard.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Coronavirus Capitalism and the Neoliberal Crisis Playbook

Illustration by Ajay Mohanty

By Gaspar Zapata

While much of the ongoing global pandemic remains unpredictable, the response of the current administration suggests a future of violent economic insecurity, especially for the working class. Covid-19 has ushered in death and destruction as well an economic crisis the scale of which continues to expand. Unemployment figures are now double the levels of joblessness during the peak of the 2007-8 Great Recession and are only expected to rise. The basic needs of working people (food, shelter, healthcare) seem increasingly unattainable. An estimated one-third of tenants could not pay rent last month and an already weak social safety net means that the number of food insecure Americans is set to surpass 40 million. Yet, the U.S. is home to nearly half of the world’s high-net worth individuals.

This extraordinary wealth combined with generalized poverty is not by accident; it was historically created by decades of neoliberal policies that yielded socialism for the rich and predatory financial capitalism for the working class. The Trump administration will only intensify this social stratification if it continues along its current path.

Neoliberalism refers to a set of ideas, beliefs and practices that promote improving human well-being through individual freedom, free markets and free trade. Since the 1970s this utopian vision has served to justify attacks on organized labor and to build support for waves of corporate deregulation. It has also been used to legitimize the destruction of welfare programs. Reagan advanced neoliberalism by tapping into racist and sexist tales of “welfare queens” to rationalize cutting programs for the poor. Clinton did his part by deregulating banking and finance and thereby set the stage for the predation of middle- and low-income households during the sub-prime crisis twelve years ago.

Source: https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/

Gradually, workers have seen wages stagnate while the cost of living keeps rising. Overall economic productivity and GDP have risen but workers have not been given a fair share of this output. The rich, on the other hand, have enjoyed historically low tax bills. These trends have generated a “double squeeze” on workers where their livelihoods are being directly exploited through low-wage, insecure work while their social safety nets have eroded and their debts have accumulated.

For the past forty years government officials, corporate lobbyists, investment bankers, and free-market intellectuals armed with neoliberal ideas have led us into a world of grave inequality, mass incarceration and what Ruth Wilson Gilmore has called organized abandonment. They have designed a political-economic system where the richest 1% own half of the wealth in the world and where the rest of us are saddled with trillions of dollars in student and credit card debt because our wages our low and our benefits practically non-existent.

During times of crisis the internal contradictions of this system become glaringly clear, but leaders dogmatically continue to apply the same inadequate solutions.

In 2008 we witnessed the neoliberal crisis playbook in action as Congress authorized billions upon billions of relief funds to rescue a collapsing financial sector. In a strategy consistent with neoliberal philosophy, experts and politicians made the protection of troubled markets their top priority. What we must remember, however, is that “markets” are people; they are ordinary borrowers and workers but also CEOs, top executives and elite investors.

Source: https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/asset-ownership-and-the-uneven-recovery-from-the-great-recession-20180913.htm

When the Great Recession was said and done, distressed working-class homeowners saw only an insignificant slither of those relief funds. It should be no shock, then, that the only income group who gained wealth since the crash has been the top ten percent income bracket. To say that “we” have recovered from the subprime crash is misleading. Only the very wealthy recovered; the rest of us are struggling to keep up.

Covid-19 is revealing the persistence of neoliberal thinking and the colossal failures of our present and past political leadership. In this cruel historical drama politicians have embraced neoliberal solutions to solve social problems created by decades of neoliberal policies to begin with. The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act is more of the same.

A provision in the CARES Act includes a potential $1.7 million tax break for high-earning individuals, or an estimated 43,000 U.S. taxpayers. Individuals with annual incomes below $75,000 will only receive a one-time $1,200 stimulus check. For those most in need of immediate relief the stimulus check pales in comparison to the relief being offered to the millionaire class. Moreover, the billions potentially lost through these tax breaks could be used to support hospitals, schools and other social services.

The Trump administration is fiercely embracing neoliberal solutions to the pandemic, even using it to deregulate environmental protections. This approach has not and will not work. The global pandemic and its aftermath will not be solved by extending aid to the rich while leaving the rest of us vulnerable to the brutal cycles of finance capitalism. It is already worsening food insecurity for working families and disproportionately claiming Black, Indigenous and Latinx lives. It will require bold actions like nation-wide rent strikes and pro-worker legislation like the proposal for a rent and mortgage freeze and the bill proposed to forgive student debt. Finding a way out of our shared predicament requires waging a united struggle against the murderous system which threatens our collective well-being.

All power to the people!

Imperialist Propaganda and the New Cold War With China

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

By Matthew Dolezal

Originally published at the author’s blog.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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