The Tamil people in Sri Lanka had expectations that they would achieve equal rights and power with the Sinhalese once independence was won from the British colonialists. As the independence movement was winning over colonialization there was no talk of any Tamil separatism.

Even before the defeat of the Axis powers, Britain prepared to decolonize Ceylon. In 1943, the colonial secretary of state stated that a constitution would be drafted will all parties involved. A condition would be that “The Parliament of Ceylon shall not make any law rendering persons of any community or religion liable to disabilities or restrictions to which persons of other communities are not made liable …”²

Britain established the Soulbury Commission in 1944. The leading Sinhalese politician was D.S. Senanayake—a conservative, who founded, in 1946, the rightist pro-independence and pro-capitalist United National Party (UNP). Senanayake became known as the “Father of Sri Lanka.” He convinced a leading Tamil politician, G.G. Ponnamblam—who founded the All Ceylon Tamil Congress (ACTC), in 1944—to partake in independence negotiations.

Another provision of the Soulbury Commission (Constitution) was that any bill which evoked “serious opposition by any racial or religious community and which, in the opinion of the Governor-General is likely to involve oppression or serious injustice to any community must be reserved by the Governor-General.”

The vote on the third reading of the “Free Lanka” bill was supported by all the Muslim members and by most Tamil and Sinhalese groups. “Some of the other minority members who did not want to openly support the bill took care to be absent or abstain. Finally, the debate and the vote of acceptance on the eighth and ninth of September 1945 was the most significant indication of general reconciliation among the ethnic and regional groups. Far exceeding the 3/4 majority required by the Soulbury Commission, Senanayake had 51 votes in favor, and only three votes against the adoption of the constitution. The vote was ‘in many ways a vote of confidence by all communities…and the minorities were as anxious as the majority for self-government.’”

Senanayake’s speech in proposing the motion of acceptance made reference to the minorities and said … “throughout this period the Ministers had in view one objective only, the attainment of maximum freedom. Accusations of Sinhalese domination have been bandied about. We can afford to ignore them for it must be plain to every one that what we sought was not Sinhalese domination, but Ceylonese domination. We devised a scheme that gave heavy weightage to the minorities; we deliberately protected them against discriminatory legislation. We vested important powers in the Governor-General… We decided upon an Independent Public Service Commission so as to give assurance that there should be no communalism in the Public Service. I do not normally speak as a Sinhalese, and I do not think that the Leader of this Council ought to think of himself as a Sinhalese representative, but for once I should like to speak as a Sinhalese and assert with all the force at my command that the interests of one community are the interests of all. We are one of another, what ever race or creed.”

The first national election was held August 23-September 30, 1947. 1,887, 364 people voted for 95 MP (members of parliament). There were six parties and many independents. The results were:

UNP with 39.8% (42 MPs)

LSSP 10.8% (10)

BLPI 6% (5)

ACTC 4.4% (7)

CIC 3.8% (6)

CPC 3.7% (3)

Labor 1.4% (1)

Independents 29% (16)³

“We are one of another, whatever race or creed,” swore the “Father” of the new independent State. It looked good for all ethnic and religious groups, but then the deceit became evident with the new citizenship act.

On February 4, 1948, the new government introduced the Ceylon Citizenship Bill before Parliament. The outward purpose of the bill was to provide a means of obtaining citizenship, but I think its real purpose was to discriminate against the Indian Tamils by denying them citizenship. The Ceylon Citizenship Act no. 18, August 20, 1948 denied citizenship to 11% of the population.

Although the All Ceylon Tamil Congress opposed the bill, it had joined with the UNP. This provoked half of its members to form the Federal Party, led by SJV Chelvanayakam. Next year, the Indian and Pakistani Residents Act, no.3, disenfranchised nearly all Tamils, who were originally from India. Their seven MPs were kicked out of parliament and there were no Indian Tamils in the 1952 parliament elections. It wasn’t until 1988 that the Sri Lanka government granted citizenship to stateless persons, who hadn’t applied for Indian citizenship. In 2003, 168,141 descendants of Indian Tamils were allowed citizenship.

The new government allowed Sinhalese to appropriate land on the Tamil traditional homeland in the north and east. Entire villages were driven out—ethnic cleansing—which the Sinhalese settled, aiming to break a geographic continuity of the Tamil homeland.⁴ Within time, Sinhalese settlers had taken over 30% of Tamil lands and homes—a la Israel in Palestine.

In 1956, The Sinhala Only Act became law. It mandated Sinhala as “the sole official language”, which, at that time was spoken by 70% of the population.

Supporters of the law saw it as an attempt by a community that had just gained independence to distance themselves from their colonial masters, while its opponents viewed it as an attempt by the linguistic majority to oppress and assert dominance on minorities. The Act symbolizes the post independent majority Sinhalese to assert its Sri Lanka’s identity as a nation state, and for Tamils, it became a symbol of minority oppression and a justification for them to demand a separate nation state, which resulted in decades of civil war.

Tamils protested the discriminatory law by using Gandhian tactics of non-violent sit-ins. Although stated advocates of non-violence, Buddhist monks led Sinhalese mobs against Tamils.

The Gal Oya riots… were the first ethnic riots that targeted the minority Sri Lankan Tamils… The riots took place from June 11, 1956 and occurred over the next five days. Local majority Sinhalese colonists and employees of the Gal Oya settlement board commandeered government vehicles, dynamite and weapons and massacred minority Tamils… It is estimated that over 150 people lost their lives due in the violence. Although initially inactive, the Police and the Army were eventually able to re-take control of the situation and brought the riots under control.

Tamil political leader SJV Chelvanayagam began to organize a massive Satyagraha (non-violent resistance). In order to avoid even more bloodshed, Prime Minister Solomon Bandaranayaka signed an agreement with Chelvanayagam promising to restore Tamil as the (or one of two) official language(s) in its minority areas. This infuriated many Sinhalese, especially monks, and they assaulted and sometimes killed Tamils in many areas. Buddhist monks even besieged the official residence of Bandaranayaka demanding that he abandoned the agreement, which he did. But, in 1958, the Sinhalese-led parliament, pressed by the violence and the pro-Moscow and Trotskyist Sinhalese parties, passed an amendment to the Sinhala Only Act (called “Sinhala Only, Tamil Also”) restoring Tamil as a co-official language in their areas of the North and East. Frustrated at the compromise, Sinhalese mobs murdered 200-300 Tamils, including some Sinhalese who gave Tamils refuge. Many Tamil women were raped and some Tamil boys were stripped, bound, and burned alive. This violent hatred evokes the lynching and burning alive of black people by whites in the southern USA.

Some Buddhists were angry that the Sinhalese Prime Minister Bandaranayaka had tried to compromise with Tamils. In 1959, a Buddhist monk assassinated him.

The language law had its intended effect. In 1955, the civil service had been largely made of Tamils, who had benefited more than Sinhalese from western style education provided by missionaries. This fact was used by populist Sinhalese politicians to come to power—or retain power—on the promise of providing more civil service jobs to Sinhalese by demanding that their language be the only one used in public service. By 1970, the civil service was almost entirely Sinhalese. Thousands of Tamil civil servants were forced to resign due to lack of fluency in Sinhala. In the1960s, government forms and services were virtually unavailable to Tamils.

Confrontation became the modus operandi; Sinhalese were the Zionists and Tamils the Palestinians!

It is important to stress, especially with progressive-revolutionary governments, such as the ALBA alliance in Latin America, and their supporters throughout the world, that the Tamils’ history in Sri Lanka is one of constant and widespread discrimination. They are also subjects to a policy of genocide as defined by the United Nations.⁵

Sri Lanka made world headlines in 1960 when a woman, Sirimavo RD Bandaranaike, was elected prime minister—the world’s first female leader. Being the widow of the martyr and founder of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) was an asset. She immediately brought Sri Lanka into the Non-Alignment Movement, founded in 1961. The originators—India’s Nehru, Egypt’s Nasser, Yugoslavia’s Tito and Ghana’s Nkrumah—sought support for each other’s sovereignty without aligning with either super-power bloc at that time.⁶

Nevertheless, Sri Lankan leaders of both predominantly Sinhala major parties continued to be dependent upon economic and military ties with India, the US, the UK, and Israel. Social welfare programs were carried out within a capitalist economic structure. This was a cause for radical opposition. In 1971, thousands of Sinhalese students, and Indian Tamil plantation workers, under the leadership of a new nationalistic and Marxist-oriented political party, Janatha Vimukthi Peramana (JVP), translated as Peoples Liberation Front, engaged in anti-government clashes. Fifteen thousand protestors were killed in the uprising.

Once in power, Bandaranaike’s widow did not alter the Sinhalese policy of genocide: “…an ingenious device was resorted to deprive the Tamils of the constitutional safeguards and the characteristics of the conditional polity. A coalition of three Sinhalese political parties, led by Mrs. Sirimavo R.D.Bandaranaike, called upon the people to give a mandate [in the 1970 General Elections, during her second term] for a new Constituent Assembly to scrap the 1948 dominion polity and create a new Republic of Sri Lanka. Whilst the voters in the seven Sinhalese provinces gave Mrs.Bandaranaike the mandate that she had requested, the Tamil voters in the Northern and Eastern Provinces summarily rejected her call. In the North and East, a mere 14% of the votes polled supported the call for a new constituent Assembly.”

Laws protecting rights of racial and religious minorities were abandoned and Buddhism was made the constitutional religion of Sri Lanka.

Sinhalese claimed 5000 acres in the Tamil farmland “Nochikulam” as theirs, renaming it “Nochiyagama.” Next year, 10,738 Sinhalese families settled in Trincomalee illegally.

“The sovereignty of the Tamil people (who were ethnically, geographically and linguistically separately identifiable and distinct) revived.”

With this setback, a reinvigorated ACTC joined with the Federal Party, in 1972, to form the Tamil United Front (TUF). Separatism or autonomy now became the cry for nearly all Tamils, who sought an Eelam part of Sri Lanka. Thirty Tamil militant groups emerged.

“The operative part is Thamil Eelam and it means the Tamil part of Eelam. The term Eelam is a synonym for Sri Lanka and has been in use in Tamil literature right from the Cankam Period dating as far back as 200 B.C. to circa 250 A.D.”

The second government of Sirimavo Bandaranaike enacted a discriminatory double standard law for admission grades to universities, requiring Tamil students to achieve higher grades than Sinhalese.

Throughout the 1970s, Sinhalese mobs clashed—with impunity—not only with Tamils but also Muslim Moors. In 1976, Sinhalese burned 271 houses and 44 shops, murdering a score of Muslims.

In 1976, the Tamil United Front Party changed its name to the Tamil United Liberation Front (TUFP) at the Vattukottai Conference, and adopted a demand for an independent sovereign state in traditional Tamil homeland in the north and east to be known as the “secular, socialist state of Tamil Eelam.”⁷

By 1975, Tamil militancy increased with the birth of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), led by Velupillai Prabhakaran, who considered himself a Marxist and follower of Che Guevara. The LTTE engaged in small armed clashes with the military.

The conservative UNP won a landslide victory in the July 1977 elections. But the pro-independence TULF won 6.4% of the popular vote, winning all 14 seats in the Tamil homeland area, and four more seats of the 168-member parliament. In response to Tamil’s peaceful struggle and its parliamentary victory, Sinhalese mobs, led by Buddhist monks, again destroyed many Tamil homes and shops and murdered up to 300 Tamils.

In July 1978, the UNP, led by Prime Minister Junius Richard Jayewardene, changed the constitution and renamed the country the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka. An executive presidency was established, allowing the president greater powers than the prime minister, whom the president now appoints. The president is also the commander-in-chief and head of the cabinet. He can dissolve parliament and has judicial impunity.

Jayewardene became the first president and appointed Ramasinghe Premadosa (UNP) prime minister. Despite the new name, “democratic socialist republic,” the capitalist government began deregulating much of what had been government run enterprises. Private enterprise was priority.

On May 31, 1981, the TULF held a rally in Jaffna in the north. Police clashed with Tamils and two policemen were killed. For three days, Sinhalese mobs, policemen, and soldiers went on a rampage. Several Tamils were taken from their homes and killed. The TULF headquarters, a newspaper office, presses, and shops were destroyed. Worst of all was the total destruction of the Jaffna library and its 97,000 volumes of books and irreplaceable historical manuscripts, some made of palm leaves. It is now well known that the fire that destroyed this unique institution of the Tamils in their homeland was masterminded by a handful of ministers of the Sinhala Government in Colombo, who were present in Jaffna the night of the fire.

“The national newspapers did not carry information about the incident and in subsequent parliamentary debates some majority Sinhalese members reminded minority Tamil politicians that if Tamils were unhappy in Sri Lanka, they should leave for their homeland in India. This is a direct quotation from United National Party member MP WJM Lokubandara:

“If there is discrimination in this land which is not their (Tamil) homeland, then why try to stay here? Why not go back home (India) where there would be no discrimination?”

“Twenty years later, the mayor of Jaffna, Nadarajah Raviraj, still grieved at the recollection of the flames he saw as a University student. He was later killed by unknown gunmen in the capital Colombo, in 2006.”

Civil War and LTTE

By summer 1983, the then small guerrilla army of LTTE was well settled in most northern and eastern areas. Their first major assault against the state’s military took place at Jaffna peninsula, July 24. LTTE ambushed a convoy of soldiers passing through land mines and killed 15.

This could have been in response to many random attacks upon Tamils in various areas. One example is in Trincomalee where, on 10 April 1983, a young Tamil died in police custody after having been held without charge for two weeks. At the judicial inquest into his death, on May 31, the Jaffna Magistrate returned a verdict of homicide. Three days later, the government changed the rules permitting the police to bury or cremate bodies without a post mortem or an inquest.

Amnesty International cabled President Jayawardene expressing concern that such a regulation could give rise to grave human rights violations and appealed to him to rescind it. But he did not. On the contrary, on June 3, 1983, the day that the new Emergency Regulation was brought into effect, the attacks on the Tamils in Trincomalee commenced in earnest.

R. Sampanthan, M.P. for Trincomalee, described that mobs of Sinhalese went from village to village setting fire to Tamil houses and shops. A particular modus operandi was observed. Heavily armed service personnel would enter a Tamil area and carry out a search alleging that explosions and dangerous weapons were hidden in that area. Invariably nothing would be recovered other than implements that would normally be available in any house. Sometimes Tamil youths would be arrested on “suspicion” and taken for questioning. After a month of many pogrom raids, the LTTE struck the army convoy.

That night and for weeks Sinhalese rampaged against Tamils, especially in the Colombo area where some Tamils youths were stripped naked and burned alive in petrol. Black July ended with between 2000 and 3000 dead Tamils, among them 53 prisoners, including key political leaders, who were murdered by Sinhalese prisoners at Welikadai. One political prisoner, Kuttimani, had his eyes gouged out and stomped upon under a soldier’s boots.

One hundred thousand Tamils were rendered homeless and that many and more fled to India.

Even non-violent advocates of separatism or independence, such as the TULF, were pushed out of the democratic process. The Sixth Amendment to the Constitution, enacted in August 1983, classified all separatist movements as unconstitutional. That meant that all its members of parliament—16 then—lost their seats. Thousands of Tamil youth joined militant armed groups, especially the LTTE, which became the most disciplined and well organized.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the LTTE established a de facto state, called Tamil Eelam, and managed a government, which provided a judicial court system, a police force, and social assistance in health and education and for the poorest. LTTE ran a bank, a radio station (Voice of Tigers), even a television station. Guerrilla leaders helped organize small cooperative farming units based on traditional methods. The LTTE dismantled the caste system and officially stopped discrimination against women. The LTTE organized a civilian administration under its command. There was order and peace in these areas, as long as everyone obeyed and when the Sri Lanka army did not bomb.

In the 1980s, there was much discontent in other parts of Sri Lanka. Radical Sinhalese youths, such as the JVP, demanded going further towards socialism. In 1987, JVP engaged in another armed uprising. But after 1989, it entered into parliamentary politics. It participated in the 1994 parliamentary general election and joined conservative and liberal party coalitions in opposing equal rights with Tamils.

Ranasinghe Premadasa was prime minister from February 1978 to January 1, 1989, under President Jayewardene, and then he became president until his assassination on Mayday 1993. Many Sinhalese elitists thought he was too common to be their leader and too compromising with Tamils. Controversial policies under his terms included the matter of language, ethnic cleansing, and the role of India in internal affairs. The first controversy was the constitutional amendment allowing “equality” of languages in the Tamil areas: “National languages shall be Sinhala and Tamil,” although, “The official language of Sri Lanka shall be Sinhala. Tamil shall also be an official language. English shall be a link language.”

This compromise spoke in double tongues. Why not just make Sinhala and Tamil equally official, as India has done with a score of languages?

Alienated Tamils

Even a U.S. Library of Congress study characterized Tamils as alienated. In 1988, it published, SriLanka: a Country Study. In the chapter entitled, “Tamil Alienation,” the authors wrote:

Moderate as well as militant Sri Lankan Tamils have regarded the policies of successive Sinhalese governments in Colombo with suspicion and resentment since at least the mid-1950s, when the “Sinhala Only” language policy was adopted…

Several issues provided the focus for Sri Lankan Tamil alienation and widespread support, particularly within the younger generation, for extremist movements…Sinhalese still remained the higher-status “official language,” and inductees into the civil service were expected to acquire proficiency in it. Other areas of disagreement concerned preference given to Sinhalese applicants for university admissions and public employment, and allegations of government encouragement of Sinhalese settlement in Tamil-majority areas.

“Government-sponsored settlement of Sinhalese in the northern or eastern parts of the island, traditionally considered to be Tamil regions, has been perhaps the most immediate cause of inter-communal violence. There was, for example, an official plan in the mid-1980s to settle 30,000 Sinhalese in the dry zone of Northern Province, giving each settler land and funds to build a house and each community armed protection in the form of rifles and machine guns. Tamil spokesmen accused the government of promoting a new form of ‘colonialism’,” but the Jayewardene government asserted that no part of the island could legitimately be considered an ethnic homeland and thus closed to settlement from outside. Settlement schemes were popular with the poorer and less fortunate classes of Sinhalese.”

Che Guevara made no bones about the significance of alienation: “…the ultimate and most important revolutionary aspiration (is) to see man liberated from his alienation.”⁸

India’s Vacillating Role

The role of India in Sri Lanka’s civil war was a major problem. India’s Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, son of assassinated Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, first supported the LTTE. His air force even dropped 25 tons of aid in their territory in Jaffna (Operation Poomalai). A month following this, the Indo-Sri Lanka Peace Accord was signed between Gandhi and the reluctant Prime Minister Ranasinghe Presmadasa, under pressure from his president, JR Jayewardene. The July 29, 1987 accord was expected to resolve the ongoing civil war. Colombo agreed to devolution of power to the Tamil provinces, and its military was to withdraw in exchange for the Tamil rebels’ disarmament. The LTTE had not been made party to the talks but reluctantly agreed to surrender arms to the Indian Peace Keeping Force. Within a few months, however, both sides flared into an active confrontation. Indian soldiers died in far greater numbers than Tamil rebels: 1,500 killed and 4,500 wounded.

In January 1989, Premadasa was elected President on a popular platform promising that the Indian Peace Keeping Force would leave within three months. The police action was unpopular in India as well, especially with some 50 million Tamil Nadu people. Gandhi refused to withdraw India’s troops, however, believing that the only way to end the civil war was to politically force Premadasa and to militarily force the LTTE to accept the accord. But, in December 1989, Vishwanath Pratap Singh was elected India’s Prime Minister and completed the pullout.

On May 21, 1991, in an act of revenge over India’s militarist actions, a female LTTE member blew up Rajiv Gandhi in a suicide bomb attack. In 1992, India became the first government, even before Sri Lanka, to declare the LTTE a terrorist group.

President Premadasa resumed the civil war, which became stalemated. Many forces were angry with him, including a rival Sinhalese leader Lalith Athulathmudali, who sought an impeachment motion against Premadasa, in 1991. Lalith was an adamant supporter of Zionism.

When Athulathmudali, a pro-Israeli power broker, challenged Premadasa two years ago with an impeachment motion in the parliament, Premadasa openly accused Mossad, the intelligence agency of Israel, of trying to topple him. In his address to the Sri Lankan parliament, Premadasa said,

“…I had Israeli interests section removed. In such a context there is nothing to be surprised about the Mossad rising up against me. Please remember that there are among us traitors who have gone to Israeli universities and lectured there and earned dirty money…”

cited Sachi Sri Kantha, quoting the prime minister in “The Puzzles in President Premadasa’s Assassination Revisited.”

In April 1993, Athulathmudali was murdered. Eight days later, on Mayday, Premadasa was murdered. The LTTE did not claim responsibility for these assassinations but were so blamed by Sinhalese and the mass media.

“When Athulathmudali was assassinated last April, the members of his party immediately accused Premadasa for ordering the killing. The murder of Premadasa could have been a return hit planned and executed by the Mossad which had lost its major card in Sri Lankan politics.”

The second Eelam war lasted from 1989 until November 1994 when the People’s Alliance (led by SLFP) candidate, Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga, won the presidency. But peace negotiations broke down and the war continued from 1995 until the end of 2001 when ceasefire negotiations made progress. But not before the LTTE proved to the Sri Lanka government and military, with 230,000 well armed troops, that it was its equal. With somewhere around 5000 guerrillas—along with a small Sea Tigers boat unit, which made some pirate hits for funding, and even a few light civilian aircraft, the Sky Tigers, which sometimes made damaging raids against the Air Force—the LTTE won many military victories.

The Sri Lankan military often bombed civilian Tamils in the LTTE-controlled zones. It claimed that they were legitimate “collateral damage” given that the guerrillas allegedly forced them to remain against their will. The civilian hostage charge was widely reported as truth by the west and its mass media, as was the allegation that the LTTE forces children into armed combat.

On January 31, 1996, the LTTE stunned the nation when it bombed the Central Bank in Colombo, which managed most financial business accounts. One suicide bomber with 200 kilos of explosions drove through the main gate and exploded, wiping out many bank floors and several other buildings. Behind him came a vehicle with two cadres firing rifles and launchers. They escaped but were later captured. Material damage was tremendous but more so was the loss of 53 lives and injuries to 1,400 people, most of them not military targets.

On July 24, 1996, LTTE forces bombed a commuter train killing 70 Sinhalese civilians. By the end of the 1990s, both sides had killed tens of thousands of people. Civilians were targeted by both sides. The Tigers claimed that civilians were targeted only when associated with military installations. But some attacks, such as the train, were unjustifiable. Furthermore, the LTTE has often murdered other Tamils who also seek autonomy but were not part of the LTTE or had made public critiques. It has, for example, killed several leaders of the TULF.

On April 22, 2000 LTTE forces surprisingly overran Sri Lanka’s Elephant Pass military base on Jaffna. Over 1,000 troops were killed and huge quantities of arms and ammunition were taken.

On July 24, 2001, the LTTE again stunned the nation and the world when it attacked the only international airport and the nearby military base.

Around 3:30 am on July 24, 14 members of the LTTE Black Tiger suicide squad infiltrated Katunayake air base… After destroying electricity transformers to plunge the base in darkness they cut through the barbed wire surrounding the base to begin their assault. Using rocket propelled grenades, anti-tank weapons and assault rifles, the militants attacked the air force planes. They were not able to attack the aircraft in the hangars but did destroy eight military aircraft on the tarmac: three Nanchange K-8 trainer aircraft, one Mil Mi-17 helicopter, one Mil Mi-24 helicopter, two LAI Kfir fighter jets, and a Mig-27. Five K-8s and one MiG-27 were also damaged. A total of 26 aircraft were either damaged or destroyed in the attack.

Eight Tigers and three air force officers died in the battle at the air base. The six remaining LTTE members then crossed the runway to nearby Bandaranaike Airport. Using their weapons, they began blowing up any civilian aircraft they could find, which were all empty. One Airbus340 was destroyed by an explosive charge; an A330 was destroyed by a rocket fired from the control tower. In addition, an A320-200 and an A340-300 were damaged in the assault.”

All 14 guerrillas were killed, along with six Sri Lankan air force personnel and one soldier killed by friendly fire; 12 soldiers were injured, along with three Sri Lankan civilians and a Russian engineer… The cost of replacing the civilian aircraft was estimated at $350 million USD. The attack caused a slowdown in the economy of Sri Lanka, to about -1.4%. Tourism also plummeted, dropping 15.5% at the end of the year.

Cease Fire

During two decades of civil war, the LTTE had several times offered a ceasefire on the condition of negotiations to establish peace and ethnic equality. With this military victory, the guerrilla army offered a unilateral ceasefire. Some national voices and many international ones were also pressing for a ceasefire. Norway took concrete steps, but it was this spectacular military victory and the loss to the economy that forced the government to the bargaining table.

The formal Ceasefire Agreement (CFA) was signed on February 22, 2002. Prime Minister Ranil Wickremasinghe and LTTE leader Velupillai Pirabakaran signed the agreement, alongside mediator Jan Petersen representing Norway’s foreign ministry.

Provisions provided for each side holding their ground positions. Neither side was to engage in any offensive military operation or move munitions into the area controlled by the other side.

The LTTE proposed an Interim Self-Government Authority (ISGA) to administer the Tamil homeland, pending final agreement and elections. The ceasefire was monitored by the Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission. It was staffed by designees from Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Iceland. The US, UK and other EU countries had observers. Headquarters were established in Colombo, and there were 60 monitors in six district teams and two naval ones. The SLMM monitored violations and mediated between the two parties but could not enforce sanctions. Many Sinhalese considered the Monitoring Mission, especially Norway, of being partial to the Tigers.

During the ceasefire, progress was made in agricultural development and general infrastructure in the Tamil Homeland. Many foreigners were invited to observe and participate in building Tamil Eelam. Impressive first-hand accounts have been written about the progress in many areas: administrative, economic and a social welfare network. While voices friendly to this process praised the advances made, many also questioned the lack of civilian input in the decision-making process.

The LTTE did not emphasize an international political solidarity movement. It did appeal for economic donations, which poured to it, especially from Tamils in the Diaspora. The LTTE stopped speaking of Marxism or building a socialist independent state. It emphasized winning militarily—if Sri Lanka continued preventing an autonomous Tamil homeland—and constructing a social welfare state with cooperative and private enterprises. The Tigers became so respectable they could openly purchase weaponry from some countries not directly under the thumb of US-EU-Israel or their partial antagonists: China, Iran and Pakistan. A May 29, 2009 Times Online piece quotes the editor of Jane’s Terrorism and Insurgency Centre, saying that the LTTE used 11 merchant ships to deliver weapons, many of which they got from Bulgaria, Ukraine, Cyprus, Thailand and Croatia. Even the World Bank recognized the LTTE as an unofficial State, according to its representative in Sri Lanka, Peter Harrold, in 2005.

The LTTE was even building a Tamil University where Tamils in the Diaspora would have taught. I spoke with one of them, a man who had earned a doctorate degree in environmental science and taught in European universities. He frequently visited the homeland he had left three decades previously. He hoped that he would return and teach once the university would be opened.

An activist in independence forces using peaceful methods, he wished to remain anonymous. His impressions were that the Tigers were the dominating factor in civilian administration but that as long as no one objected one felt safe in the Homeland areas whenever Colombo’s armed forces were not bombing. He was critical that the LTTE armed forces had resorted to terrorist methods in their history, such as assassinating political critics. The professor, however, did not think the LTTE forced children into combat or used civilians as human shields, generally.

“Tigers were good people, intelligent and sensitive to people and nature. But contradictions did exist. They were a strange animal.”

Cease Fire Ends

On December 26, 2004, the greatest earthquake-tsunami ever recorded (9.3) hit Southeast Asia. Eleven countries were deeply affected: 230,000 were killed or missing. Sri Lanka was one of the worst disasters. About 40,000 people were killed or missing; 1.5 million were displaced from their homes. International aid poured in but did not arrive in the North and East due to Sinhalese political party opposition. The LTTE organized all the aid it could muster for hundreds of thousands in the Tamil homeland. Foreign volunteers and emergency relief organizations praised the LTTE for its effective and caring work. There are many accounts of this.

Mahinda Rajapakse was appointed prime minister April 6, 2004, and then elected President on November 19, 2005 with just 50.3% of the vote. He was the pro-war candidate of a new coalition, the United People’s Freedom Alliance (UPFA). Tamil political parties and many foreign relief groups accused Rajapakse of diverting Tsunami relief funds designated for their homeland. In this complex reality, those parties most adamant about refusing aid to suffering Tamils and who demanded an end to the ceasefire with the objective of launching an all-out war were those claiming to be either hard-core Marxist-Communist-Trotskyists or self-proclaimed non-violent Buddhists.

“United People’s Freedom Alliance [is] undoubtedly the broadest coalition of progressive forces in the country. This coalition, which came into being in 2004 upon a platform of new liberal socio economic program and a resolve to defeat separatist terrorism, has since mobilized people around a social democratic agenda.”

This coalition is not just made up of alleged “progressives” but of “social” capitalists and self-styled “democratic socialists.” At the start, the coalition parties were: Sri Lanka Freedom Party, Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, Sri Lanka Mahajana Pakshaya, Muslim National Unity Alliance, Mahajana Eksath Peramuna, Democratic United National Front, and Desha Vimukthi Janatha Party.

The Communist Party of Sri Lanka and the Lanka Sama Samaja Party signed a memorandum of understanding with the SLFP so their candidates would take part in parliamentary elections in the new coalition. They also joined the UPFA. On April 2, 2004, the alliance won 45.6% of the popular vote and took 105 out of 225 seats.

A Buddhist political party, the Jathika Hela Urumaya (JHU), was founded in February 2004 and participated in the 2004 parliamentary elections, winning 6% of the vote for nine seats. In 2007, it formally joined the hodge-podge UPFA coalition government and was given a ministry post.

On April 3, 2008, JHU’s leader gave his reasons for warring against Tamils to the United States government financed Voice of America radio station.

Athurliye Rathana, a Buddhist monk who heads the Jathika Hela Urumaya party in Sri Lanka’s parliament, wants to end the suffering by putting a quick end to the war. Speaking with VOA at a seaside hotel in this former tourist haven, Rathana says he supports the government’s latest military offensive to quash the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.

“Anytime a militant group is harmful to peaceful people, then government should have the right to exercise constitutional law and order,” Rathana said. “And, LTTE is unlawful and so, under our constitutional law, anyone cannot exercise militancy. But [with] the LTTE separatist movement, the government has some duty to control their military activities. I say only one thing, ‘Please do your duty.’”

For comments like that, the Sri Lankan media has branded Rathana the “war monk,”… his sentiments are common in Sri Lanka’s majority ethnic Sinhala community.

Rathana is a celebrated figure in this predominantly Buddhist nation, where monks are cherished for their spiritual guidance. The pro-war activism of Rathana and others has spurred as many as 30,000 Sinhalese young men to join the army in the past few months.

The UPFA alliance of apparently conflicting ideologies and economic policies is so strange that one can easily be confused about who is who and why their politics are such that they are. After a month’s research, having begun as a total novice to this region, I am unclear about why various political forces take the position they do not only about the Tigers but about the entire Tamil ethnic group. For many Sinhalese, an engrained racism is clearly a major motivation. But how can one explain that a Tamil group, Eelam People’s Democratic Party, also takes part in this coalition of Sinhalese racists? The EPDP is a paramilitary group fighting against the LTTE alongside the government. It even has one member in parliament. EPDP also assassinates civilians, including BBC reporter Nimalarajan Mylvaganam.

The Cease Fire Agreement was a thorn in the side of the new ruling coalition. Although the government claimed that the Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission favored the Tiger guerrillas, its monitors had lodged 3006 violations committed by the LTTE and only 133 by the government, as of June 30, 2005. From May 2006 onward to its termination in January 2008, the Monitoring Mission was hampered by worsening hostilities, especially following a Sea Tiger boat attack on a navy convoy, May 11, 2006.

The European Union then placed the Tigers on its terrorist list, while appearing to be even-handed by calling upon the Sri Lankan government to end its “culture of impunity” and to “curb violence” in its areas of control.

Sweden, Finland and Denmark, as members of EU, also considered the Tigers to be terrorists, and the LTTE objected to their membership on the Monitoring Mission. They withdrew leaving only Norway and Iceland with 20 monitors. The reduced Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission disbanded in 2008. The path for a full war was clear.

1. John Pilger, “Distant Voices, Desperate Lives,” New Statesman, May 13, 2009.
2. See Article 29 of Soulbury Commission.
3. LSSP=Ceylon Equal Society Party comprised of Sinhalese Trotskyists; BLPI=Bolshevik-Leninist Party of India also Trotskyists; CIC=Ceylon Indian Congress, which soon changed its name to Ceylon Workers Congress, represented the Indian Tamils of the Estates Workers Trade Union; CPC, the Communist Party of Ceylon, with a pro-Moscow line; Labour was fashioned after Clement Attlee-led British Labour party. The Marxist parties later colluded with capitalist Sinhalese parties in opposing equality with Tamils. The CPC is now the Communist Party of Sri Lanka, which is part of the United People’s Freedom Alliance that includes the Sri Lanka Freedom Party-led government of Mahinda Rajapaksa.
4. “The Unspeakable Truth,” British Tamil Forum, 2008, p.8.
5. See part 1, “Justice for Sri Lanka Tamils.”
6. In 1976, Colombo was the summit site. In 1979, the Havana Declaration ensured “the national independence, sovereignty, territorial integrity and security of non-aligned countries” in their struggle against “imperialism, colonialism, neo-colonialism and racism.” In 2006, there were 118 member nations, representing 55% of the world’s population. Many of these nations have been at war with one another, and many have aligned with one or other of the previous super-powers.
7. My reading of Tamil history shows many discrepancies in dates and events. Different writings on the LTTE contend it was created at different times, either in 1972, 1975 or 1976.
8. Che Guevara, Socialism and man, Marcha, Uruguay, March 12, 1965.

That is thanks to the cash handouts generously given out to them by the Goldman Sachs run administration in Washington. The Wall Street regime continues to make monetary policy over the heads of the electorate, devaluing the dollar purposely (in the name of ‘carry trade’ transactions) while bringing the erstwhile American economic powerhouse to its knees. An ailing economy, whose financial system has imploded like the twin towers, is now headed for an Argentinean style default and/or Weimar like hyper inflation. Casino not entrepreneurial capitalism still rules over us but the ideology is morally bankrupt. So gentlemen place your bets “rien n’est va plus” as the croupiers would say on Wall Street.

1989-2009: From the dislocation of Soviet Empire to today’s American decline

What brought down the Soviet Union was economic morass and industrial paralysis. Along with colonial adventurism in places like Angola and Afghanistan which drained the national treasury. A bloated bureaucracy and an inefficient gargantuan military industrial complex which also bled the federation’s resources. America today is in a symmetrical situation to the Soviet Union’s predicament in the late 1980s. Hence, 2009 maybe to the U.S what 1989 was to the late and somewhat great U.S.S.R. The U.S is entangled in two endless war of occupation one in the Middle East the other in central Asia.

These costly conflicts at a time of great economic distress which recalls the deprivations of the great depression era, have led to historic budget deficits. During the Bush neo con years ( the neocons being a ruthless clique driving foreign policy in the White House equivalent to the KGB apparatchiks who were influencing the Kremlin’s actions abroad) the federal government’s spent like there was no tomorrow and big government grew to monstrous proportions. Huge increases in the military spending added to this horrid fiscal nightmare. Barack Obama, the man of the moment or the “Gorbi” of our times, like the last Soviet leader, has inherited a huge mess which requires Herculean, if not superhuman capacity to clean up. And like the last leader of the Soviet empire, Obama enjoys huge popularity aboard, while being practically loathed, ridiculed and derided at home (especially on the radio airwaves). And now after the recent electoral gains of the Republicans in some key states, he’s wounded (perhaps fatally) politically.

Obama: The post modern “sun king” and absolutism American style

Obama’s pseudo or simulated “Glasnost” or the apparent policy of maximal publicity, openness, and transparency in the activities of all government institutions has led ironically to many Americans placing an absolute blind trust in the man who embodies “change”. There is an abdication of reason in the name of “yes we can”. A kind of collective hypnosis hangs over the nation. Meanwhile, there are some “hard core” pockets of dissent, made up of tea party patriots, who are denouncing his “socialist style” health care project. For its part, the zombie like mass media appears to be either asleep at the wheel to all this, or is willingly (in an insidious and complicit manner) allowing a Soviet style personality cult to take shape-mold the minds of millions and enthrall the masses.

The Obama Factor

The president’s inverted version of “perestroika” (that is the restructuring or retooling of the economy) has been fine tuned to meet the need of the oligarchs and corporate barons who support him and prompt him behind the curtains. Obama and his czar –commissars (and his adoring minions of PR spin operatives) have deftly in a brilliant slight of hand in one swift jest, effectively expropriating the entire financial and industrial sectors in America by means of massive taxpayer funded “bail outs”. These ploys have turned the essence of capitalism upside down, by rewarding cronyism and criminal behavior to the point where “crime pays” very handsomely indeed, and enables billionaires, fraudsters and financiers to obtain great gain almost without almost any pain or punishment. These perverse policies are likely to fail. In the end, Gorbachev’s policies although ostensibly well meaning, actually hastened the demise of the Soviet state. This later led to its fragmentation and disintegration of the communist superpower and its Eastern Empire. America’s current plight may lead to a similar outcome.

[N]ow we are focusing on the mass movement… [N]ow we [can] really practice what we have been preaching. That means the fusion of the strategy of PPW [Protracted People’s War] and the tactic of general insurrection. What we have been doing since 2005 is the path of preparation for general insurrection through our work in the urban areas and our participation in the coalition government.

– Maoist leader Baburam Bhattarai, interview with the Britain-based World People’s Resistance Movement, October 26, 2009

Today (November 1) Nepal’s Maoists initiate, with torch rallies in Kathmandu, a mass movement to bring down the regime. This is the regime that succeeded the one their chair Prachanda headed as prime minister from August 2008 to May 2009–a compromise arrangement, always understood to be temporary and transitional, that collapsed when the Nepali Army refused to take orders from the Maoist prime minister.

Prime Minister Prachanda, noting the obvious (that the Maoists’ suspension of the People’s War and participation in parliamentary processes had not really given them state power), might have then ordered the resumption of the war. Instead, the first elected Maoist national leader made a surprising (I think even shrewdly Gandhian) move of resigning his post, while his party, the Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) redoubled its efforts to organize support among the urban masses of Kathmandu.

The Maoists claimed that acquiring top posts in the government following the toppling of the monarchy in 2008 was less important than two other tasks: achieving goals in the composition of the new constitution and building that mass urban movement. The “Prachanda Path” has always been about combining Mao’s theory of People’s War (surrounding the cities from the countryside) with Lenin’s model of the urban uprising—the October Revolution.

As of November 2005 the Maoists controlled about 80% of the country. They surrounded Kathmandu Valley but felt incapable of taking it militarily. Meanwhile King Gyanendra, deeply unpopular, had made himself even more widely despised by dissolving the parliament and arresting mainstream political leaders. The Maoists cut a deal with the legal political parties to coordinate actions to bring down the king. They agreed to eventually lay down their arms under UN supervision, in return for the other parties’ acceptance of new elections for a Constituent Assembly to author a new constitution. In the April 2008 elections, Maoists won 220 of 575 seats in the assembly, double the figure of their nearest competitors. International observers such as Jimmy Carter verified that the elections were free and fair. There is no question the Maoists have a mass base.

And there’s no question there are real limits to what you can accomplish following the normal rules. Hence “the tactic of general insurrection.”

The U.S. State Department has always seen the Maoists as “terrorists” and even keeps them on the terror list now. That’s not because they’ve used violence to overthrow a social order that inflicts misery in subtle and not so subtle, violent and not so violent ways every day as the Nepali state presides or looks on indifferently. “Terrorism” in the State Department’s lexicon refers to anything that terrifies State Department officials, and the prospect of the red flag flying over Mt. Everest is one of their nightmares. But the fact is they do believe in the violent overthrow of oppressive institutions, they do believe the revolution isn’t by any means over yet, and they do have a program for seizure of power through what Bhattarai terms “the tactic of general insurrection.”

Knowing this, U.S. Charge d’Affaires in Kathmandu Jeffrey Moon called on Prachanda at his home in the city Oct. 28 to express U.S. concern about these upcoming protests. He was apparently told that the Maoists remain committed to the peace process and the drafting of a new constitution. But suspension of the guerrilla war is one thing. General insurrection centered in the city is another. And the People’s War and the urban insurrection may connect at some point in the near future, just as the government of neighboring India undertakes an assault on the Maoist movement that has come to control vast regions of that county.

I have no idea what the outcome may be. But history is clearly not over, Communist movements are clearly not dead, and the ideal of classless society has clearly not vanished in societies where class oppression is most intense.

“A nation is a group of people united by a common mistake regarding its origin and a collective hostility towards its neighbours.”¹

As simple or even simplistic as it may sound, the quote above eloquently summarises the figment of reality entangled with modern Jewish nationalism and especially within the concept of Jewish identity. It obviously points the finger at the collective mistake Jews tend to make whenever referring to their ‘illusionary collective past’ and ‘collective origin’. Yet, in the same breath, Deutsch’s reading of nationalism throws light upon the hostility that is unfortunately coupled with almost every Jewish group towards its surrounding reality, whether it is human or takes the shape of land. While the brutality of the Israelis towards the Palestinians has already become rather common knowledge, the rough treatment Israelis reserve for their ‘promised soil’ and landscape is just starting to reveal itself. The ecological disaster the Israelis are going to leave behind them will be the cause of suffering for many generations to come. Leave aside the megalomaniac wall that shreds the Holy land into enclaves of deprivation and starvation, Israel has managed to pollute its main rivers and streams with nuclear and chemical waste.

The Invention of the Jewish People is a very serious study written by Professor Shlomo Sand, an Israeli historian. It is the most serious study of Jewish nationalism and by far, the most courageous elaboration on the Jewish historical narrative.

In his book, Sand manages to prove beyond any reasonable doubt that the Jewish people never existed as a ‘nation-race’, they never shared a common origin. Instead they are a colourful mix of groups that at various stages in history adopted the Jewish religion.

In case you follow Sand’s line of thinking and happen to ask yourself, ‘when was the Jewish People invented?’ Sand’s answer is rather simple. “At a certain stage in the 19th century, intellectuals of Jewish origin in Germany, influenced by the folk character of German nationalism, took upon themselves the task of inventing a people ‘retrospectively,’ out of a thirst to create a modern Jewish people.”

Accordingly, the ‘Jewish people’ is a ‘made up’ notion consisting of a fictional and imaginary past with very little to back it up forensically, historically or textually. Furthermore, Sand — who elaborated on early sources of antiquity — comes to the conclusion that Jewish exile is also a myth, and that the present-day Palestinians are far more likely to be the descendants of the ancient Semitic people in Judea/Canaan than the current predominantly Khazarian-origin Ashkenazi crowd to which he himself admittedly belongs.

Astonishingly enough, in spite of the fact that Sand manages to dismantle the notion of ‘Jewish people,’ crush the notion of ‘Jewish collective past,’ and ridicule the Jewish chauvinist national impetus, his book is a best seller in Israel. This fact alone may suggest that those who call themselves ‘people of the book’ are now starting to learn about the misleading and devastating philosophies and ideologies that made them into what Khalid Amayreh and many others regard as the “Nazis of our time.”

Hitler Won After All

Rather often when asking a ‘secular’ ‘cosmopolitan’ Jew what it is that makes him into a Jew, a shallow overwhelmingly chewed answer would be thrown back at you: “It is Hitler who made me into a Jew.” Though the ‘cosmopolitan’ Jew, being an internationalist, would dismiss other people’s national inclinations, he insists upon maintaining his own right to ‘self determination’. However, it is not really he himself who stands at the core of this unique demand for national orientation, it is actually the devil, master-monster anti-Semite, namely Hitler. Apparently, the cosmopolitan Jew celebrates his nationalist entitlement as long as Hitler is there to be blamed.

As far as the secular cosmopolitan Jew is concerned, Hitler won after all. Sand manages to enhance this paradox. Insightfully he suggests that “while in the 19th century referring to Jews as an ‘alien racial identity’ would mark one as an anti-Semite, in the Jewish State this very philosophy is embedded mentally and intellectually.”² In Israel Jews celebrate their differentiation and unique conditions. Furthermore, says Sand, “There were times in Europe when one would be labelled as an anti-Semite for claiming that all Jews belong to a nation of an alien type. Nowadays, claiming that Jews have never been and still aren’t people or a nation, would tag one as a Jew hater.”²

It is indeed pretty puzzling that the only people who managed to maintain and sustain a racially orientated, expansionist and genocidal national identity that is not at all different from Nazi ethnic ideology are the Jews who were, amongst others, the leading targeted victims of the Nazi ideology and practice.

Nationalism In General and Jewish Nationalism In Particular

Louis-Ferdinand Celine mentioned that in the time of the Middle Ages in the moments between major wars, knights would charge a very high price for their readiness to die in the name of their kingdoms; in the 20th century youngsters have rushed to die en mass without demanding a thing in return. In order to understand this mass consciousness shift, we need an eloquent methodical model that would allow us to understand what nationalism is all about.

Like Karl Deutsch, Sand regards nationality as a phantasmic narrative. It is an established fact that anthropological and historical studies of the origins of different so-called ‘people’ and ‘nations’ lead towards the embarrassing crumbling of every ethnicity and ethnic identity. Hence, it is rather interesting to find out that Jews tend to take their own ethnic myth very seriously. The explanation may be simple, as Benjamin Beit Halachmi spotted years ago. Zionism was there to transform the Bible from a spiritual text into a ‘land registry.’ For that matter, the truth of the Bible or any other element of Jewish historical narrative has very little relevance as long as it doesn’t interfere with the Jewish national political cause or practice.

One could also surmise that the lack of clear ethnic origin doesn’t stop people from feeling an ethnic or national belonging. The fact that Jews are far from being what one can label as a People and that the Bible has very little historical truth in it, doesn’t really stop generations of Israelis and Jews from identifying themselves with King David or Terminator Samson. Evidently, the lack of an unambiguous ethnic origin doesn’t stop people from seeing themselves as part of a people. Similarly, it wouldn’t stop the nationalist Jew from feeling that he belongs to some greater abstract collective.

In the 1970’s, Shlomo Artzi, then a young Israeli singer who was bound to become Israel’s all-time greatest rock star, released a song that had become a smash hit in a matter of hours. Here are the first few lines:

   All of a sudden
   A man wakes up
   In the morning
   He feels he is people
   And he starts to walk
   And to everyone he comes across
   He says shalom

To a certain extent Artzi innocently expresses in his lyrics the suddenness and almost contingency involved in the transformation of the Jews into people. However, almost within the same breath, Artzi contributes towards the illusionist national myth of the peace-seeking nation. Artzi should have known by then that Jewish nationalism was a colonialist act at the expense of the indigenous Palestinian people.

Seemingly, nationalism, national belonging and Jewish nationalism in particular create a major intellectual task. Interestingly enough, the first to deal theoretically and methodically with issues having to do with nationalism were Marxist ideologists. Though Marx himself failed to address the issue adequately, early 20th century uprising of nationalist demands in eastern and central Europe caught Lenin and Stalin unprepared.

“Marxists’ contribution to the study of nationalism can be seen as the focus on the deep correlation between the rise of free economy and the evolvement of the national state.”³ In fact, Stalin was there to summarise the Marxist take on the subject. “The nation,” says Stalin, “is a solid collaboration between beings that was created historically and formed following four significant phenomena: the sharing of tongue, the sharing of territory, the sharing of economy and the sharing of psychic significance…”³

As one would expect, the Marxist materialist attempt to understand nationalism is lacking an adequate historical overview. Instead it would be reliant upon a class struggle. For some obvious reasons such a vision was popular amongst those who believe in ‘socialism of one nation’ amongst them we can consider the proponents of a leftist branch of Zionism.

For Sand, nationalism evolved due to the “ rapture created by modernity which split people from their immediate past”.⁴ The mobility created by urbanisation and industrialisation crushed the social hierarchic system as well as the continuum between past, present and future. Sand points out that before industrialisation, the feudal peasant didn’t necessarily feel the need for an historical narrative of empires and kingdoms. The feudal subject didn’t need an extensive abstract historical narrative of large collectives that had very little relevance to the immediate concrete existential need. “Without a perception of social progression, they did well with an imaginary religious tale that contained a mosaic of memory that lacked a real dimension of a forward moving time. The ‘end’ was the beginning and eternity bridged between life and death.”⁴

In the modern secular and urban world, ‘time’ had become the main life vessel which illustrated an imaginary symbolic meaning. Collective historical time had become the elementary ingredient of the personal and the intimate. The collective narrative shapes the personal meaning and what seems to be the ‘real.’ As much as some banal minds still insist that the ‘personal is political,’ it would be far more intelligible to argue that in practice, it is actually the other way around. Within the post-modern condition, the political is personal and the subject is spoken rather than speaking itself. Authenticity, for the matter, is a myth that reproduces itself in the form of symbolic identifier.

Sand’s reading of nationalism as a product of industrialisation, urbanisation and secularism, makes a lot of sense when bearing in mind Uri Slezkin’s suggestion that Jews are the ‘apostles of modernity,’ secularism and urbanisation. If Jews happened to find themselves at the hub of urbanisation and secularisation, it shouldn’t then take us by surprise that the Zionists were rather creative as much as others in inventing their own phantasmic collective imaginary tale. However, while insisting on their right to be ‘like other people’ Zionists have managed to transform their imagined collective past into a global, expansionist, merciless agenda as well as the biggest threat to world peace.

There Is No Jewish History

It is an established fact that not a single Jewish history text had been written between the 1st century and early 19th century. The fact that Judaism is based on a religious historical myth may have something to do with it. An adequate scrutiny of the Jewish past was never a primary concern within the Rabbinical tradition. One of the reasons is probably the lack of a need of such a methodical effort. For the Jew who lived during ancient times and the Middle Ages, there was enough in the Bible to answer most relevant questions having to do with day-to-day life, Jewish meaning and fate. As Shlomo Sand puts it, “a secular chronological time was foreign to the ‘Diaspora time’ that was shaped by the anticipation for the coming of the Messiah.”

However, in the light of German secularisation, urbanisation, and emancipation, and due to the decreasing authority of the Rabbinical leaders, an emerging need of an alternative cause rose amongst the awakening Jewish intellectuals. The emancipated Jew wondered who he was, where he come from. He also started to speculate what his role might be within the rapidly opening European society.

In 1820, the German Jewish historian Isaak Markus Jost (1793-1860) published the first serious historical work on Jews, namely The History of the Israelites. Jost avoided the Biblical time, he preferred to start his journey with the Judea Kingdom, he also compiled an historical narrative of different Jewish communities around the world. Jost realised that the Jews of his time did not form an ethnic continuum. He grasped that Israelites from place to place were rather different. Hence, he thought there was nothing in the world that should stop Jews from total assimilation. Jost believed that within the spirit of enlightenment, both the Germans and the Jews would turn their back to the oppressive religious institution and would form a healthy nation based on a growing geographically orientated sense of belonging.

Though Jost was aware of the evolvement of European nationalism, his Jewish followers were rather unhappy with his liberal optimistic reading of the Jewish future. “From historian Heinrich Graetz on, Jewish historians began to draw the history of Judaism as the history of a nation that had been a ‘kingdom’, expelled into ‘exile’, became a wandering people and ultimately turned around and went back to its birthplace.”

For the late Moses Hess, it was a racial struggle rather than a class struggle that would define the shape of Europe. Accordingly, suggests Hess, Jews better return and reflect on their cultural heritage and ethnic origin. For Hess, the conflict between Jews and Gentiles was the product of racial differentiation, hence, unavoidable.

The ideological path from Hess’s pseudo scientific racist orientation to Zionist historicism is rather obvious. If Jews are indeed an alien racial entity (as Hess, Jabotinsky and others believed), they better look for their natural homeland, and this homeland is no other than Eretz Yizrael. Cleary, Hess’s assumption regarding a racial continuum wasn’t scientifically approved. In order to maintain the emerging phantasmic narrative, an orchestrated denial mechanism had to be erected just to make sure that some embarrassing facts wouldn’t interfere with the emerging national creation.

Sand suggests that the denial mechanism was rather orchestrated and very well thought out. The Hebrew University decision in the 1930’s to split Jewish History and General History into two distinct departments was far more than just a matter of convenience. The logos behind the split is a glimpse into Jewish self-realisation. In the eyes of Jewish academics, the Jewish condition and Jewish psyche were unique and should be studied separately. Apparently, even within Jewish academia, a supreme status is reserved for the Jews, their history and their self-perception. As Sand insightfully unveils, within the Jewish Studies departments the researcher is scattering between the mythological and the scientific while the myth maintains its primacy. Yet, it often gets into a stalling dilemma by the ‘small devious facts.’

The New Israelite, the Bible, and Archaeology

In Palestine, the new Jews and later the Israelis were determined to recruit the Old Testament and to transform it into the amalgamate code of the future Jew. The ‘nationalisation’ of the Bible was there to plant in young Jews the idea that they are the direct followers of their great ancient ancestors. Bearing in mind the fact that nationalisation was largely a secular movement, the Bible was stripped of its spiritual and religious meaning. Instead, it was viewed as an historical text describing a real chain of events in the past. The Jews who had now managed to kill their God learned to believe in themselves. Massada, Samson and Bar Kochva became suicidal master narratives. In the light of their heroic ancestors, Jews learned to love themselves as much as they hate others, except that this time they possessed the military might to inflict real pain on their neighbours. More concerning was the fact that instead of a supernatural entity — namely God — who command them to invade the land and execute a genocide and to rob their ‘promised land’ of its indigenous inhabitants, within their national revival project it was them as themselves, Herzl, Jabotinsky, Weitzman, Ben Gurion, Sharon, Peres, Barak who decided to expel, destroy and kill. Instead of God, it was then the Jews killing in the name of Jewish people. They did it while Jewish symbols decorate their planes and tanks. They followed commands that where given in the newly restored language of their ancestors.

Surprisingly enough, Sand who is no doubt a striking scholar, fails to mention that the Zionist hijacking of the Bible was in fact a desperate Jewish answer to German Early Romanticism. However, as much as German philosophers, poets, architects and artists were ideologically and aesthetically excited about pre-Socratic Greece, they knew very well that they were not exactly Hellenism’s sons and daughters. The nationalist Jew took it one step further, he bound oneself into a phantasmic blood chain with his mythical ancestors, not before long he restored their ancient language. Rather than a sacred tongue, Hebrew had become a spoken language. German Early Romanticist never went that far.

German intellectuals during the 19th century were also fully aware of the distinction between Athens and Jerusalem. For them, Athens stood for universal, the epic chapter of humanity and humanism. Jerusalem was, on the contrary, the grand chapter of tribal barbarism. Jerusalem was a representation of the banal, non-universal, monotheistic merciless God, the one who kills the elder and the infant. The Germanic Early Romantic era left us with Hegel, Nietzsche, Fichte and Heidegger and a just a few Jewish self-haters, leading amongst them, Otto Weininger. The Jerusalemite left us with not a single master ideological thinker. Some German Jewish second-rate scholars tried to preach Jerusalem in the Germanic exedra, amongst them were Herman Cohen, Franz Rosenzveig and Ernst Bloch. They obviously failed to notice that it was the traces of Jerusalem in Christianity, which German Early Romanticists despised.

In their effort to resurrect ‘Jerusalem,’ archaeology was recruited to provide the Zionist epos with its necessary ‘scientific’ ground. Archaeology was there to unify the Biblical time with the moment of revival. Probably the most astonishing moment of this bizarre trend was the 1982 ‘military burial ceremony’ of the bones of Shimon Bar Kochva, a Jew rebel who died 2000 years earlier. Executed by the chief military Rabbi, a televised military burial was given to some sporadic bones found in a cave near the Dead Sea. In practice suspected remains of a 1st century Jew rebel was treated as an IDF casualty. Clearly, archaeology had a national role, it was recruited to cement the past and the present while leaving the Galut out.

Astonishingly enough, it didn’t take long before things turned the other way around. As archaeological research become more and more independent of the Zionist dogma, the embarrassing truth filtered out. It would be impossible to ground the truthfulness of the Biblical tale on forensic facts. If anything, archaeology refutes the historicity of the Biblical plot. Excavation revealed the embarrassing fact. The Bible is a collection of innovative fictitious literature.

As Sand points out, the Early Biblical story is soaked with Philistines, Aramaic and camels. Embarrassingly enough, as far as excavations are there to enlighten us, Philistine didn’t appear in the region before the 12th century BC, the Aramaic appears a century later and camels didn’t show their cheerful faces before the 8th century. These scientific facts lead Zionist researchers into some severe confusion. However, for non-Jewish scholars such as Thomas Thompson, it was rather clear that the Biblical is a “late collection of innovative literature written by a gifted theologian.”⁵ The Bible appears to be an ideological text that was there to serve a social and political cause.

Embarrassingly enough, not much was found in Sinai to prove the story of the legendary Egyptian Exodus, seemingly 3 million Hebraic men, women and children were marching in the desert for 40 years without leaving a thing behind. Not even a single matzo ball, very non-Jewish one may say.

The story of the Biblical resettlement and the genocide of the Canaanite which the contemporary Israelite imitates to such success is another myth. Jericho, the guarded city that was flattened to the sounds of horns and almighty supernatural intervention was just a tiny village during the 13th century BC.

As much as Israel regards itself as the resurrection of the monumental Kingdom of David and Salomon, excavation that took place in the Old City of Jerusalem in the 1970’s revealed that David’s kingdom was no more than a tiny tribal setting. Evidence that was referred by Yigal Yadin to King Solomon had been refuted later by forensic tests made with Carbon 14. The discomforting fact has been scientifically established. The Bible is a fictional tale, and not much there can ground any glorifying existence of Hebraic people in Palestine at any stage.

Who invented the Jews?

Quite early on in his text, Sand raises the crucial and probably the most relevant questions. Who are the Jews? Where did they come from? How is it that in different historical periods they appear in some very different and remote places?

Though most contemporary Jews are utterly convinced that their ancestors are the Biblical Israelites who happened to be exiled brutally by the Romans, truth must be said. Contemporary Jews have nothing to do with ancient Israelites, who have never been sent to exile because such an expulsion has never taken place. The Roman Exile is just another Jewish myth.

“I started looking in research studies about the exile from the land” says Sand in a Haaretz interview, “but to my astonishment I discovered that it has no literature. The reason is that no one exiled the people of the country. The Romans did not exile peoples and they could not have done so even if they had wanted to. They did not have trains and trucks to deport entire populations. That kind of logistics did not exist until the 20th century. From this, in effect, the whole book was born: in the realization that Judaic society was not dispersed and was not exiled.”

Indeed, in the light of Sand’s simple insight, the idea of Jewish exile is amusing. The thought of Roman Imperial navy was working 24/7 schlepping Moishe’le and Yanka’le to Cordova and Toledo may help Jews to feel important as well as schleppable, but common sense would suggest that the Roman armada had far more important things to do.

However, far more interesting is the logical outcome: If the people of Israel were not expelled, then the real descendants of the inhabitants of the Kingdom of Judah must be the Palestinians.

“No population remains pure over a period of thousands of years” says Sand. “But the chances that the Palestinians are descendants of the ancient Judaic people are much greater than the chances that you or I are its descendents. The first Zionists, up until the Arab Revolt [1936-9], knew that there had been no exiling, and that the Palestinians were descended from the inhabitants of the land. They knew that farmers don’t leave until they are expelled. Even Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, the second president of the State of Israel, wrote in 1929 that, ‘the vast majority of the peasant farmers do not have their origins in the Arab conquerors, but rather, before then, in the Jewish farmers who were numerous and a majority in the building of the land.’”

In his book Sand takes it further and suggests that until the First Arab Uprising (1929) the so-called leftist Zionist leaders tended to believe that the Palestinian peasants who are actually ‘Jews by origin’ would assimilate within the emerging Hebraic culture and would eventually join the Zionist movement. Ber Borochov believed that “a falach (Palestinian Peasant), dresses as a Jew, and behaves as a working class Jew, won’t be at all different from the Jew”. This very idea reappeared in Ben Gurion’s and Ben-Zvi’s text in 1918. Both Zionist leaders realised that Palestinian culture was soaked with Biblical traces, linguistically, as well as geographically (names of villages, towns, rivers and mountains). Both Ben Gurion and Ben-Zvi regarded, at least at that early stage, the indigenous Palestinians as ethnic relatives who were holding close to the land and potential brothers. They as well regarded Islam as a friendly ‘democratic religion’. Clearly, after 1936 both Ben-Zvi and Ben Gurion toned down their ‘multicultural’ enthusiasm. As far as Ben Gurion is concerned, ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians seemed to be far more appealing.

One may wonder, if the Palestinians are the real Jews, who are those who insist upon calling themselves Jews?

Sand’s answer is rather simple, yet it makes a lot of sense. “The people did not spread, but the Jewish religion spread. Judaism was a converting religion. Contrary to popular opinion, in early Judaism there was a great thirst to convert others.”

Clearly, monotheist religions, being less tolerant than polytheist ones have within them an expanding impetus. Judaic expansionism in its early days was not just similar to Christianity but it was Judaic expansionism that planted the ‘spreading out’ seeds in early Christian thought and practice.

“The Hasmoneans,” says Sand, “were the first to begin to produce large numbers of Jews through mass conversion, under the influence of Hellenism. It was this tradition of conversions that prepared the ground for the subsequent, widespread dissemination of Christianity. After the victory of Christianity in the 4th century, the momentum of conversion was stopped in the Christian world, and there was a steep drop in the number of Jews. Presumably many of the Jews who appeared around the Mediterranean became Christians. But then Judaism started to permeate other regions — pagan regions, for example, such as Yemen and North Africa. Had Judaism not continued to advance at that stage and had it not continued to convert people in the pagan world, we would have remained a completely marginal religion, if we survived at all.”

The Jews of Spain, whom we believed to be blood related to the Early Israelites seem to be converted Berbers. “I asked myself,” says Sand, “how such large Jewish communities appeared in Spain. And then I saw that Tariq ibn Ziyad, the supreme commander of the Muslims who conquered Spain, was a Berber, and most of his soldiers were Berbers. Dahia al-Kahina’s Jewish Berber Kingdom had been defeated only 15 years earlier. And the truth is there are a number of Christian sources that say many of the conquerors of Spain were Jewish converts. The deep-rooted source of the large Jewish community in Spain was those Berber soldiers who converted to Judaism.”

As one would expect, Sand approves the largely accepted assumption that the Judaicised Khazars constituted the main origins of the Jewish communities in Eastern Europe, which he calls the Yiddish Nation. When asked how come they happen to speak Yiddish, which is largely regarded as a German medieval dialect, he answers, “the Jews were a class of people dependent on the German bourgeoisie in the east, and thus they adopted German words.”

In his book Sand manages to produce a detailed account of the Khazarian saga in Jewish history. He explains what lead the Khazarian kingdom towards conversion. Bearing in mind that Jewish nationalism is, for the most part, lead by a Khazarian elite, we may have to expand our intimate knowledge of this very unique yet influential political group. The translation of Sand’s work into foreign languages is an immediate must.

What Next?

Professor Sand leaves us with the inevitable conclusion. Contemporary Jews do not have a common origin and their Semitic origin is a myth. Jews have no origin in Palestine whatsoever and therefore, their act of so-called ‘return’ to their ‘promised land’ must be realised as an invasion executed by a tribal-ideological clan.

However, though Jews do not constitute any racial continuum, they for some reason happen to be racially orientated. As we may notice, many Jews still see mixed marriage as the ultimate threat. Furthermore, in spite of modernisation and secularisation, the vast majority of those who identify as secular Jews still succumb to blood ritual (circumcision) a unique religious procedure which involves no less than blood sucking by a Mohel.

As far as Sand is concerned, Israel should become “a state of its citizens.” Like Sand, I myself believe in the same futuristic utopian vision. However, unlike Sand, I do grasp that the Jewish state and its supportive lobbies must be ideologically defeated. Brotherhood and reconciliation are foreign to Jewish tribal worldview and have no room within the concept of Jewish national revival. As dramatic as it may sound, a process of de-judaification must take place before Israelis can adopt any universal modern notion of civil life.

Sand is no doubt a major intellectual, probably the most advanced leftist Israeli thinker. He represents the highest form of thought a secular Israeli can achieve before flipping over or even defecting to the Palestinian side (something that happened to just a few, me included). Haaretz interviewer Ofri Ilani said about Sand that unlike other ‘new historians’ who have tried to undermine the assumptions of Zionist historiography, “Sand does not content himself with going back to 1948 or to the beginnings of Zionism, but rather goes back thousands of years.” This is indeed the case, unlike the ‘new historians’ who ‘unveil’ a truth that is known to every Palestinian toddler; i.e., the truth of being ethnically cleansed; Sand erects a body of work and thought that is aiming at the understanding of the meaning of Jewish nationalism and Jewish identity. This is indeed the true essence of scholarship. Rather than collecting some sporadic historical fragments, Sand searches for the meaning of history. Rather than a ‘new historian’ who searches for a new fragment, he is a real historian motivated by a humanist task. Most crucially, unlike some of the Jewish historians who happen to contribute to the so-called left discourse, Sand’s credibility and success is grounded on his argument rather than his family background. He avoids peppering his argument with his holocaust survivor relatives. Reading Sand’s ferocious argument, one may have to admit that Zionism in all its faults has managed to erect within itself a proud and autonomous dissident discourse that is far more eloquent and brutal than the entire anti-Zionist movement around the world.

If Sand is correct, and I myself am convinced by the strength of his argument, then Jews are not a race but rather a collective of very many people who are largely hijacked by a late phantasmic national movement. If Jews are not a race, do not form a racial continuum and have nothing to do with Semitism, then ‘anti-Semitism’ is, categorically, an empty signifier. It obviously refers to a signifier that doesn’t exist. In other words, our criticism of Jewish nationalism, Jewish lobbying and Jewish power can only be realised as a legitimate critique of ideology and practice.

Once again I may say it, we are not and never been against Jews (the people) nor we are against Judaism (the religion). Yet, we are against a collective philosophy with some clear global interests. Some would like to call it Zionism but I prefer not to. Zionism is a vague signifier that is far too narrow to capture the complexity of Jewish nationalism, its brutality, ideology and practice. Jewish nationalism is a spirit and a spirit doesn’t have clear boundaries. In fact, none of us know exactly where Jewishness stops and where Zionism starts as much as we do not know where Israeli interests stop and where the Neocon’s interests start.

As far as the Palestinian cause is concerned, the message is rather devastating. Our Palestinian brothers and sisters are at the forefront of a struggle against a very devastating philosophy. Yet, it is clearly not just the Israelis whom they fight with rather a fierce pragmatic philosophy that initiates global conflicts on some gigantic scale. It is a tribal practice that seeks influence within corridors of power and super powers in particular. The American Jewish Committee is pushing for a war against Iran. Just to be on the safe side David Abrahams, a ‘Labour Friend of Israel’ donates money to the Labour Party by proxy. More or less at the same time two million Iraqis die in an illegal war designed by one called Wolfowitz. While all the above is taking place, millions of Palestinians are starved in concentration camps and Gaza is on the brink of a humanitarian crisis. As it all happens, ‘anti-Zionist’ Jews and Jews in the left (Chomsky included) insist upon dismantling the eloquent criticism of AIPAC, Jewish lobbying and Jewish power posed by Mearsheimer and Walt.

Is it just Israel? Is it really Zionism? Or shall we admit that it is something far greater than we are entitled even to contemplate within the intellectual boundaries we imposed upon ourselves? As things stand, we lack the intellectual courage to confront the Jewish national project and its many messengers around the world. However, since it is all a matter of consciousness-shift, things are going to change soon. In fact, this very text is there to prove that they are changing already.

To stand by the Palestinians is to save the world, but in order to do so we have to be courageous enough to stand up and admit that it is not merely a political battle. It is not just Israel, its army or its leadership, it isn’t even Dershowitz, Foxman, and their silencing leagues. It is actually a war against a cancerous spirit that hijacked the West and, at least momentarily, diverted it from its humanist inclination and Athenian aspirations. To fight a spirit is far more difficult than fighting people, just because one may have to first fight its traces within oneself. If we want to fight Jerusalem, we may have to first confront Jerusalem within. We may have to stand in front of the mirror, look around us. We may have to trace for empathy in ourselves in case there is anything left.

1. When And How The Jewish People Was Invented Shlomo Sand, Resling 2008, p 11.
2. Sand, p 31.
3. p 42.
4. p 62.
5. p 117.

The Home Ministry has been planning a major offensive, due to start in November 2009, against Naxals, particularly in two Indian states – Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand. A plan to deploy more than 70,000 paramilitary personnel has been chalked out. In order to combat Naxals, Chidambaram “favored the Indian Air Force firing on Naxals.” India has also “sought input from American security officials on how to best root out the leftist rebels.”¹ In September 2009 Chidambaram paid a four day visit to US that focused on India-US anti-terror cooperation, assistance in technology, assessment of security situation in South Asia and studying counter-terrorism institutions and structures.

Probably, US with its experience in “war on terror” after 9/11 is considered valuable, particularly its use of corporate media to create momentum for the occupation of Iraq by programming the public mind to go along with the state agenda, and highlight of the “evil of the other” not only to justify its genocidal violence, but also to conceal “real intentions” behind the occupation of Iraq.

Taking the fight against Naxals to a new level, the Home Ministry of India has sought to actively involve the mainstream media directly by issuing advertisements depicting “cold-blooded killings” of innocent citizens by Naxals. “Naxals are nothing but coldblooded murderers” the advertisement screamed across the corporate media. The visual showed a series of men, women and children brutally killed by Naxals. Upping the ante, media has been screaming all along that Naxals have been waging “a guerrilla war on the Indian state.”

The combined voice of the government and corporate media has heightened the threat posed by Naxals in order to rally public support with gripping fear about their own existence. It has drowned dissenting voices, and been trying to program the public mind to go along with the state agenda against Naxals. The corporate media is playing as the chief instrument of state propaganda. It is creating the momentum for the onslaught on Naxals. Josef Goebbels had this dictum: “If you say something often enough, the people will believe it.”²) Herman Goering, a Nazi, said, “People can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders…All you have to do is tell them they’re being attacked and denounce the pacifists for a lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.”³

Naxals’ portrayal as enemies of the state and democracy breaks social link between these enemies and the society. Their status as enemies of the society would not only unite people against them, but also legitimize the “good” violence that exterminates them.

However, the collective violence of “all against one” requires concealment of entire truth. Any act or even any thought of making a victim of another casts a veil over truth. The power of the “scapegoat mechanism” lies in its deception and concealment.

Who Are Naxals?

Naxals belong to varied milieu – disempowered Dalits, destitute Tribals, middle class intellectuals, and privileged rich. They do not believe in parliamentary democracy, as they see power being still concentrated in the hands of the rich, upper class. So the objective of their four decade old struggle is to liberate disempowered and destitute masses from the exploitative and oppressive political system through armed struggle. In their long struggle, Naxals have used brutal tactics to further their cause.⁴ In 2008 there were 1591 Naxal-related violent incidents in which 721 were killed. By August 2009, in 1405 incidents 580 persons have been killed. Recently, on October 8, 2009 they are alleged to have killed seventeen police men in Maharashtra.

Naxals’ struggle has, naturally, drawn mixed reactions from the government and elites, and the marginalized Indian masses. Because of their armed struggle and brutal tactics, they are considered to be security threat to the sovereignty of the state. On the other hand, Naxals enjoy wide support among the marginalized people, who have been ignored by the successive governments for the past sixty years. The October 2008 report of an expert committee, appointed by the Planning Commission, acknowledged that “the main support for the Naxalite movement comes from dalits and adivasi tribals.”⁵ The report identifies “structural violence implicit in our social and economic system” as the main reason for Naxalite violence. Dalits and Tribals comprise one fourth of India’s population.

Condition of the Tribals

In the huge region of mineral rich forest in eastern and central India spreading from West Bengal through the states of Jharkhand, Orissa and Chhattisgarh live indigenous people. These Tribals are the poorest of the poor in India. The mainstream media and the political pundits have not acknowledged that the cause of these people is not served in the largest democracy. The Tribals have no schools, no hospitals, no water, none of the amenities the state is supposed to provide. Successive governments have failed to address the basic needs of people in the poverty-stricken, but mineral rich, region. These places are epitome of neglect, deprivation and government corruption.

The Tribals are ruthlessly exploited by local landlords, traders, officials, mafia and contractors. Local police allegedly supports local mafia, landlords and traders. On January 8, 2009 seventeen Tribals were killed by the police in a fake “encounter”, according to Ramesh Varlyani, Chhattisgarh state Congress general secretary. In its scathing 118 page report “Broken System: Dysfunction, Abuse and Impunity in the Indian Police”, the Human Rights Watch pointed out “a range of human rights violations committed by police, including arbitrary arrest and detention, torture and extrajudicial killings.” It notes, “Several police officers admitted to Human Rights Watch that they routinely committed abuses. One officer said that he had been ordered to commit an “encounter killing,” as the practice of taking into custody and extra-judicially executing an individual commonly known. “I am looking for my target,” the officer said. “I will eliminate him…I fear being put in jail, but if I don’t do it, I’ll lose my position.””

The report also documents “the particular vulnerability to police abuse of traditionally marginalized groups in India. They include the poor, women, Dalits (so-called “untouchables”) and religious and sexual minorities. Police often fail to investigate crimes against them because of discrimination, the victims’ inability to pay bribes, or their lack of social status or political connections. Members of these groups are also more vulnerable to arbitrary arrest and torture, especially meted out by police as punishment for alleged crimes.”

Thus, the state has not only ignored to address basic concerns of tribal people, but also tried to destroy the voice and language of their victims by aligning with the exploiters. E.A.S. Sarma, former Commissioner of Tribal Welfare and former secretary, Expenditure and Economic Affairs, says, “Left extremism is a secondary issue. How many Tribals even know there is a government? Their only experience of the State is the police, contractors, and real estate goons. Besides, the Fifth Schedule of the Constitution grants Tribals complete rights over their traditional land and forests and prohibits private companies from mining on their land. This constitutional schedule was upheld by the Samatha judgement of the Supreme Court (1997). If successive governments lived by the spirit of the Constitution and this judgment, tribal discontent would automatically recede.”⁵

By violating their human dignity, value and rights, the state has committed violence against the Tribals. The tribal dissent, as Shoma Chaudhury says, “is a dissent out of desperation for human dignity, value and rights.”⁵ Among these poor, disempowered, and oppressed and exploited Tribals Naxals have wide support due to latter’s struggle for their cause. Prime minister Manmohan Singh acknowledged that “Left wing extremism requires a nuanced strategy, a holistic approach – it cannot be treated simply as a law and order problem. Despite its sanguinary nature, the movement manages to retain the support of a section of the tribal communities and the poorest of the poor in many affected areas. It has influence among certain sections of civil society, the intelligentsia and the youth.”

Criminalization of Politics

What has been missing in the dominant narrative of the government and corporate media is the necessity, in the light of Mumbai terrorist attacks, to have leaders with high level of personal integrity to provide effective leadership to India. It is well known that corruption and criminalization of politics in India are the two biggest hurdles for inclusive development. Shashi Tharoor in his book India: From Midnight to the Millennium sees “bureaucratic corruption and criminalization of politics as two of the most widespread problems facing India.” Bureaucratic corruption is largely a result of “the permit-license-quota Raj”. Tharoor cites as “the most dangerous phenomenon of independent India’s political life, the criminalization of politics, for many a lawbreaker has found it useful to become a lawmaker.”⁶

The controversy in 2004 over granting membership in the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to a top mafia don D.P. Yadav highlights the extent to which India’s political parties have become criminalized. According to police records D.P. Yadav is a “hardened professional criminal”. He was named in nine murder cases, three attempted murders, two dacoitees, and several cases of kidnapping for extortion. He has been charged under a number of acts, including the Excise Act, Gangsters’ Act, and Terrorist and Disruptive Activities Act. His economic and muscle power has been welcomed with open arms by political parties. He entered into politics and was elected in 1989. He even held a ministerial position in the Utter Pradesh state assembly.

In the previous Manmohan Singh government, the Union Coal minister Sibu Soren was forced to step down when he was convicted of murder (though he was later acquitted on appeal). Surprisingly, Singh, who could identify “criminals” among common people, needed a law to define “criminal” in the case of politicians. He suggested that “the country needed a law to define the meaning of “criminal”, and who should and who should not be a minister.”⁷

Criminals enter into politics with their money and muscle power in order to gain influence and political power. This, in turn, ensures that the criminal cases against them may either be dropped or not proceeded with. The Times of India points out, “Indeed, today, far from shrinking at the thought of harboring criminal elements, parties seek them out, judging the muscle and money combination they represent to be emotive value. Rough estimates suggest that in any state election 20 percent of candidates are drawn from criminal backgrounds. For the parties, it means overflowing coffers and unlimited funds to fight elections and for the criminals it means protection from the law and respectability in the eyes of society.” Asia Human Rights Commission also observes that the nexus between criminals and political party benefits both: “Criminals protect the illegitimate interests of politicians and in turn obtain protection from them and their parties.” It further says that this mutually beneficial relationship works against the establishment of the rule of law.

This promising nexus between criminal-political party prompted India’s parliamentarians across party lines to join hands to refrain from passing legislation that would rid politics of criminal and corrupt elements. However, under 2003 Supreme Court ruling, the Election Commission has made it mandatory for candidates to disclose at the time of filing their nominations for election details including their criminal background (if any), and assets. However, the Court order does not disqualify criminal elements.

The disclosure law seemed to have little impact. Asia Human Rights Commission deplores, “Criminalization of politics in India is a growing problem, despite legal attempts to address it.” According to the National Election Watch, in 2004, out of 535 elected members of parliament (MPs), 128 MPs were with criminal records and 55 with serious criminal records. Most experts’ opinion is that the situation is deteriorating. As Himanshu Jha of the National Social Watch Coalition says, “The general opinion is that the influence of criminals in politics is steadily increasing.” This is confirmed by 2009 elections: out of 535 elected MPs 153 MPs were with criminal records and 74 with serious criminal records. That means, there is an increase of 19.5% in MPs with criminal records, and 34.5% in MPs with serious criminal records.

The National Commission to Review the Working of the Constitution pointed out that criminalization has become a worrying characteristic of India’s politics and electoral system. This tears into the moral fabric of the country and has an impact on governance.

Politicians are aware of “the impunity that is built into the very edifice of Indian politics and law.” The 1984 anti-Sikh riots confirm the impunity enjoyed by law-makers-cum-law-breakers. On April 7, 2009 a Sikh reporter Jarnail Singh hurled a shoe at the home minister Chidambaram in protest against the clean chit given by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) to the two Congress leaders Jagdish Tytler and Sajjan Kumar, prime accused of the riots. Even before they received clean chit, the Congress party gave them tickets to contest in 2009 elections. The gesture of the reporter was sparked by the deep, traumatic pain caused not only by the three day massacre of more than 3000 Sikhs (some were burned alive) during the anti-Sikh riots in Delhi after the assassination of Indira Gandhi, but also the impunity enjoyed by the politicians.

The massacre of Sikhs took place in the full public view. But there has been absolutely no accountability for those heinous crimes, because the system has collaborated with politicians to protect the guilty. Commenting on the involvement of the then Congress government in the riots, eminent journalist and writer Khushwant Singh said that probably the government of the day had a hand in it as it was organized violence.⁸ The violent mobs were provided with voters’ lists to identify the homes and business establishments of Sikhs.⁹

“The ’84 killings… were mercilessly planned and executed by the state, with a breathtaking disregard for governance and constitutional rights. After this bloodbath, the state and its partners-in-crime preferred to forget the bloody drama they had enacted.” Patwant Singh wonders, “Are the lives of innocent men, women and children of so little consequence to politicians and men in public office that they can be brutally murdered en masse in the country’s capital for over four days before an effort is made to stop the killings? Does it then have to take over 22 years and 10 inquiry commissions to book the guilty for the chilling inhumanity against the Sikhs.”

One may recall the speech of Rajiv Gandhi, who was immediately sworn in as the prime minister after his mother’s death, justifying the pogrom: “Some riots took place in the country following the murder of Indiraji. We know the people were very angry and for a few days it seemed that India had been shaken. But, when a mighty tree falls, it is only natural that the earth around it does shake a little.”¹⁰ A Sikh wondered, “That’s okay. But were there only Sikhs sitting under that big tree?”

“Development” in Tribal Region

There has been a proposal for “development” in the tribal areas. Recently Chidambaram talked about “development” in this region. But he wanted Maoist-controlled areas to be liberated before any development programs could be launched there. Critics argue that it is the lack of development in the tribal inhabited region for the past sixty years that is the cause for their dissent and wide support to Naxals. So there is growing concern about the intentions of the government in taking security-centric strategy without disclosing the development plan for the mineral rich, but poverty stricken region.

In an interview, Chidambaram said that minerals were not meant to be kept buried under Mother Earth, and they have to be put to use. The land inhabited by the Tribals is the mineral heart land. There are huge deposits of iron ore, tin, bauxite, corundum and limestone, which multinational companies want to get their hands on. Government officials and private companies want the Union government to acquire the tribal lands for private investors in order to expedite the development of the states. So, development means displacement of the owners of the land, and mining. “Industrialization is a must for the state’s development since agriculture alone cannot support Jharkhand’s economy. If we stop acquiring land for private investors in Naxal-hit areas, the state will head for a major disaster,” said a state official.

Therefore, security-centric strategy serves the above purpose where major offensive against Naxals not only decimates Naxal control in the tribal region, but also displaces the Tribals from their lands. If Tribals no longer live on that land, the inconvenient Fifth Schedule of the Constitution will not apply.

Conclusion

Weapons and violence will lead us nowhere. Violence begets violence. Therefore, all the forces concerned should give peace a chance and begin dialogue to sort out genuine problems prevailing in Tribal areas. Instead of running democracy only on the strength of weapons and violence against its own citizens, government should aim at inclusive democracy and development.

1. Siddharth Srivastava, “India Plans All-Out Attack on Maoists,” in Asia Times (September 29, 2009).
2. John Pilger, “Lies and More Lies,” ZNet Commentary (September 23, 2003
3. Arundhati Roy, “Instant-Mix Imperial Democracy: Buy One, Get One Free,” www.countercurrents.org (May 18, 2003).
4. Shoma Chaudhury, “Weapons of Mass Desperation,” in Tehelka Magazine 6:39, 3 October 2009.
5. Chaudhury, “Weapons of Mass Desperation,” Tehelka.
6. Shashi Tharoor, India: From Midnight to the Millennium (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1997), reviewed by C.J.S. Wallia, IndiaStar Review of Books.
7. Seema Chishti, “India’s Love Affair with ‘Tainted’ Politicians,” in BBC News (August 2, 2004).
8. Basharat Peer, “Anti-Sikh Riots a Pogrom: Khushwant.”
9. “1984 Anti-Sikh Riots” in Wikipedia.
10. In 1998 Sonia Gandhi, wife of Rajiv Gandhi, officially apologized for the insensitive remarks.

This type of ideology may have had some traction back when Russia and China first acquired nuclear weapons. After all we thought god was on our side and had thus bequeathed nuclear weaponry solely upon the United States. What a surprise it must have been to wake up one day and find out that godless Russkies and Chinese had attained the same power the U.S. had, which is to say owning a weapon that could literally destroy the entire planet. How could a good and gracious god allow such a thing to happen? In the case of the Russians getting the bomb, we “discovered” that the Rosenbergs had passed the plans on to them for money.¹ This version proved to be nice, clean and played into sound stereotypes of the period. We even sent them to the chair in an attempt to assuage our collective consciousness that we are the good guys and as such the only ones who should be allowed to possess something that could turn the planet into a dust heap with the push of a button.

Considering that now some dozen or more nations have the bomb, slogans like being better dead than Red appear to be trite. Pakistan isn’t communist and they have the bomb. Israel isn’t a communist nation and they have the bomb, somehow “better dead than kosher” just doesn’t have the same ring to it. It also smacks of abject racism, something many conservatives are, but are loath to admit.

Slogans and stereotypes are better employed where simple minds can easily sum up their non-comprehension of a complex issue with a snappy slogan. Hence we now have loads of right-wing folk parading around with images of President Obama sporting a Hitler moustache and a hammer and sickle tattoo on his forehead. The conservatives claim Obama is turning America into a socialist country. First off while Hitler was the head of the National Socialist Party, this group of wacky characters was anything but. The hammer and sickle was the logo Lenin and his Russian cohorts adopted. Accept for the very brief life of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, also known as the Nazi/Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, Hitler hated the socialists in general and the Russians in particular. Generally it’s a good idea to get your facts straight when you want to protest publicly, but in the case of extreme conservatives when have facts ever impeded them? It’s so much easier to conjure up images of Nazi Germany and claim that the President wants to turn America into a communist country. Just chalk it up to another honest mistake for these plan and simple folks. Communism is a form of government. Socialism is an economic system, but hey who’s counting when setting up a right-wing agenda?

This game plan for employing the Red Boogieman with the Obama Administration’s National Health Care Initiative is right out of the 1950’s red-baiting McCarthy era. Anyone with any sense of history should be able to understand this and see its fallacies. Unfortunately this hasn’t been the case when you look at the rest of America beyond the New York and Los Angeles skylines.

Both of these cities do have a distinct advantage over most other Americans when it comes to understanding the methods being employed by the right. The healthcare initiative is not the first time conservatives have used slogans and Red baiting to destroy something that was for the public good. Conservatives played this same card effectively nearly six decades ago to ensure that the Dodgers abandoned Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field for the sun soaked stadium that would arise out of the fields of Elysian Park Heights, or better known to Angelinos, Chavez Ravine.²

Faced with an extreme housing shortage in the post-war years Los Angeles claimed eminent domain for all of the properties in the three neighborhoods of Chavez Ravine, a sleepy Hispanic enclave just west of downtown. The real estate became the property of the City Housing Authority. CHA had noted architects Richard Neutra and Robert Alexander design a community that would provide low income housing, schools, parks and shops.

As with any government program it takes time to get off the planning stages. Such was the case with the Elysian Park Heights Development Project. By 1952 the thinking had changed. Only Communist countries supplied government funded housing. In America you paid for what you had and if you didn’t have anything that was your own tough luck. State Senator John B. Tenney, chair of the California Senate Committee on Un-American Activities and the leading Red-hunter in the state began an investigation of alleged Communist infiltration into the CHA. The Los Angeles city council immediately sought to backtrack on its support for the CHA, voting that year to cancel its contract with the agency. The CHA appealed all the way up to the State Supreme Court when in April 1952 the Court took the conservatives’ side and decided not to hear the case thus reaffirming city’s right to cancel their contract. Not satisfied with the State Supreme Court’s decision, the Los Angeles City Council placed a referendum on the June ballot. Proposition B prevailed upholding the city’s decision to cancel the CHA contract. This literally changed the city’s mayoral leadership when the three-term incumbent, Fletcher Bowron lost to Norris Poulson primarily over the housing issue of Chavez Ravine.

With the defeat of the public housing and planned community project Los Angeles was now able to use real estate claimed through eminent domain in anyway they saw fit. What better way to say we care about our citizens than denying them quality lost cost housing and literally giving the property to a private business owner? Walter O’Malley had long been considering a move from Ebbets Field. When approached by leading Angelinos such as City Councilwoman Rosalind Wyman and the Chandlers, owners of the Los Angeles Times, O’Malley traded a hunk of downtown real estate less than half the size of the Chavez Ravine property, tax free for 60 years.

All of this sounds very familiar when you know the history. Unfortunately most Americans couldn’t tell you our second President’s name let alone remember something like Walter O’Malley’s business chicanery with the Los Angeles oligarchy. This is undoubtedly why the conservatives have chosen to dig up the Red boogieman imagery when President Obama started mentioning something like government sponsored healthcare.

Currently there are four lobbyists working for the pharmaceutical, insurance companies, medical associations etc. to every Congressperson and Senator on Capitol Hill. Their goal is simple, the defeat of the President’s heath care plan, or at the very least its evisceration. Oddly enough the very same folks that complain about our government embracing socialism are the first to cry “Foul,” and look for a government handout when their bank, auto company or military contract goes belly-up. Somehow it isn’t socialism when the government decides to give taxpayers’ dollars to Merrill Lynch, GMC or Blackwater. That’s just good old fashioned American business and the Red boogieman isn’t even in sight. Knowledge of the issue and looking beyond slogans is the only way to combat such thinking and allowing conservatives to destroy the public good for the interests of private business. A good slogan can certainly come in handy though. Just think of what the Democrats might have accomplished if they would have called the healthcare initiative Medicare for Everyone instead of “public option” which sounds more like a bathroom facility at a park.

1. One of the reasons I italicized “discovered,” while Julius was probably guilty, it is highly doubtful his wife was. They both played into the Jewish stereotype of the day which also made it easier to get a death sentence and carry it out swiftly. This probably wouldn’t have worked with WASP Alger Hiss. He looked too much like “us.” The Rosenbergs were definitely ethnic in appearance which no doubt worked against them in the media.
2. Golden Dreams – California in an age of abundance. Kevin Starr pp. 146-153.

Hinton’s book is a fascinating, absorbing and detailed account of land reform in a single Chinese village, Long Bow, near Changzhi in a liberated area in 1948 when land was turned over to the peasants. No less than the better known Red Star Over China, it is a classic of the revolution wrought by Mao’s Communist Party of China (CPC). The book is a very concrete, first person account. Hinton himself lived in the village of Long Bow in China at the time of land reform when the feudal estates were broken up and given to the peasants. Two of its characteristics make the book compelling. First the reader gets to know the participants, the peasants, by name and to witness their lives change forever as they take their destiny into their own hands for the first time in millennia. Second, the book begins by describing in detail what life was like before liberation. This writer is pretty much sob-resistant, but I wept several times as I read the condition of the peasants, ruthlessly exploited and degraded by the landowners in collaboration with the central government and the connivance of the Catholic “missionary” effort.

Hinton took over a thousand pages of notes and returned to the US only upon the termination of Truman’s widely despised war on Korea in 1953, which killed one million Asians and about 50,000 U.S. soldiers and contributed mightily to his defeat at the hands of Eisenhower. Hinton’s notes were promptly confiscated by customs and turned over to the notorious McCarthyite committee of Senator James Eastland. Hinton had his passport confiscated, was harassed by the FBI, blacklisted and unable to find work. He finally found land to farm which he did for a decade and a half. He finally got the release of his notes and set to work on Fanshen. No major publishing house would print it, but in 1966 Monthly Review Press, bless their Marxist souls, finally published it. In the splendid political climate of the 60s, it was a great but short lived success.

One especially stirring moment in Hinton’s account arrives when the landlords, deprived of any armed force to impose their will, take to threatening the peasants with the wrath of their ancestors. Standing before a monument to his ancestors, fearful and hesitant, one of the leading peasants finally takes a hammer to the headstone and smashes it to pieces. There is no thunderbolt from the skies, and at that moment the hold of the old exploiters was greatly weakened but not broken. The peasants remained afraid that Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists and their army would win and the old landlords would return; and the influence of the Catholics and their support of the old ways remained. But the peasants encouraged by the CPC cadre pushed on (Of course the threat of the displeasure of an ancestor is pretty thin gruel compared to the fire and brimstone fear that the monotheistic desert religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, provided to the West.) Here Mao’s words found expression in the deeds of the peasants:

“What should we not fear? We should not fear heaven. We should not fear ghosts. We should not fear the dead. We should not fear the bureaucrats. We should not fear the militarists. We should not fear the capitalists.”

Pretty good advice –then and now.

During land reform in Long Bow, there was no presence of the People’s Liberation Army, just a few CPC cadre and in this case Hinton. More often than not the cadre had to restrain the peasants from killing the landlords at once and often in fairly merciless ways – and the cadre were not always successful. Millenia of rage at the beatings, rapes, theft, death of loved ones and worst human degradation imaginable poured out at the rulers of old China in those days. But revolution is not a matter of serving tea, as Mao put it.

I recently returned from a short stay in China. Without Hinton’s book, an adequate perspective on what I saw would have been impossible. New China is impressive in many respects, but it arose on the ashes of old China and the suffering endured for millennia by the Chinese peasantry until the end of Chiang Kai-shek’s U.S. backed rule. In Hinton’s book Mao makes no appearance nor do other giants of the Chinese revolution, but we see the fruits of their work up close. Chairman Mao liked to say that to understand society one should look down, not up; and Fanshen does just that. Look down not up – pretty good advice and so little regarded on the contemporary “left” which is so much given to watching those on high.

New Unionism: The union movement is the largest democratic force in the world today, by far. However, too many union members complain about bureaucratic behaviour at leadership level. Do you accept this is a problem, and, if so, what do you think are the root causes?

Dan Gallin: First, let’s get the problem in perspective. The level of bureaucracy in unions is constantly overstated. We have much less difficulty in this area than corporations do, for instance. Of course corporations are, by their very nature, top-down power structures – what could be less democratic than your average workplace? – and I cannot imagine anything as wasteful as some management bureaucracies. Similarly, think about bureaucracy in government, or in tri-partite bodies, or in non-governmental organisations. The difference is that unions, by their very structure and purpose, are consciously committed to internal democracy, and so failures are clearly seen as such. The basic structures of unionism are democratic and the internal struggle to assert and reassert democracy is always there. Trade unions have to deliver; there is a very short time span between demand and the delivery. Think of collective bargaining, for instance. Unions are constantly being held to account by their members.

NU: Are you trying to tell us there’s no real problem, then?

DG: No. I am not trying to minimize the problem. What I am saying is that bureaucracy is a pervasive feature of all institutional and organizational life. What, after all, is a bureaucracy? It is an administration, and all organizations need an administration. The problem arises when this administration develops a collective interest of its own, separate and eventually even opposed to the interests of the people it is supposed to serve.

This is serious enough in government, where the civil service constitutes a bureaucracy that can easily overreach its authority. In a democracy, the civil service is supposed to be the servant of the people. When it starts to act as its master, democracy is in danger.

In the trade union movement, the problem is even more serious because its administration, its own civil service if you wish, must represent people who have no other source of power than their organization. If this organization ceases to be responsive to their needs, they lose everything. An administration that builds its own power at the expense of the membership is betraying its trust – that is treason.

NU: If, as you say, trade unionism is inherently democratic, why is it that we hear these complaints about unions being run as dictatorships and/or oligarchies?

DG: Actually, there are not so many cases of this, in proportion. What happens is that we have some spectacular examples of organizations which degenerate and then become notorious. They are falsely represented as typical of the movement, most often in anti-union propaganda. But there is never any guarantee against an organization, even with the best democratic traditions, being hijacked by anti-democratic cliques or personalities.

The hijacking of the Russian revolution by the Communist bureaucracy led by Stalin is a classical example. After four or five short years, a vibrant, radically democratic, revolutionary mass movement started giving way to the rule of a bureaucracy which first asserted, then consolidated power by means of terror, police and military terror against its own people, on a scale not seen before in modern times. A whole new society with a bureaucratic ruling class!

How do these things happen? In order to work, democracy needs the active support of large masses of people at all times. In a union, this means the active participation of most of the membership. Democracy is not a state of being, it is an activity, it is in fact hard work, and it is a constant work in progress. You might say the same thing about freedom.

Most people are not able to maintain a high level of commitment over time. They are not organization professionals, they need to get on with their lives, as they should, so “democracy fatigue” might set in; especially after periods of great social stress. They might not pay attention to what happens in the organization for a time, routine sets in and the professionals take over. If the leaders are not trained in the right kind of politics, if they are not persons of the highest individual integrity, and if they are not supervised and controlled, they may start treating the organization as if it were their own property.

This is why it is the responsibility of every progressive and democratic trade union leadership to maintain constitutional and practical conditions in which membership participation and control is ensured and welcomed, without making conditions of participation too onerous for ordinary members.

NU: Just by way of clarification, can you explain what you mean by “trained in the right kind of politics”?

DG: Socialist politics, of course. And by that I mean the kind of politics based on the values that were at the origins of the labour movement and that made it great: solidarity, selflessness, respect for people, a sense of honour, and the modesty that comes with the awareness of being a soldier in the service of a great cause, a contempt for self-promotion, or “le refus de parvenir” as Monatte¹ called it.

NU: Do you think the Cold War contributed to bureaucratizing the movement?

DG: It certainly did. In a situation of extreme political polarization by outside forces, it is easy to lose sight of the original purpose of the exercise.

First, let us be clear what we are talking about. The Cold War was a conflict between States, between two blocs of States, led by the two superpowers of the time: the United States and the USSR, more or less from 1949 to 1989.

However, this conflict had nothing to do with a much older conflict within the labour movement. This earlier conflict arose after the October Revolution, when the Russian Communist Party created an International of its own and declared war on all other movements of the Left unless they accepted total subordination to its dictates.² That conflict became unbridgeable once the Communist leadership had moved to imprison and execute activists of other Left tendencies in the territory under its control, including its own opponents and dissidents. Under Stalin, this became a systematic campaign of extermination, with hit men spreading out all over the world to assassinate opponents.

It is small wonder that a majority of the Left, of all tendencies, became “anti-Communist”, meaning that they organized to defend themselves as best as they could against Communist claims of hegemony and terror.

When Nazi Germany attacked the USSR in 1941, breaking the treaty it had signed two years previously, the USSR found itself part of the anti-fascist war-time alliance. Despite past history and experience, much of the Western trade-union movement, which was predominantly social-democratic, was ready for organizational unity with Soviet bloc labour organizations. The result was the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU), which was founded in 1945. However, it lasted only four years as an inclusive organization of the world’s labour movement (though it continued, and still exists, as a Communist rump).

The unity on which the WFTU had been founded was the temporary unity of governments, not a unity of labour – none of the contentious issues between the Communists and everyone else on the Left had been resolved. When the unity of governments gave way to the rivalry between the US and the USSR for world power, the artificial top-down unity of the WFTU also broke apart.

What happened then was a race between the two blocs to secure the support – in fact, the control – of civil society organizations (labour, youth, students, women, etc.), with trade unions as prime targets.

And now comes the complicated part, which must be clearly understood. The Western governments and the non-Communist Left suddenly had the same enemy. The conflict between governments – the “Cold War” – and that earlier conflict within the labour movement, became superimposed. For some, they became indistinguishable.

This is how the war-time relationships which some socialists – and others – had formed with the political services of the US or UK governments (among others) to fight the Nazis continued seamlessly into the fight for a “free world”, against the new totalitarian menace.

In reality, we were of course still dealing with two different conflicts and two distinct interests. One was fighting Stalinism to defend working class interests, the other was fighting the USSR as a rival imperialism to that of the US. These are hardly compatible positions, but the most difficult thing to comprehend in politics, especially if you have the knife at your throat, is that the enemy of your enemy is not necessarily your friend!

Despite the apparent symmetry of the situation of the trade union movement within the two blocs, the reality was quite different. In the Soviet bloc, the trade union apparatus was part of the government structures of a police state, and a fairly subordinate structure at that. Dissidence was treated as a criminal offence or as a mental disorder. So in that context, the bureaucracy issue does not even arise in connection with the Cold War — the whole system had been thoroughly bureaucratized long before. In its first decades, that system was impossible to crack from within.

The situation in the West was much different: here a three-way battle was being fought between the advocates of an alignment on pro-American policies, the advocates and apologists for Soviet policies, and those who kept saying that neither option represented working class interests and that the labour movement should refuse to be aligned with either side.

Those of us who held the latter position believed that the lines of cleavage that mattered most in the world were not the vertical ones separating the two blocs, but the horizontal ones between the working class and the rulers of both systems, a fundamental division cutting across both blocs.

This was not an easy position to hold. The pressures to align and to conform were very strong. Having been put in charge of the AFL-CIO’s International Department by George Meany,³ Jay Lovestone⁴) — the Dr. Strangelove⁵ of the labour movement — with his acolyte Irving Brown⁶ and the various AFL-CIO Institutes, were running around the world buying unions with US government money, in close cooperation with the CIA , and trying to destroy any organization or individuals that did not accept their line, whether Communist or not. They were not looking for allies, they were recruiting agents.

The Soviet bloc operators were doing the same for the other side, also backed by considerable diplomatic and financial resources. The result of this competition is not difficult to guess: it spread a culture of corruption, especially in Africa where the movement was weakest and most vulnerable, but also in parts of Asia, Latin America, Europe and the United States itself, where some labour leaders were co-opted into Cold War politics, although most had no idea what the International Department was up to, and did not much care until all these operations were exposed in the mid-1960s.

In that sense the Cold War was a very powerful factor of bureaucratization in the West: it created and strengthened corrupt leaderships who no longer had to take their memberships into account, it enforced political conformity, stifled discussion, suppressed dissent and isolated all radical opposition through ‘red baiting’.

NU: Some labour writers contend that the acceptance of Cold War politics, and anti-Communist purges by the leadership of the American labour movement, contributed to its paralysis during the conservative onslaught of recent years.

DG: Yes and no. It’s not that simple. True enough, after the anti-Communist purges in the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and the merger with the American Federation of Labor (AFL) in 1955, the conservative elements of the AFL prevailed in the merged AFL-CIO. These people would later prove totally at a loss in the face of globalization and the conservative onslaught launched by Reagan, and continued by his successors, both Republican and Democrat.

But the problem with this story is that it exonerates the American Communist Party of any responsibility in these developments. The CP and its trade union activists are cast in the role of innocent victims. This overlooks the war the CP waged against all of the Left from its earliest days: first against the IWW and the socialists, then against the Trotskyists and against every other kind of radical group it didn’t control, and of course against most union leaderships, progressive or not. The CP did what it could to destroy the American Left and, like in Niemöller’s poem,⁷ when they came to get it there was nobody left to defend it.

This said, most conservative labour leaders didn’t need the Cold War in order to be ferociously anti-radical, super-patriotic and, eventually, helpless before the anti-labour campaigns of the Right. You have to remember that we’re dealing here with very stupid people. They may have been street-wise and cunning, but they knew nothing about the world and couldn’t think strategically. The roots of conservatism in the American union movement are very perceptively described by authors such as Daniel Fusfeld and Patricia Cayo Sexton.⁸) What the Cold War situation did, was to give people like Lovestone the opportunity to organize the right-wing of the American trade union bureaucracy as a base for a major international operation, and to isolate leaders of the labour Left, like Walter Reuther,⁹ Ralph Helstein¹⁰ and Pat Gorman,¹¹ as well as some good unions with a Communist history, like the ILWU and the UE.

NU: Did the Communists not at least denounce the clandestine right-wing operations the American unions were involved in?

DG: Not at all. Of course they would denounce operations like the overthrow of Arbenz in Guatemala, or of Goulart in Brazil, as examples of American imperialism in action, but there was never any exposure of the union involvement. The CIA and British government operations in the labour movement were blown open by Trotskyists and independent radicals in the mid-1960s. Then the New York Times picked up the story and it became a major scandal. But the CP had nothing to do with it at any stage. Afterwards, of course, everyone started writing about it.

NU: While all of this was happening in the US, bureaucratization must surely have been a growing problem in the European trade union movement as well?

DG: In Europe and elsewhere, for instance in Japan, the polarized politics of the Cold War also enforced political conformity and stifled dissent, but Europe is a complicated place with many political and trade union cultures, so generalizations are not very useful. In some countries Cold War politics played a major role in the labour movement, in others hardly at all.

Far more pervasive and general were the consequences of the war. Today it is hard to imagine the extent to which the historical labour movement had been destroyed, first by the rise of fascism in the 1920s and 1930s, then by the war itself, with the occupation of most of Europe by the Nazi armies and police. In most of Europe, the structures of the labour movement were wiped out, parties and unions of course, but also the entire institutional network that rooted the movement in society: welfare institutions, credit unions, co-ops, cultural and leisure time activities – everything.

Most of the leadership of the movement, right down to local level, had to go into exile, or into concentration camps, or died in the war. Many of the best people were lost. One of the important parties of the Socialist International, the Jewish Labour Bund,¹² was destroyed entirely, together with the population that supported it. No one had imagined anything like this could happen, and those who had hoped that the end of WWII would usher in another period of social revolution, a re-play of 1918, had lost touch with reality.

Superficially, the unions emerged in a strong position – after all we were on the side of the victors, whereas big business had collaborated with fascism throughout Europe and had much to be forgiven for. In fact, labour was far weaker than it appeared, and far more dependent on the State than before the war. That too did not seem to be a problem at first, since most post-war governments were pro-labour in one way or another, but it did eventually lead to the loss of the political and material independence of the movement and, yes, it did promote bureaucratization.

Whereas the pre-war movement conceived of itself as a counter-culture and an alternative society, at least in principle, the post-war movement made its peace with the “social market economy” and demanded no more than a better life within the system (full employment, welfare, social protection, good wages and working conditions).

In that situation, the leadership of the movement became increasingly unwilling to maintain a whole network of flanking institutions. If you don’t want to change society then you don’t need to build an alternative counter-culture or an alternative economy. Think of all the money you can save. So the unions concentrated on their presumed “core business” – collective bargaining with “social partners” – the parties concentrated on elections, and the movement lost its roots in society, lost many of its think tanks and educational institutions, and lost its periphery, a sphere of influence and protection.

At the same time, you had the surge of prosperity in post-war Western Europe through the Marshall Plan. An exhausted working class, after the deprivation and the sufferings of the war, started to get its life back and became gradually more comfortable over the next thirty years. And why not? But as it played out, as a major political factor, it created a problem the movement couldn’t cope with, because it also coincided with the rise of media empires, with television, financed largely by advertising. Our movement was not ready to compete at that level. This is where we lost the communications war. We lost our press and any independent expressions of working class culture, with the long-term effect of losing the culture wars in the 1990s.

Many of the issues of the vanished civil society of labour eventually got taken over by others (feminists, environmentalists, human rights activists, etc.), but that’s another story.

Then, in countries like France, Italy and Greece, where the CP was dominant in the labour movement, the working class became hostage to Cold War politics and political positions, as well as labour alignments. They were frozen for about thirty or forty years. In some other countries, notably Germany, Cold War polarization also contributed to deadening the political debate and distorting trade union priorities.

Finally, European unions have become accustomed to State subsidies, in general for specific activities, such as education or participation in a host of official and quasi-official institutions and meetings. Today, in many countries, unions would be unable to function without the government subsidies they have become accustomed to.

So what do you get? A heavily bureaucratized and passive movement, initially led by survivors, then rapidly replaced by complacent and arrogant careerists who are happy to depend on the State. They administer the gains of past struggles but are unwilling to conduct any new ones, opposing any ideas they have not thought of themselves and believing that nothing must ever happen for the first time. That kind of leadership educates union members to be passive consumers of union services, not participants in struggle.

NU: You said before that, as far as Europe was concerned, generalizations were not very useful. Should we take that to include what you just said?

DG: You got me there. I think what I have tried to do is draw a common denominator, a composite picture which applies in general but not exactly in any one country. For example, in the Nordic countries, except for a short-lived split in Finland, the Cold War had hardly any impact at all. In Spain, where the labour movement emerged from a fascist regime only in the 1970s, rank-and-file democracy is a strongly-felt aspiration. All of Eastern Europe is a different situation again, and a very complicated situation, with many cross-currents. And of course there are always exceptions. There have been outstanding labour leaders like Otto Brenner,¹³ Wilhelm Gefeller¹⁴ in Germany, Jack Jones¹⁵ in Britain, André Renard¹⁶ in Belgium. So, one has to fine-tune every national situation. But some will recognize my descriptions and, as the saying goes, if the shoe fits, wear it.

Neither do I want to idealize the pre-war labour movement in Europe. There were too many entirely avoidable and disastrous defeats. The leading labour parties of Germany and Austria had armed militias ready to fight which were awaiting orders that never came. The French Popular Front government refused to support the Spanish Republicans in the civil war, who, had they won, would have changed the course of history. Not to speak of the catastrophic Communist policies, in Germany, in Spain, all over. One needs to reflect on these defeats and learn from them. But even so, the level of ambition in those days was higher.

NU: You were general secretary of the IUF for many years, and active in the international union movement. How does the international movement cope with the problem of bureaucratism?

DG: With difficulty. You have to realize that the international movement is yet another level removed from the rank-and-file: the actual members of international trade union organizations, in a statutory sense, are national unions, not individual workers, so the international organization will reflect to a very large extent the culture and practices of its affiliated unions, particularly the large affiliates.

So, structurally, it is almost inevitably bureaucratic. The politics of the leadership, basically the secretariat and the governing bodies, makes a big difference. You can have an organization with a deeply rooted culture of militancy and a democratic culture, which will do two things: first, ensure that democratic practices are respected and encouraged in the way it operates, within its own governing bodies, and, second, encourage democratic participation within its affiliates wherever it can, for example through its educational programs, in its publications, etc.

NU: And then you have the others…

DG: Indeed. Again, it is a question of politics, of how you interpret the situation and, consequently, how you evaluate the union response required. If you believe that “social partnership” is an accurate description of labour/management relations, and that social change occurs through conversations between political leaders and experts – “social dialogue” – then you will invest your resources and energies in a lobbying operation. The privileged counterparts in these conversations will be the bureaucrats of government organizations and of employers’ organizations. In meeting after meeting, you will be bargaining about words, and you will believe you have won a significant victory when you have changed a sentence in a statement. This can go on forever, and no one will ever know the difference. The workers who are members of such organizations don’t even know they exist.

NU: How can workers, at rank-and-file level, learn to tell the difference between useful and useless organizations? Where does usefulness become apparent?

DG: Very simple: workers certainly can tell the difference when they become involved in a conflict. When it comes to conflict, the differences are very quickly apparent. And whether our international sell-out artists like it or not, unions are about conflict. Either the international organization pulls out all stops and the saying “one for all, all for one”, (especially the second part) becomes a concrete reality, for as long as it takes, or else the international organization starts mediating instead of fighting, tries to minimize and kill the conflict, even sides with the employer just to be rid of the problem.

NU: How does this relate back to the issue of bureaucratism? Are you suggesting that bureaucracy and politics are related?

DG: They are, very much so. However, the relationship is not a mechanical one. For instance it would be simplistic and wrong to say that left-wing politics protects us against bureaucracy. If we are talking about the Communist tradition, the opposite is true, almost always, and this includes Maoism, which is actually an extreme form of Stalinism. People who come out of that school are often dangerous authoritarians. Even when they change their politics, they don’t necessarily change their methods.

And of course social-democracy has its own awesome bureaucratic traditions; even anarchist and syndicalist organizations, contrary to legend, can be run in extremely authoritarian and bureaucratic ways.

No, the only form of politics which is an effective antidote to bureaucratism is the kind of socialist politics that contains a strong element of radical democracy. This goes back to Marx himself, but despite appearances, this current was never dominant in the socialist movement. It surfaces from time to time, a person like Rosa Luxemburg would be fairly typical, there were others within the political families of the Left. Eugene Debs in the United States would be another example.

NU: That’s not a very broad political base. If that’s all we have, is the struggle against bureaucratism lost in advance?

DG: No, because in fact we have very much more. The politics of radical democracy respond to a very deep and fundamental need felt by workers. They keep coming back to this on their own, and they very often spontaneously develop democratic forms of organizing, of conducting struggles, of running their organizations. Rosa Luxemburg understood this. This aspiration is very strong. That is the basic reason why the labour movement has such a democratic culture, despite all the pressures to the contrary from the society that surrounds it… the “old shit”, as Marx called it.¹⁷

NU: Do you see workers’ desire for deeper forms of democracy extending from union HQ all the way down into the workplace?

DG: Yes, except I would put it the other way around, from the workplace – the “point of production”, as the IWW used to say – to union HQ. It has to start at the point of production. As I said, this is a very fundamental need of workers, and actually very often of people in general. Think of women’s movements or peasant’s movements – in all progressive mass movements there is this demand for transparency and accountability in the leadership.

The point is to nurture and strengthen the politics of radical democracy, the particular strand of socialist politics which I believe is the authentic Marxism, which insists that power, where it matters, always has to remain in the hands of the workers. Today this means almost all of society, since nearly everybody is part of the working class, whether they know it or not. To get there, you have to start from the bottom, the point of production, and then build democratic institutions, like democratic unions, impose democratic procedures at every level, democratize the decision-making mechanism in public administration. We don’t want to abolish bureaucracy if bureaucracy means administration, we all need administration and we want it to be honest, transparent and efficient, in our own organizations to start with, then in society at large. We want an administration built on our key values: justice and freedom. These will be the values of the society of the future – if we make it that far.

1. Pierre Monatte (1881-1960) A proofreader by profession, he was a leader of the French CGT when it was a revolutionary syndicalist organization and, in 1909, founded its journal, La vie Ouvrière. He was an anti-war internationalist during World War I., joined the French Communist Party in 1923 and was expelled in 1924 for opposing its bureaucratization. He then returned to revolutionary syndicalism, and in 1925 he founded La Révolution Prolétarienne, which is still being published. “Le refus de parvenir” means: “the refusal of social climbing”.
2. The Second Congress of the Comintern in 1920 agreed on ‘Twenty One Conditions‘, which formalised the beginning of ‘the great split’: a split which was to divide the labour movement for the rest of the century. Note in particular: ‘In the columns of the press, at public meetings, in the trades unions, in the co-operatives – wherever the members of the Communist International can gain admittance – it is necessary to brand not only the bourgeoisie but also its helpers, the reformists of every shade, systematically and pitilessly.’
3. George Meany (1894-1980), president of the American Federation of Labor from 1952 to 1955, then, following its merger with the Congress of Industrial Organizations, president of the united AFL-CIO from 1955 to 1979.
4. Jay Lovestone (1906-1989), a founder of the American Communist Party, later leader of the Right-Wing opposition group (the pro-Bukharin faction) which dissolved in 1941. In 1943 Lovestone became international affairs director of the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union and, in 1963, director of the international affairs department of the AFL-CIO. He held that position until 1974 and as the main architect of the collaboration of the AFL-CIO with the CIA. For more on Lovestone, see: A Covert Life: Jay Lovestone, Communist, Anti-Communist, and Spymaster by Ted Morgan (New York: Random House, 1999
5. Dr. Strangelove: the 1964 black comedy film by Stanley Kubrick, featuring a paranoiac American general launching a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, hoping to thwart a Communist conspiracy to “sap and impurify” the “precious bodily fluids” of the American people with fluoridated water. The US president in the film is advised by a “mad scientist” type: Dr. Strangelove.
6. Irving Brown (1911-1989) , chief lieutenant and hatchet man for Lovestone since the 1930s, set ujp”anti-Communist” operations in the trade union movement, mostly in Europe, including the notorious Mediterranean Committee, organized with the help of gangsters in French, Italian and Greek ports.
7. Friedrich Niemöller (1892-1984), prominent German anti-Nazi theologian and Lutheran pastor. He is best known as the author of the following lines (and variations thereof):
   “First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a communist; Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist;
   Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist;
   Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew;
   Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak out for me.”
   
8. Daniel Fusfeld: The Rise and Repression of Radical Labor 1877-1918, Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, Chicago, 1980 (ISBN 088286050X) and Patricia Cayo Sexton: The War on Labor and the Left – Understanding America’s Unique Conservatism, Westview Press, Boulder/San Francisco/Oxford, 1991 (ISBN 0813310636
9. Walter Reuther (1907-1970), leading organizer and after 1946 president of the United Auto Workers’ union, a Socialist Party member until 1939, president of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1952, negotiated the merger with the American Federation of Labor in 1955, eventually clashed with Meany over the conservative policies of the AFL-CIO and formed a short-lived alternative center, the Alliance for Labor Action (1958–1972) with the Teamsters and a few smaller unions. On May 9, 1970, Reuther and his wife May were killed when their chartered plane crashed while on final approach to the airstrip near the union’s recreational and educational facility at Black Lake, Michigan. In October 1968, a year and a half before the fatal crash, Reuther and his brother Victor were almost killed in a small private plane as it approached Dulles airport. Both incidents are amazingly similar; the altimeter in the fatal crash was believed to have malfunctioned. When Victor Reuther was interviewed many years after the fatal crash he said, “I and other family members are convinced that both the fatal crash and the near fatal one in 1968 were not accidental.”
10. Ralph Helstein (1908-1985), president of the United Pckinghouse Workers of America (UPWA) from 1946 to 1968. Under his leadership, the union, a CIO affiliate, became one of the most militant and democratic unions in the US. It organized the meat packing industry in the US and Canada and played a leading role in fighting for minority and women’s rights. When the UPWA merged with the Amalgamated Meat Cutters union in 1968, Helstein became vice president and special counsel. He worked with the union until 1972 and died in Chicago in 1985.
11. Patrick Emmet Gorman (1882-1980), a life-long socialist, International Secretary-Treasurer of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen (AFL) from 1942 to 1976 (the Meat Cutters were an old socialist union which had a European constitution, where the secretary-treasurer, not the president, was the chief executive officer). Gorman opposed Meany on the Vietnam war and on many other political issues.
12. The General Jewish Labour Union of Lithuania, Poland and Russia, in Yiddish the Algemeyner Yidisher Arbeter Bund in Lite, Poyln un Rusland, generally called the Bund (from German: Bund, meaning federation or union) or the Jewish Labour Bund, was a Jewish political party and trade union in several European countries operating predominantly between the 1890s and the 1930s with remnants of the party still active in the United States, Canada, Australia, France and the United Kingdom. The Bund opposed Zionism and fought for the recognition of Jews as an autonomous cultural community within European countries. In this and in other respects, it was strongly influenced by the Austro-Marxist school of socialism, and was a left-socialist party in the context of the Labour and Socialist International. In WWII it was active in the resistance movement against the Nazi occupation in Poland and in Lithuania, one of its leaders, Marek Edelman, was a leader of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in 1943, and later of the Workers’ Defense Committee (KOR) in 1976 and of the Solidarity movement. Two leaders of the Bund, Victor Alter and Henryk Erlich, who had sought refuge in the USSR after the German invasion, were executed in December 1941 in Moscow on Stalin’s orders.
13. Otto Brenner (1907-1972), president of the German metal workers’ union IG Metall from 1956 to 1972. In 1931 Brenner left the Social-Democratic Party (SPD) which he had joined as a youth to join the Socialist Workers’ Party, founded by Left Socialists and dissident Communists, too late to prevent the seizure of power by Hitler. Brenner became active in the anti-Nazi resistance, was arrested in 1933, sentenced to two years’ prison and kept under police supervision until the end of the war. In 1945 Brenner re-joined the SPD and became active in the reconstruction of the trade union movement. At the head of the IG Metall he played a leading tole in the defense of democratic rights and against rearmament. In 1961, he was elected president of the International Metalworkers’ Federation.
14. Wilhelm Gefeller (1906-1983), president of the German chemical workers’ union IG Chemie from 1949 to 1969, one of the founders of the post-war German trade union movement, active in the SPD. Strong advocate of co-determination in German industry and at international level, and of democratic rights. President of the International Chemical and General Workers’ Unions (ICF) in the late 1960s.
15. James Larkin (Jack) Jones (1913-2009), general secretary of the Transport & General Workers’ Union (UK) from 1968 to 1978. Throughout his career he strove to increase the power and influence of shop stewards. In 1937 he joined the International Brigades in the Spanish civil war and was wounded in 1938. Jones was also Vice-President of the International Transport Workers Federation and, after his retirement, was a campaigner for pensioners’ rights. His autobiography, Union Man, was published in 1986.
16. André Renard (1911-1962), Belgian trade unionist, active in the resistance under Nazi occupation,created an illegal united trade union movement independent of political parties and advocated its extension to the entire country at liberation, but could not overcome the split between socialist and Catholic unions. Deputy General-Secretary of the socialist trade union center FGTB, leader of the six-week general strike in 1960-1961 against the austerity policies of the conservative government. A strong advocate for the autonomy of Wallonia (the French-speaking part of Belgium).
17. ”…revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the old shit and become fitted to found society anew.” Karl Marx: The German Ideology, Part I: Feuerbach. Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlook 1845.

But two key words seem to have survived the attrition and withstood the test of time: imperialism and financialism.¹

Talk of imperialism and financialism – and particularly of the nexus between them – remains as catchy as ever. Marxists of different colours – from classical, to neo to post – find the two terms expedient, if not indispensable. Radical anarchists, conservative Stalinists and distinguished academics of various denominations all continue to use and debate them.

The views of course differ greatly, but there is a common thread: for most Marxists, imperialism and financialism are prime causes of our worldly ills. Their nexus is said to explain capitalist development and underdevelopment; it underlies capitalist power and contradictions; and it drives capitalist globalization, its regional realignment and local dynamics. It is a fit-all logo for street demonstrators and a generic battle cry for armchair analysts.

The secret behind this staying power is flexibility. Over the years, the concepts of imperialism and financialism have changed more or less beyond recognition, as a result of which the link between them nowadays connotes something totally different from what it meant a century ago.

The purpose of this article is to outline this chameleon-like transformation, to assess what is left of the nexus and to ask whether this nexus is still worth keeping.

Empire and Finance

The twin notions of imperialism and financialism emerged at the turn of the twentieth century. The backdrop is familiar enough. During the latter part of the nineteenth century, the leading European powers were busy taking over large tracts of non-capitalist territory around the world. At the same time, their own political economies were being fundamentally transformed. Since the two developments unfolded hand in hand, it was only natural for theorists to ask whether they were related – and if so, how and why.

The most influential explanation came from a British left liberal, John Hobson, whose work on the subject was later extended and modified by Marxists such as Rosa Luxemburg, Rudolf Hilferding, Vladimir Lenin and Karl Kautsky, among others.²

Framed in a nutshell, the basic argument rested on the belief that capitalism had changed: originally ‘industrial’ and ‘competitive’, the system had become ‘financial’ and ‘monopolistic’.

This transformation, said the theorists, had two crucial effects. First, the process of monopolization and the centralization of capital in the hands of the large financiers made the distribution of income far more unequal, and that greater inequality restricted the purchasing power of workers relative to the productive potential of the system. As a result of this imbalance, there emerged the spectre of ‘surplus capital’, excess funds that could not be invested profitably in the home market. And since this ‘surplus capital’ could not be disposed of domestically, it forced capitalists to look for foreign outlets, particularly in pristine, pre-capitalist regions.

Second, the centralization of capital altered the political landscape. Instead of the night-watchman government of the laissez-faire epoch, there emerged a strong, active state. The laissez-faire capitalists of the earlier era saw little reason to share their profits with the state and therefore glorified the frugality of a small central administration and minimal taxation. But the new state was no longer run by hands-off liberals. Instead, it was dominated and manipulated by an aggressive oligarchy of ‘finance capital’ – a coalition of large bankers, leading industrialists, war mongers and speculators who needed a strong state that would crack down on domestic opposition and embark on foreign military adventures.

And so emerged the nexus between imperialism and financialism. The concentrated financialized economy, went the argument, requires pre-capitalist colonies where surplus capital can be invested profitably; and the cabal of finance capital, now in the political driver’s seat, is able to push the state into an international imperialist struggle to obtain those colonies.

At the time, this thesis was not only totally new and highly sophisticated; it also fit closely with the unfolding of events. It gave an elegant explanation for the imperial bellicosity of the late nineteenth century, and it neatly accounted for the circumstances leading to the great imperial conflict of the first ‘World War’. There were of course other explanations for that war – from realist/statist, to liberal, to geopolitical, to psychological.³ But for most intellectuals, these alternative explications seemed too partial or instrumental compared to the sweeping inevitability offered by the nexus of empire and finance.

History, though, kept changing, and soon enough both the theory and its basic concepts had to be altered.

Monopoly Capital

The end of the Second World War brought three major transformations. First, the nature of international conflict changed completely. Instead of a violent inter-capitalist struggle, there emerged a Cold War between the former imperial powers on the one hand and the (very imperial) Soviet bloc on the other (with plenty of hot proxy conflicts flaring up in the outlying areas). Second, the relationship between core and periphery was radically altered. Outright conquest and territorial imperialism gave way to decolonization, while tax-collecting navies were replaced by the more sophisticated tools of foreign aid and foreign direct investment (FDI). Third and finally, the political economies of the core countries themselves were reorganized. Instead of the volatile laissez-faire regime, there arose a large welfare-warfare state whose ‘interventionist’ ideologies and counter-cyclical policies managed to reduce instability and boost domestic growth.

On the face of it, this new constellation made talk of finance-driven imperialism seem outdated if not totally irrelevant. But the theorists didn’t give up the nexus. Instead, they gave it a new meaning.

The revised link was articulated most fully by the Monopoly Capital School associated with the New York journal Monthly Review.⁴ Capitalism, argued the writers of this school, remains haunted by a lack of profitable investment outlets. And that problem, along with its solution, can no longer be explained in classical Marxist terms.

The shift from competition to oligopoly that began in the late nineteenth century, these writers claimed, was now complete. And that shift meant that Marx’s ‘labour theory of value’ and his notion of ‘surplus value’ had become more or less irrelevant to capitalist pricing.

In the brave new world of oligopolies, the emphasis on non-price competition speeds up the pace of technical change and efficiency gains, making commodities cheaper and cheaper to produce. But unlike in a competitive system, these rapid cost reductions do not translate into falling prices. The prevalence of oligopolies creates a built-in inflationary bias which, despite falling costs, makes prices move up and sometimes sideways, but rarely if ever down.

This growing divergence between falling costs and rising prices increases the income share of capitalists, and that increase reverses the underlying course of capitalism. Marx believed that the combination of ever-growing mechanization and ruthless competition creates a ‘tendency of the rate of profit to fall’. But the substitution of monopoly capitalism for free competition inverts the trajectory. The new system is ruled by an opposite ‘tendency of the surplus to rise’.

The early theorists of imperialism, although using a different vocabulary, understood the gist of this transformation. And even though they did not provide a full theory to explain it, they realized that the consequence of that transformation was to shift the problem of capitalism from production to circulation (or in later Keynesian parlance, from ‘aggregate supply’ to ‘aggregate demand’). The new capitalism, they pointed out, suffered not from insufficient surplus, but from too much surplus, and its key challenge now was how to ‘offset’ and ‘absorb’ this ever-growing excess so that accumulation could keep going instead of coming to a halt.

That much was already understood at the turn of the twentieth century. But this is where the similarity between the early theorists of imperialism and the new analysts of Monopoly Capital ends.

Black Hole: The Role of Institutionalized Waste

Until the early twentieth century, it seemed that the only way to offset the growing excess was productive and external: the surplus of goods and capital had to be exported to and invested in pre-capitalist colonies. But as it turned out, there was another solution, one that the early theorists hadn’t foreseen and that the analysts of Monopoly Capital now emphasized. The surplus could also be disposed off unproductively and internally: it could be wasted at home.

For the theorists of Monopoly Capital, ‘waste’ denoted expenditures that are necessary neither for producing the surplus nor for reproducing the population, and that are, in that sense, totally unproductive and therefore wasteful. These expenditures absorb existing surplus without ever creating any new surplus, and this double feature enables them to mitigate without ever aggravating the ‘tendency of the surplus to rise’.

The absorptive role of wasteful spending wasn’t entirely new, having already been identified at the turn of the twentieth century by Thorstein Veblen.⁵ But it was only after the Second Word War, with the entrenchment of the Fordist model of mass production and consumption and the parallel rise of the welfare-warfare state, that the process was fully and conscientiously institutionalized as a salient feature of monopoly capitalism.

By the end of the war, the U.S. ruling class grew fearful that demobilization would trigger another severe depression; and having accepted and internalized the stimulating role of large-scale government spending, it supported the creation of a new ‘Keynesian Coalition’ that brought together the interests of big business, the large labour unions and various state agencies. The hallmark of this coalition was immortalized in a secret U.S. National Security Council document (NSC-62), whose writers explicitly called on the government to use high military spending as a way of securing the internal stability of U.S. capitalism.⁶

According to its theorists, monopoly capitalism gave rise to many forms of institutionalized waste – including a bloated sales effort, the creation of new ‘desires’ for useless goods and services and the acceleration of product obsolescence, among other strategies. But the two most significant types of waste were spending on the military and on the financial sector.

The importance of these latter expenditures, went the argument, lies in their seemingly limitless size. The magnitude of military expenditures has no obvious ceiling: it depends solely on the ability of the ruling class to justify the expenditures on grounds of national security. Similarly with the size of the financial sector: its magnitude expands with the potentially limitless inflation of credit. This convenient expandability turns military spending and financial intermediation into a giant ‘black hole’ (our term): they suck in large chunks of the excess surplus without ever generating any excess surplus of their own.⁷

Now, on the face of it, the efficacy of this domestic black hole should have made imperialism less necessary if not wholly redundant. According to the theorists of Monopoly Capital, though, this would be the wrong conclusion to draw. It is certainly true that, unlike the old imperial system, monopoly capitalism no longer needs colonies. But the absence of formal colonies is largely a matter of appearance. Remove this appearance and you’ll see the imperial impulse pretty much intact: the core continues to exploit, dominate and violate the periphery for its own capitalist ends.⁸

Spearheaded by U.S.-based multinationals and no longer hindered by inter-capitalist wars, argued the theorists, the new order of monopoly capitalism has become increasingly global and ever more integrated. And this global integration, they continued, has come to depend on an international division of labour, free access to strategic raw materials and political regimes that are ideologically open for business. However, these conditions do not develop automatically and peacefully. They have to be actively promoted and enforced – often against stiff domestic opposition – and they have to be safeguarded against external threats (the Soviet bloc before its collapse, Islamic fundamentalism and rogue states since then, etc.). And because such promotion and enforcement hinge on the threat and frequent use of violence, there is an obvious justification if not outright need for a large, well-equipped army sustained by large military budgets.

In this context, military spending comes to serve a dual role: together with the financial sector and other forms of waste, it propels the accumulation of capital by black-holing a large chunk of the economic surplus; and it helps secure a more sophisticated and effective neo-imperial order that no longer needs colonial territories but is every bit as expansionary, exploitative and violent as its crude imperial predecessor.

Dependency

The notion of neo-imperialism boosted and gave credence to a subsidiary theory of dependency.⁹ This support was somewhat paradoxical, since the lineage between the two theories was weak if not contradictory. Recall that, by emphasizing the role of domestic waste, the theory of Monopoly Capital served to deemphasize if not totally negate the absorptive importance of the periphery. But the analysts of dependency put their own emphasis elsewhere. The persistence of (neo) imperialism, they claimed, showed that, regardless of its own internal dynamics, the core still needs to keep the periphery chronically subjugated and underdeveloped.

This dependency, went the argument, is the outcome of five hundred years of colonial destruction. During that period, the imperial powers systematically undermined the socio-economic fabric of the periphery, making it totally dependent on the core. In this way, when decolonization finally started, the periphery found itself unable to take off while the capitalist core prospered. There was no longer any need for core states to openly colonize and export capital to the periphery. Using their disproportionate economic and state power, the former imperialist countries were now able to hold the postcolonial periphery in a state of debilitating economic monoculture, political submissiveness and cultural backwardness – and, wherever they could, to impose on it a system of unequal exchange.

Unequal exchange can take different forms. It may involve a wage gap between the ‘less exploited’ labour aristocracy of the core and the ‘more exploited’ simple labour of the periphery. Or the core can compel the periphery to buy its exports at ‘high’ prices (relative to their ‘true’ value), while importing the periphery’s products at ‘low’ prices (relative to their ‘true’ value). As a result of this latter difference, the terms of trade get ‘distorted’, surplus is constantly siphoned into the core (rather than exported from or domestically absorbed by the core), and the eviscerated periphery remains chronically underdeveloped.¹⁰

This logic of dependent underdevelopment was first articulated during the 1950s and 1960s as an antidote to the liberal modernization thesis and its Rostowian promise of an imminent takeoff.¹¹ And at the time, that antidote certainly seemed to be in line with the chronic stagnation of peripheral countries.

But what started as a partial theory soon expanded into a sweeping history of world capitalism. According to this broader narrative, capitalism was and remained imperial from the word go: it didn’t simply start with conquest; it started because of conquest. Its very inception was predicated on geographical exploitation and domination – a process in which the financial-commercial metropolis (say England) used the surplus extracted from a productive periphery (say India) to kick-start its own economic growth. And once started, the only way for this growth to be sustained is for the metropolis to continue to eviscerate the periphery around it. The development of the emperor depends on and necessitates the underdevelopment of its subjects.

The next theoretical step was to fit this template into an even broader concept of a World System – an all-encompassing global approach that seeks to map the hierarchical political relationships, division of labour and flow of commodities and surplus between the peripheral countries at the bottom, the semi-peripheral satellites in the middle and the financial core at the apex. From the viewpoint of this larger retrofit, capitalism is no longer the outcome of a specific class struggle, a conflict that developed in Western Europe during the twilight of feudalism and later spread to and reproduced itself in the rest of the world. Instead, capitalism – to the extent that this term can still be meaningfully used – is merely the outer appearance of Europe’s imperial expedition to rob and loot the rest of the world.

This view reflected a fundamental change in emphasis. Whereas earlier Marxist theorists of imperialism accentuated the centrality of exploitation in production, dependency and World System analysts shifted the focus to trade and unequal exchange. And while previous theories concentrated on the global class struggle, dependency and World System analyses spoke of a conflict between states and geographical regions. The new framework, although nominally ‘Marxist’ on the outside, has little Marxism left on the inside.¹²

And if we are to believe the postists who quickly jumped on the dependency bandwagon, there is nothing particularly surprising about this particular theoretical bent. After all, ‘history’ is no more than an ethno-cultural clash of civilizations, a never-ending cycle of imperial ‘hegemonies’ in which the winners (ego) impose their ‘culture’ on the losers (alter).¹³ To the naked eye, the totalizing capitalization of our contemporary world may seem like a unique historical process. But don’t be deceived. This apparent uniqueness is a flash in the pan. Deconstruct it and what you are left with is yet another imperial imposition – in this case, the imposition of a Euro-American ‘financialized discourse’ on the rest of the world.

Red Giant: An Empire Imploded

The dependency version of the nexus, though, didn’t hold for long, and in the 1970s the cards again got shuffled. The core stumbled into a multifaceted crisis: the United States suffered a humiliating defeat in Vietnam, stagflation decelerated and destabilized the major capitalist countries and political unrest seemed to undermine the legitimacy of the capitalist regime itself. In the meantime, the periphery confounded the theorists: on the one hand, import substitution, the prescribed antidote to dependency, pushed developing countries, primarily in Latin America, into a debt trap; on the other hand, the inverse policy of privatization and export promotion, implemented mostly in East Asia, triggered an apparent ‘economic miracle’. Taken together, these developments didn’t seem to sit well with the notion of Western financial imperialism. And so, once more the nexus had to be revised.

According to the new script, ‘financialization’ is no longer a panacea for the imperial power. In fact, it is prime evidence of imperial decline.

The reasoning here goes back to the basic Marxist distinction between ‘industrial’ activity on the one hand and ‘commercial’ and ‘financial’ activities on the other. The former activity is considered ‘productive’ in that it generates surplus value and leads to the accumulation of ‘actual’ capital. The latter activities, by contrast, are deemed ‘unproductive’; they don’t generate any new surplus value and therefore, in and of themselves, do not create any ‘actual’ capital.

This distinction – which most Marxists accept as sacrosanct – has important implications for the nexus of imperialism and financialism. It is true, say the advocates of the new script, that finance (along with other forms of waste) helps the imperial core absorb its rising surplus – and in so doing prevents stagnation and keeps accumulation going. But there is a price to pay. The addiction to financial waste ends up consuming the very fuel that sustains the core’s imperial position: it hollows out the core’s industrial sector, it undermines its productive vitality, and, eventually, it limits its military capabilities. The financial sector itself continues to expand absolutely and relatively, but this is the expansion of a ‘red giant’ (our term) – the final inflation of a star ready to implode.

The process leading to this implosion is emphasized by theories of hegemonic transition.¹⁴ The analyses here come in different versions, but they all seem to agree on the same basic template. According to this template, the maturation of a hegemonic power – be it Holland in the seventeenth century, Britain in the nineteenth century or the United States presently – coincides with the ‘over-accumulation’ of capital (i.e. the absence of sufficiently profitable investment outlets). This over-accumulation – along with growing international rivalries, challenges and conflicts – triggers a system-wide financial expansion, marked by soaring capital flows, a rise in market speculation and a general inflation of debt and equity values. The financial expansion itself is led by the hegemonic state in an attempt to arrest its own decline, but the reprieve it offers can only be temporary. Relying on finance drains the core of its energy, causes productive investment to flow elsewhere and eventually sets in motion the imminent process of hegemonic transition.

Although the narrative here is universal, its inspiration is clearly drawn from the apparent ‘financialized decline’ of U.S. hegemony. Since the 1970s, many argue, the country has been ‘depleted’: it has grown overburdened by military spending; it has gotten itself entangled in unwinnable armed conflicts, and it has witnessed its industrial-productive base sucked dry by a Wall Street-Washington Complex that prospers on the back of rising debt and bloated financial intermediation.¹⁵

In order to compensate for its growing weakness, these observers continue, the United States has imposed its own model of ‘financialization’ on the rest of the world, hoping to scoop the resulting expansion of liquidity. Some states have been compelled to replicate the model in their own countries, others states have been tempted to finance it by buying U.S. assets, and pretty much all states have been pulled into an unprecedented global whirlpool of capital flow.

The spread of ‘financialization’, though, has only been party successful. For a while, the United States benefited from being able to control, manipulate and leverage this expansion for its own ends. But in the opinion of many, the growing severity of recent financial, economic and military crises suggests that this ability has been greatly reduced and that U.S. hegemony is now coming to an end.

Capital Flow and Transnational Ownership

The highly publicized nature of these imperial misgivings makes this latest version of the nexus seems persuasive. But when we look more closely at the facts, the theoretical surface no longer seems smooth; and as we get even closer to the evidence, cracks begin to appear.

Start with the cross-border flow of capital, the international manifestation of ‘financialization’. This process is often misunderstood, even by high theorists, so a brief clarification is in order. Contrary to popular belief, the flow of capital is financial, and only financial. It consists of legal transactions, whereby investors in one country buy or sell assets in another – and that is it. There is no flow of material or immaterial resources, productive or otherwise. The only things that move are ownership titles.¹⁶

These changes in ownership, of course, are of great importance. If the flow of capital is large enough, the stock of foreign owned assets will grow relative to domestically owned assets. And as the ratio rises, the ownership of capital becomes increasingly transnational.

The history of this process, from 1870 to the present, is sketched in Figure 1, where we plot the total value of all foreign assets as a percent of global GDP (both denominated in dollars). The underling numbers, admittedly, are not very accurate. The raw data on foreign ownership are scarce; often they are of questionable quality; rarely if ever are they available on a consistent basis; and almost always they require painstaking research to collate and heroic assumptions to calibrate. There are also huge problems in estimating global GDP, particularly for earlier periods. But even if we take these severe limitations into consideration, the overall picture seems fairly unambiguous.¹⁷

The figure shows three clear periods: 1870-1900, 1900-1960 and 1960-2003. The late nineteenth century, marked by the imperial expansion of ‘finance capital’, saw the ratio of global foreign assets to global GDP more than double – from 7% in 1870 to 19% in 1900. This upswing was reversed during the first half of the twentieth century. The mayhem created by two world wars and the Great Depression on the one hand and the emergence of domestic ‘institutionalized waste’ on the other undermined the flow of capital and caused the share of foreign ownership to recede. By 1945, with the onset of decolonization under U.S. ‘hegemony’ and the beginning of the Cold War, the ratio of foreign assets to global GDP hit a record low of 5%. This was the nadir. The next half century brought a massive reversal. In the early 1980s, when Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher announced the beginning of neoliberalism, the ratio of foreign assets to GDP was already higher than in 1900; and, by 2003, after a quarter century of exponential growth, it reached an all time high of 122%.

This final number represents a significant level of transnational ownership. According to recent research by the McKinsey Global Institute, between 1990 and 2006 the global proportion of foreign-owned assets has nearly tripled, from 9% to 26% of all world assets (both foreign and domestically-owned). The increase was broadly based: foreign ownership of corporate bonds rose from 7% to 21% of the world total, foreign ownership of government bonds rose from 11% to 31% and foreign ownership of corporate stocks rose from 9% to 27%.¹⁸

The next step is to break the aggregate front and examine the distribution of ownership. This is what we do in Figure 2, which compares the foreign asset shares of British and U.S. owners from 1825 to the present. The chart shows two important differences between the earlier era of ‘classical imperialism’ dominated by Britain and the more recent ‘neo-imperial’ period led by the United States.

First, there is the pattern of decline. British owners saw their share of global assets fall from the mid-nineteenth century onward, but until the end of the century their primacy remained intact. The real challenge came only in the twentieth century, when capital flow decelerated sharply and foreign asset positions were unwound; and it was only in the interwar period, when foreign investment gave way to capital flight, that the share of British owners fell below 50%.

The U.S. experience was very different. U.S. owners achieved their primacy right after the Second World War, when capital flow had already been reduced to a trickle – and that position was undermined the moment capital flow started to pick up. In 1980, when U.S. ‘financialization’ started in earnest, U.S. owners accounted for only 28% of global foreign assets. And by 2003, when record capital flow and the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq prompted many Marxists to pronounce the dawn of an ‘American Empire’, the asset share of U.S. owners was reduced to a mere 18%.

Second, there is the identity of the leading owners. In the previous transition, power shifted from owners in one core country (Britain) to those in another (the United States). By contrast, in the current transition (assuming one indeed is underway) the contenders are often from the periphery. In recent years, owners from China, OPEC, Russia, Brazil, Korea and India, among others, have become major foreign investors with significant international positions – including large stakes in America’s ‘imperial’ debt.

Does this shift of foreign ownership represent the rising hegemony of countries such as China – or is what we are witnessing here yet another mutation of imperialism? Perhaps, as some observers seem to imply, we’ve entered a (neo) neo-imperial order in which the ‘Empire’ actually boosts its power by selling off its assets to the periphery?

The Global Distribution of Profit

Surprising as it may sound, such a sell-off is not inconsistent with the basic theory of hegemonic transition. To reiterate, according to this theory, hegemonic transitions are always marked by a financial explosion which is triggered, led and leveraged by the core in a vain attempt to arrest its imminent decline. Supposedly, this explosion enables the hegemonic power to amplify its financial supremacy in order to (temporarily) retain its core status and power. And if retaining that power requires the devolution of foreign assets and the sell-off of domestic ones, so be it.

The question is how to assess this power. How do we know whether the core’s attempt to leverage global ‘financialization’ is actually working? Is there a meaningful benchmark for power, and how should this benchmark be used and understood?

Unfortunately, most theorists of hegemonic transitions tend to avoid the nitty gritty data, so it’s often unclear how they themselves gauge the shifting trajectories of global power. But given the hyper-capitalist nature of our epoch, it seems pretty safe to begin with the bottom line: net profit.

Net profit is the pivotal magnitude in capitalism. It determines the health of corporations, it tells investors how to capitalize assets, it sets limits on what government officials feel they can and cannot do. It is the ultimate yardstick of capitalist power, the category that subjugates the social individual and makes the whole system tick. It is the one magnitude than no researcher of capitalism can afford to ignore.

With this obvious rationale in mind, consider Figure 3, which traces the distribution of global net profit earned by publicly-traded corporations. The chart, covering the period from 1974 to the present, shows three profit series, each denoting the profit share of a distinct corporate aggregate: (1) firms listed in the United States; (2) firms listed in developed markets excluding the United States; and (3) firms listed in the rest of the world – i.e., in ‘emerging markets’.

The data demonstrate a sharp reversal of fortune. Until the mid-1980s, U.S.-listed firms dominated: they scooped roughly 60% of all net profits, leaving firms listed in other developed markets 35% of the total and those listed in ‘emerging market’ less than 5%.

But then the tables turned. During the second half of the 1980s, the net profit share of U.S.-listed firms plummeted, falling to 36% in less than a decade. The 1990s seemed to have stabilized the decline, but in the early 2000s the downward drift resumed. By the end of the decade, U.S. firms saw their net profit fall to 29% of the world total.

The other two aggregates moved in the opposite direction. By 2009, the profits of firms listed in developed countries other than the U.S. reached 53% of the total, while the share of ‘emerging market’ firms quadrupled to 18%.

These numbers, of course, should be interpreted with care. First, note that our profit data here cover only publicly traded firms; they don’t include unlisted, private firms. This fact means that variations in profit shares reflect two very different processes: (1) changes in the amount of profit earned by listed firms, and (2) the pace of listing and delisting of firms. The latter factor became important during the late 1980s and 1990s, when Europe and the ‘emerging markets’ saw their stock market listings swell with many private corporations going public – this at a time when the number of listed firms in the United States remained flat.

Second, the location of a firm’s listing says nothing about its operations and owners. Many firms whose shares are traded in the financial centres of the United States and Europe in fact operate elsewhere. And then there is the issue of ultimate ownership. Recall that currently one third of all global assets are owned by foreigners. This proportion is already large enough to make it difficult to determine the ‘nationality of capital’, and if it were to rise further the whole endeavour would become an exercise in futility.

The theoretical implications of these caveats have received little or no attention from students of hegemonic transitions, and their quantitative implications remain unclear. But even if we take the ‘nationality of capital’ at face value and consider the numbers in Figure 3 as accurate, it remains obvious that ‘financialization’ has not worked for the hegemonic power: despite the alleged omnipotence of its Wall Street-Washington Complex, despite its control over key international organizations, despite having imposed neoliberalism on the rest of the world, and despite its seemingly limitless ability to borrow funds and suck in global liquidity – the bottom line is that the net profit share of U.S. listed corporations has kept falling and falling.

The Engine of ‘Financialization’

Now, in and of itself, the collapse of the U.S. profit share – much like the sell-off of U.S. assets – isn’t at odds with the theory of hegemonic transition. To repeat, this theory suggests that the hegemonic/imperial power, having been weakened by its prior financial excesses (among other ills), will kick-start, promote and sustain a system-wide process of ‘financialization’. According to the theory, the latent purpose is to leverage this process in order to slow down the hegemon’s own decline – but nowhere does the theory say that this ‘strategy’, whether conscious or not, has to succeed.

Presented in this way, the story sounds historically compelling, logically consistent and empirically convincing – but only if we can first establish one basic fact. We need to show that the global process of ‘financialization’ indeed has been led by the United States. This is the starting point. Only if U.S. ‘financialization’ preceded, was bigger than and propelled ‘financialization’ in the rest of the world can we speak of the U.S. leveraging this process for its own ends. And only then can we assess whether that leveraging succeeded or failed.

So let’s look at the evidence.

Concepts and Methods

The initial step in this sequence is to measure ‘financialization’. Conceptually, the task may seem simple. All we need to do is calculate the share of financial activity in overall economic activity and then trace the trajectory of the resulting ratio. When this ratio goes up, we can say that the economy is being ‘financialized’; when it comes down we would conclude that it is being ‘de-financialized’.

But that’s easier said than done.¹⁹

The basic difficulty is that capitalism is mediated through money, and that fact makes every mediated activity both ‘economic’ and ‘financial’ at the same time. As we have already seen, heterodox economists bypass the problem by defining ‘finance’ more narrowly to denote activities that merely shuffle money and credit without producing ‘real’ goods and services (and obviously without generating any surplus value and ‘actual capital’). Unfortunately, though, this yardstick isn’t very practical. In order to use it, the economist needs to know which activity is ‘productive’ and which is not; and yet, strange as it may sound, this is something that economists do not – and indeed cannot – know. Despite hundreds of years of theorizing and endless claims to the contrary, they remain unable to actually measure ‘productivity’. They cannot quantify the productivity of the CEO of a large bank – or of an auto mechanic for that matter. In fact, they don’t even have the units with which to measure such productivity.

The only thing they can do is to assume. Mainstream economists assume that productivity is ‘revealed’ by income, so if the CEO earns 1,000 times more than the mechanic, he must be 1,000 more productive. Marxists reject this arbitrary assumption; instead, they stipulate, also arbitrarily, that financiers are unproductive while mechanics are productive – although this claim still leaves them unsure of how to treat actual corporations, where ‘unproductive’ and ‘productive’ activities are always inextricably intertwined.

The net result is that we don’t have a clear theoretical definition for ‘finance’ and therefore no objective way to assess the extent of ‘financialization’.

But not all is lost.

We certainly can stick with conventions – and the convention, at least among capitalists and investors, is to treat ‘finance’ as synonymous with the FIRE sector; i.e., with firms whose primary activities involve financial intermediation (banking, trust funds, brokerages, etc.), insurance or real estate.

Based on this conventional (albeit theoretically loose) definition of finance, and given our specific concern here with capitalist power, it seems appropriate to proxy the extent and trajectory of ‘financialization’ by looking at the share of total net profit accounted for by FIRE corporations. The magnitude of this share would indicate the extent to which FIRE firms have been able to leverage ‘financialization’ for their own end, and the way this share changes over time would tell us whether their leverage has increased or decreased.

The Inconvenient Facts

This distributional measure of ‘financialization’ is depicted by the two series in Figure 4. The first series shows the net profit of FIRE corporations as a percent of the net profit of all U.S.-listed firms. The second series computes the same ratio for firms listed outside the United States.

And here we run into a little surprise.

According to the theory of hegemonic transition, the engine of ‘financialization’ is the United States. This is the black hole of the World System. It is the site where finance has been used most extensively to absorb the system’s surplus. It is the seat of the all-powerful Wall Street-Washington Complex. It is where neoliberal ideology first took command and from where it was later imposed with force and temptation on the rest of the world. It is the engine that led, pulled and pushed the entire process.

But the facts in Figure 4 seem to tell a different story. According to the chart, the United Sates has not been leading the process. If anything, it seems to have been ‘dragged’ into the process by the rest of the world. …

During the early 1970s, before the onset of systemic ‘financialization’, the U.S. FIRE sector accounted for 6% of the total net profit of U.S.-listed firms. At the time, the comparable figure for the rest of the world was 18% – three times as high! From then on, the United States was merely playing catch-up. Its pace of ‘financialization’ was faster than in the rest of the world; but with the sole exception of a brief period in the late 1990s, its level of ‘financialization’ was always lower. In other words, if we wish to stick with the theory of a finance-fuelled red giant that is slowly imploding as its peripheral liquidly runs out, we should apply that theory not to the United States, but to the rest of the world!

Indeed, even the most recent period of crisis seems at odds with the theory. According to the conventional creed, both left and right, the current crisis is payback for the sins of excessive ‘financialization’ and improper bubble blowing.²⁰ In this Galtonean theory, deviations and distortions always revert to mean, ensuring that the biggest sinners end up suffering the most. And since the U.S. FIRE sector was supposedly the main culprit, it was also the hardest hit.

The only problem is that, according to Figure 4, the U.S. wasn’t the main culprit. On the eve of the crisis, the extent of ‘financialization’ was greater in the rest of the world than in the U.S. And yet, although the world’s financiers committed the greater sin, it was their U.S. counterparts who paid the heftier price. The former saw their profit share decline mildly from 37% to 25% of the total, while the latter watched their own share crash from 32% to 10%.

The gods of finance must have their own sense of justice.

The End of a Nexus?

Of course, this isn’t the first time that a monkey wrench has been thrown into the wheels of the ever-changing nexus of imperialism and financialism. As we have seen, over the past century the nexus had to be repeatedly altered and transformed to match the changing reality. Its first incarnation explained the imperialist scramble for colonies to which finance capital could export its ‘excessive’ surplus. The next version talked of a neo-imperial world of monopoly capitalism where the core’s surplus is absorbed domestically, sucked into a ‘black hole’ of military spending and financial intermediation. The third script postulated a World System where surplus is imported from the dependent periphery into the financial core. And the most recent edition explains the hollowing out of the U.S. core, a ‘red giant’ that had already burned much of its own productive fuel and is now trying to ‘financialize’ the rest of the world in order to use the system’s external liquidity.

Yet, here, too, the facts refuse to cooperate: contrary to the theory, they suggest that U.S. ‘Empire’ has followed rather than led the global process of ‘financialization’ and that U.S. capitalists have been less dependent on finance than their peers elsewhere.

Of course, this inconvenient evidence could be dismissed as cursory – or, better still, neutralized by again adjusting the meaning of imperialism and financialism to fit the new reality. But maybe it’s time to stop the carousel and cease the repeated retrofits. Perhaps we need to admit that, after a century of transmutations, the nexus of imperialism and financialism has run its course, and that we need a new framework altogether.

1. The precise terms are rather loose and their use varies across theorists and over time. Imperialism, empire and colonialism are used interchangeably, as are finance, fictitious capital finance capital, financialization and financialism. Here we use imperialism and financialism simply because they rhyme.
2. John. A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1902 [1965]); Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital, with an introduction by Joan Robinson, translated by A. Schwarzschild (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1913 [1951]); Rudolf Hilferding, Finance Capital: A Study of the Latest Phase of Capitalist Development, edited with an introduction by Tom Bottomore, from a translation by Morris Watnick and Sam Gordon (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1910 [1981]); Vladimir I. Lenin, ‘Imperialism, The Highest State of Capitalism’, in Essential Works of Lenin. ‘What Is to Be Done?’ and Other Writings (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1917 [1987]), p. 177-270; Karl Kautsky, ‘Ultra-Imperialism’, New Left Review, 1970, No. 59 (Jan/Feb), p. 41-46 (original German version published in 1914).
3. See, for example, Joseph A. Schumpeter, Imperialism and Social Classes, with an introduction by Bert Hoselitz, translated by Heinz Norden (New York: Meridian Books, 1919; 1927 [1955]); Barbara Wertheim Tuchman, The Guns of August (New York: Macmillan, 1962) and The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914 (New York: Macmillan, 1966); and Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (New York: Random House, 1987), Ch. 5.
4. Some of the important contributions to this literature include Josef Steindl, Maturity and Stagnation in American Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1952 [1976]); Shigeto Tsuru, ‘Has Capitalism Changed?’ in Has Capitalism Changed? An International Symposium on the Nature of Contemporary Capitalism, edited by S. Tsuru (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1956), p. 1-66. Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order (New York: Modern Reader Paperbacks, 1966); and Harry Magdoff, The Age of Imperialism: The Economics of U.S. Foreign Policy, 1st Modern Reader ed. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969).
5. Veblen’s early analysis is articulated in The Theory of Business Enterprise (Clifton, New Jersey: Augustus M. Kelley, Reprints of Economics Classics, 1904 [1975]).
6. See U.S. National Security Council, NSC 68: United States Objectives and Programs for National Security. A Report to the President Pursuant to the President’s Directive of January 31, 1950. Top Secret (Washington DC, 1950); David A. Gold, ‘The Rise and Fall of the Keynesian Coalition’, Kapitalistate, 1977, Vol. 6, No. 1, p. 129-161; and Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler, ‘Cheap Wars’, Tikkun, August 9, 2006.
7. Classical Marxists interpret the role of waste rather differently. In their account, wasteful spending withdraws surplus from the accumulation process; this withdrawal reduces the pace at which constant capital accumulates; and that reduction lessens the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. See for example Michael Kidron, Capitalism and Theory (London: Pluto Press, 1974).
8. Perhaps the clearest advocate of this argument was the late Harry Magdoff, a writer whose empirical and theoretical studies stand as a beacon of scientific research; for a summary, see his Imperialism Without Colonies (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2003). Similar claims (minus the research) are offered by Ellen Meiksins Wood, Empire of Capital (London and New York: Verso, 2003).
9. Some of the important texts here include Raúl Prebisch, The Economic Development of Latin America and its Principal Problems (New York: United Nations, 1950); Paul A. Baran, The Political Economy of Growth (New York and London: Modern Reader Paperbacks, 1957); Andre Gunder Frank, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America: Historical studies of Chile and Brazil (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967); Arghiri Emmanuel, Unequal Exchange. A Study of the Imperialism of Trade (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972); Eduardo H. Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973). Samir Amin, Accumulation on a World Scale: A Critique of the Theory of Underdevelopment. 2 vols. (New York: Monthly Review Press. 1974); Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein, The Modern World-System. Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1974) and The Modern World-System II: Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World-Economy, 1600-1750 (New York: Academic Press, 1980); and Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, Dependency and Development in Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979).
10. The inverted commas in this paragraph highlight concepts that the theory of unequal exchange can neither define nor measure. Since nobody knows the correct value of labour power, it is impossible to determine the extent of ‘exploitation’ in the two regions. Similarly, since no one knows the ‘true’ value of commodities, there is no way to assess the extent to which export and import prices are ‘high’ or ‘low’. This latter ignorance makes it impossible to gauge the degree to which the terms of trade are ‘distorted’ and, indeed, in whose favour; and given that we don’t know the magnitude or even the direction of the ‘distortion’, it is impossible to tell whether surplus flows from the periphery to the core or vice versa, and how large the flow might be.
11. W.W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1960).
12. The question of what constitutes a ‘proper’ Marxist framework is highlighted in the debates over the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Important contributions to these debates are Maurice Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1946. [1963]); Paul M. Sweezy ‘A Critique’, in The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism, Introduction by Rodney Hilton, edited by R. Hilton (London: Verso, 1950 [1978]); Robert Brenner, ‘The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism’, New Left Review, 1977, No. 104 (July-August), p. 25-92; and Robert Brenner, ‘Dobb on the Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism’, Cambridge Journal of Economics, 1978, Vol. 2, No. 2 (June), p. 121-140. For edited volumes on this issue, see Rodney Hilton, ed., The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism, Introduction by Rodney Hilton (London: Verso, 1978); and T. H. Aston and C. H. E. Philpin, eds., The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
13. For a typical narrative, see John M. Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation. (Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press. 2004).
14. See for example, Fernand Braudel, Civilization & Capitalism, 15th-18th Century, translated from the French and revised by Sian Reynolds, 3 vols. (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1985); Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein, The Politics of the World-Economy: The States, the Movements, and the Civilizations (Cambridge, New York and Paris: Cambridge University Press and Editions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 1984); and Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times. London: Verso, 1994.
15. For the ‘depletion thesis’, see for example Seymour Melman, Pentagon Capitalism: The Political Economy of War, 1st ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970) and The Permanent War Economy: American Capitalism in Decline (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974). A broader historical application is given in Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (New York, NY: Random House: 1987).
16. The generalization here applies to portfolio as well as direct foreign investment. Both are financial transactions, pure and simple. The only difference between them is their relative size: typically, investments that account for less than 10% of the acquired property are considered portfolio, whereas larger investments are classified as direct. The flow of capital, whether portfolio or direct, may or may not be followed by the creation of new productive capacity. But the creation of such capacity, if and when it happens, is conceptually distinct, temporally separate and causally independent from the mere act of foreign investment.
17. The early data on foreign assets are incomplete in that they do not cover all countries (especially smaller ones). As a result, the measured ratio of foreign assets to global GDP in the earlier years of the chart may be somewhat understated (see Maurice Obstfeld and Alan. M. Taylor, Global Capital Markets: Integration, Crisis and Growth [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004], p. 51-57).
18. See Diana Farrell, Susan Lund, Christian Fölster, Raphael Bick, Moira Pierce, and Charles Atkins, Mapping Global Capital Markets. Fourth Annual Report (San Francisco: McKinsey Global Institute, January 2008), p. 73, Exhibit 3.10.
19. For a detailed analysis of the associated difficulties and impossibilities that we discuss here only in passing, see Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler, Capital as Power: A Study of Order and Creorder (New York and London: Routledge, 2009), Chs. 6-8 and 10; and Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan, ‘Contours of Crisis II: Fiction and Reality’, Dollars & Sense, April 28, 2009.
20. See Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan, ‘Contours of Crisis: Plus ça change, plus c’est pareil?’ Dollars & Sense, December 29, 2008; and ‘Contours of Crisis II: Fiction and Reality’, Dollars & Sense, April 28, 2009.

Instead of adopting adopting a single-payer plan, which would both cover everyone and be the most cost-effective solution, they’re going to pass an outrageous insurance-and-drug-industry-friendly bill. Then, they’ll brag about how they passed “landmark legislation.”

At least until the bills come due and the government goes bankrupt.

Despite the armed racist mobs turning their brains off and running their mouths at town halls (Trotsky called them “human dust” in his day), Congress will pass and President Obama will sign into law something mislabelled health care reform. The devil, as always, is in the details.

First and foremost, a robust public option is pretty much off the table, and with it, anything meaningful, substantive, or worthy of the name “reform.” A public option would be a government-run single-payer health insurance program similar to Medicare. You know, that big scary socialist-fascist-communist-anti-American-beginning-of-the-Gulag government program that has sent tens of thousands of patriots to their graves thanks to Soviet death panels? Yeah, that Medicare.

Despite their trash talk, Republicans in Congress refused to kill Medicare in a recent vote. Not a single Republican would vote against this diabolical Marxist scheme. We ought to deport these single-payer-loving commies back to Cuba where they belong, but only after some “enhanced interrogation” at Gitmo, of course. We can start with Michelle Bachmann. At least then she’ll have something real to fear for a change.

President Obama said “those who profit from the status quo” are behind the efforts to sabotage the legislation. The funny thing is, he gave them a seat at the health care reform table in an effort to buy their acquiescence. Instead of going to war with the institutions that have a vested interest in sabotaging his agenda, the president allowed them to shape the legislation. This is Dick Cheney’s Energy Task Force all over again, except its out in the open. When people voted for change, they weren’t voting for lobbyists to use the front door of the White House instead of the back door.

At a “historic” summit, Obama announced that hospitals, drug and insurance industries, and doctors’ associations agreed to $2 trillion savings over the next 10 years. But as the New York Times noted, “None of the proposals are enforceable, and none of the savings are guaranteed. … At this point, cost control is little more than a shared aspiration.”

Obama surrendered any hope of meaningful health care reform in exchange for – nothing. Absolutely nothing. The drug companies, for example, agreed to voluntarily cut costs by $80 billion over the next 10 years. In exchange, the legislation won’t legalize the re-importation of cheaper drugs from abroad, and there won’t be government negotiation of drug prices for Medicare beneficiaries. (For anyone who’s counting, that’s another campaign promise Obama reneged on and another Bush policy he’s adopted.)

Never mind the fact that these agreements don’t have the force of law behind them. Never mind that they are so vague as to be totally meaningless. Never mind the lack of an enforcement mechanism in case these industries don’t live up to their obligations. While we’re at it, never mind health care reform.

The reason the Right is screaming against a single-payer or public option is very simple: it works. Cheap, universal, quality health care coverage is what the drug companies, insurance crooks, doctors’ organizations, and the rest of the health care industrial complex are so deathly afraid of. They stand to lose hundreds of billions of dollars and could be driven out of business if the profit motive is removed from the health care equation.

We get the least bang for the buck because our system is set up to get the private sector the most buck for the bang. In McAllen, Texas, where medical costs are among the highest in the nation, an investigative journalist found that doctors did all kinds of medically unnecessary procedures to increase their income. One doctor claimed that ordering superfluous tests was a necessary evil to avoid lawsuits, to which a general surgeon replied, “We all know these arguments are bullshit. There is overutilization here, pure and simple. … [T]he way to practice medicine has changed completely. Before, it was about how to do a good job. Now it is about ‘How much will you benefit?’”

The fee-for-service system, where doctors get paid every time they run a test, see a patient, do a procedure, etc., is one of the reasons health care is so costly. The Mayo Clinic, which Obama touts as a model for the nation, keeps costs low and has excellent outcomes because their doctors are essentially proles. They work under one year contracts for a salary instead of deriving their incomes from individual services performed.

None of the legislation in Congress would touch the fee-for-service system.

David Roderick, the chairmen of U.S. Steel, once commented: “US Steel is not in the business of making steel. It is in the business of making money.” Ditto for doctors’ associations, insurance companies, hospitals, and pharmaceutical giants. They’re not in the business of helping sick people, they’re in the business of making money. The health care system can either prioritize making money, or it can prioritize delivering the best possible health care for the population. It can’t do both.

Private sector profits are at the heart of why the U.S. health care system is number one in the world when it comes to costs but is 72nd in terms of the health of its population.

Plans that fail to address this issue are doomed. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) says that none of the plans under consideration by Congress would halt or reverse health care inflation. (By contrast, the CBO says single-payer would save $1 trillion(!) over the course of a decade, yet no fiscal conservatives are screaming for single-payer at the town halls.)

Obama’s version of the public option is not even worthy of the name. He says, “it shouldn’t be something that’s simply a taxpayer-subsidized system that [isn't] accountable, but rather [has] to be self-sustaining through premiums and that [has] to compete with private insurers.” For those who don’t spend their lives inside the Beltway, here’s the translation: I don’t want to drive the insurance industry out of business with an effective public option that would provide cheap quality health care for everyone. So, I want the government plan to emulate what the private sector does, even though those practices are what’s creating the rapid inflation and terrible outcomes for patients in the first place.

Setting up a public option this way guarantees it’ll be a miserable failure. Not only would it lead to political blowback that could dislodge the Democrats from power (not that I care), it would discredit the very idea of a public option (which I do care about). On top of that, it’d make the health care system even more dysfunctional, chaotic, and costly than it already is. It’d do for the Democratic Party what the Bush’s Iraq war did for the Republicans.

Sadly, it looks like we won’t even get the half-assed version of the public option described above, mainly because the insurance industry spent $11 million since 2007 getting Democrats elected to Congress. The Democrats are prepared to bear the political consequences of a deeply flawed version of the public option without even delivering it. In all likelihood, cooperatives will take the place of a public option, thanks to Senate Finance Committee, which the White House directed industry lobbyists to work with.

That’s right: President Obama directed industry lobbyists to focus their efforts on the Senate Finance Committee. Your president has betrayed you.

After the legislation passes, health care decisions will continue to be made exclusively by penny-pinching insurance company bureaucrats. Medical bills will continue to be the number one reason people declare bankruptcy. Denying people coverage because of preexisting conditions will be outlawed, which is well and good. But lawyers and accountants for the insurance companies have probably figured out a way around the ban: charge people with preexisting conditions ten, a hundred, or a thousand times more than the average policyholder. Those who are too poor or sick to buy private insurance will be forced into the co-op system, which will be quickly overloaded and become insolvent. The government will then be forced to either subsidize co-ops with taxpayer dollars, kick people off the rolls, charge them higher rates, or some combination of all three.

The bottom line is that whatever passes promises to be a costly, ineffective failure.

The health care industrial complex is in a win-win situation. If reform fails to pass because right-wing Democrats join the miserable Republican rump, they win. If reform without a real public option, they win. An aide to the Senate Finance Committee admitted, “The bottom line is that health reform would lead to increased revenues and profits.” The law that passes will make buying health insurance coverage mandatory for all Americans. That will boost the industry’s profits as almost 50 million Americas are forced into the insurance marketplace, aided by small tax credits.

Obama said, “I would rather do the right thing and have one term than be mediocre and have two.” At this rate, he won’t be forced to choose. American history has plenty of one-term mediocrities who broke campaign promises at the behest of Corporate America.

The workers were likely justified in their calculations of job cuts. From the point of view of American experience it just seems like common sense to worry that a capital enterprise is going to eventually fire half or more of its workers. Why would privatization behave any differently in China than it does here?

There are exceptions of course. Jim Cramer recently introduced his television audience to the CEO of USA steel producer Nucor who has cut capacity in half without laying-off any workers. At Nucor workers have been kept on payroll, but hours have been drastically cut. Nucor is a remarkable exception to the rule of private capital.

Shifting our point of view to Chinese workers, we can read statements by Communist Party officials exhorting the people to imitate methods of efficiency that are studied by every B-School MBA: mergers, capacity cuts, new “efficiencies” of technology. Now that the Communist Party has primed the pump of capital development, there are certain objective laws that must be obeyed.

I don’t recall reading where a Communist Party official called for layoffs outright, but anyone who has studied Capital Volume One can figure out what results from mergers, downsizing, and technology upgrades. Marx snidely called the beneficiaries “free workers” which is exactly what the workers of Tonghua steel decided not to be.

In the USA we have some rules about layoffs and shutdowns which require some employers to give proper notice in the form of time or money. Despite these rules, a half million workers per month are being “set free.” In many cases the employers express genuine regret as they appeal to objective laws of sustainable business plans.

On both sides of the Pacific, capital is undergoing development in ways that workers well understand. The Tonghua steel workers simply did the math.

What appears to be missing on both sides of the Pacific is some sort of regulation of the labor market such that jobs lost at one site are correlated in real time to jobs created at another. Or to put the question more carefully, when capital development in one place subtracts a labor cost, what coordinates the addition of an equal labor cost somewhere else?

We are hearing so much these days about the heroic expansion of monetary and sovereign balance sheets. Where is the heroic balance sheet for labor costs, whether in America or the People’s Republic?

Taking a cue from the logic of cap and trade, such a balance sheet for labor might be called catch and trade. Get a license to carry capital only if you take out an obligation to return a portion of labor costs. This is only fair, since capital is no good to anyone without the jobs that will be needed to employ it. You just promise to pay for those jobs so long as your capital permit shall last. If your business plan later calls for capital development to eliminate jobs, then you either keep paying the labor costs you agreed to earlier or you trade that labor cost off to some other capital carrier.

This system would not necessarily transfer the worker, but it would seek to keep the total labor costs of the capital-carrying marketplace at a level that would enable workers to enter a robust labor market at any time.

As it stands in conception so far, a catch and trade system would be indifferent to whether an employer is private or not. What difference does it make to a worker whether the capital that he brings to life is financed by private or sovereign credit?

In the crisis we face today, it is still an open question whether capital will be better managed by capitalists or communists. At the Tonghua Steel plant, the question was not academic. 25,000 precious jobs were at stake. The Chinese steel workers were saying something important for all of us. They were saying that employment should be taken much more seriously by the folks who would carry capital around these days. They saw a jobless recovery in their future and they said hell no.

The same general logic applies to credit and debt. Our current crisis of labor and capital in the USA was produced by a wealth implosion that followed from certain objective laws of credit. Individuals and corporations helped to overheat the credit structure from below, happily assisted by financiers whose business it should have been to more responsibly coordinate the total credit picture.

In many cases, the debt load is still sustainable and credit scores are good. But many other individuals and corporations got caught “under water.” I don’t think of all the victims as a foolish class. There was a zeit-geist which had so many people thinking that they were part of a system that could keep going. What was more difficult to see, although it was pointed out plenty of times, was how the sum of our actions added up to a toxic level of credit and debt.

The helpful thing about cap-and-trade logic is that it recognizes some system-wide quantity that is a matter of public concern and provides some real-time market pressure on that basis. A cap on system-wide credit might have helped to keep development sustainable.

From China the daily news brings us a headline that expresses the collective fear of labor markets around the globe. Joblessness is not the road to recovery. How else can we say it loud and clear?

To turn the picture right side up, we begin with the biggest lesson from the financial sucker punch hitting workers of the world this year–human value comes from having real work to do.

Today’s value crisis hits hardest where profits–and this is why they are called earnings–are failing to produce new tools. This is the demand crisis. Our demand that leaders take better care of the people’s tools has not been heard.

Of course, as the great London philosopher sez in Capital Volume One, tools are contradictory things. The better tools get, the fewer workers needed per unit. Hence the labor-management contradiction. Hence the iron law of social revolution. Dearborn, then and now. Once you start making better tools you can’t help but create–what shall we call it? Change?

And the big problem with change is that people try to go around or over or under or WITHOUT the progressive re-production of tools. No new tools, no real change.

Capitalism is of course the holy system which speaks the language of the Gospel and promises to keep tool making dynamic and efficient so that value flies up from work. And it does have a metaphysical charm owing to our impression that profit and tools derive from some conjoined living form.

The great San Francisco economist Henry George said interest payments are legitimate social demands because the wealth we put back into tools needs to grow like anything else. Of course any living thing can demand disgusting amounts of fodder and grow to obscene proportions on that basis, but it should not use the words of Henry George as an excuse for that.

Now, if we are consistent in our terminology here, we could say that anyone who kills the living conjunction between earnings and tools can be considered anti-capital. But if we were consistent in just this way, we would demand triple damages from Wall Street for a trillion or more anti-capital crimes.

Instead of consistent terminology, however, what we are getting fed these days is nonsense soup. For example, in my home there is an electric soap box where people sit for hours yammering about how outraged they are at outsized cash payments going to workers at institutions who once made a contest of stashing wages and profits into silos that nobody can find.

Well, who was it let go of that money in the first place? Who should demand it back? Predatory lending is piracy. Predatory lending that inflates a mortgage bubble is piracy. To find pirates, you don’t have to go all the way to Tortuga or Mogadishu.

Today there is some question about how to value “toxic assets” that derive from predatory debt. But there’s a simple way to value the cost of such piracy. How much would it cost to give every penny back?

We can solve this demand crisis in at least two ways. First, we could demand that all the pirate trunks of “toxic assets” be loaded onto flatbed trucks and driven back to California where they belong. Overnight, California would need no more I.O.U.’s.

Or second–because to be honest about it we secretly admire pirates and sometimes find ourselves dreaming that we could join them–we can demand that all these big-bonus banking houses show us how they are putting their talents to work funding the next generation of tools that we have been needing as a nation since about this time last year.

We demand that they assist California, too.

Meanwhile, we know what the yammering soap boxers want us to believe about the demand crisis. They want us to believe anything really that will keep us from connecting the dots. In that direction there’s a demand crisis, too.

When we look around the world we see a number of leaders – Chávez is one of them but not the only one – who, over the last eight years, have become more and more negative and oppositional to the United States. The prior administration tried to isolate them, tried to support opposition to them, tried to turn them into international pariahs. It didn’t work.

We are going to see what other approaches might work. We have no guarantees that we can create a better relationship with someone who has a different view of politics, the economy, and so much else. But we think it’s worth trying to just explore this and see what comes of it. I don’t think that in today’s world — a multipolar world where we are competing for attention and relationships with at least the Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians — it’s in our interest to turn our backs on countries in our own hemisphere.

So we’re going to try some different approaches. No illusions about who we’re dealing with or what the issues are. But I think it’s worth a try, because what we’ve been doing hasn’t worked very well. In fact, if you look at the gains, particularly in Latin America, that Iran is making and China is making, it’s quite disturbing. They are building very strong economic and political connections with a lot of these leaders. I don’t think that’s in our interest.

I’m certainly open to constructive criticism and ideas, but – we talked about exchanging ambassadors again with Chávez, which I think we will do at some point. We are looking to figure out how to deal with Ortega. The Iranians are building a huge embassy in Managua, and you can only imagine what it’s for.

We want to try to build better relationships with [Ecuador's Rafael] Correa, and we want to see if we can figure out how to get an ambassador back and work with [Evo] Morales in Bolivia.

We’re facing an almost united front against the United States regarding Cuba. Every country, even those with whom we are closest, is saying ‘you’ve got to change, you can’t keep doing what you’re doing.’ We would like to see some reciprocity from the Castros on political prisoners, human rights, and other matters.

So we’re looking at a number of different relationships and trying to figure out whether we can be more productive. My bottom line is: What’s best for America? How do we try to influence behavior that is more in our interest than not? And that’s how we’re looking at it.

– US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Address to State Department Employees, May 1, 2009

In resisting the aggressions of the most powerful empire ever to have existed, our people fought for the other sister peoples of this continent. The OAS was an accomplice of all the crimes committed against Cuba.

At one moment or another, the totality of the countries of Latin America were victims of interventions and political and economic aggression. There is not one single one that can deny that. It is ingenuous to believe that the good intentions of a president of the United States can justify the existence of that institution that opened the gates to the Trojan horse that backed the Summits of the Americas, neoliberalism, drug trafficking, military bases and economic crises. Ignorance, underdevelopment, economic dependence, poverty, the forced return of those who emigrate in search of work, the brain drain, and even the sophisticated weapons of organized crime were the consequences of interventions and plundering proceeding from the North. Cuba, a little country, has demonstrated that it can resist the blockade and advance in many fields, and even cooperate with other countries.

– Fidel Castro, “The Trojan Horse,” June 2, 2009

Washington “pretty much by itself”

On June 3, at the end of a a Ministerial Conference of the Organization of American States (OAS) in San Pedro Sula, Honduras – and while President Barack Obama was the recepient of lavish pomp and circumstance by the absolutist monarchy and semi-feudal dictatorship of the House of Saud in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia – Washington’s delegation, led by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, patched together a last-minute, highly-diluted resolution that allowed Washington to save some face and prevent an abject political humiliation over its anti-Cuba policy. Nevertheless the gathering registered a further retreat by a clearly stung Washington in the face of overwhelming Hemispheric (and international) opposition to the decades-long US economic and political war – and permanent military intimidation and threats – against revolutionary and socialist Cuba.

Washington continues to hold onto the core of its bipartisan policy of demanding the overturning of the Cuban government and promoting the consequent return of US economic, financial, and political domination. But, in doing so, Washington, under the Obama Administration, was forced, at San Pedro Sula, to jettison yet another legal prop cushioning and justifying the core policy, in this case a US-promoted 1962 resolution expelling Cuba from the OAS.

According to an article in the May 31, 2009 USA Today the Obama Administration went into the Conference prepared to accept the abrogation of the 1962 resolution and retreat to a position of setting political conditions for Cuba’s “membership” in an Hemispheric body which the Cuban revolutionaries view with contempt as an historic tool of US imperialism against Latin America and the Caribbean. Other national delegations, led by Nicaragua and Venezuela, put forward a position of opposing any conditions on Cuba. This view was apparently supported by at least the two-thirds majority needed to pass if things had moved to an open and public vote. But a push for an up-or-down vote did not happen and apparently an accomodation was made to Washington’s “needs.”

When the US delegation found no support for specific language deliniating its political conditions – the usual demagogic and hypocritical boilerplate about “democracy,” “political prisoners,” “free elections,” and so on – the Clinton-led team was reduced to conjuring up language, mealy-mouthed enough to reach “consensus,” that could be nevertheless be spun into a stick to attack Cuba and maintain Washington’s core, unchanged agenda.

The language within the actual resolution, passed by acclamation, reads “…that Cuba’s participation in the OAS would be the result of a dialogue initiated at the government of Cuba’s request and in conformity with the practices, purposes and principles of the OAS.”

Dan Restrepo, who is a special assistant to President Obama and senior director for Western Hemisphere affairs on the U.S. National Security Council said, “What we’ve seen today is really a testament to the hard work of multilateral diplomacy…The United States and other countries from various parts in the hemisphere fought, defended and prevailed in saying that this was not an automatic process, that ‘yes, let’s leave an argument of the past in the past, let’s not become prisoners of the past, but let us ensure that we are defending the basic principles of democracy and human rights and nonintervention and noninterference as the path forward to Cuba’s return to the organization.”

In an article in the June 5 Washington Post – based on mostly unattributed interviews with “diplomats” and obviously spun by US officials to present what happened in the most positive light – it was reported that polarization, rupture, and even the possible disintegration of the OAS appeared imminent. At one point, before bolting to the Middle East to join Obama, Clinton had blurted out the reality that Washington was “pretty much by itself” in the discussions over Cuba at the OAS Conference.

The Post piece further asserts that “The United States compromised more than it ever had in the OAS on the Cuba issue, diplomats said, and it mustered its most impressive diplomatic firepower to get a deal – with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton leading the delegation and [President] Obama calling Brazilian President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva.”

On the defensive throughout the San Pedro Sula Conference, Clinton took the line that the new Obama Administration had already done so much to reverse Bush’s “failed” policy on Cuba that they were actually taken aback by how little this had softened the united, clear, and unwavering call by all governments and countries across the Americas for Washington to immediately and unilaterally end all economic and travel sanctions against Cuba.

“I want to emphasize the United States under President Obama is taking a completely new approach to our policy toward Cuba: We have eased restrictions on family travel and remittances,” Clinton said. “As I was getting ready in my hotel room this morning, I had CNN on and I saw just a tearful reunion between a man and his little baby boy who he hadn’t seen in a year and a half because of the prior travel restrictions.” Clinton added that the Obama Administration had also authorized telecommunications links with Cuba supported resuming bilateral talks on immigration and direct mail.

“We are not interested in fighting old battles or living in the past,” she said in the text of a speech prepared for delivery to the group. “At the same time, we will always defend the timeless principles of democracy, human rights, and the rule of law.” Of course the whole “past” of US interventions and subversion in the Americas shows a vicious disregard for the “timeless principles of democracy, human rights, and the rule of law.”

The Post article tells us that “Nicaragua and Venezuela were threatening to quit the group unless Cuba was readmitted…And there was a possibility that members could put the issue to a vote, leaving the United States alone on the losing side, which would have caused a backlash in Congress.” Republican and Democratic Congessional Representatives most strongly identified with the counter-revolutionary elements in the Cuban-American community tied to decades of terrorism and sabotage inside Cuba (who are in now in a distinct and shrinking minority) have been threatening to cut off US funds to the OAS which has historically been utterly dominated by Washington’s political and economic interests and priorities – with no higher political priority than eliminating the Cuban revolutionary example.

Recovering from the Bush years

Such a move is viewed as politically disastrous by top US policymakers who are attempting to advance, not further erode, US political authority in the Americas, which is seen as having deteriorated significantly during the years of the George W. Bush Administration. Those years saw the defeat in 2002 of a US-backed military coup in Venezuela and the failure of the White House drive to get rid of the government of Hugo Chavez as well as the election and consolidation of other left-wing governments in Bolivia and Ecuador that are in conflict with Washington and international capital and which quickly developed close relations and deepening economic and political collaboration with Cuba. All of those governments came into power out of the mass popular struggles and class battles against the imperialist-imposed austerity, or “neoliberal,” policies that have increasingly framed and marked politics in Latin America from the mid-1990s under the Democratic William Clinton Adminstration through the years of the second Bush Administration.

Throughout the Americas the traditional political spectrum moved significantly to the left in the Bush years as conservative governments were defeated electorally in Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Paraguay, and El Salvador (and narrowly maintained power in Mexico and Peru). All of these new governing parties and coalitions remain firmly within the framework of the prerogatives of the capitalist market and the boundaries of bourgeois electoralism, eschewing the use of governmental power to promote mass mobilizations of workers and peasants. Nevertheless, to one degree or another, these governments present themselves as receptive to the demands and pressures from working people and the class and popular struggles and resistance that break out independently of them, including the increasingly politically conscious and militant struggles of indigenous peoples fighting institutionalized racism. These governments have not generally been marked by harsh repression against workers and peasants and political space has expanded.

All of this can easily bring these “leftist” governments into conflict with the “national” capitalist and landlord classes and consequently the US government which ultimately is the main prop of these ruling classes. At the same time US economic and financial power competes ferociously and unequally with these same ruling classes. One registration of all these economic, social, and political contradictions is that all of these governments (and indeed more conservative governments such as Colombia and Mexico) have pursued normal and friendly relations and collaboration with Cuba. Cuban medical and education missions thrive and do amazing work in many of these countries, where popular solidarity with Cuba is strong whatever the political coloration of the government.

The Obama Adminstration is in the unenviable position of seeing Washington’s anti-Cuba policy become a very public obstacle to the positive (from their point of view) development of US diplomacy and policies throughout the Americas. It is striking that even relatively conservative governments in Latin America and the Caribbean feel unable to identify publicly with Washington in placing conditions and politically attacking a government in Cuba that is led by revolutionary Marxists.

The Obama Administration and the US rulers in general understand fully that the disintegration of the OAS – the historic instrument and cover of US policy and Hemispheric domination – could only strengthen the already clear tendency in Latin America and the Caribbean toward regional and other bodies independent of US (and Canadian) participation which register the growing economic integration and common political orientation that runs counter to the economic, financial, social, and political policies and priorities promoted by Washington. In December 2008 Brazil hosted a Summit of Latin American and Caribbean leaders which pointedly excluded the United States and Canada and included Cuba.

The Bolivarian Alternative to the Americas (ALBA), initiated by Venezuela and Cuba and expanded to now include Bolivia, Nicaragua, Dominica, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Honduras, and Ecuador began and developed out of the struggle against the drive by Washington, under the cover of the OAS, to impose the so-called Free Trade in the Americas (FTAA) treaty on the peoples of the Hemisphere, reinforcing and extending neoliberal imperialist domination and unequal economic and financial exchange and social relations. FTAA is now in, at best, a comatose state to the great dismay of Washington and Wall Street.

Needless to say the current economic and financial crisis and the onset of world depression conditions can only exacerbate class and social polarization and struggle throughout the Americas, adding to the urgency for Washington to reposition itself politically and recover from the derailment of US policy over the past decade.

The Cuban Revolution and the OAS

In 1962 the Democratic Party Administration of John Kennedy was able to push through Cuba’s expulsion from the OAS based on an “adherence…to Marxism-Leninism [which] is incompatible with the inter-American system” by the revolutionary leadership team headed by Fidel Castro which came to power when the Cuban Revolution triumphed on January 1, 1959. The Cuban revolutionaries established a government which was supported enthusiastically by the overwhelming majority of the Cuban people, particularly among industrial workers, peasants, Black Cubans, and youth of all social classes. The Cuban government had solidified that support by carrying out sweeping, revolutionary measures on agrarian reform and land redistribution; workers rights and entitlements such as pensions, maternity leave, trade-union representation, and so on; universal access to free medical care; radical rent and utility cost reductions; massive programs to eliminate illiteracy and establish access to excellent education free of charge for all; the smashing of racist Jim Crow segregation laws and practices; the promotion of laws and policies that greatly elevated the status and emancipation of women; and the eradication of US-based Mafia networks which organized the island’s vast prostitution, gambling, and narcotics rackets.

Naturally these measures did not go down well with the social and class forces in Cuba that had benefited and profited from the social relations of the pre-revolutionary order that was being uprooted nor, of course, with US business and financial interests that utterly dominated every aspect of the Cuban economy. As in every genuine Revolution, Cuban society became highly polarized along social and class lines. Although a distinct, clear minority, there were still hundreds of thousands of Cubans whose “way of life” was disrupted and swept away by the Revolution driven by and in the interests of the overwhelming majority who were oppressed, degraded, and exploited…and who had now risen up in a united, clench fist of revolutionary mobilization and action.

The Cuban landowning class, bourgeoisie, and large layers of the professional and middle classes – most of whom chose to ensconse to Miami and the United States — became the social base for the US-organized attempts to overturn the revolutionary order in Cuba. (Of course, not every landlord, capitalist, or middle-class professional opposed the Cuban Revolution and not every worker, peasant, and Black Cuban supported it. But it is an indisputable fact that this was the general, overwhelming tendency.)

The revoked 1962 OAS resolution also cited Cuba’s alliance with the former Soviet Union and allied Eastern European regimes as the revolutionary Cuban government sought to defend the triumphant Revolution against direct US military aggression after the defeat of the US-organize Bay of Pigs invasion by Cuban counter-revolutionary mercenaries. This was a period of intense counter-revolutionary activity organized from the United States and vertically directed by the White House, CIA, and State Department. Every day assassination plots were being organized, terrorist incursions planned and implemented, and plans for economic sabotage carried out. Large bureaucracies employing hundreds of operatives were established just for the purpose of planting false stories in the press, spreading vile rumors and disinformation (so-called psychological operations or “psy-ops”). Miami was the nerve center and after the debacle of the Bay of Pigs it suffered a nervous breakdown.

The 1962 OAS expulsion of Cuba was part of Washington’s attempt to re-establish political cover and credibility for new direct aggression – this time without the leading edge of its mercenary Cuban proxies – by US forces. This period culminated later in 1962 with Cuba acceeding to Soviet pressure to secretly install nuclear weapons on Cuban territory in the hope of deterring the US invasion they knew was in place and impending. Upon discovery, Washington organized a naval quarantine of Cuba and threatened to engage Soviet naval vessels entering Cuban waters, a sequence of events that nearly led to direct military strikes and an invasion of Cuba by the United States, not to speak of devastating nuclear exchanges between the United States and the Soviet Union and untold millions of deaths. The crisis was resolved when the Soviet leadership removed the nuclear weapons from Cuba, the Kennedy Administration agreed, in a secret protocol, to remove US nuclear missiles from Turkey that were an equivalent distance from the Soviet Union, and an alleged, informal pledge that the United States would not invade Cuba.

US government documents declassified since the 1962 “Missile Crisis” reveal that Washington policymakers fully understood that a US invasion would meet truly massive popular Cuban resistance – the entire population was armed to the teeth and in a state of full territorial mobilization – that would in the first days and weeks lead to 10,000 or more US casualties. It was this reality – as much as any supposed “statesman-like cool” – that restrained President Kennedy from ordering an invasion and negotiating, without the participation of the Cuban government, a mutually agreeable settlement with an equally anxious and politically-diplomatically outmaneuvered Soviet government which had overplayed its hand.

From then until now Washington has focused on isolating and subverting Cuba through attempts to implement a death-inducing economic and financial blockade, supplemented with terrorist attacks and economic sabotage launched from US soil by CIA-trained Cuban-American cunter-revolutionaries (including as revealed in 1976 US Senate Hearing the introduction of biological agents to destroy Cuban agricultural production).

The resolution passed by acclamation at San Pedro Sula overturned the 1962 expulsion of Cuba from the Washington-dominated body following the 1959 Cuba Revolution. It took Washington three years after the triumph of the Revolution to muster the support among the various capitalist governments of Latin America and the Caribbean to boot out the revolutionary Cuban government. Over the next decade-and-a-half succeeding Administrations – Democratic and Republican – and the Democratic Party-controlled Congress, promoted policies that established vicious right-wing military dictatorships throughout Latin America (Brazil 1964; Dominican Republic 1965 following a US invasion; Uruguay and Chile 1973; Argentina 1976; Bolivia with numerous coups and counter-coups from 1964-82) adding to the already longtime family-military tyrannies backed by Washington (Duvalierist Hait; Somocista Nicaragua; El Salvador; and so on.

This is the “past” Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton do not want to be “living in.” And who can blame them? But the present-day economic, social, and political realities in the Americas, the legacy of oppression, grinding exploitation, and obscene social inequality, flows precisely from this “past.” Indeed, how could they not be? Among these present-day realities which the Obama team came up against in San Pedro Sula is the clear and united Hemispheric solidarity with Cuba against Washington’s economic and political war.

The overriding aim of Washington’s Cuba policies is to prevent the extension of the Cuban socialist revolution, especially in the Americas, which overturned capitalist property relations on the island and began to forge a new society and new human beings based on human needs over private profit and solidarity with the oppressed and exploited overwhelming majority of humanity.

This has not changed to this day and has become more compelling and imperative with the ongoing waves of mass popular and anti-imperialist struggle that have shaken Hemispheric politics in the young 21st Century. This is why Washington continues to be willing to put up with Hemispheric and international isolation and embarrassment over its policy toward a small Caribbean island that has had such a huge impact on world politics and whose influence and resonance on the world stage is greater than ever.

Epilogue to San Pedro Sula

A few days after the OAS Ministerial Conference the White House chose, with great fanfare, to announce the arrest of a former State Department employee and his wife on “espionage” charges of giving “classified” US government documents to Cuba. Supposedly the couple had been under “suspicion” for over a decade.

Nine days later the US Supreme Court announced it would not accept an Appeal to review the outrageous injustice of the five Cuban revolutionaries, the Cuban Five – Fernando Gonzalez, Rene Gonzalez, Antonio Guerrero, Gerardo Hernandez, and Ramon Labanino – who have been incarcerated in US prisons for more than a decade for the “crime” of preventing ongoing terrorist attacks against their country from US soil by infiltrating counter-revolutionary Cuban-American organizations involved in such activities. The case of the Cuban Five is emblematic of the entire history of Washington’s response to the Cuban Revolution and, at the same time, the Five Cuban patriots represent the extraordinary and heroic individuals – out of the ranks of ordinary people – that a genuine Revolution produces. The continued denial of freedom for the Cuban Five and the growing awareness and resonance of their cause has become an important part of the deepening political price Washington is paying, and is prepared to pay, to defeat and destroy the example of the Cuban Revolution. It is teaching a whole new generation worldwide about the Cuban Revolution.

Clearly, Washington’s anti-Cuba policy will not go away gently into the night. But the pressures are mounting to end, once and for all, US economic and travel sanctions and for the normalization of US-Cuban relations. The relationship of forces has changed in the Americas. While US imperialism retains great military power, its economic and financial might is increasingly crisis-wracked and its political authority has never been weaker since the origins of the modern US Hemispheric imperial colossus at the very end of the 19th Century. But today Washington can no longer control events in the Americas.

Many components of NAFTA favored US corporate interests at the expense of Mexico’s general population, but the Zapatistas were particularly opposed to NAFTA’s rewriting of the Mexican Constitution, in order to eliminate the population’s biggest victory won during the Mexican Revolution fought years before, at the time of World War One. “The Mexican Revolution wrote into the national constitution the opportunity for a village to hold its land communally, in an ejido, so that no individual could alienate any portion of it,” writes Staughton Lynd,¹ co-author of the new book Wobblies and Zapatistas: Conversations on Anarchism, Marxism and Radical History. Both Lynd (a Marxist from the US) and his co-author Andrej Grubacic² (an anarchist from the Balkans) are public supporters of the Zapatistas, who they argue have set a powerful example of revolutionary organizing that should influence anti-capitalists around the world. Much like the historical traditions of the Haymarket Martyrs and the ‘Wobblies’ (the Industrial Workers of the World) in the United States, Lynd and Grubacic argue that the Zapatistas have synthesized the best aspects of both the Marxist and anarchist traditions.

Based upon his research and his personal travels to the Zapatista communities in Chiapas where he met with historian Teresa Ortiz, Staughton Lynd identifies three key “sources of Zapatismo.” First, is the issue of land. Before NAFTA, the communal lands called ejidos made up more than half of Mexico’s land. The day of the 1994 uprising, the Zapatistas occupied formerly communal lands that had been appropriated. Directly citing the legacy of the Mexican Revolution, the Zapatistas named themselves after Emiliano Zapata, an anarchist revolutionary who was a key figure in the Mexican Revolution, and whose popular slogan “Land and Liberty” is still heard today.

Second, Lynd identifies a form of Liberation Theology that is influenced by both Christian and Native American spirituality, with Bishop Samuel Ruiz being a key figure.

“The final and most intriguing component of Zapatismo, according to Teresa Ortiz was the Mayan tradition of mandar obediciendo, ‘to lead by obeying’…When representatives thus chosen are asked to take part in regional gatherings, they will be instructed delegates. If new questions arise, the delegates will be obliged to return to their constituents. Thus, in the midst of the negotiations mediated by Bishop Ruiz in early 1994, the Zapatista delegates said they would have to interrupt the talks to consult the villages to which they were accountable, a process that took several weeks. The heart of the political process remains the gathered residents of each village, the asemblea,” writes Lynd.

This anti-authoritarian tradition of mandar obediciendo was central to the Zapatista’s decision not to see themselves as a revolutionary vanguard. Lynd explains that “beginning in early 1994, Marcos said explicitly, over and over again: We don’t see ourselves as a vanguard and we don’t want to take power.” To support his argument, Lynd cites a variety of statements from Marcos, including his August 1994 statement at the National Democratic Convention in the Lacandon Jungle. Here, Marcos proclaimed that the Zapatistas had decided “not to impose our point of view,” and that they had rejected “the doubtful honor of being the historical vanguard of the multiple vanguards that plague us…Yes, the moment has come to say to everyone that we neither want, nor are we able, to occupy the place that some hope we will occupy, the place from which all opinions will come, all the answers, all the routes, all the truth. We are not going to do that.”

Lynd, coming from the Marxist perspective, harshly criticizes the influence of vanguard politics on Marxist revolutionary movements, whereby these movements have adopted authoritarian and anti-democratic practices, with these abuses of power being justified by the argument that their particular group is the vanguard of the revolution, and is therefore entitled to lead the revolution as it sees fit. Lynd sees the Zapatista’s rejection of vanguard politics as representing a “fresh synthesis of what is best in the Marxist and anarchist traditions.” The Zapatistas, Lynd writes, “have given us a new hypothesis. It combines Marxist analysis of the dynamics of capitalism with a traditional spirituality, whether Native American or Christian, or a combination of the two. It rejects the goal of taking state power and sets forth the objective of building a horizontal network of centers of self-activity. Above all the Zapatistas have encouraged young people all over the earth to affirm: We must have a qualitatively different society! Another world is possible! Let us begin to create it, here and now!”

Wobblies and Zapatistas is highly recommended to both the seasoned fan of books about radical history and theory, and the reader who is just now becoming interested in radical politics. While rooted in the inspirational examples of both the Wobblies and the Zapatistas, this book uses refreshing language and an informal conversational format of Grubacic interviewing Lynd. Their dialogue provides a big picture of global struggles against capitalism, and all forms of oppression. I myself learned for the first time that in the US, both the Haymarket anarchists of the late 1800s, and the anarchist Wobblies of the early 1900s were heavily influenced by Marxism. I also learned that many Marxists, such as Rosa Luxemburg from Germany, were themselves very critical of the anti-democratic and elitist consequences of the vanguard strategy of organizing that has been embraced by so many Marxists.

Lynd and Grubacic’s exploration of the relationship between Marxism and anarchism is played out through their examination of so many fascinating stories of popular rebellion throughout world history. Many of these stories are about workers’ rebellions, but Lynd emphasizes that while the role of workers in making revolution is very important, workers are only part of the big picture, and workers should not be prioritized over other parts of society, including prisoners, students, women, and racially oppressed groups. Lynd summarizes his theory for best making revolutionary change: “We are all leaders, not just as a collection of individuals, but as persons embedded in different kinds of institutions and communities of struggle. The framework with within which all these aspirations must be lodged is the collective action, not of taking state power, but of building down below a horizontal network of groups and persons that is strong enough to command the attention of whoever is in government office.”

To accompany this book review, I interviewed co-author Staughton Lynd, asking him these four questions below.

Hans Bennett: This decade in Latin America has seen so many successful poor people’s movements. Are you particularly inspired by any of these victories? How do these embody those traits that you spotlight as so positive regarding the Zapatista movement?

Staughton Lynd: As your question suggests, the most hopeful part of the earth during this past decade has been Latin America. The Zapatista movement seems the most significant effort, but I believe it is organically connected to movements in other countries that have elected Leftist governments. The Zapatistas speak of governing in obedience to those below, “mandar obediciendo.” The Zapatistas interpret these words to direct them not to try to take state power, but instead to create a horizontal network of self-governing communities sufficiently strong that the national government will have to pay attention to “the below” and be accountable to it. However, in Bolivia when Evo Morales became president, he said in his inaugural speech that he intended to “mandar obediciendo”: that is, he accepted the Zapatista formulation as to how it should be between elected officials and the electorate, and in his capacity as an elected official, he intended to try to live up to it.

HB: How can US organizers adopt the Zapatista’s approach?

SL: The fundamental problem is that unlike the Zapatistas we do not have communities that have existed for centuries, that make decisions by consensus, that designate many persons to undertake small tasks or “cargos” for the community, that understand the first obligation of an elected representative to be listening, not talking. Instead, “organizing” in the United States is invariably quasi-Alinskyan, that is, inspired by the methods of Saul Alinsky, who in turn modeled his work on trade union organizing in the 1930s. I was one of four original teachers at Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation Training Institute founded in 1968-1969, and am an historian of the labor movement in the 1930s, so I think I know whereof I speak. The Alinsky approach assumes that people are motivated by individual, short-term, primarily economic self-interest. “Solidarity unionism” instead encourages people to take small steps in the interest of the group as a whole: for example, in a layoff to share the pain equally rather than strictly applying seniority.

HB: Given that we’re living in the “belly of the beast,” how do you think we in the US can best support Latin America poor people’s struggles that are resisting both their local ruling class, and US influence/dominance?

SL: Support for radical or revolutionary movements in other countries is a tricky undertaking. The Left in the United States has over and over again fallen into the error of romanticizing foreign movements and regimes. Examples are: the Soviet Union, revolutionary Cuba, the National Liberation Front in Vietnam, Nicaragua under the Sandinistas, and perhaps now, the Zapatistas. I believe what is helpful is to say, ‘The United States should cease to intervene in Country X,’ but not, ‘We unreservedly favor whatever insurgent movement exists there.’ We should have learned this from the period of the Vietnam war. As soon as the Vietnamese had driven out the United States they created “re-education camps” against which I, at least, felt obligated to protest. Similarly, when the Sandinista government was voted out of office in 1990, Margaret Randall exposed the fact that a handful of men had run everything, including AMNLAE, which presented itself as a women’s organization. So we in the US are better off when we support the withdrawal of US troops, closing of US military bases, the nationalization of US private investments, but do not try to control what happens next.

HB: Given today’s “global economy,” do you know of any examples of any US workers being involved with cross-border working class organizing?

SL: Cross-border organizing has been timid and bureaucratic. I would like to see, for example, General Motors workers in Mexico, Canada and the United States strike together. The demands of each national group of workers would be somewhat different, but so what? Instead, even reform movements in American trade unions acquiesce in chauvinism. Thus Teamsters for a Democratic Union tries to keep Mexican truck drivers from entering the United States, even though (a) NAFTA requires their admission, (b) simple solidarity would suggest that if Iowa corn farmers can take advantage of NAFTA to destroy the livelihoods of countless Mexican campesinos by exporting corn to Mexico without import duties, then truck drivers in the United States should meet with their Mexican counterparts and seek solutions that benefit all workers involved.

1. Staughton Lynd taught American history at Spelman College and Yale University. He was director of Freedom Schools in the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer. An early leader of the movement against the Vietnam War, he was blacklisted and unable to continue as an academic. He then became a lawyer, and in this capacity has assisted rank-and-file workers and prisoners for the past thirty years. He has written, edited, or co-edited with his wife Alice Lynd more than a dozen books.
2. Andrej Grubacic is a dissident from the Balkans. A radical historian and sociologist, he is the author of Globalization and Refusal and the forthcoming titles: Hidden History of American Democracy and The Staughton Lynd Reader. A fellow traveler of Zapatista-inspired direct action movements, in particular Peoples’ Global Action, and a co-founder of Global Balkans Network and Balkan Z Magazine, he is a visiting professor of sociology at the University of San Francisco.

Panic ensued. The one hallway leading out of their attic apartment was engulfed in flames. Charles, Annie and James’ 19-year-old son, made a daring leap through the wall of fire and escaped, but the rest of the family was trapped. The only way out of the inferno was through the window; there were no fire escapes. Annie made it down to the second floor windowsill with the help of another son, Willis. The crowd below placed a pile of blankets on the ground to cushion her fall and told Annie, dangling for her life, to let go. She hit the pile and survived. Willis also jumped and survived. The fire, described by one Chicago firefighter as a “holocaust,” killed four of the Hickman children. They were found underneath the bed with Leslie (14), shielding the bodies of his younger siblings Elvena (9), Sylvester (7), and Velvena (3).

Hickman returned home the following morning to find his building gutted and his family gone. He recounted later that a neighbor approached him and broke the tragic news. “He said, ‘Mr. Hickman, I hate to tell you this, four of your children is burnt to death.’ And I weakened to the ground.” Even though he was distraught and wracked with pain, Hickman remembered a threat made by his landlord to burn out the tenants out of his building if they didn’t move out.

Hickman found his family, buried his children, moved into a new apartment, and returned to work. But justice eluded him. “Paper was made to burn, coal and rags. Not people. People wasn’t made to burn, ” he told his son. The police didn’t seriously investigate the case. Coleman, his landlord, was a free man. Over the next six months, Hickman became increasingly depressed and frustrated. His family worried about his mental stability. On July 16, he picked up his .32 caliber pistol and went to confront Coleman at his home on the Southside of Chicago. He found Coleman sitting in car outside his house and accused him of setting the fire. Hickman later claimed that Coleman admitted it. Hickman, a deeply religious man, raised his pistol, looked Coleman straight in the eye and said, “God is my secret judge,” and shot him four times. Coleman died three days later.

Police arrested James Hickman at his home and charged him with murder. State prosecutors sought the death penalty. The Hickman family saga could have ended with another tragedy with James facing life in prison or execution by the State of Illinois. But a small group of revolutionary socialists in Chicago, members of the Socialist Worker’s Party (SWP), took the lead in putting together a vibrant community based campaign that ultimately resulted in James Hickman going free. How did they accomplish this?

Jim Crow Chicago Style

James Hickman, like many African Americans during and immediately following the Second World War, came to Chicago to escape the grinding poverty of life in the rural Deep South. Hickman was born on February 19, 1907 near Louisville, Mississippi. His parents were sharecroppers and at ten years old he went to work in the fields. When James was sixteen years old he married Annie, who was to be his wife for the rest of his life. They had nine children together. His first goal after arriving in Chicago was to find a decent paying job to support his large family. He eventually found one at International Harvester’s Wisconsin Steel plant near the Indiana border. But finding decent housing for his family was another story.

Hickman searched for housing in Chicago when the overwhelmingly bulk of the city’s growing African-American population was still confined to a narrow sliver of land on the Southside of the city starting at what was then called 22nd Street (now called Cermak) and stretching to 62nd Street between Wentworth and Cottage Grove Avenues. More than 60,000 black workers came to Chicago from 1940 to 1944 seeking employment in war-related industries. This migration to Chicago continued after the war. “Between 1940 and 1950 Chicago’s black population swelled by 214, 534,” according to Chicago housing historian Arnold Hirsch, bringing it up to a total of 492, 265. The boundaries of the ghetto were walled off by restrictive “covenants”—deals between white homeowners and larger institutions, which stipulated that that only whites could buy homes in certain defined areas.

In 1927, the Chicago Real Estate Board began promoting racially restrictive covenants to YMCAs, churches, women’s clubs, the many chambers of commerce and property owners’ associations as a way of “protecting” the value of their property from incoming black families. This racist housing policy was backed by the city and by the policies of the federal government. It is believed that by the mid-1940s as much as 80 percent of Chicago’s residential housing was covered by restrictive covenants of one kind or another. The Supreme Court in 1948 ruled that restrictive covenants were unconstitutional, the year following the Hickman case, though little would change for many years.

The available housing for Blacks in Chicago was confined almost entirely to the South Side ghetto, leading to massive overcrowding. A small enclave of Blacks was beginning to grow on the West Side of the city, but it was plagued by the same problems that residents struggled with in the South Side ghetto. In many cases, black landlords were as guilty as white landlords of making money hand-over-fist by cutting up apartments into smaller and smaller units called “kitchenettes.” The cute sounding word really meant a dilapidated one-room apartment. According to Hirsch, “The Chicago Community Inventory estimated that there were at least 80,000 such ‘conversions’ between 1940 and 1950.” Nicholas Lemann, in history of the black migration to Chicago, The Promised Land, vividly describes the kitchenettes as “rickety three-story tenemen…with heating, plumbing, and insulation that were rudimentary at best and often completely non-functional.” Yet, there was little to no options for black families seeking shelter. The housing crunch for blacks was made worse by returning veterans. Blacks faced white violence when they tried to move into predominately white communities. This is how Jim Crow worked in Chicago. This is also how James Hickman met David Coleman.

A dangerous man

David Coleman was also from the South and came to Chicago in 1943 with ambitions to be a businessman. Coleman met a woman in July 1946 with a building to sell at 1733 West Washburne, on the West Side of Chicago; he leased it from her shortly thereafter. In effect, he had day-to-day control of the property and he collected the rents.

In the middle of August 1946, Hickman heard that an apartment was available at Coleman’s building, which was subdivided into Kitchenettes. Coleman first showed him the basement apartment for $50 a month. Hickman later told journalist John Bartlow Martin, “The water was half a leg deep in the basement…no windows, no lights, no nothing in there.” Hickman declined the basement “apartment” but Coleman quickly offered him an attic apartment for $6 a week until the space on the second floor became free. “We walked up the stairs, it so dark,” Hickman later testified, “we almost had to feel our way…I am walking around looking at it, I don’t like this. She [Annie] said, I don’t nether but surely we can stay here because we ain’t got no place.” It was a small attic that adults could barely stand-up in, and there was no electricity, no gas, and only one window. But they needed shelter for their seven children. So, despite their reservations the Hickman’s told Coleman that they would take the attic “apartment” with the expectation that the second floor apartment would be theirs soon. They gave Coleman one hundred dollars as a down payment.

Days turned to weeks and still there was no word from Coleman on the promised apartment. Finally, Hickman confronted Coleman in mid-September 1946 and demanded back his $100 deposit so he could look for another place. Coleman refused. “I won’t pay you until I get ready,” Coleman barked at Hickman. In return Hickman said he would take him to court. Hickman recalled that Coleman threatened to burn him out. “He said he had a man on the East Side ready to burn the place up if…I had him arrested.” The Hickmans swore out a warrant for Coleman’s arrest but the police didn’t arrest him.

This wasn’t the first time that Coleman threatened to burn his building. The previous fall, tenants in Coleman’s building stopped contractors (who showed up with no notice) from further cutting up their apartments into smaller units. Coleman appeared at the scene and tenants told him that he would have to go to court to evict them. He declared, “I am the owner, I don’t have to go to Court to do that, I will get everybody out of here when I want if it takes fire.”

Coleman was clearly a dangerous man, but the city authorities did nothing. In fact, the coroner’s jury that heard testimony concerning the death of the Hickman children could not decide if the fire was accidental or deliberate, and recommended that the State’s Attorney initiate an investigation into it. No serious investigation was done. In the end, Coleman was fined by the city authorities for a series of safety and health violations—totaling $450—the equivalent of $112.50 a piece for each of the dead Hickman children.

“We got there first”

Soon after Hickman shot and mortally wounded Coleman, he returned home and waited for the police to arrest him. He offered no resistance and confessed to what would soon be the murder of David Coleman. While in jail Hickman was interviewed by a two of the most important newspapers in Chicago, the Chicago Daily Defender, the leading Black newspaper in Chicago, and the Chicago Daily Tribune. But by far the best piece of journalism on Hickman was written by Robert Birchman for The Militant, the weekly newspaper of the Socialist Worker’s Party, who laid out the case. “The story of Hickman is the story of negligence and callous disregard of housing and health conditions. It is the story of the horrible slums in which the Negro people are forced to live in dilapidated, disease-ridden firetraps,” declared Birchman. “It is the most tragic of many calamities in which 22 persons have lost their lives, many others suffered injuries and hundreds made homeless as a result of fires in Chicago’s Negro ghettos since the first of the year.” Shortly after Birchman’s interview with Hickman, M.J. Myer, a Chicago labor attorney and co-counsel in the (historically important but largely forgotten) Minneapolis sedition trial of American Trotskyists in 1941, became lead counsel for Hickman. Myer released a statement shortly after the coroner’s inquest into Coleman’s death, that read in part, “In Hickman’s mind all evidence pointed to Coleman’s responsibility for the burning to death of his four children This idea has obsessed him until it reached a point where he no longer could control himself.” Myer also announced that a defense committee was being formed on Hickman’s behalf. Two other attorneys joined Myer; Leon Despres, then a counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union and soon to be a famous Chicago alderman, and William H. Temple, an African-American criminal defense attorney and a member of the Chicago NAACP executive board, giving Hickman an effective legal team. They all agreed to represent him without compensation.

How did the SWP get involved in the case so rapidly? They had 150 members in the greater Chicago area, whereas the Stalinist Communist party, by far the dominant group on the U.S. Left, had easily ten times that number, if not more. “We got there first, not the Communist Party, because our members were involved in the neighborhood in tenant rights,” longtime socialist Frank Fried, told me in a telephone interview. “They were members of the Westside Tenant’s Union.” Fried had just left the navy and was active in the liberal American Veterans Committee; he would become a leader of the SWP-initiated Hickman Defense Committee.

Immediately following the fire, the tenants in Coleman’s building organized themselves into the Chicago Area Tenants Union, which members of the SWP were actively involved in. The driving force behind the tenants’ union was the Chicago SWP organizer, Milt Zaslow (who went by the public name of Mike Bartell) and his partner Edith. “The tenants’ rights organization that began in the building where Milt, Edith and their son lived,” wrote Karin Baker and Patrick Quinn in 1997 obituary of Zaslow/Bartell. “The group pushed for improved living conditions, among other demands. At one time a renters’ strike developed that involved thousands in the city of Chicago. The campaign got so big that people in distant neighborhoods were calling them, wanting to get involved.”

The SWP also benefited from the revival of civil rights activism following the end of the war. The Congress for Racial Equality (CORE), which was founded in 1941 at the University of Chicago and pioneered many of the tactics that became mainstays of the civil rights movement of 1950s and 60s, took the lead in the fight against Jim Crow in Chicago. “Chicago CORE, after a year of inactivity, was revived in the autumn of 1945 under the chairmanship of the black schoolteacher and NAACP leader, Gerald Bullock.
Finding few members interested in action, he dropped the chapter’s rigid selection procedures and made a broad appeals for new members to which the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP) responded,” according to historians Meier and Rudwick. Gerald Bullock would later play an important part in the Hickman defense campaign. An SWP member became the editor of the local Chicago CORE-News. One of the most successful campaigns of CORE, involving SWP members, was the campaign to desegregate the aptly named White City Skating Rink in 1946. “Although it was located in the predominantly African-American part of the city, only whites were allowed in certain areas of the park, such as the roller rink. The SWP under Milt’s leadership was central in implementing a broad-based campaign that broke the color barrier at White City.” Frank Fried recalls, “Mike was an organizer’s organizer. He got up everyday and read the four daily newspapers, and look for things to get involved in.” The Hickman case was one of them. Leon DesPres deeply believed that, “but for Mike, James Hickman would have been convicted.”

“Will you help us?”

Working quickly, SWP activists put together a Hickman Defense Committee on August 8, 1947. The focus of it’s work was, according to Fried, was “to make it politically impossible in the eyes of the people of Chicago for the prosecutors to convict Hickman, to put as much pressure that could be mobilized on the city, and take the case national to pressure the state and the city.” The committee received support from the Chicago Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) Industrial Union Council, the American Federation of Labor Building services employees union, the American Veterans Committee, and the Baptist Ministers Conference of Chicago. A public appeal for Hickman was signed by Willoughby Abner, first vice-president of the Chicago CIO Council and chair of the Hickman defense committee; Charles Chiakulous, president of the UAW-CIO Local 477; and Bernis Johnson, chair of the Westside NAACP Youth Council.

Abner was important to the defense campaign because of his stature as a leading black trade unionist in the UAW in the Chicago area. According to historian Nelson Lichtenstein, Abner “organized thousands during the war in several South Side foundries and small manufacturing facilities.” Sidney Lens, a local trade union official, who later become a nationally known historian and antiwar leader during the Vietnam War), also played a central role in Hickman’s defense campaign. “We put a collection can for donations, a petition and leaflets about Hickman in every store, bar or restaurant we could in the black neighborhoods in Chicago,” says Fried. “People gave generously. Everybody knew about Hickman. I think the prosecution was screwed from the beginning.”

Why was the Hickman cause so popular? The reasons were explained in an article written on the case for the journal Fourth International some time before Hickman’s trial. “Every so often a previously unknown individual suddenly attracts wide attention. There is usually a social reason for this. The story connected with the particular case epitomizes the plight of voiceless millions, focusing on the needs of one group and the crimes of another, bringing into the light of day the festering rottenness of class society…. Hickman’s story is the story of Jim Crow as it is practiced north of the Mason-Dixon line.” The tragedy of James Hickman personified the plight of Chicago’s black community.

Seeking to organize a large public display of support for James Hickman and his family, the defense campaign organized rallies at several churches across Chicago. The largest rally was held on September 28, 1947 at the Metropolitan Community Church on Chicago’s South Side. To build the rally, the campaign put up “hundreds of posters announcing the event,” canvassed the area with “two sound trucks,” and handed out “40,000 leaflets.” Over 1,200 people attended with the overwhelmingly African-American audience unanimously passing a resolution calling for Hickman’s release. The featured speaker at the rally was actress Tallulah Bankhead, who starred in Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat and was a member of a powerful Democratic Party family from Alabama. Her father had been speaker of the House of Representatives in the late 1930s, but she broke with her family over the conservatism of the Southern Democrats, particularly their virulent racism. Her involvement in the Hickman campaign was something of a “coup” for Sidney Lens. He recalled three decades later:

I was leaving my office on Dearborn Street one evening when I noticed her name on the marquis half a block away. She was starring in a new play. On the spur of the moment I went to the stage door and asked for her. To my surprise she knew about Hickman and was immensely sympathetic. When I asked her, however, to speak at the rally we planned at the Metropolitan Community Church, she shuddered as if I hit her with a blast of artic air. “Why, Mr. Lens, how can I make a speech?” It took a while to figure out that what she meant was that while she was capable of reciting other people’s lines, she was incapable of constructing a speech on her own. I agreed therefore to write a speech for her, and a couple of days later she advised that “I read it to my secretary and made her cry. I’ll be happy to deliver it.”

Bankhead, according to Lens, “drew tears from the whole audience, a couple of thousand people” with a riveting speech:

It seems to me a shameful condemnation of our society that 2000 years after Christ, people are still herded together into Black ghettoes merely because of their skins have different pigmentations than other people. No one condones murder or any act of violence. I hope the day shall come soon when humanity can resolve not only its racial problems but all problems coolly and rationally; when emotional acts of violence—be they individual or national—can be eliminated. So long, however, as there exists anywhere on earth one minority that is treated with contempt, that is herded into Black slum areas, that is abused and insulted, so long will we have violence, hate, brutality, savagery. So long as there exists a Jewish problem, or a Mexican problem—or a problem of any minority—so long will one form of violence beget another. I am proud to be one of the humble gladiators in this struggle against narrow prejudice and stupidity. I am glad to lend my efforts so that there shall be no more James Hickman tragedies.

Other speakers that night included the best-selling African-American author Willard Motely, and Chicago packinghouse union official Philip Weightman. Hickman’s attorney M.J. Myer roared to the crowd, “It is not Hickman who should be on trial, but the inhuman landlords and real estate interests who sacrifice human lives for profit, for they are the real criminals. They are the people who should be put behind bars and kept there.” The Communist Party, which could have contributed significant resources to the Hickman campaign, refused to participate and stood outside the Hickman defense rally handing out a pamphlet, The Great Conspiracy by Alfred Kahn, attacking the SWP and repeating old slanders that Trotskyism and fascism were in league against the Soviet Union.

Motley, author of the 1947 best-selling novel Knock on Any Door, which was made into a film starring Humphrey Bogart in 1949, played an incredibly important part in the Hickman defense campaign. He had a huge reputation at the time of the case. His book sold 47,000 copies during its first three weeks in print and a total of 350,000 during the next two years. His involvement opened many doors for supporters of Hickman. However, the one door that Motley could not open was to the Chicago Sun (soon to be the Sun-Times). The Chicago based author met Hickman in prison and wrote an eloquent appeal that the defense committee attempted to publish in the Chicago Sun, one of the largest circulating newspapers in the mid-west. The Sun’s owner Marshall Field, heir to the Field family fortune and a publicly identified liberal, refused to printed Motley’s appeal even after the defense committee was prepared to pay for the space. Motley publicly attacked Field for his hypocrisy. He is one of those “rich liberals…who talk out of both sides of their mouths.” The defense committee had Motley’s appeal circulated to many of the largest Black newspapers in the country including the Chicago Daily Defender. Motley didn’t hold back his feelings about the Hickman case:

You have seen many pictures of men who have killed. You have seen the photographs of the returned soldier. Perhaps next door lives a boy who killed some other boy during the war. In the war millions of men killed other millions of men because they believed they were a threat to their homes, their wives, their children. This threat was thousands of miles from home. These were strangers killed, with whom there had been no personal contact. James Hickman killed the man who had threatened his wife and children with a death more horrible than the Nazi gas chambers. And carried it out. This is what I was thinking of as I sat talking to Hickman today. Hickman needs help. There are three children left who need him. A wife who needs him. Will you help us help him?

“This man has paid enough”

The defense campaign scored a major victory when the State’s Attorney office announced on the eve of the trial that it was dropping its demand for the death penalty. This changed the whole atmosphere surrounding the trial. Leon Despres, co-counsel for Hickman, said that it made the trial “less edgy.” It was also a backhanded admission that the pressure of the defense campaign was working. James Hickman went on trial for the murder of David Coleman on November 5 before a white judge and an all-white jury in the Cook County Criminal Court building. The presiding judge was Rudolph Desort, the prosecutor was Assistant State’s Attorney Samuel Friedman, and M.J. Myer was the lead counsel for the defense. The prosecution presented a total of eight witnesses that included four policemen and Coleman’s half-brother, Percy Brown, who under cross-examination gave testimony that reportedly contradicted statements he had made earlier to the police.

M.J. Myer in his opening statements argued that Hickman was not guilty because he was “temporarily insane” at the time of the shooting of David Coleman. Myer placed the blame for the shooting of Coleman on the terrible living conditions in Coleman’s building and the death of the Hickman’s four children. Myer called witnesses that testified to Coleman’s previous threats to burn the tenants out of the building and James’ anguished state of mind following the fire and deaths. Two psychiatrists testified for the defense. Dr. Boris M. Ury interviewed Hickman, while he was incarcerated at Cook County Jail. Hickman spoke about the divinely inspired “mission” of his dead children’s lives. “I see the future in these four was destroyed. They would have been great people had they lived. I had a vision, but their lives was cut-off.” Dr. Ury’s report went on: “Client continued to discuss the grandiose ‘mission’ of his children: ‘The Lord had work for them to do. He had picked them out…’ Examiner [Ury] inquired whether this godly mission would be confined to work among the colored people but he was assured by his client that the mission would be applicable to all people.” Dr. Ury concluded his report by saying that Hickman shot Coleman “in a schizoid, disassociated state, feeling he was accomplishing the Lord’s will.”

Leon Despres considered James Hickman’s testimony in court “magnificent” and, at times, “poetic.” Hickman sat solemnly in the witness chair and wore a modest gray suit with a white flower in lapel, according to Chicago Daily News reporter John Culhane, who pieced together the courtroom scene from interviews with Leon Despres and access to his Despres’ case files for an article he wrote in the mid-1960s.

“This was God fixed this,” Hickman testified.

I had raised these children up and God knowed that vow I made to him…that these children was a generation to be raised up. God wasn’t pleased what happened to them….

I had two sons and two daughters who would some day be great men and women, some day they would have married, some day they would have been fathers and mothers of children. These children would have children and these children would children and another generation of Hickmans could raise up and enjoy peace.

The trial lasted nine days. On November 15, after nineteen hours of deliberation, the jury informed the judge that they couldn’t reach a decision. It was a classic “hung jury”—seven to five for acquittal. The State’s Attorney’s office initially declared that it would retry James Hickman the following January. But it soon reversed itself and announced that it was dropping the murder charge and recommending to the judge that Hickman be sentenced to two years probation if he pleaded guilty to manslaughter. He agreed and walked out of court a free man on December 16, 1947. Hickman had served a total of five months in jail. Samuel Friedman, the prosecuting attorney, said that one of the major reasons that his office didn’t want a retrial was the public support for Hickman from across the country as he held up letters of support for Hickman. “They are too numerous to read all of them here,” Freedman declared holding up a fistful of letters, resolutions and telegrams, “but the general opinion is to the effect that mercy ought to be shown to an individual who, under the stress of the loss of four children, has been punished to such an extent that society can be magnanimous and afford him a chance to return to his remaining children and his wife, and spend the rest of his lifetime in peace.” Though he admitted “some quarters” would disagree with his recommendation, Freedman concluded, “The state feels this man has paid enough with the loss of his children.”

“A chain of personal memories”

The Hickman family returned to the private lives after the trial. But within a year the case received it’s widest publicity (outside of Chicago) when Harper’s magazine commissioned renowned journalist John Bartlow Martin to write a story on the Hickman case. Martin’s writings would today be called “true crime,” but that would be a great disservice to them. They were neither lurid nor exploitative, as many true crime works are. Martin’s writing style combined the best techniques of a novelist and a journalist with the motivation of a socially conscious liberal. In his autobiography, written many decades after the Hickman case, he recounts how he approached writing the The Hickman Story:

In preparing to do the piece, I read Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma and other books, but only for my own background information—I wrote the piece almost entirely from interviews, especially interviews with Hickman and his wife and with the landlord’s relatives, I simply told the story of Hickman’s and the landlord’s lives and their world—the world below.

The “world below” was one of racism and poverty that greeted Black refugees from the Deep South. “I wanted to do not an article, crammed with demographers’ statistics, but, rather, a story about a man. James Hickman had been a sharecropper in Mississippi. He was deeply religious and deeply devoted to his children.” Martin’s article is great writing and deserves to be read by everyone today committed to social justice.

But what lift’s the story from the page is the illustrations of the Hickman case by the great American artist, Ben Shahn. Shahn’s name is not one that many Americans would recognize, but millions have seen his work, particularly his drawings of the martyred Sacco & Vanzetti, and the three murdered civil rights activists, Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman. Shahn’s drawings of the Hickman case that hung on the east wall of Leon Despres’ old law office caught the eye of reporter John Culhane, prompting him to write one of the few profiles of the case to appear in the decades that followed the trial. Shahn later wrote of his own struggle to capture the enormity of the Hickman family tragedy:

I was asked to make drawings for the story and, after several discussions with the writer, felt that I had gained enough of the feel of the situation to proceed. I examined a great deal of the factual visual material, and then I discarded all of it. It seemed to me the implications of this event transcended the immediate story; there was universality about man’s dread of fire, and his sufferings from fire. There was a universality in the pity which such a disaster invokes, had its overtones. And the relentless poverty which had pursued this man, and which dominated the story, had its own kind of universality.

Sometimes, if one is particularly satisfied with a piece of work which he has completed, he may say to himself, ‘well done,’ and go on to something else. Not in this instance, however. I found that I could not dismiss the event about which I had made drawings—the so-called “Hickman Story.”… I had some curious sense of responsibility about it, a sort of personal involvement.

The Hickman tragedy “aroused in me,” Shahn recalled, “a chain of personal memories.”

There were two great fires in my own childhood, one only colorful, the other disastrous and unforgettable. Of the first, I remember only that the Russian village in which my grandfather lived burned, and I was there. I remember the excitement, the flames breaking out everywhere…The other fire left its mark upon me and all my family, and left scars on my father’s hand and face, for he had clambered up a drainpipe and taken each of my brothers and sisters and me over the house one by one, burning himself painfully in the process. Meanwhile our house and all belongings were consumed, and my parents stricken beyond their power to recover.

The most powerful of all of Shahn’s Hickman drawings is the four huddled, deceased children. His “personal involvement” led him to use his own siblings as the basis for the drawing. “They resemble much more closely my own brothers and sisters.” John Bartlow Martin’s story and Ben Shahn’s drawings remain the most powerful documents from that era of the Hickman case. Unfortunately, the Hickman trial transcript disappeared many decades ago along with much of the paperwork related to Hickman’s legal defense. The Sidney Lens Papers at the Chicago Historical Society has some of the Hickman defense campaign literature, flyers and brochure—just enough to give you a feel for the campaign.

“Dismiss it in a sentence or two”

Despite all of this, one has to ask, how can such a powerful story disappear from the public memory? This is an amazing story, not only of rapacious greed and racism that led to an excruciatingly painful family tragedy, but also the triumph of justice over very long odds. It didn’t take place in some remote part of the country, but played itself out in Chicago, who’s crime-obsessed, tabloid press salivated over stories of much less interest. I think there were several things working against the Hickman case getting the recognition that it deserved. The case took place in 1947; over the next few years the death-grip of the Cold War would tighten around U.S. society. A virulent level of repression would drive socialist, communists and radicals of various allegiances to the very margins of American society. In many ways, the campaign to save James Hickman was one of the last echoes of the great radicalization of the American working class of the 1930s and 1940s. A successful political campaign to free an African-American man who shot and killed his landlord led by revolutionary socialists is not the type of story to be embraced during the height of the American Century. The Hickman case was simply steamrolled over by a decade and half of political repression and cultural conformity. This, however, is only a part of the answer.

The other part lies, I believe, in who writes the history of the American Left. By-and-large they were historians that were members of the Communist Party and the New Left of the 1960s, few of who have shown any interest or political sympathy for the revolutionary tradition of Marxism and the Russian Revolution in the form Trotskyism in this country in the 1930s and 1940s. “Trotskyism has been written out of the history of the American left,” notes veteran revolutionary socialist Joel Geier. There are notable exceptions, such as Alan Wald’s The New York Intellectuals or Bryan Palmer’s James P. Cannon and the Origins of the American Revolutionary Left, but too often the most popular left-wing histories of the 1930s and 1940s simply dismiss, denigrate or out-rightly censure the role of Trotskyism in the radical movement.

One of the worst examples of this is Labor Untold Story by Boyer and Morais, published by the UE, one of the unions of the CIO era that was led by the CP. It strait-forwardly ignores the Trotskyist-led great Minneapolis Teamster strikes of 1934. It was the strikes in Minneapolis, Toledo and San Francisco that directly led to the formation of the CIO. This type of censorship may be extreme but not uncommon. This includes the 1941 trial of the Trotskyists of the SWP for “subversion” under the reactionary Smith Act that became the model for the trials that destroyed the CP after WWII. Yet, as Ellen Schrecker in her Many Are The Crimes: McCarthyism in America notes, “There is little scholarship on the Trotskyist Smith Act case. While recognizing it implications for the later Smith Act cases, most writers tend to dismiss it in a sentence or two.” Instead of “dismissing it in a sentence or two,” it’s time that Trotskyism gets the proper recognition it deserves in American radical history.

There are many stories such as the Hickman case that need to be recovered from oblivion and retold. Last year Clint Eastwood’s film Changeling was released. Set in 1928 Los Angeles, it told the real-life story of Christine Collins and her search for the truth behind the kidnapping of her son and the mind-boggling public relations stunt by the LAPD, who sent her the wrong child and then attempted to shut her up when she refused to play along. It led to an explosion of public protest. The story disappeared from public memory for eight decades until screenwriter J. Michael Straczynski, a former journalist, was contacted by an old source at Los Angeles City Hall, who told him that the city was planning to destroy some of its archives and that there was “something [Straczynski] should see.” This turned out to be a transcript of a city council hearing of Collins’ case. There are thousands of stories of injustice and struggle hidden away in the archives of city halls around the country. Hopefully, younger historians can bring to light the many of these stories before they are lost to history.

I want to extend a special thank you to two people, Frank Fried and Leon Despres. Frank first told me about the Hickman case at Joel Geier’s 70th birthday party, and Leon Despres (who passed away on May 7, 2009 at 101 years old) for allowing me to discuss the case with him at his Hyde Park residence. Patrick Quinn has been extremely helpful in tracking down important sources of information on the case and commenting on the first draft of this article. I also want to thank the Chicago Historical Society for allowing me access to the Sidney Lens papers, and the Library of Congress for access to the Hickman files in John Bartlow Martin’s papers. The librarians in charge of the Willard Motley papers at the Northeastern Illinois University were very helpful but I ended up referencing different material on Motley’s role in the Hickman case.

A commodity looks simple enough, says the pro-capitalist economist. Most such economists say a commodity is any object with a use value that somebody wants and is willing to pay for, and its value is determined by supply and demand. Nothing drives such a common sense economist more to distraction than reading Karl Marx who says a commodity is “a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.” What can Marx mean? Economics is a science, even a mathematical science, what has it got to do with metaphysics and theology?

Take a wooden table, says Marx. It is just wood that human labor has turned into a table and taken to market. Wood + Labor = Table. Where is the mystery? When it gets to the market, the table finds itself in the company of the stool and the chair. All three have use values, are made of the same wood and may be in equal supply and equal demand — yet each has its own different price.

Why these different prices? Same wood, same demand, same supply. They are all the products of human labor. What is the difference among them that justifies different prices? The prices are reflections of the underlying values of the products. Could the values be different? What does Marx say determines value? It is the different quantities of socially necessary labor time embodied in the commodities.

The table, the stool and the chair are three “things” that are related to each other as the embodiment of the social relations and necessary labor of human beings that created them. Human social relations have been objectified as the relations between non human things. The chair may be more valuable than the table, but the reason is now hidden away from the perception of people.

“A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing,” Marx writes, “simply because in it the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relations of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour.”

To find an analogy Marx tells us we have to turn to the “mist-enveloped regions of the religious world.” In that world, the inventions of the human mind take on an independent existence and humans begin to interact with their own fantastical creations as if they were really independently existing objective things. This is similar to the Fetishism of Commodities. All the commodities we see about us are part of the sum total of all the socially produced objects and services created by human labor in our society. People all over the world are making things which are traded, shipped, sold, resold, etc. But their use values cannot be realized until they are sold — i.e., exchanged, especially exchanged for money. But why are some more expensive than others? Why do some have more value than others? Supply and demand has a role to play in setting price, but it merely causes price to fluctuate around value.

The fact that we know that value results from the socially necessary labor time spent in making commodities “by no means,” Marx says, “dissipates the mist through which the social character of labour appears to us to be an objective character of the products themselves.”

This is because we are so used to how the market operates under capitalism, how prices fluctuate, commodities rise and fall in prices, working people, as consumers, naturally just think the values (which we usually don’t differentiate from prices) are products of the natural world, that is, are functions of the things for sale or barter themselves. This is why “supply and demand” seems to be the basis of the value of things. We often fail to see it’s all really the result of the socially necessary labor time expended in the labor process that is the determining factor in value

This confusion of price and value leads Marx to say, “The determination of the magnitude of value by labor time therefore is a secret, hidden under the apparent fluctuations in the relative values of commodities.”

We are reminded that to understand the real nature of a social formation we have to reverse our knowledge of its historical development. We begin with the full-fledged capitalist system and try to figure why the prices of things are the way they are. Looking at the mature system, we don’t really see its primitive origins. In the same way many religious people looking at a human being fail to see an ape in the historical background.

Marx continues: “When I state that coats and boots stand in a relation to linen, because it is the universal incarnation of abstract human labor, the absurdity of the statement is self evident.” This has been remarked upon both by the most astute of thinkers (Bertrand Russell) and the most pedestrian (Ayn Rand).

The problem is that pro-capitalist ideologues look upon an historically transient economic formation, its own, as an eternally existing social order. Of course prices are set by supply and demand. What is that crazy Marx talking about? As the economist Brad Delong said, he had never known anyone who thought that way.

Well, let’s look at something other than the full-blown capitalist system at work. Marx says, “The whole mystery of commodities, all the magic and necromancy that surrounds the products of labor as long as they take the form of commodities, vanishes therefore, so soon as we come to other forms of production.”

To help explain, Marx gives the example of Robinson Crusoe. He chooses the fictional character Robinson because he was a popular example used in the texts of the day. Robinson has to make everything for himself, obtain his own food, and provide his own shelter. Obviously, the things that are most important for his survival are those he expends most of his labor time upon and are consequently the most valuable to him.

Marx then says we should consider a community of free people working together cooperatively to make all things necessary for their society. Whereas Robinson was just making use of values for himself, in this community a social product is being created. The people have to set aside part of the product for future production, but the rest they can consume. How would they divide it in a fair manner? They would divide the product in proportion to the labor time each individual had contributed to the joint production of the social product.

This is how barter went on in the Middle Ages. Peasants knew precisely how much labor time was involved in making cheese, for example, and in making a pair of shoes. If it took twice as long to make a pound cheese than a pair of shoes, no one was going to trade more than a half pound of cheese for his shoes. It is only in the complicated processes of commodity production, especially in capitalism, that the Fetishism of Commodities begins to manifest itself and the true nature of the source of value is lost.

The loss of knowledge about value produces generally a confused consciousness in our world. Our alienation from our own social product, the effects of commodity fetishism, and the continuing influence of religion all work together to keep us confused and off guard. But seeing what our condition is with respect to such mental blights also tells how far along the road to liberation we are and how far we have to go (quite a distance I fear).

The world is reflected in these distorted forms of consciousness. “The religious world,” Marx tells us, “is but the reflex of the real world.” And, for our capitalist society where all human relations, and relations of humans with the the things they create, are reducible to commodification based on the value of “homogeneous human labor,” the best form of religion is Christianity. (And since Catholicism represents a pre-bourgeois view of human nature more suitable to feudalism, at least in a Western or European framework, it is the Protestant form that is more congruent with capitalist conceptions.)

Why is this? Marx says it is because the idea of “abstract man” is the basis of the the religious outlook of these systems. A religion based on an abstract view of “human nature” is just the ticket for an economic system that capitalist ideology says is also based on “human nature.” The religion reinforces the basic presuppositions of the capitalist view of abstract humanity.

As long as humans are alienated and confused about how capitalism works and are mystified by their relation to the objects of their labor they will never be free, or free from the spell of religion, according to Marx. “The religious reflex of the real world,” he writes, can only vanish “when the practical relations of every-day life offer to man none but perfectly intelligible relations with regard to his fellowmen and to Nature.”

The next two sentences from Marx are extremely important as they explain, in very general terms, the failure of the Russian Revolution and the downfall of the socialist world system. The first sentence served as the basic idea for the Bolsheviks many years after it was written: “The life processes of society, which is based on the process of material production, does not strip off its mystical veil until it is treated as production by freely associated men, and is consciously regulated by them in accordance with a settled plan.”

This is certainly what was attempted — first by war communism, then the NEP and then by the five year plans, forced collectivization and industrialization. But why the failure? Where were the “freely associated” people?

To pull off this great transformation, the goal of communism, Marx wrote “demands for society a certain material ground-work or set of conditions of existence which in their turn are the spontaneous product of a long and painful process of development.”

In other words, the seizure of power was premature. The material ground-work had been insufficiently developed. If Lenin represented the negation of the Czarist regime, Gorbachev and Yeltsin represented the negation of the negation — brought about by the failure of that long and painful process of properly developing production by freely associated people. For all its efforts, the socialist world still belonged to that world in which the processes of production had the mastery over human beings and not the other way around. So we must still put up with the Fetishism of Commodities for a while longer.

The present crisis gives us an opportunity to think about the Fetishism of Commodities as it applies to the real world. General Motors is about to be 70 percent owned by the US government, and the UAW will have a stake of about 17.5 percent. This leaves 12.5 percent in the hands of the capitalists. The commodities that the workers make (vehicles) don’t have a life of their own. Their value is determined by the socially necessary labor time it takes workers to make them. They are extensions of the being of the working people rather than capitalists who have proved themselves totally incompetent.

The working people of this country far out number monopoly capitalists — both industrial and financial. The UAW and the AFL-CIO as well other unions should demand that the government represent the interests of the working class majority. Ideally, the 87.5 percent joint government-worker control of GM would not be used to return control to private interests, but to rationalize the auto industry by means of worker control, eliminate the capitalists and the Fetishism of Commodities that keeps people thinking private interests have a role to play in production.

Such actions might lay the ground work for future nationalizations of basic and vital industries, and, by extension, a more socially planned and democratically determined distribution of the benefits of our labor.

One of the greatest weaknesses of the mainstream environmental movement has been its failure or refusal to identify capitalism as the root problem. Indeed, many of the world’s Green Parties, including the one in Canada where I live, openly describe themselves as eco-capitalist, committed to maintaining the profit system.

Of course this puts them in a contradictory position when they face the reality of capitalist ecocide.

In Canada, as you may know, oil companies are engaged in what the British newspaper The Independent accurately called “The Biggest Environmental Crime in History,” mining the Alberta Tar Sands. If it continues, it will ultimately destroy an area that is nearly twice as big as New South Wales, in order to produce oil by a process that generates three times as much greenhouse gas as normal oil production.

It is also destroying ecosystems, killing animals, fish and birds, and poisoning the drinking water used by Indigenous peoples in that area,

It’s obvious that anyone who is serious about protecting the environment and stopping emissions should demand that the Tar Sands be shut down. But when I raised that in a talk not long ago in Vancouver, a Green Party candidate in the audience objected that would be irresponsible, because it would violate the oil companies’ contract rights.

Evidently, for these ecocapitalists, “capitalism” takes precedence over “eco.”

But as capitalist destruction accelerates, and as capitalist politicians continue to stall, or to introduce measures that only benefit the fossil fuel companies, we can expect that many of the most sincere and dedicated greens will begin to question the system itself, not just its worst results.

Greens moving left: Gus Speth

An important case in point, and, I hope, a harbinger of what’s to come in green circles – is James Gustave Speth, who is now dean of the Yale University School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.

Gus Speth has spent most of his life trying to save the environment by working inside the system. He was a senior environmental advisor to US President Jimmy Carter, and later to Bill Clinton. In the 1990s he was Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme and Chair of the United Nations Development Group. Time magazine called him “the ultimate insider.”

Last year, after 40 years working inside the system, Speth published a book called The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Stability. In it, he argues that working inside the system has failed because the system itself is the cause of environmental destruction.

My conclusion, after much searching and considerable reluctance, is that most environmental deterioration is a result of systemic failures of the capitalism that we have today …

Inherent in the dynamics of capitalism is a powerful drive to earn profits, invest them, innovate, and thus grow the economy, typically at exponential rates …

That’s exactly correct, no Marxist could have said it better. Nor could we improve on Speth’s summary of the factors that combine to make contemporary capitalism the enemy of ecology.

An unquestioning society-wide commitment to economic growth at almost any cost; enormous investment in technologies designed with little regard for the environment; powerful corporate interests whose overriding objective is to grow by generating profit, including profit from avoiding the environmental costs they create; markets that systematically fail to recognize environmental costs unless corrected by government; government that is subservient to corporate interests and the growth imperative; rampant consumerism spurred by a worshipping of novelty and by sophisticated advertising; economic activity so large in scale that its impacts alter the fundamental biophysical operations of the planet; all combine to deliver an ever-growing world economy that is undermining the planet’s ability to sustain life.

Speth is not a Marxist. He still hopes that governments can reform and control capitalism, eliminating pollution. He’s wrong about that, but his analysis of the problem is dead-on, and the fact that it comes from someone who has worked for so long inside the system makes his argument against capitalism credible and powerful.

The socialist movement should welcome and publicize this development, even though Speth and others like him, don’t yet take their ideas to the necessary socialist conclusions.

Greens moving left: James Hansen

Similarly, we should be very encouraged that NASA’s James Hansen, one of the world’s most respected climate scientists, joined in the March 20 demonstration against a planned coal-fired electricity plant in Coventry, England. Hansen is another environmentalist who has worked inside the system for years.

He told the UK Guardian that people should first use the “democratic process” by which he means elections. He went on:

What is frustrating people, me included, is that democratic action affects elections but what we get then from political leaders is greenwash.

The democratic process is supposed to be one person one vote, but it turns out that money is talking louder than the votes. So, I’m not surprised that people are getting frustrated.

I think that peaceful demonstration is not out of order, because we’re running out of time.

In the same interview, Hansen expressed concern about the approach of the Obama administration:

“It’s not clear what their intentions are yet, but if they are going to support cap and trade then unfortunately I think that will be another case of greenwash. It’s going to take stronger action than that.”

Like Speth, Hansen is not a socialist. But he condemns the most widely-promoted market-based “solution,” and he calls for demonstrations and protests, so ecosocialists can and must view him as an ally.

Why ECOsocialism?

Which brings me to a question I’ve been asked many times, including during this visit to Australia. “Why ecosocialism?”

Why not just say ’socialism’? Marx and Engels were deeply concerned about humanity’s relationship to nature, and what we would today call ecological ideas are deeply embedded in their writings. In the 1920s, there was a very influential ecology movement in the Soviet Union. So why do we need a new word?

All that is true. But it is also true that during the 20th century socialists forgot or ignored that tradition, supporting (and in some cases implementing) approaches to economic growth and development that were grossly harmful to the environment.

Socialist Voice recently published an interview in which Oswaldo Martinez, the president of the Economic Affairs Commission of Cuba’s National Assembly addressed just that question. He said:

The socialism practiced by the countries of the Socialist Camp replicated the development model of capitalism, in the sense that socialism was conceived as a quantitative result of growth in productive forces. It thus established a purely quantitative competition with capitalism, and development consisted in achieving this without taking into account that the capitalist model of development is the structuring of a consumer society that is inconceivable for humanity as a whole.

The planet would not survive. It is impossible to replicate the model of one car for each family, the model of the idyllic North American society, Hollywood etc. – absolutely impossible, and this cannot be the reality for the 250 million inhabitants of the United States, with a huge rearguard of poverty in the rest of the world.

It is therefore necessary to come up with another model of development that is compatible with the environment and has a much more collective way of functioning.

In my view, one good reason for using the word ‘ecosocialism’ is to signal a clear break with the practices that Martinez describes, practices were called socialist for seventy years. It is a way of saying that we aim not to create a society based on having more things, but on living better — not quantitative growth, but qualitative change.

Another reason, just as important, is to signal loud and clear that we view ecology and climate change not as just as another stick to bash capitalism with, but as one of the principal problems facing humanity in this century.

Evo Morales: Save the planet from capitalism

Although he has never used the word, so far as I know, one of the strongest defenders of ecosocialist ideas in the world today is Evo Morales, the president of Bolivia, the first indigenous head of state in Latin America.

In a short essay published last November, Evo brilliantly defined the problem, named the villain, and posed the alternative.

Competition and the thirst for profit without limits of the capitalist system are destroying the planet. Under Capitalism we are not human beings but consumers. Under Capitalism, Mother Earth does not exist, instead there are raw materials. Capitalism is the source of the asymmetries and imbalances in the world. It generates luxury, ostentation and waste for a few, while millions in the world die from hunger in the world.

In the hands of capitalism everything becomes a commodity: the water, the soil, the human genome, the ancestral cultures, justice, ethics, death … and life itself. Everything, absolutely everything, can be bought and sold and under capitalism. And even “climate change” itself has become a business.

“Climate change” has placed all humankind before a great choice: to continue in the ways of capitalism and death, or to start down the path of harmony with nature and respect for life.

You know, last year I spent months working with other members of the Ecosocialist International Network, composing a statement to be distributed at the World Social Forum. It was finally published as the Belem Ecosocialist Declaration.

Now I wonder why we didn’t just publish this statement by comrade Evo Morales. He set out the case for ecosocialism, including a program of 20 demands, more concisely, more clearly, and vastly more eloquently than we did. I urge you to read it and to distribute it as widely as possible.

Slamming on the brakes

Writing in the 1930s when Nazi barbarism was in the rise, the Marxist philosopher and literary critic Walter Benjamin said:

Marx says that revolutions are the locomotives of world history. But the situation may be quite different. Perhaps revolutions are not the train ride, but the human race grabbing for the emergency brake.

That’s a powerful and profound metaphor. Capitalism has been so destructive, and taken us so far down the road to catastrophe, that one of the first tasks facing a socialist government will be to slam on the brakes.

The only choice, the only way forward, is ecosocialism, which I suggest can be defined simply as a socialism that will give top priority to the restoration of ecosystems that capitalism has destroyed, to the reestablishment of agriculture and industry on ecologically sound principles, and to mending what Marx called the metabolic rift, the destructive divide that capitalism has created between humanity and nature.

The fate of the ecological struggle is closely tied to the fortunes of the class struggle as a whole. The long neo-liberal drive to weaken the movements of working people also undermined ecological resistance, isolating it, pushing its leaders and organizations to the right.

But today neo-liberalism is discredited. Its financial and economic structures are in shambles. There is growing recognition that profound economic change is needed.

This is an historic opportunity for ecological activists to join hands with workers, with indigenous activists, with anti-imperialist movements here and around the world, to make ecological transformation a central feature of the economic change that is so clearly needed.

Together we can build a society of Good Ancestors, and cooperatively create a better world for future generations.

It won’t be easy, and it won’t be quick, but together we can make it happen.

Anyone who denies that is either lying or somehow unaware of the huge mass of compelling scientific evidence.

Many publications regularly publish articles summarizing the scientific evidence and outlining the devastation that we face if action isn’t taken quickly. I highly recommend Green Left Weekly as a continuing source. I’m not going to repeat what you’ve undoubtedly read there.

But I do want to draw your attention to an important recent development. Last month, more than 2500 climate scientists met in Copenhagen to discuss the state of scientific knowledge on this subject. And the one message that came through loud and clear was this: it’s much worse than we thought.

What were called “worst case scenarios” two years ago by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change actually understated the problem. The final statement issued by the Copenhagen conference declared: “The worst-case IPCC scenario trajectories (or even worse) are being realized.”

Nicholas Stern, author of the landmark 2006 study, The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change now says, “We underestimated the risks. We underestimated the damage associated with the temperature increases, and we underestimated the probability of temperature increases.”

Seventeen years of failure: with one exception

Later this year, the world’s governments will meet, again in Copenhagen, to try to reach a new post-Kyoto climate treaty. Will they meet the challenge of climate change that is much worse than expected?

The politicians’ record does not inspire hope.

Seventeen years ago, in June 1992, 172 governments, including 108 heads of state, met at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro.

That meeting produced the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the first international agreement that aimed “to achieve stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a low enough level to prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.” In particular, the industrialized countries promised to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions below 1990 levels.

Like the Kyoto Accord that followed it, that agreement was a failure. The world’s top politicians demonstrated their gross hypocrisy and their indifference to the future of humanity and nature by giving fine speeches and making promises — and then continuing with business as usual.

But there was one exception. In Rio one head of state spoke out strongly, and called for immediate emergency action — and then returned home to support the implementation of practical policies for sustainable, low-emission development.

That head of state was Fidel Castro.

Fidel began his brief remarks to the plenary session of the 1992 Earth Summit with a blunt description of the crisis: “An important biological species is in danger of disappearing due to the fast and progressive destruction of its natural living conditions: mankind. We have become aware of this problem when it is almost too late to stop it.”

He placed the blame for the crisis squarely on the imperialist countries, and he finished with a warning that emergency action was needed: “Tomorrow it will be too late to do what we should have done a long time ago.”

After the 1992 Earth Summit, only the Cubans acted on their promises and commitments.

In 1992 Cuba amended its constitution to recognize the importance of “sustainable economic and social development to make human life more rational and to ensure the survival, well-being and security of present and future generations.” The amended constitution obligates the provincial and municipal assemblies of People’s Power to implement and enforce environmental protections. And it says that “it is the duty of citizens to contribute to the protection of the waters, atmosphere, the conservation of the soil, flora, fauna and nature’s entire rich potential.”

The Cubans have adopted low-fertilizer agriculture, and encouraged urban farming to reduce the distances food has to travel. They have replaced all of their incandescent light bulbs with fluorescents, and distributed energy efficient rice cookers. They have stepped up reforestation, nearly doubling the island’s forested area, to 25% in 2006.

As a result of these and many other projects, in 2006 the World Wildlife Federation concluded that Cuba is the only country in the world that meets the criteria for sustainable development.

By contrast, the countries responsible for the great majority of greenhouse gas emissions followed one of two paths. Some gave lip service to cleaning up their acts, but in practice did little or nothing. Others denied that action was needed and so did little or nothing.

As a result we are now very close to the tomorrow that Fidel spoke of, the tomorrow when it is too late.

Why Cuba?

The World Wildlife Federation deserves credit for its honesty in reporting Cuba’s achievements. But the WWF failed to address the next logical question. Why was Cuba the exception? Why could a tiny island republic in the Caribbean do what no other country could do?

And the next question after that is, why have the richest countries in the world not cut their emissions, not developed sustainable economies? Why, despite their enormous physical and scientific resources, has their performance actually gotten worse?

The first question, why Cuba could do it, was answered not long ago by Armando Choy, a leader of the Cuban revolution who has recently headed the drive to clean up Havana Bay. His explanation was very clear and compelling:

“This is possible because our system is socialist in character and commitment, and because the revolution’s top leadership acts in the interests of the majority of humanity inhabiting planet earth – not on behalf of narrow individual interests, or even simply Cuba’s national interests.”

General Choy’s comments reminded me of a passage in Capital, a paragraph that all by itself refutes the claim that is sometimes made, that Marxism has nothing in common with ecology. Karl Marx wrote:

“Even an entire society, a nation, or all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the earth. They are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations.”

I’ve never known any socialist organization to make this point explicitly, but Marx’s words imply that one of the key objectives of socialism must be to build a society in which human beings work consciously to be Good Ancestors.

And that is what the Cubans are doing in practice.

The idea that we must act in the present to build a better world for the future, has been a theme of the Cuban revolutionary movement since Fidel’s great 1953 speech, “History Will Absolve Me.” That commitment to future generations is central to what has justly been called the greening of the Cuban revolution.

The Cubans are committed, not just in words but in practice, to being Good Ancestors, not only to future Cubans, but to future generations around the globe.

Why not capitalism?

But what about the other side of the question? Why do we not see a similar commitment in the ruling classes of Australia, or Canada, or the United States?

If you ask any of them individually, our rulers would undoubtedly say that they want their children and grandchildren to live in a stable and sustainable world. So why do their actions contradict their words? Why do they seem determined, in practice, to leave their children and grandchildren a world of poisoned air and water, a world of floods and droughts and escalating climate disasters? Why have they repeatedly sabotaged international efforts to adopt even half-hearted measures to cut greenhouse gas emissions?

When they do consider or implement responses to the climate crisis, why do they always support solutions that do not work, that cannot possibly work?

Karl Marx had a wonderful phrase for the bosses and their agents — the big shareholders and executives and top managers and the politicians they own — a phrase that explains why they invariably act against the present and future interests of humanity. These people, he said, are “personifications of capital.” Regardless of how they behave at home, or with their children, their social role is that of capital in human form.

They don’t act to stop climate change because the changes needed by the people of this world are directly contrary to the needs of capital.

Capital has no conscience. Capital can’t be anyone’s ancestor because capital has no children. Capital has only one imperative: it has to grow.

The only reason for using money to buy stock, launch a corporation, build a factory or drill an oil well is to get more money back than you invested. That doesn’t always happen, of course — some investments fail to produce profits, and, as we are seeing today, periodically the entire system goes into freefall, wiping out jobs and livelihoods and destroying capital. But that doesn’t contradict the fact that the potential for profit, to make capital grow, is a defining feature of capitalism. Without it, the system would rapidly collapse.

As Joel Kovel says, “Capitalism can no more survive limits on growth than a person can live without breathing.”

A system of growth and waste

Under capitalism, the only measure of success is how much is sold every day, every week, every year. It doesn’t matter that the sales include vast quantities of products that are directly harmful to both humans and nature, or that many commodities cannot be produced without spreading disease, destroying the forests that produce the oxygen we breathe, demolishing ecosystems, and treating our water, air and soil as sewers for the disposal of industrial waste.

It all contributes to profits, and thus to the growth of capital — and that’s what counts.

In Capital, Marx wrote that from a capitalist’s perspective, raw materials such as metals, minerals, coal, stone, etc. are “furnished by Nature gratis.” The wealth of nature doesn’t have to be paid for or replaced when it is used — it is there for the taking. If the capitalists had to pay the real cost of that replacing or restoring that wealth, their profits would fall drastically.

That’s true not only of raw materials, but also of what are sometimes called “environmental services” — the water and air that have been absorbing capitalism’s waste products for centuries. They have been treated as free sewers and free garbage dumps, “furnished by Nature gratis.”

That’s what the pioneering environmental economist William Kapp meant nearly sixty years ago, when he wrote, “Capitalism must be regarded as an economy of unpaid costs.”

Kapp wrote that capitalism’s claims of efficiency and productivity are: “nothing more than an institutionalized cover under which it is possible for private enterprise to shift part of the costs to the shoulders of others and to practice a form of large-scale spoliation which transcends everything the early socialists had in mind when they spoke of the exploitation of man by man.”

In short, pollution is not an accident, and it is not a “market failure.” It is the way the system works.

How large is the problem? In 1998 the World Resources Institute conducted a major international study of the resource inputs used by corporations in major industrial countries — water, raw materials, fuel, and so on. Then they determined what happened to those inputs. They found that “One half to three quarters of annual resource inputs to industrial economies are returned to the environment as wastes within a year.”

Similar numbers are reported by others. As you know, about a billion people live in hunger. And yet, as the head of the United Nations Environmental Program said recently, “Over half of the food produced today is either lost, wasted or discarded as a result of inefficiency in the human-managed food chain.”

“Inefficiency” in this case means that it is no profit to be made by preventing food waste — so waste continues. In addition to exacerbating world hunger, capitalism’s gross inefficiency poisons the land and water with food that is harvested but not used.

Capitalism’s destructive DNA

Capitalism combines an irresistible drive to grow, with an irresistible drive to create waste and pollution. If nothing stops it, capitalism will expand both those processes infinitely.

But the earth is not infinite. The atmosphere and oceans and the forests are very large, but ultimately they are finite, limited resources — and capitalism is now pressing against those limits. The 2006 WWF Living Planet Report concludes, “The Earth’s regenerative capacity can no longer keep up with demand — people are turning resources into waste faster than nature can turn waste back into resources.”

My only disagreement with that statement is that it places the blame on “people” as an abstract category. In fact the devastation is caused by the global capitalist system, and by the tiny class of exploiters that profits from capitalism’s continued growth. The great majority of people are victims, not perpetrators.

In particular, capitalist pollution has passed the physical limit of the ability of nature to absorb carbon dioxide and other gases while keeping the earth’s temperature steady. As a result, the world is warmer today than it has been for 100,000 years, and the temperature continues to rise.

Greenhouse Gas Emissions are not unusual or exceptional. Pouring crap into the environment is a fundamental feature of capitalism, and it isn’t going to stop so long as capitalism survives. That’s why “solutions” like carbon trading have failed so badly and will continue to fail: waste and pollution and ecological destruction are built into the system’s DNA.

No matter how carefully the scheme is developed, no matter how many loopholes are identified and plugged, and no matter how sincere the implementers and administrators may be, capitalism’s fundamental nature will always prevail.

We’ve seen that happen with Kyoto’s Clean Development Mechanism, under which polluters in rich countries can avoid cutting their own emissions if they invest in equivalent emission-reducing projects in the Third World. A Stanford University study shows that two-thirds or more of the CDM emission reduction credits have not produced any reductions in pollution.

The entire system is based on what one observer says are “enough lies to make a sub-prime mortgage pusher blush.”

CDM continues not because it is reducing emissions, but because there are profits to be made buying and selling credits. CDM is an attempt to trick the market into doing good in spite of itself, but capitalism’s drive for profits wins every time.

Ian Angus was a featured guest at the World at a Crossroads: Fighting for Socialism in the 21st Century conference , in Sydney Australia, April 10-12, 2009. The event, which drew 440 participants from more than 15 countries, was organized by Democratic Socialist Perspective, Resistance and Green Left Weekly. The above is Ian’s talk to the plenary session on “Confronting the climate change crisis: an ecosocialist perspective.” He has lightly edited the text for publication.

Although it is difficult to separate the RAF’s theory from their actions–actions which included murder–if one does so they find an application of left theory that perceived the anti-imperialist resistance in the advanced industrial nations (First World, if you will) as just another part of the worldwide anti-imperialist movement. It was this conclusion that the RAF used to rationalize their attacks on US military installations in 1972 during their anti-imperialist offensive.. They did not believe the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) to be in a revolutionary situation, but justified their attacks via the argument that the US and other imperial forces (German and British) should be attacked wherever they were, not just in Vietnam or another country where they were engaged in overt warfare. This approach echoed the slogan popularized by the Weatherman organization in the US-Bring the War Home.

I lived in Frankfurt am Main, Germany during the period described in this book. I attended protests against the Vietnam War, in support of the burgeoning squatters movement (and against property speculation) in Frankfurt, against the Shah of Iran, in support of Gastarbeiter rights and against the repressive regimes in Turkey and Greece. I also attended concerts and street festivals where the German counterculture mingled flamboyantly with the US servicemen and adolescents that abounded in the country then. When the IG Farben building and Officer’s Club in Frankfurt am Main were attacked by the RAF, a serious security effort became part of our daily lives. School buses taking us to the American High School in Frankfurt were boarded by military police who checked our bags while other GIs used long-handled mirrors to check underneath the buses for explosive devices. German police and military set up shop at airports and train stations, holding automatic weapons. Autobahn exits were the site of roadblocks. Wanted posters featuring the faces of the RAF members appeared everywhere. The Goethe University in Frankfurt came under increased police surveillance, especially after the playing of a tape-recorded message from RAF member Ulrike Meinhof at a national conference there. A protest held against the US mining of northern Vietnamese harbors and intensified bombing of the Vietnamese people was patrolled by police armed with automatic weapons. Nonetheless, many of the protesters chanted “Für den Sieg des VietCong, Bomben auf das Pentagon!” (For the victory of the NLF, bomb the Pentagon). The following day, the Pentagon was bombed by the Weather Underground.

Recently, PM Press in California published the book The Red Army Faction, A Documentary History: Volume 1: Projectiles For The People. This voluminous work includes virtually all of the communiques and theoretical pamphlets published by the RAF from 1970 to 1977. This period is considered the first period of the RAF–an organization that saw its original leadership imprisoned after the aforementioned bombing offensive against US military installations in Germany. These members were followed by another set of individuals drawn to the RAF mostly through support organizations that developed to protest the conditions of the RAF’s imprisonment and their eventual deaths that many still believe were state-sanctioned murders. Over the next two decades , hundreds of others would join the organization to replace those imprisoned and killed. Besides the text written by the RAF, the editors have written an accompanying text that provides a take on the history of post World War Two West Germany that has been mostly unavailable to English readers.

The RAF was an intensely sectarian organization. They saw most of the rest of the German Left as revisionist or opportunist, unwilling to make the commitment armed struggle required. Besides invalidating the gains won by the autonomist squatters’ movement and other independent groupings, this analysis ignored the fact that other approaches might have been more effective in the long term. By positioning itself to the left of all other leftist groups in Germany, the RAF insured its limited effectiveness. Once the State was able to capture its primary membership and literally isolate them in prisons, the RAF’s purpose moved away from challenging the imperialists to one of staying alive inside a draconian and psychologically debilitating prison environment.

Indeed, as this book clearly demarcates, the bulk of the work of the RAF in the 1970s centered around the nature of their existence in prison. In what would become a harbinger of the future we live in, the German prison authority and its departmental ally the Bundeskriminalamt (BKA) developed an architecture and series of mechanisms designed to destroy the minds of the RAF prisoners. Isolation cells painted completely in white where the neon light never went off. No contact with any human for months at a time. The use of informers and ultimately a trial held in a specially designed prison courthouse that took place without the defendants or their attorneys. In addition, laws were passed that criminalized not only the act taken by the attorneys to defend their clients but also the acts of any individuals who opposed the actions taken by the State against the RAF prisoners. Of course, this enabled the RAF to point out the unity of purpose between the right wing CDU-CSU West German government and the SPD (with obvious comparisons to the role played by the German Social Democrats after World War I when they used the right-wing militia known as the Freikorps to kill members of the revolutionary Spartacists). The special laws enacted against the RAF and its supporters contained many elements of laws now in existence in the US, realized most fully in the Patriot Act.

While the RAF was certainly successful in exposing the fundamental authoritarianism of the modern capitalist state through their hunger strikes and other actions, they did nothing towards rebuilding the anti-imperialist movement that the 1972 actions were conceived in. This created a situation where their developing analysis of imperialism and the struggle against it became essentially moribund. In other words, the repression by the German government and its allies was successful.

The editors of this work, J. Smith and André Moncourt, have created an intelligently political work that honestly discusses the politics of the Red Army Fraktion during its early years. Their commentary explains the theoretical writings of the RAF from a left perspective and puts their politics and actions in the context of the situation present in Germany and the world at the time. It is an extended work that is worth the commitment required to read and digest it. More than a historical document, The Red Army Faction, A Documentary History: Volume 1: Projectiles For The People provides us with the ability to comprehend the phenomenon that was the RAF in ways not possible thirty years ago.

History is littered with post-crisis regulations. If there are undue restrictions on the operations of businesses, they may view it to be their job to get around them, and you sow the seeds of the next crisis.

– Liz Ann Sonders, chief investment analyst, CharlesSchwab & Co., a leading US provider of investment services.¹

And so it goes. Corporations, whether financial or not, strive to maximize profit as inevitably as water seeks its own level. We’ve been trying to “regulate” them since the 19th century. Or is it the 18th? Nothing helps for long. You close one loophole and the slime oozes out of another hole. Wall Street has not only an army of lawyers and accountants, but a horde of mathematicians with advanced degrees searching for the perfect equations to separate people from their money. After all the stimulus money has come and gone, after all the speeches by our leaders condemning greed and swearing to reforms, after the last congressional hearing deploring the corporate executives to their faces, the boys of Wall Street, shrugging off a few bruises, will resume churning out their assortment of financial entities, documents, and packages that go by names like hedge funds, derivatives, collateralized debt obligations, index funds, credit default swaps, structured investment vehicles, subprime mortgages, and many other pieces of paper with exotic names, for which, it must be kept in mind, there had been no public need or strident demand. Speculation, bonuses, and scotch will flow again, and the boys will be all the wiser, perhaps shaken a bit that they’re so reviled, but knowing better now what to flaunt and what to disguise.

This is another reminder that communism or socialism have almost always been given just one chance to work, if that much, while capitalism has been given numerous chances to do so following its perennial fiascos. Ralph Nader has observed: “Capitalism will never fail because socialism will always be there to bail it out.”

In the West, one of the most unfortunate results of the Cold War was that 70 years of anti-communist education and media stamped in people’s minds a lasting association between socialism and what the Soviet Union called communism. Socialism meant a dictatorship, it meant Stalinist repression, a suffocating “command economy,” no freedom of enterprise, no freedom to change jobs, few avenues for personal expression, and other similar truths and untruths. This is a set of beliefs clung to even amongst many Americans opposed to US foreign policy. No matter how bad the economy is, Americans think, the only alternative available is something called “communism,” and they know how awful that is.

Adding to the purposeful confusion, the conservatives in England, for 30 years following the end of World War 2, filled the minds of the public with the idea that the Labour Party was socialist, and when recession hit (as it does regularly in capitalist countries) the public was then told, and believed, that “socialism had failed.”

Yet, ever since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, polls taken in Russia have shown a nostalgia for the old system. In the latest example, Russia Now, a Moscow publication that appears as a supplement in the Washington Post, asked Russians: “What socio-economic system do you favor?” The results were: “State planning and distribution”: 58% … “Based on private property and market relations”: 28% … “Hard to say”: 14%.²

In 1994, Mark Brzezinski (son of Zbigniew) was a Fulbright Scholar teaching in Warsaw. He has written: “I asked my students to define democracy. Expecting a discussion on individual liberties and authentically elected institutions, I was surprised to hear my students respond that to them, democracy means a government obligation to maintain a certain standard of living and to provide health care, education and housing for all. In other words, socialism.”³

Many Americans cannot go along with the notion of a planned, centralized society. To some extent it’s the terminology that bothers them because they were raised to equate a planned society with the worst excesses of Stalinism. Okay, let’s forget the scary labels; let’s describe it as people sitting down to discuss a particular serious societal problem, what the available options there are to solve the problem, and what institutions and forces in the society have the best access, experience, and assets to deliver those options. So, the idea is to prepare these institutions and forces to deal with the problem in a highly organized, rational manner without having to worry about which corporation’s profits might be adversely affected, without relying on “the magic of the marketplace.” Now it happens that all this is usually called “planning” and if the organization and planning stem from a government body it can be called “centralized.” There’s no reason to assume that this has to result in some kind of very authoritarian regime. All of us over a certain age —individually and collectively — have learned a lot about such things from the past. We know the warning signs; that’s why the Bush administration’s authoritarianism was so early and so strongly condemned.

The overwhelming majority of people in the United States work for a salary. They don’t need to be motivated by the quest for profit. It’s not in our genes. Virtually everybody, if given the choice, would prefer to work at jobs where the main motivations are to produce goods and services that improve the quality of life of the society, to help others, and to provide themselves with meaningful and satisfying work. It’s not natural to be primarily motivated by trying to win or steal “customers” from other people, no holds barred, survival of the fittest or the most ruthless.

A major war can be the supreme test of a nation, a time when it’s put under the greatest stress. In World War 2, the US government commandeered the auto manufacturers to make tanks and jeeps instead of private cars. When a pressing need for an atom bomb was seen, Washington did not ask for bids from the private sector; it created the Manhattan Project to do it itself, with no concern for balance sheets or profit and loss statements. Women and blacks were given skilled factory jobs they had been traditionally denied. Hollywood was enlisted to make propaganda films. Indeed, much of the nation’s activities, including farming, manufacturing, mining, communications, labor, education, and cultural undertakings were in some fashion brought under new and significant government control, with the war effort coming before private profit. In peacetime, we can think of socialism as putting people before profit, with all the basics guaranteed — health care, all education, decent housing, food, jobs. Those who swear by free enterprise argue that the “socialism” of World War 2 was instituted only because of the exigencies of the war. That’s true, but it doesn’t alter the key point that it had been immediately recognized by the government that the wasteful and inefficient capitalist system, always in need of proper financial care and feeding, was no way to run a country trying to win a war.

It’s also no way to run a society of human beings with human needs. Most Americans agree with this but are not consciously aware that they hold such a belief. In 1987, nearly half of 1,004 Americans surveyed by the Hearst press believed Karl Marx’s aphorism: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need” was to be found in the US Constitution.⁴

Along these lines, I’ve written an essay entitled: “The United States invades, bombs, and kills for it, but do Americans really believe in free enterprise?”⁵

I cannot describe in detail what every nut and bolt of my socialist system would look like. That might appear rather pretentious on my part; most of it would evolve through trial and error anyway; the important thing is that the foundation — the crucial factors in making the important decisions — would rest on people’s welfare and the common good coming before profit. Humankind’s desperate need to halt environmental degradation regularly runs smack into the profit motive, as does the American health-care system. It’s more than a matter of ideology; it’s a matter of the quality of life, sustainability, and survival.

“Omission is the most powerful form of lie.” – George Orwell

I am asked occasionally why I am so critical of the mainstream media when I quote from them repeatedly in my writings. The answer is simple. The American media’s gravest shortcoming is much more their errors of omission than their errors of commission. It’s what they leave out that distorts the news more than any factual errors or out-and-out lies. So I can make good use of the facts they report, which a large, rich organization can easier provide than the alternative media.

In early March, the Washington Post ran an article about Iran which stated that “Iranian leaders … reiterated that the Holocaust was ‘a lie’.” The article then went on to add that Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad “repeated his assertion that the Holocaust is a ‘big lie’.”⁶ That’s all we’re told. What is the poor reader to conclude but that some Iranian leaders must be amongst that much vilified and ridiculed group called “Holocaust deniers”?

What the article fails to mention is that these Iranian leaders use the word “lie” to refer to only particular features of the Holocaust. There is no report of any of them simply, clearly, unambiguously, and unequivocally asserting that what we know as the Holocaust never took place. Ahmadinejad, for example, has instead commented about the peculiarity and injustice of a Holocaust which took place in Europe resulting in a state for the Jews in the Middle East instead of in Europe. Why are the Palestinians paying a price for a German crime? he asks. And he wonders about the accuracy of the number of Jews — six million — allegedly killed in the Holocaust, as have many other people of all political stripes and nationalities, including the noted Italian author Primo Levi, a Holocaust survivor. Even Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian National Authority — Israel and Washington’s favorite Palestinian because of his opposition to Hamas, their least favored Palestinians — wrote in his doctoral dissertation: “The truth of the matter is that no one can verify this number, or completely deny it. In other words, the number of Jewish victims might be 6 million and might be much smaller — even less than 1 million.”⁷

It is also worth noting that at the end of the Post article we learn that “a senior Israeli official in Washington, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not cleared to discuss such matters publicly” has asserted that “Iran would be unlikely to use its missiles in an attack [against Israel] because of the certainty of retaliation.” Really? That’s what I and others have been saying for years. It should have been the story’s headline, not the very last sentence, literally. Yet, we can be certain that Israeli and American officials and their disciples will continue to warn the world of the danger of Iranian missile attacks. So will the Washington Post, engaging in future omissions of its own news story.

What actually has long worried Israeli and US officials about possible Iranian nuclear weapons is not that Iran might attack anyone, but that Israel’s beloved security blanket — being the only nuclear power in the Middle East — would at risk, as might be Washington’s dominance of the area.

Later in March, the Los Angeles Times ran an obituary of Janet Jagan, the former president of Guyana and widow of Cheddi Jagan who had earlier also been president. The obituary says not a word about the fact that for 11 years, 1953-64, two of the oldest democracies in the world, Great Britain and the United States, went to great lengths in their repeated attempts to prevent the democratically elected Cheddi Jagan from occupying his office.⁸

I’ve selected these examples of omission virtually at random. If I wanted to report on each media omission concerning significant US foreign policy matters I could fill this newsletter each month with nothing else.

It happens that in late March the Washington Post also provided us with the less common out-and-out lie. In an editorial about the leftist former guerillas in El Salvador, the FMLN, winning the presidential election with their candidate Mauricio Funes, the Post said: “If Mr. Funes as well as the election’s losers now respect the rule of law, the result could be the consolidation of the political system the United States was aiming for when it intervened in El Salvador’s civil war during the 1980s. At the time, the goal of a successful Salvadoran democracy was dismissed as a mission impossible, just as some now say democracy is unattainable in Iraq and Afghanistan.”⁹

The idea that the US intervention in the Salvadoran civil war stemmed from a desire to bring democracy to the country is so breathtaking in its audacity that it’s conceivable the Post editorial writer is suffering from early-stage Alzheimer’s; it’s wholly comparable to saying that the Apartheid regime of South Africa strove to increase harmony and equality between blacks and whites. In the process of supporting a Salvadoran government of remarkable tyranny, brutality and human-rights violations, the United States provided the country’s armed forces with a never-ending supply of funds, weapons and training that brought continual destruction and suffering to the people of El Salvador. The Post’s “disclosure” will not send historians scurrying to rewrite their books. Nor can it serve to conceal the fact that the United States is not fighting for “democracy” in Iraq and Afghanistan any more than it did in El Salvador.

The ideology of Barack Obama

In the past two months:

• US Vice President Joe Biden was asked by reporters at a summit in Chile if Washington plans to put an end to the near-50-year-old economic embargo against Cuba. He replied “No.”¹⁰
• Israeli authorities broke up a series of Palestinian cultural events in Jerusalem, disrupting a children’s march and bursting balloons at a schoolyard celebration.¹¹ There has not been, nor will there be, any embargo of any kind by the United States against Israel. Nor will President Obama make any comment about what he really feels about invading a children’s party and bursting their balloons.
• The White House and the Pentagon appear to be having a competition over who can announce the most troops being sent to Afghanistan. Is anyone keeping a body count?
• US drones continue to drop bombs on people’s homes and wedding parties in Pakistan. No one in Washington publicly admits to this or comments in any way about the legality or morality of it all.
• Bolivia and Ecuador have expelled American diplomats for what their hosts saw as conspiring to undermine the government.

Any number of other examples can be given of how alike the foreign policies of the Bush and Obama administrations are, how little, if any, change has occurred; certainly nothing of any significance. Yet, my saying such a thing is precisely what most often bothers Obama supporters who read or hear my comments. They’re in love with the man with the toothpaste-advertisement smile, who’s “smart” (whatever that means), who plays basketball, and is not George W. Bush, and his wife who puts her arm around the queen of England.

Obama’s popularity around the world is enhanced, to an important extent, by the fact that he has endeavored to conceal or obscure his real ideology. As an example, in early March, in an interview with the New York Times, he was asked: “Is there a one word name for your philosophy? If you’re not a socialist, are you a liberal? Are you progressive? One word?”

“No, I’m not going to engage in that,” replied the president.¹²

The next day he called the Times reporter, telling him: “It was hard for me to believe that you were entirely serious about that socialist question.” Obama then gave the reporter several examples of why his policies show that he isn’t a socialist.¹³

He didn’t have to convince me. Obama’s centrist bent is clear to anyone who bothers to look. But after the Times incident — which apparently bothered him — he may have felt the need to be more clear about his ideological leanings to avoid any further silly “socialist” episodes. The next day, meeting at the White House with members of the New Democrat Coalition, a group of centrist Democratic members of the House, Obama said at one point: “I am a New Democrat.”¹⁴

Most conservatives will probably continue to see him as a dangerous leftist. They should be happy that Obama is the president and not any kind of real progressive or socialist or even a genuine liberal, but the right wing is greedy.

1. Washington Post, March 29, 2009
2. Russia Now, in Washington Post, March 25, 2009
3. Los Angeles Times, September 2, 1994
4. Frank Bernack, Jr., Hearst Corp. President, address to the American Bar Association, early 1987, reported in In These Times magazine (Chicago), June 24-July 7, 1987
5. William Blum, Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower, chapter 26
6. Washington Post, March 5, 2009
7. The Middle East Media Research Institute, “Inquiry and Analysis,” No. 95, May 30, 2002; also see Wikipedia, entry for Mahmoud Abbas, “Doctoral Dissertation” section
8. Los Angeles Times, March 29, 2009. See William Blum, Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, chapter 16 for what was left out
9. Washington Post, March 21, 2009
10. Miami Herald, March 28, 2009
11. Washington Post, March 22, 2009
12. New York Times, March 7, 2009
13. New York Times, March 8 2009
14. Politico magazine, online, March 10, 2009