Engels will compare his and Marx’s “bastard” progeny with the “legitimate” progeny of Herr Dühring with respect to economic production in this chapter. Dühring rejects any notion of the capitalist production system which claims that economic crises are due to the very nature of the structure of capitalism itself. That is a Marxian fantasy.

For Dühring, Engels says, “crises are only occasional deviations from ‘normalcy’ and at most only serve to promote ‘the development of a more regulated order.’” The Marxists maintain, au contraire, that crises are caused by over-production and this is a structural fault within the capitalist system itself. But Dühring rejects this and writes that the real reason for crises is, in his words, “the lagging behind of popular consumption … artificially produced under-consumption … with the natural growth of the NEEDS OF THE PEOPLE (!), which ultimately make the gulf between supply and demand so critically wide.”

To this Engels replies that the masses have been forced to under-consume throughout history and in every economic system based on class exploitation, therefore under-consumption is not some artificially produced phenomenon but something all class societies share — i.e., that the exploited class never has the value of its yearly production returned to it at the end of the year. The crises of industrial capitalism, however, only date from the the first quarter of the nineteenth century.

Thus, Engels concludes, it is under capitalism that periodic economic crises come into the world and while under-consumption of the masses is a PREREQUISITE it is not the CAUSE of crises. And knowing this, he says, “tells us just as little why crises exist today as why they did not exist before.”

Dühring, in fact, does not think mass markets are all that important anyway. He himself says that capitalist production happens to “depend for its market mainly on THE CIRCLES OF THE POSSESSING CLASSES THEMSELVES.” His confusion becomes only more apparent when he follows up on this by claiming that the most important industries (this is the 1870s remember) are cotton and iron production. But, Engels points out, the production of these two is entirely dependent on a mass market and the possessing class make up only an “infinitesimally small degree” of its market.

Engels then points out that capitalism, by it very need to grow and expand, brings about crises. He says, for example, in England there is just one small town (Oldham) that from 1872 to 1875 doubled its production of spun cotton [the number of its spindles went from 2.5 to 5 million] and this is just one of a dozen small towns around Manchester. Oldham, by the way, produced as much spun cotton as ALL of Germany (including Alsace). This was happening in towns all over Great Britain.

It thus shows “deep-rooted effrontery” on the part of Herr Dühring to blame the English masses for under-consumption rather than the capitalists for over-production when it comes to “the present complete stagnation in the yarn and cloth markets.”²

Engels ends his critique of Herr Dühring’s views on crises but gives a few quotes that demonstrate that Dühring has no idea about capitalism as an economic system but sees everything in terms of the behavior of individuals. If over-speculation and the unplanned building of private factories are responsible for crises we must see that as simply “the ordinary interplay of overstrain and relaxation” of the system and look closely at “the rashness of individual entrepreneurs and the lack of private circumspection” as one of the causes.

The only “rashness” here, Engels maintains, is the habit of turning the facts of economics into “moral reprobation.” This is a problem of our times as well, not just the time of Engels. How often do we hear talk about our current crisis as a product of “greed” on the part of Wall Street bankers and that they should pay their “fair share” of taxes and such rubbish as if the decay of capitalism is a moral disorder on the part of the ruling class instead of a structural disorder that requires the replacement of the system rather than remedial Sunday school classes for the capitalists.

But all this has been treated of in the previous chapter of Anti-Dühring and Engels wants to move on (Cf. “Frederick Engels on the Theoretical Development of Modern Capitalism” in the November 2011 Political Affairs). Engels will now turn his attention to Dühring’s new system of viewing socialism which is called “the natural system of society.”

Dühring bases his system of socialism on what he calls the “universal principle of justice” which applies everywhere and is independent of historical and economic facts. This is enough to disqualify it as idealistic nonsense but Engels wants to philosophically pepper spay Dühring for having the gall to attack Marx for being unclear and fuzzy as to what type of socialism he believes in. It appears that the demands made in the name of the workers in the Communist Manifesto are “erroneous half measures” far inferior to Dühring’s ideas which represent “a comprehensive schematism of great import in human history.”

Marx, according to Dühring, thinks of socialism as “nothing more than the corporative ownership by groups of workers … an ownership that is both individual and social.” Engels is upset because this is far from anything Marx has suggested and in truth actually applies to the system that Dühring has concocted.

Dühring advocates a federation of independent economic communes which compete with one another and which have absolute freedom of movement from one commune to another. In this crazy system the wealthy successful communes will out compete the poorly run communes which will become defunct as the people will all end up moving to the well run ones.

Production within the communes stays the same as production in the past — i.e., the communes are still capitalist in nature even though controlled by the workers. So the greatly touted natural system of justice and the new socialism amounts to the fact, Engels says, that “the commune takes the place of the capitalists.”

What are Dühring’s views on the most basic form of all hitherto existing methods of production — i.e., the division of labor? With respect to the primary division, that between TOWN and COUNTRY (or industry and agriculture) he has little to say beyond some common place remarks about its “inevitable” nature and the possibility of overcoming it in the future. Thin gruel from Engels’ point of view.

When it comes to the modern division of labor in trade and industry Dühring is very vague and only says that we have an “erroneous division of labor” and that all will be remedied in the future “as soon as account is taken of the various natural conditions and personal capabilities [of the workers].” Engels doesn’t say so, but Dühring’s views here are suspiciously similar to those of Plato in the Republic and very far from the socialist analysis of Marx to which Engels now turns.

Marx tells us that in all societies where production springs up “spontaneously” (including capitalism) we discover the means of production dominate the people not the other way around. The first great division of labour saw the development of towns and cities surrounded by peasant agriculturalists. This division has doomed rural people for thousands of years, Marx says, to “mental torpidity” and enslaved the town dwellers to their own specialized trade. This “stunting” of humanity increases with the increase of the division of labor.

Under capitalism the workers become tied to their machines and to one specific function and one tool. Capitalism, Marx says in Das Kapital “converts the laborer into a crippled monstrosity. by forcing his detail dexterity at the expense of a world of productive capabilities and instincts…. The individual himself is made the automatic motor of a fractional operation.” How much this has been alleviated by the modern day union movement varies from country to country and in proportion to the percentage of workers who are unionized. The large number of working people in the US for example, that vote Republican shows that “mental torpidity” is not confined to the rural populations of Texas, Iowa or Alaska (to name a few).

It is not just the workers who suffer under the present day division of labor but also, Engels says, the “empty-minded bourgeois” chasing after profits (Donald Trump comes to mind), the lawyers dominated by “fossilized legal conceptions” and so-called “educated classes” of society plagued by “local narrow-mindedness” and “mental short-sightedness”– just think of the tribe of Sunday morning news pundits paraded before the public by all the major TV networks, or the platoons of professors giving advice about everything under the sun and hardly agreeing on anything other than that capitalism is still the best of all possible economic formations.

But how are we to overcome this division of labor and the consequent alienation of humanity from its potentials and possibilities? One way only says Engels: “in making itself the master of all the means of production to use them in accordance with a social plan, society puts an end to the former subjection of men to their own means of production.” In other words, socialism based on central planning and most importantly — a feature historically absent in 20th century socialist societies due to their premature appearance in economically backward conditions — planning democratically controlled and carried out by the working people themselves. The former alienating division of labor will be done away with as “society cannot free itself unless every individual is freed.”

Engels says that this is not just a “fantasy” or a “pious wish.” He maintains that the state of industrial development in the 1870s is so advanced that society could “reduce the time required for labour to a point which measured by our present conceptions, will be small indeed.” This figure needs to be actually quantified — but the point is all the goodies needed to live and thrive could be created with people just working a few hours a week and with no one being chained to any one boring and unsatisfying job. The growth in productivity since Engels’ day must make this even more true today.

Engels quotes Das Kapital: “The employment of machinery does away with the necessity of crystallizing this distribution [of labor-tr] after the manner of Manufacture, by the constant annexation of a particular man to a particular function. Since the motion of the whole system does not proceed from the workman, but from the machinery, a change of persons can take place at any time without an interruption of the work….”

Modern capitalism with its constant crises and dislocations of industrial centers and working people and financial catastrophes makes, Marx says, it necessary that we posit as a “fundamental law of production, variation of work” so that modern workers have to be ready to change jobs and learn new skills or leave the labor market. This disrupts lives and threatens widespread social disorder. Only socialist planning and a system that puts people before profits can prevent society from self destructing under the contradictions generated by the present capitalist world market which, in the name of profits first and people last, fragments both human individuals and their social relations with others which inevitably results from the private appropriation of socially created wealth.

Engels also says that the abolition of capitalism and the development “one single vast plan” which harmoniously “dovetails” industry and the means of production so that the differences between town and country are overcome is a prerequisite to overcoming environmental degradation and “present poisoning the air water and land.” To this must be added the current disaster of human induced global warming which simply cannot be dealt with as long as capitalism remains the dominant economic system. This problem was not seen in Engels’ day and now, despite the overwhelming scientific evidence of impending doom, the various capitalist powers are unwilling to take the drastic regulatory measures needed to deal with the problem.

Engels maintains that none of these claims he is making is “utopian” but that they are logical conclusions of scientific central planning and the abolition of the difference between town and country. It looks as if the towns, or rather the great cities (such as New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Moscow, Beijing, etc., etc., will have be abolished as well! Engels says that it “is true that in the huge towns civilization has bequeathed us a heritage which it will take much time and trouble to get rid of.” But, “the great towns will perish.”

No, this is not Pol Pot, it is Frederick Engels and he is saying this because he envisions a complete redistribution of the population under socialism in order to get the “most equal distribution possible of modern industry.” So the abolition of the separation of town and country means the abolition of the cities. They must and will be eliminated “however protracted a process it may be.” This might just be a little too “utopian” and perhaps with the progress of science and communications since the 1870s, especially the growth of the internet, the contradictions between town and country can be resolved without offing the Big Apple.

In any event, leaving the abolition of cities aside, the point Engels wants to make is that Dühring’s view of socialism leaves out of account that building socialism will necessitate “revolutionizing from top to bottom the old method of production and first of all putting an end to the old division of labour.” Dühring thinks that the state can just take over production as is and harmonize it to people’s “natural appetites and personal capabilities.” He also thinks the division between town and country is natural and inevitable and has no plan for putting an end to the alienation and crippling of human capabilities that result from this division.

So much for Engels’ critique of Dühringian socialism’s handling of production. In the penultimate chapter of Anti-Dühring Engels will discuss the problems of distribution.

1. Anti-Dühring Part III Chapter III “Production.”
2. Engels is referring to an economic crises of the 1870s.

“To be internationalist is to pay our debt to humanity” says Fidel Castro and this can be read on many billboards in Cuba.

What is internationalism?—cooperation among people and nations, states my dictionary. The book of definitions maintains that internationalism is a principle of communism and socialism. It is the belief of ideological leaders such as Lenin, Fidel and Che.

Che wrote in his essay, “Socialism and Man”, that proletarian internationalism isn’t just a duty but a necessity. If revolutionary leaders forget this, Che wrote, the revolution will lose its inspiration and imperialism will benefit.

Che was also known for having severely criticized Soviet Union leadership for having lost its internationalism with the world’s proletariat and the Third World. Following up on Che’s critique, I find it important to criticize communist and socialist parties, and governments led by these parties, which let down people who are oppressed by, or invaded by, national or foreign powers.

Internationalism in action

1. Internationalists must support resistance fighters against invasions. Therefore, one must chastise political parties and groups that give political or moral support to those who call themselves the Iraq Communist Party as it is part of the Quisling government the USA terrorist state set in. ICP leaders live side by side the invaders in the Green Zone. That there are organizations in the United States, UK, Denmark and elsewhere, which call themselves communist or socialist parties and that cooperate with the world’s greatest terrorist state is incomprehensible, shameful, immoral and anti-internationalist.

2. The same applies to people who still support the Zionist state of Israel, which commits genocide against the Palestinian people. Millions of decent people have gotten together to support Palestinians in many ways, including Ships to Gaza. In Denmark, four groups of people have challenged the state’s terrorist laws by donating solidarity aid to the secular leftist PFLP which is part of the Palestinian resistance. Rebellion (Denmark), Fighters and Lovers, Horserød-Stuthoff Association (veterans of WWII resistance fighters imprisoned in Horserød and Stuthoff prisons), and TIB’s club (local carpenters near Copenhagen) have aided both PFLP and FARC, Colombian armed liberation movement.

3. Internationalist can not cooperate with US-NATO aggressive wars, which always have the goal of controlling that country’s economy and politics for capitalist profits. It is shameful that many experienced socialists and communists, as well as naïve progressive people, have backed up West’s big capitalist plans to take over Libya, and thus have bombed Libya back to the stone age. Denmark was one of only six countries that dropped tens of thousands of bombs on Libya, destroying much of it infrastructure, schools, hospitals…In fact, Denmark dropped more bombs on Libya than it has on any other country in its history, Afghanistan included. And the pilots were cowards as there was no resistance by Libya’s air force, already decimated.

This conflict has little to do with the Arab Spring movement. It is a conflict between internal war lords, with ordinary people involved who wished to increase democracy but who were misled by US-NATO whose forces seek to control Libya’s oil and avoid a gold-based currency that Gaddafi was promoting amongst all African countries. Now, US-NATO has placed a lackey government in Tripoli just as they did in Afghanistan and Iraq.

4. Internationalists must also criticize comrade governments, such as Cuba and ALBA governments in Latin America, when they make big mistakes regarding internationalism. We can’t be true comrades-solidarity activists by keeping our mouths shut when this occurs. Such is the case with their support of the brutal government of Sri Lanka, which practices genocide against the minority Tamil population. Ever since independence from Great Britain, in 1947, the majority Sinhalese governments and chauvinist Buddhist monk system has discriminated against Tamils. They have constantly been treated as second class citizens, their language and religions relegated to secondary status without national recognition. Even pogroms have been employed with the brutal murder of many thousands on various occasions. And since May 2009, following the end of a 26-year civil war, ethnic cleansing in the traditional Tamil homeland in the north and eastern areas is the rule of the day.

Cuba and ALBA have spoken only positively of their historic ties with the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), to which Sri Lanka is a member, but so are 130 other nations. One cannot, in the name of protecting each nation’s sovereignty, avoid critique when one or more of these nations oppresses or conducts pogroms and genocide against part of the population. Nor can we accept as an excuse the immoral geo-political game that nearly all governments of whatever color play.

We shall also criticize Bolivia, Uruguay, Brazil and other Latin American progressive governments for helping the US and France in their ouster of the only decent and only democratically elected people’s president in Haiti’s history, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. These Latin American governments actually assist the US’s 2004 coup d´état against Aristide by placing occupying troops in the small country, seeking to dampen the people’s anger. These progressive governments should, instead, back up the people’s desire to bring their president back to state power, just as they sought to do for President Zelaya in Honduras where national capitalists and generals kicked him out of office, with background support once again by the United States government.

5. On the personal and organizational plain, internationalism operates when workers of a major firm ask people to boycott a product because of the mistreatment of the workers by the firm. This is the case with Coca-Cola whose workers in Colombia asked us to stop buying the “drink of the death squad” (David Rovics song), because it hires mercenaries to murder workers who seek to organize a union and struggle for collective bargaining. Workers in other countries, such as Guatemala, and farmers in India have asked the same.

It is with joy that I can state that here where we gather (carpenters’ hall in Valby, Denmark), this union is one of the few local unions and political or grass roots groups in Denmark that has boycotted Coca-Cola. This is something any and all individuals can do. It is just a soda drink. So drink something else. Boycotting Coca-Cola is just like boycotting all products from Israel and Sri Lanka. It is a simple act of solidarity, of internationalism.

Charlotte and I have just returned from a six week trip in India where two of my books (“Tamil Nation in Sri Lanka” and “Sounds of Venezuela”) were published by New Century Book House, Tamil Nadu. The Tamil book concerns the history and contemporary life of the Tamil people in that island-nation, and the need to act in solidarity with them. The Venezuela short book concerns this people’s efforts to create a better world for themselves and solidarity with all peoples. When people asked us where we are from we often replied that we are “internationalists”. Interestingly, many Indians understood our meaning and were pleased to think in terms of being brothers and sisters in the world.

This concept, and feeling, of brotherly love, of internationalism has taken off in a bigger way, in 2011, than in many decades. It started in Tunisia, and has expanded to the indignados in Spain, to the anti-capitalists in Wall Street and in hundreds of cities throughout the US and the West.

We have much to criticize and yet much to be glad for as 2012 opens. We must remember and appreciate those who set us off on this new anti-capitalist/anti-imperialist, non-violent and democratic revolution—from the martyr in Tunisia (street vendor Mohammed Bouazizi) and his Iraqi spiritual brother a bit earlier, shoe-thrower Muntazar al-Zaidi, to Occupy Wall Street protestors to Bradley Manning and Julian Assange and co-workers at Wikileaks, who helped spark it all by blowing the whistle on the war criminals. These modern-day Paris Commune resisters without arms—OWS and Occupy the World—are growing and they are presenting a vision and with it a program-in-discussion that must be studied and supported.

Internationalism is an endless struggle, an endless challenge. It does not end even when one or more of our political parties take over the governing reigns. We activists from the streets must always keep our wary eyes pinned on the leaders, regardless of their names, just as our clear eyes cast light upon humanity’s future.

In the late 1960s I was traveling low budget, working in vineyards, hitchhiking, sleeping under bridges or in youth hostels, visiting medieval castles.  After six months in Europe, I went to North Africa and the Middle East, then back to see more of Europe.  I got a ride on a Greek freighter, working my way, washing pots and pans in the galley.  The ship was headed for the French port of Marseilles. The month was May.

But as we neared our destination, the ship changed course.  ”The port is closed,” the captain said. “There’s a strike.”  He spoke little English and I understood no Greek, so that was all I knew for the moment.  We were now heading for Genoa, Italy, where we docked the next day.  There I left the ship and set about to see Italy.  I was thinking of going to Rome, but I’d barely set foot on land when I heard news of something really big happening in France.  It wasn’t just a local dock strike in Marseilles.

Being the incorrigibly curious person that I am, I had to see it, whatever it was, and the place to see it was obviously Paris.  So I set out northward, hitchhiking up through Switzerland and into France, where I lucked out and got a ride all the way to Paris.  I was doubly fortunate in that the driver was a Britisher who had spent much of his life studying French history, specializing in the late 19th century.  ”This is 1871 all over again,” he told me.

What happened in 1871?  I wanted to ask, but was too embarrassed to reveal my ignorance of French history.  I could nevertheless look around me now and see that the whole country was shut down, clearly in a state of extreme upheaval.

The driver turned on the radio from time to time, and we heard President Charles de Gaulle making an impassioned speech to the nation. Not understanding French, I only caught the closing line. “Vive la république!”  Then they played La Marseillaise.

“He’s finished,” the driver told me.  ”Just like Louis Napoleon.”  He spoke with the assurance of one who knew his subject.

We passed fields and vineyards.  When we got to the toll roads, we were asked by the local toll-keepers for donations to support the strike.

It was evening when we reached Paris. Darkness had fallen, and a loud banging sound of explosions could be heard from not too far away.  ”Do you think they’re shooting it out?” I asked.  The driver shook his head.  He looked worried

“Let me off here,” I said.  ”I have to see what’s happening.”

“That wouldn’t be wise,” he advised me.

The explosions were somewhere off to the right.

I promised him I would be careful, and, thanking him for the ride, I set out in the direction of the blasts.  Looking back at my youthful curiosity, I still shudder at my presumptions of immortality.  Having already passed through so many ostensibly dangerous places, I’d come to feel as though I were a non-material being, a ghost-traveler, immune to the hazards of the road.

The dark streets were empty, and all the lights in the buildings seemed to be off.  I could hear the hollow knocking of my footsteps on the pavement, and I wondered where all the people were.  After walking a few blocks, I came to a broad avenue where a large crowd was gathered.  As I got closer, I saw they were behind a barricade fashioned of cobble stones and whatever was at hand.  Making my way to the front of the crowd, I saw in the distance a phalanx of riot police.  They were launching bombs or grenades in our direction which burst with a very loud sound and a flash of light.  I guessed that they were intended for psychological effect, as they didn’t seem to be causing physical damage or injuries.  Nobody seemed bothered by them.

Finally the gendarmes charged, and everybody ran up side streets, then regrouped.  I watched this repeated several times over.  Finally, late in the night, I found a space on the floor of a large crowded hall where I could unroll my sleeping bag.  I think it was in the Sorbonne University, which was occupied by the students.

In the morning I went out to see what was going on.  Everything was fairly quiet, with only a few cars on the streets.  The gendarmes were nowhere to be seen, not even the traffic cops who normally stood in the intersections. In their place were the demonstrators, the students and workers, directing the traffic. That sight impressed me, a world of no gendarmes.  They had been driven from the streets, and the world of Paris was now in the hands of the demonstrators.

It was an eerily calm and peaceful world. Shops and stores were closed.  No windows seemed to be broken.  Debris littered the streets, and there were still the remains of barricades here and there.  Nobody manning them now, the police being gone.

I thought of the riots which were then taking place in so many in U.S. cities, where there’d been burning and looting, but there was none of that here in Paris.  I marveled at the order and self-discipline of the French; truly a cultured people, who rioted without breaking windows.  I used the word “riot,” but was it a riot?  Or was it something else?

I saw it all, but I had no idea what I was looking at.  A revolution?  Was this what a revolution looked like?  Surely it couldn’t be a revolution, but what was really going on around here?

Being unable to speak French, I finally found someone who spoke English, and I asked, “What’s happening?”  The guy looked at me as though I were the biggest idiot he’d ever in his life encountered, and he said: “Can’t you see for yourself?”

Finally I looked up Bernard, a friend who lived in the Latin Quarter.  I’d met him a couple years earlier, on my way to Japan.  He’d been out in the demonstrations of the night before. Since he was a friend, I felt I could ask him the question nobody else seemed willing to answer.  ”What is going on?” I asked him. “Can’t you see for yourself?” he replied.

I stayed a few more days in Paris, then set out for England.  But on reaching the port of Calais, I found that it too was closed.  Why had I even bothered to go to Calais?  I should’ve known it would be shut down like the rest of France.

So I went a different way; I went to Germany and up through Scandinavia.  Eventually, I came back to France, and everything seemed to be pretty much back to normal.  Gendarmes were directing traffic at intersections, just as they always had.  It was like nothing had happened  The massive, nationwide strike, shutdown, whatever it was, was over.  Gone.

On some streets, artists were vending posters with revolutionary slogans.  That was all.  As before, it was useless to ask my friend.  ”You can see for yourself,” he would have said.

Later I learned the tragedy of what had happened.  The nation-wide strike I’d witnessed had been more than a protest; it had been a bid for change, in effect, a revolution, that failed because the very large French Communist Party, which controlled the unions and dominated the left, had taken over the strike and sent the workers back to work.

The May rebellion took place more than forty years ago, but the story of what happened in France was enough to make me eternally suspicious of the establishment left–whether it’s the allegedly radical Communist Party, or the supposedly progressive wing of the Democratic Party.  Others seem to feel the same way today.  When Occupy Wall Street came into existence last September, activists carefully steered clear of the Democratic Party, the party which has offered so much hope and delivered so much disappointment.  And so Occupy has established itself outside of our broken political system, and this has been key to its instant traction and phenomenal growth as a movement about occupying public space, buildings, and our imaginations.

Vive la France?  Vive l’Amérique?  Mais non! Vive Occupy!  Vive le monde!

To transcend without transcending

— Ernst Bloch

In the 20thCentury, real socialism failed. In the 21st Century, unreal capitalism.

— Luis Eduardo Aute

In those heady early days of the Oakland Commune when the little village of newly-dubbed “Oscar Grant Plaza” was being set up, an old comrade who had been part of the early organizing of the occupation was walking through the village and describing it to me on his cell phone. We were doing relay reporting: I’d been down the day before and reported back to him, now he was giving me an update.

“…And just past the media tent and the library is the supply tent…” A young woman working at the supply tent jumped into the conversation and began to show him where things went as my friend explained that he was giving a comrade a “virtual tour” of sorts.

“Over here you drop off clothes; there is where you drop off food; tents and camping supplies go over there…”

“And money?” my friend asked. He had been carrying a $5 bill in his hand, money someone had given him to pass on to the camp.

“Oh.  We don’t do money,” she replied.

“’We don’t do money!’ ‘We don’t do money!’” my friend repeated incredulously as he walked away from the supply tent. “That’s the most radical statement I’ve heard so far!”

Since those glorious first moments of what could now be called an uprising or a movement, the occupiers have had to make greater concessions to “reality,” meaning that they now “do” money, but it’s to their credit that they have done so tentatively and on their own conditions. Every revolution begins by questioning the very concept of “reality” as it is socially defined and by pushing against it until it begins to fray and finally give way to a new definition. The root of the word “reality” is intertwined with “royalty” (“real” in Spanish means both “real” and “royal”) because there was a time when royalty defined reality. Now, in the Americas at least, “royalty” no longer exists and “reality” has been transformed in a redefinition that excludes royalty itself.

What seemed utopian before that moment in that moment suddenly became the very definition of reality. In the past this process has involved violence, like the execution of King James in the English Civil War, but that itself was only a culminating symbolic representation of a long process of psycho-social transformation through education, culture, ritual, etc. in the construction of a new model of reality that eventually supplanted the “royal” model.  In that sense “utopia” must be the home and destiny of a revolutionary struggle, and poetry must be its most powerful weapon, if it is to succeed.

One element in the process of the construction of new models of reality, or “revolutions” is the meme, the “viral message,” and it often takes the form of a slogan or chant. The power of political mantras to transform our understanding or redefine our understanding of reality is evident when we consider what the slogan “we are the 99%” has done in the Occupy movement.

Slogans can be prosaic, functional statements, rational and unambiguous, like a statement of doctrine for a church service or a political rally (“We are the 99%” or “The people united will never be defeated” etc.), or they can operate like a poem, suprarational and ambiguous, forcing us to reconsider our sense of “reality.” Those aphorisms in this latter category fit with the “sixth” type of ambiguity as enumerated by William Empson: “when a statement says nothing and the readers are forced to invent a statement of their own, most likely in conflict with that of the author.”

Of this latter group is the Situationist epigraph, “Be realistic: demand the impossible.” This statement, in fact, does say something, but it’s akin to “nothing” insofar as it is apparently contradictory: When could the “impossible” be considered “realistic”? What could be “realistic” about “demand[ing] the impossible”?  In contrast to the prosaic “marching” slogans repeated at every demonstration to unite and strengthen group solidarity, this Situationist epigraph is elusive and subversive by its very nature. And for that reason it warrants a closer look.

While we don’t know the actual context that inspired the writer of the Situationist epigram since the Situationist as a movement spanned the years 1957 to 1972, it is most likely that the slogan, “Be realistic: demand the impossible,” first appeared during the uprising of May 1968 in Paris. The slogan then probably referred to the clarity the writer had at that moment that the state would eventually cede to its demands and thereby destroy the movement for radical social change. This common ruling class response to the social demands of the oppressed is summed up in the words of a prince in Luchino Visconti’s classic movie, The Leopard: “If we want things to stay as they are, everything will have to change.” Making “realistic” demands that could, and would, be met, therefore, would ensure the end of the struggle, the destruction of the movement, and guarantee that “things stay the same.”

A few years later, reflecting on that romantic May of 1968, the French singer/songwriter, Georges Moustaki in his song, “Le Temps de Vivre”  (“The Time to Live”), reinterpreted that Situationist slogan:

Nous prendrons le temps de vivre  - We’ll take the time to live

D’être libres mon amour – to be free, my love.

Sans projets et sans habitudes – Without projects or habits

Nous pourrons rêver notre vie – we’ll dream our life.

Viens, je suis là, je n’attends que toi – Come, I’m here, awaiting only you

Tout est possible, tout est permis – Everything is possible.  Everything is permitted.

Viens, écoute, les mots qui vibrant – Come listen to these words that vibrate

Sur les murs du mois de mai – on the walls of the month of May

Ils te disent la certitude – They give us certitude

Que tout peut changer un jour – that everything can one day change

The song expresses the same utopian spirit as the slogan; it is also an affirmation that what is deemed “impossible” can be realistic. Moustaki, reflecting back on that historical moment from a context in which such a slogan had become an “impossible demand,” sees the revolutionary upsurge of 1968 as a hope or a “certitude” of revolutionary change “one day” in some indeterminate future.

A few years later, when the reaction against the “Revolution of 1968” was in full bloom and the likes of Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and other champions of neoliberal capitalism suggested “There Is No Alternative” (the famous “TINA” that dominated the late 20th Century), the Situationist slogan took on a new meaning. It became a statement of resistance against impossible odds in the struggle for a new world that was nowhere to be seen. It was a statement of defiance of a “reality” decreed by the masters of the totalitarian lie of the neoliberal capitalist system watching over a locked-down world. With the collapse of “real” socialism and as the world slouched off into that netherland of the “end of history” where the hope of every left alternative, and even the humane possibilities of capitalism, if such existed, were extinguished with the end of the Cold War and the supreme victory of neoliberalism, the Situationist slogan was stored in the dusty attic of history. TINA was the only slogan allowed in this brave new world of neoliberal rule, the echolalia of a mantra that darkened the human mind and increasingly reduced it to catatonia with each repetition.

But almost immediately the “impossible” reappeared, especially in Berkeley, where I was living at the time, but also around the world. Little by little, the circle A of anarchism, no doubt painted by anarcho-punks with a clear grasp of the need for the “impossible,” was sprayed on walls and billboards. Then increasingly the circle “A” began to appear more broadly in personal wear, silk-screened on t-shirts, until it became a fashion statement. In the context of a Capitalist State that claimed the whole planet, the demand for the impossible demand reemerged.

With the Zapatista uprising of 1994 and thereafter, the slogan once again took on an immediate, positive meaning for people in the movement for a “possible world in which many worlds fit.” Contesting with the hegemon, the dream of the possible new world became not merely a demand for “the impossible” but for a plurality of possibilities, a rainbow of possibilities.

Out of the collapse of the 20th century utopia-turned-dystopia of “real socialism” and the flatulent promise of the “Third Way,” both of which having clouded and overshadowed all other radical alternatives of an earlier time, such as social democracy, mystical anarchism, secular anarchism, anarcho-syndicalism, utopian cooperativism, religious socialism and, yes, the multitude of Marxist socialist alternatives, the World Social Forums (WSF) arose in the heart of the capitalist world that had prohibited the possibility of dreams. The “impossible” was transformed by WSF’s belief that “another world is possible” and as anti-globalization activists confronted the brutal capitalist state in Seattle and elsewhere.

But the definitive break with TINA and the neoliberal siege of the world, formed in iron around the “possible,” came with the changes in Latin America, particularly in South America, where left governments took power in the process of emerging from the military dictatorships organized and supported by the US. “Demanding the impossible” meant in that context something very similar to what it meant in 1968: it became a call to not settle for reforms to capitalism, but to push the agenda farther, beyond the realm of the “possible” as defined for us by the capitalist system or even by so-called “socialist” governments proclaiming the “socialism of the 21st century” but offering only more handouts and top-heavy, bureaucratic parties in the style of the Marxist-Leninist parties of 20th century communism.

In the present, just ten years after the uprisings in Argentina, the victory of left governments throughout Latin America, and the presidential victory of the first African American in US history, the slogan has a new, even more dramatic meaning: if the planet is to survive, we have no choice but to “demand the impossible.” Many of what were viewed as “impossible” achievements in 1968 have been won, and they clearly don’t go far enough.

In Latin America the “left” governments continue to follow the extractivist development model dictated by world capitalism even as they turn more attention to their poorest citizens. This is particularly true of Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa, who has repeatedly directed repressive military and police forces against environmentalists and indigenous people attempting to defend the earth. But even President Evo Morales works from a double discourse, proclaiming socialism and respect for indigenous rights and Pachamama while building roads through indigenous lands and nature reserves to facilitate the business of Brazilian capital.

Then, of course, there’s the United States, where the official political spectrum, by world standards, has been reduced to that very small space between the far right and the extreme right, rigidly confined, to this day, by strict neoliberal orthodoxy. Just a few years ago “demanding the impossible” seemed to consist of electing an African American liberal to the presidency. That achievement of anti-racist progressive forces still remains one of the most inspiring moments in the 21st Century USA despite the disappointment that followed. At best, President Obama has turned out to be only a shade different from his predecessor, and in some ways he’s worse: it’s doubtful that Bush would have managed to pass the free trade agreements Obama has pushed through, nor would Bush have been able to get away with murder – literally, in the case of bin Laden, Al-Awlaki and countless Pakistanis – without an enormous outcry from left liberals.

In this context, what does it mean to “be realistic” and “demand the impossible”? What “impossible demand” must we make in our context, a context in which the continuation of the capitalist system has become impossible (if Immanuel Wallerstein is correct in his analysis that we’re now experiencing a “systemic crisis”), and the survival of human civilization unlikely?

Those currently occupying the cities across the US and the world have been criticized for not “making demands” or “having a program” or “an agenda.” Occupiers have responded that “our occupation is our demand.” Certainly the right to peaceably assemble is a first requirement for any movement, but the occupiers, more than anyone, are quite clear that the demands can’t end there. Many argue that the occupiers need to come up with a long list of specific demands, but I would side with those Situationists who would argue that such a list would be self-defeating: it would invite the rulers of the world to cede demands and ensure that “things stay the same.”

Yet it’s clear that the “impossible” demand is the only alternative to this impossibly irrational and unsustainable system that turns “reason” and all its resources to the exploitation and destruction of the planet. The occupiers, for the most part, aren’t so simple-minded as to fall for the “possible.” They know that the last thing they should do is offer a “realistic” set of demands and settle for a “realistic” program. The time has come to make “impossible” demands on this impossible system because the future of the world is at stake. And we can’t settle for anything less

Today, Engels says (he means the 1870s in Europe  but his comments are still as true now as then) there is a growing sense that something is basically wrong and unfair in how our national and international economic system operates. It can’t employ all who wish to work; millions of people are living in poverty; famines, droughts brought about by human activity engulf large sections of the globe and hunger stalks the streets of many of our largest cities. Families are homeless and uprooted, and our schools and colleges fail to properly educate the youth to understand the world they live in. Yet a very small group of wealthy people grow richer and richer while the vast majority of humanity suffers and wastes away.

This shows, according to Engels, that new ways of production and distribution have evolved and that the social order we live in has not kept up with these developments. In fact, our social order has become dysfunctional and is holding back all the possible potential improvements in human welfare that the new productive and distributive powers could provide. It is the task of socialists to discover and point out the current impediments which prevent the productive system from reaching its full potential and to discover the means of benefiting all humanity rather than just a small portion. And, he says: “These means are not to be invented, spun out of the head, but discovered with the aid of the head in the existing material facts of production.”

Our present society is the creation of a class of people consisting of merchants, shopkeepers, owners of small manufacturing concerns, all those who made their living either by buying, selling, and trading commodities, small farmers who trucked their product to market and those who ministered to them (doctors, lawyers, teachers and preachers). Underneath this class was a class of laborers who made the commodities, or helped in their storage and distribution, upon which the former relied for their income. This latter class became the working class of today and the former the class of people living off of the surplus value created by the working class. Marx and others referred to them as the bourgeoisie or capitalists.

This mode of production, the creation of commodities for a market, has come to be called capitalism. The first capitalists found themselves subservient to a powerful ruling class of nobles consisting of feudal lords and (mostly) hereditary monarchs who lived by means of agricultural exploitation of serfs and taxation of the income of the developing bourgeoisie. This ruling class stifled the productive capacity of the bourgeoisie and prevented it from reaching its true potential. In other words, the bounds within which the feudal system restricted the capitalists were incompatible with that class’s growing mode of production and so, Engels says, the “bourgeoisie broke up the feudal system and built upon its ruins the capitalist order of society.”

Once the feudal bonds were broken (the French Revolution was one of the most dramatic instances) the capitalist mode of production flourished and developed the productive forces of society to unprecedented heights, only in its turn to find that its own associated method of distribution contradicted its mode of production. The social product is a collective creation of working people in all the branches of production but it is appropriated by a small number of capitalists who own and control the means by which this social product is created. The social product is then distributed in a way that increases the social wealth of the capitalist class at the expense of the well being of the working people, ultimately leading to their impoverishment. The only way the working people can free themselves from the exploitation of the capitalist class is by uniting together and abolishing it.

This conflict is waged daily in every work place, factory, field, and mine where the capitalist mode of production holds sway. This very active and real class warfare is a feature, 24/7, of daily life in almost every country on the face of the earth, and just like high blood pressure (the silent killer) it is going on and even intensifying whether the people involved are aware of it or not.

Engels says, “Modern socialism is nothing but the reflex in thought, of this conflict in fact; its ideal reflection in the minds, first, of the class directly suffering under it, the working class.”  The fact that in many countries many, and even most, working people are lacking this “reflex in thought” is testament to the power of the capitalist class, through its mass media and control of the education system, means of entertainment, and professional sports, to fill the heads of working people with illusions and a false sense of reality.

How did this class warfare between workers and capitalists begin?  It was not to be found in the Middle Ages because the peasant farmers and handicraft men, or their families, made their own necessities by and large, and the products of their labor belonged to them. They could use them themselves or take them to market as commodities or pay their taxes and feudal dues in kind or exchange them with one another.

With the progress of invention it was possible for a person to set up shop with, say, many looms, and put many hands to work side by side with the peasant with his own loom in his hut making products for himself. Now the product of the man with many looms belonged to him and loom workers were given wages.

Engels says the old division of labor of the peasant village with products being exchanged in kind began to break up as this primitive factory system began to evolve. “In the midst of the old division of labour, grown up spontaneously and upon no definite plan, which had governed the whole of society, now arose division of labor upon a definite plan, as organized in the factory; side by side with individual production appeared social production.” Planning locally, and eventually central planning, was a major feature of the success of capitalism. Whatever the problems of 20th century socialism were, they did not result from the use of central planning, per se.

As the capitalist system evolved it eventually replaced individual production with social production but kept in place individual appropriation of the products that were produced – thus creating a new class of exploited human beings that became known as the proletariat who soon began to stand outcast and starving amid the wonders they had made, which wonders were now the property of the bourgeoisie.

As production for a market became more and more wide spread it was soon discovered, Engels points out, that: “Anarchy reigns in socialized production.” This is because no one can really tell what the fate of the commodities they are making will be.  Will there be a demand for them? Will they be sold at a profit or loss? Even with the planning involved in setting up the factory system there always remains this risk factor under capitalism.

Capitalism thus finds itself subject to the laws of EXCHANGE (“the only persistent form of social interrelations”) which manifest themselves in competition. The anarchy became exacerbated since capitalism destroys competing modes of production and will not co-exist with them;thus handicrafts were replaced by the system of manufacture and manufacture by steam powered machinery.

This all happened under pressure of the age of discovery, starting roughly with the voyages of Columbus, and planting of colonies which vastly increased the number of markets and sealed the fate of the handicraft system which could not keep up with demand. It also led to the outbreaks of wars between nations fighting for market share — a form of anarchistic behavior that still marks the world capitalist system.

It is at this point that Engels turns to Darwinian images to describe the relations of capitalists to one another. Both Marx and Engels were very impressed with The Origin of Species but neither were so-called “social Darwinists.” Nevertheless, today’s globalization is simply an extension of the world market of the nineteenth century that Engels described as a universal struggle of existence between different capitalist elites and whole nations and those who fail are “remorselessly cast aside” — unless, of course, they get government stimulus money and bailouts.

“It is,” Engels says, “the Darwinian struggle of the individual for existence transferred from nature to society with intensified violence.” Capitalism reduces humanity back to its natural animal form of existence. This is the result of the intensification of the contradiction between socialized mode of production and the private capitalist appropriation of the social product.

One of the results of the unfettered competition between capitalists is that they lose control of their own economic system, as we see going on at present, and as it crashes the anarchy of production (which also reigns in the financial sector) forces “the great majority” of the people into becoming “proletarians.”  The current Occupy Wall Street Movement (OWSM) reflects the fact the “middle class” (actually a better paid strata of the working class mixed with small business people and professionals) is being forced into lower paid jobs, unemployment, bankruptcy, and debt and sees no way out for itself in this economy. They are becoming part of the surplus population (from the point of view of the capitalists) and don’t like it. They have yet to fully realize that this is the natural outcome of capitalism and their only hope for a better life is to support socialist economic measures.

The OWSM is a natural response to what is the latest breakdown in the capitalist system. Engels dates the first general breakdown to the Crisis of 1825, caused by over- speculation by the banks (esp. the Bank of England) in unsound investments in Latin America (esp. Peru). Just as our current crisis, investors were given misinformation about the soundness of their investments and when the market collapsed were left holding bag. The banks use the term “asymmetric information” to note that what they know about the investment and what you know is different. The term “fraud” would be more to the point. In 1825 France bailed out England.  In our current crisis the US taxpayers bailed out the banks.

These panics used to occur about every ten years but there was some stabilization after World War II and we had about 60 years of minor panics and recessions before this current world wide ongoing economic crash of the capitalist system with no end in sight. However, for Engels, what looks like a financial crisis is really a crisis in production. Socialized production has made too many goodies for the markets so factories laid off working people who then could not pay their bills — esp. the fraudulent mortgages. Since the financial sector had cooked up so many mortgages based on “asymmetric information” the whole economy began to fall apart.

So many factories remain closed or under-utilized that unemployment balloons, and the great productive forces available to our economy are dormant until the capitalists can figure how to get them going again in such a way that they, not the American people, can once again appropriate the wealth that will be created by the workers. The added twist of our day is that capitalists, their industries having become unproductive during the down turn, add to their profits by getting out of paying taxes, by adding fees and surcharges to service products, and by hiking interest rates to private borrowers (credit cards, for example) even while commercial interest rates are held low by government intervention via the Federal Reserve.

As the corporate world flounders, as the auto industry recently did, it relies on “its official representative”; namely, the state, to come to its aid. It should be obvious to all that the state which Lincoln called “of the people, for the people, by the people” is now “of, for, and by the corporations”. It is their referee.

Engels says that the state will eventually be forced to take over the commanding heights of the economy simply because the capitalists can no longer control them due to the growing contradiction between the socialized productive forces (masses of workers united with or without unions in the creation of the social product in factories and industries and subject to increasing unemployment and poverty) and the private appropriation of the social product by the 1 to 10% of the ruling class and its top functionaries. The tipping point has not yet been reached, but it is coming.  If not in this crisis, then the next it will present itself.

This state takeover under capitalism is not yet socialism, Engels tells us, even though the commanding heights will have been converted into state property. However, the takeover reveals that all the functions of running the economy can be taken over by state “salaried employees”. Since the “modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine” as it is forced to nationalize failing industries “it actually becomes the national capitalist.” The state directly exploits the working people having done away with individual, and incompetent, private capitalists (done in by their own creation).

This is not a stable situation and in a democracy it cannot last. The contradiction between the state and the people brings “to a head” the capitalist relation between people and their government and this must “topple over.”  State capitalism is not, therefore, the answer to the class conflict, “but concealed within it are the technical conditions that form the elements” leading to that answer.

Once the people understand the source of their problems is the private appropriation of the social product, then the 99% can really set an agenda to put the 1% in their place. Here is what Engels thinks should happen. The people should set about ” the harmonizing of the modes of production, appropriation, and exchange.” Hopefully they can do this through political action and the regulation of the three modes. Engels says “it depends only upon ourselves to subject them to our own will” and if we don’t do so, these forces will continue to work against us and to master us. State capitalism will be transformed in the direction of socialism.

The greatest challenge is to become conscious of the need for what is to be done especially when that need is the take over of the economy by the people because “this understanding goes against the grain of the capitalist mode of production and its defenders”; i.e., the capitalists, the major political parties, the mass media, the mainstream churches, and the public and private education systems as well as the leadership of most unions and mass organizations as presently constituted.

Nevertheless, according to Engels, as the crisis deepens this consciousness will begin to develop in all of the above institutions except for the capitalist class itself and those completely dependent upon it. The working people and its allies and friends, the 99%, will have to take political power out of the hands of the corporations and their flunkies, if they have not already been nationalized, and turn the current privately held means of production into state property.

A by product of this action, the abolition of private property, is that the 1% will no longer have the means to dominate the 99% — all people will be equally working for their own and the common good. This is what Engels means when speaking of the ending of classes and class exploitation.

An even more startling consequence, to both his own time and ours, is Engels’ (and Marx’s) belief that the state will disappear. Even the most jaded Libertarian or demented tea bagger could never hope to get government reduced to zero. But Engels points out that throughout history the role of the state has been to control the 99% in the interests of the 1% — be they slave owners, feudal lords, or capitalists. This role will no longer exist in a society where everything (economically speaking) is owned and managed by the people collectively at the points of production and distribution. There will still be planning commissions and civic associations, but the state, as we know it, will be superfluous.

This doesn’t  mean that the state will be formally abolished by some sort of declaration or proclamation. It will just slowly wither away over time as its functions become moribund. At least this is the ideal that Engels has in mind for it; perhaps like “liberty and justice for all” it will remain an ideal that every generation comes closer to but never 100% attains. Then again maybe Engels will be right.

We must be mindful that all of this speculation about the coming to power of the working people, the disappearance of the 1%, the transition to socialism, etc., is dependent on the development of the productive forces of society to such a high degree of perfection that they can eliminate scarcity and there will be the possibility of abundance of food and other necessities and luxuries for all and that the only reason for poverty and suffering is the control of society by the 1% in its own selfish interests.

In the language of philosophy this means that Sartre’s proposition in the Critique of  Dialectical Reason: “Scarcity is a fundamental relation of our History and a contingent determination of our univocal relation to materiality” leading to his assertion “There is not enough for everybody” does not hold, it has been overcome and negated, for our world. Indeed, Engels thought it did not hold even in the nineteenth century. We have the productive capacity but we cannot use it due to the capitalist framework within which it exists. It is as the sick person — the medicine exists to cure him but he hasn’t the money to buy it, so he dies.

If this is ever done, and it is a big IF, the world humanity will find itself in after the passing of the capitalist mode of production will be very different from the world of today. Commodity production will cease as there will be no market and no anarchy of production. Objects with use values will be made according to a central plan and they will be made to satisfy human needs not to be sold for profit. There will be no more struggle for existence as all humans will be provided for and, Engels says, for the first time humanity will live as humans should and not be subject to an animal existence. For the first time humanity will control the laws of its own social existence and economy and not be subjected to them. The pre-history of humanity will be over and the true history of humanity will begin. It will be the beginning not the end of history. It will be the leap of humanity “from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom.”

Well, as the Chinese say, a journey of a thousand miles begins with one step, I hope we have made that step on September 17, 2011 a few blocks from Wall Street in Liberty Square. But even if we haven’t and Engels was at heart an utopian and his vision of the future a dream, still a dream, if that is all it is, can, as Martin Luther King, Jr.  taught us, inspire people to fight for a better world.

Besides being utterly ridiculous, that outlook works against their own professed interest.

After all, practical solutions to today’s many societal problems will necessarily come from that part of the ideological ground not being trod by clown shoes or neo-Nazi jackboots.

Those who’ve incessantly been described as commie traitors to all that’s good, decent, and properly American will actually be the ones who’ll save our country from collapse in the end.

Much to the appreciation of grateful masses: “Well, if socialism means getting my job and home back, and having affordable healthcare and a solid pension, then I’m all for it!”

Chalk that up as a big, forfeited victory for real revolutionaries tickled pink by the Right’s unwitting validation of the long-standing Marxist claim that capitalism in global, systemic crisis becomes so beset by limiting contradictions that it can’t simultaneously meet the profit lust of a corporate/financial elite and the wage-earning majority’s crying human needs.

Each time some wildly irresponsible conservative insists that tax loopholes larger than the rings of Saturn for the mega rich shouldn’t be closed, but that social safety net programs vital to the beleaguered masses need drastic cutting, old Karl’s ghost shakes its head in incredulous wonder.

The myopic Right is blindly working overtime to prove Marxism’s central claim, namely that capitalism in its moribund monopoly stage is utterly incompatible with fair play and justice, that the rich will get richer and the poor poorer, and that the disintegrating “free market” hand basket will completely fall apart before it gets even halfway to Hell.

During the devastating travails of the Great Depression, the intimate organizing connection that the U.S. Communist Party had with America’s unemployed made it definitely look like a Yankee variation of the Bolshevik revolution would happen here.

Franklin Roosevelt recognized that threat, however, and had the wisdom to co-opt Communist demands by absorbing them into his New Deal, thus giving American capitalism continuing decades of being able to derive benefit from its golden goose — a mass proletariat still subject to routine under-compensation for the true value of the wealth its daily labor creates.

Now, the Republican axis is determined to decimate the entire New Deal legacy, leaving everyday people with nothing as protection or crucial service precisely when predatory exploitation by the capitalist hierarchy is at its worst.

Without the least bit of heart, and even less critical sense, Rick Perry and others of his benighted ilk are adamant in insisting that profit-dripping bosses and banksters not offer a dime to help pay for the economic crisis their own avarice, ineptitude, and criminality created.

The cost should be borne, instead, by old folks on fixed incomes, by impoverished urban residents and the rural destitute, by students in classrooms with leaking roofs and not enough books, and by working-class mothers who open kitchen cupboards at suppertime to just a few remaining cans of vegetables and some Raman noodles.

The guilty few get off entirely free; the innocent multitudes collectively suffer.

Hasn’t that colossal inequity been the essential impetus for every great revolutionary uprising in recorded history?

You can be sure that an untenable status quo is irrevocably at the end of its rope when its most ardent defenders become so bereft of viable options that everything they say and do actually enables and advances precisely that which they most despise and fear.

There is now open speculation about the euro’s survival and even that of the European Union itself. The whole situation hangs in the balance. And all for what? Because Greece cannot pay its bills. But this was surely no surprise. Every serious person knew full well that the crisis of the Greek economy was so deep that all the rescue packages could do was to buy a little time.

The time is now up. Greece cannot pay its bills and that is that. So why all the fuss? How does it come about that the problems of a small country on the periphery of Europe can bring about a tragedy of such dimensions? One might call it a Greek tragedy, were it not for the fact that it is not at all confined to Greece. Its origins must be sought beyond the confines of Greece and its repercussions will also be felt far afield.

Why are the European leaders falling over themselves in a desperate attempt to restore confidence? Why is Jean-Claude Trichet, the president of the European Central Bank, demanding stricter budgetary rules? Why has Mario Draghi, head of the Bank of Italy and Trichet’’s successor at the ECB, called for binding limits not on just budgets but also on a host of other national economic policies?

At the roots of the nervousness in the markets are doubts about the stability of Europe’s banks. It is no accident that bank stocks were hit hardest in the recent crash. After the last crisis there was a black hole in the banks that governments have been attempting to fill by shovelling in billions of taxpayers’ money. The result has been close to zero. The banks are not lending, the capitalists are not investing, the economies are stagnant, unemployment is growing, and now they are on the brink of a new slump.

The problem is that to this very day nobody knows what the real debts of the banks are. Decades of deregulation and uncontrolled speculation in things like hedge funds, whose workings are very obscure, mean that the danger to the global financial system is systematically underestimated, like the bulk of an iceberg that cannot be seen because it is submerged.

What is known is that French and German banks are heavily exposed to Greece. This alone explains the tender concern with which the governments in Paris and Berlin view the Greek crisis. If (or rather, when) Greece defaults, it would be followed immediately by a crisis of the banking system in the two pivotal countries of the EU. That is why they cobbled together a “rescue fund”, the European Financial Stability Facility. But it is a case of too little and too late.

The crisis that began with the bankruptcy of banks has now moved on to express itself as the bankruptcy of whole nations. If Greece is allowed to collapse, other more important economies will follow. That is why the leaders of the Euro zone have called an emergency summit in Poland. Their previous plans are in ruins. The debt exchange that was agreed to in July is now dead in the water. They will have to throw it out and grant Greece some kind of debt relief to prevent a collapse that would have devastating effects throughout Europe.

Europe and America

Sooner or later the EU authorities must decide either to relieve Greece and Ireland of their austerity programmes, or else pull the plug, pushing them over the abyss of default. Despite all the brave talk about keeping Greece inside the Euro zone, in the end they will have to take the latter course. This will have the most serious consequences’ for Europe and the world economy.

If the EU and IMF decide that they cannot continue to throw good money after bad, and withhold their support, this would push Greece into the abyss. This would signify what the markets most fear: a disorderly debt default. The social, political, and economic consequences of such a step would be incalculable – and not only for Greece. This scenario would spell chaos on an epic scale.

But this prospect is provoking alarm in ruling circles in Europe. Economists are already talking about the breakup of the euro zone, leaving Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, and Spain outside it. But if you say “A”, you must also say “B”, “C”, and “D”. Globalization means that every economy in Europe is linked to every other economy. So what happens in even a smaller economy such as Greece will inevitably affect all the others.

What would the consequences be for the rest of Europe – for Britain, France, yes, and Germany too? It would trigger a chain reaction of collapsed banks in those countries. French banks are heavily exposed to Greece, but so are German banks. British banks are rather less exposed to Greece, but heavily exposed to Ireland. Austrian banks are exposed to Italy, and so on.

The results would be catastrophic for Europe, and not only for Europe. An economic collapse in Europe would send a Tsunami racing across the Atlantic, putting pressure on the dollar and threatening to undermine the unstable financial set-up in the USA. When Greece goes, the question is immediately posed of the contagion spreading to other countries. Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Italy will fall like dominoes. Banks will collapse, starting with the Greek and Cypriot banks, and then proceeding to the UK and US financial system, both of which are unsound.

In order to prevent his from happening, some bourgeois economists are now discussing other possibilities: for example, a German “Marshall Plan” for Greece and southern Europe. The idea seems childishly simple: Germany received millions of dollars in Marshall Aid, which enabled it to rebuild its shattered economy after 1945. Why should Germany not do the same for southern Europe? This is what the Americans are demanding ever more insistently.

Sadly the historical parallel is misguided. In 1945 the USA enjoyed a total hegemony over its competitors. Its industry was intact, while Europe and Japan were devastated by the War. Two thirds of the world’’s gold was in Fort Knox. The dollar then was “as good as gold”. Above all, the world capitalist economy was entering into a phase of upswing that lasted almost three decades. None of these factors exist now.

Germany is the leading power in Europe but it does not possess the virtually unlimited economic reserves that the USA enjoyed in 1945. Its shoulders are broad, but not strong enough to bear the weight of the accumulated deficits of Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Italy and the rest. Most importantly, Europe and the world are not on the verge of a long period of upswing but, on the contrary, on the eve of a new recession and a prolonged period of economic difficulties and austerity.

Barack Obama accuses the eurozone that it is dragging the rest of the world into crisis again, conveniently overlooking the small matter of the huge US fiscal crisis and the inability of the Republicans and Democrats to agree on a serious plan for reducing the huge budget deficit.

The Americans are desperately calling on Germany to “do more” to pull Europe out of crisis. The Germans must cut taxes; they must boost the economy; they must send more money to Greece; they must lead a coordinated fiscal stimulus across northern Europe. Germany must do this and Germany must do that. But who are the Americans to tell the Germans what to do?

Yes, say the Europeans, but who pays for all this? To this question there can only be one answer: France and Germany, or more correctly, Germany, which is Europe’s banker of last resort. Those who have talked bib about a Marshall Plan for Greece are now politely requested to put their money where their mouths are. But this is easier said than done. It immediately raises political problems that cannot easily be overcome.

Eurobonds?

Twenty years ago, after the collapse of the USSR, the German ruling class had big ambitions. Their idea was that a unified Germany could dominate Europe, achieving by its economic muscle what Hitler failed to do by military means. Over the past two decades, France has been increasingly pushed into second place and Germany now rules the roost in Europe.

The idea of a closer European Union will appeal to those sections of the German ruling class that still entertain some illusions of grandeur. But the past 20 years have also convinced Germany that such ambitions can come with a very hefty price tag. This contradiction has been exposed by the recent debate on the possible creation of “Eurobonds”.

Guy Verhofstadt, leader of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe in the European Parliament, is only one in a growing chorus of voices calling for the creation of Eurobonds. Germany’s finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, has suggested that Europe needs to move to full fiscal union.

The Greens and SPD in Germany already back Eurobonds. But they are facing an electoral backlash, not only against fiscal union but against bailouts in general. The French have expressed guarded support for the proposal. Even the British Conservative leaders have adopted a surprisingly positive attitude (itself an indication of the seriousness of the crisis), which is causing them problems with their rank and file.

On the one hand, this idea contains a certain logic. All history shows that it is impossible to achieve a firm and lasting monetary union without some kind of political union. But here we immediately run up against new contradictions. The creation of Eurobonds would require a degree of political consensus that is simply not there. Any movement in the direction of fiscal union will meet fierce resistance. It would also require a fundamental revision of the EU’’s founding treaties.

The experience of the farce over the proposed European Constitution shows that it is not easy to get people to vote more powers for Brussels either in national parliaments or in referenda. And the mood of euro-scepticism has become even stronger since then.

But the governments of Germany and other northern European are coming under pressure from increasingly restive public opinion, unwilling to pay the debts of foreign states. The Merkel government is unpopular and has just suffered a humiliating drubbing in recent elections.

For the time being, Merkel is making the right noises: Greece must stay in the Euro Zone; the Euro must stay; Germany will do this and Germany will do that. But the fact is that Germany, the most powerful economy in Europe, is showing signs of strain. Its economy is slowing down, as a result of the general stagnation of the world economy. Its politicians are showing signs of impatience at being continually asked to put their hands in their pockets.

So far the EU has bailed out the Greek economy, or at least provided some funds with which the beleaguered Papandreou government could pay the wages of its civil servants and the pensions of its old folk. But more money than this is required. It is like pouring money down a bottomless well. And in the end, one way or the other, Greece will still default.

All that they have done is to yet again create a breathing space for Greece. But this comes at a huge cost to the Greek people, who are presented with the bill. As always, it is not the bankers and speculators who are asked to pay but the poorest sections of society: the workers, the unemployed, the old and the sick.

The price of “stabilizing the finances” and “restructuring” their economy is a brutal slashing of living standards and an increase in unemployment. This will lead to a further fall in tax revenue and thus a further increase in the deficit in the public finances. In what way this madness is supposed to help Greece to pay its debts is a mystery compared to which the Eleusinian Mysteries of old were child’’s play.

Without economic growth, tax revenues will remain stagnant, and the capacity to service debts will continue to decline. But the world economic slowdown and the merciless pressure to reduce the deficit through austerity, has plunged Greece into a deep slump. Despite all the painful sacrifices of its people, the government of Athens continues to miss its fiscal targets.

Alarm at this prospect is compelling the politicians in Brussels to take emergency measures to prevent the immediate collapse of the Greek economy. They still possess a number of instruments they can use: a relaxation of the demands of the creditors, an agreement not to press too hard on Athens to meet unrealisable fiscal targets. This would be quite a logical thing to do, on the grounds that it is not possible to squeeze blood from a stone.

There can be no solution for the problems of Europe without economic growth. Economic, social and political stability, throughout Europe, depends on it, and not only in Greece. But there is no prospect of a recovery of growth in the near future.

Protectionist tendencies

The deafening chorus shows that Europe is not short of proposals. They have proposals by the bucket load. The problem is that none of these proposals can do anything to solve the euro zone’s immediate problems. They cannot pay Greece’s debts. They cannot stop the problem from spreading to other countries. They cannot restore the shattered confidence of investors.

In the most optimistic scenario, they may possibly (just possibly) do a little to ease some problems in the long run (but, as Keynes pointed out, in the long run we are all dead). But they will do nothing to resolve the present crisis, which is clearly getting out of hand.

The hopeless confusion of the economists is illustrated by the strange spectacle of Jeff Sachs, the man who unleashed neo-liberalism onto Eastern Europe, calling for a global version of the New Deal. The problem is that any such suggestion is anathema to the Republican dominated Congress, which is hell-bent on pursuing the opposite policies.

Neither free market economics nor Keynesian stimulus policies have worked, or can work. Governments and their economist advisers are in a state of despair. There is no more money for fiscal stimulus, but austerity policies only serve to depress demand still further, aggravating the slump.

The greatest fear is that a new recession will provoke a resurgence of protectionist tendencies and competitive devaluations, as happened in the 1930s. This would have catastrophic effects on world trade and pose a threat to globalization itself. All that has been achieved in the past 30 years can unravel and turn into its opposite.

The measures recently announced by the Swiss National Bank to push down the value of the Swiss franc is a warning of the way things are drifting in the direction of protectionist policies and competitive devaluations. It was this that turned the 1929-33 slump into the Great Depression of the 1930s. The same thing can happen again.

Danger of reaction?

We have pointed out repeatedly that all the attempts of the bourgeois to restore the economic equilibrium will destroy the social and political equilibrium. Greece is proof of this assertion. Already social and political stability have been destroyed. And the realization that all the sacrifices have been in vain will make the austerity utterly intolerable.

It is possible that the Greek ruling class will seek a solution to their problems by moving towards reaction as they did in 1967. But the Greek workers remember 1967 and the crimes of the Junta. Any move in that direction now would provoke civil war.

This is recognized by an American political analyst, Barry Eichengreen (Professor of Economics and Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley.) in a recent article, significantly entitled: “Europe on the Verge of a Political Breakdown”:“ In Greece itself, political and social stability are already tenuous. One poorly aimed rubber bullet might be all that is needed to turn the next street protest into an outright civil war.”

Barry Eichengreen is not alone. Paul Mason, the economics editor of BBC2’ s Newsnight writes:

“In the chancelleries of Europe, above all in Berlin, these are questions that are impossible to mention. There is a total mismatch between political expectation and what is imminent.

“It reminds me – as so much of 2011 reminds me – of 1848. Metternich sneering out of the window at the irrelevant mob, a few hours before his unceremonious overthrow, Guizot unable to breathe with shock as he resigns his ministry, Thiers, prime minister for one day, suffering a bout of 19th Century Tourette’s in his carriage, hounded by the masses…”

These lines show that the most intelligent bourgeois strategists are seriously alarmed by the developments in Greece. The problem is not so much that this could lead to civil war. The problem is that the Greek bourgeoisie would not be sure of winning such a war. The working class is undefeated. Behind them they feel the support of the mass of the Greek population – not just the workers and peasants, not just the students and intellectuals, but also the small shopkeepers and taxi drivers who are driven to revolutionary conclusions by the sudden collapse of their living standards.

The politicians in Brussels fear that Greece is becoming ungovernable. If it has not yet become so, it is thanks to the reformist leaders. The Pasok leadership is anxious to prove its “statesmanlike qualities” and its patriotism, that is, its devotion to the interests of the bankers and capitalists. It is willing to take upon its shoulders all the odium of the austerity programme, and even to sacrifice itself on the altar of Greek and European Capital, if necessary.

In November 2001 there was an uncontrolled default in Argentina, accompanied by a run on bank deposits. The banks closed their doors, there were mass protests in the streets and the president had to flee from the roof of his palace in a helicopter. Something similar might occur in Greece, where protesters have hung a banner on the railings of parliament showing a helicopter carrying off Prime Minister George Papandreou.

The government is deeply unpopular. But who could replace it? The right-wing opposition party does not want to take over the reins of government in conditions of acute crisis with an aroused working class. It is not the right wing that the bourgeoisie is obliged to lean on to save it but the leaders of Pasok. Politicians like Evangelos Venizelos and Elena Panaritis (the non-elected, Western-educated MP advising Papandreou) and Papandreou himself are the Saviours of the bourgeoisie: their only defence against the masses.

It is the same story all over Europe. Without the reformist leaders, capitalism could not last even for a week. For that very reason, talk about the danger of fascism and Bonapartism makes no sense at the present time. The ruling class all over Europe must base itself on these organizations. The bourgeoisie does not need the fascists at this moment in time. Any attempt to move in the direction of fascism or Bonapartism at this point would simply provoke the labour movement to action.

Of course, this can change. The present crisis can last for years or even decades. However, at a certain point, the ruling class will say: there are too many strikes, too many demonstrations, too much disorder; we need to restore Order! Then there could be a movement towards reaction. But even in such a case, the ruling class would have to proceed carefully, first testing the ground by moving towards parliamentary Bonapartism.

That is not the perspective now, either in Greece or any other country in Europe. On the contrary, the pendulum will swing to the left. The working class will have many opportunities to take power into its hands before the ruling class can turn to reaction. Of course, the movement of the working class is never in a straight line.

The civil servants’ union, ADEDY, warned that it was gearing up for action over the government’s plans to extend a “labour reserve” scheme that would put civil servants on a sharply reduced salary for 12 months before reviewing their status. This shows that there are still important reserves in the working class in Greece. New layers will move into struggle to replace those that are exhausted by many months of constant activity.

We must not adopt a superficial and impressionistic attitude to events like the events in Greece. The masses cannot stay on the streets indefinitely. There will inevitably be periods of lull, in which the workers will think deeply about what has happened, criticize, differentiate and draw conclusions. It is precisely in such periods that the ideas of Marxism can gain a powerful echo, on condition that we are patient, that we listen to what the masses are saying and put forward the correct slogans.

In the revolutionary events that are coming, the advanced workers and youth will learn. If we work correctly we can help them to draw revolutionary conclusions, and come to understand the need for Marxism and a revolutionary organization.

All over Europe the working class and the youth are taking the road of struggle. In Italy there have been a general strike and mass demonstrations against the austerity plan. Berlusconi’s programme is too little for the bosses but too much for the workers. Outside parliament one evening, riot police came under a barrage of fire, paint bombs and even a pig’’s heart, hurled by angry protesters.

Moody’’s have already warned of a possible downgrade of Italy’’s credit rating on June 17 and its decision is expected by Saturday. Incessantly, implacably, the crisis is spreading and new burdens are being placed on the shoulders of the working class in every country.

What is the duty of the Marxists in this situation? We do not aim to reach the masses with our propaganda. That is beyond our ability. We aim at the most advanced elements of the workers and youth. We do not put forward “easy” agitation slogans that merely tell the workers what they already know. The workers need to be told the truth. And the truth is that under capitalism the only future that awaits them is a future of permanent austerity, falling living standards, unemployment and poverty.

We must explain that only the expropriation of the bankers and capitalists and the replacement of capitalist anarchy by a democratic planned economy can provide a way out of the crisis. In particular, we must counter the nationalist poison of the Stalinists by advancing the slogan of the United Socialist States of Europe, the only real alternative to the bankrupt bosses’ EU. Our duty, to use Lenin’’s expression, is to patiently explain.

• Originally appeared at In Defence of Marxism.

Yes, capitalism’s highly productive and has made many Americans rich and facilitated Washington’s global rule. It’s also an unstable system responsible for extreme inequality, poverty and stagnant wages at home and aggression abroad to advance U.S. economic interests. And yet, how frequently in the mass media, government or in progressive or liberal circles is the system itself criticized, even given the mess that it is creating today for a majority of Americans?

Until recent years, practically never, but a bit more now. The June 27 issue of The Nation was devoted to articles “Reimagining Capitalism,” all about reforming the existing system not replacing it, but a step forward. Also in June, the Dalai Lama told 150 Chinese students studying at the University of Minnesota that “I consider myself a Marxist…. But not a Leninist.” The current Time magazine reports “Marxism has been trending high on Google.”

What has made capitalism so sacrosanct in our society? It wasn’t always that way. For about 65 years to the start of the Cold War following World War II in 1945 there had been lot of talk about socialism in the U.S. and criticism of capitalism among immigrant and native workers. A number of labor leaders and unions identified as socialist. The great union leader Eugene V. Debs (1855-1920) obtained almost a million write-in votes as the 1920 Socialist Party presidential candidate while in Atlanta Federal Penitentiary for having opposed World War I. The Communist Party is said to have had 100,000 members around 1940.

The major factor in the virtual silence today about the shortcomings of capitalism as a system is that five generations of Americans, starting in the late 1800s and accelerating wildly since the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, have been trained by their rulers and institutions throughout their entire lives that socialism is an existential danger to the “American way of life” and to democracy and freedom.

This was accompanied by several periods of red hunts, mass jailing, deportations and severe political repression, culminating in 1945-1960 with the purge of socialists and communists from the trade union movement and political witch hunts, the imprisoning of communist leaders, and firings of teachers, writers, actors, directors, and ordinary workers from tens of thousands of jobs. Workers in millions of occupations had to sign loyalty oaths.

Anti-communism became the watchword throughout America but the actual target always was and remains much wider, including all the many varieties of socialism from Marxism-Leninism to mild democratic socialism, extending even to non-socialist social democracy, and implicitly to everyday progressivism and liberalism when reforms are contemplated.

The word “progressive” practically dropped out of the language in the 1950s for a couple of decades since it was suggested by Cold War liberals as well as run-of-the-mill reactionaries, politicians and bosses that those so designated were “soft on communism.” The word “liberal” itself began to disappear for about a decade around the 1990s (remember the “L” word?), mainly because Republican name calling and the Democratic Party’s definitive moves away from liberalism.

Both words are back for now, though liberal/progressive influence seems negligible, mainly because of the implosion of the USSR and the end of the Cold War. Of course, there are small communist and socialist organizations and left publications in the U.S., but criticism of America’s laissez-faire form of capitalism or capitalism as a system is considered out of bounds in the rest of our society. If this doesn’t change, nothing much is going to change in terms of gross economic inequality and distortions of democracy because anticommunism, in essence, has come to mean pro-capitalism-no-questions-asked.

We think Joel Kovel made a good point, at the very end of his important 1994 book “Red Hunting in the Promised Land,” when he wrote: “The capitalist order, with all its brilliant accomplishments, had not succeeded; it has only won [the Cold War]. There can be no future worthy of human beings unless the existing system is challenged. For this, the overcoming of anticommunism is indispensable.”

Americans may live in the richest country in the world, but it is in a society where about 10% of the population possesses nearly 90% of the nation’s assets. In a country of 312 million people the  entire ruling class can fit comfortably into Yankee Stadium, with room left over to generously  pass out free tickets to thousands of the 46.2 million Americans living below the poverty line.

Democracy can never fulfill its potential under such circumstances, and the vaunted “American dream” is fast fading for the working class/middle class as the U.S. economic system seems headed into a second recession and the weakening of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Isn’t it time for the American people to directly question what’s wrong with capitalism, or at least inquire, in the words of an old saying: “Where are we going and what are we doing in this hand basket?”

Prachanda’s strange path

Chairman Prachanda and Dr. Bhattarai have gone from heroic revolutionary leaders to rather common high caste Brahmin politicians in expensive suits, watches and ties. They went from speeches about smashing the state and Cultural Revolution to promises about millennium development goals and private finance initiative. What happened?

Marxism-Leninism-Maoism-Prachanda Path was the official ideology of the Nepali Maoists, and was to be the union of the Soviet and Chinese models of revolution; the Maoist peoples war with Leninist urban insurrection. Prachanda Path was Maoism synthesised for Nepali conditions; Prachanda Path was said to be a zigzag path, one that goes from left to right to left to right to confuse the enemies and play them off against one another. So, the Maoists would play the royalists against the bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie off against the royalists; play India off against China and China off against India, and then to play the UN off against the US. In the party itself, Prachanda would play the left winger Kiran against the right winger Bhattarai, one time supporting Kiran, another time Bhattarai, all the time advancing ahead. Prachanda was thought of as the master strategist, with a secret plan, and in some ways this is true.  But Bhattarai is now the Prime Minister, and it is his line the party are following, as they have been since the end of the Peoples War.

The ending of the Peoples War and the entrance into parliamentary politics was justified to the cadre by saying that the struggle had changed form, and that the new struggle would be in the urban centres. This was a change of form from a rural movement towards an urban one, from a secret and hidden leadership to an open leadership in the parliamentary system. The cadre were told that the outward form was electoral struggle, but the internal and true essence was preparation for urban insurrection.

This did indeed seem at the time to be an ingenious tactic, and one that might succeed. And if it had worked, it would have been truly glorious. That is, under the cover of entering into the parliamentary system, the Maoists would bring their troops into the capital and mobilise the Kathmandu proletariat for an urban insurrection. The cadre were told that at an opportune time, the reactionaries would attack and there would be the final conflict between the RNA and the PLA for control of Nepal. The PLA would leave the cantonments, and the YCL (Young Communist League) would take control of the streets in Kathmandu. And, indeed, this was possible; after the peace process when the YCL turned up in Kathmandu, they were organised as a paramilitary force which attracted many young people, their core leadership were ex-PLA, and the popular mood was for revolution.

However, the longer and longer the Maoists stayed in the parliamentary system; the less and less likely this seemed. The leadership said they were taking part in elections as a tactic, confusing their enemies and that their real purpose was to expose the parliamentary system. Unfortunately, it was not the electoral system that was exposed, but the Maoist leaders themselves who were exposed as just another bunch of corrupt opportunist politicians; it was not the enemies of the Maoists who became confused, but their friends and supporters.

The role and importance of the UN has been overlooked by many.  From the point of view of the ‘international community’ and the UN itself, the United Nations Mission in Nepal (UNMIN) must be judged a quiet success. The UN oversaw the transformation of the Maoists from a revolutionary party to a civilian party, and oversaw the dismantling of the PLA. The Maoist leadership agreed to the UN DDR program (Disarmament, Demobilisation, Reintegration) for the PLA, and this has been almost carried through; the handover of the keys is really only the last symbolic gesture before demobilization of the PLA. International donors will help reintegration by giving a pay out to the PLA soldiers to restart their life as civilians. As for the number of PLA to be integrated into the Nepal Army, it is really just a bargaining chip; it does not really matter much apart from to the soldiers themselves and their families. Some form of integration will take place; that much is agreed upon by all parties, including Kiran and the left wing of the Maoist party.

The UN allowed the implementation of those Maoist demands that did not conflict with the demands of the ‘international community’. These included the abolition of the monarchy and the widening of political participation of previously unrepresented groups, such as Dalits, as well as various social development programs-hospitals schools orphanages etc, generously aided by NGO money. It was indeed strange to see the Maoists get on so well with the UN, not wanting the UN to leave; it was finally the Congress and the UML that asked the UN to leave Nepal. The UN had done their job.

The Maoist leadership justified a lot of this international money coming in by saying ‘we are tricking the imperialists, we are taking the imperialist money but we will use it for revolution’. This excuse seemed plausible for a short time, but unfortunately it is not really possible to fool international donors, such as the World Bank, because they will certainly check how their money is spent. It was not the imperialists that were tricked, but rather the Maoist cadre and supporters. They took much of what the leadership was saying on trust, and did not have the money or resources to check what was happening.  The practice of emphasising the personality of the great leader Prachanda made it hard for ordinary cadre and supporters to challenge or question the great leader’s decisions.

There is another justification that has been coming from the leadership regarding the integration of the PLA into the Nepal Army. This justification suggests that the PLA integrated into the Nepal Army will subvert the army with their superior ideology, winning the ordinary soldier over to the cause of revolution, and thus suggesting that there are still plans for the coming urban insurrection. These types of justifications from the Maoist leadership are simply too hard to believe, there have been too many of them, all incapable of being verified and all in the end proved false.  The leaders of the Nepal Army are surely not that stupid to be tricked. Just as the PLA does not consider itself defeated, neither does the Nepal Army. Prachanda tried to sack the army chief when he was Prime Minister and he was forced to resign. The Nepal army is much bigger than the PLA, well equipped, funded and trained by Britain, US, and India; the leadership of the Nepal Army is controlled by the same people who were previously known as ‘royalists’, the big money in Nepal. The real power in Nepal has not really changed, despite the changes in government.

This was the final zigzag of Prachanda Path, as Prachanda turned from being the leader of the proletariat to being a ‘paid representative of capital’, his public persona changing from revolutionary leader to a man of peace and  great statesman speaking at the UN general assembly in New York, meeting Bush in the White House etc. This is what has been truly strange, to see how easy it was for Prachanda and Bhattarai to use the communist language to the communists, and the capitalist language to the capitalists, to both making promises and pretending to be in their camp. But whose interests do they serve, truly?

During the Peoples War, most of the Maoist political leadership were not in Nepal, but in India.  After 9/11, tough new policies were passed internationally to finish off groups on the ‘US terrorist list’.  In Sri Lanka the LTTE were finished off in an extremely brutal fashion; there was the likelihood of a similarly brutal war in Nepal.  The Indian government arrested several Maoist central committee members, including Com. Baidya and Com. Gajurel, the leaders of the left wing of the Maoist party. It seemed likely that Prachanda would be arrested soon, probably to face a similar fate to Chairman Gonzalo in Peru. The decision to end the Peoples War must have been made at this time, by Prachanda and Bhattarai, and a compromise was agreed upon. The strength of the Maoists and their depth of support among the people, as well as the mass movement (janandolan) led to a compromise on both sides. The revolution would end, the Maoist leadership would join the political establishment, and the monarchy abolished.

The PLA, however, were never defeated. The Maoists controlled a good deal of the country, and they had mass support in their base areas, where things such as the abolition of the caste system, the abolition of feudal barbarities around marriage; the abolition of the various forms of serfdom, the building and running of schools and hospitals, the giving of land taken from rich landowners to landless peasants, communal villages etc. had taken place. There was much that was achieved and much that could have been extraordinary. These things have more or less ended, and the base areas are swamped with NGO funded projects. We may say that the revolution was not destroyed by real bullets so much as by sugar coated bullets.

The party slogan and vision during the Peoples War was Nepal as a ‘base area for the world revolution’. During the elections, the slogan became ‘turning Nepal into Switzerland’. Again, not a bad idea in itself, Nepal reformed along Singaporean lines, but not a communist one. Likewise, the policies of the new Bhattarai led government are not bad as such, and may well create jobs and develop the country but they are simply neoliberal policies dressed up in socialist sounding rhetoric.

Unlike Prachanda, Dr. Bhattarai was always quite honest; he is an honest reformist. His honesty must be commended and is rare in the communist movement.  When he spoke of ‘leaving communism to our grandchildren’- he meant it.  He is also speaking honestly when he says that: ‘Even if some leaders and cadre may oppose or some splinter groups may move out, even then it won’t make much impact on the political line followed by the party’. The left wing of the party has been consistently outplayed and marginalised, and has been unable to challenge or present a viable alternative to Dr. Bhattarai’s line. The most they can do is split off and form a new party, and cause a little commotion.

Dr. Bhattarai probably does have popular support of most Nepalese at the moment, as most are sick of the bickering of the political parties and their failure to reach a consensus, write the constitution and provide jobs. Most Nepalese do not want a return to war, and Dr. Bhattarai is a man of peace.

Dr. Bhattarai is also telling the truth when he speaks of a ‘historical compromise’; the extent and terms of the compromise will no doubt become clearer in time. The Nepali revolution has been over for a long time. The Nepali revolution ended not in defeat, not in victory, but simply as compromise

This time there were about 100 taking part in the protest. I don’t know if any were Libyans, but there was a new element — almost half of the protesters were black, marching with signs saying: “Stop Bombing Africa”.

There was another new element — people supporting the bombing of Libya, facing us from their side of Pennsylvania Avenue about 40 feet away. They were made up largely of Libyans, probably living in the area, who had only praise and love for the United States and NATO. Their theme was that Gaddafi was so bad that they would support anything to get rid of him, even daily bombing of their homeland, which now exceeds Serbia’s 78 days. I of course crossed the road and got into arguments with some of them. I kept asking: “I hate that man there [pointing to the White House] just as much as you hate Gaddafi. Do you think I should therefore support the bombing of Washington? Destroying the beautiful monuments and buildings of this city, as well as killing people?”

None of the Libyans even tried to answer my question. They only repeated their anti-Gaddafi vitriol. “You don’t understand. We have to get rid of Gaddafi. He’s very brutal.” (See the CNN video of the July 1 mammoth rally in Tripoli for an indication that these Libyans’ views are far from universal at home.)

“But you at least get free education and medical care,” I pointed out. “That’s a lot more than we get here. And Libya has the highest standard of living in the entire region, at least it did before the NATO and US bombing. If Gaddafi is brutal, what do you call all the other leaders of the region, whom Washington has long supported?”

One retorted that there had been free education under the king, whom Gaddafi had overthrown. I was skeptical of this but I didn’t know for sure that it was incorrect, so I replied: “So what? Gaddafi at least didn’t get rid of the free education like the leaders in England did in recent years.”

A police officer suddenly appeared and forced me to return to my side of the road. I’m sure if pressed for an explanation, the officer would justify this as a means of preventing violence from breaking out. But there was never any danger of that at all; another example of the American police-state mentality — order and control come before civil liberties, before anything.

Most Americans overhearing my argument with the Libyans would probably have interjected something like: “Well, no matter how much you hate the president you can still get rid of him with an election. The Libyans can’t do that.”

And I would have come back with: “Right. I have the freedom to replace George W. Bush with Barack H. Obama. Oh joy. As long as our elections are overwhelmingly determined by money, nothing of any significance will change.”

Postscript: Amidst all the sadness and horror surrounding the massacre in Norway, we should not lose sight of the fact that “peaceful little Norway” participated in the bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999; has deployed troops in Iraq; has troops in Afghanistan; and has supplied warplanes for NATO’s bombing of Libya. The teenagers of those countries who lost their lives to the US/NATO killing machine wanted to live to adulthood and old age as much as the teenagers in Norway. With all the condemnation of “extremism” we now hear in Norway and around the world we must ask if this behavior of the Norwegian government, as well as that of the United States and NATO, is not “extremist”.

The Berlin Wall: Another Cold War Myth

The Western media will soon be revving up their propaganda motors to solemnize the 50th anniversary of the erecting of the Berlin Wall, August 13, 1961. All the Cold War clichés about The Free World vs. Communist Tyranny will be trotted out and the simple tale of how the wall came to be will be repeated: In 1961, the East Berlin communists built a wall to keep their oppressed citizens from escaping to West Berlin and freedom. Why? Because commies don’t like people to be free, to learn the “truth”. What other reason could there have been?

First of all, before the wall went up thousands of East Germans had been commuting to the West for jobs each day and then returning to the East in the evening; many others went back and forth for shopping or other reasons. So they were clearly not being held in the East against their will. Why then was the wall built? There were two major reasons:

1) The West was bedeviling the East with a vigorous campaign of recruiting East German professionals and skilled workers, who had been educated at the expense of the Communist government. This eventually led to a serious labor and production crisis in the East. As one indication of this, the New York Times reported in 1963: “West Berlin suffered economically from the wall by the loss of about 60,000 skilled workmen who had commuted daily from their homes in East Berlin to their places of work in West Berlin.”¹

In 1999, USA Today reported: “When the Berlin Wall crumbled [1989], East Germans imagined a life of freedom where consumer goods were abundant and hardships would fade. Ten years later, a remarkable 51% say they were happier with communism.”² Earlier polls would likely have shown even more than 51% expressing such a sentiment, for in the ten years many of those who remembered life in East Germany with some fondness had passed away; although even 10 years later, in 2009, the Washington Post could report: “Westerners say they are fed up with the tendency of their eastern counterparts to wax nostalgic about communist times.”³

It was in the post-unification period that a new Russian and eastern Europe proverb was born: “Everything the Communists said about Communism was a lie, but everything they said about capitalism turned out to be the truth.” It should also be noted that the division of Germany into two states in 1949 — setting the stage for 40 years of Cold War hostility — was an American decision, not a Soviet one.⁴

2) During the 1950s, American coldwarriors in West Germany instituted a crude campaign of sabotage and subversion against East Germany designed to throw that country’s economic and administrative machinery out of gear. The CIA and other US intelligence and military services recruited, equipped, trained and financed German activist groups and individuals, of West and East, to carry out actions which ran the spectrum from juvenile delinquency to terrorism; anything to make life difficult for the East German people and weaken their support of the government; anything to make the commies look bad.

It was a remarkable undertaking. The United States and its agents used explosives, arson, short circuiting, and other methods to damage power stations, shipyards, canals, docks, public buildings, gas stations, public transportation, bridges, etc; they derailed freight trains, seriously injuring workers; burned 12 cars of a freight train and destroyed air pressure hoses of others; used acids to damage vital factory machinery; put sand in the turbine of a factory, bringing it to a standstill; set fire to a tile-producing factory; promoted work slow-downs in factories; killed 7,000 cows of a co-operative dairy through poisoning; added soap to powdered milk destined for East German schools; were in possession, when arrested, of a large quantity of the poison cantharidin with which it was planned to produce poisoned cigarettes to kill leading East Germans; set off stink bombs to disrupt political meetings; attempted to disrupt the World Youth Festival in East Berlin by sending out forged invitations, false promises of free bed and board, false notices of cancellations, etc.; carried out attacks on participants with explosives, firebombs, and tire-puncturing equipment; forged and distributed large quantities of food ration cards to cause confusion, shortages and resentment; sent out forged tax notices and other government directives and documents to foster disorganization and inefficiency within industry and unions … all this and much more.⁵

The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, of Washington, DC, conservative coldwarriors, in one of their Cold War International History Project Working Papers (#58, p.9) states: “The open border in Berlin exposed the GDR [East Germany] to massive espionage and subversion and, as the two documents in the appendices show, its closure gave the Communist state greater security.”

Throughout the 1950s, the East Germans and the Soviet Union repeatedly lodged complaints with the Soviets’ erstwhile allies in the West and with the United Nations about specific sabotage and espionage activities and called for the closure of the offices in West Germany they claimed were responsible, and for which they provided names and addresses. Their complaints fell on deaf ears. Inevitably, the East Germans began to tighten up entry into the country from the West, leading eventually to the infamous Wall. However, even after the wall was built there was regular, albeit limited, legal emigration from east to west. In 1984, for example, East Germany allowed 40,000 people to leave. In 1985, East German newspapers claimed that more than 20,000 former citizens who had settled in the West wanted to return home after becoming disillusioned with the capitalist system. The West German government said that 14,300 East Germans had gone back over the previous 10 years.⁶

Let’s also not forget that Eastern Europe became communist because Hitler, with the approval of the West, used it as a highway to reach the Soviet Union to wipe out Bolshevism forever, and that the Russians in World War I and II, lost about 40 million people because the West had used this highway to invade Russia. It should not be surprising that after World War II the Soviet Union was determined to close down the highway.

We came, we saw, we destroyed, we forgot

An updated summary of the charming record of US foreign policy. Since the end of the Second World War, the United States of America has …

    1. Attempted to overthrow more than 50 governments, most of which were democratically-elected.
    2. Attempted to suppress a populist or nationalist movement in 20 countries.
    3. Grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least 30 countries.⁷
    4. Dropped bombs on the people of more than 30 countries.
    5. Attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders.

In total: Since 1945, the United States has carried out one or more of the above actions, on one or more occasions, in the following 69 countries (more than one-third of the countries of the world):

(See a world map of US interventions.)

The occult world of economics

When you read about economic issues in the news, like the crisis in Greece or the Wall Street/banking mortgage shambles are you sometimes left befuddled by the seeming complexity, which no one appears able to untangle or explain to your satisfaction in simple English? Well, I certainly can’t explain it all myself, but I do know that the problem is not necessarily that you and I are economic illiterates. The problem is often that the “experts” discuss these issues as if we’re dealing with hard and fast rules or laws, not to be violated, scientifically based, mathematically sound and rational; when, in fact, a great deal of what takes place in the real world of economics and in the arena of “expert” analysis of that world, is based significantly on partisan party politics, ideology, news headlines, speculation, manipulation, psychology (see the utter meaninglessness and absurdity of the daily rise or fall of stock prices), backroom deals of the powerful, and the excessive power given to and reliance upon thoroughly corrupt credit-rating agencies and insurers of various kinds. The agencies like Moody’s and Standard and Poor’s are protection rackets — pay our exorbitant fees or we give you a bad rating, which investors and governments then bow down to as if it’s the result of completely objective and impressive analytical study.

Then there’s the exceptions made for powerful countries to get away with things that lesser countries, like Greece, are not allowed to get away with, but all still explained in terms of the unforgiving laws of economics.

And when all other explanations fail to sound plausible, the experts fall back on “the law of supply and demand”. But that law was repealed years ago; just try and explain the cost of gasoline based on it, as but one example.

So there’s a lot to cover up, many reasons why the financial-world players can’t be as open as they should be, as forthright as the public and investors may assume they are.

Consider the US budget deficit, about which we hear a great deal of scare talk. What we don’t hear is that the most prosperous period in American history occurred in the decades following the Second World War — from 1946 to 1973. And guess what? We had a budget deficit in the large majority of those years. Clearly such a deficit was not an impediment to growth and increasing prosperity in the United States — a prosperity much more widely shared than it is now. Yet we’re often fed the idea of the sanctity of a balanced budget. This and other “crises” are typically overblown for political reasons; the current “crisis” about the debt ceiling for example. Paul Craig Roberts, former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury under Reagan, now an independent columnist, points out that “regardless of whether the debt ceiling is raised the US government is not going to go out of business. … If Goldman Sachs is too big to fail, certainly, the US government is.”

In economic issues that occupy the media greatly, such as the debt ceiling, one of the hidden keys to understanding what’s going on is often the conservatives’ perennial hunger to privatize Social Security and Medicare. If you understand that, certain things become much clearer. Naomi Klein points out that “the pseudo debate about the debt ceiling … is naked class war, waged by the ultra rich against everyone else, and it’s well past time for Americans to draw the line.”

Consider, too, the relative value of international currencies. Logically, reasonably, if the British pound is exchangeable for two dollars, one should be able to purchase in Washington goods and services for two dollars which would cost one pound in London. In real life, this of course is the very infrequent exception to the rule. Instead, at places called “exchanges” in New York and Chicago and London and Zurich and Frankfurt a bunch of guys who don’t do anything socially useful get together each day in a large room, and amidst lots of raised voices, busy computers, and numerous pieces of paper, they arrive at a value for the pound, as well as for a barrel of oil, for a pound of porkbellies, and for various other commodities that affect our daily lives. Why should these speculators and parasites have so much influence over the real world, the real economy, and our real lives?

As a general rule of thumb, comrades, as an all-purpose solution to our economic ills, remember this: We’ll keep going around in crisis circles forever until the large financial institutions are nationalized or otherwise placed under democratic control. We hear a lot about “austerity”. Well, austerity has to, finally, visit the super-rich. There are millions (sic) of millionaires and billionaires in the United States and Europe. As governments go bust, the trillions of dollars of these people must be heavily taxed or confiscated to end the unending suffering of the other 95% of humanity. My god, do I sound like a (choke, gasp) socialist?

1. New York Times, June 27, 1963, p.12.
2. USA Today, October 11, 1999, p.1.
3. Washington Post, May 12, 2009; see a similar story November 5, 2009.
4. Carolyn Eisenberg, Drawing the Line: The American Decision to Divide Germany, 1944-1949 (1996); or see a concise review of this book by Kai Bird in The Nation, December 16, 1996.
5. See William Blum, Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, p.400, note 8, for a list of sources for the details of the sabotage and subversion.
6. The Guardian (London), March 7, 1985.
7. See chapter 18 of Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower – add Palestine, 2006 to the list.

The future leader of China, Mao Zedong, was either present at one of Russell’s lectures or read a detailed account of it in the Chinese press. The purpose of this article is to discuss Russell’s blueprint for Chinese liberation and compare it to what the Chinese, under the leadership of the Communist Party, actually did. Another purpose is to point out that many of Russell’s comments about the role of the United States, made over 90 years ago, as well as what was needed in China, are still relevant today.

A word of caution. Russell considered himself a radical and a “socialist”, perhaps even a theoretical “communist” (although he was hostile to many of the actions of the Russian Bolsheviks) at this time. After WWII and up to the late 1950s Russell was a cold war anti-Communist, though not a ridiculous mindless one a la Sidney Hook and those in his milieu, before coming to his senses in the 1960s. I am only concerned, in this article, with Russell’s political statements and opinions in the early 1920s. Some of Russell’s views, while commonly held in the 20s, are completely politically incorrect by today’s standards — I will note them with explanation marks (!!) but otherwise I will not address them or pass over them in silence. These are usually remarks dealing with the nature of the “Chinese mind” or “character” as if all Chinese think a certain way.

“Questions”

This article will deal with Chapter One of POC: “Questions.”

In trying to understand China, Russell thinks he is dealing with a totally alien culture. He is forced to ask himself  what his ultimate values are, what makes one culture or society “better” than another, and what ends does he wish to see triumph in the world. He says different people have different answers to these questions and he thinks they are just subjective preferences not amenable to argument. He will merely state his own and hope his reader will agree with him.  Russell is no objectivist in morals. The ends he values are: “knowledge, art, instinctive happiness, and relations of friendship and affection.” He believes in the goals, if not   always the methods, of communism (although he is not a Marxist), and thinks a socialist society will best approximate the ends he wants. There are elements in Chinese culture that also reflect his ends better than they are reflected in Euro-American culture.

Russell thinks a nation should be judged not only on how its own people are treated, but also on how it treats others. He finds China, in this respect, better than the imperialist nations of the West. In the following quote Russell uses the word “our” and I want to stress that he does not intend to restrict its meaning to the British Empire but uses it inclusively to refer to the major imperialist nations of Europe and the English speaking world or even to “capitalist” nations thus including Japan.

“Our prosperity,” he writes, “and most of what we endeavor to secure for ourselves, can only be obtained by widespread exploitation of weaker nations .” The Chinese, however, obtain what they have by means of their own hard work. China is radically different today but  I think what Russell says about it is still basically correct and what he says about  “us” hasn’t changed very much at all.

What happens in China, he says, will determine the whole future course of world history. There are tremendous resources in China and whether they are to be controlled “by China, by Japan, or by the white races [!!], is a question of enormous importance, affecting not only the whole development of Chinese civilization, but the balance of power in the world, the prospects of peace, the destiny of Russia, and the chances of development toward a better economic system in the advanced nations.”

This remark is as true today as it was some 90 years ago. Chinese civilization, however, is now, at least, much more in the hands of the Chinese, the world balance of power remains in flux, the destiny of Russia is still undetermined, and a better economic system for the West (i.e., socialism) is still a distant dream but may be positively influenced by the economic development of China.

I didn’t mention the “prospects for peace” and that is because in the short term Russell was absolutely  correct: the civil war and revolution in China, World War II (in the Pacific), the Korean War, and the Vietnam War all had China, in one way or another, as their focus and the hope of eventually controlling her resources as a backdrop. Today, as well, many circles in the West, associated with international finance capital, see China as a future threat and the US military has contingency plans for a war with her. So Russell was quite prescient to see the economic resources of China as the focal point of contemporary history.

“Modern China”

Russell discusses the internal state of China, as he understood it in 1920-21, in his chapter “Modern China” in “The Problem of China.” He thinks there are only two ways the Chinese can escape from imperialist domination. The first way is for China to become a strong military power. Russell thinks this would be a disaster.

However, since “the capitalist system involves in its very essence a predatory relation of the strong towards the weak [a perfectly good Leninist proposition even if clumsily expressed], internationally as well as nationally” he proposes a second way for Chinese liberation. The foreign imperialist powers will have to “become Socialistic”. Russell thinks this is the only real solution for the Chinese.

It didn’t occur to Russell that China might free itself by military means and work towards socialism at the same time. It goes without saying that the Chinese would be waiting for kingdom come to be liberated if they had taken Russell’s advice and expected Europe and America to turn socialist.

Russell, as did many in his generation, expected a major war to eventually break out between Japan and the United States over which would be top dog in the far east, but did not see that war as an opportunity for the victims of imperialism to break free and become independent. At any rate, in respect to his “only” solution to Chinese liberation, Russell was wildly off the mark — despite his Leninist grasp of the nature of capitalism.

Russell did, however, urge progressives to support the fledgling government of Sun Yat-sen which was at this time battling the war lord system. No one at that time foresaw that the Kuomintang would degenerate into a fascist despotism under Sun’s successor, Chiang Kai-shek, or that the recently founded Communist Party of China would be the eventual vehicle both for Chinese liberation and regeneration.

Russell’s next comment was completely correct and was about an issue that, after the success of the revolution, the Chinese took very seriously.  Russell wrote that “in the long run, if the birth-rate is as great as is usually supposed, no permanent cure for their poverty is possible while their families continue to be so large.”

The introduction of birth control and the one child policy, which was a drastic step and is now being reevaluated, probably helped to considerably contain the population from an unmanageable explosion (not to credit natural disasters and the unintended consequences of  policies that turned out to be mistaken with respect to premature industrial expansion and agricultural reforms in the 1950s).

Another problem the Chinese would have to overcome before they could hope to compete with the West, according to Russell, was lack of a modern educational system for the masses. This too the CPC saw as a major problem and immediately after coming to power launched a mass literacy program and built schools and institutions of higher learning throughout China.

This was a prerequisite, Russell said, as Chinese workers would need education and skills in order to command decent wages (he did not foresee a socialist revolution in China). Nevertheless, industrialization in China, as in all other countries, would begin to develop by methods that are “sordid and cruel.” Intellectuals, he remarked, “wish to be told of some less horrible method by which their country may be industrialized, but so far none is in sight.”

Whether you are capitalist or socialist, it appears,  if you are starting from a primitive economic base, the only way you can accumulate capital to make industrial advances is to take  it from the surplus value created by the working class. As we will see Russell thinks state capitalism, or state socialism (they are the same for him), would be the best way for the Chinese to go — but he doesn’t envision a revolution.

Russell now hits upon a major problem which I think was responsible for some of the major errors of the Mao era.

There is one traditional Chinese belief which dies very hard, and that is the belief that correct ethical sentiments are more important than detailed scientific knowledge. This view is, of course, derived from the Confucian tradition, and is more or less true in a pre-industrial society.

One would think that Russell, with commitments to science as the basis for correct knowledge of the world, would hold that “detailed scientific knowledge” is always to be preferred; how would a pre-industrial society ever advance to a higher level without also developing  science?

In the 1950s and 60s Mao pushed the line that politics (“correct ethical sentiments”) was the correct guide to action and could win out over any objections based on economic (scientific) considerations. This led to the twin disasters of the Great Leap Forward and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. There was no basis in Marxism for the views he was espousing even though Mao used Marxist terminology to try and explain his thought. If Russell were correct, this would have been a case of the unconscious Confucian substrata in Mao’s world view manifesting itself in Marxist guise.

Mao, himself, was anti-Confucian at this time so even he was blind to the real origins of the reactionary policies he was peddling in Marxist dress. I should also point out that it was only one wing of Confucianism that held to this view — an Idealist trend that developed in the Ming Dynasty and that there were other wings of Confucianism that were materialistically motivated. Mao had indeed studied Ming Confucianism and was influenced by it in his youth, and, I think, unconsciously after he assumed power.

“Present Forces and Tendencies in the Far East”

Russell’s chapter, “Present Forces and Tendencies in the Far East” (in The Problem of China) deals with the balance of power in this region in the 1920s and focuses on China, Japan, Russia and America. I will omit his comments on Japan here and concentrate on China’s dealings with America and the influence of Russia. Russell points out that the interests of Britain are (leaving India to the side) basically the same as those of America — at least its ruling sector of finance capital and NOT “the pacifistic and agrarian tendencies of the Middle West.”

At this time Russell thought that the two most important “moral forces” in the Far East were those emanating from Russia and America. He thought the Americans to be more idealistic than the jaded imperialists running the European capitalist states. However, he thought that cynical imperialist views were an inevitability as a nation’s power increased and the Americans would abandon their idealism.

We must keep this in mind, he warns us, “when we wish to estimate the desirability of extending the influence of the United States.” Today we can see that Russell was right. The United States has evolved into the most cynical and ruthless imperial power in the world, encircling the globe with its garrisons and fleets, and subjecting whole nations and peoples to its bloody domination in search of power, wealth, and resources.

All this, however, was in the future. The benign United States that appeared to Russell was that of the Harding Administration and the Washington Naval Conference, presided over by Secretary of State Charles Evan Hughes. The conference was held from late 1921 to early 1922 and was the first disarmament conference in modern history. It was designed to reign in Japanese aggression in China, limit naval construction, and keep the Open Door Policy in place in China.

Russell thought America’s policy at the conference was a liberal one, but only because the outcome of the conference was in line with American interests in the Far East. What Russell really believed was that “when American interests or prejudices are involved liberal and humanitarian principles have no weight whatever.” Have we seen anything to contradict this assessment since the days of Warren Harding (or those of George Washington for that matter)?

If American plans for the future economic development of China should be successful, Russell thought it would be disastrous for China. It would certainly be good for America and her allies, but would involve “a gradually increasing flow of wealth from China to the investing countries, the chief of which is America [the CPC appears to have reversed this flow]; the development of a sweated proletariat [still a problem]; the spread of Christianity [another great evil]; the substitution of American civilization for Chinese [not yet but McDonalds and KFC have secured beach heads];…. the gradual awakening of China to her exploitation by the foreigner [China was already awake when Russell wrote]; and one day, fifty or a hundred years hence [around 1972 or 2022], the massacre of every white man throughout the Celestial Empire at a signal from some vast secret society.”

Well, the great awakening was already at hand when Russell wrote.  He was just blind to it.  China liberated itself in a little over 25 years, despite the best actions the US and its allies could do to prevent it, and no vast secret society sprang up to threaten every “white man.” The Celestial Empire has become a People’s Republic.

Russell’s vision of the future was off, but the definition he gave of what the West considers “good” government was spot on, even today: “it is a government that yields fat dividends for capitalists.” This is still the game plan in the 21st century.

Russell now embarks on some ill founded speculations which, nevertheless, hint at a grain of truth. He predicts, for example “it is not likely that Bolshevism [as seen in Russia-tr] as a creed will make much progress in China.” He gives the following three reasons:

1) China has a decentralized state tending towards feudalism whereas Bolshevism requires a centralized state. Russell doesn’t seem to understand a successful socialist revolution would reverse this tendency.

2) China is more suitable for anarchism because the Chinese have a great sense of personal freedom and the Bolsheviks need to have (and do have) more control over individuals “than has ever been known before.” This is strange. The Chinese had just emerged from an oriental despotism under the Manchus that had regulated everything including dress and hair styles for the population, and had no tradition of anything like “personal freedom” as had developed in Europe.

3) Bolshevism opposes “private trading” which is the “breath of life to all Chinese except the literati.” But ninety percent of the Chinese at this time were basically illiterate peasants  most of whom were under the control of a feudalistic landlord class. The Chinese masses had more in common with the Russian masses than Russell seemed to realize.

The greatest appeal of Bolshevism, Russell said, was to the youth of China who wanted to develop industry by skipping the stage of capitalist development. But Russia was now engaged in the New Economic Policy and Russell thought this signaled a slow return to capitalist methods which would disillusion the Chinese.

But, Russell said, the fact that as a creed Bolshevism [i.e., Marxism] would not hold any lasting appeal, Bolshevism “as a political force” had a great future. What he meant was that Bolshevik Russia would continue to play the Great Game in Asia and follow in the footsteps of Tzarist imperialism with Bolshevik imperialism since “the Russians have an instinct for colonization” [!!].

Here is where Russell becomes very confused in his analysis. He doesn’t really define “imperialism.” Marxists at this time defined it as the international policy of monopoly capitalism based on the control of the state by  financial capital sometimes allied with industrial capital. In this sense Bolshevik imperialism was a contradiction in terms. As far as “the Russians,” lumped together without any attempt at class analysis, having an “instinct” to become colonialists — such general statements are useless in trying to describe social reality.

Regardless, Russell thinks it would not be so bad for Russia to become hegemonic in Asia. The Russians could enter into more nearly equal relations with Asian peoples because their “character” [!!]  is more “Asiatic” than that of the “English speaking-nations.”  English speaking nations would not be able to have the same understanding and ability “to enter into relations of equally” with these strange inscrutable Orientals.  As a result an Asian Block of nations would arise as a defensive block and this would be good for world peace as well as “humanity.”

Russell recommends that outside powers leave off meddling with the Chinese and attempting to impose their own values on them as the Chinese will, left to themselves, “find a solution suitable to their character” for their own political problems. This idea  of “national character” is quite unscientific and if Russell had understood what he read of Das Kapital and other Marxist writings and substituted some such phrase as “find a solution based on their own historical development and class relations”, he would have made better sense. POC would have been better understood, in fact, if “national character” had been replaced by “historical development” whenever it occurred along with a brief description of that development.

Russell goes on to predict what the future of China will most likely be. Marxists, as  great predictors of the future themselves, especially its inevitable trends and outcomes, understand what a risky business this is and should have great sympathy for Russell’s wrong headed  prognosis.

Since the US emerged unscathed from WW I it had an excess of available capital to invest  and would be the principal nation involved in China’s future development. “As the financiers are the most splendid feature of the American civilization, China must be so governed as to enrich the financiers.” The US will contribute greatly to building educational institutions in China so that Chinese intellectuals will end up serving the interests of the big Trusts just as American intellectuals do. As a result a conservative anti-radical reform system will be produced and touted as a great force for peace. But, Russell points out: “it is impossible to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear or peace and freedom out of capitalism.”

The US will encourage the growth of a stable government, foster an increase in income to build up a market for American goods, discourage other powers besides themselves from meddling in China, and look askance upon all attempts of the Chinese to control their own economy, especially the nationalization of the mines and railroads, which Russell sees as a “form of State Socialism or what Lenin calls State Capitalism.” The reference to Lenin is in respect to the New Economic Plan (NEP) in Russia.

The US would also keep lists of radical students and see to it that they would not get jobs, try to impose its puritan morality on the Chinese, and because Americans think their own country and way of life are “perfect” they will do great damage to what is best in Chinese culture in their attempts to make China as much as possible resemble what they call “God’s own country.”

As a result of all this a “Marxian class-war will break out” between Asia and the West. The Asian forces will be led by a socialist Russia and be fought for freedom from the imperialist powers and their exploitation. These views are very different from those Russell will be representing in his future Cold War phase.

Ever the pessimist, Russell sees this war as so destructive all around that probably “no civilization of any sort would survive it.” When the actual war came it was very destructive, but it was a civil war between the bourgeois democratic capitalist powers and the authoritarian fascist capitalist powers into which the Russians were drawn against their will and from which the Chinese emerged as a free and independent people determined to build socialism.

Russell ends his chapter on a socialist note about the evils of the “present” (1920s) system of world wide capitalist domination. His conclusion is almost a perfect description of the world we live in today. “The essential evil of the present system,” he says, “as Socialists have pointed out over and over again, is production for profit instead of for use.”  American power may, for a while, impose peace, but never freedom for weak countries. “Only international Socialism can secure both; and owing to the stimulation of revolt by capitalist oppression, even peace alone can never be secure until international Socialism is established throughout the world.”

“The Outlook for China”

The last chapter in Bertrand Russell’s POC is entitled “The Outlook for China”. Russell, writing in 1922, thinks that China (due to its population and resources) has the capacity to become the second greatest power in the world (after the United States). Today the US seems to be slipping economically so maybe China will become number one in the world sometime in the present century.

Three things will have to come about for China to reach its full potential. Russell lists them as: 1) The establishment of an orderly government [the CPC has accomplished this requirement]; 2) Industrial development under Chinese control [this too has been brought about by the CPC whether you call it "market socialism" or "state capitalism"]; 3) the spread of education [ditto care of the CPC].

All three prerequisites put forth by Russell have been attained if not quite in the manner he imagined in his book. Let’s look at some of Russell’s elaborations on these prerequisites.

First, the problem of orderly government. Russell says that in the 1920s China was functionally anarchic with battling warlords and weak central governments in the north and south of the country. He envisioned an eventual constitutional setup and a parliamentary form of government. But he cautioned that even so the masses of the people (Russell uses the term “public opinion”) will have to be guided by what amounts to a Leninist political party using democratic centralist methods.

Here is what Russell wrote: “It will be necessary for the genuinely progressive people throughout the country to unite in a strongly disciplined society, arriving at collective decisions and enforcing support for those decisions upon all its members.” That is just what happened under the leadership of CPC.

Second, the problem of industrial development. China, or any country for that matter, to be truly free has to also be economically free and that requires that it has control of its own railroads and natural resources. He thus thinks the Chinese government should own the railroads and the mines of China. He also thinks that state ownership of “a large amount” of the industry in China should also occur. “There are many arguments for State Socialism, or rather what Lenin calls State Capitalism, in any country which is economically but not culturally backward.”

Russell thinks that is possible for China, with a strong and honest government, to skip over the stage of capitalism and lay the foundations for socialism. This is tricky business as the Chinese would find out much later. If you skip too far and too fast you can trip and fall on your face.  With the right government “it will be possible to develop Chinese industry without, at the same time, developing the overweening power of private capitalists by which the Western nations are now both oppressed and misled.” We can only hope that China is heading in this direction.

Third, the problem of education. Russell says that “Where the bulk of the population cannot read, true democracy is impossible. Education is a good in itself, but is also essential for developing political consciousness, of which at present there is almost none in rural China.”

By “democracy” Russell then, and almost all Western governments and their intellectual tools today, mean “bourgeois democracy”; i.e., “democratic” institutions and constitutions that guarantee the government will be controlled by, for, and of one of two contending classes that exist in the modern capitalist world; i.e., the capitalist class. Russell proclaimed his belief in “socialism” (Mao even said Russell believed in “communism”) but he never transcended the bourgeois concept of “democracy” inculcated in him by the British ruling class by which he was educated.

But the wider, and I believe correct, meaning of “democracy” (rule of the “demos” or people) includes other forms of government than those proclaimed by the bourgeoisie and their lackeys.  It must refer to any form  of government that objectively rules in the interests of its people; i.e., the vast majority of its population composed of working people,  called by old time communists “the toiling masses” and historically personified by the “people’s democracies” and “people’s republics” of eastern Europe and Asia, and by the only completely democratic state in the Western Hemisphere, Cuba.

In just a few years after Russell wrote the above words, hundreds of millions of the peasants of “rural China” would develop a political consciousness that would lead to the overthrow of the rule by landlords and capitalists in China and the establishment, however flawed, of a true people’s republic. Then they learned to read.

Russell was both correct and incorrect in saying the following: “Until it has been established for some time, China must be, in fact if not in form, an oligarchy, because the uneducated masses cannot have any effective political opinion [or in the case of the US -- miseducated masses]. If that “oligarchy” is a real communist party (not one in name only) it will bring to the masses the correct political opinion that they and they alone control their own destiny and can abolish their subjection to a class that only lives off of their exploitation. The one party state may be the instrument leading to this liberation and its own eventual elimination, along with the state, but it also gives to the masses “effective political opinion” and if it doesn’t, it may find itself being eliminated ahead of schedule.

Russell hoped the Chinese, by combining “Western” science with their traditional culture, would create a new civilization free of the deficiencies of the capitalist West. What we are seeing now, in the 21st century, in China is perhaps the fulfillment of Russell’s vision but it is a synthesis of Marx, left wing Confucianism, and modern science. Hopefully the coming century will see the end of Western “civilization” as we know it, a predatory war based imperialist system attempting to enchain the world, and the establishment of a real new world order. The values of Bertrand Russell will be better remembered and served in such a world.

Epilogue: What Mao thought of Russell’s Views on China¹

In his lecture at Changsha, Russell …. took a position in favour of communism but against the dictatorship of the workers and peasants. He said that one should employ the method of education to change the consciousness of the propertied classes, and that in this way it would not be necessary to limit freedom or to have recourse to war and bloody revolution….

My objections to Russell’s view point can be stated in a few words: ‘This is all very well as a theory, but it is unfeasible in practice’.

Education requires money, people and instruments. In today’s world money is entirely in the hands of the capitalists. Those who have charge of education are all either capitalists or wives of capitalists. In today’s world the schools and the press, the two most important instruments of education, are entirely under capitalist control. In short, education in today’s world is capitalist education. If we teach capitalism to children, these children, when they grow up will, in turn, teach capitalism to a second generation of children. Education thus remains in the hands of the capitalists.

Then the capitalists have ‘parliaments’ to pass laws protecting the capitalists and handicapping the proletariat; they have ‘governments’ to apply these laws and to enforce the advantages and the prohibitions that they contain; they have ‘armies’ and ‘police’ to defend the well-being of the capitalists and to repress the demands of the proletariat; they have ‘banks’ to serve as repositories in the circulation of their wealth ; they have ‘ factories’, which are the instruments by which they monopolize the production of goods.

Thus, if the communists do not seize political power, they will not be able to find any refuge in this world; how, under such circumstances, could they take charge of education? Thus, the capitalists will continue to control education and to praise their capitalism to the skies, so that the number of converts to the proletariat’s communist propaganda will diminish from day to day. Consequently, I believe that the method of education is unfeasible….

What I have just said constitutes the first argument.

The second argument is that, based on the principle of mental habits and on my observation of human history, I am of the opinion that one absolutely cannot expect the capitalists to become converted to communism. If one wishes to use the power of education to transform them, then since one cannot obtain control of the whole or even an important part of the two instruments of education — schools and the press — even if one has a mouth and a tongue and one or two schools and newspapers as means of propaganda…. this is really not enough to change the mentality of the adherents of capitalism even slightly; how then can one hope that the latter will repent and turn toward the good? So much from a psychological standpoint. From a historical standpoint…. one observes that no despot imperialist and militarist throughout history has ever been known to leave the stage of history of his own free will without being overthrown by the people. Napoleon I proclaimed himself emperor and failed; then there was Napoleon III. Yuan Shih-K’ai failed; then, also there was Tuan Ch’i-jui…. From what I have just said based on both psychological and a historical standpoint, it can be seen that capitalism cannot be overthrown by the force of a few feeble efforts in the domain of education. This is the second argument.

There is yet a third argument, most assuredly a very important argument, even more important in reality. If we use peaceful means to attain the goal of communism, when will we finally achieve it? Let us assume that a century will be required, a century marked by the unceasing groans of the proletariat. What position shall we adopt in the face of this situation? The proletariat is many times more numerous than the bourgeoisie; if we assume that the proletariat constitutes two-thirds of humanity, then one billion of the earth’s one billion five hundred million inhabitants are proletarians (I fear that the figure is even higher), who during this century will be cruelly exploited by the remaining third of capitalists. How can we bear this?

Furthermore, since the proletariat has already become conscious of the fact that it too should possess wealth, and of the fact that its sufferings are unnecessary, the proletarians are discontented, and a demand for communism has arisen and has already become a fact. This fact confronts us, we cannot make it disappear; when we become conscious of it we wish to act. This is why, in my opinion, the Russian revolution, as well as the radical communists in every country, will daily grow more powerful and numerous and more tightly organized. This is the natural result. This is the third argument…..

There is a further point pertaining to my doubts about anarchism. My argument pertains not merely to the impossibility of a society without power or organization. I should like to mention only the difficulties in the way of the establishment of such form of society and of its final attainment…. For all the reasons just stated, my present viewpoint on absolute liberalism, anarchism, and even democracy is that these things are fine in theory, but not feasible in practice….

1. Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, “Communism and Dictatorship”, November 1920. January 1921 [Extracted from two letters to Ts’ai Ho-sen[1895-1932 a leader of the CPC, arrested in Hong Kong by the British and turned over to the Kuomintang which killed him- tr], in November 1920 and January 1921]

For openers, Bobby Kennedy was about as “leftist” as Douglas MacArthur.  In truth, he, like his brother John, was a shrieking anti-Communist.  The Kennedys were not only rock-ribbed Cold Warriors, they were fairly paranoid about it—confusing progressivism with Bolshevism—which is why they believed, ludicrously, that Martin Luther King, Jr. was a Communist, and is why they (John as president and Bobby as Attorney General) had King’s telephone tapped.

How much of an anti-Communist was Bobby Kennedy?  Consider:  During the early 1950s Bobby served as an aide to Senator Joseph McCarthy.  Yes, that Joseph McCarthy.  His witch-hunting senate committee ruined the careers of scores of Americans through the use of smears and innuendo.  It’s a fact.  Bobby (“Don’t get mad….get even”) Kennedy was Joe McCarthy’s boy.

It was only after family patriarch, Joe Kennedy, advised his son to jump off the McCarthy bandwagon (alas, “Tail-Gunner Joe” had become an embarrassment, having degenerated into a clownish, alcoholic demagogue) that Bobby sought a new vocation.  It was only after Papa Joe urged him to abandon Commie-hunting and focus on another boogie man that Bobby Kennedy decided to make America’s labor unions his next victim.

Obviously, there were many corruption targets to choose from.  He could have gone after Wall Street, pharmaceuticals, insurance companies, defense fraud, payola in the record industry, etc., but because Joe Kennedy had no ties, no loyalties, no connections of any kind to the working class—indeed, he held the common working man in contempt—organized labor became Bobby’s new whipping boy.  Best to leave those slender, well-groomed gentlemen in the three-piece suits alone, and go after the stocky guys in the watchmen’s caps and mackinaws.

As for Bobby’s celebrated social conscience, that’s another… well, exaggeration.  In his award-winning history of the CIA (Legacy of Ashes), Tim Weiner reports that it was Bobby himself who spearheaded the plan to murder Fidel Castro.  It was Bobby Kennedy who not only initiated the assassination plot, but who—following one ignominious failure after another—flogged the hare-brained operation to keep it going.  After all, he was the president’s brother.  Who was going to tell him to back off?

All those bizarre reports that we’ve heard about—the exploding cigars, the LSD-laced coffee, the chemical additives to cause Fidel’s beard to fall out (!), bribing trusted Castro associates to poison him, hiring out-of-town Mafia hit men to murder him outright—those were all sanctioned by Bobby.

Based on documents released via FOIA (Freedom of Information Act), as well as material gleaned from numerous first-person interviews (Legacy of Ashes has a staggering 150 pages of notes), Weiner made the case that Bobby Kennedy was obsessed with killing Fidel Castro, that he ate, drank and breathed Castro assassination fantasies.

It’s also been documented that Bobby Kennedy bullied Lyndon Johnson into continuing the Vietnam war.  According to historian Doris Kearns Goodwin (in Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream), Bobby insisted to LBJ that President Kennedy would have done everything in his power to keep Southeast Asia from falling to the Communists, and that it was therefore incumbent upon Johnson to honor his dead brother’s legacy by not abandoning the war.  He pressured LBJ to remain in Vietnam, arguing that pulling out would be the act of a coward and traitor.

It was only after the Vietnam war had become toxically unpopular and been deemed unwinnable that Bobby, who was now seeking the 1968 presidential nomination, reversed his position and declared himself America’s “peace candidate,” harshly criticizing Johnson for his hawkishness.  So much for Bobby’s principles… and so much for Brother John’s “legacy.”

While Bobby Kennedy obviously had some good qualities, it’s a mistake to regard him as heroic—as a combination of Mahatma Gandhi, Cesar Chavez, and Che Guevara.  Bobby was no hero.  He was a hardboiled player.  If we insist on making comparisons, he was a combination of Lee Atwater, John Gotti, and Henry Kissinger.

It is Dühring’s 1871 work Critical History of Political Economy that Marx intends to critique, beginning with Dühring’s claim that his work in Political Economy “is absolutely without precedent.” Here we will find a definitive treatment of the subject in a scientific manner. The science is, he says, “peculiarly mine.”

Dühring’s first great “discovery” is that Political Science is a modern creation with no medieval or ancient roots. Marx points out, however, that this claim to modernity was already put forth by him in Capital and Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. The difference is that Marx begins with the great founders of this science [from William Petty (1623-1687) and Boisguillebert (1646-1714) to Ricardo (1772-1823) and Sismondi (1773-1842)] while Dühring begins with the “wretched abortions” of later bourgeois economists. Marx also has respect for the medieval and classical traditions.

Of course, since Political Science was founded in an attempt to scientifically understand modern CAPITALISM, you will not find it in the classical (slave) world , nor the middle ages (feudal). Capitalist societies are based on commodity production and exchange but there was limited commodity production and exchange in both the classical period and the Middle Ages and what the Ancients and other pre-moderns had to say about it is still worth while; Marx especially defends the economic writings of Aristotle (384-322 BC) and Plato (427-347 BC) from Dühring’s unerudite “criticisms.”

Dühring is also ignorant of the history and development of political economy in the modern period. For example, he takes a minor work [Antonio Serra's Breve trattato of 1613 as a defining work of Mercantilism -- the dominant economic theory of capitalism for its first 250 years of existence, ending around the time of Adam Smith (1723-1790)] while completely ignoring Thomas Mun’s (1571-1641) A Discourse of Trade of 1609 which was “the mercantilist gospel” for the entire Seventeenth Century.

Worse than that is Dühring’s treatment of William Petty, “the founder of modern political economy.” After much hard thinking and many investigations, Petty in 1662 formulated one of the bed rock foundations of political economy as a science (Treatise on Taxes and Contributions). Here, Marx says he “lays it down in a definite and general form that the values of commodities must be measured by equal labour.” Further, in a work of 1672 (Anatomy of Ireland) Petty has overcome “the last vestiges of mercantilist views.”

These are great intellectual feats for the founder of the new science. Marx says about Petty, and this applies to Marx himself in our day, that what is “quite natural in a writer who is laying the foundations of political economy and is necessarily feeling his way, experimenting and struggling with a chaos of ideas which are only just taking shape, may seem strange in a writer who is surveying and summarizing more than a hundred and fifty years of investigation whose results have already passed in part from books into the consciousness of the generality.” That Dühring fails to grasp this and thinks that “there is fair measure of superficiality” in Petty’s thinking, only shows, Marx avers, that Dühring is a “vainglorious and pedantic mediocrity.”

One of Petty’s great successors was the the philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) who, besides his works on the social contract and the foundations of epistemology, also wrote an important work in the fledgling science of political economy: Some Considerations of the Consequences of the Lowering of Interests and Raising the Value of Money, 1691.

Petty had already compared interest to “rent on money”– i.e. to “rent of land and houses.” His position was that all rent should be unregulated and determined by the market. This, of course, is a reactionary view today but not so in 1691. This was part of the fight against Mercantilism which progressives in those days rightly viewed as a system that held back social and economic progress by using the state to impose import duties and taxes to defend domestic markets and subsidize exports.

Trying to regulate interest rates, i.e., rent on money, Petty felt was “against the law of nature”. Petty, Marx wrote, “declared that legislative regulation of the rate of interest was as stupid as regulation of exports of precious metals [a pillar of Mercantilism] or regulation of exchange rates.” Ideas that are reactionary and unworkable today (just think of the ridiculous economic and philosophical bloviations of Ayn Rand and her followers) in the end stage of capitalism, were forward looking and progressive during it birth pangs.

Locke, whose economic essay, basically followed Petty’s lead, had a great influence in those European countries struggling to go beyond the strictures of the Mercantilists or economic nationalists. Petty, who is, incidentally credited with the invention of the laissez faire school, was also supported by Sir Dudley North (1641-1691) in A Discourse on Trade, 1691, a contemporary of Locke’s, whose work, Marx says “is a classical exposition, driven home with relentless logic, of the doctrine of free trade– both foreign and internal….”

Locke and North deserve credit for furthering Petty’s views and in developing them along new lines. But Dühring sees none of this. For Marx, the period 1691-1752 is crucial for the understanding of the development of political science. In was in this period that the writers influenced by Petty, Locke, North, and others, laid down the foundations for overthrowing Mercantilism. This period is a blank page for Herr Dühring. Dühring passes directly to David Hume (1711-1776) and the physiocrats. Marx has many interesting things to say about Hume as an economist (his philosophy is not mentioned) and why Dühring is so enamored with him.

Hume published his Economic Essays in 1752 and they are, in our current terminology, basically a plagiarized version of the 1734 work of Jacob Vanderlint (died 1740) Money Answers All Things. While Hume almost literally follows Vanderlint, he is, according to Marx, “less profound.” Dühring is unaware of Vanderlint and praises Hume while none the less failing to understand what he says.

Since Dühring doesn’t have a real understanding of Hume, I will just present Marx’s views for the record. Hume’s theory of money is that money is just a TOKEN of value and, ceteris paribus, “commodity prices rise in proportion to the increase in the volume of money in circulation, and fall in proportion to its decrease.” Hume is basically saying that the increase in the amount of gold and silver in circulation, due to the imports from the New World, increases the prices of commodities. He also notes that this takes some time to spread through out the country until it finally trickles down to the working people: in Hume’s words “it must first quicken the diligence of every individual before it increases the price of labour.” So old is Reaganomics.

But Hume is not, according to Marx, addressing the “real scientific question” in this description: i.e., how an increase in money “affects the prices of commodities.” However, Marx does not answer this question here as he really wants to remark on Hume’s theory of INTEREST. Hume says it is the not the money supply but the rate of profit that regulates the amount of interest (here he attacks Locke’s view). Hume’s theory is not original. Just as he got almost all his ideas from Vanderlint on most economic issues, his interest theory is just a rehash, and not as exact, of the work of J. Massie (died 1784) “An Essay on the Governing Causes of the Natural Rate of Interest,” 1750.

Hume, by the way, maintains a low interest rate means a nation is in a “flourishing condition.” Well maybe in his day — but we have low interest rates in the USA and we are hardly “flourishing”, at least with respect to the majority of the population which is made up of working people.

There are other problems with Hume’s ideas, according to Marx. Marx says “he had not the slightest understanding of the function of the precious metals as the measure of value.” This is because he didn’t know what “value” itself meant in terms of capitalist production. For example, he corrects Locke for holding that the precious metals only have “an imaginary value” by saying what they really have is “a fictitious value.” These views are “much inferior” not only to those of Petty but to his contemporaries as well who were writing on these subjects — especially, his friend Adam Smith.

Hume also is blind to the economic world coming into existence all around him. He holds to the outmoded view “that the ‘merchant’ is the mainspring of production.” Despite these limitations, Marx concedes that in his day Hume was still a “respectable” political economist. His criticism is meant to dispel the over wrought praise Hume is given by Dühring. Because, while respectable, Marx adds, “he is anything but an original investigator, an even less an epoch making one.”

Why does Marx think that Dühring likes Hume so much? It is because Dühring identified with Hume. Hume was denounced by the church for some of his views, but not so much as Gibbon was for his, Dühring too fell afoul of the authorities for some of his views. Hume attained a better reputation as a philosopher, and Dühring thinks that will also be his fate (it was not to be.)

Marx can’t resist giving two quotes which many Hume fans would resent. The first is from a popular German world history book by Friedrich Schlosser (1766-1861): “In politics Hume was and always remained conservative and strongly monarchist in his views.” He was also highly racist in his views on Africans. And William Cobbett (1762-1835) calls him “selfish” and a “lying Historian” [Hume wrote a history of England] and implies he was an hypocrite for attacking monks for their fatness, their not having wives or children and begging for their bread while he himself was without “a family or a wife and was a great fat fellow, fed, in considerable part, out of public money, without having merited it by any real public services.”

Well, enough about Hume. Marx next turns his attention to Dühring and the physiocrats, especially the Tableau Economique of Francois Quesnay (1694-1744). Marx says Dühring’s attempt to explain Quesnay’s economic theories (the physiocrats were the first real school of modern economics, not counting the Mercantilists as modern!, and Quesnay was the founder) is completely mixed up and confused and shows, once again, that Dühring doesn’t know what he is talking about. But so that WE can understand what the school was all about, Marx undertakes to explain it for our benefit.

The physiocrats divided society into three classes: the PRODUCTIVE class — i.e., agricultural workers and farmers — all wealth comes from a nation’s agricultural production; the LANDLORDS [landowners, the nobility, the Church] who live off of the surplus produced by the farmers; and the STERILE class [the industrial bourgeoisie, merchants, etc, who live off of the raw materials and surpluses of the productive class. Where's the proletariat? Sorry, 17th century France was too backward to have noticed this newly developing class.

Quesnay is not describing the actually real existing economy of France-- he is constructing a simple MODEL that represents a starting point for understanding the actual economy (just as Marx did in Das Kapital). Marx says Quesday makes three premises to simplify the model: 1) he only looks at circulation between the classes and not within them; 2) he only deals with simple reproduction and constant prices; and 3) he treats all the annual purchases between the classes as a lump sum. Marx also notes that at this time almost all the non-food articles consumed by peasant families in Europe were home made and "treated as supplementary to agriculture."

Lets start the ball rolling: the Tableau (all figures are based on the value of French money in the 17th century) the total value of the harvest for one year is the starting point. This amount will be the "total reproduction" in France for that year -- let us refer to it as 5 economic units [5EU -- this was 5 million livres in those days].

Since the farmers are the only productive class they have the entire 5EU to themselves. They produced it by investing 2EU in seeds, etc., so they have a surplus of 3EU. They give 2EU to the landlords as RENT and the landlords then buy food from them in the amount of 1EU for the year so now the farmers have 2EU and the landlords 1EU.

With their 1EU left, the landlords buy the things they need to live on, etc., [other than agricultural goods] from the STERILE class. The farmers also buy from the Sterile class say 1EU but the sterile class has to buy food from the farmers but it does not buy back as much in EUs from the farmers as the farmers gave to it because, instead of a fair trade in equivalents, the sterile class has extracted a profit from the farmers by selling their commodities to them above the cost of production AND above their real value.

By the end of the year it is time to reap another harvest and the cycle continues. I have simplified Marx’s exposition because the physiocrats are now only of historical interest and the main point has been shown– i.e., that for them all wealth is produced by the farmers and is then distributed about society to the other classes.

Having finished with the physiocrats Marx makes two more observations on Dühring’s incompetence. First, Dühring thinks that the physiocratic school ended with Turgot (1727-1781) the originator of the Idea of Progress and controller-general of France, 1774-76, in charge of economic reforms under Louis XVI. But Marx says the school actually ended with Mirabeau (1749-1791) “the leading economic authority in the Constituent Assembly of 1789.”

Second, Dühring barely mentions Sir James Steuart (1712-1780) whose work was between Hume and Adam Smith and who “permanently enriched the domain of political economy” (with An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy, 1767). And what he does say about him is wrong.

Marx ends his chapter with the opinion that Dühring’s Critical History is not worth reading, and he is particularly upset that Dühring begins his history with the large landlords of ancient history and doesn’t know anything about “the common ownership of land in the tribal and village communities, which is the real starting-point of all history.”

The “Report of the Secretary-General’s Panel of Experts on Accountability in Sri Lanka” was delivered to Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on March 31 concerning: 1) alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in the last phases of the 26-year old civil war, September 2008 to May 19, 2009; 2) consequences for approximately 300,000 Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) and, by extension, for 2.7 million Sri Lankan Tamils, 13% of the 21 million population.

After receiving the report, which calls for investigations into these allegations, Ban Ki-moon stated that he did not have the power alone but one of three UN bodies had to request such action, either the General Assembly or the Security Council or the Human Rights Council.

The panel—chairman Marzuki Darusman (Indonesia), Steven Ratner (US), and Yasmin Sooka (South Africa)—was commissioned by the Secretary General, June 22, 2010, after Sri Lanka’s government had failed to rehabilitate or reconcile with the Tamils affected by the brutal war, which, according to the Panel, caused up to 40,000 civilian deaths in those eight months, plus several thousand combatants of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and government soldiers.

The Panel began work in September 2010 but had to conduct its research outside Sri Lanka as the government refused this United Nations body permission to enter its country. The Panel could interview many eye witnesses, however, who were eventually released from military camps after months of detention—many of whom bribed their way out—or who were able to escape the war zone towards the end on boats provided by the International Committee of the Red Cross. Several ICRC workers and other humanitarian employees were killed by government military shelling.

Of the dozens of recommendations proposed by the panel, the last two concern the United Nations.

“A. The Human Rights Council should be invited to reconsider its May 2009 Special Session Resolution (A/HRC/8-11/L. 1/Rev. 2) regarding Sri Lanka, in light of this report.”

The above cited resolution had been proposed by the Sri Lankan government to praise its behavior in the war and condemn only the LTTE for war crimes and terrorism. Not a member of the HRC, Sri Lanka got Cuba, then the Non-Aligned Movement president, to introduce it. It passed with 29 voting in favor and 12 against with six abstentions.

The Panel determined that, “the Human Rights Council may have been acting on incomplete information”.

“B. The Secretary-General should conduct a comprehensive review of actions by the United Nations system during the war in Sri Lanka and the aftermath, regarding the implementation of its humanitarian and protection mandates.”

The Panel criticized the UN’s role in this conflict. “During the final stages of the war, the United Nations political organs and bodies failed to take actions that might have protected civilians.”

The Panel recommended that the Government of Sri Lanka (GOSL) should “commence genuine investigations”, and an independent international mechanism established by the UN Secretary-General should also investigate what did occur.

The Panel recommended that GOSL should also “issue a public, formal acknowledgement of its role in and responsibility for extensive civilian casualties.”

In its summary, the Panel wrote:

The Panel’s determination of credible allegations reveals a very different version of the final stages of the war than that maintained to this day by the Government of Sri Lanka. The Government says it pursued a ‘humanitarian rescue operation’ with a policy of ‘zero civilian casualties’. In stark contrast, the Panel found credible allegations, which if proven, indicate that a wide range of serious violations of international humanitarian law and international human rights law were committed both by the Government of Sri Lanka and the LTTE, some of which would amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity (author emphasis). Indeed, the conduct of the war represented a grave assault on the entire regime of international law designed to protect individual dignity during both war and peace.

Especially the Panel found credible allegations associated with the final stages of the war. Between September 2008 and 19 May 2009, the Sri Lanka Army advanced its military campaign into the Vanni using large-scale and widespread shelling causing large numbers of civilian deaths. This campaign constituted persecution of the population of the Vanni. Around 330,000 civilians were trapped into an ever decreasing area, fleeing the shelling but kept hostage by the LTTE. The Government sought to intimidate and silence the media and other critics of the war through a variety of threats and actions, including the use of white vans to abduct and to make people disappear.

The Government shelled on a large scale in three consecutive No Fire Zones, where it had encouraged the civilian population to concentrate, even after indicating that it would cease the use of heavy weapons. It shelled the United Nations hub, food distribution lines and near the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) ships that were coming to pick up the wounded and their relatives from the beaches. It shelled in spite of its knowledge of the impact, provided by its own intelligence systems and through notification by the United Nations, the ICRC and others. Most civilian casualties in the final phases of the war were caused by Government shelling.

The Government systematically shelled hospitals on the frontlines. All hospitals in the Vanni were hit by mortars and artillery, some of them were hit repeatedly, despite the fact that their locations were well-known to the Government. The Government also systematically deprived people in the conflict zone of humanitarian aid, in the form of food and medical supplies, particularly surgical supplies, adding to their suffering.

The Panel’s full text of 214 pages lists details of possible war crimes and crimes against humanity on both sides in paragraphs 246-252:
The government is accused of: murder, extermination, mutilation, arbitrary imprisonment, rape, torture, persecution founded on race, religion or politics, and disappearances.

The LTTE is accused of: violence to life and person, torture, mutilation, forced labor and forced recruitment of children, and shooting civilians trying to flee the war zone.

The IDP Tamils were brutally confined and treated. Tamils in their traditional Northern and Eastern “High Security Zones” are militarized, denied normal rights, intimidated and made victims of violence.
The Panel therefore recommended that GOSL end all state violence, release all displaced persons and facilitate their return to their homes or provide for resettlement. [Thousands of Tamil homes have been taken over by soldiers and other Sinhalese.] It should also repeal the Emergency Laws that deny democratic and civil rights.

The Mahinda Rajapaksa family regime continues to deny any wrong-doing, contending that NO civilians were killed and were later well treated in IDP camps. It claims it only attacked the LTTE. If there were civilians killed, according to government logic, it is their own fault for being there. The Panel cites international law that “an attack remains unlawful if it is conducted simultaneously at a lawful military object and an unlawfully-targeted civilian population” (paragraph 199).

The GOSL says it has established a transparency process to address the past from the 2002 ceasefire agreement to the end of the conflict, the so-called Lessens Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC).

While the Panel views this as a “potentially useful opportunity to begin a national dialogue”, the “LLRC fails to satisfy key international standards of independence and impartiality, as it is compromised by its composition and deep-seated conflicts of interests of some of its members.”— Three were government officials; one an Attorney-General.

The Panel also points to the history of conflict between the government and Tamils seeking full rights. For decades the Tamils used Gandhian civil disobedience, non-violent tactics before many took up arms in several groups. The Tamils have suffered half-a-dozen pogroms, with government backing, in which thousands were brutally murdered, including mutilation and being burned alive.

In the few instances in which governments have set up commissions of inquiry to examine human rights abuses, they have “failed to produce a public report and recommendations have rarely been implemented”.

The fact is, states the report (paragraph 28):

After independence [from Great Britain in 1948], political elites tended to prioritize short-term political gains, appealing to communal and ethnic sentiments, over long-term policies, which could have built an inclusive state that adequately represented the multicultural nature of the citizenry. Because of these dynamics and divisions, the formation of a unifying national identity has been greatly hampered. Meanwhile, Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism gained traction, asserting a privileged place for the Sinhalese as protectors of Sri Lanka, as the sacred home of Buddhism. These factors resulted in devastating and enduring consequences for the nature of the state, governance and inter-ethnic relations in Sri Lanka.

The first pogrom took place in June 1956 as the new Prime Minister SWRD Bandaranaike (Sri Lanka Freedom Party/SLFP—the same party to which the Rajapaksas belong) backed the “Sinhala Only” bill, one of several discriminatory measures against the Tamil people. Because some Tamils conducted sit-ins, Buddhist monk-led mobs rampaged for ten days, murdering 150 Tamils and burning their homes and businesses. Ironically, because Bandaranaike was willing to engage in dialogue with Tamil leaders he was murdered by a “pacifist” Buddhist monk, September 29, 1959.

Bandaranaike’s widow, Sirimavo, became PM in July 1960 and continued discriminatory policies against Tamils. She sat as PM or President four terms spread over 40 years, for a total of 13 years. She was the world’s first female PM and brought Sri Lanka into the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) as a founding member, in 1961. NAM, now with118 state member, stands against imperialism, interference from foreign nations, bloc politics, and against racism. Cuba and other progressive governments, as well as reactionary ones in the “Third World”- based NAM have, therefore, backed Sri Lanka in international issues.

In 2004, Cuba and Venezuela launched ALBA (Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of our America) as an alternative to capitalist economic and political coalitions. Today there are eight Latin American government members, including Ecuador, which is now on the HRC along with Cuba. In 2009, Bolivia and Nicaragua, both in ALBA, were members of the HRW supporting Sri Lanka.

These socialist leaning governments have better human rights records than the previous capitalist governments of their countries, which were for many decades under the dictates of US imperialism and before that under European colonialism. ALBA partners now have a chance whether on the Council or not to help the Tamil people in some way, also by calling for an investigation.

This is the challenge that the countries of NAM on the HRC now face with the Panel’s recommendations for an international investigation into alleged war crimes. Will they resist criticizing a member for its racist and terrorist actions against an entire people, or will they take sides with a clearly oppressed people? The latter choice might place them voting alongside the rich, Western nations that will probably call for some sort of an investigation. (See my piece on this dilemma.)

As I view the possible thinking of socialist Cuba and other NAM countries, the dilemma is between supporting sovereignty for Third World countries confronted with interference from imperialist and former colonialist states, a legitimate issue, and conducting national policies in such a way that no section of the population is systematically discriminated against or subject to genocide.

Since the 2009 HRC resolution, there are 15 new countries on it, among them the US. One must ask: just what is the game plan of the US and its European allies, who make sounds of protest against Sri Lanka’s abuse of human rights while they are the worst offenders, constantly engaging in aggressive wars against NAM members and others: now warring against the sovereign government of Libya, the peoples of Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and Palestine.

One can also ask why one of the Panel members, Ratner, participated in such an elaborate, comprehensive and just report. As a legal expert of international law he advised the US State Department (1998-2008), which is the major political aggressor in the world and has backed Sinhalese nationalist governments against Tamil’s liberation efforts, providing armaments, intelligence, finances, military training, propaganda. (See my article.)

But then most governments of both “blocs” have done the same: China, Russia, India, the UK and other European states, even Iran and also and especially Israel.

Clearly victims of US permanent war aggression, such as Cuba, react against its hypocritical “support” for “human rights”, and side with the “victim” Sri Lanka. Not in all cases, however, is the “victim” innocent. There are more offenders of human lives and civil rights than the imperialists. And the Sinhalese majority has been whipped up by Buddhist supremacist clergy and Sinhalese nationalist chauvinism by all the governments in Sri Lanka since 1948. Unfortunately, and without comprehension from my viewpoint, most of the Sinhalese-led Communist, Trotskyist, and Maoist parties have immorally allied themselves with the two major parties to keep the Tamils down.
The United Nations is comprised of 192 nations, only three in the world are not in it: Kosovo—a separatist state creation of the US-EU; Taiwan, a separated part of China; and 771 people in the state of the Vatican City. The member states of the HRC, with China and Russia and other large countries represent more than one-half the world’s citizens.

Third World countries comprise the majority on the HRC. They have many ethnic peoples long oppressed and brutalized by others. Let us remember Rwanda and how the UN failed to intervene and prevent genocide of one million people. The UN again failed in a similar debacle in Sri Lanka. Let us hope that the Human Rights Council will redeem these tragedies regardless of motives.

The revolutionary [is] the ideological motor force of the revolution…if he forgets his proletarian internationalism, the revolution which he leads will cease to be an inspiring force and he will sink into a comfortable lethargy, which imperialism, our irreconcilable enemy, will utilize well. Proletarian internationalism is a duty, but it is also a revolutionary necessity. So we educate our people.

– Che Guevara in Socialism and Man

“Castillo de MORAL” read the label. Wine named Moral, that’s what Carsten gave me.

That was big of him, a strident Marxist-Leninist who sides 100% with the victims of invasions by imperialists. For him that means no criticisms of those who resist these invasions, such as the current ones in the Middle East and Libya. No admonishment of Taliban, al Qaeda, Saddam Hussein and his Baath party and Iraqi soldiers combating the invaders and their Iraqi collaborators.

Incidentally, among the first collaborators was the Iraqi Communist Party, followers of the old Moscow line. They returned from exile to support the US occupiers in its lackey government. They live in its “green zone”. This contradiction has not swayed the Moscow-oriented Communist parties of several countries from backing them—that includes, the Communist Party In Denmark, the US and UK communist parties and others. One cannot be opposed to imperialism and its invasion in Iraq and support one of the main culprits.

Yet we anti-imperialists cannot remain silent about brutal crimes committed by some of the resistance groups against innocent, unarmed civilians who are nearby when a suicide bomber lets go; or those women and girls who are raped and then punished for being raped; or, with some groups, the denial of women to enjoy sex by removing part or the entire clitoris; and, in the case of some, the denial of women to have the same rights as men, or…

This attitude of covering eyes is common among many hard-core leftists. So was it also for most Communists and anti-imperialists when Soviet Russia and Eastern Europe Communist parties were jailing and killing their own critics, many of whom were true communists and anti-imperialists.

Most of the readers of these pieces know this history. Some of us remember the hateful words and wrongful deeds committed by one group against another within our own camps: the Stalinists, the Maoists, the varying shades of red purer than the next. Today, there is less of that but at the same time there is less activity, less passion in support for those the imperialists attack.

We don’t see a Ho Chi Minh, a Fidel, or Che in the Middle East struggles to regain their sovereignty; and we are all too few who are motivated to fight for them, and when fighting do so quite mildly, not like when we fought alongside the Vietnamese.

I contend that this difference is not only because capitalism has won the battle (for now) over most bodies and minds, especially in the rich capitalist countries and not only in the “Christian” West. I contend that the Cuban revolution, and the Vietnamese revolution and their fight for sovereignty against the French and Usamericans were conducted on moral principles.

They fought without torturing the enemy, without killing and manhandling prisoners, and after victory, down to this day, the Cuban government and police authorities do not murder people on the streets or torture criminals in jail, nor torture the political “dissidents” who, more than not, have been paid with US government funds to join its side against Cuba’s government.

Some US soldiers in Vietnam, who later came over to our side, have said that some torture did occur at the hands of Vietnamese communists. If this is true, it was the exception to the rule—don’t believe for a minute that John McCain was actually tortured. Whereas with the Yankees and their European allies, and their allies in the Middle East today, or in nearly all of Latin America yesterday and today in Colombia and Honduras, or in Indonesia yesterday, or the African dictators and Zionist Israelis (the list is long) torture, rape, and wanton murder was and is normal.

Look, if we are to fight this immoral system of profit-making motivated brutality, this disregard for human worth, then we must be different. We must be moral! We must offer a hopeful future for people else why should they join us. We have lost millions of supporters and millions more potential ones because of immoral Soviet-Comecon state leaderships, the wanton slaughter and crimes of humanity committed by Cambodia’s Pol Pot “communists”, the forced recruitments and murder of civilians by the “Maoist-Guevarist” Shining Path guerrillas…

Few leftists place morality on their struggle agenda. I believe it may be so, partially, because Marx and Lenin, certainly Stalin and Mao, did not make “the ethical question” a priority. No, the working class, the masses will fight because they must, in order to survive the dictates of exploitative capitalism. It is an objective, dialectical matter not one of morality, they meant.

Yet these leaders did speak of the subjective need for consciousness, that is: objective conditions may be ready for revolution but if the individual and working class do not see it, do not feel it then revolution does not happen automatically. I contend that the lack of consciousness is a major problem in today’s world—especially among the video war game fanatic youth and their consumer hungry parents (workers) in this era of individualism, in this age of permanent war.

What is ethics and morality?

Morality is rules we apply to live by, in order to be ethical: that is, to care for one another, to live in harmony, in fellowship and peace. Ethics is necessary for our collective survival and that of our surroundings, the earth and the elements. To accomplish this universal ethic, we must share what we make, share natural resources, assure that the planet breathes life and not chemical death. It is immoral to take from others—don’t we parents tell our children that when we send them to nursery school—to make systems that favor some and exploit and destroy others, that require war-making, that destroy other life forms.

Moral rules are necessary for people to cooperate so that we can achieve goals, which we would not be able to dream of if each of us were left on our own. And morals prevent groups’ needs and goals from colliding. If there were no enforced moral rules to decide disputes, we would end in chaos, and no one would be able to achieve any goal.

So what do we put in place of gripper capitalism and its individualism “morality”? I think George Orwell said it well in his essay, “Can Socialists Be Happy?”

The real objective of Socialism is human brotherhood… Men [and women] use up their lives in heart-breaking political struggles, or get themselves killed in civil wars [Spain, for instance], or tortured in secret prisons of the Gestapo [or Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, or a myriad other secret torture chambers in many countries not the least of which are prisons in the US], not in order to establish some central-heated, air-conditioned, strip-lighted Paradise, but because they want a world in which human beings love one another instead of swindling and murdering one another.

“At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love,” is the way that Che put it.

Many Christians, who read what the Bible says anyway, should identify with these views. Isn’t that what Jesus Christ is supposed to have stood for?

We must know by now that that is not the philosophy of the self-styled “democracies” of the West. We can’t really call it loving people when, for instance, the nation I was born in has invaded/intervened/conducted humanitarian operations 160 times in 66 nations since World War II.

We must act against our governments’ terrorist wars, “humanitarian operations”, else accept the consequences of shared blame. If we don’t stop the madness it will soon lead to world destruction.

Is it “humanitarian” to arm and aid some Libyan clans who want Gaddafi to go so that they can put in other powerful men, some of whom were Gaddafi’s sidekicks all these “successful” years of cooperation with the rich oil-thirsty governments? Unfortunately, the original massive uproar movement there has been taken over by these power hungry men. We should support the people’s uproar without being beguiled into backing the erstwhile leftist Gaddafi. The distinction is admittedly not easy to act upon.

Nevertheless, we must fight against the aggressive wars wherever they are. We must fight on the public streets and before their offices and bases, and we must support the invaded resistance fighters. Yes, I want the resistance to win over “us”. Some of them may not be the best people or have the best ways of relating to one another or the best laws—I refer to bin Ladin types here—but it is their world that “we” invade to take from them what they have. “We” don’t invade them to bring about “democracy”. No serious person can possibly believe that today.

Beyond condemning the US and its allies’ crimes against humanity, we must be even-handed if we are to be revolutionaries, or just decent people. I do not believe it to be “foolish consistency”, as Abraham Lincoln is so often cited for saying, to look all evil in the eye and call it by its name: evil. And not all the evil is deposited at the Pentagon, White House, Langley, or at Downing Street.

If we want a socially just economy and equality in human relationships (socialism, communism, anarchy…) then we must place love/solidarity/morality in the center.

There was a time following World War II when the Nuremberg Tribunal’s conclusion was widely accepted as a moral principle: “Individuals have international duties, which transcend the national obligations of obedience… Therefore [individual citizens] have the duty to violate domestic laws to prevent crimes against peace and humanity from occurring.”

That is what Bradley Manning did when he leaked internal cables to the world showing war crimes committed systematically by his government. He should get the Medal of Humanitarian Honor for that not life in a chamber submitted to daily psychological torture. And so must we also back another hero, Julian Assange, and Wikileaks for making available to us the secret information about US+ war crimes, on-going torture, and US diplomats’ take on the world. I have added my solidarity, this time in the form of half my pension fund for Wikileaks defense and existence.

The moral concept of responsibility, the Nuremberg code, is what the “guilty innocent” citizens of the United States need to understand about their governments’ constant wars, and what caused September 11, 2001. Too many American Dreamers have been “good Germans” for too long. Whoever it was who conducted those wrongful acts of terror—and I do not doubt that some elements in the Bush regime were accomplices—they should not be applauded as heroes. But the world that was threatened by those acts has to understand WHY they unleashed their terror, if Arab foreigners were, in fact, the perpetrators or co-perpetrators. They acted as they did because they, and millions and millions more across the Third World, have been and are being subjected to terror and Big Time thievery by all United States governments. Unfortunately, the governments are aided by most of their working class citizens, those who join in the murder and torture as soldiers and secret agents, and mercenaries, and those who turn their heads in the hope of living the life of “ignorance is bliss.”¹

They didn’t stop with Afghanistan, purportedly seeking bin Ladin and gang—I knew from the first cry for his blood that they would never find him because they need him wherever he is or isn’t—no they went on to the main target, Iraq, then extended to Pakistan and now Libya.

While writing this series, I have been interrupted to join in small and mild demonstrations in support of the Arabic peoples’ struggles in Tunisia and Egypt, and against the empire’s bombings in Libya. Wikileaks played an important part in this popular movement beginning in Tunisia. The leaks showing how corrupted Tunisia’s Ben Ali government had been was not news to the citizenry, but when it became world known it did encourage people to rebel. They saw the opportunity, sparked by one of their own—Mohammad Bouazizi—in his suicide protest, and felt that they could pull it off with the world’s sympathy. And they were right.

Arabic despots and dynasties and Western imperialists are frightened of the contagious wave of authentic democratic rebellion throughout the Arabic world. The people want an end to their lack of power, and end to the elite’s thievery of their wealth, an end to their endemic corruption and their repression. The West was caught off guard by the rebellion, but now sees the chance to make a populist score by bombing one of the despots, a lesser one than their strongest allies in Saudi Arabia, Oman, and Bahraini where the US Navy is entrenched. The West demands stability=passivity; it must stop the rebellion from becoming successful, which could lead to anti-capitalist movements, too. We must act in solidarity with these people and not the new governments that still back the exploitative system.

Act as we speak

Our world is ruled by one economy, capitalism. We know that capitalism is avaricious by nature; to grow it must become imperialist. That logic fits the good guys too. It is fitting the shoe of the Chinese Communist party and, to a lesser extent, our former Vietnamese comrades—our brothers and sisters victimized by U.S. crimes against their humanity. Both systems’ leaders are today exploiting their own workers. This process also has too good a start in Cuba.

It was wrong politically/morally of the governments of Cuba, Bolivia and Nicaragua to let down the Tamil population in the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka by extending unconditional political support to the Mahinda Rajapaksa government that had just massacred tens of thousands of Tamil civilians in its efforts to destroy the Tiger army (LTTE-Liberation Tigers for Tamil Eelam).

The long civil war ended in May 2009, and the UN Human Rights Council (HRC) voted, 29 to 12 with 6 abstentions, to applaud Sri Lanka for its victory against the terrorism of the Tigers. The majority resolution was proposed by Sri Lanka itself and introduced by Cuba, at that time the rotating leader of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) of which Sri Lanka is a member.

OK, what is wrong with this scenario? First, Sri Lanka is neither democratic nor socialist. The economy is capitalist based with a good deal of multinational corporation enterprises.

The government murders journalists (at least 34 in seven years) who expose government crimes and discrimination against the minority Tamil population. Discrimination is codified by law and in practice in a variety of ways: language, religion, lack of equal rights to education and jobs. The majority Sinhalese have, on several occasions, conducted murderous pogroms against Tamils, usually led by Buddhist monks and with self-proclaimed leftist parties’ backing. Several thousands of unarmed Tamils have been so slaughtered. Some of the murdering political parties have claimed to follow the paths of Che, Mao, or Moscow’s CP. Today, they partake in the coalition government—United People’s Freedom Alliance—alongside the Rajapaksa family of corrupted mass murderers in the largest party, Sri Lanka Freedom Party.

This murderous racism cannot be tolerated by true internationalists. The betrayers of Che and internationalism in Sri Lanka include: Janatha Vimukthi Peramana (JVP), which ironically lost about 20,000 of its rebelling young members in attacks against them by Sri Lanka governments, in the 1970-80s; the Communist Party of Sri Lanka; the Trotskyist Lanka Sama Samaja Party.

The Tigers started off in the late 1970s as Marxists, shouting Che’s name to the heavens. They later murderously eliminated other Tamils in the struggle for independence and sovereignty because of differences over tactics or personalities. They bombed areas and vehicles where Sinhalese civilians were without regard to innocent lives. And they abandoned any Marxist program. They righteously fought for a homeland with sovereignty, which most Tamils wanted, but they forgot all about socialism, people’s democracy, Che’s principles.

The big capitalists on the HRC wanted a resolution that, while applauding Sri Lanka and only condemning the Tigers just like the Cuba-led resolution, asked the Sri Lanka government to look into the possibility that some war crimes might have been committed by some of its own. If so, then the government should deal with it. Rather mild, I’d say.

There was no voice inside the HRC condemning the terrorist Sri Lankan government or the greatest terrorists: the United States and Israel, with China, Pakistan, Iran, Japan, India and many more tagging along. China, though, does more than tag along. It is after big influence and is getting it.²

Then there is the moral contradiction of the Bolivian government of Evo Morales—an indigenous person whose people have long been oppressed by the same forces which have suppressed and oppressed the Haiti black people—backing the 2004 US-France-led coup against the only decent, democratically elected president in Haiti’s history, Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

Both Aristide and Venezuela’s socialist firebrand Hugo Chavez called his ouster for what it was: a rich-backed local rebellion supported by the superpower-led coup.

After Aristide’s ouster, the US got UN support to occupy the country with 7000 troops, officially led by Lula’s Brazilian government, another contradiction in morality and history. US, France, and Canada had their troops there, too. But when enough Latin American governments sent in collaborating soldiers, the big powers mostly moved out. Since 2007, Bolivia has had 300 soldiers there. They—along with troops from Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and, guess who? Sri Lanka—are paid by the UN. In Bolivia’s case, the government receives $1,028 for each soldier but only spends about $300 per solider. Is it money that takes priority over solidarity amongst continental brethren?

It is positive that fellow ALBA governments in Venezuela and Cuba send real aid to the hungry people, who are the poorest in that hemisphere, and all the more so since the last earthquake with over 300,000 killed, a like number injured and over one million homeless.

Praising Cuba for its systematic “human capital export” solidarity should not keep us from real concern about its future now decided by the Communist party leadership at its 6th congress. The new economic package does not deepen socialism and people’s democracy (one in the same), rather it deepens petty-bourgeois production relations and individualistic mentality—worker-capitalists in the making. This so-called “market socialism” will lead to more market capitalism, in reality, with big foreign investors, and tourism, still getting priority.

Communist leaders still lack trust in the working class to run the economy and set political policy.

Workers power should include oversight committees staffed on a rotating basis by actual workers across the country. I firmly support what James Petras wrote:

What especially requires reform is a new system of public accountability based on independent accounting authorities, consumers’ and workers’ oversight commissions with the power to ‘open the books’. Workers and professional control will not eliminate corruption altogether but it will challenge the authorities through independent periodic reviews…Greater accountability within the leadership is necessary but not sufficient. There must be control and vigilance by authorized commissions from below and by a parallel independent general accounting office…a new system of elected representatives to oversee the allocation of the budget to the various ministries and the power to summon responsible officials to televised hearings for a strict public accounting.³

When revolutionary, communist, anarchist organizers are engaged in workers struggles under capitalism, one of their best arguments when confronted by management that their demands are not economically possible is the demand: “Open the books.” So when they are told they now have their own economy, their own Marxist state why can they not see the books?

It is difficult to know why Communist governments in this past century never rely on their citizenry to run things. Even the best of them apparently do not truly trust their own ideology. Maybe they know more than I; maybe they know that if workers held the reigns of real power they would not go the collective way of socialism. If that is so, then what are we fighting for?

Live Well vs. Live Better

I, too, say let us be like Che. For example, when his wife called to ask for use of his government car to take their sick daughter to the hospital, his morality led him to reply that she should take the bus like every other Cuban mother with a sick child.

On a world scale when Che realized that the Soviet CP leadership did not commit itself to a forceful policy of solidarity with the Third World, he criticized them publicly as foreign policy opportunists. I am certain that he would have qualms with his comrade leaders in today’s world for similar opportunism, for lack of fulfilling the promises put forth by communist ideology.

In my opinion, what is worth fighting for is what Evo Morales and the indigenous peoples’ movement stands for in Bolivia: live well, not live better. We discussed this at length during the People’s world climate conference in Cochabamba. I excerpt here from what the Bolivian delegation to the UN presented during that time.

Faced with so much disproportion and wealth concentration in the world, so many wars and famine, Bolivia proposes Living Well, not as a way to live better at the expense of others, but an idea of Living Well based on the experience of our peoples. In the words of the President of the Republic of Bolivia, Evo Morales Ayma, Living Well means living within a community, a brotherhood, and particularly completing each other, without exploiters or exploited, without people being excluded or people who exclude, without people being segregated or people who segregate.

Living Well is not the same as living better, living better than others, because in order to live better than others, it is necessary to exploit, to embark upon serious competition, concentrating wealth in few hands. Trying to live better is selfish, and shows apathy, individualism. Some want to live better, whilst others, the majority, continue living poorly. Not taking an interest in other people’s lives, means caring only for the individual’s own life, at most in the life of their family.”
“The construction of a Living Well vision to counteract Global Crisis in this era of climate chaos and diminished resources in our finite planet, means ending consumerism, waste and luxury; consuming only what is necessary, achieving a global economic ‘power down’ to levels of production, consumption and energy use that stay well within the environmental capacities of the Earth.

In order to adapt ourselves to the true reality of a post carbon era, we will have to satisfy our fundamental needs such as food, housing, energy, production, and means of support from local systems and resources. This means encouraging regional and local self-sufficiency, sustainability and control; economic localization and community sovereignty, local production for local consumption, local ownership using local labor and materials.

Furthermore, Living Well means reallocating the trillions of millions destined for war in order to heal Mother Earth who is injured by the environment issue.

Waking up the ethical and moral values of our peoples and cultures, we can make this new millennium, a millennium of life and not of war, a millennium for Living Well, for balance and complementarity. Together we can build a culture of patience, the culture of dialogue and fundamentally the Culture of Life, a way of life that is not dependent on excessive consumption of non-renewable energy that emits greenhouse gases but is based on the harmonious relationship between man and nature.

“Hagamos lo imposible!” We’ll do the impossible! Che predicted.

Notes and an acknowledgement: I thank the daughter of a preacher for inebriated brainstorming, and more thanks for the most thoughtful of gifts: a bronze sculpture of a fist gripping an angry pen.

1. See my piece, “The Guilty Innocent.”
2. See my November 2009 series on the Sri Lanka-Tamil conflict. Part 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.
3. “Cuba: Continuing Revolution and Contemporary Contradictions”, August 12, 2007.

It took a lot of insistence but I final obtained the high level approval necessary to travel abroad on a Cuban ship. Cuba does not have passenger ships. I was assigned to the Giorita. It was an eventful month-long trip across the Atlantic. You can find out more about this by reading Cuba at Sea.

While on tour in England, I attended a publishers’ book launching in London where I met Jon Lee Anderson. He had recently signed a contract to do the “definitive” Che book (Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life). Jon was not a revolutionary but he was a thorough researcher-interviewer and had admired Che in his youth.

After sailing back to Cuba on another Cuban container ship, Rose Island, a couple months later, I met Jon again, and his family. They lived in Cuba for three years while Jon worked on the book. He had unique access to Aleida March, Che’s widow, and to many government archives. Jon and I spoke a lot about Che, the Cuban revolution, where Cuba was heading and other worldly matter.

When Jon’s book came out in early 1996, I wrote a favorable review in English and in Spanish. Some solidarity activists with Cuba did not like the book. I suppose because it was too “objective”. I later met Aleida again and asked her opinion. She was disappointed with Jon for not having taken up Che’s economics seriously enough and for having revealed too many intimate aspects of his life. The intimacy was necessary, I thought, to show the real person. I agreed that there was too little about the economics, but still it is the most thorough book of the many on Che’s life. I quote from the epilogue to give a taste of the conclusion Jon came to.

Che’s unshakable faith in his belief was made even more powerful by his unusual combination of romantic passion and coldly analytical thought. This paradoxical blend was probably the secret to the near-mystical stature he acquired, but seems also to have been the source of his inherent weaknesses—hubris and naïveté—he consistently failed to understand how to alter the fundamental nature of others and get them to become ‘selfless Communists’. But along with his mistakes, what is most remembered about Che is his personal example, embodying faith, willpower, and sacrifice.

As the veteran Cuban intelligence official ‘Santiago’ observed recently:
‘Toward the end, Che knew what was coming, and he prepared himself for an exemplary death. He knew his death would become an example in the cause of Latin American revolution, and he was right. We would have preferred him to remain alive, with us here in Cuba, but the truth is that his death helped us tremendously. It’s unlikely we would have had all the revolutionary solidarity we have had over the years if it weren’t for Che dying the way he did.’

I agree with both Jon and “Santiago’s” assessment of Che and his significance for Cuba and revolution generally. I excerpt from my review of Anderson’s book.

Three decades after the murder of the legendary revolutionary Che Guevara, not one country is guided by the martyr’s social ideals or economic theories, yet his legend grows.

“Marxist guerrillas in Asia, Africa and Latin America, who were anxious to revolutionize their societies, held his banner aloft as they went into battle. And, as the youth in the United States and Western Europe rose up against the established order over the Vietnam War, racial prejudice, and social orthodoxy, Che’s defiant visage became the ultimate icon of their fervent if largely futile revolt,’” writes Anderson.

The author reveals that Che, not Raúl Castro as believed, played the main role in bringing [Cuba and the Soviet Union] together. Yet Che became the first of Cuba’s leaders to openly criticize the direction that the Soviet revolution had taken, which was also guiding Cuba toward making some of the same state-elitist and bureaucratic mistakes.

Cuban “spymaster and keeper of its secrets” Manuel Pineiro Losada—Red Beard—gave his first interview to an author…it was Guevara who stood behind the “exportation of revolution”. Pineiro said that Che encouraged Nicaraguans and Guatemalans, Peruvians, Venezuelans, Argentines and others to take up armed struggle.

He foresaw creating the “new man” –an individual not motivated by power or greed and material objects but by ideals that would lead one to consciously sacrifice for society.

This biography of “the most complete human being of our age,” as Jean-Paul Sartre said of Guevara, was made possible because Che’s widow and state leaders believed that the time was right to bring it out and that Anderson possessed the personal integrity to treat him honestly.¹

Not only did Jon treat Che honestly but he put his meaning in perspective for history and for me personally. The essence of that was well put in an interview with Jon.

What makes Che so fascinating to me is that he was unusually a man for his time. There was something that happened in the post-war world and especially for a brief time in the 60s which Che is now indistinguishable in our minds from—and that’s right and as it should be because Che saw that at that very moment the world was in an optimum state to be revolutionized. It didn’t work out, but it was possible. He was right, and he went for it.

He was inspired by a strong sense of indignation about what he saw around him. I think there were mistakes made in the end in Bolivia, but he wasn’t wrong in the idea that it could be the locus for a continental revolution, and he wasn’t wrong in assuming that Argentina could fall, or that Bolivia could fall. Evo Morales is in power now…

Che had founded Prensa Latina (PL), which hired me when I returned to Cuba, in early 1993. I was to translate and write features and other articles for Latin America’s largest news agency. An Argentine journalist friend of Che’s, Jorge Ricardo Masetti, was PL’s first director. He got well known foreign writers to contribute. Among them were: Jean-Paul Sartre, Charles Wright Mills, Waldo Frank, and Gabriel García Márquez.

It was a privilege to work for Prensa Latina, especially being the only “Yankee”. I wrote on many themes, most of which I chose: from cultural to archeological finds, from interviews with Cuban philosophers to solidarity activism. However it was difficult to write about Cuban politics and economy, nearly impossible, in fact, if one wished to be forthright and analytical.

During the three years I worked there, several story ideas I proposed were turned down: notions about how the economy actually works, how workers do or do not make real decisions, and the criminal case of Robert Lee Vesco, a notorious fugitive financier. The director was a decent guy and a competent journalist but he told me that he would be in trouble if he allowed publication of such pieces. He wouldn’t bring the ideas further up the line either for fear that simply proposing them would reflect badly upon him.

I had experienced censorship in the US, Great Brittan and Denmark’s MSM, the so-called heartlands of free press and democracy. Nevertheless, it was disturbing that censorship was a routine element of Cuban policy, especially so because without adequate information and exchange of ideas the population cannot have a real opportunity to shape policy.

In the last period in Cuba, I engaged in an act of solidarity with my inspirer. Through my contacts as Morning Star’s correspondent, I learned of an enterprise in England to commercialize a “Che Fruta” beer. A young admirer of Che’s came up with the idea for a “solidarity” beer. It would be brewed and bottled in Cuba and sold abroad as a joint venture.

Various media were mocking the hypocrisy. Firstly, Che did not drink beer. It agitated his asthma. Secondly, he would have croaked at the notion that the country he loved most would be commercializing his name.

I don’t know if it was due to my efforts, but I got this information to top officials who castigated lower echelon people who were cooperating with the enterprise, and it got stopped. Since then, however, hundreds of products are sold (even in Cuba) using Che’s name and face. Many consumers don’t even know anything about “the pop star”.

Had my consciousness not bothered me so much, I could have worked for PL forever and had a great time in Cuba. But it felt exceptionally painful living in a nation whose government declared it was driven by Marxist-Leninist principles, yet one could not be a Marxist activist. I did not return to live there after I took a leave, in spring 1996, to attend my brother’s funeral in the US and then visit my wife in Denmark, and her newly born grandchildren. I can’t say that I was better off living in capitalist Denmark. In those Cuban years, I had often felt useful writing and working voluntarily. In Denmark, I am nobody and there is no hope for socialism or anything radical.

1. “Impelled to fight”, my review published by the Morning Star, July 10, 1997.

Burchett’s journalist code influenced my journalism: “It is not a bad thing to become a journalist because you have something to say and are burning to say it. There is no substitute for looking into things on the spot, especially if you are going to write on burning international issues of the day. Make every possible effort to get the facts across to at least some section of the public. Do not be tied to a news organization in which you would be required to write against your own conscience and knowledge.”

I later met Burchett. We spoke of doing some writing about Cuba but we never got to it.

I had begun working as a reporter in 1967. The written word for me is a tool I wield for our liberation from exploitation and oppression. My first reporting was for the Communist party California weekly, People’s World. My last articles were first-hand accounts from Prague just after the Soviet invasion. They were not published however, a decision taken by top party leaders over the editor’s objection, and I ceased writing for the People’s World.

Che was with me in more ways than I knew at the time. His image and revolutionary thoughts were often present at demonstrations in which I participated, especially anti-imperialist actions. But what I did not know, until I worked in Cuba in 1988, was that he had a flare for writing journalistically.

On June 14, 1988, Cuba’s Journalist Union published Che Periodista (Journalist Che) commemorating his 60th date of birth. It is a collection of chronicles, battle accounts, critiques of imperialism, ideological think pieces, and an homage to Camilo Cienfuegos, a close comrade killed in an airplane accident after the revolutionary victory.

Che’s reportage originally appeared in Verde Olivo (Olive Green), the Cuban revolutionary army magazine, written between October 1959 and April 1961. I found Che’s writings concise, freshly formulated in a crisp style.

After my Czechoslovakia report was ideologically censored by the Communist party, I sought employment in the mass media, or mainstream media (MSM). My first job was as sports editor in central California at the Hanford Sentinel (1969-70). Not knowing anything about sports writing, I learned on the job. Then, I moved up to general reporting and features. I was soon fired, because I wrote about a taboo subject: racist covenants in housing.

The editor ran my piece, “Titles Include Race Restricting Provision,” on the front page, January 29, 1970. The lead read: “Said premises shall not be sold, conveyed, rented or leased to or occupied by any person not of the Caucasian race.” I had found this restriction on deeds at a real estate agency.

When real estate advertisers complained to the publisher, he warned me to learn what to write and what not to write. After I told this to a local Mexican-American, who had told me that some of his people had been denied the right to buy certain properties, one hundred people showed up to picket outside the newspaper offices. This was the first time in its history that the paper had been picketed. The publisher fired me as they chanted to save my job.

“Twins! I had twins,” I yelled to Bill when I came to work one morning at the Riverside Press-Enterprise, my next newspaper job. The week before, I had been congratulated and promoted by the publisher after my probation period of three months. I worked on the editorial desk with Bill, our city editor. But now he wasn’t smiling as usual.

“Ron, I’ve got bad news,” Bill said glumly. “The FBI is coming tomorrow to talk about you,” his voice tapered to a whisper when mentioning the FBI.

Goddamn government! Just got back on my feet; and now with two sons I had to find another job.

The FBI agents told the chief editor and the publisher that I was secretly working with the Black Panther Party in the city. It didn’t help my case with the anti-union publisher that I was trying to organize a union as well. The publisher fired me upon hearing from the FBI.

I didn’t know it at the time but I had been a target of COINTELPRO, the Agency’s code name for its dirty tricks campaign against leftists, especially anti-war and civil rights activists, and Black Panthers. Their tactics included periodic murders, fraudulent imprisonment, and cajoling employers to fire their workers who were government opponent activists.

After leaving the Committee United for Political Prisoners, I took a reporting job at the weekly Los Angeles News Advocate (LANA), whose slogan was “radical, responsible journalism”.

I covered many topics, but concentrated on the Vietnam War and resistance to it. The publisher and I were often at odds over how radical we should be. With my last reportage for LANA I combined my activism in the anti-war movement as one of 150 delegates from US groups participating in the largest world-wide anti-war conference. The World Peace Assembly was held in Versailles, France February 11-14, 1972.

We were 1200 delegates from 84 countries. Both US anti-war coalitions were present: People’s Coalition for Peace and Justice and National Peace Action Coalition. I supported both and tried to get them to cooperate in some actions, which rarely succeeded. It was a unique event for me personally because it was here where I first met Burchett. It was also my first encounter with the people that my country was murdering in Southeast Asia, and with people from Cuba, the country that would become my true homeland in years to come.

Among several well known participants was one of Bolivia’s many generals who had seized political power, Juan José Torres. In fact, General Torres had just been ousted the summer before as the nation’s top leader by another General, Hugo Banzar, in yet another coup. I did not know it at the time but Torres had been on the Joint Chiefs of Staff under yet another coup general, René Barrientos, and as such he had cast his vote to murder Che. Yet here he was a “peace” delegate.

During three days of speeches, debates, and working group sessions we adopted an extensive program of antiwar activities to occur in many parts of the world throughout the rest of the year. We were not united on priorities or tactics, however. Some wanted to concentrate on pressuring politicians to be more serious about peace negotiations; others wanted more actions against politicians for making the war in the first place, having no trust in their “peace” rhetoric.

I came under fire from some for my position to boycott the crucial war technology industry, especially war aircraft corporations. Nixon had begun to withdraw troops and was bombing all the more. While we met, in fact, the International Herald Tribune reported, on February 14: “The US Command in Saigon announced that B-52 bombers few 19 missions in the 24 hours ending at noon today, the largest number of missions flown in a day…”

My proposal to boycott and picket war industries was denounced by the French Communist Party (supported by other national CPs) as “anti-working class”. They had control of the unions in many war plants, especially in France. If my proposal took effect, workers would lose wages and even jobs. I was seen as a provocateur, something the CIA also circulated. Divide and conquer!

There was a special meeting with the leading delegates from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia for all the delegates from the United States. I felt overwhelmed with admiration for them and tearfully sad.

I also met had a heartfelt meeting with Melba Hernandez, Cuba’s leading international representative. She had been a guerrilla at the Moncada barracks, Santiago de Cuba, July 26, 1953.

We concluded the conference with most of us marching in Paris against the war. Between 25,000 and 40,000 participated. At a celebration in the evening, Joe Bangert sang. He was a New York delegate of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. He had been a solider in Vietnam and had gone over to the people’s side, and married a Vietnamese woman. She and her child had just been killed in a US bombing raid.

Leaving LANA, I went over to its competitor and much larger Los Angeles Free Press, or the Freep, as it was known. I was the political reporter. I continued anti-war reportage, exposing police brutality, racism in housing and in government, covering the student revolt and various liberation struggles. One of the most significant reportages was May 1972 demonstrations, which had been called for at the World Peace Assembly.

My two page spread in the forthcoming Freep started thusly:

Anti-war activists say that the government of the United States is waging an all-out war against the people of Indochina and the people of this land.

On May 11, 1,800 tons of bombs were dropped on a small area outside the town of An Loc in South Vietnam. The same day, the news media reported that 1,800 Americans had been arrested during the three-day period in protests involving hundreds of thousands against Nixon’s actions.

Furthermore, for the first time, Nixon’s generals had mined Vietnamese harbors.

In the Los Angeles area, we held demonstrations in many places, among them at Nixon’s reelection campaign headquarters. The police were extremely violent. They beat people, and chocked some unconscious with truncheons. Two civilian clothed policemen, who had been on the picket line, beat Ron Kovics with blackjacks as he sat in his wheelchair. I filmed the police violence.

Kovics had fought against the Vietnamese. After he was wounded and paralyzed for life, he began to see who the real enemy was. He eventually wrote an auto-biographical account, “Born on the 4th of July” (his birth date as well as that of the U.S. Declaration of Independence), which was made into a Hollywood movie. Kovics is still acting against US wars to this day, now in the Middle East.

On that day, four decades ago, 200 Los Angeles demonstrators were arrested for “failure to disperse when ordered”. My colleague, Earl Ofari, wrote a sidebar to my coverage:

“Among those arrested…was Ron Ridenour…as soon as he began filming Ron Kovics being pushed out of his wheelchair by police officers, two plainclothes officers whom [Ridenour] knew from other demonstrations yelled at a uniformed officer to arrest him.”

I was jailed and released hours later on bail. I was later charged with the usual “disturbing the peace,” “interfering with an officer”, “resisting arrest”, and a couple more for good measure.

My case spurred several newspapers and media associations to support my right to report and photograph without being arrested. A defense committee was also organized. Nevertheless, I was found guilty of some of these charges and sentenced to one year in prison. One charge was “disturbing the peace”: swearing in the presence of women as I was being attacked by cops.

Kovics commented: “They beat me because I represented the undeniable truth of the war. I represented the crimes of this war. …It’s absurd that [Ron] should get one year in jail for taking pictures of me being beaten.”

We appealed the case. We had many witnesses, including the ex-wife of undercover cop Stanley Frugard, who testified that he had been an undercover policeman who had been after me for years.

Appellate judges concurred that the sentencing judge had erred in not allowing my attorney to argue that I was a victim of “discriminatory enforcement”. So, I was free again. But Los Angeles “red squad” police did not rest at that.

COINTELPRO Provocation

“Ron Ridenour’s [pen has] inspired some and angered others… a copy of [Ridenour’s] 1971 Internal Revenue Service forms…
found its way anonymously to the newspaper offices. The same forms were also sent to the “Staff” [another “underground” newspaper], the Socialist Workers party headquarters, to the Peace Action Council, and to the Citizen Research Investigating Committee,” wrote Los Angeles Free Press editor Art Kunkin.

This was another COINTELPRO action, trying to cast me in the light of an agent for the US government. Someone(s) had taken my signature, the same one as was on my California driver’s license, and copied it onto fake tax forms. I was supposed to have earned $17, 784.54 from the “United States Army, Pentagon Building Arlington, Virginia.”

A handwritten note said: “I think you’ll know what to do with this information about a pig agent”; signed by “a concerned friend.”

Government agents of world destruction were trying to make my fellow activists and government critics think of me as a “pig agent” and they were nearly successful, because the “Staff” had assigned someone to write a story that I was an agent. Fortunately, Kunkin did his homework convincingly for the reporter, and others who had received the forgery, that this was, in fact, a provocateur action.

This was becoming a common tactic, which caused several honest leftists, especially Black Panthers, to be cast aside as agents. In some cases, violence was committed against innocent people.

In my case, it was ironic that in the same period that I was being smeared, a FBI memorandum from the L.A. office, dated November 28, 1973, noted:

“RIDENOUR’s long association with the ‘underground’ press as well as his affiliation with numerous subversive groups would both tend to preclude interview of subject since this would most surely be a futile effort.”

I continued writing exposes and acting against their wars abroad and brutality at home. I wish to share one more issue where I was both reporter and activist, that of Wounded Knee.

Wounded Knee was part of Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, in South Dakota. It had the highest murder rate of any area of the United States. Between 1973 and 1976, there were 170 murders per 100,000 population average, whereas the city with the highest murder rate was Detroit, Michigan with 20 per 100,000. The national average was nine per 100,000.
At Pine Ridge, poverty, alcoholism and unemployment were widespread. The Bureau of Indian Affairs’ local authority, Richard Wilson, and his deputies ruled over the large reservation like concentration camp guards.

The traditional Oglala Sioux chiefs called in AIM (American Indian Movement) to help them out. This resulted in an occupation of the local post office. Then the chiefs declared secession from the United States. They declared secession and initiated the Independent Oglala Nation (ION). They sought their sovereignty long ago stolen from them by the US government despite treaties that had supposedly guaranteed them self-determination.

US Marshals, FBI agents and National Guards were sent in. Indians held their ground with rifles. The government had 15 armed personnel carriers, .50 caliber machine guns, and helicopters, as well as light weapons. Apparently, their orders were to prevent numerous deaths. Nevertheless, in the 71 days the ION held out two Indians were killed by snipers, and two, at least, were wounded. One Marshall was wounded.

This unusual militancy created a stir across the nation. Celebrities, such as Jane Fonda and Marlon Brando, spoke out for them. In fact, during the stand-off, Brando asked Apache Sacheen Littlefeather to speak for him at the Oscars where he was to be presented with the best actor award for The Godfather. She said that Marlon would not accept the award due to “poor treatment of Native Americans in the film industry”.

While the Free Press’s owners and I differed over politics and their sexist sex ads, they allowed me to rent a car at their expense and drive to the battle field. Many supporters had come in stealthily as well. Among the 500 defenders of the new nation were representatives from 60 other tribes from many states. There were a few Chicanos (Mexican-Americans active in their own liberation struggle), a handful of blacks and a few Vietnam War veterans. One of those was Joe Bangert.

I came as a reporter-photographer but also helped the leadership with publicity and getting the message out. When I left, I carried information to another reservation and organized support.

One of the leaders of the movement, Carter Camp, a Poncha Indian from Oklahoma, told me: “We’re going to revive our roots; return to the ways we always lived and complete the hoop that was broken when our whole nation was broken… The new nation shares what it has. There will be no accumulation of goods. No one will have so many horses that some do not have any.”

“We identify with the oneness of all people. Black, yellow, red and white are the four scared colors and are the colors of all people.”

These Native Americans felt kinship with the 200 Indians massacred at Wounded Knee by U.S. government troops, in 1890. They now declared that, “The right to life belongs to each man. By remaining a separate nation we choose to live.”
But it was not to be that way. On May 5, a peaceful negotiation had been worked out. Some leaders were arrested but allowed to make bail, and some courts dismissed the charges. U.S. government “spin doctors” understood that the Native peoples had a lot of sympathizers around the world.

In December 2007, some activists from the 1973 takeover restarted a move to secede from the US. Representatives take their message to international bodies. I met some in Bolivia, in 2010, at the People’s World Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth—about which I write further on in this series.

Besides my writings at the Freep, I was somewhat more successful at organizing a guild union there than I had been at the Riverside Press-Enterprise. But as we were negotiating a contract, the publishers fired me. They were angry about my organizing and also because I supported radical feminists who were protesting the paper’s sexist ads. Shortly after firing me, Kunkin was fired and many workers left. The union fell apart.

Free Lancing

Graham Greene’s writings influenced me deeply. One of the philosophical pearls that Greene wrote became a motto for me as well as that of Burchett’s. “I try to understand the truth even if it might compromise my ideology.”

I met Greene in Panama where he wrote a talk to launch a solidarity march with Central America for which I was an organizer and media coordinator, in 1985-6. We were 400 people from a score of countries joined to support the Contadora peace process—a Latin American initiative to pressure the El Salvadoran and Guatemalan governments to stop repressing their own people and the US-made contra war against Nicaragua’s Sandinista government. We crossed through much of Central America and ended in Mexico City “marching” mainly in buses we hired. The last demonstration attracted 50,000 people in Mexico City. Most of us stopped to shout our anger at the Embassy of Death, as Mexicans call the US Embassy.

For me, as a solidarity activist and Marxist thinker, the most decisive motivation to struggle is the issues and not what any political party or government advocates—first an activist and then an advocate journalist for the underdog, for the invaded peoples.

So, after being fired from several jobs both in the mass media and the alternative/left media, I went about making a so-so living free lancing rather than cow-towing to MSM ideology or too simplistic leftist ideological media.

During the next years I wrote and/or edited for scores of US newspapers, news agencies,
magazines and alternative media as a stringer, correspondent or free lancer.

One of the most popular pieces I did as a free lancer was the Playboy scoop interview with Jane Fonda, and her radical husband Tom Hayden. I knew them from the anti-war movement and convinced Fonda to do this interview. She had despised Playboy for publishing a nude or semi-nude photo of her without permission. She had always refused their interview requests.

Washington Post‘s west coast bureau chief Leroy Aarons joined me. I had to miss the fifth and final session because I started serving a six-month jail sentence for supporting striking textile workers. Four civilian clothed policemen had jumped me as I stood before a busload of Mexican workers brought in from across the border. They had not been told that the Mexican-American workers at the plant were on strike. I spoke to them in Spanish about this and encouraged them not to become scabs when the cops took me down. I was arrested for “resisting arrest”, of course.

In between free lancing for magazines and newspapers over a decade, I worked 18 months for the American Civil Liberties Union as its media chief. I got our civil liberty court cases and general message out to the media, often successfully. I also edited and wrote for our newspaper-journal.

In the mid-1970s, I had a stint as an editor/reporter at the rebellious and investigative reporting weekly, the Los Angeles Vanguard. We were a handful of full and part-time editors and writers but we put out a good rag. We even won an award for pieces Dave Lindorff wrote. My forte was police brutality investigations. This was, perhaps, the best newspaper I worked on, but we couldn’t last long without advertisers. Newspapers can’t survive in the capitalist world on sales alone.

Four or five years after I was fired from the Los Angeles Free Press, the iconoclastic Larry Flynt of Hustler and Chic magazines hired me as its managing editor. Flynt had recently bought the Freep and gotten rid of the sex ads. He wanted an investigative reporting, ass kicking newspaper.

Soon after coming aboard, a whistle blower handed me a copy of the former LA Police Department chief’s auto-biographical manuscript, Hang ‘Em at the Airport, which was a reference to what chief Ed Davis had remarked on how he would handle the airplane hijacking problem:

“I’d move a portable courtroom, complete with judge, jury and executioner, out to the airport. Once a skyjacker was taken into custody, he could have the benefit of a swift and sure justice. If he was found guilty, he could be hung on the spot.”

This crazy man was running to be governor at that time, and he had the audacity to entitle his biography with that hanging judge message. Fortunately he didn’t win but not because he was crazy, I think, because several other crazy men became California governors: Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger among them.

There wasn’t much revealing about the manuscript and Davis hadn’t found a publisher, but we had a scoop anyway. The reporter I assigned to do the story, Bruce Henderson, called Davis’ agent-lawyer to get a response. The response came quickly in the form of an injunction against publishing any material from the book. So we wrote around it and when indicating a citation from the book, we had blank spaces around the words: “Deleted by order of commissioner Arnold Levin”.

Unfortunately, Larry Flynt was soon shot walking out of a courtroom, one of many he was forced to appear before by authorities opposed to his magazines. This was in Georgia where he and his lawyer were shot by yet another crazy man. Both men survived but Flynt was paralyzed from the waist down. Flynt’s executives did not like Flynt’s maverick ideas about radical, muckraking journalism so they closed down the Freep. I was out of a job again and went back to free lancing.

At the end of 1978, I traveled to Nicaragua and Costa Rica to cover the liberation war fought by the Sandinistas (FSLN). This was the era of President James Carter. He realized that the Somoza family dictatorship was coming to a close, and an alternative had to found—much like the imperialists have recently decided to get rid of Gaddafi. There was no alternative, other than the leftist FSLN guerrillas and they would not do for imperialism. Among those I met in death-soaked Nicaragua was Carter’s government messenger, who told me that they were working on an alternative. But before they could create one, the Sandinistas won on July 19, 1979.

Before their victory, I had met with some guerrilla fighters. Among those I interviewed were the future Foreign Minister Miguel D’Escoto, who also became the United Nations general assembly president years later; Father Ernesto Cardenal, who became the Minister of Culture; and the future Vice-President Serio Ramirez.

My writings appeared in magazines and newspapers, including the New York Times. I left the United States soon thereafter, in 1980. In 1984, I worked for President Daniel Ortega’s wife, Rosario Murillo, for a while. She was the director of the Sandinista Cultural Workers Association (ASTC). I wrote public relations pieces for them, including from the war zone by the Honduran border. I also did a report about censorship affects for the Minister of the Interior, Tomas Borge.

When I moved to Denmark my pen continued painting sketches of United States-caused pain.

Investigating corruption and abuse of power, Hoang Hung made plenty of enemies in high places. His best know article is about how officials in Long An, after receiving bribes from developers, kicked hundreds of farmers off their lands to make way for golf courses. After his death, a colleague quoted Hoang Hung, “We’re soldiers on the media battlefield. We must dare to speak the truth, dare to fight for social justice in spite of harassment from many quarters.” Fifty years old at his death, Hoang Hung was too young to participate in the Vietnam War. His father, however, was a Vietcong who died in battle.

The Vietnamese Communists won the war so they could eventually open the country to Capitalist sweat shops and golf courses. No wonder Hoang Hung was pissed. To make room for a rich man’s game, hundreds of Vietnamese became landless. Though Vietnam is smaller than California, it has more than twice the population. The deltas and coastline are packed with people. There, even a lawn is an alien concept, and as popular as soccer is, there are few grass fields. Vietnamese grow rice and vegetables, not grass. The last thing Vietnam needs is golf courses, but of course they aren’t built for the locals.

According to George Carlin, America doesn’t need these vast, high maintenance fields either. From a 1992 skit, “It is time to reclaim the golf courses from the wealthy and turn them over to the homeless […] Think of how big a golf course is. The ball is that fucking big! What do these pinheaded pricks need with all that land? There are over 17,000 golf courses in America. They average over 150 acres apiece. That’s 3 million plus acres, 4,820 square miles. You could build two Rhode Islands and a Delaware for the homeless, on the land currently being wasted on this meaningless, mindless, arrogant, elitist, racist […] and a boring game.”

In any case, whoever killed Hoang Hung was a pro. The assassin knew that he tended to work late and often slept in his second floor home office. Waiting until the lights were out, the killer managed to climb onto the balcony without being detected just after midnight. He then entered the darkened room where his target was sound asleep inside the mosquito netting. After the attack, there were photos published in the Vietnamese press of the scorched bed and the near-naked victim lying in the hospital, where he suffered for ten days before dying. Make no mistake about this: Hoang Hung was killed as a warning to other journalists. Make too much noise and you will be roasted alive like this man.

In the 60’s, South Vietnamese monks immolated themselves to protest against the government. Their action was effective because it was a horrendous spectacle. It was visual. At the same time, South Vietnam’s best novelist, Nhat Linh, also committed suicide in protest, but he did it by ingesting poison in private. Whereas the image of a burning monk has become iconic, Nhat Linh’s death caused no international ripple whatsoever. It wasn’t visual. There is nothing to show.

Everywhere now, not least America, writers are becoming more invisible by the day, in any case. With so much mass media all the time, it would not matter if an American writer became a living torch in Times Square. They’d just hose his ashes into the gutter and point the camera at the naked cowboy. The Vietnamese Communists have also figured out that serious writers are mostly irrelevant in this cultural climate. They used to lock up poets—one, Nguyen Chi Thien, was imprisoned for a total of twenty-seven years—but now they pretty much leave poets alone. Though many are still blocked from publishing, poets are no longer jailed. To imprison a poet is to shine a spotlight on him. No one pays attention to poets anyway, no matter what they write. From the perspective of tyranny, it would be foolish to flesh out this nothingness.

Journalists, however, are a different story. They can still reach the masses. America has solved this problem by consolidating her media outlets. There are countless newspapers and TV stations here, there seems to be many voices speaking, but nearly all are manipulated by the same puppet master. As everyone sits in the dark, the spotlight is fixed on a tiny ring where there’s much flailing over next to nothing. Should anyone still manages to get out of line, however, America can always snuff him out, just like the Vietnamese did. Invading Iraq, we bombed the office of Al Jazeera and shelled the Palestine Hotel, killing three journalists. We also arrested Al Jazeerra’s al Sami al-Hajj and kept him in Guantanamo for six years without charge. In 2005, an American tank shot at a car carrying Italian journalist, Giuliana Sgrena, injuring her and killing intel agent, Nicola Calipari.

On the American fringe, independent voices are free to write as they please, but even the best among them can only appear in little read webzines. Many write almost exclusively on their own blogs. Needless to say, they have almost no impact on the general public. In too late late capitalism, those who seek to tell the truth don’t need to be burnt. They are already being drowned out by nonsense.

How about Canada?

For more than three decades the RCMP ran PROFUNC (PROminent FUNCtionaries of the Communist Party), a highly secretive espionage operation and internment plan. In October CBC’s Fifth Estate and Radio-Canada’s Enquête aired shows on “this secret contingency plan, called PROFUNC, [which] allowed police to round up and indefinitely detain Canadians believed to be Communist sympathizers.”

In case of a “national security” threat up to 16,000 suspected communists and 50,000 sympathizers were to be apprehended and interned in one of eight camps across the country. Initiated by RCMP Commissioner Stuart Taylor Wood in 1950, the plan continued until 1983.

The plan was highly detailed. Police stations across the country would receive a signal to open their PROFUNC lists and apprehend said individuals. The “communists” would then be taken to “reception centres” where they would be restricted from talking and anyone attempting to flee would be shot. Eventually, the “communists” would be moved to one of the regional internment camps where their contact with the outside world would be limited to a single 1-page letter each week. Their children would be sent to live with other family members.

Thousands of officers collected information for PROFUNC at one time or another. Each potential internee had an arrest document (C-215 form) that was regularly updated with the person’s physical description, age, photos, vehicle information, housing and sometimes the location of doors they might use to escape arrest.

Only a small number of the names on the list are public, but it clearly didn’t take much to be put on it. Enquête uncovered the name of a 13-year girl who was on the list because she attended an anti-nuclear protest in 1964. Many prominent individuals were also on the PROFUNC list, including a former Manitoba cabinet minister, Roland Penner, CBC President Robert Rabinovitch, and NDP leader Tommy Douglas (who was voted greatest Canadian in a CBC poll).

Enquête focused on the presumed use of PROFUNC lists during the 1970 October Crisis when Pierre Trudeau’s government implemented the War Measures Act. The head of the Montreal police’s anti-terrorism squad when the Front de libération du Québec kidnapped two government officials, Julien Giguère, told Enquête that his department had a list of 60 suspected FLQ sympathizers that they wanted to investigate. But the federal government wanted to justify their suspension of civil liberties and their claim of an “apprehended insurrection” so the RCMP and Sureté du Québec added many names to the Montreal police list. These added names appear to have come from PROFUNC lists. In subsequent days police agencies carried out almost 4,000 raids and made 500 arrests. Many of those detained were held without charge for weeks or months.

Robert Kaplan, Solicitor General from 1980 to 1984, ended PROFUNC when he ordered the RCMP to stop whatever they were doing that blocked elderly Canadians from entering the US. Kaplan claims the Fifth Estate informed him of the program.

PROFUNC was disbanded at about the same time as the Trudeau government opened the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Certain Activities of the RCMP (or Macdonald Commission), which investigated the RCMP’s “theft of the membership list of the Parti Québécois, several break-ins; illegal opening of mail; burning a barn in Quebec where the Black Panther Party and Front de libération du Québec were rumoured to be planning a rendezvous; forging documents; and conducting illegal electronic surveillance.”

As a result of the Macdonald Commission, Ottawa reduced the RCMP’s role in security and intelligence gathering. In 1984 they created the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) to carry out security and intelligence gathering work that had previously been the RCMP’s responsibility.

CSIS may not continue all of the functions of PROFUNC, but they definitely still monitor individuals based upon their political beliefs. The focus may no longer be solely on leftists. Politicized Muslims are definitely also on the list.

In recent years CSIS has been involved in the mistreatment of a number of innocent individuals. In 2003 the intelligence agency prodded Sudan to detain Abousfian Abdelrazik, a Sudanese-born Canadian citizen, who was then tortured and put through a harrowing six-year ordeal. CSIS is also largely responsible for the incarceration of more than a dozen Muslims on security certificates. These individuals (who are permanent residents, refugees or foreign nationals living in Canada) have been incarcerated without being able to see the evidence CSIS has put forward against them.

Of course, CSIS doesn’t only target Muslims. From last October to May 2010 at least seven friends of Stefan Christoff, one of Montreal’s most effective grassroots activists, were visited by CSIS agents. They arrived unannounced early in the morning and asked detailed and sometimes menacing questions about Christoff.

CSIS has also been actively spying on Aboriginal protesters. In the lead up to G8/G20 protests in Toronto CSIS was accused of trying to intimidate members of Red Power United.

Before, during and after the recent G8/G20 protests in Toronto Canada’s various security services demonstrated a flagrant disregard for individual’s civil liberties. Usually held in miserable conditions for 48 or 72 hours, about 1,100 people were picked up in the largest mass arrest in Canadian history. The vast majority of those arrested had their charges dropped because there was not a shred of evidence against them.

To protect against a plan such as PROFUNC or G8/G20 type police repression the Left needs to build a vibrant movement that doesn’t self marginalize. One way the Left can protect itself against security service attacks is to be known by as large of a segment of society as possible. We need to be seen as part of “normal” society.

Zizek says the wealthy are victims of their own wishful thinking. Eventually, the dystopia that monopoly capitalism is creating will spread its shadow over all. Unemployed, employed, owners, CEOs and financiers. The moment of critical mass is at hand. The masters of capital have few if no more cards up there sleeves. They will most certainly try some tricks that they used in the past in what will ultimately prove to be useless attempts to rebuild the capitalist planet, but the facts are obvious. There are fewer and fewer markets to create then exploit. Buying and selling credit and debt with other credit and debt can only fool the piper for so long. The time to pay that piper is nigh.

I once had a friend whose family left the Netherlands right before the Nazis took that nation over. I’m not sure if she was Jewish, but her mother knew that none of them would survive long once the Third Reich moved into their neighborhood. Who knows, maybe they were communists. Anyhow, back in 1981 when the Polish workers went on a nationwide strike after the country’s Stalinist government brutally attacked workers associated with the Solidarnosc movement, she mentioned her fears for the Polish people while we were waiting for the bartender at the club we were in to bring us another beer. I began talking about a couple strikes in the United States that I had worked on a few years earlier. My friend cut me short by saying that all assumptions should be tossed out and that those who understood how to take care of each other would fare better than most everyone else in the future.

This understanding is not very present in the capitalist mindset, even (if not especially) among those that work in its shops, factories and fields. Instead, workers tend to assume the philosophy of those who pay them. Believing that the individual is the key to survival, the road to privatized dystopia is not only accepted, it is cheered by an apparent majority.

Back to Slavoj Zizek. His most recent book, titled Living In the End Times, is an adventure. A bit verbose, the rock star philosopher examines the state of things on planet earth early in the twenty-first century. By dividing his analysis into what grief counselors call the five stages of grief, Zizek looks closely at the nature of the problem–capitalism and its culture. He examines the causes by traveling through Western philosophy and holds the entire dilemma up against the critical facilities of Marx and Engels. The journey is fascinating despite the use of ideas as practical applications of other ideas–a philosopher’s trick that tends to obfuscate instead of clarify. The chapters that immediately follow each of those named after the aforementioned stages are where Zizek most applies what he is trying to say about world political and cultural reality. In other words, it is in these chapters Zizek attempts to apply his ideas to something real. However, it is often the medium of film that he uses to illustrate his points. It’s as if Plato’s shadows on the cave had become that which cast those shadows. Not unlike Ronald Reagan and his confusion, Zizek refers to film as if it were real.

I recently read an article about the current economic crisis that said individual greed caused the events. While this is true to a certain extent, the facts have a lot more to do with the critical mass mentioned above. The finance industry needed to find something to sell because the market was saturated and people could not afford what was out there unless their credit was stretched beyond that which was reasonably practical to pay. Essentially, capitalism at its current stage creates and enables greed because its machinery knows that is what keeps it alive.

There are a couple ways to fight against the coming end. One method is currently unfolding in the United States and the other rears its angry head in places like Greece and France (and most recently Great Britain). The former is a method that coincides as neatly as a lap joint with the individualistic culture of the United States. This method is best expressed in today’s political milieu by the Tea Party. Their obsessive individualism pretends that every human really is an island and therefore has the right to hoard, keep and protect what he believes to be his. Everyone else can go to hell. Underlining this disorder is a belief that every one can become rich if they only work hard enough. As anyone that has looked at who funds the Tea Party knows, this egocentric philosophy is championed by a few extremely wealthy social Darwinists.

The other method is one that depends on solidarity and mass action. The Greeks and French folks in the streets understand that this crisis is not an act of god, it is not inevitable and it is directly related to the current stage of monopoly capitalism–capitalist globalization. They know that the masters who make the rules have different priorities than the masses and that the only way to change is to change those priorities to reflect those of the workers (employed and unemployed) and others the wealthy want to disempower. Given this, notes Zizek, then perhaps the only way to do so is in such a way that public order is disturbed. To prove his point, he cites the Greek protests of 2008 after police killed a teenager. If one recalls, those protests spread across Europe. Anything less than direct action that upsets the applecart of the State is ineffective either because the State ignores them or coopts them. As an example of the latter, Zizek points to the official response of Washington and London to the February 15, 2003 massive protests against the impending invasion of Iraq. Once the protests were over, the invasion occurred. However, the polite protesters were able to feel good that they had done what they felt they could to prevent it, while the invading governments could point to the protests as an example of “how democracy works.” When, in essence, it really only worked for those governments and the war machine they are an integral part of.

Among his many targets, Zizek includes liberal democracy. He agrees that its failures are all too clear. Many of these failures can be attributed to the fact that economic liberalism and the so-called free market has trumped political liberalism. It was Herbert Marcuse who wrote in his book One Dimensional Man: “Freedom of thought, speech, and conscience were-just as free enterprise, which they served to promote and protect–essentially critical ideas, designed to replace an obsolescent material and intellectual culture by a more productive and rational one. Once institutionalized, these rights and liberties shared the fate of the society of which they had become an integral part. The achievement cancels the premises.” In fact, insists Zizek, those rights are now counter to the greater project of maintaining the capitalist system no matter what its guise may be.

This is despite the fact that most citizens of western democracies (and probably democracies in other parts of the world as well) prefer the social freedoms and equality that political liberalism promises. However, the free market, because it is not really free in that word’s greater sense, finds that it can not survive in a world where there is no inequality. Capitalism, after all (and especially monopoly capitalism) creates (and needs) haves and have-nots. Consequently, those leaders who champion political liberalism and democracy find themselves acceding to the demands of those who believe the marketplace trumps all other realities. In other words, political liberals, also being firm believers in the marketplace, succumb. Nothing proves this better than the Obama presidency.

Speaking of that presidency, in a discussion of Tony Blair’s last election, Zizek points out that Blair was the most unpopular person in Britain in 2005. Yet, because there was no official way to express displeasure, he was reelected. The most recent elections in Great Britain and the United States take this a step further. Voters are frustrated with the lack of change but see no official way to express that, so in Britain they put a Liberal-Conservative coalition in power that is doing exactly what New Labour planned to do. In the US, they either voted for the faux populist Tea Party, or they didn’t vote at all. In the meantime, a bipartisan panel has recommended major changes in Washington’s Social Security and Medicare, while other austerity measures are put in place in both nations. The war in Afghanistan continues to escalate and any pretense of a withdrawal is slowly washed from memory. Nothing will change. At the same time, change must come. Mr. Zizek describes the situation in his own way in Living In the End Times, but in the end the text is merely an intellectual’s intricate plaything.

If we are to effect change, books like Mr. Zizek’s Living In the End Times are not going to be the spark that lights the prairie fire, no matter how cleverly written. Although Zizek’s text is potentially important to those who will take the time to read it, I am still convinced that our search for a better future is better served by reading the first chapters of a small book first published on February 21, 1848. That book? The Manifesto of the Communist Party by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. I think Mr. Zizek would agree.