Now that the “greater calamity” has occurred, Einstein’s prescience takes on a heartbreaking dimension, because it could have been avoided. A “just and lasting compromise” was possible, and it would have benefited both peoples. Jews and Arabs could be living in harmony, mutually benefiting from their different cultural gifts. But the imposition of a Jewish state, mass immigration, and ethnic cleansing destroyed that possibility, and now they are dying from nationalism and mutual atrocities.

Worldwide we are caught in the deadly fallout of the Holocaust. It traumatized the Zionists to the extent that they lost standards of justice and ethics that had been built up over centuries. Their efforts to turn Palestine into Israel have led to 60 years of fighting that is spreading to more and more countries. This battle is a major but unstated reason for US military aggression in the Muslim world from Libya to the Philippines, and that in turn is a major but unstated reason for the global economic crisis.

Germany was the site of the previous act of this tragedy. But what unfolded there had its roots in the trauma the Germans went through in the 1920s and ’30s. At the outbreak of the Second World War, W.H. Auden looked back on the suffering imposed on the Germans by the Versailles Treaty and wrote in his poem “September 1st, 1939″: “Those to whom evil is done, do evil in return.”

The former victims become the perpetrators, now in the Mideast. We are trapped in an ongoing chain of linked cataclysms.

To understand this chain and break it, we need to view it historically. What each link has in common is powerful financial interests relentlessly fighting to expand. The First World War was primarily a struggle between the established imperial states of Britain and France and a newcomer in the game of empire, Germany. The fascism that arose in its aftermath was financed by German capitalists in order to destroy the rising socialist movement and to rearm for another war. The Second World War in Europe was a continuation of the imperialist struggle of the First, and in the Pacific it was an imperial battle between the USA and Japan for control of Asia. After the Holocaust the demands for a Jewish state were supported by the USA and Britain mainly to extend their power over the Mideast and its oil. All this aggression with its millions of shattered lives was disguised under banners of idealism, but its fundamental impulse was economic domination.

How to break the chain? War and many other forms of violence are generated by the underlying structural violence of capitalism, which is intrinsically unjust and inevitably produces conflict. This outmoded, destructive system chains us also into working to make its owners rich. To have peace and to have fulfilling lives, we need to replace it with a democratic socialist society that emphasizes the humane in humanity. As Einstein wrote, “I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy.”

This last, the encultured view of ourselves, robs us of our class identity. Very few of us consider ourselves working class. The term has been made to seem a musty relic of the nineteenth century, synonymous with lower class, a disreputable band of losers who are to be feared and perhaps pitied, but certainly not to be identified with. Instead we are offered a hierarchy of many classes: upper, upper middle, middle, lower middle, and last and certainly least, the lumpen lower. Within these we are fragmented further by conflicting differences: ethnic, religious, gender, life style. We’re supposed to identify with our niche and our job and to strive to move up or at least not slip down in the hierarchy. But more and more of us are slipping down, losing the few securities we had. In our bewildered anger we find allies only within our isolated niche, so our struggles are ineffective.

Almost all of us are, in fact, working class. Everyone in the world who has to work for someone else for the essentials of living is working class. Only when we join together in solidarity will we succeed.

The elite have also fragmented us geographically. The most exploited are far away from the centers of power and thus invisible to us except for media images of illegal aliens storming our borders or insurgents attacking our soldiers. They live under the heel of authoritarian governments held in power by the rich nations and are forced to work under deplorable conditions. The wealth extracted from their labor has enabled the corporations to pay their employees in the home country better wages, thus minimizing discontent here and stimulating consumption of their products.

That economic arrangement is changing, however, as global competition intensifies. Selling in the world market has become more important than selling in the home country. Competing globally requires low prices, so corporations are slashing wages and benefits. The international working class is being leveled. Our task now is to unite and overthrow the elite that rules us all.

This elite is composed of many nationalities and has many internal conflicts. They even make war on each other when economics demands it. But they always recognize their overriding interests as a class, and they will do everything in their considerable power to defend those interests. We, the workers of the world, need to recognize and defend our own class interests with as much determination as our rulers.

They have designed a political system in the USA that ensures their power monopoly. The candidates of both major parties represent their interests. Through corporate financing, winner-take-all elections, ballot-access laws, and slanted media coverage, they effectively exclude alternatives.

To break free of their political control and build genuine democracy, we must delegitimize in particular the Democratic Party, which exists to channel potentially radical discontent into dead-end streets. The Democratic Party is the graveyard of social movements, capturing people’s hopes for fundamental changes, then burying them. It produces only superficial reforms that strengthen capitalism.

Each of us should examine the parties and organizations on the left, find one that matches our orientation, and actively support it. Just being angry at the system isn’t enough. Unless we are organized and militant, a viable alternative to the capitalist parties won’t emerge. The best program I’ve found is the Socialist Equality Party’s .

Labor unions, like the Democratic Party, have become merely reformist. They have been purged of any anti-capitalist leadership and now serve the same function on the economic front that the Democrats serve on the political front: to convince the working class to accept the dictates of capital. Union leadership collaborates with employers to worsen the conditions of their members. They have become functionaries of capitalism and are richly rewarded for it. Workers are going to have to build an independent base of power that will throw out this bureaucracy and militantly confront bosses worldwide.

The reformism pushed by the Democratic Party and the labor unions is reinforced by the liberal media. They foster the idea that the system is basically good but just has some problems that need to be fixed. This is appealing because it’s easy. Instead of revolution to replace the system, we just need to repair it.

Reforms have in the past improved a few conditions. Social Security helped stave off abject poverty in old age, and Medicare helped protect a family’s savings from catastrophic health costs. From the 1950s to the ’70s unions were able to force through higher wages and better working conditions in many industries. But these hard-fought reforms are being reversed now because of capitalism’s need to reduce prices to compete with emerging industrial powers such as China and India. The pressure of international competition is being shifted on to us, the workers, and the Democrats and unions are implementing that. In this new economic reality, reformism has become a coward’s dream, a way of avoiding the unpleasantness of protracted struggle. We need to abandon its delusion and prepare to fight for fundamental changes that will replace oligarchic capitalism with democratic socialism.

Another thread that binds us is the image of socialism that has been burned into our brains. We are continually persuaded that it means brutal dictatorship, concentration camps, no freedom, a slave state. To counter this, we need to criticize the regimes of the Soviet Union and China and point out that they weren’t socialist. The totalitarian tradition in their cultures and constant attack by the capitalist nations kept them from achieving anything close to real socialism. In many cases the government took over as the exploitative boss, and the workers had little power. Real socialism means economic democracy, where we decide together how our economic life will be organized. It puts the resources and productive capacity of the world in the hands of its people, who use them to meet human needs rather than to generate private profits for a few owners.

We are educated to serve the system: to be obedient, to respect authority, to fit into a hierarchy. We are channeled into learning skills the corporations need, and our labor has become just another commodity. Our deepest interests and talents often remain undeveloped, unrecognized even by ourselves. This won’t change until students, parents, teachers, and other workers come together and educate one another to take power.

The mass media exist to control the masses by shaping our perceptions of reality. The pap they feed us switches off our brains, so we can’t analyze society as a system. Instead of thought, we are offered a dazzling array of personal emotions and sensory stimulation to distract us from the bleak reality of our lives.

Through entertainment and news the media fixates us on physical violence, so we don’t perceive the structural violence that causes it. We get lurid, fear-arousing accounts of violence committed by ghetto youths and Muslim guerrillas accompanied with commentaries calling for tough measures to combat these vicious berserkers. We get no accounts of the structural violence of poverty and oppression that capitalism and imperialism have created there. It’s this built-in structural violence that generates the physical violence.

The corporate media exists also to stimulate greed and consumption. Capitalism divides us from one another, and the isolation imposed by this false separation generates insecurity and a sense of incompleteness. It creates hollow personalities craving to fill an inner emptiness, then it comes to the rescue by promising satisfaction through consumption. First it causes the void, then convinces us to fill it with things — beautiful, fascinating, stimulating, extraordinary, sexy things. Lots of them. And so much the better that they never really fill our needs, because then we need more of them.

Dissident Voice and other alternative publications are awaking people from the stupor induced by this mainstream propaganda. They deserve our support.

To escape from the mental manipulation, we must strive for inner self sufficiency so we won’t need all that garbage the media is selling us. This self sufficiency has its basis in our shared humanity, and if we tune in to that, the superficial substitutes of commercial products and entertainment will lose their appeal. A good way to combat such conditioning is a consumer strike. Buy as little as possible. Turn off the television. By overcoming our need for entertainment, we can develop our own authentic creativity. When we’re not consuming as much, the planet will breathe a sigh of relief. Instead of hiding behind fashion, jewelry, and cosmetics, let’s face the world as we are and let the beauty of our defiance show.

The media creates images and myths that reinforce the existing ideologies. Rugged individualism, for example, validates the “every man for himself” ethos of capitalism. The belief that we are isolated beings striving for our own gratification is an axiom of our society. Men are particularly enamored of it, taught to identify with the mountain man, the lone wolf, the entrepreneur.

The separations between people are easy to see: each of us inhabit a different body. Our connections are much more fundamental, but they are invisible, so a shallow culture like ours doesn’t perceive them. We can overcome this by centering ourselves in our connectedness and acting from it. In our lives and in our art we can demonstrate the deeper commonality that underlies our surface separations. Our genuine individuality can be best developed within this context.

Reinforcing traditional masculinity is one of the chief ways in which the elite seek to keep the working class on its side. They exploit the fact that many men cling to maleness as the last power left to them. Working-class men have almost no say over their work lives; machismo has become their only realm of agency. This is exploited by elements of the media, who portray leftists as intent on rendering traditional males extinct. Admittedly, there’s a grain of truth in this. Traditions of dominance and aggression, whether practiced by men or women, need to be resisted. The real attack on working class men, though, is coming not from leftists but from economic forces that are increasingly constricting their lives and limiting their possibilities down to low paying, exhausting jobs. The rage this generates in them is deflected by the media towards leftists, feminists, and minorities, who are actually the core opposition to those economic forces.

We need to show traditional men that socialism will give them economic security and power in the work place. When they have that, they won’t need to dominate their wives and children. If they persist in doing so, society has to prevent them from that. The dominator mentality is a pathology we must overcome.

Gender politics by itself won’t build socialism. In fact, in many cases it ends up serving capitalism. But gender studies can help break the patriarchal mold that keeps producing the same authoritarian personality type. It opens up new possibilities and fosters psychological diversity. By showing that our categories of feminine and masculine aren’t natural but cultural, it calls into question the naturalness of other institutions. It helps us see that capitalism also is not an inherent necessity but rather a product of social forces open to change. Gender subversion can lead to political subversion.

The enforcement mechanisms of society — military, police, and courts — are the bottom line of oppression. All three are licensed to kill and do so regularly. The military are the spear carriers of capitalism. Their job is to defend and expand the empire, and they slaughter millions for that goal. The police live up to their motto, To Protect and To Serve, but they are primarily protecting and serving an oppressive social structure, defending property and its owners against attacks by the deprived. The courts are run by judges who are for the most part members of the elite. They are the final arbiters of punishment, locking up anyone who threatens the system, primarily poor minorities. They have created an American gulag, an egregious, ever-growing prison-industrial complex that crushes those who dare defy its rules.

We need to show the soldiers and police they are workers too. We all have the same basic interests and the same common enemy: their employer. If we win enough of them to our side, they will stand with us rather than against us when a revolutionary situation develops. Winning the judges to our side is unlikely. Most of them are ruling class. We’ll probably just have to find some socially useful work for them, like sweeping the sidewalks.

Our rulers (yes, we really do have rulers) try to convince us that there’s no solution to humanity’s problems, no alternative to the way things are now. This is human nature. Get used to it.

Fortunately the international working class is refusing to get used to it. It is resisting this new wave of impoverishment the corporations and their governments are trying to force onto it. Our bound Gulliver is starting to awaken. It knows now it is fettered and is testing its strength against these bonds. In some places it has already broken a few. The rule of the Lilliputians is coming to an end. This won’t happen quickly, though. A long struggle lies ahead of us. But the tide has changed and is now running in our favor.

The uprising began in the Muslim world because they are under the most direct imperialist attack. It has spread to the NATO countries, the chief instigators of the attacks, because their populations are having to pay the bills for this war through social cutbacks and lower wages. As the uprising spreads globally, the elite will do everything they can to crush it. They will try to divide us and make us fight one another. They will offer tempting reforms and compromises that will allow them to maintain ownership. They will bribe some of our opportunistic leaders with promises of token power if they cooperate. They will jail us. They will even kill some of us. But if we persist, holding to a militant rather than a reformist course, we will eventually free ourselves of them and build a system that emphasizes the humane in humanity. This is our time, a historic battle for liberation.

However, the spark was lit. The eruption of popular protest against the neoliberal corporate agenda that most of the world had already experienced by the winter of 2011 had finally reached the nation most responsible for that agenda — the United States. The rest of the year would see the expansion of that protest across the United States grow in dimension and breadth. From further State Capitol occupations to the occupations of city parks, the masterminds and profiteers of the neoliberal economy were put on notice. Meanwhile, protest from like minded citizens of the rest of the world also continued to spread. Politicians scrambled as they figured out how to respond to what was clearly a left-oriented popular movement against those who had bought and sold them long ago.

Naturally, there have been millions of words written and published about this wave of people power. A very recent collection of some of those words edited by Wisconsinites Paul and Mari Jo Buhle, is titled It Started In Wisconsin. Essentially a collection of essays written by various participants and organizers of the Wisconsin protests, It Started In Wisconsin provides a reasonable and objective look at the movement. By discussing its structures and organizational strategies, the politics of the movement are also examined. Like the Wisconsin movement itself, the parameters of the discussion tend to remain limited to the parameters of the liberal-progressive spectrum.

The book begins with the first essayist attempting to place the protests firmly in the tradition of the great Progressive Robert LaFollette. However, the very fact that the movement ended up being confined to the traditional Democrat-Republican contest made even the more left elements of the Progressive philosophy irrelevant in the final outcome. It Started In Wisconsin tends to examine the uprising and its politics from a generally anti-corporate perspective but, like the movement itself, never truly challenges capitalism at its roots as an essentially unequal system that by its nature requires growing levels of inequality.

There is one essay that stands out from the rest of those that analyze the movement in that it does look beyond the façade of neoliberalism. That essay, titled “The Role of Corporations” by Roger Bybee, is the most radical in the book. Radical, that is, in the fundamental definition of the word: “of or going to the root or origin.” The essay is a clear and straightforward description of how neoliberal capitalism works, who it benefits and, to put it bluntly, who it screws. No other analytical piece between these covers quite approaches the clarity and depth of analysis like Bybee’s.

Yet, this book is not really about analysis. It is a collection of stories from those that participated in one of the most inspiring movements to erupt in the US heartland in decades. Those stories provide the observer from afar with a fairly universal and nuanced look at the daily lives of those involved in organizing, occupying, reporting and otherwise participating in those weeks of popular democracy. Interspersed between the tales of the workers, students, farmers and other protesters are a number of photographs and comics. The inclusion of these graphics truly enhances the overall effect.

One of the last two essays in It Started In Wisconsin discusses the position of the Wisconsin uprising in the global insurrections of the past eighteen months. The authors of this short essay, Ashok Kumar and Simon Hardy, briefly discuss the possibilities and take a quick look at the lessons they see to be learned. In addition, and most importantly, they broach the subject of the differences between the radical grassroots and the more conservative entrenched union and political leadership. It is here, they hint, that the real direction of this global movement will be determined. In Wisconsin that outcome has already taken one turn with the shifting of the uprising’s momentum into the recall efforts against Governor Scott Walker. The outcome of this turn to electoral politics is still being hotly debated by many of the uprising’s organizers, with some of them refusing to endorse the Democratic candidate opposing Walker because they see him as just more of the same.

Moving from the local to the global, let us consider another recently published text that takes a look at the international manifestations of this movement. This book, titled Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere is authored by journalist Paul Mason. Like the Buhle’s effort, Mason’s book describes the movements against neoliberal intolerance and authoritarianism that have become part of the collective imagination this past year. Likewise, Mason’s text examines the politics of the movement from what can only be termed a new left viewpoint. What this means is that he places the emphasis on the cry for freedom implicit in these protests while under-emphasizing the economic nature of the oppression the protesters are rebelling against.

Given the broader scope of Mason’s text, there is also a broader discussion. Several different manifestations of the movement — from Greece to London to Cairo to Spain and other points in between — are reported on. These reports are good journalism. One feels as if they are present at the rallies, occupations and riots that Mason describes. The anecdotal tales he provides should remind anyone who participated in any kind of popular resistance in the past decades of the energy and hope one finds and feels at such events. These are the stuff that makes one join such movements.

When it comes to analysis, Mason’s text provides some interesting possibilities. He spends a fair number of words discussing the desire for freedom this global movement represents. The Egyptian opposed to the harshness of the Mubarak authoritarian regime and the British student fearing the limitations a life without affordable education will create are examined through what Mason calls the social laboratory of the self. He emphasizes the role of social networking and the existence of a new dimension in organizing directly related to the existence of networking technology. He rightly questions the validity of the Left, but does not really examine what he means by the Left, choosing instead to adopt the mainstream media’s definition that the Left is composed of political parties like Labour in Britain, various elements of the Democratic Party in the United States, and numerous sects espousing various versions of Leninism.

By dismissing the Left, even in its current splintered formation, Mason is also dismissing a more radical analysis of the true culprit in the global economic catastrophe. It is true, as Mason makes clear, that neoliberal policies are responsible for the numerous maladies the global uprising sprang from. However, what is unexplored in Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere is why neoliberal capitalism is the dominant economic regime on the planet. That explanation can only come from an understanding of the economic works of Marx and his theoretical successors like Nikolai Bukharin, Rosa Luxembourg and even Lenin. It was these thinkers and revolutionaries, after all, that studied and explained the stages of capitalism in the industrial world and how they would come about. So far, they have been pretty damn accurate.

Mason has it right when he places the search for freedom against the authoritarianism of a Mubarak or of neoliberalism in the context of Marx’s discussion of the alienation of the human spirit under capitalism. However, by not taking a similar look at the analysis Marxist economics provides regarding the trajectory of capitalism, the analysis he provides falls short. It would be useful for Mason and the protesters he writes about if they knew that a Marxist anti-imperialist analysis does not mean that a Leninist solution is the necessary result.

Yet, Mason is not much different from the movements he describes. Rightly opposed to the excesses of neoliberal capitalism (which is merely another phase of monopoly capitalism as described by Luxembourg, et al), the current movement runs the risk of merely removing the worst of those excesses. If this is the result, it will only be a few decades before an even harsher manifestation of capitalist greed subordinates the world. Unless, that is, the current movement undertakes a truly radical analysis that places the existence of capitalism itself at the core of the problem.

I don’t expect that capitalism will be removed from the planet. However, without an understanding that it is capitalism that is the root of the problems of inequality and sustainability we are currently facing, there can be no substantive change in the future we face. Then, again, the very fact that many elements of the movement don’t seem too concerned about the Left’s role is a call to those on the Left to get active and make it clear that what passes for the Left in today’s world is for the most part nothing of the sort. Indeed, it is a rejection of the Left’s important and earth-changing history.

Despite the aforementioned shortcomings, these two publications are worthwhile and provocative reads. The authors and editors present the primary actors in the global uprising — students, workers and the marginalized — and describe their passion, joy and fears. They also begin to explain where the global movement against neoliberalism came from and where it is now. Reading them in this context will certainly help guide us through that movement’s next metamorphosis.

Fidel Castro (age 85) urged those assembled to a moral duty to prevent the extinction of humankind and challenge the expanding predations of neo-liberal global capitalism. He expressed concern for the inevitable collapse of Wall Street and the international monetary system. Paper money is worthless without backing from gold or other assets, Castro asserted. Environmental destruction is classless in that eventually all will suffer—both the rich and the poor—if neo-liberal capitalism continues on its rampart global destruction, he professed.

Castro’s main message was clear. Cuban socialism is an international example of a humanitarian economy in the world. “We have over 80,000 doctors,” he said, and “we are currently training 830 Pakistani medical students and many others from around the world.”

Fidel Castro, reverently referred to as “Commandante” by many of those present, was flanked by the Cuban Minister of Culture, Abel Prieto, and the president of the Cuban Book Institute, Zuleika Romay. The participants in the encounter were invited guests to the 2012 International Cuban Book Fair that ran from February 10 to 19 in Havana.

The nine-hour session went from 1:00 PM until after 10:00 PM, with only two short coffee breaks. Fidel gave extended responses during the event, commenting on the presentations, asking questions, and recalling the history of the Cuban revolution and Cuba’s humanitarian efforts over the past fifty plus years. Some 40 people presented briefings on their concerns. The lies and propaganda of the corporate/capitalist media were important themes for the day. One participant remarked how the global corporate media seeks to create a monoculture of the mind inside the capitalist countries.

As an invited author for the International Cuban Book Fair, I was honored to participate in the discussions held with the “Commandante.” His energy is inspiring and his command of history and contemporary issues is phenomenal. Castro had serious health issues a few years back, but remains mentally alert. He walked with assistance from his bodyguards, but remained fully participatory in the nine-hour session.

Cuba is an international example of the potentialities of socialism, and an ongoing symbolic challenge to marketplace capitalism. In the United States there is a continuing propaganda drumbeat against the Cuban revolution. Castro is often described as a military dictator repressing his people and blocking freedoms in Cuba. But this description ignores some undisputed social advances under his leadership that could serve as an example of what a society can do when it turns its resources to humanitarian purposes.

Contemporary neo-liberal capitalism undercuts wages, unions and social welfare, which results in the expansion of poverty, hunger, and extreme inequality. Cuba is a demonstration that humanitarian socialism can work for the masses. Cuba is the number one organic farming country in the world. Cuba has full employment, zero starvation, and some of the best health care in the world. Cuba’s life expectancy is equal to the United States and education up through university is paid for by the state for all students.

As a media-reform advocate, participant and observer, I watched tens of thousands of young people arrive at the International Book Fair in the old Spanish fort overlooking downtown Havana. These are multi-generations of people who have never suffered media advertisements. Three University of Havana literature majors, with whom I spent a full day, laughed hysterically when I asked them if they wanted a McDonald’s Happy Meal. They represent a people who accept the equality of socialism and collective growth of human betterment, and will strongly defend their way of life if necessary. As literature majors they have completed three years of Latin, and are starting classical Greek. They have had courses in historical and modern Latin American and European literature, and art. Their university education costs them nothing, and the government provides all textbooks and living expenses.

After the collapse of the USSR, Cuba lost most of it subsidies from the socialist block of nations. The early 1990s were a difficult transition. This was when Cuba opened it doors to those who wanted to leave. Some 30,000 people choose to move to the United States. Yet, ten million people choose to stay and build the independent socialist country that Cuba is today. Several other South American countries, notably Venezuela and Ecuador, have taken note of Cuba’s successes and are moving in a similar direction seeking socialist equality.

Some in the US believe that when the senior Cuban leadership from the 1959 revolution passes away, US corporations and displaced Cubans abroad will waltz back into Havana to return capitalism to the island. It is very clear to me, and many contemporary observers, that multiple generations of socialist Cubans will never allow this to happen.

There is no doubt that, between 2008-2009, the capitalist system in Europe and the United States suffered a severe shock that shook the foundations of its financial system and threatened to bankrupt its ‘leading sectors’.

However, I will argue the ‘crises of capitalism’ was turned into a ‘crises of labor’. Finance capital, the principle detonator of the crash and crises, recovered, the capitalist class as a whole was strengthened, and most important of all, it utilized the political, social, ideological conditions created as a result of ‘the crises’ to further consolidate their dominance and exploitation over the rest of society.

In other words, the ‘crises of capital’ has been converted into a strategic advantage for furthering the most fundamental interests of capital: the enlargement of profits, the consolidation of capitalist rule, the greater concentration of ownership, the deepening of inequalities between capital and labor and the creation of huge reserves of labor to further augment their profits.

Furthermore, the notion of a homogeneous global crisis of capitalism overlooks profound differences in performance and conditions, between countries, classes, and age cohorts.

The Global Crises Thesis:The Economic and Social Argument

The advocates of global crises argue that beginning in 2007 and continuing to the present, the world capitalist system has collapsed and recovery is a mirage. They cite stagnation and continuing recession in North America and the Eurozone. They offer GDP data hovering between negative to zero growth. Their argument is backed by data citing double digit unemployment in both regions. They frequently correct the official data which understates the percentage unemployed by excluding part-time, long-term unemployed workers and others. The ‘crises’ argument is strengthened by citing the millions of homeowners who have been evicted by the banks, the sharp increase in poverty and destitution accompanying job loses, wage reductions and the elimination or reduction of social services. ‘Crises’ is also associated with the massive increase in bankruptcies of mostly small and medium size businesses and regional banks.

The Global Crises: The Loss of Legitimacy

Critics, especially in the financial press, write of a ‘legitimacy crises of capitalism’ citing polls showing substantial majorities questioning the injustices of the capitalist system, the vast and growing inequalities and the rigged rules by which banks exploit their size (“too big to fail”) to raid the Treasury at the expense of social programs.

In summary the advocates of the thesis of a Global Crises of Capitalism make a strong case, demonstrating the profound and pervasive destructive effects of the capitalist system on the lives of the great majority of humanity.

The problem is that a ‘crises of humanity’ (more specifically of salary ad wage workers) is not the same as a crisis of the capitalist system. In fact as we shall argue below growing social adversity, declining income and employment has been a major factor facilitating the rapid and massive recovery of the profit margins of most large scale corporations.

Moreover, the thesis of ‘global’ crises of capitalism amalgamates disparate economies, countries, classes and age cohorts with sharply divergent performances at different historical moments.

Global Crises or Uneven and Unequal Development?

It is utterly foolish to argue for a “global crises” when several of the major economies in the world economy did not suffer a major downturn and others recovered and expanded rapidly. China and India did not suffer even a recession. Even during the worst years of the Euro-US decline,the asian giants grew on average about 8%. Latin America’s economies especially the major agro-mineral export countries (Brazil, Argentina, Chile, ) with diversified markets, especially in Asia, paused briefly (in 2009) before assuming moderate to rapid growth (between 3% to 7%) from 2010-2012.

By aggregating economic data from the Euro-zone as a whole the advocates of global crises, overlooked the enormous disparities in performance within the zone. While Southern Europe wallows in a deep sustained depression, by any measure, from 2008 to the foreseeable future, German exports, in 2011, set a record of a trillion euros; its trade surplus reached 158 billion euros, after a155 billion euro surpluses in 2010.¹

While aggregate Eurozone unemployment reaches 10.4%, the internal differences defy any notion of ‘general crises.’ Unemployment in Holland is 4.9%, Austria 4.1% and Germany 5.5% with employer claims of widespread skilled labor shortages in key growth sectors. On the other hand in exploited southern Europe unemployment runs to depression levels, Greece 21%, Spain 22.9%, Ireland 14.5%, and Portugal 13.6%.² In other words, ‘the crises’ do not adversely affect some economies, that in fact profit from their market dominance and techno-financial strength over dependent, debtor and backward economies. To speak of ‘global crises’ obscures the fundamental dominant and exploitative relations that facilitate ‘recovery’ and growth of the elite economies over and against their competitors and client states. In addition global crises theorists wrongly amalgamated crises ridden, financial-speculative economies (US, England) with dynamic productive export economies (Germany, China).

The second problem with the thesis of ‘global crises’ is that it overlooks profound internal differences between age cohorts. In several European countries youth unemployment (16-25) runs between 30 to 50% (Spain 48.7%, Greece 47.2%, Slovakia 35.6%, Italy 31%, Portugal 30.8% and Ireland 29%) while in Germany, Austria and Holland youth unemployment runs to Germany 7.8%, Austria 8.2% and Netherlands 8.6%.³ These differences underlie the reason why there is not a ‘global youth movement’ of ‘indigenous’ and ‘occupiers.’ Five-fold differences between unemployed youth is not conducive to ‘international’ solidarity. The concentration of high youth unemployment figures explains the uneven development of mass street protests especially centered in Southern Europe. It also explains why the northern Euro-American “anti-globalization” movement is largely a lifeless forum which attracts academic pontification on the “global capitalist crises” and the impotence of the “Social Forums” are unable to attract millions of unemployed youth from Southern Europe .They are more attracted to direct action. Globalist theorists overlook the specific way in which the mass of unemployed young workers are exploited in their dependent debt ridden countries. They ignore the specific way they are ruled and repressed by center-left and rightist capitalist parties. The contrast is most evident in the winter of 2012. Greek workers are pressured to accept a 20% cut in minimum wages while in Germany workers are demanding a 6% increase.

If the ‘crises’ of capitalism is manifested in specific regions, so too does it affect different age/racial sectors of the wage and salaries classes. The unemployment rates of youth to older workers varies enormously: in Italy it is 3.5/1, Greece 2.5/1, Portugal 2.3/1, Spain 2.1/1 and Belgium 2.9/1. In Germany it is 1.5/1.⁴ In other words because of the higher levels of unemployment among youth they have a greater propensity for direct action ‘against the system’; while older workers with higher levels of employment (and unemployment benefits) have shown a greater propensity to rely on the ballot box and engage in limited strikes over job and pay related issues. The vast concentration of unemployed among young workers means they form the ‘available core’ for sustained action; but it also means that they can only achieve limited unity of action with the older working class experiencing single digit unemployment.

However, it is also true that the great mass of unemployed youth provides a formidable weapon, in the hands of employers to threaten to replace employed older workers. Today, capitalists constantly resort to using the unemployed to lower wages and benefits and to intensify exploitation (dubbed to “increase productivity”) to increase profit margins. Far from being simply an indicater of ‘capitalist crises,’ high levels of unemployment have served along with other factors’ to increase the rate of profit, accumulate income, widen income inequalities which augments the consumption of luxury goods for the capitalist class:the sales of luxury cars and watches is booming.

Class Crises: The Counter-Thesis

Contrary to the “global capitalist crises” theorists, a substantial amount of data has surfaced which refutes its assumptions. A recent study reports “US corporate profits are higher as a share of gross domestic product than at any time since 1950.”⁵ US companies cash balances have never been greater, thanks to intensified exploitation of workers, and a multi-tiered wage systems in which new hires work for a fraction of what older workers receive (thanks to agreements signed by ‘door mat’ labor bosses).

The “crises of capitalism” ideologues have ignored the financial reports of the major US corporations. According to General Motors 2011 report to its stockholders,they celebrated the greatest profit ever, turning a profit of $7.6 billion, surpassing the previous record of $6.7 billion in 1997. A large part of these profits results from the freezing of its underfunded US pension funds and extracting greater productivity from fewer workers–in other words intensified exploitation–and cutting hourly wages of new hires by half.⁶

Moreover the increased importance of imperialist exploitation is evident as the share of US corporate profits extracted overseas keeps rising at the expense of employee income growth. In 2011, the US economy grew by 1.7%, but median wages fell by 2.7%. According to the financial press “the profit margins of the S and P 500 leapt from 6% to 9% of the GDP in the past three years, a share last achieved three generations ago. At roughly a third, the foreign share of these profits has more than doubled since 2000.”⁷ If this is a “capitalist crises” then who needs a capitalist boom?

Surveys of top corporations reveal that US companies are holding 1.73 trillion in cash, “the fruits of record high profit margins.”⁸ These record profit margins result from mass firings which have led to intensifying exploitation of the remaining workers. Also negligible federal interest rates and easy access to credit allow capitalists to exploit vast differentials between borrowing and lending and investing. Lower taxes and cuts in social programs result in a growing cash pile for corporations. Within the corporate structure, income goes to the top where senior executives pay themselves huge bonuses. Among the leading S and P 500 corporations the proportion of income that goes to dividends for stockholders is the lowest since 1900.⁹

A real capitalist crisis would adversely affect profit margins, gross earnings and the accumulation of “cash piles.” Rising profits are being horded because as capitalists profit from intense exploitation, mass consumption stagnates.

Crises theorists confuse what is clearly the degrading of labor, the savaging of living and working conditions and even the stagnation of the economy, with a ‘crises’ of capital: when the capitalist class increases its profit margins, hoards trillions, it is not in crises. The key point is that the ‘crises of labor’ is a major stimulus for the recovery of capitalist profits. We cannot generalize from one to the other. No doubt there was a moment of capitalist crises (2008-2009) but thanks to the capitalist state’s unprecedented massive transfer of wealth from the public treasury to the capitalist class–Wall Street banks in the first instance–the corporate sector recovered, while the workers and the rest of the economy remained in crises, went bankrupt and out of work.

From Crises to Recovery of Profits: 2008/9 to 2012

The key to the ‘recovery’ of corporate profits had little to do with the business cycle and all to do with Wall Street’s large scale takeover and pillage of the US Treasury. Between 2009-2012 hundreds of former Wall Street executives, managers and investment advisers seized all the major decision-making positions in the Treasury Department and channeled trillions of dollars into leading financial and corporate coffers. They intervened financially troubled corporations,like General Motors, imposing major wage cuts and dismissals of thousands of workers.

Wall Streeters in Treasury elaborated the doctrine of Too Big to Fail to justify the massive transfer of wealth. The entire speculative edifice built in part by a 234 fold rise in foreign exchange trading volume between 1977-2010 was restored.¹⁰ The new doctrine argued that the state’s first and principle priority is to return the financial system to profitability at any and all cost to society, citizens, taxpayers and workers. Too Big to Fail is a complete repudiation of the most basic principle of the “free market” capitalist system: the idea that those capitalists who lose bear the consequences; that each investor or CEO, is responsible for their action. Financial capitalists no longer needed to justify their activity in terms of any contribution to the growth of the economy or “social utility”. According to the current rulers Wall Street must be saved because it is Wall Street, even if the rest of the economy and people sink.¹¹ State bailouts and financing are complemented by hundreds of billions in tax concessions, leading to unprecedented fiscal deficits and the growth of massive social inequalities. The pay of CEOs’s as a multiple of the average worker went from 24 to 1 in 1965 to 325 in 2010.¹²

The ruling class flaunts their wealth and power aided and abetted by the White House and Treasury. In the face of popular hostility to Wall Street pillage of Treasury, Obama went through the sham of asking Treasury to impose a cap on the multi-million dollar bonuses that the CEO’s running bailed out banks awarded themselves. Wall Streeters in Treasury refused to enforce the executive order, the CEO’s got billions in bonuses in 2011. President Obama went along, thinking he conned the US public with his phony gesture,while he reaped millions in campaign funds from Wall Street!

The reason Treasury has been taken over by Wall Street is that in the 1990’s and 2000’s, banks became a leading force in Western economies. Their share of the GDP rose sharply (from 2% in the 1950’s to 8% in 2010).¹⁰

Today it is “normal operating procedure” for President’s to appoint Wall Streeter’s to all key economic positions; and it is ‘normal’ for these same officials to pursue policies that maximize Wall Street profits and eliminate any risk of failure no matter how risky and corrupt their practioners.

The Revolving Door: From Wall Street to Treasury and Return

Effectively the relation between Wall Street and Treasury has become a “revolving door”: from Wall Street to the Treasury Department to Wall Street. Private bankers take appointments in Treasury (or are recruited) to ensure that all resources and policies Wall Street needs are granted with maximum effort, with the least hindrance from citizens, workers or taxpayers. Wall Streeters in Treasury give highest priority to Wall Street survival, recovery and expansion of profits. They block any regulations or restrictions on bonuses or a repeat of past swindles.

Wall Streeters ‘make a reputation’ in Treasury and then return to the private sector in higher positions, as senior advisers and partners. A Treasury appointment is a ladder up the Wall Street hierarchy. Treasury is a filling station to the Wall Street Limousine: ex Wall Streeters fill up the tank, check the oil and then jump in the front seat and zoom to a lucrative job and let the filling station (public) pay the bill.

Approximately 774 officials (and counting) departed from Treasury between January 2009 and August 2011.¹³ All provided lucrative “services” to their future Wall Street bosses finding it a great way to re-enter private finance at a higher more lucrative position.

A report in the Financial Times Feb. 6, 2012¹³ entitled appropriately Manhattan Transfer” provides typical illustrations of the Treasury-Wall Street “revolving door.”

Ron Bloom went from a junior banker at Lazard to Treasury, helping to engineer the trillion dollar bailout of Wall Street and returned to Lazard as a senior adviser. Jake Siewert went from Wall Street to becoming a top aide to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and then graduated to Goldman Sachs, having served to undercut any cap on Wall Street bonuses.

Michael Mundaca, the most senior tax official in the Obama regime came from the Street and then went on to a highly lucrative post in Ernst and Young a corporate accounting firm, having help write down corporate taxes during his stint in “public office”.

Eric Solomon, a senior tax official in the infamous corporate tax free Bush Administration made the same switch. Jeffrey Goldstein, who Obama put in charge of financial regulation and succeeded in undercutting popular demands, returned to his previous employer Hellman and Friedman with the appropriate promotion for services rendered.

Stuart Levey, who ran AIPAC sanctions against Iran policies out if Treasury’s so-called “anti-terrorist agency,” was hired as general counsel by HSBC to defend it from investigations for money laundering.¹³ In this case Levey moved from promoting Israels’ war aims to defending an international bank accused of laundering billions in Mexican cartel money. Levey, by the way spent so much time pursuing Israels’ Iran agenda that he totally ignored the Mexican drug cartels’ billion dollar money laundering cross-border operations for the better part of a decade.

Lew Alexander a senior advisor to Geithner in designing the trillion dollar bail out is now a senior official in Nomura, the Japanese bank. Lee Sachs went from Treasury to Bank Alliance, (his own “lending platform”). James Millstein went from Lazard to Treasury bailed out AIG insurance run into the ground by Greenberg and then established his own private investment firm taking a cluster of well-connected Treasury officials with him.

The Goldman-Sachs-Treasury “revolving door” continues today. In addition to past and current Treasury heads Paulson and Geithner, former Goldman partner Mark Patterson was recently appointed Geithner’s “chief of staff.” Tim Bowler, former Goldman managing director, was appointed by Obama to head up the capital markets division.

It should be abundantly clear that elections, parties and the billion dollar electoral campaigns have little to do with “democracy” and more to do with selecting the President and legislators who will appoint non-elected Wall Streeters to make all the strategic economic decisions for the 99% of Americans. The policy results of the Wall Street-Treasury revolving door are clear and provide us with a framework for understanding why the “profit crises” has vanished and the crises of labor has deepened.

The “Policy Achievements” of the Revolving Door

The Wall Street-Treasury conundrum (WSTC) has performed herculean and audacious labor for finance and corporate capital. In the face of universal condemnation of Wall Street by the vast majority of the public for its swindles, bankruptcies, job losses and mortgage foreclosures, the WSTC publically backed the swindlers with a trillion dollar bailout. A daring move on the face of it; that is if majorities and elections counted for anything. Equally important the WSTC dumped the entire “free market” ideology that justified capitalist profits based on its “risks”, by imposing the new dogma of “too big to fail” in which the state treasury guarantees profits even when capitalists face bankruptcy, providing they are billion dollar firms. The WSTC dumped the capitalist principle of “fiscal responsibility” in favor of hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts for the corporate-financial ruling class, running up record peace time budget deficits and then having the audacity to blame the social programs supported by popular majorities. (Is it any wonder these ex-Treasury officials get such lucrative offers in the private sector when they leave public office?) Thirdly, Treasury and the Central Bank (Federal Reserve) provide near zero interest loans that guarantees big profits to private financial institution which borrow low from the Fed and lend high, (including back to the Government!) especially in purchasing overseas Government and corporate bonds. They receive anywhere from four to ten times the interest rates they pay. In other words the taxpayers provide a monstrous subsidy for Wall Street speculation. With the added proviso, that today these speculative activities are now insured by the Federal government, under the Too Big to Fail doctrine.

Under the ideology of “regaining competitiveness” the Obama economic team (from Treasury, the Federal Reserve, Commerce, Labor) has encouraged employers to engage in the most aggressive shedding of workers in modern history. Increased productivity and profitability is not the result of “innovation” as Obama, Geithner and Bernache claim; it is a product of a state labor policy which deepens inequality by holding down wages and raising profit margins. Fewer workers producing more commodities. Cheap credit and bailouts for the billion dollar banks and no refinancing for households and small and medium size firms leading to bankruptcies, buyouts and ‘consolidation’ namely, greater concentration of ownership. As a result the mass market stagnates but corporate and bank profits reach record levels. According to financial experts under the WSTC “new order” “bankers are a protected class who enjoy bonuses regardless of performance, while relying on the taxpayer to socialize their losses.”¹² In contrast labor, under Obama’s economic team, faces the greatest insecurity and most threatening situation in recent history: “in what is unquestionably novel is the ferocity with which US business sheds labor now that executive pay and incentive schemes are linked to short term performance targets.”¹⁴

Economic Consequences of State Policies

Because of the Wall Street “ takeover” of strategic economic policy positions in Government we can now understand the paradox of record profit margins in the midst of economic stagnation. We can comprehend why the capitalist crises has, at least temporarily, been replaced by a profound crises of labor. Within the power matrix of Wall Street-Treasury Dept. all the old corrupt and exploitative practices that led up to the 2008-2009 crash have returned: multi-billion dollar bonuses for investment bankers who led the economy into the crash; banks “snapping up billions of dollars of bundled mortgage products that resemble the sliced and diced debt some (sic) blame for the financial crises.”¹⁵ The difference today is that these speculative instruments are now backed by the taxpayer (Treasury). The supremacy of the financial structure of the pre-crises US economy is in place and thriving … “only” the US labor force has sunk into greater unemployment, declining living standards, widespread insecurity and profound discontent.

Conclusion: The Case Against Capitalism and for Socialism

The profound crises of 2008-2009 provoked a spate of questioning of the capitalist system, even among many of its most ardent advocates¹⁶ criticism abounded. ‘Reform, regulation and redistribution’ were the fare of financial columnists. Yet the ruling economic and governing class took no heed. The workers are controlled by door mat union leaders and lack a political instrument. The right-wing pseudo populists embrace an even more virulent pro capitalist agenda, calling for across the board elimination of social programs and corporate taxes. Inside the state a major transformation has taken place which effectively smashed any link between capitalism and social welfare, between government decision-making and the electorate. Democracy has been relaced by a corporate state, founded on the revolving door between Treasury and Wall Street, which funnels public wealth to private financial coffers. The breach between the welfare of society and the operations of the financial architecture is definitive.

The activity of Wall Street has no social utility, its practioners enrich themselves with no redeeming activity. Capitalism has demonstrated conclusively, that it thrives through the degradation of tens of millions of workers and rejects the endless pleas for reform and regulation. Real existing capitalism cannot be harnessed to raising living standards or ensuring employment free of fear of large scale, sudden and brutal firings. Capitalism, as we experience it over the past decade and for the foreseeable future, is in polar opposition to social equality, democratic decision-making, and collective welfare.

Record capitalist profits are accrued by pillaging the public treasury, denying pensions and prolonging ‘work till you die’, bankrupting most families with exorbitant private corporate medical and educational costs.

More than ever in recent history, record majorities reject the rule by and for the bankers and the corporate ruling class.¹⁷ Inequalities between the top 1% and the bottom 99% have reached record proportions. CEO’s earn 325 times that of an average worker.¹² Since the state has become the ‘foundation’ of the economy of the Wall Street predators, and since ‘reform’ and regulation has dismally failed, it is time to consider a fundamental systemic transformation that begins via a political revolution which forcibly ousts the non-elected financial and corporate elites running the state for their own exclusive interests. The entire political process, including elections, are profoundly corrupt: each level of office has its own inflated price tag.The current Presidential contest will cost $2 to $3 billion dollars to determine which of the servants of Wall Street will preside over the revolving door.

Socialism is no longer the scare word of the past. Socialism involves the large-scale reorganization of the economy, the transfer of trillions from the coffers of predator classes’ of no social utility to the public welfare. This change can finance a productive and innovative economy based on work and leisure, study and sport. Socialism replaces the everyday terror of dismissal with the security that brings confidence, assurance and respect to the workplace. Workplace democracy is at the heart of the vision of 21st century socialism. We begin by nationalizing the banks and eliminating Wall Street. Financial institutions are redesigned to create productive employment, to serve social welfare and to preserve the environment. Socialism would begin the transition, from a capitalist economy directed by predators and swindlers and a state at their command, toward an economy of public ownership under democratic control.

1. BBC News, Feb. 8 2012.
2. FT 1/19/12, p7.
3. Financial Times (FT) 2/1/12, p2.
4. FT 2/1/12.
5. FT 1/30/12.
6. Earthlink News, 2/16/12.
7. FT 2/13/12 P9.
8. FT 1/30/12 p6.
9. FT 1/30/12, p6.
10. FT 1/10/12, p7.
11. FT 1/20/12, p11.
12. FT 1/9/12, p5.
13. FT 2/6/12, p7.
14. FT 1/9/2012, p5.
15. FT 2/8/12, p1.
16. FT 1/8/12 to 1/30/12
17. FT 2/6/12, p6.

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.

Karl Marx may not have referred to the 1% and the 99% when he wrote of those extremes in the 19th century, but they certainly capture this moment in the 21st. Americans appalled at minority domination of national wealth as they pay for endless wars, increasing inequality and vanishing public services have joined a rising global movement for democracy.

65% of the planet’s 7 billion people are poor, bringing the 21st century still closer to Marx’s words of the 19th. Humanity’s call for another world is growing louder and more insistent. The forces of reaction are working to smother that voice through their private governments and media but also through supposedly public and even progressive political circles.

In a particularly sad irony, a budding form of anarchic democracy in America grows through the “Occupy” movement, while an attempt at such governance in Libya has been crushed, at least temporarily. The NATO attack succeeded in obliterating a governing force that tried representing a majority of the Libyan people. While Gaddafi’s regime made many mistakes after its initial socialist phase, perhaps most seriously in re-aligning with the treacherous west, its Green Book attempt to create real and not simply representative democracy was laughed at by cynics but in line with anarchist dreams of power coming from collective will and not individual leadership. Many in the Occupy movement may not know what really happened in Libya, but under thought control exercised by agents of the 1% relatively few have any idea.

More important, growing numbers of people are learning that minority ruled society is the root cause of most problems facing humanity. That these problems grow more severe each day makes the increased demand for change both timely and ever more necessary. The Climate Change meetings in Durban that found the 1% ruling powers standing in the way of any change threatening their fanatic worship of private investment and belief in the market deity only showed more conclusively that democracy of the 99% must become reality to end the hypocritical sham that has gone by its name far too long.

Occupy Wall Street’s General Assembly urged “the people of the world…create a process to address the problems we face, and generate solutions accessible to everyone.”

These solutions are impossible under the domain of private capital’s 1%. The un-regulated markets of obsessive profit seeking are like un-protected sex. Even at their best they can produce unwanted results and at their worst they may produce terminal disease, which is what present global market forces have created. We cannot opt for a temporary remission via private profiteering which carries the disease; the 99% need to consider the abolition of minority dominated market forces and the beginning of democratic control of global resources, in the interest of all the earth’s inhabitants and not just a tiny group of multi billionaires. In an alleged modern, civilized, digitized society, it’s time we end stupid mythology about hard work earning people incredible sums of money that bring them the power of gods.

How do people come by such wealth? How many packages must they deliver, students must they teach, patrons must they serve, miles must they drive, wounds must they bandage, legal briefs must they submit, floors must they sweep, children must they raise, to end up with a billion dollars? Ten billion dollars?

What sense does it make to have one human living on millions of dollars a week while billions of humans live on less than five dollars a day?

The imperial rulers maintain dominance only by virtue of military might. Without massive murder power such as was exercised in Libya and is threatened in Syria and Iran, they would already be gone and as global opposition grows that power will soon not be enough to dominate the planet. Newer threats to powerful nations like China and Russia only show the near dementia of rulers nearing the end of their reign.

But the madness of the diminishing cult, with nuclear weapons at their disposal, threatens our future, just as humanity shows signs of coming together to create a different world of peace, social justice and protection for the environment that sustains all mankind. Leaving control of social wealth in private hands would be suicide for the human race.

Henry Ford once said, “It is well enough that the people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.” He was correct. We need to understand that system and transform it by creating federal, state and municipal public banks, owned, administered and investing according to the wishes of the people whose funds are held by these institutions. We cannot rely on some wealthy people investing according to moral principles unknown to most of their class. They should be taxed and their money democratically invested in the societies that created this wealth in the first place. We need to create a sensible maximum wage and a higher minimum wage that guarantees survival, with a social safety net that allows no one to go hungry, experience untended illness, or live without shelter.

There is far more than enough wealth to house, feed, clothe and benefit everyone, if we simply stop squandering that wealth on minorities who use it to perpetuate a system that is bringing us closer to social disaster. Capitalism is in a crisis which will get much worse before we make it better. In order to do that we need to end inequality and begin to recognize that the survival of one is dependent on the survival of all.

Happy New Year. 2012 could be a big one.

Even before the elections, on the streets of Moscow and Petersburg, in the major cities’ (and even some of the provincial ones’) classrooms and among school teachers, people had begun talking about politics, albeit a politics which does exist as of yet. After the election farce, it was not just the usual attendees of the right-wing “Marches of the Discontented” and left-wing protests taking to the streets of Moscow and Petersburg, but even those who were previously apolitical. And this is important.

It would be wrong to claim that these elections were fundamentally more fraudulent than previous ones or even the 1996 elections in which Zyuganov conceded to Yeltsin. But this time the now-traditional vote rigging was crasser than usual and occurred under different circumstances. In order to understand what precisely those circumstances are, we have to remember who the current powers that be in Russia are. Too many people have managed to forget this, and the new generation (thanks to the liberals’ successful demolition of our education system) never knew.

20 years of pillage

The USSR was dissolved by the party nomenklatura, who then undertook to seize (“privatize”) all state property while also attempting to maintain power. The current regime is merely an extension of the Yeltsin government. During the course of the 1990s everything inherited from the Soviet Union was torn asunder — a vicious process that continued throughout the decade, engendering countless local wars, widespread crime, impoverishment, marginalization, and death. As a result, an intense feeling of hatred took hold over the vast majority of the country’s population. Various scams and tricks allowed this process to continue all the way up to the economic catastrophe of 1998 — and even for a little while after that. But then the jig was up and it was time to change the signs.

The ideological project known as “Putin” was created at the end of the 90s in order to preserve Yeltsin’s oligarchic system, but with a new face (the very same system that is being exposed in London now as the court battle between Berezovsky and Abramovich unfolds). The project’s purpose was supposedly to counteract the consequences of the “roaring 90s,” which entailed rehabilitating certain elements of the Soviet past. The old Soviet hymn was brought back, having been rewritten for the fourth time by the very same author Sergei Mikhalkov, along with red flags for Victory Day and the mass production and distribution of “St. George ribbons” [trans. note: the St. George Medal was a medal of honor given to Soviet soldiers during WWII, itself an attempt by the Stalin regime to revive Russian patriotism]. They “discovered” some positive aspects of Soviet history such as the “strong state” and the “effective manager” comrade Stalin. But in the country’s social structure and economy nothing changed fundamentally: the capitalist oligarchic system was preserved and even reinforced, even if the crew at the helm changed a little bit. The bureaucracy and big capital merged into a single class, but not everyone made it. Khodorkovskii, for instance, went to jail (as he made a wrong move in the clan war). In the 2000s, the process of class formation came to an end. The ruling class crystallized and achieved a kind of semi-permanence. The division of spoils came to an end, but this new ruling class was not capable of anything, except cannibalizing the remains of the old Soviet economic and scientific achievements.

Nevertheless, a good many people took Putin seriously, although we won’t delve into this story of public deception here, the success of which was largely facilitated by rising prices for raw materials. Throughout the Putin decade the strip mining of the Soviet inheritance continued, which resulted in its virtual destruction in all spheres: the economy, education, the sciences. Scientists emigrated or died prematurely, education and the health care system were successfully and consciously laid to waste under the pretext of “reform”, and the strategic sectors of manufacturing were dismantled by consensus between foreign competitors and our home-grown parasites. If social inequality somewhat lessened during this period, it was largely due to a certain “bounce back” after the monstrous impoverishment of the population in the 90s. Russia definitively entered the ranks of the dependent countries of the “third world”, albeit one with nuclear “red button” inherited from the Soviet Union. The “middle class” — all the necessary qualifications of this term aside – did grow in size a bit during the 00s in the largest cities, but only thanks to the expansion of the ranks of managers and servants serving the ruling class, just as you would expect in a country of peripheral capitalism.

In the Putin decade feelings of disappointment and discontent slowly accumulated amongst the masses. At the beginning of the 2000s politically naïve voters had completely different hopes: an end to the widespread thievery at the top and the destruction of the economy and the return of some kind — any kind — of social justice. But what happened was the opposite. Now these frustrations and feelings of discontent are rising to the fore. The crisis that began in 2008 and continues to this day sowed seeds of uncertainty amongst the people and detonated their hopes of “stability” (and stability, after all, was the mantra of the Putin project!).

The powers that be have gotten so lazy and so caught up with their own personal enrichment that they have become completely deprofessionalized, having lost their last competent members long ago. Even in the realm of propaganda! Take for instance the recent pseudo-exposé about “Golos” [trans. note: a Russian liberal NGO doing independent election monitoring], which supposedly is carrying out orders from the American and Swedish intelligence services to destabilize Russia and recruit young students as spies. It was the most unbelievable garbage one could imagine. By comparison, the anti-dissident propaganda films of the Andropov era, which in their own time were considered quite sloppy, seem like cinematographic masterpieces on the level of Bergman and Fillini! And so it goes everywhere and with everything now in Russia. Our GLONASS satellites and Fobos-Grunt probes are falling out of the sky, our Bulava missiles do not fly, our orphanages and nursing homes are burning down, our Bulgaria river cruise ships are sinking and our Sayano-Shushenskii hydroelectric stations are crumbling. The ruling class simply does not know how to do anything anymore; except rob, cheat and steal and then divvy up the loot.

“Elections,” “Parties,” and “Leaders”

Elections in Russia have been rigged ever since the attack on the Supreme Council in 1993 and the new constitution was passed. But before that, elections to the legislature were marked by low turnout, with just about 25% of registered voters casting a ballot. For that reason, the first act of voting fraud began with inflating the number of voters, so that the elections were not ruled void. Then, with the same purpose, they removed the “Against all” option from the ballots.

During previous elections they were already resorting to audacious acts of fraud. In fact the fraud and kleptocratic politics of the powers that be evoked protests those times too. But we need to remember how they ended.

After the attack on the parliament in 1993, all its leaders — Rutskoy, Khasbulatov and others [trans. note: parliamentary opposition leaders at that time] — managed to insinuate themselves into the new political system wonderfully well. While they were in fact the losers in that battle, they were simply the losing faction and thus occupied not first, but second place in the new system. They apparently were not worried at all about all those who died in Moscow on those fateful October days in 1993.

In 1996 Yeltsin’s victory in the presidential election was facilitated by the consolidation of the ruling class. Zyuganov, who had won the first run-off, voluntarily conceded to Yeltsin. Despite its platform and all the protests that the Communist Party (CPRF) seemingly supported, this supposedly communist party simply conceded to the powers that be — and did so as soon as it could.

The protests against monetization of state benefits and the commercialization of education are some of the most recent, yet already forgotten examples of mass public actions. In 2005-2006 these protests — far larger than the ones we see today [trans. note: this article was written before the mass actions on Saturday, 10 December] in 550 cities and towns, each with participation of tens of thousands of people. What was the upshot of these protests? Some small concessions, mostly on the local level; in other words a complete flop. This was the inevitable result because the ruling class would have had to make available a significant amount of funds to the erstwhile recipients of those state benefits — funds that they already had their dirty paws on. With today’s protests, though, the government will likely gladly allow for some repeat elections in this or that contested district, as such a concession will have no effect on anything of consequence.

Right now none of the parties — not the CPRF, not Just Russia, and certainly not the Liberal-Democratic Party (LDPR) — are willing to declare the elections completely fraudulent. We are already hearing from their representatives things like: “it would be absolutely silly to give up the opportunities that increased Duma representation will offer (CPRF);” that they will create a federal “election violation investigation committee” to “make inquiries” and that “we do not recognize the results for certain districts, but there were districts where there was no vote rigging at all (Just Russia).” These are pathetic excuses made for the sake of maintaining their Duma salaries and kickbacks. They have been making these excuses their entire parliamentary career. Certainly none of these parties has raised doubts about the prevailing political system or state of social relations. Nor have any of them promised to abolish or at least substantially amend the existing constitution, alter property relations or punish those who are guilty for the ruling class’ crimes.

You have to understand something. These clowns in parliament are corrupt to the core. They sit in parliament for ten and half years doing absolutely nothing. And they do not plan to do anything. They are all just factions of a single ruling class, utilized for the management of public perception. In no way do they fundamentally differ from One Russia, except maybe in their greater degree of civility. If you believe them for even a second (having been deceived, perhaps, by their high-profile visits to opposition protests, whereby they are simply trying to accumulate political capital for future sell-outs), they will just betray you again — just like they did ten times before.

But what about the leaders of the so-called “extraparliamentary opposition?” Can we trust them? Let’s take a look:

Boris Nemtsov — formerly a close member of the oligarchic Yeltsin “family,” and one of the architects of the 1998 default and personally responsible for that economic catastrophe.¹

Ilya Yashin — former leader of Yabloko’s youth faction, who organized MGLU student protests in 2003 against tuition hikes and later recruited students to participate in his party’s protests for a modest sum of money (in 2003 it was about 200 rubles, but later 500).

Aleksei Naval’ny — by his own admission, a “Russian nationalist,” was expelled from Yabloko for nationalism, is aligned with DPNI (Movement against Illegal Immigration [trans. note: a nativist group whose politics are akin to those of the U.S. "minuteman" groups]), is a regular participant in the fascist “Russian marches,” yet despite these well-known facts, is hailed by the Russian liberal press [trans. note: and the Western media as well² ]. He is warmly received at the U.S. State Department (and here is one case where the dullards in Putin’s propaganda team are not lying). Let’s be very clear: fascists and nationalist populists have never defended the interests of the working class — they simply exploit them.

And now voicing their support for the protests are the former Putin PR rep Marat Gel’man and Chubais and Gaidar’s old pal from the privatization team Alfred Koch (and the assassin of Gusinskii’s old NTV station). All of these characters are from the same group of 90s-era parasites.

None of these people will hesitate at any moment to sell the protesters out for their own economic interests or for the sake of political capital. Once again, they are just a fraction of the ruling class. A fraction — but nothing more than that. Their struggle is one between clans. That is not ours!

Elections, elections…

What is their program? Under which slogans are they calling people into the streets? A protest under the slogan “I’m for honest elections” — such a protest constitutes an a priori defeat. Any election presided over by these forces simply cannot be “honest”. Any federal level election these days is a farce. Therefore, they will only result in the usual fraud. The only exit from this impasse is to create an extra-systemic opposition. It is pointless to hold “honest elections” or support the corrupt politicians from CPRF, Just Russia, LDPR or Yabloko. It is imperative that we begin to engage in some do-it-yourself politics, outside the pre-drawn lines of the powers that be and in direct contradiction of parliamentary cretinism.

“Honest elections” according to prevailing constitutional and electoral rules will only lead to replacing Putin with a Zhirinovskii [trans. note: the literally clownish leader of LDPR] or Sobyanin [trans. note: current mayor of Moscow and Putin protégé] or the half-fascist Naval’ny. How are they better? There will be no radical concessions on the part of the powers that be. These are people who have stolen billions of dollars, all stored away in foreign banks, and built palatial estates on the Black Sea Coast (as both Putin and the Patriarch have done).³ They have no intention of giving up these things.

“Honest elections” will in no way solve the most pressing problems of the country. They will not change Russia’s position as a raw material-supplying appendage of the West. They will not revive our devastated and thoroughly stripped manufacturing sector — not to mention our high-tech industries (robotics, electronics, aviation, biotech, etc) because we already lack the human resources necessary for it. They won’t resurrect those millions of our countrymen and women who went to an early grave, driven there by the ruling class.⁴

They will not repair our now thoroughly broken health care system and will not make it once again free and universal. “Honest elections” will not resuscitate our de facto destroyed and utterly profaned education system. They will not eliminate mass alcoholism and drug addiction or our AIDS and hepatitis epidemics. They will not undo the country’s monstrous, shameful social inequality, as a result of which some people are already killing themselves and children out of hunger (just read the news!⁵ ), whereas others are buying islands, mansions, yachts and soccer clubs for millions of dollars. Those “honest elections” will not change anything except to replace one set of snouts in the offices with another – and yet all exactly the same.

What is to be done?

The problem, of course, is not with the elections, but with capitalism. If some fools still think that all our woes stem from the fact that we do not have the kind of capitalism they have abroad (ours is the “wrong capitalism” or “underdeveloped capitalism”), just let them have a look at what is going on abroad: an economic crisis, the collapse of the financial system, declining production, mass unemployment, riots in the streets, three million families have been tossed out of their homes in the U.S. alone (and this the richest capitalist country), and the impending meltdown of the Eurozone. The peripheral countries are being hit even worse by all this.

Political rejects like Yashin, Navalny, Nemtsov, Limonov [trans. note: leader of the National Bolshevik movement, a "left-leaning" nationalist group] and others are all hoping to ride atop this wave of spontaneous and so far ideologically formless protests into the political “big leagues” (just like Zhirinovski and his ilk managed to do 20 years ago right before the collapse of the USSR). Why help them in this endeavor? A repeat of 1991 (and 1993 and 1996 and 2005) — this is the same damn rake. The country’s economy will not withstand a second 1991; there is no Soviet material reserve left to tap. It has already been devoured and pillaged. Our entrance into the WTO is literally on the horizon, which assumes, by the way, a second edition of “shock therapy” — and right now would be a great time from the ruling class’s perspective to have an occasion to tighten the screws even further.

The substantial uptick — even under the conditions of vote rigging — in the share of votes for the CPRF and Just Russia speaks to the fact that socio-economic issues are important to the voters. And it’s precisely socio-economic issues that should be in the slogans of the protesters: against joining WTO; against capitation financing of schools;⁶ against the demolition of health care and education. But so far there is not even a call for progressive taxation of the rich [trans. note: Russia has a flat tax of 13 percent]! And the current “leaders” of the “opposition” are keen on keeping even this modest demand under wraps. Therefore there is no point in following them.

If you want change — do not bother to choose between Putin and Zhirinovski, Medvedev and Navalny or Zyuganov and Nemtsov. Do not entrust your fate once again to another new, wonderful “daddy.” Instead work to create structures that reflect your own social interests. Certain comrades on the left have already claimed that the current events are a “revolution”, an “uprising”, a “revolt” and see in them the specter of a Russian Tahrir Square. This rrr-revolutionism and exaggerated self-ascribed importance is not only laughable, but shameful even. It is inexcusable to mislead the youth (who are still not all that politicized) with talk of easy fixes. In Moscow there are eleven million people, but only about seven thousand took to the streets, whereas those in the provinces remained mostly passive and indifferent.

The only thing that could save Russia (or any other country occupying the periphery of the capitalist world system) from further degradation, decay and decomposition is the overthrow of the capitalist system itself, in other words: socialist revolution. That is a worthy cause for which to live and struggle. Socialist revolution, however, will not take place by the will of some petty provocateurs like Naval’ny or Yashin, who, please note, do not strive for revolution – they actually fear it. They simply want to amalgamate themselves with the same class to which Putin, Medvedev, Abramovich, Deripaska and the like belong and join them in robbing and oppressing you. Do you really need this?

If you really want to go to protests, go with your own slogans and signs — ones that reflect your own interests, not the interests of opportunists like Naval’ny and Yashin. May we suggest some?

“Give us universal, equal and free education and let the oligarchs and bureaucrats pay for it!”

“Give us universally accessible and free health care and let the oligarchs and bureaucrats pay for it!”

“Down with the ruling class funded trade unions of FNPR! Give us free and independent trade unions!”⁷

“Down with the pro-capitalist new Labor Code! Bring back the Soviet-era KZoT!”⁸

“Down with the political police! Abolish the OPONs and the “E” Center!”⁹

“Down with clericalization of the state and schools! We demand full separation of church and state!”¹⁰

“Give us student stipends that will allow us to actually study full-time, not part-time and let the oligarchs and bureaucrats pay for it!”

“Hail to the new, democratic constitution! Power to the people, not the oligarchs and bureaucrats!”

And demand that they give you the opportunity to pronounce those slogans. If they do not, you will be taken advantage of again by the opportunists and parasites.

Do not rely on elections or career politicians to solve your problems. Career politicians are professional con-men and flimflammers. If you wish to defend your rights and your interests, create blocks of resistance to oligarchic and bureaucratic caprice at your places of work, study and residence. Fight against the introduction and/or increase of tuition and medical fees; against the closing of hospitals, schools and daycare centers; against the demolition of parks for the more churches; against the imposition of religion and obscurantism in schools; against low salaries, speed-ups and overtime; against the thievery of the utilities companies. Begin with these small things as there is no other choice!

Letting off steam and venting your frustrations at protests will not change your situation one bit. The bureaucrats and capitalists couldn’t give a damn about your angry shouts on the street. They will not lower the exorbitant utility fees, they will not increase the paltry salaries and pensions, they will not resolve the housing problem, they will not abolish the OPK¹¹ or the university entrance exam, they will not reinstate free universal health care. We need to engage in concrete battles for very concrete things.

The choice is this: class struggle or replacing one set of parasites with another. No other choice is available.

The process whereby one realizes his or her interests and fights for them is not an instantaneous one. It is not just attending one or several protests. In our country the people have for too long stopped thinking and acting in line with their own interests. But this here is the only chance to actually change things for real. Do not let yourself step on the rake again!

1. Anatolii Lantov, “‘Stoprotsentnaya lozh’ Borisa Nemtsova,” Politoline, December 27, 2010.
2. Foreign Policy magazine named Navalny one its "Top 100 Global Thinkers" for 2011. See "The FP Top 100 Global Thinkers," Foreign Policy, December 2011. The New York Times also featured a rather laudatory article about Navalny, although to its credit, it did include a disclaimer about his politics: "Five years ago, [Navalny] quit the liberal party Yabloko, frustrated with the liberals’ infighting and isolation from mainstream Russian opinion. Liberals, meanwhile, have deep reservations about him, because he espouses Russian nationalist views. He has appeared as a speaker alongside neo-Nazis and skinheads, and once starred in a video that compares dark-skinned Caucasus militants to cockroaches. While cockroaches can be killed with a slipper, he says that in the case of humans, ‘I recommend a pistol.’ See Ellen Barry, “Rousing Russia with a Phrase,” New York Times, December 9 2011.
3. For some pictures of his palatial estate on the Black Sea shore. Putin’s personal wealth is estimated at $40 billion. See “Sostoyanie Putina mozhet dostigat’ 40 milliardov dollarov,” Novy Region 2, November 16, 2007.
4. In his study on Russian mortality in the 90s, epidemiologist Neil Bennet stated that “the Russian mortality crisis of 1990-95 represents the most precipitous decline in national life expectancy ever recorded in the absence of war, oppression, famine, or major disease.” He estimated that between 1990-1995 there were 1.36 to 1.57 million premature deaths, with approximately 70% occurring amongst men. This calamitous drop coincided with the economic reforms of that same period. See N. Bennet et al., “Demographic Implications of the Russian Mortality Crisis,” World Development, 26.11 (1998): p. 1921. Boris Kagarlitskii likewise notes that, “During the Civil War, from 1918 to 1920, the Russian population fell by 2.8 million. During the years of Yeltsin’s ‘first presidency’ alone, the decline was 3.4 million.” See Boris Kagarlitskii, Russia under Yeltsin and Putin: Neoliberal Autocracy, London: Pluto Press, 2000, p. 3.
5. In January 2010, a women who had been laid off and couldn’t afford to buy food suffocated her children and then hanged herself. See Irina Gollay, “V Chelyabinske zhenschina zadushila detey iz-za bednost”, Komsomolskaya Pravda, January 25, 2010, .
6. The capitation financing scheme is explained by a local teacher and activist of the Communist Party K. Ladogin thusly: “The term “capitation financing of educational institutions” means that every middle school student in the country will get an equal amount of funding. This money will go to the school where the individual student is studying. The schools must now actively promote themselves to attract more students. The school principal should therefore become a financial manager and the vice principal a “representative of the government within the school – in other words a commissar and should “insinuate himself into the teacher collective”. He is also charged with conducting monthly testing of the students and send the results up the ladder.” See K. Ladogin, “Uchitelya dolzhny otgovarivat shkolnikov ot postupleniya v vuzy,” Skepsis, September 17, 2007, .
7. In a recent article for the Russian Analytical Digest, Irina Olimpieva provides this useful summary of the current labor union structure of Russia:

   Since the beginning of the 1990s, the Russian labor movement has been divided into two continuously warring camps—the “official” unions, affiliated with the Soviet-legacy Federation of Independent Trade Unions (FNPR) and the so-called “free” or “alternative” labor unions. Free labor unions differ from official unions in many respects, including their militant nature and conflict-based ideology, grass-roots methods of labor mobilization and organization, the economic resources that they use, and their forms of membership and leadership. Today two different modes of labor interest representation exist at the same time: the distributional mode employed mainly by the official unions and the protest mode, which is more typical for free labor unions. While official labor unions continue to dominate the organized labor scene, in recent years they have faced growing competition from their alternative counterparts. Overall, the dominance of the distributive
   system, based on cooperation between the employer and union, over the protest model signifies the preservation of the strength of management in labor relations, squeezing unions to the sidelines in serving workers. Accordingly, labor relations based on market mechanisms have not replaced the previous administrative system as many observers had once anticipated.

   See Irina Olimpieva, “‘Free’ and ‘Official’ Labor Unions in Russia: Different Modes of Labor Interest Representation,” Russian Analytical Digest 104 (October 27 2011), p. 2.

8. The new Russian Labor Code, passed in 2002 eliminated many rights long held by Russian workers and their unions (the old code was inherited from the USSR) such as overtime compensation for working over 40 hours. After the passage of the law, respected legal specialist and pro-labor activist Vladimir Mironov was moved to comment that “The practical meaning of the new labor code is that it gives the employer the legal right to force his employees to work as long as he wants. The worker gets nothing in exchange – not even token compensation.” See V. Mironov, Uzdechka dlya trudyashchikhsya, VMN, (11.01.2002), which can be read here: . See also Aleksandr Yelagin, “New Russian Labor Code Allows Employers to Gut Workers’ Rights,” Socialist Action (July 2000).
9. OPON (formerly OMON) is more or less the Russian equivalent of the U.S.’s SWAT team and is frequently deployed to break up demonstrations and/or intimidate protesters. Center “E” is the Russian Interior Ministry’s notorious “Center for Extremism Prevention,” which Amnesty International has accused of stifling dissent from journalists and activists under charges of extremist activity and using torture to extract confessions from criminal suspects. For a recently published evaluation of Center E’s performance over the last three years, see Pyoter Sarukhanov, “‘Eshnikov’ bez raboty ne ostavyat,” Novaya Gazeta, October 10, 2011.
10. In 2007 a course on Russian Orthodoxy was introduced in public schools. See Clifford J. Levy, “Welcome or Not, Orthodoxy Is Back in Russia’s Public Schools,” New York Times, September 23, 2007. See also “Otkrtoe pismo nauchnykh sotrudnikov protiv vvedeniya OPK v shkolakh i teologii v universitetakh i VAK,” Alternativy, April 4, 2008.
11. OPK stands for Fundamentals of Russian Orthodoxy Culture, a new course that has been introduced into the Russian public school curriculum.

Speaking to about 500 Mussolini Democrats and more than a dozen reporters at the tactically sophisticated Invertebrates For Obama think tank in Washington, Obama lashed out at “so-called progressives” clamoring for an expanded New Deal.

“Far too many Americans are looking for a hand-out, not a hand up,” he said, apparently targeting the growing Occupy Wall Street movement and its sympathizers. “The reason we must reject socialist economics is that it conflicts with our core political philosophy about the purpose of government.”

“We cannot preserve liberty for ourselves and our posterity if government fails to fulfill its obligation to sustain the free market system with trillions of dollars of bailout money for selfless Wall Street firms deemed ‘too big to fail.’” Therefore we must seek common ground with the GOP and renounce relics of the Communist era like Social Security and Medicare.” To sustained applause the president added, “I hereby do so.”

Obama called for a reform of his own health care law to include a “private option” that would allow HMOs to deport Americans without health insurance to Cuba, in hopes of bankrupting the free health care system available on the Communist-ruled island. “The cost of treating fifty million uninsured Americans should bring down the Castro brothers once and for all,” proclaimed Obama gleefully.

The president said he would grant federal aid to states expelling the medically needy to Cuba, adding that he would veto any attempt to have them treated in the U.S. “We’ve got to get beyond the idea that democratic government means doling out aid to irresponsible citizens who refuse to pull their own weight.” The president emphatically rejected appeals for government assistance from ordinary Americans. “As we all know from civics lessons the only legitimate function government has is performing those tasks that Americans cannot perform themselves – like carpet-bombing foreign nations and giving away the store to transnational corporations and international banks.”

The president went on to state that his reformed health care reform bill would prove itself a more efficient system than the universal care available through Medicare. “Obviously the market is more efficient than government,” said Obama. “I mean, how much equity is returned to stockholders under Medicare? Absolutely none! Whereas under HMOs investors are making a killing, if you’ll pardon the expression,” the president said. Asked about the much higher administrative costs under privatized care, Obama explained that those “don’t count,” because they are passed on to the public.

On issues like declaring the war in Iraq “over,” Obama portrayed himself as the candidate who goes the extra mile for peace. “George Bush declared ‘mission accomplished’ in Iraq only once, while I am now working on my second final withdrawal from that liberated country,” the president said with obvious pride.

Obama also called for “staking out the middle ground” by privatizing Social Security, outsourcing the public schools to China, and handing over municipal water systems to corporate polluters in need of infusions of public capital in order to pay off fines imposed for systematically polluting the environment.

Europeans invaded the Americans and stole the lands and wealth held by native peoples for thousands of years. They enslaved black Africans who they held as slaves and even after slavery ended they kept them as second-class citizens.

Black people developed various forms of struggle including civil disobedience, sit-ins, pickets, mass rallies, propaganda, and voting for equality where possible. Another form of struggle was the Black Panther Party’s armed self-defence when attacked by Ku Klux Klan and the ruling class’ police. Another form was the Gravey Movement that called for separation from the United States, demanding territory in the south. Very much like the Tamils after the 1976 Vattukottai resolution.

In the United States millions of blacks and whites fought this racist discrimination for over a century and eventually won most basic rights but not before millions were arrested, imprisoned for long times, and many murdered. Many thousands of black people were lynched, burned alive, mutilated, tortured to death until the 1980s.

Fidel Castro: “Those who are exploited are our compatriots all over the world; and the exploiters all over the world are out enemies…Our country is really the whole world, and all the revolutionaries of the world are our brothers.” “To be internationalist is to settle our debt with humanity.”

Che Guevara from Socialism and Man: “The revolutionary is the ideological motor force of the revolution. If he forgets his proletarian internationalism, the revolution, which he heads 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.”

I believe that these principles apply to the Tamils of Sri Lanka. I believe Che would agree with your struggle for equality and when not possible to achieve within the Sri Lankan chauvinist context, he would understand your fight for your own nationhood.

I think this is also what Lenin meant in his 1916 thesis, “The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination”:

“Victorious socialism must necessarily establish a full democracy and, consequently, not only introduce full equality of nations but also realize the right of the oppressed nations to self-determination, that is, the right to free political separation.”

I am hurt and deeply disappointed that the government of Cuba—where I have lived and worked side by side with the people and government for eight years—as well as the socialist-progressive governments of Venezuela, Bolivia and other Latin American governments have not understood that those principles must apply to the Tamil people of Sri Lanka. I got involved in solidarity with your people’s struggle because you have been so brutally treated, and because of these righteous principles expressed by Lenin, Fidel and Che. I have written critically about these governments siding with the Sinhalese governments of Sri Lanka while it denies the Tamil people those basic principles and rights, and commits genocide.

Perhaps Cuba+ have not understood the history of struggle that Tamils have undergone to win full equal rights before taking up arms. For 30 years you fought peacefully but you were met with brutal force, with pogroms/massacres of hundreds and thousands of people—even worse than that used against blacks in the US, and against Palestinians by Israelis. And, unfortunately, it was not only the governments that have done this against Tamils but also misguided Buddhist monks who betray the peaceful, coexistence values of Buddhism.

Your people’s organizations must meet and discuss these realities with the communist and socialist parties and with people’s grass roots and indigenous organizations in Latin America and elsewhere. You must explain to them your history, why you had to take up arms and fight for separation, for an independent nation. They have to hear of your suffering, of your struggles, why Tamil Eelam is a NECESSITY. You must remind them what they say about international solidarity, about what Lenin meant about political separation when the ruling powers will not grant a people their basic democratic and equal rights.

The progressive governments have won majority votes for new constitutions in Bolivia, in Ecuador, in Venezuela that grant equal rights to their indigenous peoples. In Bolivia, for instance, under the new constitution there are four official national languages, three of them are indigenous ones as well as Spanish. The same equalitarian development is happening in several progressive, pro-socialist governments in Latin America. If these people could know you simply want these same rights, they would listen to you and stop backing Sri Lanka. But they have been misguided because when they hear the worst terrorist in the world—the United States of America government—raise a little finger of possible criticism that maybe the Sri Lanka government should investigate itself to find some official scapegoat for violating human rights, Cuba should react against this hypocrisy. But they must know that in this case the Sri Lanka government is a terrible violator of human rights, and not just against the Tamils, but also against Muslims, the indigenous tribes, and it also exploits Sinhalese workers and the poor, and castes.

We must understand that Cuba, and so many governments and peoples, has been victimized by the United States false accusation that it commits “human rights abuse”. Cuba has been blockaded by the US since its victory in 1959. The US tried to overthrow the new revolution in April 1961. It brought the entire world to the brink of a nuclear war in October 1962. The US has sabotaged Cuba, murdered and handicapped thousands of its citizens; it even infiltrated bacteriological diseases in its livestock, its grains and sugar cane.

What has Cuba done to “deserve” this murderous aggression? It has done what Big Capital does not do, what imperialists will not do. It has introduced full and free education and health care. It has assured every citizen food and shelter. No one starves. 80% of its people own their own homes after paying the state simply what it actually costs to build them.

It has organized an excellent system of disaster management in which people and their animals are evacuated before hurricanes hit the island nation. And more often than not no one is killed, and their livestock is saved. That is not what happens in the United States especially in the areas where blacks and poor people live and are struck by natural disasters.

Cuba came to the aid of Angola when attacked by apartheid South Africa. Cuba, alongside with the new Venezuela, comes to the aid of tens of millions of people in scores of land around the world with their medical care, curing even blindness, and educating people to read and write, offering sports and technical assistance. Cuba has more doctors serving the international arena than is offered by all the governments in the United Nations. Cuba does not export war and torture, disease and starvation. It exports “human capital”.

Tamils in Tamil Nadu, Sri Lanka Tamil refugees here and in the Diaspora should not rely on the greatest terrorist in the world to help them. The Yankees offer no help without humiliating costs. We must be aware that since World War 11, the US has invaded/intervened militarily 160 times in 66 countries. We must understand that now with a black-faced puppet president of Big Capital, the imperialists are at war in seven countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya, Somalia, Ethiopia and now Uganda. They kill tens of millions; they torture hundreds of thousands; they starve hundreds of millions.

US’s staunch ally, Zionist Israel commits genocide against the Palestinian people. It offered Mossad intelligence, great amounts of weaponry, killer aircraft and even pilots to Sri Lanka, in order to murder the Tamils. After the end of the war, May 2009, Sri Lanka sent its military chief-of-staff, Donald Perera, to Israel as its ambassador, a reward for Zionist assistance. He told the largest Zionist daily, Yedioth Abornoth: “I consider your country a partner in the war against terror,” thus coupling terrorism with the Palestinians’ struggle for their homeland and the Tamils’ simple right to exist in peace and equality.

Perera spoke proudly of having “a great relationship with your military industries and with Israel Aerospace industries.”

Perera spoke about the murder, on May 31, 2010, of nine Turkish solidarity activists bound for Gaza with survival supplies: “I can understand that Israel had to protect itself.”

Perhaps because of the complexity of geo-politics, the history of standing for sovereignty of the member nations of the Non-Alignment Movement (NAM), the leaders of Cuba and ALBA lands (Bolivarian Alliance of the Peoples of Latin America) cannot support the goal of a separate nation within Sri Lanka. But they could be convinced to chastise the Sri Lankan government for its atrocities against the Tamil people, and the other oppressed people under the chauvinist Sinhalese leadership. They could see within the context of their moral ideology that it is only right that Tamils must have equality and the basic right to exist without fear of murder and takeovers of their homes and lands. Your peoples’ organizations should remind these pro-Palestinian governments that it is only Israel that supports the US blockade against Cuba; that it is the US and Israel that lead the tiny opposition to Palestine’s right to be a member of the United Nations.

Regardless of whether Cuba has achieved socialism—it is a long process after all and there is so much destruction and subversion coming from the Yankee imperialists—the Cuban people and the government are still worthy of our love and support. They have conducted no wars or torture against any people and they have helped many millions. It is now time that they are approached by all your organizations and become convinced to come to the aid of their natural brothers and sisters in Sri Lanka—the oppressed Tamil people.

We have wandered over the deserts and the seas. We have been hungry and thirsty. We have been murdered and tortured. We are of the working class, of the castes; we are many races and nationalities. We share a common vision: freedom and equality; bread and water on the table; a shelter over our heads. We must fight together to live in peace and harmony.

We must unite around the world and struggle for an independent international investigation into war crimes and crimes against humanity against Sri Lanka government leaders.

We must call for a worldwide Boycott of Sri Lanka. Che Guevara would be on our side today!

When Libya was granted its independence by the United Nations on December 24, 1951, it was described as one of the poorest and most backward nations of the world. The population at the time was not more than 1.5 million, was over 90% illiterate, and had no political experience or knowhow. There were no universities, and only a limited number of high schools which had been established seven years before independence.¹

Gaddafi had many grand plans. Many of them were of a pan-African nature. This included the formation of a United States of Africa.

Gaddafi’s Pan-African Projects

Colonel Gaddafi started the Great Man-Made River. The Great Man-Made River is a massive project to transform the Sahara Desert and reverse the desertification of Africa. The Great Man-Made River with its irrigation plans was also intended to help the agricultural sector in other parts of Africa. This project was one of the victims of NATO’s attacks on Libya.

Gaddafi also envisioned independent pan-African financial institutions. The Libyan Investment Authority and the Libyan Foreign Bank were important players in setting up these institutions. Gaddafi, through the Libyan Foreign Bank and the Libyan Investment Authority, was instrumental in setting up Africa’s first satellite network, the Regional African Satellite Communication Organization (RASCOM), to reduce African dependence on external powers.²

It is believed that his crowning achievement would have been the creation of the United States of Africa. The supranational entity would have been created through the African Investment Bank, the African Monetary Fund, and finally the African Central Bank. These institutions were all viewed with animosity by the European Union, United States, International Monetary Fund (IMF), and World Bank.

Gaddafi’s Wealth Redistribution Project

Gaddafi had a wealth redistribution project inside Libya. U.S. Congressional sources in a report to the U.S. Congress even acknowledge this. On February 18, 2011 the report stated:

In March 2008, [Colonel Gaddafi] announced his intention to dissolve most government administrative bodies and institute a Wealth Distribution Program whereby state oil revenues would be distributed to citizens on a monthly basis for them to administer personally, in cooperation, and via local committees. Citing popular criticism of government performance in a long, wide ranging speech, [he] repeatedly stated that the traditional state would soon be “dead” in Libya and that direct rule by citizens would be accomplished through the distribution of oil revenues. [The military], foreign affairs, security, and oil production arrangements reportedly would remain national government responsibilities, while other bodies would be phased out. In early 2009, Libya’s Basic People’s Congresses considered variations of the proposals, and the General People’s Congress voted to delay implementation.³

The Wealth Redistribution Project, along with the establishment of an anarchist political system, was viewed as a very serious threat by the U.S., the E.U., and a group of corrupt Libyan officials. If successful it could have created political unrest amongst many domestic populations around the world. Internally, many Libyan officials were working to delay the project.

Why Mahmoud Jibril Joined the Transitional Council

Amongst the Libyan officials who was opposed to this project and viewed it with horror was Mahmoud Jibril. Jibril was put into place by Saif Al-Islam Gaddafi. Because of strong influence and advice from the U.S. and the E.U., Saif Al-Islam selected Jibril to transform the Libyan economy and impose neo-liberal economic reforms.

Jibril would become the head of two bodies in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, the National Planning Council of Libya and National Economic Development Board of Libya. While the National Economic Development Board was a regular ministry, the National Planning Council would actually put Jibril in a government position above that of the equivalent of the prime minister–the Office of the General-Secretary of the People’s Committee of Libya. Jibril actually was one of the forces that opened the doors for privatization and poverty in Libya.

About six months before the conflict erupted in Libya, Mahmoud Jibiril actually met with Bernard-Henri Lévy in Australia to discuss forming the Transitional Council and deposing Gaddafi.⁴ He described Gaddafi’s Wealth Redistribution Project as “crazy” in minutes and documents from the National Economic Development Board of the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya.⁵ Jibril believed that the masses were not fit to govern themselves and that an elite should control the fate and wealth of any nation. What Jibril wanted to do is downsize the government and layoff a large segment of the public sector, but in exchange increase government regulations in Libya. He would also always cite Singapore as the perfect example of a neo-liberal state. While in Singapore, which he regularly visited, it is likely that he meet with Bernard-Henri Lévy.

When the problems erupted in Benghazi, Mahmoud Jibril immediately went to Cairo, Egypt. He told his colleagues that he would be back in Tripoli soon, but he had no intention of returning. In reality, he went to Cairo to meet the leaders of the Syrian National Council and Lévy. They were all waiting for him to coordinate the events in Libya and Syria. This is one of the reasons that the Transitional Council has recognized the Syrian National Council as the legitimate government of Syria.

Mahmoud Jibril is now the prime minister of the Transitional Council of Libya. The opposition of Jibril to Gaddafi’s Wealth Redistribution Project and his elitist attitude are amongst the reasons he conspired against Gaddafi and helped form the Transitional Council. Is this ex-regime official, who has always been an open supporter of the Arab dictators in the Persian Gulf, really a representative of the people?

1. Henri Pierre Habib, Politics and Government of Revolutionary Libya (Montmagny, Québec: Le Cercle de Livre de France Ltée, 1975), p.1.
2. Regional African Satellite Communication Organization, “Launch of the Pan African Satellite,” July 26, 2010.
3. Christopher M. Blanchard and James Zanotti, “Libya Christopher M. Blanchard and James Zanotti, “Libya: Background and U.S. Relations,” Congressional Research Service, February 18, 2011,” Congressional Research Service, February 18, 2011, p.22.
4. Private discussions with Mahmoud Jiribil’s co-workers inside and outside of Libya.
5. Internal private documents from the National Economic Development Board

Denmark elected a staunch right winger as prime minister. Denmark joined in military attacks with imperialist states against weaker states. I turned to journalist Ron Ridenour, who lives in Denmark, to give a first-hand voice to what is taking place.

I support revolution against occupation, oppression, exploitation; however, I hold that the long-term viability of a revolution must be rooted in the people — not in a personality. Therefore, I have reservations about “leaders” — for example, Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez — who (besides implementing socialism for the masses) seemingly covet the esteem, if not the perks, of governmental office. Ridenour speaks Spanish, has lived in Cuba, written many books about the revolution there, so he is an informed go-to person for reflections on the revolution there and elsewhere.

Ridenour, notably, has also given voice to the very marginalized plight of the Tamils in Sri Lanka, has long been active in journalism, has his own website, and in his own words, “Besides using words in an effort to eradicate racism, inequality and wars, I have been an activist against wars, racism, chauvinism and for socialist solidarity.”

This week, I interviewed Ridenour about Denmark, Cuba, and the leaderless revolutionary stirrings against the financial elitists.

Kim Petersen: Denmark is supposed to be a peace-loving state with an envious social safety net. You pointed out in a recent article that the Danish political landscape has slanted rightwards? What caused this? And how can progressivist politics become predominant?

Ron Ridenour: The causes are several, both historical and contemporary. Leftist parties and unionists in Denmark, like people in most of the world, lost faith and hope in socialist-communist solutions due to the atrocities and corruption of Communist parties in power, and then with the fall of those governments in eastern Europe. Even those governments still calling themselves communists base their economies on capitalism today.

One of the main problems of nearly all leftist parties and governments is that they do not believe that the mass—unionists, unemployed, family farmers, students—are actually capable of ruling “sensibly.” One of the best of benevolent “dictators,” Fidel Castro, does not believe such either. Most leaders believe in themselves and not the mass. So, in fact, real socialism has yet to be attempted. No party in power has ever really begun the process of educating workers+ to use political power and then turning over power to the working class, as our ideology calls for.

Another factor, especially Danish, is a national inferiority complex. That is, “We’re just a little country, you know,” so we can’t expect to run things ourselves. This was actually a folksy saying of one of Denmark’s best known politicians, Erhard Jacobsen. For decades, Denmark relied upon Germany and since WWII it relies on the US, first for its economic Marshall Plan and since for its military might. And today Denmark is not a peace-loving state. It is involved in four wars alongside its Big Daddy.

Then there is the national complex of indifference, or “ligegladhed.” There has been a lot of charitable giving of money to the poor abroad but little engagement or true solidarity. Even the left-ish parliamentary party, Unity List (Enhedslisten), opposes support for opponents of the terrorist terror laws, or for armed resistance by the invaded of US-NATO wars.

One can never answer fully what causes policy without taking the economy into account. Danes still live comfortably economically, almost all, in relationship with others even European neighbors. I think that the left parties rely on parliamentarian politics because of this. They do not believe that significant numbers of people will actually support grass roots radical struggles. And the unions long ago aligned themselves with capitalist reformism and oppose extra-parliamentary struggles, including sustaining strikes, of any consequence. Why risk being arrested, losing your job and then your mortgage, your car or one of them simply to do the “right thing”?

How can progressive (?) politics become predominant? Well, if progressive means pushing for reformist policies within capitalism that is becoming dominant now for the two Danish so-called socialist parties in parliament. (Unity List and People’s Party/SF), and it has been so for the major Social Democratic party for decades. But if progressive means radical, then the economy has to collapse, or when it is in deep crises as it is now, then grass roots groups have to take to the streets and stay there just as is possibly happening with Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Uproar, perhaps in Spain and Greece. We have to kick the parliamentary-based politics out of our movements. We have to feel the power in ourselves and push the politicians out.

Yes, there must also be strong unions and workers must strike and/or join Occupy Wall Street. Radical-revolutionary political parties must educate and protest with sensible and morally just programs. They should not act against the more autonomous oriented grass roots groups but in parallel.

KP: This touches on the previous questions, in many countries, people scoffed that Americans could “elect” a born-again, foot-in-mouth, right-winger such as George W. Bush as president. Yet Canadians soon found themselves with Prime Minister Stephen Harper (a man to the right of Bush), and Danes wound up with Anders Fogh Rasmussen as prime minister (also a hawkish right-winger). Why do you think this is happening in much of the western world?

RR: Precisely because the left gave up actually being left. It was too difficult and most got too comfortable within the capitalist system. The left adopted the bourgeois democratic premise of making policy within parliaments whose role is to protect finance power. In Copenhagen, Wall Street is Børsen and its building is literally next door to parliament and the executive government.

When finance crises occur, you only have two sources to acquire money to pay for it: from the workers-pensioners-students or from the owners of capital and industry. The latter approach would mean that the rich will refuse to pay for their crises and so, you must nationalize their “private” property, that is, the production centers where wealth originates and the banks that manipulate the wealth for a few. But that takes guts, struggle, sacrifice.

PM Fogh Rasmussen was awarded the greater job of being the commander of NATO. He is loved by the warmongers on Wall Street and the Pentagon, and hated by the peoples who are invaded, but all the parliamentary parties here congratulated him. He should have been ostracized as well as the biggest of capitalists here, AP Møller-Mærsk, the world’s biggest shipper and a major warmonger. Instead his supermarkets, which take in half the food sales, are much of the left’s favorite stores because they are cheap.

We have to find that indignation that many Arabs have found, that some Spanish and Greeks are finding, that is part of OWS, and that us oldies had in the 60s-70s. We have to practice what we preach. Boycott the worst companies (like Mærsk and Coca-Cola…). Go on strike. Refuse to do the system’s bidding. Find our inner strength and alternative life styles. Act in solidarity with the oppressed-exploited-invaded.

KP: The progressivist image of Denmark is further diminished now with its participation in the NATO (currently headed by Fogh Rasmussen) invasion of a sovereign state. There are reports of Danish troops engaging in torture and massacres. How do you read this playing out on the streets in Denmark?

RR: Unfortunately, nothing is happening regarding these atrocities. There is one small group of pacifists who conduct a vigil in front of parliament daily since the beginning of the war against Afghanistan. But it is more of a curiosity than a threat. The anti-war movement died, in part because the Unity party dropped out of protesting because its leaders wanted “influence” with lucrative jobs in parliament. And the climate movement has so far refused to take up wars as part of their anti-pollution protests albeit wars are a major cause of pollution and adverse climate changes. I think they are just too scared of being accused of being outsiders or radicals….

KP: You hinted at a “shaky future” for the Cuban revolution. Do you see Cuba falling further away from the socialism won through the revolution? Who will stand to benefit (or lose) from Cuba’s opening to capitalism?

RR: Yes, I am afraid that what I foresaw in that piece nearly a year ago it occurring rapidly now. More and more openings for capitalism have been adopted even before the Communist party national conference body has met and decided on precise policies to propose to the state. Raul Castro as both leader of the state and the party, following his brother, has already decided. Now, private property (housing) can be bought and sold; cars can be bought in hard currency at big prices, which very few Cubans can acquire legitimately; small enterprises are encouraged to employ workers, and thereby opening up officially for exploitation of labor.

Who will benefit is a new class of small capitalists and real estate hustlers, and speculation will become widespread. Relatives of Cubans in Miami and Spain will be even more privileged than those Cubans without such remittances. Wall Street will benefit in the end, because the blockade against Cuba will be lifted in the not distant future. Other Wall Streets in the world already benefit.

KP: In a summer article on the state of the revolution in Cuba, you defined ethics partially as “We act so that no one person, race or ethnic group is either over or under another.” You added, “We struggle to create equality for all.” If, indeed, the revolution is a revolution of the people and not about a personality or personalities, what does the unbroken political “leadership” of Fidel Castro from 1959 to 2008 speak to such ethics?

You also quoted from Che that “one must have a great deal of humanity and a strong sense of justice and truth in order not to fall into extreme dogmatism and cold scholasticism, into an isolation from the masses.”

In general I support much of what Fidel Castro has helped to bring about in Cuba, but I find that his one-man leadership of the revolution is dangerous in that it embeds the revolution in a person (in this case in a family) rather than in the people. Is Fidel Castro the only person besides his brother fit to “lead” (and do the people require a leader?) the revolution for Cubans?

RR: The points you quote from my piece and your question are part of dialogue, both fraternal and violently hostile, the non/anti-capitalist left has had for more than a century. In my own view, after half a century of struggle and thought that also embraces these points, my conclusion is NO to your question. And that, of course, holds true for Hugo Chavez (and all other leaders), albeit most of the left in Venezuela, as well as a large sector of the general population, believes Chavez is unique and most be their one and only leader for, perhaps, a lifetime. That was also the case with the Cuban people and Fidel for the first decade or so. Well, that is what the Arab uproar wants to end, albeit those gruesome dictators cannot be compared to the kind-hearted Fidel.

The main problem with one leader syndrome is that it saps the vision, inspiration and energy from the mass. I have seen this happening before my eyes during the eight years I worked in Cuba and lived with the people. They lost hope that socialism could actually be the best solution when they always had to wait for answers/permission/resources/materials from above. The same happened in Russia and Eastern Europe.

Now it has come to past that most Cubans, I think, really don’t believe socialism is worthwhile and they want a chance to try supply-demand marketing. This will split the people into classes and further antagonize the true solidarity amongst themselves and with other peoples that they had assiduously built. And that is the essence of what Che meant in the cited quotation—the state and the party have become isolated from the mass and they see no other way out than capitalism with some bourgeois democratic-oriented reforms, such as what the big powers are endeavoring to impose on the Arab rebellion.

Another major mistake that Cuban leaders made is not separating some powers between the state and the Communist party. As the unity strategy goes in Cuba when the state makes a policy for short-term economic benefit or for some diplomatic reason—such as backing the genocidal, brutal governments of Sri Lanka against the entire Tamil population—the party is disallowed from criticizing this or for showing solidarity with, for instance, the much discriminated-against Tamils.

KP: There is growing dissent in the United States, but it is marginalized and propagandized in the corporate media (nothing surprising there). The Occupy Wall Street movement in the US seems to be gathering momentum, having staying power, and perhaps causing ripples in the system. If the grassroots activism proves influential in the US, how do you think this might affect Europe?

RR: I see that 66% of the people Gallop polled in the US want the rich to be appropriately taxed, and 54% want all politicians out of a job. It is that spirit that has to take root, and that is growing in Europe too.

The most important and radical elements in these protests are that they are 1) anti-capitalist, 2) not led by self-interest seeking persons or parties. In fact, OWS is more radical than what we created in the 60s-70s, because it is primarily aimed at the true enemy: capitalism, which is the main cause for adverse climate changes and aggressive wars.

The first solidarity demos with OWS in Denmark are taking place Saturday (October 15) alongside hundreds other cities in scores of lands. This initiative was taken by the indignados in Spain. There, and in other countries on the verge of bankruptcy such as Greece, there is greater potential for sustained radical movements than there is right now in Scandinavia and Germany. But this economic crisis will not just melt any time soon—a spell of anger is mounting. I think in a few European countries protests will arise and continue sporadically, at least.
I see it as a positive development, in fact, that in the recent Danish election, the so-called red block won and with it the Unity party and SF have dropped key programmatic elements of any socialist nature. I think the Unity Party/SF sellout will help create a backlash that could become a true protest movement. But we must also recognize that too few people are really hurting enough economically here to cause them to develop a real sustained fight. I hope I’m wrong.

In Denmark, we must not go to a demo to hear jazz music and a handful of “leaders” speak and then go home to TV or to a cafe for beer and wine. We must find that inner indignation and with it empower ourselves. We must develop leadership in all of us. We must take over tactical areas and stay there. We have one big problem, even greater than the might of police brutality, and that is the weather. Already temperatures are falling to freezing in the evenings in some of Europe and in NYC it is getting cold too. We might have to postpone our staying power over the cold, raining, snowy winter months and return in even greater numbers and strength in the spring.

I close with a quote from Naomi Klein’s talk at Wall Street, October 6. “We have picked a fight with the most powerful economic and political forces on the planet. That’s frightening… Always be aware that there will be a temptation to shift to smaller targets… Don’t give in to that temptation… Let’s treat this beautiful movement as if it is the most important thing in the world.” “It is!” and she points to her favorite sign: “I care about you!”

One contributing factor involves the sterile cultivation of the persona of the “reasonable liberal,” a type favored and rewarded by the status quo-protective power brokers of the Democratic Party and by corporate media organizations that find useful his trait of rendering himself feckless (e.g., the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue) by the passion-annihilating (but self-serving) device of his preening amiability?

But in so doing, the self-gelded liberal has sacrificed libido and discarded sacred vehemence for careerist privilege. Worse, the rest of us are advised to follow suit… that, in order to gain credibility, one must slouch towards center-hugging irrelevance.

We are counseled that in order to navigate this age of corporate dominance that one’s irascible apprehensions and unruly aspirations must be suppressed, for such passions are deemed too radical for mainstream sensibilities, and are therefore regarded as impractical as they are untoward by the crackpot realists of the corporate bottom line whose dictates dominate the political discourse and economic arrangements of our time.

“Prune down [a human being’s] extravagance, sober him, and you undo him.”
– William James

Yet these self-termed “realists,” by means of their ad hoc machinations and hidden-in-plain-sight schemes, are responsible for the creation, promotion and maintenance of a financial system (and its attendant economic, political and ecological consequences) that is as sound as the flight plan of Icarus.

When a nation displays this degree of a noxious mixture of mass ignorance and official mendacity, an age of peace and plenty becomes as possible as holding a tea dance in a tsunami.

Yet facing folly is difficult. Stunned by the implications of one’s mistakes and misapprehensions, initially, one will reel in the direction of a familiar road–or be seized by an impulse to retreat from the casuistry-sundering fury of the larger world. Yet, as Thomas Paine averred, “A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.” And as Albert Camus counseled, “Freedom is the right not to lie.”

With this in mind, shall we blunder off-road into the landscape of unquestioned narratives?

For example, the following is a topic, when broached, that rarely fails to incur the manipulative rage of the perpetually adrenaline intoxicated right and causes liberals to drop to their knees in penance for sins never committed: The questioning of this culture’s reverential, unflagging “support of our troops” blunderbuss and attendant comic book hero-level palaver, such as, “all good Americans stand firm in our support of our troops and our war against the forces of international terrorism.”

A bit of personal perspective as to why I demur: Forty-eight years ago, this month, four young girls were murdered in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham Ala. At the time of the tragedy, I was a child living in Birmingham. I remember the event to this day. My father, freelancing as a photojournalist at the time, arrived on the scene not long after the blast. I remember him coming home shaken and pale. The event is seared into my memory: how the blind hatred of the vicious can erupt into daily life and inflict irreparable harm and abiding sorrow.

Accordingly, this is why I can not abide U.S. wars of imperium e.g., its Shock and Awe bombing campaigns, the same modus operandi of those despicable, redneck bombers.

The dead of Iraq, Central Asia, and Libya were no more responsible for committing acts of terrorism against the people of the U.S. than those little girls, readying for a choir performance in the basement of that church in Alabama, were guilty of any crime perpetrated against the “white race.”

Moreover, the attacks staged on 9/11/2001 did not “change everything.” The event merely sped up the trajectory of the national security state/military industrial complex towards the landfill of history.

For more than a century, whether the propagandists of U.S. Empire promulgate the subterfuge of fighting “to make the world safe for democracy” or defending against “the evil empire,” or waging a “war on terror”–the objective remains, to secure resources for the U.S. homeland. And that is what we, the populace of empire, can “thank a veteran” for providing.

From the Blue Coats at Wounded Knee to the baby-faced tools of imperium at My Lai and Fallujah to the predator drones scouring Central Asia, the U.S. is the single largest perpetrator of terrorism worldwide. As all the while, guilty by their complicity citizens of the U.S. sit on their sofas, oblivious or unmoved by any event transpiring beyond their self-circumscribed field of reference. There should be a monument erected to the tragic legacy wrought by the acts of terrorism at “Ground Zero”–and it should be a statue representing a willfully ignorant fat-ass sitting on his couch, TV remote in hand, Cheetos crumbs stippled in the folds of his mouth.

Granted, Lower Manhattan took a tragic hit, a decade ago, and many people suffered as a result (I know I live a couple of neighborhoods upwind) but none worse than the people of Iraq and Central Asia. Somehow, I suspected (and was proven sadly correct) that their experiences would not be evoked, as part of the 9/11 hagiography foisted and verbal monuments cast to sacred victimhood, as part of the official ceremony commemorating the event.

Moreover, not long after 9/11, an attack was launched from Lower Manhattan that collapsed the global economy. I, for one, would like to hear a bit more about that.

By parroting the self-serving hagiography of 9/11/01, as well as, “I support the warrior, but not the war” type fallacies, liberals continue to play right into the sustaining narratives of the national security state.

Case in point, the empty, oft-heard, liberal pundit assertion, “My idea for a 9/11 tribute would involve bringing our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan home, with proper benefits.” Nonsense. Worse than nonsense: Precious, cloying, self-congratulatory piffle. The statement is axiomatic of the feckless calls and specious cries common to that species of walking cliché known as “troop-supporting” liberals.

As far as I’m concerned, “our troops”–human delivery systems of U.S. government sanctified terrorism–can walk home; that way, maybe, they might learn something about the larger world, other than their mission to kill the people they happen upon without question, and then share with their fellow belligerently ignorant countrymen what they learned about life (its sacred quality) on their long, Odysseusian journey home.

Apropos, reasonable liberals counsel such declarations serve as “bad public relation” tactics. “Don’t you realize that you risk alienating Middle America? Remember, the reactionary fallout created by the radicalism of the 1960s?”

The fact is: The passionate questioning of the entire war effort in Southeast Asia, the role of soldiers included, helped to bring an end to the war and factored into the soldiers’ rebellion at the later stages of the protracted conflict. In increasing numbers, the conscripts began to refuse to kill and die for a dubious cause, they went hippie on the ass of the military state.

The activist left ended the war; self-serving liberals blew the peace.

The “bad PR” involving “spitting on the troops” was after the fact, rightwing confabulation, promulgated to intimidate liberals into shamed silence, and, of course, liberals being liberals, it worked. True to form, they “distanced” themselves from the “troop-demoralizing radicals of the irrational left.” In reality, they fled in fear from arrays of rightwing created strawmen.

PR itself is the dubious craft of professional lying–corporate era legerdemain. In fact, the craft is the opposite of the resonate truth carried by deepening poetry, poignant prose and challenging political speech–the near exclusive domain of the left in the 1960s.

You ask what makes me sigh, old friend
What makes me shudder so
I shudder and I sigh to think
That even Cicero
And many-minded Homer were
Mad as the mist and snow.

–William Bulter Yeats, except from “Mad As The Mist And Snow”

The inspired, enduring (very threatening to some) art, music and political action of the era were not the result of liberal accommodation and compromise. Antithetically, the cause of peace and justice (briefly) made some headway despite liberals not because of them.

As a famous literary drunk once quipped, “Rome wasn’t burned in a day.” Change will not come with a victim-centered view of the world…including viewing the nation’s toxically innocent, economic conscripts as mere victims of circumstance. Yes, young people make stupid choices–but treating them as victims does not serve them or the nation well.

“Liberal compassion” should not be extended to countenancing acts of mass murderer. Time and time again, liberals play into rightist propaganda, by allowing the discussion of U.S. militarism to be framed as exclusively pertaining to the sacrifices of individual soldiers, whose fates, in the larger context of events, have been appropriated a device of imperial plunder. By truckling to this narrative, liberals play into the propaganda of those who prosper by the homicidal designs of the present day U.S. military state.

Instead, let us endeavor to disabuse the culture of the delusion that there exists noble sacrifice in the act of killing and dying for the agendas of empire. When an individual U.S. soldier begins to stagger in the direction of his own humanity (renouncing his complicity in the death-sustained system, as many did during the Vietnam era) then we should open our arms and embrace him with a fierce compassion.

On a personal basis, my family had little money. And I made many self-destructive choices, but I also had tenacious mentors who challenged me, called me on my destructive nonsense, pointing out the bulwark of denial and hubris that sustained its shabby, ad hoc structure. Making a home in being lost, I took up residence in the enduring structure of poetry, literature and music: Whitman, Kerouac, Rilke, Dylan, the Allman Brothers, Leonard Cohen, Iggy Pop, Joe Strummer, and others too numerous to name taught me to question, as the expression went, “everything.”

This is not rocket science; this is far more important; this is the essential subject matter that informs the propulsion and guidance systems of the human heart. Withal, instruct the young how to build and inhabit the structure of a cogent argument and to navigate a soul-suffused landscape of poignant verse, lyric, and insight.

To do so, one must not shy away from confrontation. During the Civil Rights Movement and Vietnam War era, before the left was manipulated into fearing the libido borne of sacred vehemence, stupid opinions were not coddled; they were challenged.

Feelings were hurt. Egos were bruised. But an illegal war was shortened and a number of (long over due) rights were granted.

[…]Having come
the bitter way to better prayer, we have
the sweetness of ripening. How sweet
to know you by the signs of this world!

–Wendel Berry, excerpt from “Ripening”

At present, among the things we can ill afford are fantasy prone kids, duped into believing modern soldiering bestows nobility and involves heroic sacrifice. Instead, the times call for brave misfits, encouraged to embrace rejection by a dysfunctional society and primed to endure the inherent bumps and buffeting inflicted from a culture that has gathered into the formation of a flying wedge of self-destructive, crash-fated crazy.

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?”

Despite opposition from the imperialist countries led by the US, the 2001 WCAR became a flashpoint for focusing international attention on two issues: reparations for slavery and the liberation of Palestine. It involved a convergence of several events: the official meeting of member states that adopted the DDPA; the NGO Forum that approved a substantially stronger document (the WCAR NGO Forum Declaration); a two-day general strike led by COSATU against the privatization of social services in South Africa/Azania; and daily protest marches outside the conference venue regarding land reform, Palestine, and reparations. The government meeting was marked by a walkout of the US, Canadian, and Israeli delegations.

A 2009 review conference took place in Geneva, Switzerland following the 2001 WCAR and reaffirmed the DDPA. The US, Canada, Israel, and seven other rich countries boycotted this meeting as well.

Now, ten years after the Durban conference, delegates representing the member states of the UN will discuss the DDPA again – this time in Midtown Manhattan. The Obama administration, along with the governments of Australia, Canada, the Czech Republic, Israel, Italy, and the Netherlands, have already announced plans to boycott the gathering. Combined with this boycott, the lackeys and mouthpieces of the US ruling class are already working to derail the conference with false charges of anti-Semitism and jingoistic references to the 9/11 attacks (see for example the 6/3 New York Daily News editorial “President Obama must organize an international boycott of obscene, anti-Semitic Durban III confab” which contains blatant falsehoods about the content of the DDPA).

Why Is the US Empire So Afraid?

The Obama administration’s decision to boycott the September 2011 conference in NYC was announced in a June letter from Joseph E. Macmanus, acting U.S. assistant secretary of state for legislative affairs, addressed to some members of Congress. The letter claimed that the US was boycotting, because the Durban and follow-up conferences have “included ugly displays of intolerance and anti-Semitism.”

Two years ago, the Obama administration released a more detailed press statement regarding its decision to boycott the 2009 review conference in Geneva. Titled “U.S. Posture Toward the Durban Review Conference and Participation in the UN Human Rights Council,” the statement opposed the reaffirmation of the DDPA and outlined the conditions for a document that would be tolerable to the US:

It must not single out any one country or conflict, nor embrace the troubling concept of “defamation of religion.” The U.S. also believes an acceptable document should not go further than the DDPA on the issue of reparations for slavery.

The Obama administration’s reasons for boycotting the September 2011 conference in NYC and the 2009 review conference in Geneva are pretenses for shutting down criticism of Israel. Out of 341 paragraphs, the DDPA contains four paragraphs on Palestine, hardly any “singling out” of the Zionist entity. To protect its attack dog in the Middle East, the US is once again resorting to the usual tactic of equating criticisms of Israeli settler-colonialism with anti-Semitism.

The Obama administration’s non-participation is not surprising or exceptional. It exposes the fact that this administration continues to carry out the strategic interests of the US ruling class in maintaining white supremacist national oppression inside the Empire and in dominating the people of the world.

The Bush administration deliberately sent a low-level delegation to the 2001 WCAR, which did not include secretary of state Colin Powell, and then recalled it in the middle of the conference. During the Carter and Reagan administrations respectively, the US boycotted the 1978 and 1983 World Conferences to Combat Racism and Racial Discrimination in Geneva, where UN member states condemned apartheid in South Africa/Azania as a crime against humanity and denounced Israel’s collaborative relationship with the apartheid regime.

Why is the US Empire so afraid of participating in UN-sponsored conferences on racism and racial discrimination? While the one-country-one-vote forum of the UN General Assembly is certainly more difficult to control than the UN Security Council or an exclusive gathering of the imperialist countries, most of the countries in the General Assembly are neocolonial states, run by local elites that play varying roles in administering imperialist relations. Thus, why does the US have such a record of non-participation?

First, there exist real contradictions in foreign policy between the US ruling class and certain dependent countries, even while the latter do not break fundamentally with the imperialist system and are not reliable allies of the peoples’ movements. Second, each of these UN-sponsored gatherings is a forum for shaping the views of people around the world, where peoples’ movements have the opportunity to influence international public opinion through militant street mobilizations outside conference venues.

Both of these factors contribute to the possibility of embarrassment and isolation at any UN function for the US ruling class, which sits at the head of a country with racism in its DNA. To paraphrase Mao, here is one arena where it is not the people who fear US imperialism, but it is US imperialism that fears the people of the world.

A Hard Look at the Text of the DDPA

The DDPA is not legally binding or enforceable under international law. It derives its authority from moral recognition and the commitment of UN member states to implement its provisions. As such, the struggle over the DDPA’s language is primarily an ideological struggle over how to understand history and our present conditions. Viewed in this way, it is a compromised text. The DDPA contains a few provisions that could be advances in the fight against racism if seized by the peoples’ movements, but embodies a capitulation to the imperialist countries in some other important ways.

The most important advance made in the text is the acknowledgement in Paragraph 13 that “slavery and the slave trade are a crime against humanity and should always have been so, especially the transatlantic slave trade.” The term “crime against humanity” carries weight under international law and the recognition of slavery as such may have given a boost to reparations litigation. Yet, at the same time, the DDPA does not contain any language advocating reparations for slavery. It only expresses profound “regret” for slavery and states in Paragraph 100 that “some States have taken the initiative to apologize and have paid reparation, where appropriate, for grave and massive violations committed.” Beyond that, there are only general provisions discussing the right of all victims of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia, and related intolerance to seek “just and adequate reparation.” Furthermore, the DDPA fails to similarly characterize colonialism as a “crime against humanity.” There is much further to push.

The four paragraphs discussing Palestine in the DDPA are even more timid. Paragraph 65 discussing the right of refugees to return voluntarily to their homes and properties provides no indication that it is addressing Palestinian refugees in particular. This should be contrasted with the declaration and programme of action adopted at the 1978 World Conference to Combat Racism and Racial Discrimination which referred explicitly to the Nakba (Arabic for “catastrophe” – the name given to the 1948 mass expulsion): “the cruel tragedy which befell the Palestinian people 30 years ago and which the[y] continue to endure today – manifested in their being prevented from exercising their right to self-determination on the soil of their homeland, in the dispersal of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, the prevention of their return to their homes, and the establishment therein of settlers from abroad.”

The leading provision Paragraph 63 simultaneously recognizes the Palestinian right to self-determination and to the establishment of an independent state alongside “the right to security for all States in the region, including Israel.” The previous declarations and programmes of action adopted at the 1978 and 1983 World Conferences to Combat Racism did not condition the Palestinian right to self-determination on Israel’s security. In that respect, the DDPA is a step backward. Further, note that the text discusses the right of States to “security,” not people or populations, in effect codifying the existing states in the region. This is a predictable gesture in a document adopted by the UN member states, yet ironic in light of the North African and Arab democratic revolts. Finally, of course, UN General Assembly Resolution 3379, which correctly identified Zionism as a form of racism and remained in place from 1975 to 1991, continues to set the bar in the struggle within the UN over the proper characterization of Israeli settler-colonialism and its ideology.

Build the People’s Movements; Isolate the US Imperialists

As September 22 approaches, working and oppressed people in the US Empire can draw lessons from past historic campaigns to bring the crimes of the US ruling classes before the UN. In 1951, Paul Robeson and William L. Patterson presented a petition to UN officials titled “We Charge Genocide” condemning the oppression of Black people in the US, reflected in the widespread practice of lynching. Malcolm X would again raise the call during the 1960s for Black people to use the UN as a forum to expose their oppression in the US. In 1970, the Young Lords and the Puerto Rican Student Union organized a march of 10,000 people to the UN demanding independence for Puerto Rico, the release of political prisoners, and an end to police violence. In 1979, the National Black Human Rights Coalition organized a 5,000-strong march to the UN, with the slogans “Black People Charge Genocide” and “Human Rights is the Right to Self-Determination.” There should be a renewed focus today on the UN as an important site of struggle for working and oppressed people in the US.

COSATU’s two-day general strike against neoliberal policies on the eve of the 2001 WCAR in Durban provides a powerful example of how peoples’ movements can utilize such international gatherings to their advantage. The September 22 meeting is taking place not only in the country that is the home base of the Empire, but in the city that is the heart of US finance capital. It is crucial for all working and oppressed people to mobilize for the Durban + 10 Coalition activities from September 18 through 22, especially any protest marches that are planned.

The movement for reparations in the US can broaden and deepen its forces by highlighting the survivals of slavery in the foundations of US society today and the failure of Reconstruction to fully uproot them. Mass incarceration. Racist policing. Schools that operate like jails. Disproportionate unemployment. Enduring Black poverty throughout the country and in the Black Belt south.

In the weeks leading up to the conference and during the days of scheduled activity, we must make clear that reparations for slavery, as well as one hundred years of semi-slave sharecropping and national oppression that continues to this day, is a just demand that exposes the true character of the US Empire. It is a demand that is central to the liberation of the Black nation and the right of Black people to self-determination everywhere. It is a demand for the global redistribution of wealth stolen by the Empire. Without it, socialism is impossible.

By conjuring up Stalinist witch-hunts, and Chinese prison camps, Dhillon openly supports the shameful, abusive distribution of wealth that exists in this country, and upholds the rights of the super rich to hoard their power over the rest of the citizenry. But is there a person alive who feels that the slimy, craven creatures that inhabit the halls of our Congress today are any less despicable than what Dhillon perceives as the bureaucrats who ran the Soviet Union during the 40s and 50s, or China during Mao?

If we’re going to be bullied by corporate oligarchs, Tea Bag idiots, and spineless, opportunistic Democrats, why not say yes to socialism, and enjoy a fairer share of the country’s resources and riches? Look at what capitalism has done to this country: no country in the world imprisons a larger percent of its own population, especially the poor and minorities, for such unconscionable  lengths of time, than the U.S. – not Russia, not China, not any “socialist” country.

Since we are virtually enslaved by the rich, why don’t we opt for a more even distribution of wealth than we currently have? Let’s become a socialist nation, and combat bureaucratic hierarchies, rather than be ruled by sycophant politicians who bow down to the rich, and deprive us of  everything.  Americans have the creative spirit to build a more equitable society and economic system that will meet the needs of our people.  Universal health care, free public education, and a structured, controlled creative economy are certainly preferable to the slavery to which the people of the U.S. are being subjected. If we don’t get a fair shake under vulturistic capitalism, why not accept evil socialism, with its positives, as well as its negatives, as an alternative? Countries that incorporate socialism as part of their agenda provide universal health care to their people, free education to their children and security in old age.

If Dhillon is correct, that providing health care to pregnant women is “socialism – pure and simple,” then let’s take her at her word, and go for it. This nation, as well as the other capitalist nations of Europe, are entering a second decade of economic crisis. It would be preferable to struggle against socialist bureaucrats than against corporate CEOs and their Pentagon  mercenary thugs. The fact that Dhillon equates even the minor regulation of corporate independence with socialism is not surprising given the ignorance  of most Republicans these days.

It should be obvious to Dhillon and her ilk that the majority of the people of the world share our vision over hers. The only question is if the U.S. can build enough drones and prisons to silence the dissenters here and abroad. Across Africa, the Middle East, Latin America and Asia, the U.S. is seen as a unilateral terrorist threat to world peace. Everyone knows that the Oligarchs own the nation outright, and that lapdog politicians, Wall Street and the military/industrial complex control everything from our wealth to our foreign policy.

Dhillon probably has no problem with dictatorships, corporate oligarchies, or apartheid nations, so long as they are anti-socialist and pro-capitalist. She undoubtedly supports the U.S. forcing its definition of capitalistic democracy and nation building upon one country after another. Let the people be damned, she says, kiss up to the rich and get ahead. What a vile value  system she represents!

If socialism is the antidote, the sooner we adopt it, the quicker the cure.

After the overthrow of Louis XVI and the abolition of the monarchical French state, a new state was constructed by the revolutionaries — one based on “eternal” reason and designed to be completely rational. The spiritual progenitor of this state was Rousseau’s book “The Social Contract”. But “eternal” reason turned out to be simply the explanation of existence from the point of view of the rising bourgeois class. The complexity of the new political reality they had created quite eluded them as the contradictions between their class and the newly conscious masses of the disposed poor of Paris and the countryside began to manifest themselves. The wretched of the earth exerted themselves and the bourgeois rational state fell apart and morphed into the Reign of Terror under which the masses, for a moment, gained “the mastery” and saved the Revolution.

With the abolition of feudalism the bourgeoisie had expected social peace but instead got a furious international response and the development of an intense struggle between the poor and the rich at home. After Robespierre and the Jacobins, representing the French masses, were overthrown on 9 Thermidor Year II (July 27, 1794) by the conservative bourgeoisie, the new ruling class lost faith in its own ability to rule. After five years of corrupt government under the Directory, they surrendered to the coup d’etat of Napoleon Bonaparte on 18 Brumaire Year IX (November 9, 1799).

All this turmoil was a reflection of the “development of industry upon a capitalist basis [which] made poverty and misery of the working masses conditions of existence of society.” From the dispossessed Paris masses (the “have-nothings” and other disadvantaged groups the proletariat began to develop “as the nucleus of a new class.” However, at this time “the antagonism between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, was still very incompletely developed.” At this historical juncture the three “founders” of socialism appeared: Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Owen.

First on the scene was Claude Henri Comte de Saint-Simon (1760-1825). The Revolution was supposed to be a victory of the Third Estate (production workers) over a ruling class of idlers (the nobility and the Catholic hierarchy and its priests). But, in reality, Engels says, the victory did not go to the Third Estate as a whole but only that part of it owning property, “the socially privileged part.” Saint-Simon saw the Revolution as a struggle between “workers” (anyone engaged in productive activity) and “idlers”– people living off unearned income. For him “the workers were not only the wage workers, but also the manufacturers, the merchants, and the bankers.” Science and Industry must move to the forefront and lead the revolution. The undeveloped nature of the class struggle within the Third Estate is apparent — the proletariat and the capitalists are in the same “class.” (I can’t say the vast majority of the American people have gone much beyond that stage of consciousness yet but it has recently began to dawn on them that class struggle is real).

Saint-Simon’s heart was in the right place as he wanted to improve the conditions of the lowest and greatest number of the Third Estate — what would become the proletariat and included the masses of downtrodden peasants, the most numerous and poor; Engels quotes him: “la class la plus nombreuse et la plus pauvre.” However, his socialism was utopian as he expected the bankers to lead the way into the new world! “The bankers especially were to be called upon to direct the whole of social production by the regulation of credit.” Ironically the bankers today, the finance capitalists, do control production but in their interests not those of “la plus nombreuse et la plus pauvre.”

Saint-Simon actually thought the rich bourgeoisie, bankers and manufacturers, would change themselves into public servants and use their ruling positions to help the poor and oppressed. But at least he realized the “poor and oppressed” made up the majority of “the people” (Third Estate). In fact, Engels credits him with understanding that the Revolution was a three way struggle — Nobility vs. the Bourgeoisie AND the propertyless masses even though there was a tendency to group the latter two together when contrasted to the Nobility. His greatness was in proclaiming that “all men ought to work” and recognizing that within the bourgeois revolution the Reign of Terror represented the power of “the toiling masses” against the haut bourgeoisie.

Engels quotes Saint-Simon addressing himself to the poor masses: “See what happened in France at the time when your comrades held sway there; they brought about a famine.” The “they” are the bourgeois enemies of Robespierre and the rule of the Parisian sans culottes. Saint-Simon also saw a future where economics was more important than politics; i.e., the administration of things (planned economy) over the administration of people (the bourgeois state); i.e, he envisioned “the abolition of the state.”  We find in Saint-Simon the seeds, Engels says, of “almost all the ideas of later Socialists that are not strictly economic.”

Following on the appearance of Saint-Simon came the ideas of Francois-Marie Charles Fourier (1772-1837). He contrasted the actual living conditions of the people after the establishment of bourgeois rule (“material and moral misery”) with the pictures of what life would be like painted by their pre-revolutionary propaganda and by the “rose-colored phraseology of the bourgeois ideologists of his time.”

In his first book, ”The Theory of the Four Movements” (1808) he wrote, “Social progress and changes of a period are accompanied by the progress of women towards freedom, while the decay of the social system brings with it a reduction of the freedoms enjoyed by women.” Therefore, “Extension of the rights of women is the basic principle of all social progress.”

Engels says of him, with respect to the above passage, that: “He was the first to declare that in any given society the degree of woman’s emancipation is the natural measure of the general emancipation.”

This not only tells us a lot about Saudi Arabia, but where our own society is heading with its failure to pass an Equal Rights Amendment and the movement to restrict the right to abortion, as well as the recent Supreme Court ruling that the women discriminated against for years at Walmart have no right to a class action suit to redress their grievances.

Fourier also divided the history of human development up to the present era into “four stages of evolution,” which were 1.) Savagery 2.) the Patriarchate 3.) Barbarism, and 4.) Civilization.

In this scheme “Civilization” appears with the development of capitalism in the 1500s and he says “that the civilized stage raises every vice practiced by barbarism in a simple fashion into a form of existence, complex, ambiguous, equivocal [and] hypocritical.” Engels says that for Fourier civilization develops along “a vicious circle” throwing up contradictions it cannot resolve and arriving at the exact opposite destinations that it wants to arrive at or at least pretends to want to arrive at so that, as Fourier writes, “under civilization POVERTY IS BORN OF SUPER-ABUNDANCE ITSELF.”

For example, the US, the richest country in the world, has 25% of its children at, or under, the official poverty line — a completely ridiculous society! One of the things Engels admires about Fourier is his masterly use of the dialectical method in his writings, which he compares to that of Hegel “his contemporary.” Engels also says something curious here. He says Fourier postulates the “ultimate destruction of the human race” which he introduced into historical science just as Kant had introduced the “ultimate destruction of the Earth” into natural science. But, in this pre-Star Trek world, Kant’s end of the Earth scenario would have entailed the end of the human race as well.

Saint-Simon and Fourier were products of the French Revolution but, Engels points out, at the same time over in England just as great a revolution was taking place. The whole basis of bourgeois society was being changed by the development of steam engines and tool making machines and manufacture (from the Latin “manus” hand) was being replaced by gigantic factories where machines tended by workers began to to turn out commodities rather than commodities directly made by them, “thus revolutionizing the whole foundation of bourgeois society.”

This industrial revolution began to divide society into a powerful group of capitalists on one hand, and propertyless proletarians on the other. The heretofore large and stable middle class began to break up and tended to be forced down into the lower class of workers — “it now led a precarious existence.” Sound familiar?

However, then the term “middle class” had a different meaning than it does now. Then it meant the class of artisans and small shop keepers who thrived in the era of manufacture. Now it is used to refer to an income group consisting of well paid workers and professionals whose wages were partially subsidized by the mega-profits of the imperialist international capitalist corporations who bought a modicum of social peace at home at the expense of the international solidarity of first world workers with third world workers and peasants by the creation of a labor aristocracy, according to Lenin, in the metropolitan countries. Professionals such as lawyers, doctors and the parasitical class of preachers and priests were also included.   With the decline of high paying production jobs in the West due to the rise of industry in the third world, among other factors, these high wage jobs are disappearing forcing the “middle class” down into lower paying jobs and so, as in the first days of capitalism, it now leads “a precarious existence.”

Another difference is that today we have labor unions, pro-working class political parties and associations, and growing class awareness which is developing into a major class battle for the protection of people’s jobs, life styles and incomes. This battle is just beginning and should grow as today’s world capitalist system proceeds further down the path of decay and self destruction.

But in the England of the early 1800s, capitalism was on the rise and not the decline. It was into this world that the third great early founder of socialism arose: Robert Owen (1771-1858). Owen was a materialist in philosophy and thought that humans were the product of their heredity (although at this time nothing was known of genes or DNA or any of the mechanisms of heredity) and their environment, most particularly their childhood environment. For 29 years (1800-1829) he managed New Lanark the large cotton-mill employing around 2500 “hands” in Scotland. And, Engels says, by “simply placing the people in conditions worthy of human beings” the workers lived in a society without “drunkenness, police, magistrates, lawsuits, poor laws, [or] charity.” He sent all the children off to school at age 2, put the working day at 10 1/2 hours (not the 13 or 14 that was the norm) and kept everyone on full wages when there was a four month shut down due to a cotton crisis AND made large profits and doubled the value of the business.

Well, my goodness! Why didn’t all the capitalists follow suit? They didn’t follow suit, for the same reason Owen fought with the other shareholders at New Lanark — they didn’t like the extra expenses that had to be put out for “conditions worthy of human beings.” After Owen left in 1829 the community continued, in one form or another, under different capitalists, until 1968 when it went bust. It is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site drawing in around 400,000 tourists a year to visit it and the house where Owen lived.

In his work “The Revolution in Mind and Practice” (1849) Owen wrote he was unhappy with New Lanark because “The people were slaves at my mercy.” He pointed out that New Lanark’s 2500 workers, with steam power, created as much social wealth as it took 600,000 workers to create a couple of generations earlier. Those 600,000 had to be paid living wages just as the 2500 — so what happened to all the surplus wealth saved in wages that would have gone to 597,500 extra workers? It was pocketed by the capitalists.

This new wealth was being generated all over England. It was being used to wage the wars of the Empire and to maintain an oppressive aristocratic and bourgeois order at home. “And yet this new power was the creation of the working class.” Owen wanted this vast new wealth to go to the working class that created it for the building of a new society in which it would be, as Engels says “the common property of all, to be worked for the common good of all.”

In his day, because of his reforms at New Lanark, Owen was considered a great philanthropist. He was lionized and respected and welcome at the tables of the rich and powerful. But as soon as he started talking about the working class creating all the wealth and how it ought to build a new society based on “common property” he was dropped like a hot potato, became persona non gratia, and shunned by official society. He therefore went to the working class and became a union leader and, Engels says, “Every social movement, every real advance in England on behalf of the workers links itself on to the name of Robert Owen.”

Owen called for the overthrow of three great impediments to the advance of the working class and the reform of society along communist lines — private property, religion, and “the present form of marriage (Engels).” Marriage is going through some radical changes nowadays and it is certainly very different from the forms of marriage Owen would have seen in the early 19th century. But private property and religion (i.e., supernaturalism and superstition) are still major impediments that hold back social progress for workers.

The last few pages of this chapter Engels devotes to vituperative attacks against Dühring and his negative views of the three utopians compared to whom Dühring is a pipsqueak. Engels says Dühring displays “a really frightful ignorance of the works of the three utopians.” Their works are still worth reading (Dühring’s are not) and whatever limitations they have were the result of the undeveloped conditions of early industrial capitalism. But since the time of the utopians and today (the 1870s) “modern industry has developed the contradictions laying dormant in the capitalist mode of production into such crying antagonisms that the approaching collapse of this mode of production is, so to speak, palpable.”

Well, they may have been “palpable” to Engels, but capitalism is still around, sad to say. And once again the palpability of capitalist collapse is in the air. From the looming default of Greece, to the threat of defaults spreading to Spain, Portugal and Italy which will bring down the Euro-zone and mobilize millions of workers to take to the streets of Europe, to the failure of the recovery in the United States and the desperate turn to the Tea Party by big capital to nurture home grown fascism to attack the workers and their unions, the smell of capitalist decay is everywhere. Let us hope this generation of workers will pay due to the long ago optimism of Frederick Engels.

George Papandreou is not bought, he is rented. He sells public enterprises to the multinationals. He reduces wages, pensions and employment at the behest of the IMF. He turns over the public treasury to the European banks. He supports NATO’s war
against Libya. He directs the Greek Coast Guard to enforce Netanyahu’s blockade of Gaza.

– according to a demonstrator in Syndigma Square, Athens, July 3, 2011

A self-proclaimed “Socialist” Government in Greece is imposing by ballots and clubs the most far reaching reversals of wages, pensions, jobs, educational, health and tax programs in the history of Western Europe.

The Pan Hellenic Socialist Party (PASOK) has totally abdicated any pretense of being a sovereign government, handing over present and future macro and micro policymaking to the European Central Bankers, the IMF and the power within the European Union/Germany, France). The so-called “austerity” program includes the pillage and auctioning of all the strategic lucrative public enterprises and large scale public land covering all historic and recreation sites. Never has any regime, socialist or not, so blatantly and brutally reverted an independent country to the most unadulterated form of colonial rule.

The Parliamentary Road to Colonial Pillage

Greece’s Great Leap Backward has taken place under the leadership of a “socialist” Prime Minister (George Papandreou) backed by the vast majority (97%) of “socialist” Parliamentarians and the entire “Socialist” Cabinet, with less than 4% defections.

While the parliament debates and votes to debase the country’s sovereignty and degrade the people, hundreds of thousands demonstrate in the streets and plazas. The elected leaders and legislators of PASOK totally ignore the protests, heeding only the directives from the Prime Minister and his appointed party bosses. Parliamentary politics is clearly totally insulated from the people it is supposed to represent.

What kind of government is capable of such a vehement repudiation of the popular will? What kinds of legislators are capable of systematically driving down living standards for the past three years and for the next ten years?

PASOK always was a party of patronage – not a party of programmatic change. PASOK, from its first electoral victory in 1981, offered public sector jobs, credit, loans and favors to its electoral constituency. At the beginning in the early 1980’s, the addition of new public functionaries was ostensibly to implement the socio-economic reforms, which the right-wing public bureaucrats were sabotaging. But as the momentum for ‘reform’ petered out, job appointments continued to multiply, as part of a process of building a large scale electoral party machine.

Thousands of under-employed university graduates with organizational skills crowded the Party offices and over time secured a permanent place in the bloated public bureaucracy. They contributed to securing votes for the PASOK candidates, following the practices of the right wing New Democratic Party. The public sector became the major employment office for several reasons: Most ‘public employees’ held ‘multiple jobs’, some as many as four and five, including self-employment and jobs in the informal economy. Secondly, the so-called private sector in Greece never developed a capacity to grow, invest, innovate, apply technology, compete and create new markets. Most leading Greek businesspeople depended on political links to the Party of Government to secure loans for projects that never materialized, credits that they used to import capital goods from the European Union and loans to import consumer products.

Entry into the European Union (EU) provided PASOK and the Right with huge transfers of capital and loans ostensibly to “modernize” the economy and make it competitive. In exchange Greece lowered its tariff barriers and EU goods flooded the local market. EU funds financed PASOK’s patronage machine; private business borrowed EU funds and passed payment onto the state, with complicit politicians. Professionals and the middle class secured easy credit to buy pricey imports. The regime economists and politicians “cooked the books”, showing positive growth and hiding liabilities. Everything was mortgaged. The European banks collected interest; Western European manufacturers exported consumer goods. According to the experts, Greece was “integrated” into the European Union … unfortunately on the basis of becoming as dissimilar as any country could be from its dominant partners.

PASOK was built around an elite and mass constituency that never paid taxes but extracted and depended on state handouts. Billionaire ship owners avoided taxes as they operated under foreign flags (Panama) but agreed to hire Greek ship captains and contribute to Party coffers. Professionals, lawyers, doctors and architects, barely declared any income, receiving under-the-table cash payments as undeclared income far exceeding any salaries. Business leaders, real estate speculators, bankers and importers all paid off Party leaders in order to secure tax abatements while securing EU loans, which they recycled into tourist properties and overseas accounts. What passed as the Party and business elite were in fact an organized network of kleptocrats: They plundered the treasury and left it to wage and salaried workers to pay the bills, since the latter suffered obligatory payroll tax deductions. Greece is the worse country in the world to be a wage worker – as it’s the only sector that’s taxed and exploited.

Greece is a country of self-employed small business people and independent small farmers, some of whom lease land from urban professionals, small tourist hotel owners and restaurateurs: The overwhelming majority of them pay only a small fraction of their taxes while demanding full public services. They are part of the ‘patronage’ apparatus of PASOK, mostly the recipients of unregulated credit and loans, which were used to increasing personal incomes rather than productivity.

EU loans financed the modernization of Greek living standards, increasing the importation of German appliances and automobiles, as well as Danish and French feta cheese (cheap imports substituted for local products). In other words, Europe captured Greek markets increasing its trade deficit while the bureaucracy became the employer of last resort. These EU practices and relations allowed PASOK to retain a solid patronage base of business kleptocrats, small business tax evaders and new layers of state functionaries.

The EU bought Greece’s increasing politico-military subservience: Greece supported the Afghan, Iraq, Libyan and Pakistan wars. Especially under George Papandreou, PASOK’s subservience to Israel and its US Zionist backers exceeded all previous regimes

The Bills Come Due

Greek public and private kleptocrats falsified the national accounts turning mounting deficits into positive surpluses, till the system imploded. The EU banks presented the bill and demanded payments. The Greek state and capitalist class, under PASOK, immediately proclaimed a program of ‘austerity’ and ‘tax reforms’. In fact, it only would enforce the former, since it did not want to undermine its tax-evader elite and social base.

Massive cutbacks in wages, pensions and jobs were imposed and enforced. PASOK legislators toed the line, since their inflated salaries, pensions, perks and payoffs depended on submission to the Prime Minster, who, in turn, was dependent on the imperial bankers and bourgeois kleptocrats. PASOK’s existence as a Party depends on the flow of EU loans, bailouts and sell-outs to sustain its clients. The PASOK regime is the great example of an authoritarian party: Groveling at the feet of the EU bankers and leaders while ripping at the throat of millions of impoverished Greek pensioners, wage and salary workers. PASOK’s tax-evader and patronage base is barely affected by the fiscal reforms: Tax revenues have actually decreased because of the deepening recession and non-enforcement.

As the PASOK regime deepens and extends the savaging of incomes and as mass resistance multiplies, young unemployed people (55%) have become more desperate and confrontational toward a government, which is ever more repressive and prone to violence.

Totally committed to extracting marrow from the bare bones of workers remuneration, PASOK literally agreed to allow the EU/IMF to oversee, price and sell the entire public patrimony. In other words the debt payment has become the lever for transferring sovereignty to the imperial countries and for maximizing the extraction of wealth from labor. What remain of the “Greek State” are the police and military assigned to forcibly impose the new imperial order on the exploited and impoverished majority.

In the midst of this catastrophic turn of events, of pillage and poverty, the PASOK legislators hold the line: They still count on the mass base of 25% of self-employed professionals, bankers, consultants and tax-evaders to continue to back the regime because they are barely affected by the sell out.

The bailout will allow for the PASOK legislators to collect their lucrative pensions if they are voted out and the self-employed and professionals will continue to cash in on non-taxed tourist rents and revenues from property even as their local clientele is impoverished. PASOK, Papandreou and his coterie have demonstrated that electoral politics is compatible with the most abject surrender of sovereignty, with sustained and savage repression of the majority of the working population and with a deep, long-term reduction of living standards. The Greek experience once again demonstrates that, faced with the demise of the capitalist system, the differences between conservatives, and social democrats vanish. Democratic freedoms exist only as long as the majority submits to the rule of imperialist powers and their local kleptocrat capitalist collaborators.

No doubt new elections will take place, even as living standards plunge, the debt payments increase and the country is stripped of all of its assets. Probably PASOK will be voted out of office. Their conservative adversaries will simply follow their example as police enforcers and debt collectors.

For the vast majority of Greeks there is no future and no solution in the existing system of street protest and parliamentary politics. The latter ignores the former. This impasse raises the question of what kinds of extra parliamentary action are necessary and possible to end the rule by de-factor imperial rulers and kleptocratic collaborators.

I remembered this incident while reading Joe Allen’s newest book People Wasn’t Made To Burn. The story therein is of a man, James Hickman, who loses two of his children in a fire that was almost certainly set by his landlord as a means of chasing the tenants from the building so that he could increase his income. At the time of the fire, the living conditions were already unsafe and unhealthy, yet greed compelled by the desire to increase profit rendered any concerns about this irrelevant. His children’s deaths eventually drove Mr. Hickman into such depths of depression that he killed the landlord. After seeing justice for his children’s death denied by the system, Hickman saw no other course but to administer his own. The murder of the landlord inspired a movement to defend Mr. Hickman and change the nature of rental housing in Chicago. Allen takes this tragic story and renders it into a chilling narrative that reads like a novel. Simultaneously, Allen’s description of the efforts undertaken by socialists and others in Hickman’s defense read like an organizing primer.

It was the presence of socialists and other like-minded folks that made sure that the movement against the prosecution of Hickman was bigger than Hickman or his act. Under the direction of these activists, the movement around Hickman’s defense became an indictment of a system that let slumlords get away with murder. During the period that this story takes place there were so-called covenant laws that forbade blacks from renting in certain neighborhoods, thereby allowing unscrupulous landlords to charge exorbitant rents for buildings they did not even attempt to maintain. This aspect of legal institutional racism endangered the poor, especially African-Americans.

Furthermore, it was the system of profit that encouraged landlords to let their properties slip into dangerous disrepair while overcharging their tenants. It was also the system of profit that encouraged corruption amongst the very officials hired to guarantee safe living conditions. As labor leader Willoughby Abner told a rally on the opening day of Hickman’s trial: “The same government which failed to heed the need of Hickman and millions of other Hickmans is now trying to convict Hickman for its own crimes, its own failures.” Indeed, it is that system that continues to insure that abuses like this continue to this day.

Allen has written a masterpiece of historical narrative. The story of James Hickman and his family is an emotionally wrought story on its own. Allen’s retelling leaves none of that emotion out. Although it is history he is writing down, the manner of the telling makes that history as current as the latest breaking news. The book is further enhanced by the inclusion of artist Ben Shahn’s illustrations reprinted from a 1947 Harper’s magazine feature about the Hickman case. Allen ends his story with a description of a 2010 fire in Cicero, Illinois, which is right outside of Chicago. There were no fire escapes in the building and it was overcrowded. The people who lived there were violating occupancy laws because they could not afford separate apartments. That fire killed seven people and was found to be deliberately set by the landlord and his maintenance man. This time around the authorities were able to get an indictment of the men responsible for the deaths. In fact, the prosecution intends to seek the death penalty. However, the system that Willoughby Abner said “failed to heed the need of Hickman and millions of other Hickmans” continues to force people to live in unsafe living conditions while making it likely that unscrupulous landlords will continue to choose profits over the safety of those who rent from them. Indeed, it will continue to make it likely that certain landlords would rather burn their properties than take care of them.