1/12/2022 Opposing Beijing Olympics Human Rights Watch Echoes Anti-China Extremists & Debunked Claims. By: Caleb T. MaupinRead NowWith the Winter Olympics set to take place in Beijing next month, the anti-China lobby is hard at work, looking to politicize the event and further damage China’s image internationally. The same cast of characters from the Neocon Right-wing are walking onto the stage. Leading the charge was Mike Pence who spoke before the Heritage Foundation all the way back in July, saying, “President Biden should make a clear and unequivocal demand that the 2022 Winter Olympics be moved from Beijing unless China comes clean on the origins of COVID-19 and immediately ends the persecution of the Uighur people. The Olympics should only take place in countries that respect fundamental human rights and the well-being of mankind.” Peter Navarro, the crackpot anti-China hack who worked in the Trump administration after a career making sponsored documentaries, used his platform on FOX Business to make similar statements on November 15th writing: “The Beijing Winter Olympics offer a golden opportunity for Biden to exert pressure on Communist China on all of these issues.” Prior to working with Trump, Navarro was considered fringe by most academic economists, and since 2020 he has been a promoter of the “Stop the Steal” claims that China somehow teamed up with Venezuela to rig the US elections and remove Trump. While heated words against the Beijing Olympic Games from the usual suspects shouldn’t be surprising, Human Rights Watch (HRW) has jumped in with a very out of character criticism specifically directed at sponsors. HRW’s China director Sophie Richardson wrote: “There are just three months until the Beijing Winter Olympics but corporate sponsors remain silent over how they are using their influence to address China’s appalling human rights record.” Human Rights Watch aims to use its influence to pressure companies like Coca-Cola and Airbnb not to sponsor the games. “To politicize sports by fabricating lies and rumors and undermining the Olympic cause is unpopular and will never succeed,” said China’s foreign ministry spokesperson, Wang Wenbin. The double-standards and selective outrage demonstrated by HRW in this instance is massive. Is HRW seeking a boycott of events in Britain where journalist Julian Assange sits in prison? Has HRW ever called for events in the USA to be cancelled or lose sponsorship because of Guantanamo Bay, the heavy handed repression of Black Lives Matter protesters, or the numerous unilateral illegal invasions and occupations the USA has carried out over the years? Facts Don’t Match Hysterical AllegationsThe basis of the outage for HRW is not real documented events but rumors that don’t match the facts. The claim that “genocide” is being conducted against Uygurs doesn’t add up. From 2010 to 2018, the Uygur population in China’s Xinjiang Autonomous region grew at a faster rate than the region’s population overall. Uygurs were exempt from China’s notorious “one child policy” before it was ultimately scrapped in 2015, and were known to have large families, often 9 or 10 children. China invested $5.2 billion into public health in Xinjiang in 2017, with spectacular results including an increase in life expectancy. Infant and maternal mortality rates were cut in half according to a study published by the Lancet in 2019. Promoters of the “Uygur Genocide” use photographs of the newly built medical clinics as “proof" that birth control is somehow being forced on the population. Zamira Dawut, an individual rolled out by the BBC as a victim of forced sterilization by Chinese officials has been documented to have never studied in a vocational center as she claimed and had never been sterilized. Her claims, treated as undisputed fact by western media, have been thoroughly debunked by public records. Many of the individuals cited as “missing” or “disappeared” by Ugyur separatists have been found living perfectly normal lives either in China or abroad. Furthermore, the Chinese government has a policy of not only allowing local customs and traditions to continue, but sponsoring them and helping them flourish. The Chinese government has either built or refurbished a number of mosques in recent years. Claims about the abuse of graveyards or outlawing of local customs have been widely debunked. Journalists have freely visited Xinjiang and seen local Uygurs freely observing festivals, religious ceremonies and other customs. Adrian Zenz: Another Non-Reliable ExtremistThe source for almost all of these claims about persecution of Uygurs is yet another discredited extremist, this time a German religious fanatic tied to the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. The widely cited Adrian Zenz is the author of a book entitled: “Worthy to Escape: why all believers will not be raptured before the tribulation,” in which he referred to homosexuality as “one of the four empires of the beast,” predicted that Jews would either be “refined” or “wiped out” in a “fiery furnace,” and called for the “scriptural spanking” of disobedient children. Zenz is also opposed to notions of gender equality and takes a number of traditionalist positions that render him to be viewed as a political basket case in modern, socially liberal Germany. Yet HRW repeats his claims as undisputed facts and uses them as the basis for shaming Olympic corporate sponsors. Rhetoric against the Olympics is expected from the likes of Mike Pence, Peter Navarro, Mike Pompeo and Adrian Zenz. These are individuals tied to the ideological neoconservative cold war right wing. Despite the 20th century long being over, they are operating with an outdated playbook, waving God and the Bible as amulets to ward off “the commies.” However, Human Rights Watch purports to be a credible, balanced organization that renders data in an objective way to advance the universal goals of improving civil liberties around the world. Biden presented himself as a relief from the wild-eyed fanaticism of the Trump administration. While China’s economy continues to grow and its reputation around the world has greatly expanded due to the Belt and Road Initiative and other successful development projects, anti-China moves laced with hysterical, non-factual allegations are only serving to further isolate the United States from the international community. The Olympic Games will proceed regardless of Biden’s diplomatic boycott and HRW’s call for pressure on corporate sponsors. The only thing in question is the role of the United States in global affairs, which is increasingly being rolled back despite their increasingly shrill tone, as China speeds forward. AuthorCaleb Maupin is a widely acclaimed speaker, writer, journalist, and political analyst. He has traveled extensively in the Middle East and in Latin America. He was involved with the Occupy Wall Street movement from its early planning stages, and has been involved many struggles for social justice. He is an outspoken advocate of international friendship and cooperation, as well as 21st Century Socialism. He doesn’t shy away from the word “Communism” when explaining his political views, and advocates that the USA move toward some form of “socialism with American characteristics” rooted in the democratic and egalitarian traditions often found in American history. He argues that the present crisis can only be abetted with an “American Rebirth” in which the radicalism and community-centered values of the country are re-established and strengthened. Archives January 2022
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1/11/2022 College campuses in the crosshairs of U.S. government’s anti-China witch hunt. By: Noah StyzkgoldRead NowSince 2018, the U.S. Department of Justice has aggressively pursued an anti-China witch hunt under the banner of the “China Initiative.” After conducting thousands of investigations with few convictions, the program has recently produced its first academic conviction in the high profile case against Professor Charles Lieber, the former chair of the Harvard Chemistry department. The China Initiative was launched as one of the DoJ’s top priorities under far-right Attorney General Jeff Sessions with the stated purpose of preventing “Chinese economic espionage,” meaning the theft of trade secrets and technology from U.S.-based entities. The program came on the heels of the Trump administration digging further into the reckless trade war on China and vague restrictions on Chinese student visas under Presidential Proclamation 10043. The FBI witch hunt against Anming Hu Not long after the initiation of this program, it was clear the DoJ was conducting a racist anti-China witch hunt. And like any other political witch hunt, it would destroy the lives of those it investigated based on little more than profiling and suspicion. Professor Anming Hu at the University of Tennessee was the first to be charged and brought to trial under the China Initiative. The FBI began investigating Hu in 2018 after an agent found a flyer on Google suggesting he had taught at Beijing University. The agent then confronted Hu with accusations of espionage, and actually attempted to coerce Hu into spying on Chinese academics for the U.S. government. After Hu refused for fear of his own safety, the FBI began an extensive investigation. They would place multiple agents, sometimes six or seven at a time, trailing Hu and his son from home to school to work for the next 21 months. After still finding no evidence of espionage, the FBI pursued charges of grant fraud with the hopes of gaining any conviction at all. Once the charges were brought against Hu, he was immediately fired by the University of Tennessee, which it was later revealed aided in the investigation. For the next 18 months, Hu would be under house arrest with no job or income, covering legal fees with GoFundMe donations. Once it finally went to trial in June 2021, the case was declared a mistrial. The baseless charges would then be dismissed by a judge soon after. After the trial, Hu said “My basic human rights were invaded, my reputation was destroyed, my heart was deeply hurt, my family was hurt,” he said. “This is not fairness.” Thousands have now faced these incredibly invasive and harmful investigations based on little more than their Chinese heritage. Racism and charges of “disloyalty” An analysis of the China Initiative by the MIT Technology Review has shown that nearly 90% of those investigated are of Chinese heritage. These initiatives are both driven by and contribute to the larger political context of demonization of China. The intensification of anti-China rhetoric by politicians and the corporate media has led to a sharp rise in anti-Asian hate crimes in the US, drawing comparisons to the rise in Islamophobia following the attacks on 9/11. Within academia, many have noted how the China Initiative has now created an environment of distrust and fear amongst peers. A survey of academics in the United States by the Committee of 100, a non-profit organization of prominent Chinese Americans, found that just over half of Chinese academics were afraid they were being surveilled by the U.S. government. The survey also found that non-Chinese scientists have been cutting ties with their collaborators in China, are no longer hiring Chinese researchers and have been limiting communications with scholars in China. Even with an extremely low conviction rate, the initiative has effectively chilled international academic exchange. Despite widespread investigations, the program has failed to produce the promised convictions of untold numbers of “Chinese spies” stealing trade secrets. Having failed to produce the desired results, the program has shifted its focus away from economic espionage and towards “research integrity.” This has practically meant targeting more Chinese academics for essentially any ties whatsoever to Chinese institutions and looking for minor errors in esoteric and contradictory reporting procedures, just as happened to Hu. In the high profile case of MIT Professor Gang Chen, a U.S. attorney said it was not just about economic espionage, “but about loyalty to China.” New Cold War mentality The China Initiative is not just a racist attack on Chinese academics. It is a part of the new Cold War effort by the U.S. ruling class to maintain their dominant world position despite China’s rapid development. This is how imperialism in the 21st century functions. Dominant capitalist powers aim to keep the formerly colonized and semi-colonized nations of the world in a perpetual state of underdevelopment, so they can exploit them as a cheap source of resources and labor, and pit them against the working class of the imperialist nations. A critical feature of this imperialist domination is preventing technology and knowledge transfer to developing countries, ensuring they will never be able to catch up or compete with the advanced capitalist countries. When targeting academics in a rabid McCarthyite search for “disloyalty,” the agents often look for connections to national talent development programs in China, especially the “Thousand Talents Program”. Hu, Chen, and Lieber were all chosen to participate in this program. Far from a secret plot to steal trade secrets, these programs are completely normal and common in the developing world. National governments aim to support and maintain top talent as a measure to prevent “brain drain” from their countries. It is only through the distorted lens of the new Cold War that such programs are viewed as a threat to U.S. national security. In recent decades, the Chinese economy has grown dramatically. Remarkably, China has now lifted over 850 million people out of extreme poverty and is on track to soon become a high-income economy by world bank standards. This is a clear illustration of the successful development under the socialist political and economic system of China. This has been made all the more poignant this past year when we compare the response of the two systems in the U.S. and China to the COVID-19 pandemic. The U.S. ruling class is clearly threatened by the peaceful rise of China and the implications this has for the imperialist world order. This same new cold war rhetoric is written all over the China Initiative. The Cold War of the 20th century saw attacks on many academics, questioning their loyalty to the United States as well. This included Nobel laureates like Albert Einstein and Linus Pauling, as well as J. Robert Oppenheimer (scientific director of Manhattan Project) and Qian Xuesen. Xuesen, a Professor of Aeronautics at Caltech, would ultimately be deported back to his home country in China where he would play a crucial role in the development of China’s space program. The DoJ, now under the Biden administration, still refuses to suspend the China Initiative. Thousands in the academic community are standing with their colleges against these racist witch hunts in the name of international scientific collaboration for the benefit of all humanity. This article was originally published in Liberation News. Archives January 2022 1/11/2022 Democrats’ inaction on tax credit condemns millions of children to poverty. By: Kenya ElliottRead NowWorking-class families are faced with an extra burden as the new year begins — the expiration of the expanded child tax credit. The expansion provided support for families struggling during the pandemic by changing some key factors of the already existing credit. Namely, the expansion increased the annual amount per child from $2,000 to between $3,000 and $3,600, it paid the credit in monthly installments rather than in one lump sum, and it expanded the full benefits of the credit to families who previously had been ruled ineligible due to their income being too low. On the same day that the CTC expansion expired, there were almost 450,000 new COVID cases reported, almost double the number reported at the same time in 2021. The 7-day average was over 380,000 cases per day. The expiration of the CTC is just the latest in a wave of COVID protections that have been allowed to end, despite the fact that the pandemic is worse than ever. The Paycheck Protection program ended in March of last year, enhanced unemployment benefits ended in September, the federal eviction moratorium expired over the summer, and we haven’t received a stimulus check since the spring of 2021. There was an attempt to make the CTC permanent as part of Biden’s proposed social program budget, as supporters of the expansion had been hoping from its inception. In the six months since the expansion started, it kept almost 4 million children out of poverty, reducing the child poverty rate by almost 30% and providing much needed aid to millions of families. However, just like how the social program budget started out with provisions that would provide funding for clean energy, free community college, paid family and sick leave, and tax increases on the hyper-wealthy and corporations that were all eventually removed or drastically reduced, right-wing Democrats have stood in the way of the CTC expansion as well. Joe Manchin in particular is responsible for killing the CTC extension, citing racist and elitist “concerns” about what families will use the money for, along with the entirety of the social program budget. Research has shown that the CTC extension has reduced child poverty and food insecurity, and that in a time where the system is failing left and right to protect and provide for working-class people, recipients of the tax credit used it to buy food, pay rent and other bills, pay for childcare, buy clothes, create savings and pay down debt. These are all necessities that should be provided to everyone, and while the child tax credit was nowhere close to the full scope of social support that’s needed, it provided an invaluable safety net for families across the country that has now been ripped away. Despite having control of the House, Senate and presidency, the Democrats have failed at every turn to adequately handle the COVID-19 pandemic. They have repeatedly capitulated to right-wing forces within their own party that stand opposed to instituting, or even continuing, the most meager social benefit programs. They could use their power and influence to apply pressure to Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema, and other right-wing Democrats who so clearly and blatantly work to obstruct any legislation that would benefit the working class. Instead, Biden and the Democratic Party shrink their proposed bills, remove key elements, and chip away at reforms that working-class people desperately need in an attempt to find “common ground.” By allowing Manchin and others to do away with the most progressive elements of the social program budget, by allowing corporate greed and interests to supersede the needs and wellbeing of the people, by allowing themselves to be controlled by the furthest right members of the party, the Democrats have once again failed the same working-class people they claim to represent. They have put themselves in a position where they are unable to pass any but the most limited reforms. COVID cases are at an all-time high across the country, millions of people have gotten sick, and yet the Democrats have let the relief programs that were in place expire, and have failed to implement anything meaningful in their place, leaving millions of struggling people vulnerable to food insecurity, housing instability, serious illness and more. The expiration of the child tax credit makes the failure of the Democratic Party painfully clear. We need a new system, one that prioritizes human need over the profits of corporations, and cannot be held hostage by the whims of an individual. AuthorThis article was originally published in Liberation News. Archives January 2022 The Matrix is a film about work. Long before Neo escapes the matrix he has to break out of a much more mundane space of confinement, the office cubicle. The film is thus part of that odd series of films that came out in 1999 that were about the confines of the cubicle and the working day, a list that includes Office Space, Fight Club, and American Beauty (and Being John Malkovich). It was an odd year, in the midst of the dot-com bubble and the Clinton third way, a year that on the surface was good for capitalism, the movies were telling a different story, a story in which work and the office was sucking the life out of people. An idea which The Matrix made literal in its dystopian future of energy sucking pods, in other words, cubicles 2199. In The Matrix we see two different escapes from this world. The first, in the film's opening scenes, is offered by the internet, by the world of hacking. Thomas Anderson/Neo (Keanu Reeves) is cubicle drone by day and hacker by night. Two different lives each with different futures. The first is one of quiet desperation, one that provokes the question about the nature of life and control, or, as the film puts it "What is the Matrix?". The other is one that gets him out of the house and eventually brings him into contact the answer to the question, to understanding what the Matrix is. As it has often been noted the matrix itself can be understood to be a kind of allegory for the internet, or at least early ideas about the internet. On the one hand there is the capacity for self invention and reinvention, exemplified by the collection of various styles and fashions that the "digital selves" wear in the Matrix, three piece suits, trench coats, and gravity defying sunglasses, coupled with the ideal of the dissemination and even democratization of knowledge though digitization. It is a world in which anyone can know anything at the touch of a button, even kung fu. On the other hand, the ubiquity of surveillance and control, agents are everywhere and everything is monitored. The Matrix success was not just in its ability to capture the frustration with the world of the cubicle but it also began to chart out in the imagination the new spaces of escape and control that were being hatched from so many cubicles, on so many computer screens, the space of the virtual world. The internet was in many ways driven by a line of flight, an attempt to escape the cubicle, even if those lines of flight ended with people tethered to laptops, trying to figure out new ways to disrupt industries in order to survive. When The Matrix Resurrections opens, those two identities, the two lives, office worker by day/hacker by night have been merged into one. We meet Thomas Anderson successful video game designer. He has designed three successful Matrix games. He no longer works in a cubicle but in the corner office of a workspace that is as open plan and as "fun" as one would expect. Complete with a coffee shop, Stimulations, that functions as its necessary extension. Computers are no longer the dull grey machines by day, and place of illicit escape by night, but are both at once. Frustration and boredom no longer leads to a search for the true sources of control over society, but towards escape. As one of Thomas' co-workers confessed he nearly ruined middle school by spending all of his time in the Matrix. Escape is not what it once was, nor is control. Much is made about the meta-nature of the fourth film. It begins with Warner Brothers demanding a new sequel to the Matrix. It reminds us that even those films that frame our fantasies of escape, of blowing up the cubicles we work in, are only made if they can make a profit. Many have interpreted these scenes to be Lana Wachowski expressing her own reluctance of being drawn back into her successful franchise. They also function as something of a theory of the blockbuster film itself, or at least an earlier era of the blockbuster. As one character states in the pitch meeting "we need to think bullet time," referencing the first film's special effect that slowed down time so that we could watch characters dodge bullets. The history of the blockbuster, especially the science fiction film, is often one in which images of science fiction futures is made possible by actually existing technological innovations off of the screen. Think Terminator 2 and the liquid metal of the T-1000, Jurassic Park and CGI dinosaurs, and The Matrix and bullet time as a new depiction of action. It used to be a new film needed a new gimmick to become a hit, something to drive people to the spectacle. The contemporary superhero film, or, to be more accurate Intellectual Property film if you include the Star Wars movies, seems to have severed this link. More or less using the same CGI, driving people to the theater to see the next installment not because of spectacular effects but to finally see this or that character return or appear for the first time. Hence the importance of the post-credit scene. This theory of the blockbuster, and its changing role is not an aside, but brings us back to the nature of the film itself, the way it theorizes control and the way in which it enacts it. The Matrix Resurrections is in some sense a sentient blockbuster, aware of the constraints it faces and the possibilities it opens. The line about "bullet time" is one aspect of its self-awareness and limitation. There is no new effect that makes the film a marked departure from the original three, not qualitatively different. Bullet time appears again, but instead of the image slowing to the point where we can see the imperceptible act of dodging bullets it is drawn out to allow for the villain's monolog. To refer to David Graeber's point cited above, there was a point where the only straight line of technological progress was in special effects, we got no closer to exploring the solar system or building robot butlers but the renditions of spaceships and robots on the screen got better with each passing year. Perhaps there is even a slowdown in the rate of special effects. The lack of technical innovation behind the screen is matched by the films halfhearted attempt to deal with the changes of technology in the word since it was first released. There are a few lines about no longer needing landlines as the interface between the matrix and the real world. The matrix of the latest film is simultaneously more spatially defined, appearing as a specific city, San Francisco, rather than the anyplace whatsoever that defined the first film, and disconnected, as it is possible to enter in Paris and open a door onto a bullet train in Japan, but this is indistinguishable from the globe trotting that defines the thriller as a genre. The one point where the film seemed to reflect the change of the modern internet is that the agents of the previous film, the fast and deadly forms of control that could appear anywhere, are replaced by "bots" that can appear anywhere and in large numbers. Swarms of programmed hostility would seem to be just as important to understanding the modern internet of social media as disseminated control was to its earlier version. Both the original film and its latest iteration have what could be called thesis statements about the nature of control. The first is offered by Agent Smith who offers the following as an explanation of the matrix, "Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery." This idea that human beings are controlled not by an ideal by some idealized version of the world, but by both desires and fears, hope and despair is returned to again. As the analyst states in the latest film. "It is all about fiction. The only world that matters is the one in here (pointing to the head), and you people believe the craziest shit. Why? What validates and makes your fictions real? Feelings." To which he adds later, "Feelings are easier to control than facts." This statement could be understood as a thesis statement about the changes that the internet has gone under since the first film, from a conflict over control over knowledge and information, or at the very least intellectual property (Napster and The Matrix came out the same year) to the internet of social media, one driven less by conflicts of control over information than control through anger, hope, and despair. This is interesting as a statement about the internet, but it is hard to see it working out in the film. There are some interesting aspects of emotional control through both the film's critique of therapy and psychiatric drugs as a regime of control, and, more to the point, in the case of Trinity, of the family as a form of emotional control. The film does not really follow through with these, does not really offer us a map of the forces of emotional or affective control that dominate modern life. The reason for this is given in the post-credit scene, which is less about setting up the next sequel than explaining the demise of film itself. Feelings no longer need narrative structure when a cat video or quick meme can do. Apparently, The Matrix Resurrections has not been the same hit of its predecessors. I for one was glad to be able to watch it at home, but a week before it released millions of people returned to the theaters to see the latest Spider-Man movie. To cheer with other people. Perhaps, and this goes beyond the scope of this post, what I have referred to as intellectual property films have to be understood in terms of their own affective economy, their combination of hope and fear, or, more to the point, nostalgia as an emotion. AuthorJason Read is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern Maine. He is the author of The Micro-Politics of Capital: Marx and the Prehistory of the Present (SUNY 2003) and The Politics of Transindividuality (Brill 2015/Haymarket 2016) and a forthcoming collection of essays, The Production of Subjectivity: Between Marxism and Post-Structuralism (Brill 2022) as well as The Double Shift: Marx and Spinoza on the Politics and Ideology of Work (Verso 2023). He blogs on popular culture, philosophy, and politics at unemployednegativity.com. This article was originally published in Jason's blog Unemployed Negativity. Archives January 2022 Jason Barker's film, Marx Reloaded, was released in 2011. It is 52 minutes long and is now available for viewing on the internet. It was interesting to watch but it did not have a lot to do with Marx except superficially. If Marx was reloaded it was with blanks. The film presents a series of talking heads, many of whom have no grasp of what Marx and Marxism are all about and who engage in flights of "postmodern'' speculation as to the meaning of Marxism today. There are a few exceptions that I will note. There are also a few non-Marxist supporters of capitalism who don't see any future for Marx. There are no representatives from contemporary labor movements or political parties which are part of the ongoing Marxist tradition. The question addressed is if Marx's critique of capitalism is valid for our time. If the critique is valid then what comes next? Is Communism going to make a return? Is it coming back to replace the capitalist system? The film opens with an animation of Marx meeting Trotsky and Trotsky undertaking to enlighten Marx as to the significance of Marxism today. Trotsky will attempt to guide Marx to an understanding of how ideology works in society. Quite the tail wagging the dog. The film then begins by asking how economists today explain the greatest capitalist crisis since the great depression of the 1930s. This is the Global Financial Crisis that began in 2008. The answers we get are not very telling. Now the talking heads take over. First up is the late former chief economist of the Deutsche Bank, Norbert Walter (1944-1912) who says that we [bankers] made mistakes. E.g., in the USA people could get mortgages at 110% of the value of their houses. The banks made money cheaply available, people borrowed too much and they couldn't pay back what they owed. Later in the film he tells us that Marx's ideas about getting rid of capitalism by abolishing a society based on commodity production for profit would create a world that people would not want to live in as that would lead to the abolishment of "the universal medium of money" which "turns everything around us into commodities" and "money is an essential medium for civilization, for peaceful coexistence and the organization of complex societies." This begs the question as communism is a complex society based on production for human needs not commodities for profit. Mr. Walter must have forgotten about the two world wars that almost destroyed European civilization in the last century when he opined that "peaceful coexistence" is one of the benefits of a money economy. Next up is Eamonn Butler of the Adam Smith Institute, and author of Taming The Trade Unions, who tells us the crisis was caused by inflation due to governments printing too much money. That is all we hear from him. On a more general level of the problems of capitalism and the meaning of Marx's writing the film interviews several people identified as philosophers, political philosophers, theorists, critics, etc. Some are well known to the academic community although their grasp of Marxism may be questionable. We now hear from Antonio Negri, co-author of Empire, an expert on Spinoza, and a founder of Italian Autonomism, and "Worker's Power" (Potere Operaio) an ultra-left formation in Italy with a secret armed wing. Negri tells us that the capitalists [neo-liberals] cannot pay the workers the price of their labor [which doesn't even make sense in Marxist terms-- a wage is the price paid for labor-- he should at least be talking about the value of their labor-power not the price] and that they remain in power and are able to wage wars around the world only as long as the working class remains quiescent due to high wages. But as we see the capitalists can't do that so Marx is still relevant. This line of thought is taken up by the film which now asks does Marx's theory of exploitation hold today or is the way capitalists make their profits changing? The answers are sought from more talking heads without any clear explanation having been given as to what Marx's theory of exploitation is. What is clear is that with a few exceptions, which I will note, none of the answers given in this part of the film are dealing with Marx's theory. The philosopher Slavoj Zizek is now up to bat (what film on "Marxism" would be complete without this latter day Eugen Dühring). He is described as the "leader" of a new movement to revive Marxist and Communist thinking. He revives Marx by proclaiming that the classical notion of exploitation [left unexplained] no longer works due to the knowledge explosion-- he does not tell us why this is so. However, it has something to do with computers because we need them to communicate with each other and so we have to pay "rent" to Bill Gates because he owns part of our mental substance. I am tempted to think that in professor Zizek's case Mr. Gates is a slumlord. Finally we are told that we need a redefinition of the "proletariat" because the "proletariat" is larger than the working class. Zizek also notes that the unemployed today demonstrate because they want jobs-- "please exploit us in the normal way" they are saying to the capitalists. I think he strikes out as the "leader" of a new "Marxist" movement. He will appear again later. Antonio Negri now reappears. Capitalism, he says, has evolved in ways Marx could not have predicted. Exploitation is not only of factory workers but of workers throughout society. You can't start a revolution with the factory workers-- you need them but also all the other workers too [I think Marx could have predicted this, in fact he already knew it.] You need the other workers, Negri says, because they are the "most" exploited. What can that mean? The examples he gives are of research and cinema workers and the like because they produce more value. None of this makes sense because the Marxist concept of "value," "surplus value," "labor power" and "exploitation" are never brought up in the film. If they were, none of the things these talking heads and intellectual will-o-the-wisps are saying would make sense anyway only the viewers would at least understand why. Herfried Munkler now makes his appearance. Dr. Munkler, co-editor of the Complete Works of Marx and Engels and a professor at Humboldt University, in contrast to those who have appeared before, actually knows a thing or two about Marxism although in its Social Democratic deformation. His concern is not limited to discussing the plight of working people in the West but focuses on the exploitation of working people in the so-called Third World where working conditions are subhuman and wages are ridiculously low in comparison to the advanced capitalist countries. Here it is obvious that Marxist ideas are relevant and that capitalism is being abusive. Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri's collaborator on the book Empire (not worth the read) now appears to bring us back from the Third World to the the First to tell us the economy is now centered on "immaterial" and "immeasurable" products-- that is, on "ideas" not on "objects" like old fashioned commodities such as cars, refrigerators, toasters-- the products of industrial manufacturing. Economics is about relationships and intangible assets [not, coal, oil or natural gas]. He is listed as a literary critic and political philosopher, at least he talks about political philosophy like a literary critic. Now is the time for Jacques Rancière , the co-author with Louis Althusser(1918-1990) of Reading Capital (although his part was left out of the English version). He is noted for an educational theory which says a person can be a teacher without knowing anything about the subject he is going to teach; a view welcomed by not a few teachers. Rancière makes three appearances in the film and manages to say nothing of importance in any of them. Here he tells us many societies have had exploitation without "explosions" so we can't draw from exploitation the logic of an end to exploitation. Economic exploitation is not the dominant factor in all social struggles. Rancière seems oblivious to the Marxist view that, as Engels says, in the last analysis all major social struggles in class based societies have economic exploitation at their root. Each society and its economic formation needs to be individually studied. There have certainly been "explosions" over exploitation in all societies that have distinct social classes despite Rancière's contrary assertions. The film now takes up a new subject. We are told that to understand capitalism we must delve into the "mystic realm" of the commodity. It is certainly true that without an understanding of the origin and role of commodities we will not understand our economic system which is based on the production and exchange of commodities. Marx devotes the first chapter of Das Kapital to the commodity. It is a difficult chapter but once grasped the rest of the volumes of Das Kapital will be easily understood. The film however does not deal with Marx's scientific analysis of commodities but skips to the last section of the chapter which is entitled "The Fetishism of Commodities." Without an understanding of the preceding sections it is easy to misunderstand this last section and, true to form, both the film's narrator and all of the talking heads in this part of the film completely miss the point and fail to grasp Marx's ideas concerning commodity fetishism. To make a long story short, Marx's point is that the laws of the capitalist system are not products of nature as, say, are the laws of gravity or of aerodynamics but they are the result of human activity. Commodities and their relations are created by human beings and human beings can abolish them. Yet, because we are ignorant of the laws of economics we think of commodities as natural, as things which , although created by us, assume an existence independent of us and go to a market whose laws we are subject to and must conform to. This is similar to the creation of religions or "primitive" belief systems where a person creates a fetish and then bows down to it and thinks it has power over him and he must subject himself to its demands and will. The capitalist market appears as the natural form of economic exchange and there is no alternative to it. It is not true that there is no alternative and humans can abolish capitalism and rid themselves of subjection to the laws of commodity production and create an economic world which serves human needs and one where human needs do not take second place to the need to exchange commodities at a profit. None of this is addressed in this part of the film. Instead we get baloney. This is because the talking heads are in the grips of the very fetishism Marx warns us about. Norman Bolz (media theorist): "The theory of commodity fetishism is Marx's most important discovery." It isn't. Marx's most important discovery is the distinction between the value of labor and that of labor-power which is the basis of the labor theory of value and of his analysis of capitalism. It is, however, one of the most important consequences of that discovery. Bolz continues by saying Marx's theory reveals a secret as to why capitalism today "functions so well" (as the Global Financial Crisis indicates). The secret is "that goods in the capitalist market place satisfy more than simple needs; they also convey a spiritual surplus value and this value is the real reason for the purchase." This is complete and utter nonsense. Peter Sloterdijk, a philosopher, is not so definite. He says the theory is probably "the important part of Marxist doctrine." This is because "Marx is among those who discovered the fact that things live." He goes on to say, Walter Benjamin "discovered the structural similarity between human commodities [?] and commodities as objects." He thus "universalized the category of prostitution." While there may be a relationship between fetishism and prostitution on some level (handcuffs, whips, bondage, etc.,) I don't think this is what Marx was getting at. "Prostitution is always present when a beautiful thing feigns life and tries to seduce a passersby with an offer." I think professor Sloterdijk should reread Marx's chapter on commodities. Finally, here is Famonn Butler’s (policy analyst) take: he says it's human psychology to want things-- the economy is neutral-- it just produces what people want. Well then, that's it. Capitalism just produces what people want. Then why are there so many adverts all over the place? Do we need to be constantly reminded about what we want? The film now turns to Marxism and Ecology-- only by now Marxism has been unloaded rather than reloaded. Zizek is now talking about "Communism" in the sense of what we have in "common"-- the Earth as our "common substance" and we have to manage it together. He makes no proposal about how to do that. Michael Hart is also back talking about the "common" in "Communism" and how different that is from both the "Communism" found in the former Soviet Union (derived in part at least from Marx incidentally) and also the "Communism" of American Anti-Communism [evidently he doesn't approve of either kind of "Communism"]. Herfried Munkler points out that Marx "applies exploitation not only to human labor but to the limited resources of nature. He says that if the exploitation of nature continues nature will be destroyed." Munkler thinks that we can reduce the exploitation of nature under capitalism and have common ownership of the Earth without a Marxist society. But this is just social democratic optimism as befits anyone affiliated with the SPD in Germany. He gives no program. But at least he brings up an all important issue; the destruction of the environment under capitalism today. John Gray weighs in with the observation that international capitalism develops in ways impossible to predict and impossible to control (revealing that he is completely under the sway of the fetishism of commodities). He says the "New Leninists" [we have not met any "Leninists" in this film-- nor will we] and "Greens" are correct about the fact that "human action" has destabilized the environment but they are "deluded" in thinking human action can restabilize it. It doesn't occur to him that it is not humans qua humans that are destructive but only humans under the sway of particular sorts of economic and social relations. Even if humans could get together as a global collective, which he says will never happen, they could not restabilize the environment. Doom and gloom is all we can expect. The film now asks if the current economic crisis was caused by an under regulated banking system. Is the only solution now and in the future to have state regulated economic systems? The film suggests we look back into history for solutions. I should note here that people who look to the past for solutions to present day problems are usually seen to be reactionaries. Be that as it may, we return to Norbert Bolz who likes the fact that in the 19th century banks issued their own scripts which functioned as money. You could take it to another bank and redeem it in coin of the realm-- if the other bank trusted it! This system would make all the banks very aware of the true value of the scripts and bad banks would be exposed. He thinks this is a really good idea and I suppose there were no banking crises in the 19th century, except there were. John Gray rightly thinks this idea is nuts because state monopoly capital [not his term] has become so evolved and complicated since the 19th century and this has happened as a result of the close interconnection between capitalism and state power-- there is no going back. But is there going forward? Why is it that the state rushes in to save capitalism all the time? Is it possible, the film now asks, that these crises, like the one we are in right now, which broke out in 2007-2008, are not side effects of capitalism but essential to its very existence? Herfried Munkler tells us that Marx thought that crises would lead to the downfall of capitalism but since his day capitalism has gone through many crises and has "rejuvenated itself." He mentions Joseph Schumpeter's (1883-1950) theory of crises as periods of "creative destruction." "Capitalism," Munkler concludes, "doesn't age. Instead, crisis is its Fountain of Youth." This from the co-editor of the Collected Works is rather strange. Marx thought the internal contradictions would eventually bring about capitalism's collapse (or the mutual destruction of the contending classes within the system) but there was no time table and he argued that capitalism had at its disposal many tools to stave off immediate collapse but it would eventually prove dysfunctional as had the economic forms (slavery, feudalism,) that preceded it. Schumpeter’s "creative destruction" (destruction of the lives of workers and the majority of the population and creation of new wealth for the so-called 1%-- the capitalists) is no refutation of Marx's theories. The "theorist" Alberto Toscano, one of the very few interviewed who seems to have his head in the right place, points out that capitalism, whatever its ultimate fate, is responsible for creating a gigantic surplus population that it does not know what to do with. He mentions the book The Planet of Slums by Mike Davis and talks about the "surplus humanity" that capitalism has on its hands because its technological advances have made the number of workers it needs redundant. This is the "reserve army of labor" that Marx wrote about-- but now it is no longer just a "reserve" it is a surplus of human beings that are socially unneeded piling up in the slums of the world with nowhere to go. The "creative destruction" they may eventually bring about capitalism may have a hard time dealing with. Only the Chinese, with a non-capitalist economic system, seem to have been able to cope with the massive poverty in the rural areas of their country (and of course Cuba and Vietnam and a few others with non-capitalist economies are beginning to follow suit). Finally, the film asks what sense is there in believing another world, other than capitalism, is possible. TINA-- "There is No Alternative" was Ms.Thatcher's motto-- was she correct? Can a Communist alternative emerge after the experiences of the past century? Antonio Negri says there is only capitalism so we must fight the bosses as the bosses fight us. This seems to be an eternal struggle-- there is only the movement Bernstein thought and so it seems does Negri-- at least in this film-- it is difficult to get just what he means so I may be incorrect here. He tells us what we all know-- Russia didn't have "Communism" it had "socialism" [even this is doubtful in retrospect -tr]. What is socialism? It is a way to manage capitalism, just like liberalism is. How would Communism come about? It "comes into being through a relation between transformations of reality and the will or decision to do it or to build it." After this bit of balderdash he leaves us with the admonition to junk the old Communist Manifesto and to write a new one-- he is not, however, the person to do it. Nina Power, feminist philosopher, has more regard for the Communist Manifesto, and says it has continuing power to influence people. She is surely correct. Zizek writes off the 20th century "communist" states, Social Democracy, the idea of local councils, collectives, Soviets (which first popped up in the 1905 Russian Revolution) and their latter day reincarnations. What's left? He tells us he likes the idea that "A communist society is one in which each person could dwell in his own stupidity." Zizek is already doing that so he should be happy. He says he got that idea from reading Frederick Jameson. He thinks it would be great if Communism turned out to be like a Bruegel painting. Whenever I hear Zizek expostulating it brings to mind what Karl Marx said about Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) i.e., "in no time and in no country has the most homespun common-place ever strutted about in so self-satisfied a way." At least Bentham did not resort to pseudo-Hegelian verbiage. Micha Brumlik (professor of education at the Goethe University of Frankfurt am Main) maintains that after the 20th century we have the right to know what Communism is going to be like-- it has to be democratic to be supported. There will be a big fight over that, I fear, as different concepts of "democracy" will be put forth. But he is right to demand a politically active civil society not divorced from a democratic political system. He thinks that Hardt and Negri's unclear views on the "the multitude" [people retain their individualism but act collectively—a mutation of “democratic centralism”?-tr] will never get that concept up and running or have any practical outcome. Jacques Rancière leaves us with the view that while Marx wanted a "classless society" what we really need is what he calls an "emancipatory society." This is one "in which each has an equal share." This has a vague utopian sound to it-- a throwback to pre-Marxist French socialist thinking. Marxist logic, he tells us, is to prepare for the future, but he believes "instead that the idea of emancipation is really tied to a sort of appearance in the here and now of those we call the 'have-nots' and of those who make their presence felt through their capacity to think, to intervene politically and to prove themselves capable of organizing economic production." Ayn Rand (1905-1982) would like this-- the have-nots and their masters-- only for Rancière they would be good masters. This is a latter day reincarnation of Plato's Republic. Rancière goes on to criticize Negri. "Negri thinks capitalism produces communism [in the film Negri appears to think capitalism is here for the long run and must always be struggled against-- or if communism comes about it will be through the triumph of the will-- few of the people in this film are logically coherent]. In reality, Rancière says, capitalism only produces its own form of communism. But this is not the communism of everyone's capacity. There are those who say 'Look at what capitalism does. The idea of communism can't be so bad.' But I don't think those people are involved in constructing the idea of real equality today." What is this rambling discourse supposed to mean? The last pronouncement I will consider comes from Peter Sloterdijk, who tells us that "People must join together to forge alliances against the lethal. They must provide mutual security and offer each other communities of solidarity on a planetary scale [sounds like an advert for NATO]. Because for the first time collective self destruction is possible. [Is he referring to the bomb? climate change?] Before we say 'communism' we must understand the principle of 'immunism' [a new -ism to worry about] or the principle of our mutual insurance which is the most profound motive of solidarity." This is the sum and substance of the movie. Some of these thinkers are better than they have appeared in this movie-- but not by much. I don't think this film has reloaded Marx-- quite the contrary. I think it completely fails to present what Marxism is all about and its past accomplishments and future possibilities. No film can hope to present Marxism to the public without at the same time dealing with the real life problems of the union and working class movements and issues in the Third World. As I pointed out at the beginning of this review this film completely ignores working class leaders and the leaders of political movements inspired by Marxism and confines itself to interviewing intellectual talking heads who, quite frankly, often don't know what they are talking about. You can find this movie on YouTube complete with subtitles. It is 52 minutes long, and once you have watched it I think you will agree with my assessment. AuthorThomas Riggins is a retired philosophy teacher (NYU, The New School of Social Research, among others) who received a PhD from the CUNY Graduate Center (1983). He has been active in the civil rights and peace movements since the 1960s when he was chairman of the Young People's Socialist League at Florida State University and also worked for CORE in voter registration in north Florida (Leon County). He has written for many online publications such as People's World and Political Affairs where he was an associate editor. He also served on the board of the Bertrand Russell Society and was president of the Corliss Lamont chapter in New York City of the American Humanist Association. Archives January 2022 The United States claims it is operating under a “rules-based order”—but the term is not the same international law recognized by the rest of the world. Rather, it is camouflage behind which American exceptionalism flourishes. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and other members of the Biden Cabinet are fond of proclaiming the “rules-based international order” (RBIO) or “rules-based order” every chance they get: in press conferences, on interviews, in articles, at international fora, for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and cocktails. Along with the terms “human rights” and “democracy,” the RBIO is routinely used to claim a moral high ground against countries that they accuse of not following this RBIO, and wielded as a cudgel to attack, criticize, accuse, and delegitimate countries in their crosshairs as rogue outliers to an international order. This cudgel is now used most commonly against China and Russia. Oddly enough, whenever the United States asserts this “rules-based order” that China (and other “revisionist powers”/enemy states) are violating, the United States never seems to clarify which “rules” are being violated, but simply releases a miasma of generic accusation, leaving the stench of racism and xenophobia to do the rest. This is because there is a fundamental contradiction at the heart of the RBIO. The RBIO isn’t “rules-based,” it isn’t “international,” and it confounds any sense of “order,” let alone justice. It is, at bottom, the naked exercise of U.S. imperial power and supremacy, dressed up in the invisible finery of an embroidered fiction. The RBIO is a fraudulent impersonation of international law and justice. There are many layers to this misnomer, to be deconstructed piece by piece. ‘RBIO’ in Contrast With ‘International Law’ First, the RBIO is not “international” in any sense of the word. There actually is a consensual rules-based international order, a compendium of agreed-upon rules and treaties that the international community has negotiated, agreed to, and signed up for. It’s called simply “international law.” This refers to the body of decisions, precedents, agreements, and multilateral treaties held together under the umbrella of the Charter of the United Nations and the multiple institutions, policies, and protocols attached to it. Although imperfect, incomplete, evolving, it still constitutes the legal foundation of the body of international order and the orderly laws that underpin it: this is what constitutes international law. The basic foundation of the UN Charter is national sovereignty—that states have a right to exist, and are equal in relations. This is not what the United States is referring to. When the United States uses the term RBIO, rather than the existing term “international law,” it does so because it wants to impersonate international law while diverting to a unilateral, invented, fictitious order that it alone creates and decides—often with the complicity of other imperial, Western, and transatlantic states. It also does this because, quite simply, the United States does not want to be constrained by international law and actually is an international scofflaw in many cases. The United States as International Outlaw For example, the United States refuses to sign or to ratify foundational international laws and treaties that the vast majority of countries in the world have signed, such as the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), CEDAW (the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women), ICESCR (the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights), CRC (the Convention on the Rights of the Child), ICRMW (the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families), UNCLOS (the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea), PAROS (the Prevention of an Arms Race in Outer Space), the Ottawa Treaty (the Anti-Personnel Landmines Convention), and the majority of labor conventions of the ILO (International Labor Organization). In fact, the United States harbors sweatshops, legalizes child labor (for example, in migrant farm labor), and engages in slave labor (in prisons and immigration detention centers). Even the U.S. State Department’s own 2021 Trafficking in Persons Report acknowledges severe problems in the U.S. of trafficking and forced labor in agriculture, food service, manufacture, domestic service, sex work, and hospitality, with U.S. government officials and military involved in the trafficking of persons domestically and abroad. Ironically, the United States tries to hold other countries accountable to laws that it itself refuses to ratify. For example, the United States tries to assert UNCLOS in the South China Sea while refusing—for decades—to ratify it and ignoring its rules, precedents, and conclusions in its own territorial waters. There are also a slew of international treaties the United States has signed, but simply violates anyway: examples include the Chemical Weapons Convention, the Biological Weapons Convention, UN treaties prohibiting torture, rendition, and kidnapping, and of course, war of aggression, considered “the supreme international crime”—a crime that the United States engages in routinely at least once a decade, not to mention routine drone attacks, which are in violation of international law. Most recently, the AUKUS agreement signed between the United States and Australia violates the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) by exploiting a blind spot of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). There are also a multitude of treaties that the United States has signed but then arbitrarily withdrawn from anyway. These include the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran, the Agreed Framework and the Six-Party Talks with North Korea, the Geneva Conventions, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, and many others. There are also approximately 368 treaties signed between the Indigenous nations and the U.S. government; every single one of them has been violated or ignored. There are also unilateral fictions that the United States has created, such as “Freedom of Navigation Operations” (FONOPs): this is gunboat diplomacy, a military show of force, masquerading as an easement claim. FONOPs are a concept with no basis in international law—“innocent passage” is the accepted law under UNCLOS—and it is the United States and its allies who are violating international laws when they exercise these FONOPs. Air Defense Identification Zones (ADIZs) are likewise notions that have no recognition in international law—the accepted concept is “sovereign airspace”—but the United States routinely claims that China is violating Taiwan’s ADIZ or airspace—which covers three provinces of mainland China. These are some examples of the absurd fictions that the United States invents to assert that enemy states like China are violating the RBIO. This is weaponized fiction. The United States also takes great pains to undermine international structures and institutions; for example, not liking the decisions of the World Trade Organization (WTO), it has disabled the WTO’s Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) mechanism; it has undermined—and threatened—the ICC (by passing the American Servicemembers Protection Act [ASPA], also known as the Hague Invasion Act), and more recently, sanctioned the ICC prosecutor and her family members; it thumbs its nose at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and its decisions, and generally is opposed to any international institution that restricts its unbridled, unilateral exercise of power. Former U.S. Ambassador to the UN John Bolton, in blunt candor, asserted that there is “no such thing as the United Nations,” but this unhinged ideology is quietly manifested in the day-to-day actions of the United States throughout successive U.S. administrations. Whose Rules? The United States Applies Its Laws Internationally On the flip side of this disdain for agreed-upon international law and institutions is the United States’ belief that its own laws should have universal jurisdiction. The United States considers laws passed by its corrupt, plutocratic legislature—hardly international or democratic by any stretch of the imagination—to apply to the rest of the world. These include unilateral sanctions against numerous countries (approximately one-third of the world’s population is impacted by U.S. sanctions), using the instruments of the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), the U.S. legislature and courts, as well as currency and exchange systems (SWIFT). These unilateral sanctions are a violation of international law and humanitarian law, as well as perversions of common sense and decency--millions have perished under these illegal sanctions. To add insult to injury, the United States routinely bullies other countries to comply with these unilateral sanctions, threatening secondary sanctions against countries and corporations that do not follow these U.S.-imposed illegal sanctions. This is part of the general pattern of the exercise of U.S. long-arm jurisdiction; examples abound: the depraved arrest, imprisonment, and torture of journalist and WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange—an Australian national—for violating U.S. espionage laws; the absurd kidnapping of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou (a Chinese national) on Canadian soil, for violating illegal U.S. sanctions on Iran (which Canada does not itself uphold); and many other examples, too many to enumerate. This long-arm bullying is often exercised through a network of kangaroo courts within the United States, which arrogate to themselves unitary, plenipotentiary international powers to police the citizens of other countries. Not surprisingly, the United States also applies its own laws in a similarly corrupt way within its own borders, with its own gulag system fed through these kangaroo courts. The most dramatic examples of the corruption of these courts can be noted in the routine exoneration of police-inflicted murders of civilians, except under the most extreme protest and activism; and absurd judgments, such as the prosecution of Steven Donziger by a Chevron-linked corporate law firm; or the exoneration of Kyle Rittenhouse by a judge allowing the accused to run the juror lottery. Note, however, the system itself is set up for conviction: over 99 percent of federal cases that go to court result in conviction; most do not even go to trial: 90 percent of U.S. federal indictments are settled by defendants pleading “guilty” or “no contest” to charges filed against them. The idea that there is any impartial notion of justice is belied by the fact that fair and adequate legal representation is unaffordable for most defendants; that appointed public defenders are so overstretched that they often spend literally minutes on each case, simply counseling defendants to plead guilty—which most do—and individuals, in the rare cases where they do win, are often bankrupted and psychically destroyed by a system that has unlimited resources and finances to beat down its victims. This corrupt system of oppression, despite its obvious injustices and iniquities, is exacerbated within vast gray areas of the justice system where even counsel, appeal, scrutiny, or oversight does not apply, and where a single individual may be judge, jury, and executioner. These include, for example, certain parole and probation systems, review boards within prisons, debt collection systems, immigration proceedings, asset forfeiture systems, and many other quasi-judicial systems of oppression. Generally, these violations and injustices are excused or erased by the international and national media, which are complicit in maintaining an illusion of impartial, high-standards justice in the United States. This is an illusion without substance: the U.S. legal system, like the U.S. health care system or the U.S. educational system, is essentially a failed system that is designed to work only for the rich and powerful. It delivers substandard, so-called care, if not outright abuse, harm, violence, and death, to the vast majority of people who have the misfortune to enter its sausage-making chambers. Routine Exemptions, Deadly Disorder Nevertheless, from time to time, dramatic incidents of the United States flaunting the international “rules-based order”—i.e., international law by the United States—occasionally make headlines (before being rapidly silenced). One type of recurring violation is the abuse of diplomatic immunity. This type of case is mundane and repetitious: a U.S. (or Western-allied) government employee kills or harms native citizens; the United States immediately claims diplomatic immunity. Sometimes the perpetrator is drunk, out of control, or paranoid; often they are spies or contractors. For example, according to recent reports, Anne Sacoolas seems to have been a drunk U.S. spy who killed a British teenager in 2019. She was spirited away immediately as a diplomat. Raymond Allen Davis was a U.S. contractor, possibly acting CIA station chief, who shot dead two people in the street in Pakistan. Another person was killed by a vehicle picking up Davis to take him away from the crime scene. Davis was spirited out of the country, no explanations were given, and the murders were erased from media consciousness. This mindset of exceptionalism and impunity is not anecdotal, but manifests on a general, structural scale in the numerous one-sided U.S. status of forces agreements (SOFAs) in the countries where the United States has troops stationed. These give a blanket immunity similar to diplomatic immunity: the violating U.S. soldier or contractor cannot be arrested and rendered to domestic courts unless the United States chooses to waive immunity; U.S. extraterritorial exemption/immunity can be applied despite cases of murder, mayhem, violence, torture, rape, theft, sexual trafficking, and a host of other sins. This type of exceptionalism also applies to national health policies and international health regulations. For example, multiple COVID-19 outbreaks have been traced to U.S. violations of domestic public health measures—screening, testing, contract tracing, and isolation—in many territories or countries (especially island regions) where the United States has military bases. For example, several major COVID outbreaks in Okinawa have been traced to U.S. troops entering the island without following local health protocols. The United States takes the cake for hypocrisy, however, when, in several COVID lawsuits, it accused China—without evidence—of violating UN/World Health Organization (WHO) International Health Regulations by failing to notify the United States and the rest of the world in a timely manner about the outbreak of COVID-19. This is entirely refuted by the facts and the well-established timelines: no other country has worked as assiduously and as rapidly in investigating, ascertaining, and then notifying the world of the initial outbreak, as well as sharing necessary information to control it. The United States, however, has carved out a pandemic-sized exemption from reporting any infectious diseases to the WHO if it deems it necessary for its national security interests. Ironically, this exemption is carved out for the single institution most likely to propagate it--the U.S. military: “any notification that would undermine the ability of the U.S. Armed Forces to operate effectively in pursuit of U.S. national security interests would not be considered practical.” When the United States disingenuously uses the term RBIO, or rules-based international order, it may be playing at international law, but once its applications are unpacked and defused, it becomes clear that it is a weaponized fiction that the United States uses to attack its enemies and competitors. If “hypocrisy is a tribute that vice pays to virtue,” the RBIO is the vicious first tribute that the United States sends to its law-abiding opponents to undermine international order, no less dangerous for its falsehood. AuthorK.J. Noh is a journalist, political analyst, writer and teacher specializing in the geopolitics of the Asia-Pacific region. This article was produced by Globetrotter. Archives January 2022
There is so much confusion these days. We are coming out of an era of confusion, of purposeful distortion, of the establishment and arms of the state using its sophisticated propaganda machine to mislead us in so many ways as to what our interests are, that even once we begin understanding that it is the system itself that is the problem, we are immediately confronted with more distortions designed to redirect any potential revolutionary energy away from ever being a threat to the ruling class. This includes confusing us over what basic terminology is. Recently, I’ve been clarifying old Marxist terms that have been distorted over the years on social media (search for the hashtag #MarxistTerminology if you’re interested!). And this phenomenon is why I wrote this essay. I mean, even the word Marxism is a mystery these days. So let’s begin very simply: Marxism is a science. That’s right. You read that correctly. The words haven’t melted into each other, and you aren’t having an aneurysm. Marxism is a science. Or, more precisely, Marxism is a social science. Or, even more precisely, Marxism is THE social science, the science that shows how unscientific liberal social sciences are, by genuinely explaining how things happen in society and why. But how can this be, I hear you ask from across time and space. It seems so weird. Marxism can’t be a science. Science is when nerdy looking people in lab coats and goggles do experiments with test tubes, and then smoke comes out of the test tubes. And sometimes, when it’s really funny science, the science will blow up in their face and it’ll be all singed for a minute before it goes back to normal. Or, if it’s a duck doing the science, maybe his bill will get turned around. That’s science, right? And that’s certainly not what Marxism is. Well, no. Just… just no. All science developed through analyzing what is, thinking about the world around us, and creating and adding to bodies of knowledge that can explain the operation of general laws. And, boy howdy. Marxism fits this description like a glove, despite all of the metrics various ideologically motivated intellectuals have come up with in order to try to dispel the notion. In fact, Marx himself viewed things this way. And it has only been added to and improved upon over time. Entire countries have been founded on the discoveries Marx made. And today, these discoveries are leading the world into a new era. So, what makes it a science, then? It’s all well and good to make declarations about what is and isn’t science, but if we don’t explain why, how this science developed, well—then, it just isn’t very helpful. We need to know what the component parts of Marxism are and how they came to be in order to judge for ourselves what, exactly, it is. We wouldn’t call something a cheeseburger if we didn’t first open up the bun and make sure the components of a cheeseburger (1 burger, check; 1 cheese, check) were there first, would we? So, let’s give the same courtesy to Marxism that we give our various lunch and barbecue foods. William Z Foster, founding member of the Communist Party USA and heroic labor leader of the early to mid-1900’s, wrote one of the best histories of Marxism and Marxists to date towards the end of his life, the “History of the Three Internationals”. In this seminal work, he opens by describing the history of the pre-Marxist labor movement, culminating in an essay that describes the real birth of socialism as we know it today, and what made Marxism so effective in the real world, so different from everything that came before it. Marxism is a large word, and it encompasses so much, but Foster identifies the eight core features of Marxism in his essay “Major Principles of Marxist Socialism”, taken from this section in one of the most concise essays on the topic to this very day. These core features of Marxism create a progressive increase in our body of knowledge on the study of society and its progress. You’ve probably guessed by now that we’re going to be detailing those eight features here, right? If so, give yourself a high-five. You nailed it. So, let’s get started, shall we? 1. Philosophical Materialism All science rests on the fundamental idea that the material world is primary, and that our ideas are a reflection of that objective reality. Materialism says that we do not pluck ideas out of the ether and shape the world as we see fit, operating on a proverbial blank slate, but instead, that the world shapes us, that our actions are based on the way we interpret this reality, and on what is possible within that reality. Karl Marx was the supreme philosopher of materialism in his day, the original taker of the red pill. He based himself fully in this understanding, and counter-posed it against what he considered the “idealist imaginings” of others, such as Hegel, Hume, Kant, and Berkeley, whose philosophical systems all led, though one route or another, to the acceptance of some type of world creation. For philosophical idealists, it is not the material world that is primary, but the idea. A great thinker or powerful leader would poof an idea out of the ether and then put this idea into practice. For Hegel, the entirety of world history was the formation of ultimate truth through the continual process of making more precise, the idea. Marx, instead, proposed a world ruled by definite laws, and showed us how understanding these laws would lead to a greater understanding of the world itself. Not only that, Marx also showed us, in his various works, how the idealist outlook on the world constitutes a shield for the capitalist class, and how materialism could be, as Foster called it, the “sharpest intellectual weapon of the proletariat in its fight against capitalism and for socialism”. 2. DialecticsDialectics is a scary-sounding word. Almost as scary as “Bigfoot”. But once we understand what it means, it turns out it isn’t that scary at all. Really, dialectics is the study of motion—the motion of all things and how that motion happens. Lenin once described it as, “the theory of evolution which is most comprehensive, rich in content, and profound”. But that’s a little jargony and dated. Let’s put it into ordinary human language (another great phrase from Lenin), so we can wrap our brains around it. What did Lenin mean when he said this? What is dialectics? What are the nuts and bolts? “Motion is the mode of existence of matter.” When we study the motion of something, the first thing we usually want to understand is what causes that motion, right? If we want to know how a car moves, we need to understand that it has an engine and a gas pedal and all the other parts that work in interconnection that make it move. Dialectics is like learning how a car moves, but for the entire universe and everything in it. Every phenomenon has internal forces that produce its motion. When we “look under the hood”, so to speak, we discover that there are mutually interdependent forces that ‘struggle’ against each other inside any given phenomenon. The study of the molecules inside water that push against each other in order to create its evaporating or freezing point could be said to be a dialectical study of water. In this same manner, the study of the struggle between capitalists and workers is a dialectical study of society. Without dialectics, our materialist foundation is incomplete, since it is impossible to truly understand a phenomenon without understanding the core foundation of that phenomenon, its motion, the way it develops and deteriorates. The two form, one could say, an interdependent concept. Without understanding what’s under the surface, we have—well, only the surface. We can say that society is full of people who do work, but dialectics and materialism give us the tools that help us understand why those people do this work and why they do it the way they do. 3. The Materialist Conception of HistoryIt was Marx and Engels who first put the study of history on a scientific footing, tearing to shreds the old metaphysical and subjective ways of writing “history” in much the same manner as an electric shredder tears documents apart at the Citi-group offices. Through extensive, exhaustive, (and often exhausting) explanation, using their dialectical materialist methodology, Marx and Engels peel back coincidence, and trace all of the myriad phenomena in society to their source, to the one central root cause of why things in society happen the way they do. In Marxism, we often refer to this as the ‘economic factor’, or the way production is carried out within a given society. Or, simply, the way people make their living. Marx said on this, “In the social production which men carry on they enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will; these relations of production correspond to a definite stage of development of their material powers of production. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society—the real foundation on which rise legal and political superstructures to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production in material life determines the general character of the social, political, and spiritual processes of life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness.” This neatly sums up one of the major discoveries of Marxism, the economic factor as the basis of the motion of society, which we commonly refer to as the base. This puts all the rest of it into motion, and builds what we call the superstructure upon it, our political systems, laws, spirituality, and everything else. Let’s break that open and make sure we’re all on the same page before we move on, though, shall we? Since it is precisely the opposite way to look at it from the one we are taught by default. What does it mean to say that people (Marx uses men, but this is 2022 here, okay?) enter into ‘definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will’? Well, people are forced to work with and create relationships with each other in order to engage in production, right? It really doesn’t matter what we want—what matters is that we are forced to do this in order to function in society. If you are a working class person, you must go out and sell your ability to perform work to someone who owns the property which makes production possible. If you’re a capitalist, you must buy that ability to perform work from workers. Without this relationship between worker and owner, capitalist production doesn’t happen. There are many levels of this, and sometimes these days, the capitalists themselves are mostly removed from the process, instead buying the labor power of some people in order to do that for them, but it still all boils down to this essential relationship. Okay. That was easy. How about the next part? These relationships correspond to a definite stage of development of their material powers of production. Don’t worry; this one’s easy too. In order to analyze society’s motion, Marxism breaks the progress of history up into stages (I like to picture it like a timeline in my head, and each part can be divided up into stages as we see fit, in order to more easily analyze the motion). Each of these stages was created by a great leap in the technology related to production and served to advance society. The advent of the slave societies (sometimes called Antiquity in bourgeois universities), which came after what we often refer to as “primitive communism” or pre-class society, for example, was based on the invention of agriculture. Planting crops and domesticating animals rather than hunting and gathering was a completely new way human beings were engaged in production, a new form of society. We, as a species needed to eat, and as we grew, needed to eat more and more. So, we hunted and gathered more and more, and in better and better, more efficient ways, making the production of that era more efficient. This created a surplus, and then a need to own our new surplus. Likewise, the invention of factory assembly, coal and steam power represented the beginning of capitalism. Each of these class relationships (master and slave in the early era of class society, owner and worker in capitalism) correspond to the level of technological development of the human race. All of that innovation based on what’s most economically efficient, that’s what comes first. It lays the basis from which everything else in society rises. The way we go about organizing our society, our legal and political structures, that all stems from how we look at the material conditions we find ourselves in. We don’t have class without some people owning and some people working, after all. Marx was pointing out the dialectical progression of phenomena in society, a heady concept for sure, but one we can break apart and learn, as we see here. He ends the statement with a very good, quotable line that really just sums it all up: The mode of production in material life determines the general character of the social, political, and spiritual processes of life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness. Marx is saying that the form our society takes has a material basis in the economic factor. Back into ordinary human language, he’s explaining that the way we go about producing, the ‘mode of production’ and the objective relationships this causes is what determines what our social, political, and spiritual lives look like. It isn’t good ideas producing good things or bad ideas producing bad things. It is the material reality that produces good ideas and bad ideas (and even how we look at those ideas); the social relationships we create in order to, well—create, those come first. That affects how we think about things, and as we get more advanced, new ideas manifest. This quote has led a lot of people who don’t really take the time to understand what it means (a lot of them due to their class interests, as class is a large determining factor in the kind of social consciousness people have) to launch an accusation of “economic determinism” at Marx and Marxism, saying that Marxism states that only the economic factor is important, and dictates everything that happens, as if people don’t have free will or work against their own class interests. But this is a misunderstanding, and seems like it forgot to read the last part of Marx’s quote here. Engels addressed these detractors directly, saying, “According to the materialist conception of history, the determining element in history is ultimately the production and reproduction in real life. More than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. If therefore somebody twists this into the statement that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms it into a meaningless, abstract and absurd phrase. The economic situation is the basis but the various factors of the superstructure – the political forms of the class struggles and its results – constitutions, etc., established by victorious classes after hard-won battles – legal forms, and even the reflexes of all these real struggles in the brain of the participants, political, jural, philosophical theories, religious conceptions and their further development into systematic dogmas – all these exercise an influence upon the course of historical struggles, and in many cases determine for the most part their form." What he means is that the source of what happens is the economic factor, but the things it creates, these matter too, and affect the course of historical events. For example: because race and racism were created to serve capital does not mean that racism itself has not played a large role in the development of American society, or that it is not a large part of the general class struggle in this society. When we engage with the study of history using Marxism, we see that the old, bourgeois way is simply not enough to genuinely understand the real cause of things. In fact, it tends to outright ignore the true cause of events throughout history, laying emphasis instead on all sorts of secondary or superficial elements, on great ideas of great men or evil ideas of evil men. Overall, a bourgeois history lesson is often a random jumbling together of dates and deeds, battles and warriors, with very little (if ever) talk on the root cause of these battles and warriors, on the economic factor pushing these forces into motion. It can often pretend at this but fail in every respect. Case in point: the reason often given for the beginning of the first great imperialist world war is the assassination of Arch-Duke Franz Ferdinand. This is all well and good. It was a very early battle in this war, possibly the first skirmish. But why did it happen? What were the underlying factors that caused this event? These are the questions Marxism answers. If bourgeois history has no real, clear understanding of the past, then how can they possibly understand what is happening in the present? Historical materialism, however (the term we give to the dialectical materialist methodology applied to history), and its emphasis on the economic factor, gives Marxism what Foster called a “decisive advantage in drawing the elementary lessons from past history, and for understanding the fundamental meaning of the complex economic and political processes of today.” It’s this study that leads Marxists to the conclusion that economic revolution (those leaps in technology we talked about) leads to social revolution (changing conditions create an inability to live in the old way, as well as new ideas), which leads to political organization and political revolution (people are thrust into motion to do what they must to continue society, and that is a complete transformation of the basic characteristics of society into a new form), which leads us to the conclusion that socialism, the stage of development after capitalism, is inevitable. This may sound very strange at first glance, but as we learn the scientific basis and understanding of this, it naturally becomes clearer and clearer, especially when we learn how this happens over and over again throughout history, in different forms corresponding to the material levels of production of society. 4. The Class StruggleMarx wrote in the Communist Manifesto: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes. In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebians, slaves; in the middle ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all these classes, again, subordinate gradations. The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes… new forms of struggle in place of the old ones." Marx’s description of this process, of class struggle, is a description of the processes happening throughout history, compelling the motion of society. He is applying the dialectical materialist methodology to society, putting the study of its motion, of the conflicting forces making history happen, onto a scientific footing. This helps us understand all of the internal laws of motion of society, but it is up to us to put them into practice. Without Marxism, this is a confusing jumble of events, but armed with our scientific method, we can understand the forces at work that produce different events throughout history. The economic factor, again, is the central root of everything. The direct relationships people must enter into in order for society to function separates us into mutually interdependent and contradictory classes. In order for one class to fulfill what is in its material interests, it needs to directly harm the material interests of the opposing class. If a corporation (a group of capitalists recognized by the state) decides to shut down its factories in one location and move them to another one where it is able to pay workers less, this directly harms the material interests of the workers there. Likewise, when a factory organizes into a union in order to win higher wages, this harms the material interests of the capitalists. Marxism gives us the tools we need to understand this on a systemic level, to understand what our material interests as a class are. We see the opposing class (what Marx called the ‘bourgeoisie’) everywhere trying to obscure this fact, to obscure class and blur even what the term means, which can easily result in us accidentally siding with its interests against our own. Marxism doesn’t just give us the tools we need to understand history properly, but also to fight against that obscuring, and to work towards what’s best for us, instead. Marx was incredibly modest about this significant scientific discovery. In a letter to American Marxist Joseph Weydemeyer in 1852, he said that he deserved no real credit for discovering the existence of classes in modern society, or even the struggle between the opposing classes. Bourgeois academics had already begun pecking around the edges of class and production before Marx began his work. He explained the important parts of his work as having three essential parts: First, that the existence of classes corresponds to particular, historic phases in the development of production; Second, that the class struggle necessarily leads to what he referred to as the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, or the working class organized as the ruling class of society, and its interests dictating what happens in society (according to the laws of societal development); And third, that this new form of state only constitutes the transition to the abolition of class itself, and to a classless society, as the material interests of the working class necessitate working towards the end of classes altogether. There are many labels given to this, and many misrepresentations of it, based on not quite understanding the way Marx and Engels thought, what it was they were doing. In our modern society, we refer to this period after capitalism as “socialism”. Through all of this, if we look at this the way Marx did, we see that he was studying society’s motion, its progress, and discovering the forces that made that progress happen: class struggle, the dialectical “struggle” between the two opposing and interdependent forces within the phenomenon of society. As Foster took care to note, Marx was being incredibly modest in this letter. Marx and Engels created a methodology that would let us clearly see not just what is here now, but how we got to here, and in so doing, gave us the guide we need to continue progressing society and fight for a better world for the working class, for the masses. For us. 5. The Revolutionary Role of the Working ClassThe word class has become rather murky in modern American society. What is a ‘class’? Our pundits and bourgeois academics talk of the “middle class” quite frequently, or of the ‘political class’ or ‘professional managerial class’. These can have some sort of merit in our Marxist analysis, but over-all, the establishment tells us to measure what we call ‘class’ in terms of income level. The more money one has, the higher their ‘class’. This is not the terminology Marx and Engels used, and not how Marxists view ‘class’, how we separate groups of people when analyzing society and its motion. We do this, like all things, by our dialectical materialist methodology. We get to the root of things, to the economic factor, and discover that the best way to group people is according to their material interests, which lies in the social relationships created by how they relate to production. It is that relationship to production that defines what ‘class’ a given group is in Marxism. (Once we learn the fundamentals, it’s important to recognize how the distortions of the capitalist class serve their class interests, by distorting how people view themselves and production itself, individualizing it. But that’s a subject for another time.) It’s common knowledge that Marxism focuses on the ‘working class’, a group of people whose relationship to the means of production, the way they go about living and being part of society, is their lack of ownership and ability to accumulate, forcing them to sell their capacity to perform labor (a special commodity Marx calls ‘labor power’) to those who own the means of production. But Marx and Engels did not study the working class arbitrarily, or because they suffered at the hands of the ruling class, or because they wanted everything to be fair for everyone and the working class were large and represented the masses. In fact, the peasantry was larger in many regions of the world in their day, and had a completely different relationship to the means of production, one left over from the feudal era, as capitalism was becoming the dominant force in society. It was their special position as the developing class of society and material interests as the working class that made Marx and Engels focus on this class. It was (and is, to this day) in the material interests of the working class to overcome class altogether, to create the productive forces and relationships of production necessary for class itself to no longer have a reason for existing. Every dollar the workers get, the bosses see that as a dollar they lose, after all. This constant back and forth struggle would best serve the working class by overcoming it altogether and eliminating the capitalist from the equation, while the bosses, on the other hand, rely on the working class to actually produce value for them. Other classes faded with the passage of history and the development of capitalism. In Marx’s day, the small shopkeepers, artisans, and small manufacturers all stood opposed to the bourgeoisie, but for a different reason than the working class. Their class interests were in preserving their positions, making them “conservative” in the true sense of the word[1], and as capitalism progressed, became reactionary, meaning their class interests were better served in the previous stages of society. The working class, however, is produced and grows according to capitalism’s advance, and is therefore the class in the position to be the “nascent” or developing end of the contradiction at the heart of society’s progress, the only truly revolutionary class of the period of history in which capitalism is the dominant stage of development. Due to its position and material interests (remember, the Marxist focus on the economic factor), the leading role of the working class, the constructive class to build our future, has been present in successful revolutions to get past capitalism all over the world, in Russia, China, Cuba, Vietnam, etc., and working classes all over the world take it upon themselves to organize and bring this about. Lenin elaborated on this phenomenon very thoroughly, but it was Karl Marx who first began laying the groundwork for this addition. In the Communist Manifesto, he wrote of the type of, as Foster called it, “thinking-fighting-disciplined party necessary for the working class to win finally over the capitalist class.” “The Communists… are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working class parties in every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement.” So what did he mean by this? At first glance, it sounds a little egotistical, but that is not the way Marx viewed the world. He saw this as a scientist, and in order to understand what he meant, so must we. Marxism shows us that the dominant ideology and way of viewing things in any society is the ideology its ruling class. That ruling class was able to spread this way of thinking throughout that society, but it is important to look at this fact dialectically, to analyze it in its motion. Because it is dominant now does not mean it is invincible but precisely the opposite. It means it has developed already and is now undeveloping. The time this takes to happen and the way it happens are governed by the phenomena mentioned above, by class struggle and its own development. 6. Surplus Value We often hear Karl Marx’s three volume work Capital referred to as his magnum opus. Before Marx, the great bourgeois economists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo wrote on this period of history, and contributed greatly to our understanding of capitalism, value, and commodity production. They were operating in the time before Marxism, however, before the world outlook and methodology of Marxism was able to give greater clarity to the study of society and how it functions. These days, the bourgeois economists, in their increasing desperation to provide excuses, have degenerated into little more than con men, making apologies for capitalism, rather than genuinely examining its functions. Capital was Marx’s great work on this subject. Taking his new world outlook and methodology, he was able to describe the process of society and its motion, and specifically capitalist society, in a way never before possible. He explained the process of what led to capitalism, which he deemed primitive accumulation, the causes of the crises, panics, recessions, crashes, capitalism experiences every four to ten years like clockwork, and the continual concentration of capital in the hands of fewer and fewer capitalists. One of the greatest discoveries elaborated in this book was what Marx spent decades studying. What is value? Where does it originate? Marx’s elaboration of what he deemed ‘surplus value’ [2]– the value that capitalists derive from commodity sales that is not paid to the workers for their creation or used to maintain their means of production. This discovery exposed the capitalists for what they were: parasites, and this surplus value being the property of the capitalist class is the central element of the opposing interests between worker and owner, why the working class is the truly revolutionary class, according to Marxism. Since then, countless bourgeois academics have tried to refute Marx’s great work on this subject. None have succeeded. 7. The Role of the state: This is beginning to feel a little like a “Marx’s Greatest Hits” list, isn’t it? Coming in at number seven, it’s (drumroll) the role of the state! Give it a hand, everybody! Okay, bad jokes behind us. Let’s continue on. Marx and Engels dedicated quite a bit of study to the question of this thing called the state; what it is, how it developed, what its concrete manifestations are, things of that nature. While the bourgeois academics would hold that the phenomenon of the state developed spontaneously, due to the good ideas of good men (only men), and stood above society, concerning itself with the welfare of all of the people, Marx and Engels showed that The State, like all things, goes through a process of development and undevelopment due to the internal contradictions within it, based on the economic factor, that the state takes different forms according to which class is the dominant class in society, and is the tool of the dominant class of society for the repression of the other classes. They showed that, with the progress of the working class state, the continual advance of the productive forces, and motion of society, the state itself will eventually begin to wither away and un-develop, once the conditions for its existence (class struggle) are no longer a factor, replaced simply by the routine administration of things. 8. Class Struggle and Tactics of the Working Class:Marx and Engels did more than that, though. They also began understanding the forms of struggle and tactics the working class takes in its continual struggle against the bourgeoisie. William Z Foster details quite a lot of their correspondence and actions within the International Workingmen’s Association, or “First International” in his book History of the Three Internationals, which represented the first real organization of the working class in its own interests. (The letters between the two detail their original ideas on this issue, and are a fantastic read for Communist nerds, even to this day.) Before their work in showing the world the exploitative nature of capitalism or organizing workers themselves, they proved how the nascent class of society always organizes itself and overthrows the moribund class, showing how only the proletariat were in a position, once organized and educated, to lead the entire toiling masses towards socialism. They did not, however, sit around dreaming up ideas for ideal worlds, as the utopian socialists that came before them did. Instead, they relied on cold, hard science to guide the way, instead developing what is often referred to as a “guide to action”. Of the many distortions and misconceptions about Marxism going around today, the idea that this was what Marx and Engels did is one of the most prevalent. If life were a football game, this distortion would have us believe that Marx and Engels wrote out a playbook, and their criticism is that we cannot expect some playbook written for a football team 200 years ago to work on our team now, with totally different players, rules, and conditions (or sometimes, they argue that we should follow this imaginary playbook they believe was written). But Marx and Engels and company did not write a playbook for us. Of course, they were interested in a playbook for their specific team, and created this, but their main discovery was the creation of the language playbooks are written in. They developed all the X’s and O’s and little arrows you see in football movies, when the coach is explaining the trick play to the team that’s had a rough first half, so they can win the game at the very end. This language is the essence of Marxism. And each socialism that arises develops its own playbook from this language, and each socialist project wins the game with their own, unique plays, written specifically for their own conditions, their own unique time and place. Learning dialectical materialism and historical materialism, learning how to “think like a Marxist” and then apply that to our actions in the real world, is the first step in building socialism. [1] Conservative is another term that our capitalist class has mystified. Conservatism when reading Marxist texts essentially means exactly what it says on the box: to conserve what is. [2] This work will not delve into descriptions of economy in this way, and is mostly a primer. But for the sake of thoroughness, surplus value is described by Mehring as, “The mass of the workers consists of proletarians who are compelled to sell their labor-power as a commodity in order to exist, and secondly that this commodity, labor power, possesses such a high degree of productivity in our day that it is able to produce in a certain time a much greater product than is necessary for its maintenance in that time. These two purely economic facts, representing the result of objective historical development, cause the fruit of the labor-power of the proletarian to fall automatically into the lap of the capitalist and to accumulate with the continuance of the wage system, into ever-growing masses of capital. (Note: knowing the dialectial nature of society, we can look at the development of just HOW productive this commodity is, and how much more productive it is today than in Marx’s day) AuthorNoah Khrachvik is a proud working class member of the Communist Party USA. He is 40 years old, married to the most understanding and patient woman on planet Earth (who puts up with all his deep-theory rants when he wakes up at two in the morning and can't get back to sleep) and has a twelve-year-old son who is far too smart for his own good. When he isn't busy writing, organizing the working class, or fixing rich people's houses all day, he enjoys doing absolutely nothing on the couch, surrounded by his family and books by Gus Hall. Archives January 2022 1/7/2022 After the fall of Utopia: The Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone in Perspective. By: Nikita ValentinovRead NowThe Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone was a brief and deadly experiment in horizontal political organization, inspired and led by local “anarchist” and libertarian “socialists”. The zone, which for a brief moment occupied 9 acres of Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, blurred the line between performance art and insurrection. It was founded in the wake of the police withdrawal from Seattle’s East Precinct and the abandonment of the surrounding area, after weeks of clashes between the state and protestors. A summer of police killings, and lockdowns that had left millions unemployed produced a fuel-air mixture of chaos. Out of that chaos, a micro-model of a new society – an anarchist utopia – was to emerge. It is now two years later. What remains of that utopia? Only the monuments to its folly. The handfuls of carrots and cabbages that were to bring sustainable food security to a new kind of society persist, as does the “Black Lives Matter'' mural that adorns East Pine street. It was there that I watched a 50-year-old woman get shot in the chest with a tear gas canister. It was there that a 16-year-old black boy was killed by the very same protestors that said that his life mattered. What began as an uprising against police killings of black men and women, ended in the death of a black child. On June 29th, not one month after its establishment, two teenage boys in a stolen white Jeep were gunned down after crashing into a concrete barricade. Paranoia and fear had brought the CHAZ full circle and I was there to witness all of it. I was on the security team after all. But the Chaz that killed the black child and the Chaz that drove the police from the East Precinct was not the same animal. Little by little, the initial wave of popular anger was captured by a group of people who believed not in justice, but in themselves. The political “directorate” of the CHAZ was a motley collection of slam poets, self-promoters, and social-climbers. A group that, like George Orwell, attacked the left from the left, denouncing any expression of actually existing socialism as “authoritarian” in an attempt to make themselves palatable to the lowest common denominator among liberals. The “directorate” sold its naive ilk on rule without authority, on power that would grow not out of the barrel of a gun, but from the brush stroke of an artist. Theirs was the same mistake that has been repeated by the left in the United States since the 60’s; that the revolution would be won not by the disciplined masses of the working class led by a vanguard party, but by changing the hearts and minds of the nation through cultural productions. And so, in place of solidarity, they gave us self-expression, in place of organization they gave us individualism, and in place of material reality our leaders gave us simulation. The CHAZ had undergone a profound transformation. Cosplay replaced popular anger. Theater replaced collective action. The people thus went to work on building a utopian facade rather than continuing to confront the police. A community garden was erected, which demonstrators mused would one day be the standard for all food production in the United States. A “No-Cop, CO-OP” popped up that doled out snacks and water free of charge, their idea of “from each according to their ability to each according to their need”. The homeless were allowed to camp in the park and along sidewalks, and graffiti proclaiming the end of capitalism was sprayed as far as the eye could see. The state allowed all of these petty radicalisms to run their course. It set up bathrooms and kept the water and electricity on and provided emergency services to the CHAZ. Chief among the simulations were the “people’s councils” that were erected in direct opposition to the left’s tradition of democratic centralism. These acted as the main political body. They operated on the principle of consensus, every member who chose to be one (there was no criteria for membership other than to be phenotypically “left”) could speak. Every decision was non-binding and up to the individual on how they wished to carry it out. The “directorate” believed that they could decouple themselves from the political process unfolding within their own project. When concerns were brought to their attention about the potential for violence, the response was that “the people are doing the work”. By removing themselves from the machinations of the political body, this “directorate” was able to self-promote without accountability to a mass though deluded – that still expected some form of justice. Those that pull the earth off its axis and stand squarely atop it are ultimately rare. We are all products of our time. And though those who ascribe to the faith of anarchism may by some rhetorical flourishes make people believe otherwise, theirs is a bourgeois ideology. And so, the architects of the CHAZ were, just as we all are, the new neoliberal man; Homo-narcissus. The self was to be placed above all other considerations. What was good for it, was good for the whole. But a structure premised on ease of celebrity lacks the crucial ability to bind vanguard to mass, spearpoint to phalanx. Distortions and instability when they arise in the body, as all systems put to the test must face, cannot be addressed and ameliorated by a party elite more preoccupied with how many engagements their tweet gets than the lives and safety of those that they are responsible for. From the outset, the discipline of the mass as forged by the “people's councils” was in a state of terminal decline. Spontaneous actions and rule by consensus can only take you so far. Eventually the business of revolution must be rationally planned. To rely on spontaneity is to rely on the alignment of interests by accident alone. Debates in the councils went from whether to attack the West Precinct next to whether the demonstrators were “uplifting black voices enough”. Strategy began to give way to the same tired race and gender-based identity politics that have plagued the left for a half-century. But when everyone is allowed a chance to speak, there can be no ideological cohesion and so debate becomes a means by which to socially enrich the self. One demonstrator, fed-up with the paralysis, took to the council to convince the mass that the fight was not over and that it must be taken to other parts of the city. The small group of hapless protestors that she managed to convince were immediately kettled by police. It was by that point too late. The majority of people were happy to stand in the middle of the street and make individualist pronouncements of faith in whichever dead or ineffectual ideology they preferred that day. The “directorate,” rather than step in at this critical juncture to refocus the crowd, was busy doing much the same. All that was needed to push it over the edge was an enemy. Authoritative social apparatuses are necessary to ensure that individuals can trust one another without knowing one another. Just as white blood cells destroy a virus, these apparatuses vet the membership that forms the body, necessarily expelling those who prove toxic to the health of the whole. Disorganization and unconditional entry within any political body produces the opposite: fear and paranoia. When an authoritative organization is met with the enemy it is able to steel its ranks, purge those who are sympathetic, and put up a vigorous resistance to the outsider. But when vetting and proper organization are absent, the arrival of a threat shatters any guise of clarity, and it becomes impossible to distinguish friend from foe from within. Asymmetric information absorption, a direct result of disorganization by design (what anarchists and libertarian socialists call horizontalism) prevents any meaningful resistance from materializing to combat the enemy. The enemy becomes an amorphous mass in the peripheral at all times. The ennemi du mois of the CHAZ were the proud boys. A group of ideologically incohesive right-wingers who were at odds with CHAZ denizens in the same way that football hooligans from Chelsea and Arsenal are at odds with each other. With the potential for violence, the paranoia that had been left to fester within the “people's councils” went septic and the patient died of shock. A comrade of mine wearing a yellow rain-jacket to the zone, which bore vague resemblance to the gold-trimmed black polo-shirts worn by the proud boys, was accused of being one of them by fellow protestors. Surrounded, he was deemed ‘fascist looking enough’ to warrant a (narrowly escaped) beating. The “people’s councils” began to hold show-trials on who was secretly a cop or not and who was secretly on the side of the Proud Boys (of course being that they were show-trials of the anarchist variety no actual sentences were ever carried out). The mood began to resemble the most exaggerated anti-Stalinist accounts of the purges while lacking any of their mythologized efficacy. Everyone became a potential enemy. On June 15th of 2020 the Proud Boys reared their head at the outskirts of the CHAZ and smashed a man’s cellphone after getting into a scuffle with him. Reports were coming in daily of right-wing attacks on the borders of the demonstration. People began to fear the worst. And then of course it happened, the “enemy” arrived at the gates of the CHAZ in a White Jeep. The final confrontation had come to a head. After all the shots were fired, and the fog of war had lifted, in the front seat of that car lay a dead black child. Months later, I saw something that struck me despite its seeming mundaneness. At a seafood market, I watched as a live fish relentlessly attacked a ginger root that had been left floating in its tank, a root meant to season the fish before cooking it. This fish hadn’t even the slightest comprehension of its predicament nor of the inevitability of its fate. Yet it threw itself upon the ginger root with all of its impotent fishy might. I fear that we too are stuck attacking the ginger. Preoccupied with brawling the proud boys in the streets, stuck looting businesses, and burning police cars. We fight only the most apparent manifestations of our fate as neoliberal subjects because we do not understand the power around us. We do not face the things in this world that really determine the outcomes of our lives. To do so would be an enormous undertaking, a conflict not only with the bourgeoisie but capital itself, with our dead labor. And it is from this terrible state of things that we retreat into our simulations. We build our potemkin utopia that crumbles in two months. We dream of childish things: community gardens that can feed industrial civilizations, economies based on gift-giving, or a political apparatus without authority where the individual is free to express themselves in any way they see fit. We run into the arms of the very bourgeois morbo mentalis that we claim to run from. We do all of this, and we forget the very lives that this idealism costs; the little caskets we leave behind. But what has been forgotten shall be reborn. Lenin will walk across the world again. The relentless tide of history shall wash away bourgeois ideology in all its forms. Of this I am confident. AuthorBorn to Soviet immigrants and raised in Seattle Washington, Nikita Valentinov is a graduate of the University of Washington and is intellectually inspired by Paul Cockshott, Stafford Beer, Wassily Leontif, Marx, and Lenin. Nikita is a former member of the all-volunteer CHAZ security team, along with a million other failed political start-ups. Despite disillusionment with the state of mass politics he is confident in the inevitability of the cause. Nikita works in an Amazon warehouse and is currently stealing company time to write this article. Archives January 2022 1/7/2022 German war hawks beat the drum for war on Russia. By: Victor Grossman & John WojcikRead NowNew German Chancellor Olaf Scholz of the Social Democratic Party at a meeting with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg in Brussels, Belgium, Dec. 10, 2021. NATO, with the support of German militarists and arms-makers, are pushing to escalate tensions with Russia. | Olivier Matthys / AP BERLIN—Political leaders in Germany are using the results of the recent September elections here to build support for the anti-Russia hysteria being pushed now by NATO and the U.S. The armament makers and militarists in Germany are backing the Pentagon’s dangerous push for deployment of military forces around the world, just as they backed positioning of German forces for so many years in Afghanistan and as they back these days placement of German troops in countries that were once part of the Soviet Union itself. The media here contains constant, often daily warnings about Russian plans for aggression against Ukraine. The so-called Very High Readiness Joint Task Force has cut the time allotted for going into action from seven to five days. What was lacking, however, was any evidence of anything else but the stationing of Russia’s forces within its own borders, while the military forces of 15 NATO countries, including the U.S., Germany, and Britain, conduct annual maneuvers—far from their homes but all along Russian boundaries. When Sevim Dagdelen, the most militant deputy of The Left Party (Die Linke) in the Bundestag, used the question time to ask what the basis was for the frightening build-up of support for war in Germany, the official answer was: “In this exceptional case, security requirements make it impossible to give you an answer.” Video on TV of Russian tanks sitting near the Ukrainian border shows no activity at all but is used over and over, obviously for lack of anything more convincing. The media’s blood-thirstiest warrior among the newspapers, the Springer company’s Das Bild, printed a map with arrows showing Russian strategy plans. But—oh dear—the name given Lviv (or Russian Lvov) was Lemberg, not used since 1945; they seem to have used an old Nazi-era map (or older). (Note: The far-right Springer Co. now owns the news agency Politico, which seems to be just as alarmist.) And who is now in charge of German foreign policy? It is Annalena Baerbock, the Greens party leader and always among the loudest in belligerent, bellicose statements against Russia, and now China, too. Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu at the National Defense Control Center in Moscow, Russia, Dec. 21, 2021. The Russian president recently reiterated the demand for guarantees from the U.S. and its allies that NATO will not expand eastward, blaming the West for current tensions in Europe. | Mikhail Metzel, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP German foreign policy has long been divided between the “Atlanticist” position—all for armaments and maneuvers along Russian borders and in the South China Sea, the more the better—and the commercial position, reflecting the need for trade with Russia and even more with China, its main trading partner. Merkel was caught in the middle. Some in the SPD may also prefer trade and diplomacy to belligerency or war. The Greens leaders (though not all of their grassroots membership) are avid Atlanticists. Baerbock made that clear: “We stand by our responsibility within the framework of NATO and the EU and also for nuclear participation… We have to procure the successor system for the (atom bomb-carrying, VG) Tornado because the conventional capabilities have to be replaced.” Although a majority of Germans want no military action, a third group, the peace movement, though valiant, is still far too weak and splintered, and currently even sidelined by weekly protest marches by the COVID-downplaying anti-vaxxing crowd, which includes both leftists as well as far-rightists. The Left Party is not part of the new coalition resulting from the recent German elections. The three “partners” in that new coalition are the Social Democrats of the new chancellor, Olaf Scholz, the Greens, and the Free Democrats. Thus far, the Left Party has been the only peace party with seats in the parliament. Some in the party, unfortunately, want to downplay Left Party opposition to the placement of German troops anywhere outside of German territory. Among those who would be open to such compromises—compromises that would essentially take away the party’s reason to exist—are a few who would equate Russian President Putin’s placement of troops on his country’s own territory near the Ukrainian border with Pentagon placement of troops all over the world and along Russia’s borders. The main political parties in Germany also continue to disparage the German Democratic Republic which, of course, went out of existence more than 30 years ago. Some in the Left Party have been willing to avoid challenging these attacks even though the main purpose of the attacks today on the GDR are efforts to discredit not just that country but socialism in general. The majority in the Left Party seeks to take militant positions against the billionaires, from Krupp or Lockheed-Martin or Amazon to Facebook, Daimler-Benz, and Bayer-Monsanto. The hope is that that majority will see the eventual need to send all of them off to the moon, or Mars, or any other number of choice locations in outer space. Ukrainian soldiers use a launcher with U.S. Javelin missiles during military exercises in the Donetsk region, Ukraine, Dec. 23, 2021. |Ukrainian Defense Ministry Press Service via AP After the German elections on Sept. 26, 2021, it took, as usual, weeks and weeks for the three coalition parties to agree on one program, full of compromises, pledges, and promises and to resolve quarrels over who gets which cabinet seat. The answer to that old question, “Who’s on first?” was clear; Olaf Scholz, the Social Democrat (SPD), became chancellor, after 16 years of conservative Angela Merkel. Finally, on Dec. 8, he and 16 cabinet ministers were sworn in, nine pious ones adding an appeal to the divinity, “So help me God!” while the five Greens ministers and three of the six Social Democrats, including Scholz, decided to risk the job without His assistance. Pious or not, they were faced by the old truism, “Two’s company, three’s a crowd.” The SPD still calls itself “left” and tries somehow to appeal to workers or at least union leaders. The Greens, once the party of rebelliousness, still stand for women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, opposing neo-Nazis, and far-right xenophobia. But they have grown tamer and tamer. While still playing their basic environment-ecology card, they often cozy up to monopolies who like to talk green but always think first of their bank accounts. In southern Baden-Württemberg, the Greens’ one and only state governor gets along fine with Daimler-Benz, which is centered there. In Hesse, as junior coalition partners of the Christian Democrats (CDU), they have had no known run-ins with the bank interests centered there in Frankfurt/Main. All the same, the media still classifies those two as “left”—or at least “center-left.” But the third partner, the Free Democratic Party (FDP), is unabashedly right-wing and pro-capitalist, at least in all economic matters. Despite the fewest popular votes of the three, its good-looking, well-spoken one-man boss, Christian Lindner, has a loud voice, and it is he who grabbed the powerful job of Finance Minister and has taken a no-compromise stand against raising taxes on the super-rich (using the same leak-down arguments relied upon by the right in the U.S. since Reagan). While the SPD and Greens have ties with the monopolies, they occasionally move them to limited concessions, like raising minimum wages, some aid to children, and a few more euros to the jobless. But Lindner and his FDP belong outright to the biggies. Whether the pandemic wanes or worsens, working people, the jobless, the elderly, and several millions with precarious, temp, gig, part-time, and unprotected jobs will have to exert strong pressure “from below” to hinder further stagnation or worse. Getting back to the Left Party, what explained its disappointing results in the September elections? The disastrous results (4.9%) have been blamed on all sorts of things, often on the stress by the left-wing of the party on opposing NATO and any deployment of German soldiers abroad. But far more convincing is the charge by the fighting wing of the party that the major mistake was the dream of many party leaders of becoming the third party in a coalition with the SPD and Greens. This led them to resolutely attack the Christian Democrats, who were never their rivals for votes, but to spare the rod with the Greens and SPD—in hopes of being accepted by them as partners in a new government. But this did not spoil them at all; if anything it brought them votes which might have gone to The Left. In the election, the Christian Democrats lost and so did The Left, which sadly neglected its two major playing cards—as a militant spokesperson for working people, the jobless, and poorly paid, and as the only genuine party for peace. With the collapse of the war in Afghanistan, it passed up the opportunity to loudly recall: “Only we, alone, opposed that war from the start!” and “We must never again engage in a NATO war or any foreign war!” More basically, just one major candidate of The Left, co-chairwoman Janine Wissler, hesitantly attacked the whole billionaire-led system. It’s a daring stand, risky, but gaining ground even with young Americans. If matched by a genuine street-for-street fight for people’s rights, it can have surprising results; a Communist woman recently won out as mayor in Austria’s second city, Graz. The city-state Berlin also had elections on Sept. 26. For five years, it has been ruled by that very same SPD-Greens-The Left coalition which some in The Left dreamt of achieving on a national scale. In vain! But in Germany’s capital and biggest city, the state election results made it logical, arithmetically, to renew that coalition for five more years and avoid upsetting the applecart. Then how could anyone favor breaking up this ruling trinity? There were some possible reasons. The five past years in government had cost The Left votes; it had dropped from third place in 2016 (with 15.6%) to fourth place, with 14.1%, now behind the Greens, plus a loss of its traditional first place in three East Berlin boroughs. Almost every time The Left manages to join a government coalition, it loses votes in the following election; for protest voters, it has become part of the Establishment. Now, as the weakest partner, it lost its key cabinet post, Housing—after its disappointing (because greatly obstructed) record in building new apartment houses. But the overriding issue was the amazing initiative demanding the “confiscation” (though paying for it at market prices) of all housing owned by the seven companies with over 3,000 apartments, especially Deutsche Wohnen, which owned 243,000 of Berlin’s 1.5 million apartments. Members of The Left had outdone themselves to get this initiative on the ballot, collecting 350,000 signatures, while its coalition partner the SPD opposed it and the Greens waffled and dragged their feet. This was the biggest truly fighting step The Left has ever taken. Protesters attend a demonstration against rent increases in Berlin, April 6, 2019. The slogan in the foreground reads ‘Stopp Deutsche Wohnen (housing company).’ Voters in a referendum last year ordered the city government to prepare for the expropriation of large apartment owners like Deutsche Wohnen. | Michael Sohn / AP All Germany was amazed when over a million Berliners voted a resounding “Ja”—59.1%, to 40.9% voting “Nein.” People everywhere, hit hard by rapidly rising rents and fearful of being forced out of their homes (and in Germany, a majority live in rented apartments), hoped the move might spread beyond Berlin. The real estate giants, nearly all foreign-controlled, feared cuts in their big profits and grand gentrification plans and had exerted every possible form of pressure—but lost! However, the vote was only a requirement to put the matter on the agenda of the Berlin legislature, not to enforce action. And that meant trouble, most clearly in the form of Berlin’s new mayor. Franziska Giffey of the SPD, young, attractive, popular, once a borough mayor in West Berlin, then a cabinet minister in the national government—until it was “unearthed” that, in the 205 pages of her doctorate dissertation, plagiarism was evident in 76 of them. Goodbye to her degree, goodbye to her national cabinet seat! But, amazingly, she landed on her feet back in Berlin; her SPD got the most votes and she became its first woman mayor. And Giffey, like her party, rejected confiscation. Her plagiarism could be publicly proved; her (and her party’s) ties to real estate interests could not. Should The Left buckle, accept her flouting of over a million Ja voters, and join again in the city government? Yes, said right-leaning party leaders, who wangled a “compromise”—a three-party commission plus experts to “study the legal and financial questions involved in confiscation”—for a year of deliberation, then report on their conclusions after which further measures could be taken. It was clear to everyone what this meant: side-track it until enthusiasm and activity had subsided, then fully dilute or quietly bury it, i.e. postpone it to “Sankt-Nimmerleinstag” (“St. Neverman’s Day”). Adding to this, the Left would lose the important Housing department; it gets the departments of Culture, Social Services, and Justice (largely about the prisons). All have importance, but none are crucial or can win back many voters. In a first debate on the question of maintaining the status quo, 40% were opposed. But in a write-in vote of the entire membership, three-quarters of those who took part favored staying in the ruling coalition. And so it will be. Such differences on the state level reflect the worrisome condition of the whole party. It is divided, partly due to some East-West differences, but also to personal animosities, often paired closely with political views. Two one-time stalwart militants, Sahra Wagenknecht and her husband Oskar Lafontaine, a major party founder, have zig-zagged enough to move them to the party periphery, and there has still not been any open debate as to why the party lost so disastrously in September, and what meaningful consequences—even painful personal ones—which that requires. A basic question remains: Will the party continue urging some reforms and voting against arms sales and military deployment abroad, but playing down any basic condemnation of NATO and the Pentagon’s dangerous belligerency and unceasing push on all continents for world hegemony while equating this with Putin’s attempts at self-defense of Russia? Will it join the crowd in a continuing disparagement of the GDR, really aimed against socialism in general, or will it take militant positions, opposing the billionaires? That would require The Left’s support for strikes, for those evicted, for all laid-off and underpaid working people, not only in the Bundestag or state legislatures but at direct ground-level, primarily in the workshops, job centers, offices, universities—encouraging people to have a goal, for which they can fight together, march together, picket together, and also sing together. The next big meeting of The Left, probably only viral, is planned for February. Perhaps new methods and directions can gain ground—and save the sagging party before it is too late. AuthorVictor Grossman is a journalist from the U.S. now living in Berlin. He fled in the 1950s in danger of reprisals for his left-wing activities at Harvard and in Buffalo, New York. He landed in the former German Democratic Republic (Socialist East Germany), studied journalism, founded a Paul Robeson Archive and became a freelance journalist and author. His books available in English: Crossing the River. A Memoir of the American Left, the Cold War, and Life in East Germany. His latest book, A Socialist Defector: From Harvard to Karl-Marx-Allee, is about his life in the German Democratic Republic from 1949 – 1990, tremendous improvements for the people under socialism, reasons for the fall of socialism, and importance of today's struggles. This article was produced by Peoples World. Archives January 2022 One of the chapters (incomplete) in Engels' 'Dialectics of Nature' is entitled: 'The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man'. Although this was written in the 1870s it compares well, I think, with scientific ideas that are considered new today. I propose to compare Engels' views with those reported by Ann Gibbons in an article in the June 15, 2007 issue of Science ('Food for Thought: Did the first cooked meals help fuel the dramatic evolutionary expansion of the human brain?'). This article is primarily about Harvard primatologist Richard Wrangham's theory that cooking led to the expansion of the human brain, that is, the Homo erectus brain, and resulted in the intellectual development of Homo sapiens. Wrangham, Gibbons says, 'presents cooking as one of the answers to a long standing riddle in human evolution: Where did humans get the extra energy to support their large brains?' That is, how do we explain that while we use about the same metabolic energy (calorie burning) as apes of comparable size, 25% of our energy is used by our brain, the apes only use 8% for theirs. Gibbons reports that a classical explanation is that by eating meat we shrank our gastrointestinal system (we need more guts to digest plants than meat, and it takes longer) and the saved energy was devoted to the brain. 'That theory,' she says, 'is now gathering additional support.' I don't know why she calls it 'classical' because she dates it to 1995. She writes, 'Called the expensive tissue hypothesis, this theory was proposed back in 1995....' Here is Engels (who is really 'classical') in the 1870s writing about the effects of a meat diet 'shortening the time required for digestion.' Engels said, 'The meat diet, however, had its greatest effect on the brain, which now received a far richer flow of the materials necessary for its nourishment and development, and which, therefore, could develop more rapidly and perfectly from generation to generation.' In this respect, modern science has not improved on Engels! Wrangham, Gibbons reports, 'thinks that in addition, our ancestors got cooking, giving them the same number of calories for less effort.' Wrangham first 'floated this hypothesis' way back in 1999 (Science, 26 March 1999, p. 2004). There is nothing new under the Sun. Here, again, is Engels: 'The meat diet led to ... the harnessing of fire [which] ... still further shortened the digestive process, as it provided the mouth with food already, as it were, half-digested....' Modern science is repeating the views of Engels, and the science of his day, a hundred and thirty years on. Engels talks about the role of labor in the transition from ape to man, and we shall see that it is labor that is the basis, in humans, for meat eating and cooking. But first, some more of Gibbons. If cooking led to the expansion of the brain (the modern way of talking about the transition from ape to man), when was the First Supper? Wrangham thinks it was about 1.6 to 1.9 million years ago [mya] and the diner as well as the chef were Homo erecti. Of course, Engels knew nothing of modern primate evolution or what a Homo erectus was, but he did think meat eating and cooking were gradually developed from ape like ancestors (along with speech and more complex thinking), so he would not have been surprised by modern theories. The article points out that early humans (e.g., australopithecines, 4 to 1.2 mya) had chimpanzee sized brains, while H. erectus (AKA H. ergaster) had a brain twice that size (c. 1000 cc). We evolved, along with our cousins the Neandertals, around 500,000 to 200,000 years ago, with brain sizes of about 1300 cc and 1500 cc, respectively. It was meat that allowed the skull to expand for brain growth 'according to a long-standing body of evidence.' A very long standing body of evidence since it is found in Engel's article. We are told the first stone tools, used to butcher animals, date from 2.7 mya in Ethiopia (at Gona). The cut marks on bones, adjacent fossils, etc., suggest that australopithecines were making these tools and eating meat. Wrangham thinks that H. erectus replaced raw meat with cooked meat (1.9 mya) and this accounts for the big increase in its brain size. The problem with this theory is that evidence of human use of fire only dates from about 790,000 years ago in what is now Israel. However, this is not fatal to Wrangham's position. Evidence of human controlled fire is very hard to come by and it is quite possible that earlier evidence of fire use will be found. Some other scientists think Wrangham is right in principle, cooking led to brain increase (as Engels said), but his timeline is off. It didn't happen by H erectus, but by H sapiens and Neandertals. The jury is out. While the jury may be out on Wrangham, it is not out on Engels. While this article discusses meat and cooking and the theory that 'cooking paved the way for brain expansion', it mentions nary a word about the role of labor in expansion of the human brain. The real point of Engel's article should be reaffirmed. Meat eating and cooking are secondary developments derivative of what Engels called 'the decisive step in the transition from ape to man.' This was the development of the human hand as a result of the evolution of erect posture in our ancestors. Once the hand was no longer used in locomotion, it was free to develop greater dexterity which 'increased from generation to generation'-- i.e., was selected for. 'Thus,' 'Engels writes, 'the hand is not only the organ of labour, it is also the product of labour.' As the first hominids developed more dexterity they began to make tools and to live under more complex social arrangements, necessitating better communication skills. Thus Engels writes, 'First labour, after it and then with it speech--- these were the two most essential stimuli under the influence of which the brain of the ape gradually changed into that of man, which for all its similarity is far larger and more perfect.' I have already mentioned above how Engels saw the adoption of meat eating and fire (cooking) as outgrowths of the labour of primitive humans in tool making (which led to hunting and fishing) which derived from the adoption of upright posture. The Australopithecines of Goma represent the earliest tool makers (hominid, that is) and if meat eating led them to develop into H. erecti, and Wrangham proves right and H. erectus was the first cook, and the H. erecti, through the use of fire and cooking, then developed into us, then modern science has validated the argument presented by Engels in his essay of the 1870s. The prescience of Engels demands that we in the 21st Century continue to profit and learn from his writings. He closes his essay with words that are even more relevant to us today than they were two centuries ago. After tracing the development of civilization from the time of the transition to modern humans, Engels writes about how our species thinks that it is the master of nature and that we can remake the natural world to our own specifications. But we have to be 'reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people ... all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly.' But will we apply them correctly? For that we must rely upon science and it doesn't look like our political and economic leaders are willing to do that, nor do the masses of people seem properly educated as to this necessity. Engels says that while we have built up a modern civilization (industrial capitalism) by subjecting nature to our immediate interests, we have not calculated the remote long term effects of our actions. 'In relation to nature, as to society, the present mode of production is predominately concerned only about the immediate, the most tangible result....' As long as the corporations are making their profits, as long as they sell their commodities, they do not care 'with what afterwards becomes of the commodity and its purchasers. The same thing applies to the natural effects of the same actions.' So, here we are 130 years down the line with global warming, polluted air, mass extinctions in the plant and animal worlds facing us, and the oceans slowly dying. Engels had hoped that we would by now have had a world socialist community and these problems would not be facing us. But we don't and they are. There is only one way to solve them, according to Engels, and it 'requires something more than mere knowledge. It requires a complete revolution in our hitherto existing mode of production, and simultaneously a revolution in our whole contemporary social order.' We had better get to work. Time is running out! AuthorThomas Riggins is a retired philosophy teacher (NYU, The New School of Social Research, among others) who received a PhD from the CUNY Graduate Center (1983). He has been active in the civil rights and peace movements since the 1960s when he was chairman of the Young People's Socialist League at Florida State University and also worked for CORE in voter registration in north Florida (Leon County). He has written for many online publications such as People's World and Political Affairs where he was an associate editor. He also served on the board of the Bertrand Russell Society and was president of the Corliss Lamont chapter in New York City of the American Humanist Association. this article was produced by ecosocialism Canada. Archives January 2022 In an economic culture where buying mania must be instilled in people from the time they are small children, Santa is the perfect mind molester. The shopping ritual begins (in the U.S.) officially the day after Thanksgiving. This give-your-money-away festival is monthlong. "Shop until you drop as in a religious fervor" is a possible motto for it. Yet, Christmas is certainly a season of great joy as well, real fun and happiness; there's no denying that. People really do get happy with family and friends in feasts, escaping alienation, loneliness and drudgery. It's a holiday! A fundamental unity of opposites in the structure of our spiritual life: materialistic addiction and the birth of love in merriment, plus renewal of life with the new year, all in one cyclical celebration, the Sunday of the Year. For this civilization there is something profound about Christmas. We are a market, not a stone age economy of gift exchange. Token Gift exchange is used to promote commodity exchange really, but from the standpoint of celebration and ceremony, commodity exchange is promoted spiritually. Buying is a high, a good and virtuous high. Christmas cheer comes once a year. Through buying madness, things control us and we don't control things. We become objects and things become subjects, with wills and powers as if alive. The mystery around Santa Claus helps to promote this mystical reversal of the real relations between people and the commodities they make and buy. Our greatest addiction problem is not "drugs", but our addiction to commodities, our commodity fetishism, our buying madness, seeking to fulfill ourselves through things not people. People made the things, not elves. Let me say it nicer. Celebration is vital. Christmas comes but once a year, and to me it means good cheer, and to everyone who likes wine and beer. Happy New Year is after that. Happy we'll be, and that's a fact. AuthorCharles Brown is a political activist in Detroit, Michigan. He has degrees in anthropology and is a member of the bar. He teaches anthropology at Community College. His favorite slogan is "What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.” Archives January 2022 A bizarre event took place in northern India between December 17 and December 19, 2021. It was a “religious parliament” (Dharma Sansad) with the theme, “The Future of the Sanatan Dharma in Islamic India: Problem and Solutions.” The event took place in Haridwar, a city in the Indian state of Uttarakhand. The speakers—each of them dressed in saffron robes, which are usually worn by Hindu monks—took to the stage during the Dharma Sansad and spoke in a startlingly dangerous and provocative fashion. Sadhvi Annapurna, the general secretary of the Hindu Mahasabha, a right-wing Hindu nationalist outfit in India, was the most forthright in spelling out the agenda of hatred against the Muslim community that marked the tone for this event. “Nothing is possible without weapons,” she said. “If you want to eliminate their [the Muslim] population, then we are ready to kill them.” The reference to “their” and “them” in her speech was clear to everyone in the room and anyone who watched her clip, which circulated widely on social media and on television channels in India. Sadhvi Annapurna was referring to the 204 million Muslims of India. “Even if 100 of us are ready to kill 20 lakh [2 million] of them, then we will be victorious and are ready to go to jail,” she said. Despite calls by some sections of society, including a group of retired government officials, to investigate and arrest the organizers and speakers of the Dharma Sansad for making these provocative hate speeches, the police in the state of Uttarakhand did not take any “serious action” against those who tried to incite violence through this event, stated government officials in a letter they sent to Uttarakhand’s Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami “condemning his government’s response” to the Dharma Sansad. Uttarakhand is governed by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), whose leader Narendra Modi is the prime minister of India. Meanwhile, Dhami did not make any statements against the event, although photographs of him bowing before one of the speakers at the conclave appeared to suggest a close association with the people involved in organizing the event. That speaker in the photograph, Swami Prabodhananda Giri, the head of the Hindu Raksha Sena, a right-wing organization based out of Uttarakhand, said at the gathering, “Every Hindu must pick up weapons, and we will have to conduct this cleanliness drive.” It is clear that the association of “weapons” with “cleanliness” refers to the kind of ethnic or religious cleansing witnessed during various periods in history, including the Holocaust during World War II. Elections and Hate Between February and March 2022, three key north India states are expected to go to the polls; among these states is Uttarakhand. The other two states—Uttar Pradesh and Punjab—are key to the fortunes of the ruling BJP, which will see its popularity tested after Modi had to withdraw three farm bills on November 19, 2021. Farmer unrest in both Punjab and Uttar Pradesh led to a year-long protest campaign that soured the reputation of the BJP in these two states and has created the possibility of new electoral maps being drawn in both these states in India. Uttar Pradesh (which has a population of approximately 200 million) is India’s most populous state, and the fortunes of the BJP there will determine the authority of Modi’s government in Delhi, India’s capital and the central government’s seat of power. A defeat in Uttar Pradesh, or even a reduced majority, would give the opposition greater confidence to challenge Modi’s fiat approach to policymaking and to counter the right-wing ideology propagated by the BJP. Currently, the BJP dominates the state assembly in Uttar Pradesh (it won 312 out of the 403 seats in the assembly elections of 2017). The atmosphere in Uttar Pradesh remains tense for minorities (around 19 percent of the population in the state are Muslims), largely because various Hindu right-wing organizations—such as those represented at the religious conclave—have stoked the fires of hatred against the Muslim minority for generations. As part of its vote-gathering arsenal, the BJP has developed a strategy to provoke religious violence, polarize the population, and ensure that the majority Hindu vote gathers under its banner. This is what the BJP did to succeed in the 2014 general elections, before which local party officials engineered a pogrom in the town of Muzaffarnagar in August to September 2013 that resulted in the death of more than 60 people and left thousands of others displaced. In the aftermath of that violence, BJP leader—and now home minister of India (responsible for law and order in the country)—Amit Shah in 2014 told a crowd in Shamli in western Uttar Pradesh that the general election, which eventually led to the BJP seizing power in India, was about honor, and was “an election to take revenge for the insult” and “to teach a lesson to those who have committed injustice.” In November 2021, the Samajwadi Party and the Rashtriya Lok Dal (National People’s Party) formed an alliance for the Uttar Pradesh legislative elections. The Samajwadi Party had governed the state from 2012 to 2017 under the leadership of former Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav. The Rashtriya Lok Dal, meanwhile, brings heft in the western districts of Uttar Pradesh, where the farmers’ agitation had the greatest impact. This combination threatens the BJP’s divisive agenda. It is likely that more events like the Dharma Sansad focused on spreading and strengthening religious hate in Uttar Pradesh will be on offer to polarize the electorate to the benefit of the BJP. Sewers of Hate The religious conclave held in December 2021 suggested that there was a threat to Hindus in “Islamic India.” This is a theme that goes back to the 19th century, when leaders of the Hindu right wing began to say that Hinduism was being threatened by, among other things, the rising birth rate of Muslims. Facts apart, this idea festered in the sewers of right-wing thought continues to find favor in the currents within the BJP, such as Shah, who had described the minority Muslim population of Uttar Pradesh as the people “who have committed injustice.” To refer to India as “Islamic” is part of the exaggerated paranoia, a festivity of hatred that results in violence and in the consolidation of political power for the BJP. Rather than face arrest for their hate speech, the men and women who spoke at the assembly filed a complaint with the police against “maulanas or clerics” and “the Quran, maulvis [Islamic scholars] of Haridwar and other unnamed Muslims.” Sadhvi Annapurna, who had called for the murder of Muslims, is heard in a video posted on Twitter on December 28, 2021, telling a police officer to “show us that you are not biased.” Yati Narsinghanand, who organized the religious conclave, interjects to say that the police officer is “biased and on our side.” Following the religious conclave in Haridwar, 21 “Hindu monks” who participated in the conclave formed a committee to hold more of these meetings and to “convert India into a ‘Hindu Rashtra’ [state].” “You [the Hindus in India] can fight them only with arms,” the monks said, with no need to elaborate on whom they meant during their reference to “them.” Democracy in India is wounded by the acidic legacy of the Hindu right wing, which thrives on intimidation and false pride as the fuel for its success. The farmers’ agitation offered an alternative path. The two roads will be tested in these legislative elections expected to take place in early 2022. AuthorVijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is the chief editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including "The Darker Nations" and "The Poorer Nations." His latest book is "Washington Bullets," with an introduction by Evo Morales Ayma. This article was produced by Globetrotter. Archives January 2022 Protestors demonstrating against the Enbridge Line 3 Pipeline in northwestern Minnesota. Credit: Sarah LittleRedfeather/Honor the Earth. The Line 3 pipeline was a major recent target of the Left. Though the project has been completed over and above the Left’s heroic resistance, the latest iteration of the Red-Green partnership has solidified the Left’s commitment to indigenism. Water, we are told, is a resource so fundamental to human life that it should not be subject to the whims of the market. Since some indigenous nations have consistently echoed this point ever since the advent of colonization, the Left looks to them to provide a model of a collectivist, harmonious future after capitalism. What this issue represents, therefore, is a fusion of environmentalism and indigenism into what advocates hope will be a movement unstoppable due to its intersectionality. Now, it’s pretty hard to argue with the morality of water access. Perhaps that is precisely why a moral line has been adopted for the last 50 years. But such a stance is not necessarily leftist. In fact, it clashes sharply with how the Marxist Left understood itself and its relation to capitalism, history, and even water ‘rights.’ Indeed, upon closer inspection, this hot-button issue actually reveals itself to be a microcosm of the changes in the Left’s self-consciousness. Today’s Left would no doubt justify its existence by proclaiming the need to move away from the marketization of water. It would make its appeal through a redistributive vision of a future in which the rich have no claim to own or control access to water; rather, all would simply have as much as they needed, and no individual’s use would deprive that of anyone else. The Left, according to its contemporary self-identification, exists to bring water to the thirsty so that everyone has the same basic starting point to then live up to their fullest potential. After all—and they’re right about this—one can’t live a life worth being called ‘human’ without reliable access to sufficient water. But this is not how the Left always understood itself. The Marxist Left would have actually called such a vision ‘reactionary.’ Now Marx himself certainly would have been on the side of those wishing to right the wrongs of this world. But the Left’s task was not, for him, the immediate, moralistic alleviation of suffering. Rather, it was to advance the crisis of history to the point of revealing its own solution in no uncertain terms. The unfreedom characteristic of capitalism was thus for Marx the necessary, if brutal, condition for a future kind of freedom that could only be fashioned therefrom. To seek to implement a social justice vision based on ancient values, whether Christian or ‘indigenous,’ would be to obscure a higher and more fitting type of society, the potential for which the marketization of water, however absurd, reveals. Perhaps this will become clearer if we trace humanity’s relationship to water historically. We can imagine that we began our relationship to water collectively, naturally. For a long time, perhaps, human groups lived enmeshed in nature as any other animal. Humanity encountered nature not as a medium to enhance its own self-possession but rather as the necessary backdrop to its animal life. We may think of our relationship to nature much as we imagine the fish’s relationship to water. Of course, going all the way back to Rousseau, it has been posited that the notion of private property was alien to this, dare we say, state of nature. This is perhaps well illustrated by the example of water. Something so life-giving, so dangerous, and so obviously out of anyone’s individual control would have literally been inconceivable in bourgeois market terms. Reliable access to potable water was probably a pressing concern for our earliest ancestors. Undoubtedly, individuals and perhaps whole groups fought and killed each other for it. No wonder then that so many endowed water with divine or anthropomorphic characteristics. Water took its place as another being alternatively aiding and hindering us in our bleak and pointless struggle to survive. But obviously humanity did not persist in this state forever. Eventually, occurring at different paces in different times and places, we began to change our relationship to nature. Instead of a collective of forces necessary to our survival but ultimately out of our control, nature became a source of investigation, manipulation, and eventually mastery for human beings. Rather than scrounge and hunt we learned to farm and raise animals. We forced the earth to become more productive by learning the laws that governed it and taking conscious control over them. As a result, we changed the relationships that bound us to each other. Out of small groups arose societies and the first cultures. Material reality changed what it meant to be and become human and empowered us to express ourselves scientifically, artistically, religiously, poetically, gastronomically, etc. But this change could only have come about through a novel problematization of what had hitherto been uncritically accepted. We could no longer relate to nature naturally, carelessly, or collectively. To bring about and institutionalize the agricultural revolution, we began to relate to nature in an appropriative way. Nature may have retained its divinity, spirituality, or anthropomorphism, but our default mode of interacting with it as a communal species began to hinder us. As we left the state of nature to inhabit the state of society, our old relationship to water raised a new problem: that of our dependence on nature. Just as we were coming into awareness of becoming beings for ourselves, nature reminded us just how much we still had to learn in order to define our own destiny self-consciously. The freedom that society offered was superior to that enjoyed in the state of nature and ultimately incompatible with the social relationships underpinning it. Our relationship to water thus had to change in order for us to achieve higher iterations of our own potential. So we solved the problem in a sense, or translated it in another. Access to water (and now we’re no longer talking exclusively about potable water but also shipping, hydraulics, etc.) became subject to the hierarchy of class. In direct proportion as our ability to tame water grew (think of Roman aqueducts or the irrigation channels of the Yellow River), our access to it was reduced. If everyone in the natural community could freely access water, now such a ‘right’ or ‘freedom’ was refracted through the inequalities of class society. Those at the top would have had the best and most ready access, with those at the bottom likely having to fend for themselves. What’s more is that everyone, regardless of their position in this hierarchy, would have defended it if transgressed. If a lowly slave, serf, Untouchable, etc., attempted to usurp the ‘rights’ of the elites and arrogate water for themselves, even their fellow low-lifes would punish them. It doesn’t matter that water is essential for life itself. In exchange for solving the problem of scarcity, we elected to enter into unequal social relationships that cost much human life. But that is not the point. Rather, in expressing a biological need as a function of social reality, class society elevated the problem of what it means to be human. Humanity’s potential is to be a self-defining species, i.e., to become whatever it wishes to be and to be whatever it is capable of becoming. Human beings can objectify their own consciousness and imagination of how the world could be through their productive interaction with the world as it is. We can change the world simply because we want to, and this in turn endows us with great power, power that we have still not fully tapped into. It may be ludicrous to think that we’re the only such species, but ultimately it doesn’t matter. We are the universe on a crash course to full self-consciousness and -determination. We are nature transforming itself. Nature becomes human through our productive labor. At least, all of the history of class society revealed this truth to the great bourgeois thinkers from Rousseau to Marx. This is why they could observe that what we gained by becoming social beings was worth what we lost when we ceased to be natural beings. However, the freedom society offers is also just as corrupting, regressive, and even naturalizing. As society comes to take on a natural, self-evident, alien quality, then the wonders of civilization appear as “glittering misery,” in the words of Kant. Society remains a project to be actualized. The longer it lies stagnant, the more we romanticize the ancient past. But more on this later. Bourgeois social relations obviously mark not so much a break with class society as a further heightening of its transformative potential. The modern world is driven by the dynamo of human beings relating to each other via their labor. The oppressive ties of caste, community, compulsory religion, gender—in short, the unpurposive, eternal reproduction of social life along the same well-worn wagon ruts—burst open when political institutions were established to guarantee the right to labor. Labor in turn became the ground of all other rights: people (as citizens) are free to the extent that they labor. Again, obviously paradise is still a long way off. But the point is that such an arrangement raises the stakes. Human ingenuity, unleashed and objectified through the regime of private property, can find a solution to the fact that every human being needs around two to four liters of water per day just to get out of bed the following morning. We no longer need to depend on the fickle bounty of nature to receive our daily drink. And now, society itself reveals how increasingly absurd it is to wait our turn in the social hierarchy until the elites have quenched themselves, leaving the thirsty with next to nothing. Only on the basis of humanity’s journey through class society has a means of overcoming this most recent obstacle revealed itself. And we call this capitalism. Capitalism presents the problem of water as one of our dependence on society. The self-contradiction of unemployment in an industrial mode of production reveals the self-undermining nature of labor. It reveals that we no longer need to coerce people to work in order to reproduce the vastness of society and its wealth. The mode of production could work autonomously as a function of technology, thereby freeing people to choose to work and infinitely expand our species’ capacity for freedom through their voluntary labor. Indeed, the increasing technologization of life shows ever-more the farce that is the daily societal drama of going to work, simultaneously willingly and yet coerced. But for the profit needs of a few, we could very easily invent machines to artificially synthesize drinking water. We could line the salty coasts of the world with free desalination. We could cooperate and compromise to rationally organize everyone’s access to shipping lanes, fishing spots, etc. We could even artificially create fish in a lab for a fraction of the cost and with more taste and nutrients. Why not turn that technology back on our own bodies and come up with a way to eliminate the biological need for water itself? Then we would truly fulfill the bourgeois ethos and drink not on biological command but purely for pleasure’s sake. But of course, capitalism means nothing but the self-contradiction of our own freedom. Any technological attempts to resolve this contradiction only end up deepening and entrenching it. That is why the machines have not automatically made us free. Instead, they have rendered redundant more and more people, not jobs. Only socialism would allow us to confront the problem of our dependence on society head-on. For all its likely horrors, socialism would thus constitute the higher stage of what is already the highest stage of history. It would bring us one giant step closer to complete self-determination as a species. We could, in other words, elevate the problem of water from its current manifestation as a question of society to a question of technology. I mentioned earlier that the longer the world must wait for socialism, the more undesirable such a transition seems. Freedom in and through society must be actively exercised; and much like an inconsistent but earnest gym-rat, skipping workouts altogether makes it that much harder to go back. Today’s Left fetishizes indigeneity into an anti-capitalistic impetus for turning back the historical clock. The Left seems willing to revert to a time of primitive communism before class society. It wishes to dramatically and instantaneously democratize access to water such that we revert to an earlier stage of our collective existence, to a time when nature dominated us as an insurmountable horizon. The Left would fight to preserve a mode of existence that history has already revealed to be insufficient and irreversibly outdated: namely, the ‘indigenous’ tribal unit. Human beings are not meant to live like they did 10,000, 1,000, or even 100 years ago. There is no moral or Eurocentric reason for this. It is simply made true by the way in which history has moved on since the misty days of our species’ youth. Yet the Left would return us there. It would cancel those who see the potential of capitalism and perhaps violently arrest the dynamism of the modern era. Its motivation is spot-on, though. Let’s not equivocate on that. The Left’s discontent and resentment at how the world has turned out is justified. So justified, in fact, that it alone, and not the Right, holds the keys to unlocking the future. But that does not mean it must be left to its own devices. That does not mean that we should consider sacrosanct every ‘exotic’ alternative to ‘Western’ solutions. Defeating Line 3, returning guardianship of water to indigenous nations, communalizing water utilities (as opposed to, say, the most quintessentially modern example of water privatization: Chile), improving the quality of public water, democratizing shipping and fishing rights, destroying bottled water companies—all these initiatives may improve people’s lives. But that is not the point of the Left, at least not as Marx envisioned it. For Marx, socialism was merely the vehicle for raising the problem of human freedom to consciousness. It was not a moral vision equal to, say, a secularization of the Beatitudes. Socialism was to be the logical fulfillment of capitalism, the extension of private property to all of society, and thus would make good on the history of humanity’s meandering through the confusing maze of its own transformative potential. Socialism may be nasty, brutish, and short, perhaps even more so than capitalism, but this would all be for a purpose. The violence unleashed consciously by the dictatorship of the proletariat would serve to empower humans to eliminate the violence of their own social relations. The privatization of all of society, the forced labor, all of it would exist to demonstrate practically both the obsolescence of private property and the practical ability to move beyond it. Today’s Left may no longer wish to be ‘Marxist.’ That is fine, so long as it is honest. The desire to make the world better is genuine but naive. Its naivete rests on the fact that it fails to grasp how it reconstitutes the status quo with every attempt to transcend it. Marxism once posited socialism as necessarily possible due to the unfreedom and brutality of capitalism. That is, capitalism exists for the purpose of socialism. You don’t have to believe that. Indeed, the intervening history since Marx’s time makes such a statement seem ridiculous. No wonder the Left turns to indigenous nations who supposedly lie ‘outside’ of ‘Western’ history. They are made into the keepers of traditions of justice that have persisted in the face of hundreds of years of colonialism and that, as a result, have hardened into the only viable path into a harmonious future. But what is this except the rankest essentialism? It is not only farcical to think that indigenous nations have resisted or not participated in Hegel’s “slaughter-bench” of history, but it is also racist. Indigenous nations of this hemisphere and beyond all have played an integral role in making the world as it is today. As such, they are no more guilty or innocent than anyone else (and everyone is ‘indigenous’ to somewhere). To exoticize indigenous nations is to condemn them. The Left, in order to be consistent, would thus have to cancel itself over such blatant racism. Our only salvation is history. The fact that history, including Marxism, has appeared Western, colonial, or violent does not mitigate this fact. Only by embracing it so as to overcome it can we make good on its promises. Only then could we make the tragic fact of human beings dying of thirst mean something. It falls on us to redeem the past, not return to it. Thus the Left ought to reconsider its anti-history, Stalinist, racist indigenism when it comes to water rights. Justice that subverts the hard-won gains of history, justice that reverts a higher-order problem into a retrograde one, is no justice at all. AuthorWes Vanderburgh is a member of the Communist Party USA based in Washington, D.C. They strive to create the conditions for the reemergence of the revolutionary left in the United States and beyond. Archives January 2022 1/3/2022 Relevance of the Manifesto of the Communist Party in the 21st Century. By: Carlos Alarcón Aliaga, Translated By: Toby GreenRead NowThe death of communism has been pronounced time and time again, but every day it is still fought against without respite or pity. There is no popular act or uprising which the bourgeoise does not see as a sign of communism, no nationalist or progressive opinion which is not branded as communist. There is no doubt that since the publication of the Manifesto of the Communist Party in February of 1848 the bourgeoisie can no longer rest easy. The world has changed much since then, many references made that are since outdated, but its “general principles” remain valid, having been verified scientifically and confirmed by historical events. The Communist Manifesto highlights the historical role of capitalism and how it has replaced relations based on patriarchy, the family, religion etc. with cold monetary interest, with “the icy water of egotistical calculation”. For the first time the trends of capitalism are laid out, from its birth in the European feudal system and its expansion all over the world, creating the global marketplace that we today call “globalisation”. Marx and Engels foretold such a situation by stating, “The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world-market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country” (The Communist Manifesto, p.25). In the same way, they recognised that capitalism, “has made the country dependent on the towns…barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilised ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West” (p.26), forming its imperialist stage. What’s more, they correctly pointed out that, “The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production” insofar as they aid the creation of profits (p.24). But the Communist Manifesto has highlighted not only economic trends, but also political, by pointing out that, “The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” (p.23). Without a doubt, there are many more contributions from the Communist Manifesto that we cannot stop to go over in this brief article, and so we will only touch on those that have been most attacked with the aim of removing its revolutionary edge. The history of all hitherto existing history is the history of class struggles.Out of all the various social relations, relations of production are the main ones. Since the appearance of the social division of labour between manual and intellectual and the ownership of the social means of production, the division of men and women into two fundamental classes has emerged: the possessors of the means of production and the dispossessed. The group of people who took over the means of production dominate the dispossessed, making them work for their own enrichment. For this reason, the Manifesto starts by saying that history “is the history of class struggles”. Masters and slaves, patricians and plebeians, lords and serfs, masters and tradesmen, that is to say exploiters and exploited, oppressors and oppressed have always clashed, sometimes subtly and other times frankly and openly. Capitalism has not eliminated class contradictions; it has substituted the old classes for new ones; now everything revolves around the contradiction between capitalists and workers. Thousands of times it has been denied, and thousands of times it has been confirmed by reality. The bourgeoisie, unable to hide these contradictions, accepts them, but denies their origins as being in the possession or dispossession of the means of production, or in the position of people within the social relations of production. For the capitalists, social classes are defined by their capacity for consumption, and these are the classes A, B, C, D and even E, within which class interests dissipate. This same criterion serves to sort the classes into upper, middle and lower, and since no one wants to damage their social prestige, a large number of proletarians feel flattered when they are placed in the middle class. This situation of domination compels the exploited and oppressed classes to defend their rights, organising, mobilising, taking part in strikes etc. It cost the workers and the people of the 19th and 20th centuries great days of struggle for the legal recognition of their rights. For this reason, imperialist capital has counterattacked to shatter the workers’ organisations and defeat the Soviet Union and, having done this, has rolled out neoliberalism to take away democratic and workplace rights, neutralise the trade unions and the right to strike under the threat of being fired, etc. Thus, class struggle is exactly this bourgeois domination, and it exists even if the oppressed classes do not have the capacity to defend themselves and are not mobilising or going on strike. Class struggle is not a style nor a method of doing politics, as the Ecuadorian ex-president Rafael Correa so candidly declared in his time. Class struggle exists in social reality and is a consequence of the division of society into owners and non-owners of the means of production. Capitalism has simplified class contradictions: bourgeoisie and proletarians In the Communist Manifesto we read, “Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinctive feature: it has simplified the class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.” (The Communist Manifesto, pp.21-22) We arrive, therefore, at the most heavily criticised element of the Communist Manifesto and of the economic and social theory of Marxism. The working class, we are told, grows ever smaller. It results that the bourgeoisie, in order to judge the Communist Manifesto, use the categories of bourgeois “science”, which is why they speak a different language to that of Marx. In ‘Capital’, wage-earning workers are always the working class, because within capitalism the principal relationship of production is between capital and waged work, and never the relationship between capital and worker, or between capital and employee. For this reason, the working class encompasses all employees and not the simplistic workplace category that the bourgeoisie use in their factories. Furthermore, Marx uses the word ‘worker’ in its full meaning, the worker is the person who has worked and produced ever since they appeared on the face of the earth. In this way, showing that human work is superior to that of animals, such as the spider or the bee, because before carrying out the work the worker first maps it out in his mind. Marx says: “At the end of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement. He not only effects a change of form in the material on which he works, but he also realises a purpose of his own…” (Capital Volume I, p.127) To be a worker is to be a producer; it is innate in human beings and present throughout history. With a society divided into social classes, the workers are the ones who commit themselves to working so that others; the owners of the social means of production; may live and grow rich off their labour. Under capitalism, workers are proletarians as defined by Friedrich Engels: “By proletariat [is meant] the class of modern wage-labourers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labour-power in order to live” (The Communist Manifesto, p.21) However, labour-power has been understood as if one were only speaking of physical force, ignoring the display of knowledge, experience, and intelligence on the part of the worker. Marx defines it with some clarity, “By labour-power or capacity for labour is to be understood the aggregate of those mental and physical capabilities existing in a human being, which he exercises whenever he produces a use-value of any description.” (Capital Volume I, p.119). We see, then, that labour-power and capacity for labour mean the same thing and include all the spiritual faculties present in the personality of the worker, such as free will, love or hate of work, emotions of anger and anguish, concentration, knowledge, intelligence, abilities, etc. The capitalist buys these capacities for labour for them to carry out a collective work and produce the goods that he must sell on the market. This social work is a process in which different people, with different qualifications and skills, intervene. In this regard, Marx tells us, “In a factory, the labourers do not directly take part in the processing of raw materials. The workers tasked with watching over those who work on these processing tasks are of a slightly higher category; engineers who work principally with their heads. Yet the result is the production of this ensemble of workers, who possess a labour power of distinct value […]. The type of capitalist production is characterised, in effect, by the act of separating and entrusting different people with various jobs, both intellectual and manual. This doesn’t prevent the product material from being the common product of all these people, nor that this common product is translated into material wealth, nor that each one of these people is, with respect to capital, a salaried worker, a productive worker in the highest sense of the word. All of these people, in addition to working directly in the production of material wealth, directly exchange their work for money considered as capital and therefore, in addition to their salary, directly reproduce a surplus value for the capitalist.” (Teorías 1, p.224 translator’s version) All the capacities of the workers merge in this collective labour, capacities which are sold in exchange for a salary, and which provide a surplus value for the capitalist. The proletarian class is not just those who directly manufacture a product, but rather all those workers who take part in its production. The capitalists cannot do away with the working class, and so their foremost resolution is to divide it and with this same objective carry out labour outsourcing, through which workers who are indispensable to the production process are recategorized as tertiary and without any labour rights. (“El Capital” hoy, Chapter II) This throws the bourgeois categorisation into disarray and shows that the working class maintains its power and its role within the capitalist system. However, there is still more to discuss: we have only spoken of the proletariat that has succeeded in selling its capacity for work, let us now see what happens to those who do not have such luck. The tendency towards the proletarianization of capitalist society is unstoppable In its advance over the world capitalism continually disintegrates or subordinates the past modes of production, uproots thousands upon thousands of peasants and artisans from their land and their means of production, creating a new social class: the proletariat. The proletarianization of the population of the population has always been greater than the capacity for employment of capital, generating a relative overpopulation which Marx called a “reserve army of labour” because it constituted a source of labour for the necessities of the expansion of capital and for maintaining low wages. Marx and Engels used the categories of working class and proletarian class interchangeably, because although a reserve army of labour was created, for proletarians who did not manage to sell their labour power, sooner or later they would do so, according to the empirical observations and the limits of the statistics from the time in which they lived. In the 19th century and well into the 20th century this reserve army of labour became more stable in the developed capitalist countries of Europe, which one can attribute to a phenomenon exclusive to underdeveloped countries. This tendency towards the overgrowth of the reserve army of labour was undetectable in those times because there was a release valve of excess European proletarians as they emigrated to Australia and the New World, where they found better sources of work and better opportunities in land, displacing the indigenous populations, often through blood and fire, which was known as the North American “conquest of the west”. What’s more, the first and second world wars, aside from dividing up the world, also served capitalism by destroying part of the excess workforce. Today, in the 21st century, the tendency towards the growth of proletarianization and the incapability of capitalism to provide employment has increased on the one hand and, on the other hand, there are no more indigenous populations with appealing lands to be displaced, or another world war to relieve the excess of the proletarian population. Under these circumstances we have millions of proletarianized people who cannot find a capitalist to whom they can sell their capacity for work, and this has produced a growth in freelance or gig workers and, to a lesser extent, in micro businesses, which represent some 93% of economic activities within the European Union (Círculo de Empresarios, p.81), mirroring underdeveloped countries. These proletarians, when they are unable to find work, find themselves forced to take refuge in a business of subsistence, because under capitalism everything is bought and sold, and no one can live without an income. They find themselves forced, through various means, to make some small amount of capital for themselves and start a business that is the easiest and most accessible to their poverty, especially petty commerce and services. This situation is taken by the epigones of capital to organise their statistics and argue for the reduction of the proletariat because a large portion of the economically active population are dedicated to tertiary jobs. They deliberately hide that nearly the entirety of this sector are independent contractors who have no capacity for contracting labourers, are fundamentally self-employed, and their economy is a subsistence one with no capacity for accumulating capital. This reality makes them semi-proletarians, and all the political aid programmes do nothing for them because these are for the petty bourgeoisie; they don’t realise that they have their own interests which are very different from any other bourgeois splinter. (“El Capital” hoy, chapter 9) "Salaried workers and the semi-proletariat make up more than 80% of the economically active population in capitalist countries, which confirms the tendency highlighted in the Communist Manifesto that. “Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.” (p.22) Capitalism can no longer control the powers of the nether world that it has created Capitalism, seeking the greatest profits, has taken over the world and developed never before seen technological powers, with a sufficient productive capacity to solve world hunger. However, it does not do this because it is not prepared to give up the products it has available if it is not paid the price it demands. Its eagerness for profit leads it to produce to earn more and more, in a race of producing capital for the sake of producing, until there is an excess of goods in relation to the buying capacity of the population. In this bottleneck financial capital gives out quick and easy loans, not just for production, but also for consumption, creating a fictitious demand and postponing crises. In this race economic bubbles grow until they pop, such as in the 2007-2008 crisis, from which capitalism has never recovered; a great relapse was announced in 2020 when the pandemic arrived. The only thing that COVID-19 has done is deepen the crisis to unforeseen levels. "There is a great certainty when the Communist Manifesto says, “Modern bourgeois society with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.” (p.28) The crisis that the world is living through has completely unmasked capitalism. By prioritising businesses and capitalist speculation not one developed capitalist country has been able to tackle the health crisis; compared to China, Cuba, Vietnam, even Venezuela, they are an absolute embarrassment. Knowing their sanitary shortcomings for handing over health to the voracity of private profit, capitalist countries have had the necessary resources to counteract the epidemic, which has resulted in 2.5 million deaths from COVID-19 in just one year (Google news), which must be doubled if one considers all the deaths due to distraction from other illnesses[1]. It would seem that the bourgeoisie is taking advantage of the situation to do away with the excess of proletarians to whom it could never give employment; it is horrifying to learn that in Madrid and New York they have intentionally stopped checking in on retirement homes. What has happened to the gravediggers of capitalism? The economic and political situation of the world today seems to clash with what Marx and Engels said of the proletariat in 1847, “But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons – the modern working class – the proletarians.” (Communist Manifesto, p.29) The suffering of the proletariat from the 2008 crisis and the global crisis that we are currently living through is tremendous. Even before the pandemic, the cutback and annulling of labour rights were unstoppable; millions of workers lost their jobs, their savings, and their houses in developed countries. Such was the suffering that between 2007 and 2017 in Spain some 17,000 people took their own lives for economic reasons (HISPANTV). Add onto that the millions of deaths due to COVID-19 in the last year, the millions of workers who have lost their jobs and salaries, the millions of independent contractors who have lost their precarious businesses etc. The responses of the workers are lacking in focus. Some have had global impact, such as the mobilisations in the United States, France, India, Belgium, and Spain among the more well known. Only the mobilisations of the Chilean people have had a political focus against neoliberalism. But not one of these examples questions the capitalist system. This situation of the global proletariat is not down to the Communist Manifesto being wrong. After its publication the global proletariat carried out historic struggles which have changed the course of history in previous centuries. The 1872 Paris Commune was followed by the great 1917 proletarian revolution in Russia, which started the first attempt to build an alternative society to capitalism in the world, taking this immense country from underdevelopment to becoming the second greatest world power, capable of defeating Hitler’s powerful Nazi army. From then would come the revolutions in China, Korea, Cuba, Vietnam etc and an ample national liberation movement in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. It would come to pass that the imperialist bourgeoisie also learned and carried out a counterattack on various fronts: 1. Overthrow the Soviet Union by hounding it with the “Cold War” and a global ideological smear campaign as an alternative to capitalism. With the union and political organisations domesticated and the Soviet Union overthrown, all the banners of neoliberalism were unfurled, coming to cut yet more labour and union rights, but above all to impose work flexibility, giving legal capacities to the bourgeoisie to fire any who tried to organise unions. For these reasons, for example, in Peru only 5% of workers are in a union. This situation explains why the proletariat cannot organise a meaningful response to the aggressions they receive from the bourgeoisie and why, lacking an ideology and revolutionary parties, they do not carry out their struggles to end this economic, social, and political system which threatens not just workers, but all of human civilisation. It is time then to learn the lessons of history, overcome this disorganisation, end the relaxation of work laws, etc. Above all, to organise ourselves into a revolutionary party as the Communist Manifesto demands and carry out a wide-ranging political and ideological struggle for the historical interests of the proletariat of Peru and the world, in an independent manner, banishing the copycat attitudes of bourgeois governments and politicians. [1] At the time of translation (December 2021) this figure has increased to 5.3 million deaths Bibliography Alarcón, C. “El Capital” hoy: Capitalismo y crisis en el S. XXI Círculo de Empresarios (2018). ‘La empresa mediana española’. Available at: https://circulodeempresarios.org/app/uploads/2019/01/Empresa-mediana-española-informe-anual-2018-Circulo-de-Empresarios.pdf (Accessed: 22/12/2021). Google News. ‘Coronavirus (COVID-19)’. Available at: https://news.google.com/covid19/map?hl=es-419&gl=PE&ceid=PE%3Aes-419 HISPANTV (2018). ’17 mil españoles se suicidan desde 2007 por causas económicas’. Available at: https://www.hispantv.com/noticias/sociedad/380119/espana-problemas-economicos-crisis-suicidios (Accessed: 22/12/2021). Marx, K. and Engels, F. (2015). Capital: A Critique of Political Economy: Volume I. Available at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Capital-Volume-I.pdf (Accessed: 08/12/2021). (First published in 1867). Marx, K. and Engels, F. (2004). The Communist Manifesto in The Communist Manifesto & Selected Writings. Pan Macmillan: London. (First published in 1848). AuthorCarlos Alarcón Aliaga This article was originally published in spanish by Instituto Marx Engel of Peru. Archives January 2022 In any capitalist society, a disconnect between an individual’s selfhood and her labor will arise. Ask any college student and you’ll hear about the never-ending questions that go something like… What career do you want with your degree? What field are you looking into? Where do you want to work once you graduate? Inevitably accompanying that question comes intense anxiety for the student themselves. Yet, this isn’t an issue only experienced by college students— questions concerning one’s career never cease to end. They usually present in different forms, most often as self-reflecting questions the working-class subconsciously ask themselves every day… Man, what am I doing with my life? I just have to get to the weekend! I hate my job but my kids need food on the table. According to Che Guevara, capitalism moves people away from expressing their interests without even knowing it.[1] And even beyond alienating people from their interests, the interrelation between a person’s ability to produce, save, and organize[2], which are vital elements of a revolution, are also damaged under capitalistic systems. People are disconnected from their labor because even if they are working in a field they are interested in, capitalism separates the individual from the products of their labor and likewise, disconnects them from their sense of self and purpose. Martizen-Sanez writes, “The distinction that people experience between communal interests and individual interests arose because in capitalist society, human beings lacked the control of the distribution of the products of their labor and were treated as a means to an end rather than an end; their relations were reduced to purely economic relations, and the difference between an animal and a human existence had become unintelligible” (Martinez-Saenz, 24). This alienation under a capitalist system is something Marx and Guevara shared in concern. If the individual is alienated because of oppressive external conditions under capitalism, then the individual will inevitably lose touch with self. So, not only are workers frustrated with the inability to reap the fruits of their labor but they are forcibly stripped of any identity of selfhood. Marx talks of this exact same issue in his manuscript Alienated Labor. Petrović writes of this when considering Marx, stating, “The alienation of the results of man's productive activity is rooted in the alienation of production itself. Man alienates the products of his labor because he alienates his labor activity, because his own activity becomes for him an alien activity, an activity in which he does not affirm but denies himself, an activity which does not free but subjugates him. He is home when he is outside this activity, and he is out when he is in it” (Petrović, 241). Labor becomes alien to the worker who is completely disconnected from their work. Yet perhaps even worse than Marx could have predicted, “home,” where “he is outside this activity” is arguably no longer even a space where his selfhood can be reconnected in the United States. Labor has not only alienated the worker from his work but has created such extreme conditions that almost all spaces are now alienating in this country. Marx and Guevara weren't the only ones to recognize the divide capitalism causes between labor and passion, capital and self. W.E.B. Du Bois, Huey Newton, and Paul Robeson all observed not only the social differences in the Soviet Union and Mao’s People’s Republic of China, particularly related to race, but also the differences in how the working people of these places viewed and digested their labor. While we can obviously recognize the differences in their ability to reap the fruits of their labor compared to US workers (or any workers under capitalism or neoliberalism), less often do we examine the psychological relationship a Marxist revolution enables. The psychological relationship being the connection one has between his labor and his selfhood. Du Bois immediately recognized the safety and welcome he felt when he visited the Soviet Union. Yet, even beyond those social changes, he was also able to observe a new dynamic among the working people. “Du Bois applauded the Soviet program, which had made of the working people of the world ‘a sort of religion,’ a form of scientific idealism he posited as being indispensable to progress” (Carew, 54). The Soviets were dedicatedly connected to their work— producing historically groundbreaking results (we mainly consider the scientific ones), but they also psychologically pushed an entire population onwards with the same unifying intensity exhibited in religion. Du Bois’ idea that work can create a motivating spirit in the people is something he also observed in China: “Du Bois saw ‘a fable of disciplined bees working in revolutionary unison. Cataloging the public places, restaurants, homes of officials, factories, and schools visited,’ he saw only ‘happy people with faith that needs no church or priest’” (Carew, 61). Once again we have this reference to a sense of drive, pride, and motivation so unifying that it is comparable to the togetherness brought on by religion. Workers had faith in their labor and therefore did not struggle with the questions that I examined earlier in this piece. Work in Marxist societies erases the disconnect that laborers otherwise have between their selfhood and work-life in capitalist systems. Huey Newton also observes the connection between selfhood and labor that America lacks when he visited The People’s Republic of China: “While there, I achieved a psychological liberation I had never experienced before. It was not simply that I felt at home in China; the reaction was deeper than that. What I experienced was the sensation of freedom as if a great weight had been lifted from my soul and I was able to be myself, without defense or pretense or the need for explanation. I felt absolutely free for the first time in my life-completely free among my fellow men. This experience of freedom had a profound effect on me, because it confirmed my belief that an oppressed people can be liberated if their leaders persevere in raising their consciousness and in struggling relentlessly against the oppressor… To see a classless society in operation is unforgettable. Here, Marx’s dictum— from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs— is in operation” (Newton, 348, 352). Again, Newton mentions this psychological liberation that is almost spiritual or religious in nature. The societies that America paints as those in which people are forced to work for “hours without reward,” in reality actually provide a sense of freedom and liberation for one's selfhood through Marxist labor structures, the antithesis to everything we’re told in school. Yet it cannot be a coincidence that all of these African-American revolutionaries observed such similar feelings of liberation. Undoubtedly, the widespread feeling of disconnect that I described earlier in America’s working culture, is the exact opposite in cultures that have experienced Marxist revolutions. In places where Marxist revolutions have occurred, a feeling of intense connection to one’s labor arises. Du Bois and Newton do not speak of the mysticality of an un-alienated society randomly. Petrović also accounts for the same role the rejection of alienated labor has in a spiritual setting: “In this sense, Marx… speaks about communism as a society which means ‘the positive supersession of all alienation and the return of man from religion, the family, the state, etc., to his human, i.e., social life (existence)’” (Petrović, 424-425). If alienation between a worker and his work is ended, he will be able to return to his truest human condition and existence. In the same sense that Du Bois and Newton observed, ending alienation in labor, returns the man to his truest self. Paul Robeson, a local hero for my fellow Princeton, New Jersey residents, found this connection so powerful (that along for obvious social reasons) he moved his family to the Soviet Union for a period of time.[3] This reinforces the notion that Marxist revolutions create spaces for marginalized people to not only experience less racial prejudice than in the States, but also a complete liberation of selfhood. A liberation that can remove the constraints of not only racial oppression, but of the realities that all working class people experience in the United States: the inevitable disconnect between selfhood and work, or labor-alienation, that is inevitable in capitalist-based systems. Che Guevara’s idea of the “new man,” is the alternative that American workers need. In America’s capitalist hellscape, not only are adult workers disconnected from the fruits of their labor and individual sense of belonging and purpose, but the youth population is as well. We tell our youth they have to work to survive, but when they produce the tools of their survival they are completely stripped of the fruits themselves. Instead, the products of their labor go to the bourgeoisie so that this system can continue. And not only are people physically disconnected from the products of their labor, but they are psychologically disconnected from their labor as well. This makes it nearly impossible to love or find meaning in one’s job, regardless of one’s theoretical interest. Instead, American workers work only to put food on their families’ “tables” (arguably the vicious cycle doesn’t even allow that). It's a twofold issue that creates a never-ending cycle that is intentionally impossible for the working-class American to escape. Make the working-class person work a job that only gives him enough to keep him in an endless cycle of crises until he no longer love his work and can no longer love himself. Yet if we have a revolution in this country, if our workers are able to embody Guevara’s vision of the “new man,” the connection between laborer and labor can be reformed. Martinez-Saenz quotes Guevara who said, “The relation of economic controls to moral incentives is more subtle than indicated. Moral incentives, if they are truly the individual’s incentives, cannot be directed from above. That is why the many Cubans ask, ‘How can you plan voluntary work? Is this not a contradiction in terms?’ What types of economic controls are compatible with a system of moral incentives? Recognition of this issue has emerged in two forms. First, an understanding that moral incentives are directly related to the level of education and the nature of one’s employment, and this is reflected in Cuba’s intensive educational effort, particularly in technical training. Second, experimentation with a new worker organization and system of emulation whose aim in part is to stimulate greater participation and eliminate bureaucratic controls” (Martinez-Saenz, 22). Guevara clearly lays out these two steps that are important to understand in order to truly alleviate the disease of worker alienation. America, however, is nowhere close to adopting the steps Guevara saw for the people of Cuba: a revolution must take place first. This issue, therefore, is actually deeper than just a singular failure of capitalism. We know that it will be the working-class that unites to create a revolution in this country. Here we see the perfect connection: it is a working-class issue that can only be alleviated by the working-class themselves. It will take a revolution led by the working class to instate a positive relationship between workers and work. The myth of the “American Labor Shortage” shows the dissatisfaction the working class has with the exploitation of their labor. Now, more than ever, the working class must band together to revolutionize a system that does not work for them. To not only create a place where they can reap the fruits of their labor, but where workers can love their work and reject alienation. [1] Martinez-Saenz, Miguel. “Che Guevara’s New Man: Embodying a Communitarian Attitude.” Latin American Perspectives 31, no. 6 (November 1, 2004): 15–30. https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X04270639. (pg 21). [2] Martizen-Saenz, 21 [3] Carew, Joy Gleason. Blacks, Reds, and Russians: Sojourners in Search of the Soviet Promise. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2008. muse.jhu.edu/book/6044. Work Cited Carew, Joy Gleason. Blacks, Reds, and Russians: Sojourners in Search of the Soviet Promise. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2008. muse.jhu.edu/book/6044. Martinez-Saenz, Miguel. “Che Guevara’s New Man: Embodying a Communitarian Attitude.” Latin American Perspectives 31, no. 6 (November 1, 2004): 15–30. https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X04270639. Newton, Huey P., and Fredrika Newton. Revolutionary Suicide: Reprint edition. New York: Penguin Classics, 2009. Petrović, Gajo. “Marx’s Theory of Alienation.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 23, no. 3 (1963): 419–26. https://doi.org/10.2307/2105083. AuthorElla Kotsen is an undergraduate student at Bryn Mawr College. She is majoring in English and double minoring in History and Growth & Structure of Cities. She plays Division III women’s basketball and has received Centennial Conference Academic Honors. Her main subject of interest is in geopolitics and understanding the historical implications of colonization in Latin American countries. She is interested in Marxist literary theory and enjoys the work of Fanon, Eagleton, and Althusser. Ella also writes for her own independent blog where she produces opinion pieces, book reviews, and audio-based interviews. This article was republished from the Youth league. Archives January 2022 |
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