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2/23/2023 Neoclassical Economics & Postmodernist Philosophy:Two Academic Expressions of the Ruling Class By: Edward Liger SmithRead Now The relations of production at the core of all human civilizations have an immense impact on the way that young people are educated, and history has shown that the ruling economic class of any society will attempt to control the education system in that society. The capitalist economic system, or mode of production, is no different in this respect when it comes to elementary and higher-level education. The American elementary education system, for example, was originally based upon the idea of “factory schools,” which emerged during the industrial revolution in order to give parents a place to send their children while they worked all day, and to train up a “punctual, docile, and sober” working class of the future[1]. And honestly, it is fairly obvious that the elementary education system is still preparing the youth of our country for future 8+ hour workdays under the supervision of administrators. However, it’s not always as easy to see how capitalist relations of production and the ruling class influence our institutions of higher education.  Colleges were once thought to be places of free expression where new ideas are formulated and debated by the brightest minds in the nation. However, in the same way that elementary education was created to train the working class of the future, our institutions of higher education are largely designed inversely, to train the capitalist ideologues, managers, politicians, and ruling elites of the future. Far from indoctrinating the young adults of America with radical Marxism as Fox News would have you believe[2], colleges today are indoctrinating their students with neoclassical economics and postmodernist philosophy. Two ideologies which form the purest academic expressions of the capitalist ruling class and the basis of much of what is taught to college students today. Neoclassical Economics: Prior to the emergence of the Neoclassical school, the Classical school of economics was the preferred intellectual tool of capitalist ideologues and propagandists. The Neoclassical school started to form in the mid-late 19th and early 20th centuries, and largely did so in response to the growing Marxist school that was coming to prominence around the same time. In 1867 Karl Marx had published his groundbreaking work of political economy Das Kapital Volume I, which in many ways brought classical economics to its conclusion. Using the work of the most prominent classical economists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo as the basis for his investigation, Marx took the classical school’s “labor theory of value” to its logical conclusions, answering many of the questions that classical economists had been grappling with for years, and systematically criticizing the systems devised by these economists to pinpoint where their analysis went astray. Using David Ricardo’s labor theory of value Marx mapped out exactly how capitalism produces and circulates value, and in doing so, discovered that capitalist relations of production themselves necessitate the exploitation of labor, accumulation of capital, constant expansion of markets, and much more. It became clear to capitalist ideologues at this point, and even more so after the posthumous publishing of Capital volumes II and III, that the labor theory of value would no longer be of much use in defending capitalism. Classical economics was mostly abandoned by the ruling class and many people today believe that Karl Marx actually invented the labor theory of value. The ruling class now needed a new theory of economics to argue that capitalism is necessary, eternal, and maximizes human flourishing. Marx had shown in no uncertain terms that if labor is the source of all value in society, then capitalist accumulation necessitates the exploitation of that labor or else it would be impossible. And thus, the capitalists needed to toss out the labor theory of value in order to continue denying the exploitation of the working class, despite the fact that the theory had been accepted by economists for years prior. The neoclassical economists devised the “utility theory of value” as a way to displace the labor theory, which might as well be called the “subjective theory of value” because it suggests that all value is subjective, and rejects the possibility of any objective measurement of material economic value. Whereas the labor theory measures a commodity's value by the amount of socially necessary labor time needed to produce it, utility theory considers the value of a commodity to be subjectively determined by the price that consumers are willing to pay for it, in relation to the amount of the commodity that is currently being supplied on the market. Marxist economics conceptualizes price as an imperfect way of quantifying and expressing the amount of labor value contained in a commodity, the neoclassical school sees price as an absolute expression of a commodities’ value that’s dependent on its utility, which is subjectively determined by the desires of consumers. Unlike the labor theory of value, the utility or subjective theory is completely empirically untestable, a point which Marxist economist Paul Cockshott makes in his defense of the labor theory and critique of Alfred Marshall, who’s often considered the father of neoclassical economics[3]. The neoclassicals consider consumer demand to be a primary determinant of commodity prices, but a commodity’s perceived utility is an entirely subjective factor which cannot be quantified, and thus cannot be measured or compared to other commodity values numerically. This is the opposite of labor theory which measures commodity values by the average quantity of labor time needed to produce it. The utility theory of value is entirely based on the subjective perceptions of consumers which can’t be quantified and thus can’t be compared to commodity prices. This means that neoclassical economists can never actually test their theory that consumer demand determines the price of a commodity, unlike labor time on the other hand, which correlates very closely to commodity prices (as we will discuss later). The subjective nature of the utility theory, or the subjective theory of value, has been very useful for the neoclassical ideologues who defend it and allege that it has disproved the labor theory. Classical economics was originally an attempt to do with the economy what Isaac Newton had done with the natural world – use the scientific method to observe the system as closely as possible in order to decipher as best as possible its properties, motions, and laws. The economists identified human activity, i.e., human labor, to be the core source of value in all societies, as labor is the one ingredient needed to create and sell every commodity in existence. Once the source of value was determined, the economist's job became analyzing the nature of the system in which commodity values are produced, managed, distributed, accumulated, hoarded, etc. And by doing this Marx proved that the production and distribution of commodities is dominated by capitalists who don’t contribute any value themselves, and have the exclusive aim of producing surplus value by exploiting the labor of workers, which they can then take. After Marx had shown this, the pro-capitalist economists needed to abandon this scientific Newtonian approach to studying the economy. While the labor theory explains a great deal about capitalism and the nature of exploitation, the utility theory is subjective, abstract, untestable, and says next to nothing about the regular operations of capitalism. It is a theory that’s so subjective and contains so little substance that it actually becomes difficult to argue against. Why try to explain the correlation between labor time and price to somebody who can always respond with “Nope, the subjective Supply and Demand curves that I drew to intersect a given price point on this graph determine the price.” Regardless of how you argue that price is determined, the neoclassical can always draw two curves through it and claim they are the true determinants of price. It is difficult to concisely refute the substance of a theory that contains no real substance. In his critique of Alfred Marshall, Dr. Paul Cockshott rigorously examines the Supply and Demand curves that Alfred Marshall himself gave in his work, which is considered a foundational document for the neoclassical school. Cockshott turns the Demand curve given by Marshall into an algebraic equation and finds that the points on the curve have no material origin and are entirely senseless, as they were almost surely just made up and drawn arbitrarily by Marshall on a graph. Similar results are deduced in the analysis of the supply curve, showing that without a doubt this entire theory, foundational to the neoclassical school and modern economic thought, was pulled straight out of Alfred Marshall’s ass without a shred of real evidence attached to it.[4] Thinkers like Alfred Marshall and his much-revered disciple Milton Friedman generally believe that the point where the supply and demand curve intersect is called the equilibrium point, and the prices and quantities of all goods gravitate around this point, which results in a system of pricing and producing that maximizes societal well-being. When speaking about equilibrium Milton Friedman once said “I think the general equilibrium system is a beautiful work of art, it’s very valuable for students to learn it, and get a FEELING about the interrelationships of things, but there is no way it can be used in practice to analyze specific problems.”[5] This can be interpreted as an admission that the equilibrium theory is nothing besides a propaganda tool to influence the minds of young students to think that the market can magically manage the incredibly complex capitalist economy, and distract from the reality that capitalism is riddled with contradictions and crises. It’s clear to see how the theory of equilibrium directly conceals capitalism’s contradictions when we consider the labor market, because capitalism commodifies human labor power, that labor exists in a market which is available to capitalists to draw from. Thus, according to the utility theory, the intersection of the supply and demand curves on the graph not only determine the price of labor from the perspective of the capitalist, but this is also the wage of the worker, from the perspective of the person selling their labor power. And according to the neoclassicals the level of wages are always in “equilibrium” so long as the market remains “free.” No need to organize your workplace into a union to push for higher wages, or try to press the Government into raising the minimum wage, this would simply disrupt equilibrium! Says the neoclassical economist as he collects his paycheck from a corporate funded libertarian NGO. The theory of equilibrium takes away the contradiction at the very core of capitalism, the contradiction between capital and labor, and thus they remove the possibility for collective struggle by the laboring class against the capitalist class. Teaching this dogmatic and baseless idea to young people is the purpose of the equilibrium theory, as Milton Friedman said, it clearly has no real value in practice. Another neoclassical model that does nothing to explain the world.  Marxist economics identifies two different kinds of value that are contained within every commodity, the first being the quantitative measure of exchange value, and the second being the qualitative use-value. Exchange-value is a commodity's value when compared to all other commodities on the market and it is determined by the amount of human labor power expended in its production, which is expressed quantitatively in a numerical value called the price. The fact that every commodity has an exchange-value attached to it means that all commodities are commensurable, directly comparable, and exchangeable with each other. But price is only an imperfect expression of this exchange value, and thus an imperfect expression of the amount of human labor time used to produce every commodity. Differences in price and labor time stem from the reality that it is difficult to quantify concrete human labor and express it abstractly, which is what Marx dubs as the contradiction between concrete and abstract labor – a contradiction which is unresolvable under a capitalist mode of production. The qualitative use-value contained in every commodity, on the other hand, is what distinguishes commodities from one another materially, in terms of their objective and tangible content. Unlike exchange-value, use-value is entirely subjective and is determined by the needs and desires of the individual buyer. There is no way to quantitatively measure and express numerically how useful a buyer will find a commodity to be, and thus it is impossible to quantify so-called consumer demand, it is a purely subjective value. However, that’s not to say that the use-value of a commodity is unimportant, and Marx recognized that every commodity must have a use-value or it won’t be sold on the market, because buyers will never purchase a product that they have no use for. Exchange-value and use-value exist simultaneously within every commodity that is produced and circulated in the capitalist mode of production. It may be clear to some readers already that neoclassical economics simply takes the subjectively determined use-value of a commodity and claims that it somehow determines the price when related to the supply of that commodity on the Market. And as we said earlier, there is no way to test this theory with any kind of objective experiments or data analysis. On the other hand, Marxist economists like Paul Cockshott have tested the labor theory of value by calculating the amount of labor time in every industry and comparing it to the prices of commodities in that industry, then putting the data into a table to calculate the exact correlation between labor time and prices. The correlation comes out to about 94% - only offset by industries where monopolistic corporations that own large amounts of land are able to sell commodities at artificially inflated prices. The labor theory of value is objective, scientific, and testable, the utility theory of value might as well be considered commodity price astrology.  The neoclassical school also distinguishes itself from the classical and Marxist schools by tossing out any conception of history and historical development. If capitalism is shown to have a historical origin and a historically specific existence, then it can be implied that capitalism will also have an end and be replaced by a new historically specific mode of production. Thus, neoclassical economists find it most convenient to ignore the various modes of production that existed before capitalism and hyper focus on market transactions which they treat as universal, or existing within every society historically. In so doing, they can claim that humanity is naturally predisposed to market activity because the mystical forces of supply and demand always know best, and capitalism is thus portrayed as the pinnacle of human society and development, because it is the most highly developed form of commodity production and market activity. Nothing can be done to improve upon the current system except to minimize the size of the Government, at least when it comes to doing things for poor and working people, and let the capitalists accumulate to no end as rapidly as possible. Any ill effects of the market are ignored, or explained away by economists who claim they stem from Government interference and inefficiencies which only hinders the efficiency of the market. It’s not the profit gouging healthcare corporations making billions of dollars selling healthcare as a commodity each year, says the “Mises Institute” (a well-funded neoclassical think tank that offers a graduate program in economics), it’s actually Medicare and Medicaid![6] Damn the mountains of empirical evidence that say Medicaid and Medicare expansions have greatly increased access to healthcare and show that a single payer public system would work even better![7] Empirical evidence means nothing to the immortal curves that Alfred Marshall pulled from his ass! One of the most ludicrous products of this economic philosophy is what’s known as the “Economic Calculation Problem,” first laid out by the titan of neoclassical capitalist ideologues Ludwig Von Mises in 1920. His book Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth declares that it is actually impossible for humans to calculate a centrally planned economy which works as efficiently as the market. Perhaps Mr. Mises invented a time machine in order to travel to the future and observe the evolutions in technology, where he ignored Paul Cockshott’s Towards a New Socialism book on economic planning, ignored the central economic planning that’s conducted every day by monopolistic corporations such as Wal-Mart using computer software[9], ignored any and all revolutionary planning projects like Chile’s project cybersyn, and determined that no computer now or ever would be able to calculate an efficient economy under any circumstances. And what does Mises use as his standard for “efficiency” you ask? Well, the capitalist free market of course! Don’t forget that the neoclassicals always assume the market to be the most efficient method for producing and distributing goods. So to distill Mises argument down to its essence, he says no economy could ever be planned as efficiently as the free market, because none of the computer programs or planning models in 1920 could create an economy that replicated the existing market economy, which he assumes to be the most efficient method of economic distribution possible because of the made up theory of equilibrium, despite the fact that it constantly allows people to starve and creates senseless wars of conquest… Okay Ludwig, whatever you got to tell yourself to justify the system that made you an intellectual superstar. Even if it was impossible for computers to calculate a complex capitalist market economy, why would the working masses of society want that anyways? This economy drives down our wages, sends our children to die in wars of conquest, and works us to the bone for the purpose of accumulation. How hard can it be to plan an economy better than that? So, are you beginning to see the absurdity of an economic framework of analysis that always assumes markets to be optimal? When this unproven assumption is taken as fact, the neoclassical economist can argue almost anything. And Mises demonstrates this perfectly by claiming to know the future, stating with certainty that no technology will ever be invented that can plan an economy better than the sacred market. Sometimes it seems like neoclassical economics should stop pretending to be a school of economic study and embrace its dogmatic roots by becoming a religion. If you’re going to worship the market as a God, you might as well be honest about it. The neoclassical religion is even complete with its own origin story! It says that since the dawn of mankind the human species has always traded goods and services on markets. Over time humans increased the amount of goods and services they produced and traded with each other, and the more that market transactions and commerce increased, the more that society improved! For everyone except the newly enslaved people whose labor created the commercial goods of course. But eventually the benevolent ruling class realized that the one commodity human beings shouldn’t buy and sell, is other human beings. So, wage-labor, or the commodification of human labor power, came to replace slave labor, and capitalism was invented, meaning humanity had reached the pinnacle of their development. All that can be done now by those who want society to flourish is to protect our markets and keep them free! The problem with this origin story is that it is a self-serving fantasy created by neoclassical ideologues with no grasp of history and no intentions of injecting rigorous historical analysis into their scholarship. Instead of a detailed history we get a dogmatic creation story about the sacred market, culminating in the message that society should worship and protect the market if we want to flourish. While it is true that the development of markets and commerce spurred the growth of capitalism which replaced feudalism in Europe, commodity production didn’t start making substantial gains until around 1200 AD, and it didn’t explode until the industrial revolution years later. The neoclassicals simply ignore thousands of years of human history that came prior to the development of markets and commodity production, as well as mountains of historical and anthropological evidence suggesting that humans originally lived in primitive communist societies, where the means of production were held in common, and production and distribution were carried out based on the needs of the group.[11][12] Only with the development of humans' productive powers and the ability to hoard wealth did society become divided into classes, and only then did accumulation and market exchange become a major incentive to human activities. Not to mention that the division of society into classes and the emergent drive for accumulation then became the basis for most every historical atrocity that followed. For example, the exploitation of labor and slavery, wars of conquest, the systematic oppression of women, vast inequality in ownership of the necessities of life, just to name a handful. Prior to society’s division into classes of owners and workers, so called ‘human nature’ was largely cooperative, which is evidence that humans are not the inherently selfish individuals that the neoclassicals make us out to be. The Marxist view is that human nature is malleable, and changes based on material conditions. An economy divided into classes that allows the most selfish and cutthroat to rise to the top, will promote a kind of human nature that is selfish and greedy, but if humans were to exist in an economy where cooperation was incentivized, it would allow the more selfless aspects of humanity to flourish. Free markets are not equivalent to a free society, and in fact freedom of markets often means freedom of exploitation, which incentivizes selfishness and the domination of others. The ahistorical framework of the neoclassicals has had a terrible effect on academia as a whole. When Professor Edward Baptiste published his book, The Half Has Never Been Told, giving an economic analysis of the development of American Southern Slavery, Western economists embarrassed themselves by responding with anti-intellectual criticisms of the book that amounted to being mad that it disproved part of their mystical origin story about the development of capitalism. I criticize these economists more thoroughly in my article about Southern Slavery’s role in the development of European and Northern capitalism,[13] and Dr. Baptiste himself published an article destroying his neoclassical critics and their dogmatic view of history[14] that actually resulted in the economist retracting their article and issuing an apology. The basic critique of the book that the neoclassicals gave in their article Blood Cotton was that “Mr. Baptiste has not written an objective history of slavery. Almost all the blacks in his book were victims, almost all the whites villains.”[15] The authors argue that the enslavers, who implemented systematized torture in order to maximize the production of cotton commodities, were simply acting in accordance with the global markets, and therefore shouldn’t be demonized for using torture as a method of production. As Baptiste explains in his response, the economists expose the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of their own ideology with this review. Because of their adherence to market fundamentalism, and the deeply held belief that societal efficiency and wellbeing increase in proportion to the profits of the ruling class, the economists have found themselves in the absurd position of arguing that slavery wasn’t actually that bad! After all, the enslavers only captured, traded, and tortured other human beings because the market incentivized them to do it. And the market always knows best! Oddly enough the economists also argue that slaves weren’t treated as poorly as Baptiste portrays, because slaves were legally considered the property, or the capital, of their enslavers, and thus the slave owners had incentive to not maim or kill their own slaves. One has to wonder whether these economists would hold the same positions if they were allowed to hop in Ludwig Von Mises’ time machine and travel to the past to be a slave for a week. But regardless, they’ve unwittingly made an argument AGAINST capitalism and wage labor here, by arguing that capitalists would actually take better care of their workers if they owned them as private property. The implication in their argument is that wage-laborers are treated worse than slaves, because capitalists only own the wage worker’s bodies during the temporary period in which they are working, and after work hours they can dispense with the worker and draw fresh labor power from the labor market. But this is a point that is completely lost on the neoclassical economists who tend not to worry themselves with the logical implications of their theories. Unfortunately, too few academics dare to do what Baptiste did – give an account of historical economic development that runs counter to the fundamentalist beliefs of the neoclassical school. Years of ruling class influence on the academy have had incredibly harmful effects[16], and neoclassical economics have become the form of economic thought that underpins most all of the social sciences. There has been a great deal of scholarship detailing how the Koch Brothers and their oligarchic contemporaries have spent billions of dollars to influence the academies of higher learning, largely through making their multi-million-dollar donations to various colleges dependent upon those colleges teaching neoclassical economics and hiring professors who adhere to the neoclassical school. Jane Meyer’s 2016 text Dark Money[17] is a great piece of journalism that details how the Koch Brothers propaganda machine was built and how it operates. Anyone studying social sciences in academia today has surely encountered neoclassical economics at some point whether they're aware of it or not. When I was pursuing an undergraduate degree in politics, I took a microeconomics course to better understand the effect of economics on politics, where even my young mind was immediately stunned at the lack of scholarly rigor shown by my professor when I asked her some of the burning questions I had about economics. I first questioned the Professor about the economic situation in Venezuela, which she boiled down to “Venezuela used to be rich, then socialism came along, now they are poor.” At the time I didn’t realize how ludicrous this statement truly was, and I would later be motivated by this conversation to publish my undergraduate thesis on the actual political-economic situation in Venezuela, but at the time I just started asking the professor questions, naively believing she may have the answers I was looking for. I asked about the effects of US sanctions on Venezuela, the US coup efforts, why John Bolton and other members of the US State Department were so obsessed with controlling Venezuelan politics. All of these questions were batted down by the professor who gave me no honest answers and found a way to blame Venezuelan Socialism for everything negative that has happened in the country in the past 25 years. She also praised John Bolton as a man who always does what he thinks is best, and denied my claim that Bolton was influenced by American oil corporations who crave access to Venezuelan oil. Later on, I would discover that the Professor is the Chairman of the local GOP who had run for office many times with the Republican Party (losing every time), and she adhered to the neoclassical school of economics with her most influential thinker being Ayn Rand. She also used to dress up as Barbie in class (talk about commodity fetishism). This interaction was what first planted the idea in my head that Western economics may be a total scam, and the people who told me that I needed to study economics in order to learn why socialism could never work, were either scam artists or victims themselves. As I now pursue a graduate degree in Healthcare Administration, I'm finding that neoclassical economics not only dominates the economics departments in Western colleges, but the rest of the social sciences as well. A recent unit on the economics of healthcare taught us that supply and demand curves determine price, that healthcare firms must always strive to remain profitable, and that valuable healthcare resources should be spent on market analysis to maximize sales. A small paragraph at the end of the chapter mentioned that markets may not necessarily be equivalent with the needs of human populations, but the text takes the analysis no further than that. No mention is made of the fact that the chapter was based on neoclassical thought or that there are other schools of economic thought which exist. And of course, this isn’t surprising, the entire curriculum is based on healthcare administration within a capitalist machine. Every decision and analysis we’re taught to make is done to maximize profitability for healthcare organizations. Our textbook chapter on healthcare economics made no mention of the fact that public healthcare systems have shown to be more efficient than private ones time and time again. No mention is made of the fact that the contradiction between exchange-value and use-value existing within every commodity perfectly explains the crisis of American healthcare, in that healthcare producers are incentivized to prioritize exchange-value and profit over use-value and the health of the populations they serve.[18] Instead markets and profit are portrayed as universally existent and efficient and the 40,000 people who die yearly due to lack of healthcare, or the 100,000 killed by the opioid crisis created by the greed of healthcare corporations, are just unfortunate side effects of the system that can’t be helped without cutting into corporate profits. And of course, those profits are deemed eternally untouchable. Even the Marxist school of economics has not continued unaffected by the dogma of the neoclassicals. Many self-described Marxist economists have abandoned the labor theory in favor of utility theory, and even the famed Marxist professor David Harvey suggests in his reading guide for Capital Volume I, that the labor theory of value is no longer of much use as a price determinant and is only still valuable because it helps us understand that there is a socially necessary quantity of labor needed to produce the material goods humanity needs to survive, and this socially necessary labor value is concealed by the circulation of commodities and fluctuation of prices. I believe it would serve Professor Harvey well to engage with the defense of the labor theory laid out by thinkers like Paul Cockshott, and to remember that Marx himself goes into detail about the way that price and demand shocks in the market cause price to fluctuate around its labor value, or its equilibrium according to the neoclassicals – a fact which Harvey is surely aware of as he addresses it many times in his Capital Companion series. It’s possible that Harvey has been influenced by the dominance of neoclassical economics in the Western academy, and by his intellectual contemporaries who tend to scoff at the labor theory despite being unable to disprove its scientific value.[19] While I have immense respect for David Harvey as a theorist and a student of Marxism, I believe he does a disservice to budding Marxists by failing to provide a defense of the labor theory in his reading guide for Marx’s most pivotal work. In arguing that the price system has a “vital function- the regulation of demand and supply…so that they converge on equilibrium price”[20] he injects the concepts of neoclassical economics into Marxism where they do not belong. The function of the price system is to express the value of labor and facilitate the exchange of the products of labor, which it does imperfectly due to the contradiction between abstract and concrete labor. The imperfection is that prices often fail to represent the labor content of commodities with 100% accuracy, not because price fails to reach equilibrium, which unlike labor time, is a scientifically meaningless value that is not based upon anything concrete. The Marxist method of economic analysis is based upon historical materialism and the scientific method, and it emerged as a much-needed critique of liberalism after the massive societal changes that were brought on by the industrial revolution. The neoclassical method of analysis only emerged historically as a ruling class counter to Marxism, and it is based on ahistoricism and unprovable assumptions that the capitalist class finds convenient. There is no reason that Marxists should alter our analysis in order to be more in line with the mainstream thought of the neoclassicals even if there is peer pressure to do so. We can start taking the neoclassicals seriously when they start presenting theories that are based in evidence and scientific rigor. Young Marxists would be better served to engage with the analysis of a rigorous intellectual like Cockshott, rather than the work of an intellectual superstar like Milton Friedman, who’s lofty position in academia was granted to him by the ruling class. This is simply because his economic theories were tailored to capitalist interests and constitute the purest intellectual expression of the capitalist ruling class, that could not have been produced by any kind of objective analysis, but only by puppets of the capitalist oligarchs. And thus, the neoclassical theories hold as much scientific value as those produced by Feudal Lords arguing in favor of the divine right of kings. Postmodernist Philosophy In many ways the core principles of neoclassical doctrine can be equated with those of postmodern philosophy. The French postmodernist Jean-Francois Lyotard once defined postmodernism as “incredulity toward meta-narratives,”[21] i.e., the rejection of any grand narratives about society, historical progress, or humanity’s steady advancement towards something better with time. Postmodernism deconstructs these narratives in favor of the idea that society is made up of isolated individuals whose reality is based upon their own subjective experiences, and not any kind of shared sense of meaning held collectively by say, an economic class for instance. For the postmodernist there is no historical subject that fits into a grander narrative about the progress of humanity, unlike Marxism which upholds the toiling masses struggling collectively for their own liberation as the subject of history. Instead, the working class is made up of isolated individuals who are too caught up in their own subjective individual experiences and identity groups to work collectively for any kind of shared goal. Human Reason and epistemological knowledge are themselves considered to be unreliable as they are bound to be influenced by the subjective experiences of the person attempting to utilize reason. Although, the postmodernists themselves seemingly use reason in the construction of their own philosophical systems, so perhaps they only consider themselves to be rational, and its only other people who have no capacity for reason. Postmodernism rose to prominence in the 70s and didn’t explode until the 80s, but the roots of postmodernism can be found in Friedrich Nietzsche's writings in the last quarter of the 19th century. It is the culmination of that line of thought which Lukács called bourgeois irrationalism in The Destruction of Reason. For the purpose of simplicity, I will simply refer to all of these strains of thought as ‘postmodernism’ unless addressing one of them specifically. My critique is not all encompassing and is aimed more at postmodernism’s overall impact on society and the Western academy than specific postmodern thinkers. For those who want more specific critique or detailed history I recommend diving into some of the sources I’ve cited in this paper. Many of the critics of postmodernism dismiss it as unintelligible academic jargon with no decipherable meaning, while many who uphold the philosophical school tend to portray its thinkers as untouchable titans whose theory is so complex that it cannot even be critiqued. However, the best critics of postmodernism are those who reject both of these views in favor of the idea that it is in fact intelligible, it can be critiqued, and it actually should be critiqued because it has tangible effects on the real world. In recent years Marxist Philosopher Gabriel Rockhill has provided invaluable critiques of postmodernist theory, which he himself studied for years in France, as well as a historical analysis of how postmodernist theory rose to a place of prominence and status in the Western academy. Rockhill goes to great lengths to uncover the connection between postmodern thinkers and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), pointing out that if the philosophy is so important to a ruling class body of anti-revolutionary suppression, then it surely bears importance for revolutionaries as well. [22] Rockhill brings forward a mass of evidence detailing how the CIA and their arms of cultural and academic influence like the ‘Congress for Cultural Freedom’ boosted postmodernist and post-structuralist thinkers as a way to combat the influence of Marxism and sow division in leftist movements, even doing so against the wishes of the U.S. State Department at times, which had originally been duped by postmodernism's left-wing ascetic. The CIA, however, could tell from the outset that postmodernism’s radical aesthetic was just that, an aesthetic, and in fact the philosophy is deeply anti-Marxist and reactionary, as it removes the possibility of a historical subject progressing towards an ideal held in common, such as the progress of the toiling masses towards communism. The postmodernist thinker claims to reject all historical meta-narratives, but such a rejection constitutes a meta-narrative in itself! It is, in fact, a narrative which says that collective struggle will never truly progress history forward or make life better, and any sense of shared reality or meaning between workers is either illusory or imaginary. Thus, what is there for a working person to do besides feed their individualistic consumerist desires as much as possible before death? Any sense of discipline or dedication to a common struggle would be futile and based on the illusion of historical progress, a false narrative of history that only exists as a figment of the worker’s imagination. It should come as no surprise that such a message, concealed beneath the intellectual sounding rhetoric of thinkers like Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, was very useful for the CIA, who blasted it over a loudspeaker from the ivory towers of academia into the minds of the unsuspecting masses below. Any member of the working class who engages in collective struggle is simply a prisoner to their own mind unable to grasp the true nature of history. Unlike the enlightened postmodernists and Frankfurt School intellectuals, of course, who as Rockhill points out, very rarely engaged in revolutionary organizing outside the walls of the academy themselves. While postmodernist theory is not unintelligible as some claim, there is no doubt that it prioritizes style over substance and often uses complex intellectual jargon to distract from the glaring contradictions in their philosophical systems. It also allows advocates of the postmodern school to look down upon and mock class-conscious working people who may only have a rudimentary understanding of Marxism and philosophy. I saw this constantly in my own experience creating Marxist education on the popular social media app Tik Tok, which allows users to share short videos that are often accompanied by music and built in special effects. Tik Tok accounts identifying as “neo-Marxist” or “Post-left” would mock young people from working families that were interested in Marxism for believing Marx’s meta-narrative about progress through class struggle, claiming it had been largely destroyed by the postmodernists. As most people who are familiar with the app would probably imagine, the majority of these Tik Tok postmodernists were around the age of 18 and had not actually engaged with the extremely wordy scholarship of Foucault, Derrida, and Baudrillard, nor the dense and intellectually rigorous works of Karl Marx. These teens and young adults were more so drawn to the radical aesthetic of the postmodern school and the fact that it allowed them to feign intellectual superiority over their peers. And thus, these confused teens acted as online agents for discouraging radical activism and education while sowing relational division among other young people interested in radical politics. Exactly the function that the CIA had hoped postmodernism would serve. Ironically, Rockhill is able to expose the CIA and ruling class influence in the postmodernist school by using the Marxist dialectical method to structure his analysis and examine how postmodern theory has been produced and circulated. A “dialectical analysis of theoretical production,”[23] or a structuralist analysis of theoretical production used to critique the anti-structuralists. In Rockhill’s dialectical investigation he finds that the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the ford foundation, and other arms of the ruling capitalist class did fund academics directly on various occasions, but even more so than that, created the conditions for postmodernist thinkers to emerge. Millions of dollars were spent to create an academic climate where anti-communist leftists who rejected all forms of actually existing socialism could become intellectual superstars and receive consistent financial backing for their work. The CIA funded newspapers, journals, and institutes for social research would have surely rejected the work of a Marxist philosopher like Carlos L. Garrido, who upholds Marxism as a worldview and the Marxist conception of historical progress, and defends the gains made for working people by revolutionary movements.[24] Instead, these journals boosted the work of thinkers like Max Horkheimer, who became a millionaire owner of multiple textile factories, and Theodor Adorno, the son of a wealthy wine merchant, who quickly became towering figures in the Western left. Two philosophers that claimed to be Marxists, but never belonged to a working-class political party in their lives, nor lent their support to a single revolutionary movement. Horkheimer even went as far as to support the murderous US invasion of Vietnam, arguing that it was necessary to bludgeon China.[25] Perhaps the European thinker held a bias against Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnamese communists for throwing off their French colonizers a few years prior. But regardless, the CIA loves a fake Marxist who will support the carpet bombing of real Marxists. The Link Between Neoclassical Economics and Postmodernist Philosophy. So now we arrive at the connections between postmodernism and neoclassical economics, which is nowhere as clearly apparent as with the utility theory of value, or the subjective theory of value. The keen-eyed reader may have already realized a connection between the economic philosophy based on a subjective theory of value production, and a philosophical theory which believes reality is largely subjective. There is no real value created by labor, only an individual's subjective demand for the products of labor. This departure from the labor theory of value in economics represents a move towards subjectivism away from the scientific conception of history, as well as a turn from Marxism toward postmodernism. The shift reoriented the Western left just as the CIA had hoped it would, as European and North American socialists began to prioritize individual liberation above collective, and grounded itself upon issues of identity politics rather than labor. If labor is not the sole creator of value, why would the left form a movement based around the collective struggle of the laboring masses? Why not just focus on the freedom of individual identity groups? By removing labor from the core of the economic analysis, the neoclassicals remove the possibility for uniting the laborers in struggle based on their common class interests. This is similar to how postmodernism removes the possibility for struggle by atomizing the working class into separate individuals, rather than uniting them based on their common participation in the labor process, and thus their common exploitation under capitalism. Postmodern thinkers would reject the Marxist idea that the scientific method should be used to study the economy, after all, how do we even know the scientific method is the proper way to discern objective reality? Objective truths and commonly held conceptions about the economy are nothing but illusions of the mind, as is humanities’ belief that we have the capacity to study the historical development of a specific subject. In a remarkably similar way to the neoclassical economists, the postmodernist philosophers dispense with the historical view of capitalism and the understanding that it has a historical origin which implies a historical end. The “left wing” postmodernists and “right wing” neoclassicals both reject the idea that capitalism exists in a historically specific form, although the neoclassicals somehow still make the contradictory argument that capitalism is the most highly developed form of society possible. The more that society is commodified the better, they argue, the only historical development that matters for the neoclassicals is that of the market. The similarities between postmodernist philosophy and neoclassical economics are quite apparent when distilled down to their essence. Both are opposed to a historical materialist understanding of society, and both deny the possibility of having an objective measure of value, or even an objective truth. Instead, value and truth are entirely determined by the subjective experiences of individuals regardless of the objective reality. The utility theory of value is nothing but an application of the postmodernist theory of subjectivism applied to economics in an absurd manner. The postmodernist denial of historical development gives justification for the neoclassical school’s general historical ignorance. Despite these similarities most postmodern thinkers are associated with the “left wing” while the neoclassicals are considered “right wing.” In reality both ideologies are anti-Marxist, and both serve the ruling capitalist class. It’s unclear to what degree the neoclassical school influenced postmodernism or vice versa. Neoclassical economics began emerging around the 1870s, around the heyday of Friedrich Nietzsche’s writings, but well before postmodernism came to prominence in the 1970s and 80s. Thus, it’s likely that the infiltration of the academy by neoclassical thought, particularly in the social sciences, had at least an indirect effect on the major postmodernist thinkers. But regardless of the causal relationship between the two, the fact that they come to such similar ahistorical and subjectivist conclusions is what makes the comparison interesting, and what characterizes them as being the two purest expressions of neoliberal ruling class ideology in the academy. Both ideologies isolate and fragment the individual away from the collective, both deny the possibility of objective reality that can be commonly understood, both only acknowledge truth in terms of subjective individual experiences, both reject the historical place of capitalism as a specific but temporary mode of production, and most importantly, both remove the possibility for collective working class struggle against the ruling elite in order to create a better world. It is not because of their scientific value that neoclassical and postmodern thought have come to dominate the western academy, but because these ideologies express the values of neoliberal capitalism itself. This is a system which alienates, isolates, and fragments working people, places identity above labor, and preaches that the meaning of life is to consume commodities and enjoy material pleasures. This is the state of human affairs that stems from the material base of our society, from capitalist relations of production after years of development into the stage of neoliberalism. Postmodernist philosophy and neoclassical economics simply reflect the material base relations of capitalism in an academic form, and their sole purpose is to sustain this economic base by discouraging individuals from trying to change it.  References: [1] Schrager, A. (2018, June 29). The modern education system was designed to train future factory workers to be "docile". Quartz. Retrieved February 19, 2023, from https://qz.com/1314814/universal-education-was-first-promoted-by-industrialists-who-wanted-docile-factory-workers [2] Grossman, H. (2023, January 23). Dodea sources speak out about woke 'Marxist' indoctrination: 'I'm not A... sexual realignment engineer'. Fox News. Retrieved February 19, 2023, from https://www.foxnews.com/media/dodea-sources-speak-out-woke-marxist-indoctrination-sexual-realignment-engineer [3] YouTube. (2018). Why Labour theory of value is right. YouTube. Retrieved February 19, 2023, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emnYMfjYh1Q&t=8s. [4] Cockshott, P. (2020, April 5). Again on supply and demand - a critique of Marshall. YouTube. Retrieved February 21, 2023, from https://youtu.be/fmbm3u2r_Cs [5] Stateless Liberty Youtube Channel. (2014, August 2). Milton Friedman on general equilibrium. YouTube. Retrieved February 21, 2023, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rI9NiNiMod4 [6] Jacob, H. G. (2019, December 10). Medicare and Medicaid destroyed healthcare: Jacob G. Hornberger. Mises Institute. Retrieved February 21, 2023, from https://mises.org/wire/medicare-and-medicaid-destroyed-healthcare [7]Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. (2020, October 21). The far-reaching benefits of the Affordable Care Act's Medicaid expansion. Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Retrieved February 21, 2023, from https://www.cbpp.org/research/health/chart-book-the-far-reaching-benefits-of-the-affordable-care-acts-medicaid-expansion [8] Ibid. [9] Cockshott, W. P., & Cottrell, A. (1993). Towards a new socialism. Spokesman. [10] Engels, F. (1942). The origin of the family, private property and the state, in the light of the researches of Lewis H. Morgan. International Publishers. [11] William, K. J. F. (2015). Primitive communism. Science Direct. Retrieved February 21, 2023, from https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/primitive-communism#:~:text=The%20earliest%20human%20societies%20were,lived%20in%20harmony%20and%20equality. [12] Phillips, L., & Rozworski, M. (2019). People's Republic of Walmart how the world's biggest corporations are laying the foundation for Socialism. Verso. [13] Smith, E. L. (2021, July 3). American Slavery and global capitalism. . MIDWESTERN MARX. Retrieved February 20, 2023, from https://www.midwesternmarx.com/articles/american-slavery-and-global-capitalism-by-edward-liger-smith [14] Baptist, E. (2014, September 7). What the Economist doesn't get about slavery-and my book. POLITICO Magazine. Retrieved February 20, 2023, from https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/09/economist-review-slavery-110687/ [15] Anonymous. (2014, September 5). Our withdrawn review "Blood cotton". The Economist. Retrieved February 20, 2023, from https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2014/09/05/our-withdrawn-review-blood-cotton [16] Integrity, C. for P., & Levinthal, D. (2015, December 15). How the koch brothers are influencing U.S. colleges. Time. Retrieved February 20, 2023, from https://time.com/4148838/koch-brothers-colleges-universities/ [17] Meyer, J. (2016). Dark Money. Anchor Publishing. [18] Smith, E. L. (2023). The Crisis of American Healthcare. Journal of American Socialist Studies, 2. [19] Harvey, D. (2018). Money. In A companion to Marx's capital (pp. 61 ebook). Verso. [20] Ibid. [21] Aylesworth, G. (2015, February 5). Postmodernism. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved February 20, 2023, from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/postmodernism/ [22] Rockhill, G. (2017, February 28). The CIA reads French theory: On the intellectual labor of dismantling the cultural left. The Philosophical Salon. Retrieved February 20, 2023, from https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/the-cia-reads-french-theory-on-the-intellectual-labor-of-dismantling-the-cultural-left/ [23] Rockhill, G. (2022, June 27). The CIA & the Frankfurt School's anti-communism. The Philosophical Salon. Retrieved February 20, 2023, from https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/the-cia-the-frankfurt-schools-anti-communism/ [24] Carlos L. Garrido (2022), Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview: An Anthology of Classical Marxist Texts on Dialectical Materialism. Midwestern Marx Publishing Press. [25] Rockhill, The CIA & the Frankfurt School's anti-communism. AuthorEdward Liger Smith is an American Political Scientist and specialist in anti-imperialist and socialist projects, especially Venezuela and China. He also has research interests in the role southern slavery played in the development of American and European capitalism. He is a co-founder and editor of Midwestern Marx and the Journal of American Socialist Studies. He is currently a health care administration graduate student and wrestling coach at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville. Archives February 2023
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2/23/2023 Exploring Friedrich Engels’ Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy: Part 2 – Materialism. By: Thomas RigginsRead Now (Read Part 1 HERE) Engels opens the second part of his essay by saying: “The great basic question of all, especially of latter-day philosophy, is that concerning the relation of thinking and being.” This is one of the oldest questions humans have been interested in, dating back to the earliest appearance of self-consciousness in our species. As we tried to understand the world around us and the forces of nature and the other animals we lived with and are surrounded by, we thought of them as somewhat like ourselves, with some awareness or spirit, and primitive religious views began to develop in our consciousness – such as the idea that there are nature spirits to be appeased, and finally powerful gods and goddesses that could help or hurt humans. We ended up thinking that the world was created by the gods, and finally a supreme God who was also responsible for the existence of humans. Until the creation of modern science the question was: which came first nature or the creators of nature, the spirits or God? —the question was answered: thinking, the gods, mind came first and then nature. Philosophy, religion, and science began to consolidate around two great schools of thought with regard to this question: 1) Idealism; God and thinking first, man and nature second, and 2) Materialism; nature and man first, and only then can self-consciousness develop in humans, and ultimately, can thinking create the notions of gods and God in its own image — the image of humans. Engels is interested in the state of this argument in his day, when the great champion of Idealism was Hegel and his system, and Materialism was attacking this system in the form of Feuerbach’s philosophy, but more importantly, in the new and improved form that grew out of a synthesis of Hegel’s logical (metaphysical) methods and Feuerbach’s materialism which became Marxism, and which is known today as Marxism-Leninism (AKA Dialectical Materialism). Marxism-Leninism is the result of the development of Marxist theory by Lenin and the experiences of the Russian Revolution. It is based on the belief that the Lenin/Russian Revolution experience still has relevance today for the transition from capitalism to socialism. Next, Engels points out, we have to ask what is the relation of our thinking to the world, to nature? Can we get a correct reflection of the external world in our ideas of it? The majority of philosophers say “yes.” For Hegel thinking recognizes itself in the world, our ideas are part of the development in time of the Absolute Idea which has existed before the world from eternity. This is similar to Plato’s view of the things in the external world being imperfect reflections of the world of ideas which exist in “heaven” (or the Mind of God in the Christian view based on Plato). Hegel makes the mistake, as all systematic philosophers do, that since he thinks he has figured out the correct relation between thinking and being (being in the real world) his philosophy is the only correct one. Besides Materialism there have always been, and still are, practitioners of Idealism. In his day David Hume in the United Kingdom and Immanuel Kant in Germany were the most well-known. Hume was a skeptic, thinking the mind could never get to the basic reality of things (objective or subjective) and Kant also had a similar idea but was not a skeptic. The mind could understand the way the world interacted with it but the things in the world were “for us,” that is, filtered by our perceptions. Therefore, we could never know what they were “in themselves” unperceived. For Engels, Kant took care of Hume and Hegel took care of Kant. Feuerbach took care of Hegel and Marx perfected the Materialism of Feuerbach. The problem was how to get proof for the idea that nature was real, outside of us, and understandable. This was not a philosophical solution, but a scientific one. The answer, according to Engels, was a practical one. We can postulate how nature works and then test our ideas. If we can predict what will happen and it comes about, that is evidence of its independent existence, since our theory doesn’t compel nature to act a certain way, we must adapt our theory to how nature acts independently of us. This is for Engels the proof of Materialism. Engels now turns to a quote from Feuerbach from Stark (he doesn’t deal with much of the book itself, nor do we have to, as he says, it is “loaded with a ballast of philosophical phraseology.” Feuerbach has taken Hegel’s logic, which is based on the view that the categories of logic are eternal and preexist the actual physical world (this entails a complicated metaphysical argument) and demonstrates that the logic is a product of our minds (which are animal minds) and a part of the physical world from which we developed (Darwin’s theory which came later confirms this). This is Materialism, says Engels, but Feuerbach himself hesitates to completely affirm it. Here is the Feuerbach quote: “To me materialism is the foundation of the edifice of human essence and knowledge; but to me it is not what it is to the scientists and necessarily is from their standpoint and profession, namely, the edifice itself. Backwards I fully agree with the materialists; but not forwards.” What’s going on here? Engels says Feuerbach has mixed up the general concept of Materialism (matter first, mind second) with the particular form this concept assumed in the 18th century – a crude mechanical materialism that existed before the development of the Hegelian dialectic and which was still being preached in the time of Feuerbach by the natural scientists and medical doctors who had not, for the most, part studied the logic of the Hegelian system. In the same way that 18th century Idealism evolved and developed into Hegelianism, so Materialism evolved and developed into a more sophisticated form as the result of the development of science in the 19th century. Feuerbach, I think, as a student of Hegel should have known this, but Engels holds that he never properly understood Hegel’s dialectic. There were two limitations that were responsible for the mechanical nature of 18th century materialism. The first was the state of science at that time, which was dominated by the mechanistic universe of the Newtonian system. This mechanistic worldview was applied not only to physics, but to biology and chemistry as well, when both of the latter two sciences were just in their infancy compared to physics, and higher laws of process and change played second fiddle to mechanics. This was also true in geology at that time as the age of the earth was still considered to be rather young due to Biblical influences. The second limitation was related to the first— this was “the inability to comprehend the world as a process.” This also applied to the concepts of history. Everywhere there were essential unchanging factors at work that were cyclical in nature. Civilizations started out small, grew, and collapsed, and the cycle then repeated itself. Even Hegel, Engels maintains, fell victim to this mechanical essentialism with his philosophical system, although it contradicted his philosophical method which was dialectical and not mechanical. It took the work of Feuerbach and later Marx (and Engels as well) to overcome this contradiction. Nature operates according to the laws of Hegel’s logic, which are external to Nature, and Nature is an alienation of matter from its essential logical being. But the concepts of the logic start from primitive notions (Being versus Nothingness leading to Becoming, etc.,) until the whole of the system culminates due to permutations, contradictions, development of new concepts, etc., until the Absolute Idea is arrived at. The logical world is one of process, evolution, change, and progressive development; but the world of man (history) and nature are just mechanical reflections of this system of logic. Matter is inert and non-dialectical. This is the conservative element in Hegel. His system was supposed to justify the world as it is, and the ruling classes of his day appreciated this. Engels says, “the method, for the sake of the system, had to become untrue to itself.” But lurking within the Hegelian system was this revolutionary method, which was disinterred by Marx and Engels, a method which could lead to the overthrow of ‘’what is’’ and its replacement with a revolutionary new world order. The history of the last two centuries has been the painful labor of the world process to deliver and bring to birth the resolution of this contradiction. It was during this period, the mid-19th century, that history too began to be studied in a scientific manner. The bourgeois materialists descending from the 18th century didn’t see history as a developing progressive process. The Middle Ages, for example, were dismissed as a backward era that had to be overcome to get civilization back on the track laid out in the classical era of Greece and Rome. Engels says this is all wrong— the Middle Ages were a time of great progress marked by the “extension” of European civilization, the consolidation of the nation state, and technical advances that the 14th and 15th centuries introduced. It wasn’t until after the 1848 Revolutions that scientific history really got off the ground, stimulated by the rapid development of the natural sciences. Engels now seeks to explain why Feuerbach’s materialism, while it stood head and shoulders above the old mechanical materialism inherited from the Enlightenment, still missed the boat and did not really become modern enough to serve as the basis of the materialist worldview of Marx and Engels. It was not really the fault of Feuerbach. Because his philosophy was progressive ahead of his time he was banished from Academia for political reasons and ended up living out in the boondocks cut off from the intellectual ferment going on in post 1848 Europe. Therefore, he was not able to fully update his materialism to the dialectical level that Marx and Engels achieved. We will soon see, in Part III, to what extent Feuerbach still had some views based on Idealism, but first we must go over a critique of Starck’s views about Feuerbach’s “Idealism.” Engels says Starck found Feuerbach’s “ idealism in “the wrong place”. Here is what Starck says: “Feuerbach is an idealist; he believes in the progress of mankind.” As far as Feuerbach’s philosophy is concerned, Starck continues, “The foundation, the substructure of the whole, remains nevertheless idealism. Realism [materialism-tr] is for us nothing more than a protection against aberrations , while we follow our ideal trends. Are not compassion, love, enthusiasm for truth and justice ideal forces?” Starck here confuses ethical commitments to “ideals” that people have with the philosophy of Idealism, which maintains that the basis of existence, of Being, is ontologically some mental or spiritual essence or substance that predates matter and from which the material universe derives its being. These are two entirely different uses of the word “idealism”, and we should not confuse them. If Starck doesn’t understand this difference, then “he has lost all meaning of these terms” in this context. Coming up next Part III “Feuerbach” 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. He is the author of Reading the Classical Texts of Marxism. 2/23/2023 There is such thing as the Deep State (even in the depth of the Baltic Sea) By: Gilles QuestiauxRead NowThe sabotage of the North Stream gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea, where the direct role of Joe Biden and a small number of senior members of his administration has just been revealed by Seymour Hersh, seems to be the exception that confirms the rule, especially since these acts of sabotage had been announced and claimed transparently. Challenging the notion of "deep state" does not mean that the intelligence services of states do not plot. That's exactly what they are for. It is to challenge the existence of a global and omniscient - and efficient - conspiracy.  Can we define, identify, and locate the brain of capitalism? Can we locate its general staff, guess its plans, to thwart its strategy? Perhaps with the mad hope of precisely launching at it some hypersonic missile? We already know that it has no heart! The Italian Red Brigades who wanted to "strike at its heart" in the 1970s had to realize that at their expense! By attacking a pillar of Christian democracy, Aldo Moro, and therefore of the Italian capitalist state, what they did also benefited the Israeli service Mossad, which sought to weaken the pro-Arab and pro-Khadafi faction in Italian power circles. In other words, they unintentionally did the bidding of another pillar of the imperialist West. Capitalism does have internal contradictions, should we remind people? It is certain that even today, a lot of efforts are made and often useful efforts, to unmask ad hominem international leaders, responsible for the anti-popular and imperialist policies that are being conducted in the West. Of course, it is tempting to try figuring out where the so coherent text of Western propaganda comes from, such as the one is expressed throughout the most varied of channels, like the one presently imposed on us all regarding the Ukrainian war. So, can we thwart the plots of the wicked hedgehogs oppressing humanity? Can we slay the dragon? These are very dangerous questions, because the wicked and the dragon if they exist, it must be by some necessity, and it is this dialectical consideration of reality that will make that these are not the questions posed by Marx, or Lenin (whose action was so great that the ideological heirs of Tsarism in Russia continue to take it for the dragon incarnate!). The revolutionary theory of the proletariat is a theory of the bourgeoisie’s unconscious as a class. Its antagonist, liberalism, is also a theory of the unconscious, but of the bourgeois as an individual. Where liberalism tends to rely on the existence of immutable structures, of a second nature in the real to which it refers, namely the action of the market, the proletarian revolutionary wants the masses to access the awareness of what they can do and what they want to do. In the meantime, not only does the capitalist not consciously plot against workers but he is almost sincerely convinced to act (above the market once the profits collected) for their good. Bourgeois dictatorship is the dictatorship of a class, and in principle it is not that of individuals. It is therefore illusory to find in an individual or a group of restricted individuals the intelligent and evil principle of class action, even if some mythomaniac regularly offer themselves in the media to take on this role. Except in the particular case of fascism, a system consciously and rationally determined to destroy the USSR and the communist parties of the Third International (1919-1943), and which is the first historically dated and consciously perverse response to the Russian Revolution - hence the anachronism of the current so-called "antifa" trend that thrives in countries where fascism is absent. That police repression be always directed in the same direction and that the same people always suffer from it is not fascism, it is bourgeois liberalism properly applied in a class society: economic, political, or moral liberalism cannot work for the benefit of all players, without cheating somewhere, and human rights have never been more than the rights of the bourgeoisie. We should only talk about fascism when the left wing of the bourgeoisie is repressed. So, there isn’t strictly speaking such a thing as a deep state, hidden from opinion, that pulls the strings of capitalism, or if there is one, it is in the manner of the stolen letter, which is so well hidden because it is precisely visible to all, and of such triviality that everyone shrugs their shoulders when denounced. When, for example, the alienation of journalists is revealed to media owners. The deep state is not a specific concept, but rather an image taken from an "anti-totalitarian" propagandist repertoire that dates back to Georges Orwell. The very notion of a deep state, i.e., a state hidden from the layman, is also an oxymoron: the State is precisely the public power visible to all, which is powerful precisely because it is visible to all, it is the publicization of the general interest such as it is driven by the ruling classes, which are certainly blind to their own class determinations, but which nevertheless remains considerable effective precisely because it publicizes the collective consciousness and the intentions of society. If the State is secret, it then loses most of this power that appears almost magical. Indeed, this power allows the avoidance of the use of force to obtain consent and obedience from the masses and makes it possible for exploited individuals to give in to it. It is thanks to the magic of the state that shows itself to all as it is in its majesty that minorities can dominate the majority and that parasites can dominate producers. Yet there are secret networks, conspiracies, and conflicts of interest; there are powerful networks of influence. We can't deny it. One of the most powerful is formed by the American neo-conservatives (the "neocons") who want the skin of Julian Assange (but it is no longer very secret at the moment). But these networks that influence states and in particular the most powerful of them are not states themselves and even less a global state. On the one hand, these networks do not have an exact understanding of the world they are trying to lead, they are convinced, for example, that the working class and class struggle do not exist, nor do the” Western Empire,” which they are still trying to defend. And on the other hand, their objectives often remain focused on fetishized fixations, characterized most often by religious or ethnic cliques, or sometimes sexual networks, and that may range from mass in Latin, to the defense of Israel or the worldwide dissemination of "gay pride". They are composed of a double layer made up of naive and emancipated individuals, those naive who spread ideology and beat symbolic drums and those emancipated who engage in private business by taking advantage of secret territories they have laboriously developed and who are certainly not ready to take any serious risks. Wanting to prove that all these cliques, or those one particularly hates, come together in some global plot is a waste of time and energy. The burden of proof resting in the hands of those wanting to unmask the plot, these activists who pursue this chimera end up devoting themselves entirely to it and slipping into marginality. But in sights for all to see, everyone finds themselves basking in the unanimity of all sorts of cults, beliefs, and lifestyles in the fight against socialism, which is indeed intentionally organized in the ecumenical think tank networks promoted by multinationals, by the media and major Western universities; in short: in ideological anti-communism. And since these are practical networks, which do not understand theory but grasp practice very well and what it yields in term of personal advantage; they know very well that their only enemy is actual socialism, namely when socialism acquires influence in the masses. And this determined and very well-equipped ideological collusion dates back more than a century in history, to the visceral reaction of the bourgeoisies around the world against the October Revolution. Ultimately, the only plan of capitalism is to do everything it can to thwart the objective forces that historically lead it to its own demise, to transform - and to preserve itself - in its opposite, socialism. Hence, the hatred of socialism commonly and significantly erroneously called "anticommunism" is the only collective spirit of capitalism. And that is an opportunity, because it has allowed the market, in this era of neoliberalism, to privatize and deregulate everything everywhere for the direct benefit of those who practice these privatizations and deregulations. This is why we will see converge and merge into the same hateful crowd at the time action, Nazis, Takfirists, Zionists, Liberals, Conservative, communitarians of all kinds, Social Democrats, libertarians, white supremacists, anarchists, and leftists. We will witness this hatred that needs to personalize the enemy, become ever more crystallized against the figure of Stalin than against Marx or even Lenin, who remain tirelessly the subjects of attempts at cooptation by reducing them to harmless milestones in academic cultural history (three-quarters of “Marxist” intellectual who have careers working only on this). Understanding that this ideological circus acquires coherence and concerted action only in the concrete and practical perspective of a close transition to socialism does not exempt, on the contrary, from working to dissociate it into its opposing factions, following the strategy of favoring the weakest part in each antagonistic crisis when they begin to tear each other apart. In this case now, we must obviously support Russia and its Orthodox popes against NATO and its post-modern Nazis (because only naive people can see it as a Russian war against Ukraine and not the reality of a NATO war against Russia in Ukraine. As the Korean War was a war of the United States against Korea, then China, in Korea. GQ, September 2, 2022, reviewed on February 13, 2023 AuthorGilles Questiaux (GQ), born in 1958 in Neuilly sur Seine, history teacher in secondary education in Seine Saint-Denis from 1990 to 2020, member of the PCF and the SNES. This article was translated and republished from Reveil Communiste. Archives February 2023  In April 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered an eloquent and stirring denunciation of the Vietnam War and US militarism. The speech titled “Beyond Vietnam” is relevant to today’s war in Ukraine. In the speech at Riverside Church, King talked about how the US had supported France in trying to re-colonize Vietnam. He noted, “Before the end of the war we were meeting 80% of the French war costs.” When France began to despair in the war, “We encouraged them with our huge financial and military supplies to continue the war.” King went on to recall that after the French finally left Vietnam, the United States prevented implementation of the Geneva Accord which would have allowed Ho Chi Minh to unite the divided country. Instead, the US supported its preferred South Vietnamese dictator. The U.S. has played a similar role in blocking compromise solutions and international agreements to the Ukraine conflict. Following Ukraine protests in February 2014, the European Union negotiated an agreement between President Yanukovich and the opposition to have early new elections. The attitude of lead US official Victoria Nuland was crystallized in her secretly recorded comment, “F*** the EU!.” Despite the agreement, a violent bloody coup led by ultra-nationalist Ukrainians was “midwifed”. The ultra-nationalist coup government immediately started implementing policies hostile to the Russian speaking citizens of Ukraine. The coup and the new policies provoked the conflicts and resistance which have led to the situation today. The coup and policies were abhorred by a majority of Ukrainians, especially in eastern Ukraine. The Russian speaking Ukrainian citizens of Crimea voted overwhelmingly to secede from Ukraine and re-unify with Russia. The Minsk Accords of 2014 and 2015 were intended to resolve the conflict by granting some autonomy to the the Russian speaking sections in the eastern Donbass but keeping them within Ukraine. Thanks to the admissions of two prominent former European leaders, Angela Merkel and Francois Hollande, we know that the West and their Ukrainian government puppet never intended to implement the Minsk Agreement. Like the 1954 Geneva Accords regarding Vietnam, the 2014 and 2015 Minsk Agreements on Ukraine were never implemented because Washington did not want a compromise. When Ukraine President Zelensky had negotiations with Russians in Turkey at the end of March, UK PM Boris Johnson hurried to Kyiv to dissuade Zelensky from continuing serious negotiations to end the war. Similarly, the US is providing the big majority of weapons, military supplies and financial aid to Ukraine just as they did to France and then the puppet government of South Vietnam. And similarly the US and allies do not want a resolution to the conflict which might in any way be seen as win for Russia. Rationalization vs Reality of Wars in Vietnam and UkraineIn April 1965, U.S. President Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ) explained why he was escalating US involvement in Vietnam. With an Orwellian touch, he titled the speech “Peace without Conquest” as he announced the beginning of US air attacks on Vietnam. He explained that “We must fight if we are to live in a world where every country can shape its own destiny and only in such a world will our own freedom be secure… we have made a national pledge to help South Vietnam defend its independence and I intend to keep that promise. To dishonor that pledge, to abandon the small and brave nation to its enemies and the terror must follow would be an unforgivable wrong…We are also there to strengthen world order… To leave Vietnam to its fate would shake the confidence of all these people in the value of an American commitment and in the value of America’s words.” President Biden and administration leaders sound similar to LBJ in the early stage of the Vietnam War. In his remarks to Congress asking for additional funding for Ukraine, Biden said, “We need this bill to support Ukraine in its fight for freedom…. The cost of this fight is not cheap, but caving to aggression is going to be more costly if we allow it to happen…Investing in Ukraine’s freedom and security is a small price to pay to punish Russian aggression, to lessen the risk of future conflicts.” Both Russia and the US now acknowledge that the conflict in Ukraine is between Russia and NATO (led the US). Ukraine is a proxy for the US which promoted the 2014 coup and has been pumping weapons into Ukraine ever since. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin has been explicit: “We want to see Russia weakened.” The Ukrainian Defense Chief says they are fighting “to fulfill NATO’s mission.” These wars are unnecessaryJust as the US could have lived with Vietnam under Ho Chi Minh leadership without the war, the US could live with Ukraine being a neutral country and bridge between east and west, Russia and western Europe. However, as ML King observed 54 years ago, that was not (and still is not) US policy. “The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit.” He went on to name many other countries which are victims of US intervention and aggression. He said, “And if we ignore this sobering reality we will find ourselves … marching …and attending rallies without end unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy. Such thoughts take us beyond Vietnam…” Incrementally Increasing Conflict toward Total WarIn 1965, when President Johnson announced the beginning of US air attacks on Vietnam, the war had been going on for many years. The US kept incrementally increasing its commitment – from political support to advisors and trainers and special operations. In spring 1965 “only” about 400 US soldiers had died in the conflict. The war was not yet widely unpopular. Americans who protested against the Vietnam War were a small minority. We may be at a similar or earlier point in the conflict with Russia via Ukraine. While many tens of BILLIONS of dollars has been committed to Ukraine, plus advisors, trainers and other support, the US military has not yet been openly and actively deployed. The incremental buildup in Vietnam ultimately led to over 58,000 Americans and three million Vietnamese civilians and soldiers being killed. US prestige and influence was severely damaged. ML King Jr said in his 1967 speech, “We have no honorable intentions in Vietnam …. The world demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of the Vietnamese people.” If the incremental buildup toward war with Russia is not stopped, it will be immeasurably worse than Vietnam. Already we are seeing tremendous destruction with Ukrainians and Russians dying by the thousands. As with Vietnam in 1965, this could be just the beginning. The costs of war and militarismDr King described the negative impact of the Vietnam war at home. He said “A few years ago there was a shining moment …. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor, both black and white, through the Poverty Program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the build-up in Vietnam and I watched this program broken and eviscerated … I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.” Today, with nearly 60% of the federal discretionary budget going to the military, so called intelligence and nuclear weapon modernization, the situation is even more stark. While US infrastructure corrodes, homelessness, personal debt, suicides and addictions increase. Instead of spending resources improving the lives of ordinary people, the government is pouring borrowed billions into another unnecessary war. Western Media DistortionsWestern media portrayed the US and South Vietnam winning the war in South East Asia until the 1968 Tet offensive exposed the lies and reality. Similarly, western media portrays Ukrainians winning the war midst overwhelming Ukrainian public support. In reality, Russia and the secessionist areas control large areas and will advance in the near future. Ukrainian losses are already huge. The idea that all Ukrainians love the West and hate Russia is false. As an indication of the mixed sentiments, the country having received the MOST emigrants from Ukraine is Russia. While a small number continue from Russia to west European countries, the big majority stay in Russia with many awaiting the end of warfare. Just as South Vietnamese puppet leaders were built up the US for political reasons, so is Ukrainian President Zelensky. His speeches are written by Washington insiders. Largely censored from the media, Zelensky has overseen the imprisonment, torture and killing of opponents. The largest opposition party has been banned. Many Ukrainians oppose his policy and continuation of the war. Ukrainians have become cannon fodder for the US geopolitical goals, just as the South Vietnamese were. Will the US and allies continue to escalate the conflict in Ukraine, to “double down” on an intervention half way around the world with the goal of hurting Russia? Have we learned nothing from Vietnam and subsequent US/Western foreign policy disasters of the past 40 years? ML King’s Hopes and DeathIn his profound speech, Dr King said “We as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values…When machines and computer, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered… A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death …..The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just… Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out in a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism and militarism.” Exactly one year after delivering the speech at Riverside Church, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated. The Vietnam war continued for another seven years until the Vietnamese finally defeated and expelled the US military and their puppets. The disaster of the Vietnam War will be small compared to the disaster which may befall us all if US policy of attacking Russia through Ukraine is not stopped. AuthorRick Sterling is an independent journalist based in the SF Bay Area. He can be contacted at [email protected] This article was republished from Resumen. Archives February 2023 2/23/2023 Key Lessons From the Failure of the U.S. and Success of China’s Economic Stimulus Programs By: John RossRead Now Introduction It is well known that China will continue economic stimulus measures in 2023—the only serious discussion is of what type. To be successful these measures must simultaneously achieve two goals. First, they must adequately respond to China’s short-term situation—that is they must substantially reverse 2022’s economic slowdown. Second, they must aid in achieving the strategic goals China has set for 2035. It is equally well known that the international economic situation which will confront China in 2023 is unfavorable. In this regard, it is important to understand that this negative international context is itself due to the failure of the stimulus programs the U.S. launched to deal with the consequences of the COVID pandemic. The fact that China and the U.S. have both now released their economic data for 2022 as a whole allows this situation to be judged clearly. In 2022 the U.S. suffered its worst stagflationary crisis for almost half a century—the EU’s similar situation merely followed a few months behind the U.S. In detail, the U.S. experienced the highest inflationary wave for forty years while simultaneously its economic growth rate has dropped by half compared to that earlier period. These two factors, in turn, combine to produce a U.S./EU economic policy paralysis in adequately responding to their short-term slowdown in 2023—high inflation means their policymakers must adopt economically contractionary policies, in particular raising interest rates, which fail to offset, indeed intensify, economic slowing. In summary the result, as will be shown in detail, is not only short-term U.S./EU economic deceleration in 2023 but a medium-/long- term slowdown which prevents these economies achieving their strategic objectives. That is, the U.S. stimulus programs was a strategic failure—in addition to the short-term inflation, prospects for long-term economic growth were worse after these packages than before them. In summary, the present world economic situation, and therefore the one facing China, is largely determined by the interrelation of two stimulus programs. The first is the damaging consequences of the U.S. stimulus packages, creating the worst global stagflationary situation for forty years, the second is the stimulus programs being launched by China which have the potential both to launch its own economic growth and to play a key role in global economic recovery. Given these facts it is, therefore, clarificatory for achieving China’s goals to examine in detail the present international economic situation and understand the reasons for the failure of the U.S. packages, and the lessons of these for China’s own stimulus programs. Two interrelated but distinct issues are involved with this—both of which directly relate to China’s own economic situation and policies as it enters 2023.
China’s strategic goals to 2035Turning to the specific interrelation of these international economic issues with China’s strategic goals the latter, in terms of economic growth, were set out in November 2020 by Xi Jinping in 关于《中共中央关于制定国民经济和社会发展第十四个五年规划和二〇三五年远景目标的建议》的说明. This stated that discussion around the 14th Five Year Plan discussion had noted that: “the goal of doubling the economic aggregate or per capita income by 2035 should be clearly stated.” It concluded that: “It is entirely possible to double the total or per capita income.” China doubling per capita GDP from 2020 to 2035 would mean, leaving inflation out of account, achieving a per capita GDP level of $21,050. At the 20th Party Congress the fundamental goal was set as reaching the level of a “medium-developed country by 2035.” Per capita GDP of slightly above $21,000 would be significantly above the level of Hungary or Poland today, that is of major East European states, and slightly above the level of Greece—precisely a medium-developed advanced economy. China’s annual population growth in the recent period has been zero, and in 2022 was slightly below zero, consequently achieving the target of doubling total GDP is extremely close to that for doubling per capita GDP—and ensures that that the latter target will also be met. Therefore, the growth assumptions in what follows are for China doubling GDP by 2035—any realistic estimate of population changes by 2035 will not affect the fundamental economic situation. To achieve doubling of GDP/per capita GDP during 2020-2035, after growth of 3.0 percent in 2022, requires annual average growth of at least 4.6 percent in 2023-2035. Any adequate stimulus program must therefore achieve the tactical goal of accelerating economic growth in 2023 but doing so in a way that simultaneously ensures achievement of the strategic goal for 2035. These requirements will be assumed in what follows. Part 1. The Strategic Failure of the U.S./EU Stimulus Programs |
 | Slowdown in U.S. growth But if U.S. inflation soared during the period of its pandemic era stimulus packages U.S. economic growth was very slow. Recent publication of U.S. economic data for the whole of 2022, which means that three years of pandemic, 2020-2022, are covered shows that U.S. GDP grew by a total of only 5.3 percent during this period—an annual average 1.7 percent. |
This compares to China’s total growth in the same period of 13.3 percent, or China’s annual average 4.3 percent. During the pandemic China’s economy therefore grew two and a half time as fast as the U.S. This data is shown in Figure 2. The U.S. stimulus packages were therefore accompanied both by extremely high inflation and low growth i.e., stagflation.
U.S. short-term contractionary policies As is well known, to attempt to combat the inflationary wave, the U.S. Federal Reserve, and other Western central banks, have had to, and will continue for some time, to increase interest rates and tighten monetary policies with inevitable contractionary economic effects. |  |
Indeed, as Figure 3 shows, U.S. money supply has actually been falling since its peak in March 2022—a highly unusual and contractionary monetary situation. This is the exact opposite of what would be required to lessen economic slowdown. This helps ensure that the U.S. economy will remain locked in slow growth in 2023.
 | Medium-/long-term slowdown of the U.S. economy An immediate consequence of these sharply contractionary policies being carried out by the U.S. economic authorities in 2022-23 is that the medium-term term effects of the U.S./EU stimulus packages must be judged a complete strategic failure. |
Any short-term benefits during the pandemic were cancelled out, or more than cancelled out, by the contractionary policies and resulting low short-term growth required to get inflation back under control—an inflation which, as will be seen, was itself created by U.S. economic policy. This helps produce the stagnationary aspects of the situation.
For this reason, not only will the U.S./EU’s 2023 growth decelerate, but Western economies medium/ long-term growth—in particular, that of the U.S. —will slow, as even the IMF, whose predictions are normally somewhat biased in favor of the U.S., admits. Figure 4 shows that the IMF projects that annual average U.S. GDP growth, taking a long-term average to remove the effect of business cycle fluctuations, will fall from an already low 1.9 percent in 2021 to 1.6 percent in 2027. Over the same period the IMF projects EU annual growth will fall from 1.4 percent to 1.2 percent.
This complete strategic failure of the U.S./E.U. stimulus packages launched against the COVID economic downturn makes clear why it is important that China studies and draws the lessons from this extremely negative experience—as these lessons are linked to fundamental issues of economic policy and therefore also affect China.
For this reason, not only will the U.S./EU’s 2023 growth decelerate, but Western economies medium/ long-term growth—in particular, that of the U.S. —will slow, as even the IMF, whose predictions are normally somewhat biased in favor of the U.S., admits. Figure 4 shows that the IMF projects that annual average U.S. GDP growth, taking a long-term average to remove the effect of business cycle fluctuations, will fall from an already low 1.9 percent in 2021 to 1.6 percent in 2027. Over the same period the IMF projects EU annual growth will fall from 1.4 percent to 1.2 percent.
This complete strategic failure of the U.S./E.U. stimulus packages launched against the COVID economic downturn makes clear why it is important that China studies and draws the lessons from this extremely negative experience—as these lessons are linked to fundamental issues of economic policy and therefore also affect China.
What happened during the U.S. stimulus packages? Turning from the results of the U.S. stimulus packages to the processes which occurred during them, and produced these negative results, by far the largest change was in U.S. government behavior. Figure 5 shows U.S. government receipts and expenditure. |  |
As may be seen during the pandemic there was no very dramatic change in U.S. government receipts—they were 27.5 percent of GDP in the 4th quarter of 2019 on the eve of the pandemic, never fell below that level during it, and rose moderately to peak at 30.7 percent of GDP in the 2nd quarter of 2022, a rise of 3.2 percent of GDP. The extraordinarily dramatic change was the enormous surge in government expenditure during the pandemic. Between the 4th quarter of 2019 and the 2nd quarter of 2020 U.S. government expenditure rose from 34.4 percent to 54.9 percent of GDP—an extraordinary increase of more than 20 percent of GDP during six months. This 54.9 percent of GDP of government spending was unparalleled in U.S. peacetime history.
 | The vast surge in U.S. government expenditure, with merely a moderate rise in receipts, of course produced a huge excess of expenditure over income and consequently a vast increase in the budget deficit and state borrowing. As Figure 6 shows U.S. government quarterly borrowing soared to an unprecedented peacetime level of 26.2 percent of GDP in the 2nd quarter of 2020. |
A huge increase in U.S. transfer payments and subsidies
Turning to examine the uses this huge increase in U.S. government expenditure was put to, Figure 7 shows the structure and purposes of this. Making a comparison of the 2nd quarter of 2020, the peak of U.S. government spending, to the 4th quarter of 2019, the last before the pandemic struck, shows:
|  |
- There was no increase in government investment—it was 3.5 percent of GDP at the beginning of the period and 3.5 percent at the end.
- Government final consumption rose only modestly from 14.1 percent to 16.1 percent of GDP—an increase of 2.0 percent of GDP.
- Government subsidies, above all to transportation and related uses, rose from 0.4 percent to 5.0 percent of GDP in the 2nd quarter of 2020—an increase of 4.6 percent of GDP.
- Transfer payments to persons enormously increased from 14.4 percent to 28.1 percent of GDP—an increase of 13.7 percent of GDP. Payments to individuals accounted for the vast majority of the increase in government spending and were overwhelmingly used for consumption.
In terms of the structure of the economy and the stimulus packages which were launched, this increase in U.S. government spending was therefore overwhelmingly consumer oriented—10 percent of the increase in government expenditure went into final government spending, 23 percent into subsidies, and 67 percent into transfer payments to individuals. There was no increase in government investment. This is therefore the type of exclusively or overwhelmingly consumer-oriented stimulus program some supporters of the U.S. model advocate for China.
 | U.S. money supply The huge increase in consumer-focused government transfer payments was in turn accompanied by extremely rapid expansion of the U.S. money supply. Figure 8 shows that in the year to February 2021 the U.S. broad money supply rose by 26.9 percent—by far the most rapid increase in U.S. peacetime history. |
Even more extraordinarily, between February and September 2020 U.S. broad money supply rose by 20.2 percent in only a seven-month period—an annualized rate of 37 percent. These rates of monetary emission vastly exceeded, for example, the increase in U.S. money supply accompanying the Quantitative Easing to attempt to deal with the international financial crisis after 2007—the peak annual expansion of the U.S. money supply in that period was under 10 percent. In summary, the U.S. stimulus packages saw an unprecedented increase in the U.S. budget deficit and in U.S. money supply.
What occurred in the U.S. economy during its stimulus packages? Turning to the impact of these consumer-focused stimulus programs on the U.S. economy, Figure 9 shows the key changes in structure of U.S. GDP during the pandemic—that is, the changes from 2019, prior to the pandemic, to 2022. U.S. consumption rose relatively strongly by $3,551 billion. |  |
U.S. gross fixed investment also rose, by a much smaller $838 billion, but this was insufficient to even offset the capital depreciation of $848 billion in the same period. Therefore, U.S. net fixed investment, taking into account depreciation, fell by $10 billion at the same time as a surge in consumption was taking place. The U.S. capital stock at the end of this period was therefore marginally smaller than at the beginning—as the change was very small, it may be said fundamentally that during this period while U.S. consumption rose significantly there was no increase in U.S. net capital investment/U.S. capital stock.
 | Analyzing this in terms of the changes of the structure of U.S. GDP during the stimulus packages, the share of total consumption in U.S. GDP rose by 0.9 percent while the share of net fixed investment fell by 0.8 percent—as shown in Figure 10. |
This data confirms again that the nature of the U.S. stimulus programs was almost exclusively oriented to consumption and produced a further shift of the U.S. economy into consumption, while the share of net fixed investment was reduced—it was therefore almost a pure consumer stimulus.
The final outcome of the U.S. stimulus packages
To summarize, the combination of the changes in U.S. government spending with macroeconomic changes the changes in the U.S. economy during the pandemic were clear and the following:
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- Strategically the stimulus program was a complete failure—in the short term the inflationary wave forced the introduction of contractionary measures sharply slowing the U.S. economy in 2023, while in the medium/long term annual average the U.S. economic growth actually declined.
At the end of these stimulus packages the U.S. economy was therefore in a worse strategic situation, with lower growth and higher inflation, than at the beginning. Given such a policy failure, with such negative results, what was the explanation of this? Was it possible to foresee it in advance? And what were the lessons?
Part 2. Confusion of Supply and Demand: Why the U.S. Stimulus Packages Failed
The reason for this complete strategic failure of the U.S. stimulus packages was twofold. Ultimately, of course, this failure was determined by the power of different social forces within the U.S., but in more immediate terms it was due to:
- Confusions in U.S. economic thinking.
- The point in the business cycle at which this consumer-based stimulus was launched.
Confusions in U.S. economic thinking
Considering first the confusions in U.S. economic thinking these were dealt with in detail in 引发世界经济危机的罪魁祸首是美国，而非乌克兰战争. Therefore, here only an update to the new U.S. data and a summary is given.
The most important confusion in popular, more precisely “vulgar,” writing in Western economics is a fundamental and damaging confusion between the economy’s demand side and its supply side. This was used to create a false rationale for the U.S. stimulus packages, with their damaging consequences, and it unfortunately also sometimes appears in sections of China’s media. It is therefore important to clarify this.
This confusion between the economy’s demand and supply sides necessarily fails to understand the different roles played by consumption and investment in the economy, and therefore to an erroneous view that consumption can substitute for investment in terms of economic growth. To be precise:
The most important confusion in popular, more precisely “vulgar,” writing in Western economics is a fundamental and damaging confusion between the economy’s demand side and its supply side. This was used to create a false rationale for the U.S. stimulus packages, with their damaging consequences, and it unfortunately also sometimes appears in sections of China’s media. It is therefore important to clarify this.
This confusion between the economy’s demand and supply sides necessarily fails to understand the different roles played by consumption and investment in the economy, and therefore to an erroneous view that consumption can substitute for investment in terms of economic growth. To be precise:
- Considering first investment, this constitutes part of both the economy’s demand and supply sides. Investment goods and services appear in the economy’s demand side by being purchased (buying of machines, factories etc.) but they are also an input into production together with other factors such as labor—i.e., investment is part not only of the economy’s demand side but also part of its supply side. An increase in expenditure on investment is therefore not only an increase in demand but also an increase in supply—for example, if there is a purchase of a billion yuan of investment goods (machines etc.) there is also automatically a billion yuan increase in overall supply in the economy.
- In contrast to investment, consumption is only a category on the economy’s demand side, it does not appear in the economy’s supply side. This is necessarily the case because, by definition, consumption is not an input into production—if anything is an input into production it is not consumption. Therefore, for example, if there is a billion yuan increase in consumption there is a billion yuan increase in the demand side of the economy, but not any automatic increase in the economy’s supply side. An increase in consumption increases the demand side of the economy but, unlike with investment, it does not automatically increase supply.
Confusion over this fundamental theoretical issue, as will be seen, significantly explains the strategic failure of the U.S. stimulus packages.
A technical note
To put this issue technically then, for example, in the most common form of “Western economics,” the growth accounting deriving from Solow, inputs into production are capital, labor, and total factor productivity (TFP). Other forms of Western growth accounting make a more detailed breakdown of these factors—an example is the KLEMS (capital, labor, energy, materials, services) framework developed by Jorgenson and applied by the European Commission. In Marxist economics supply side categories are living labor, capital, and socially necessary (or non-socially necessary) labor time.
It is unnecessary here to discuss the differences between these concepts in “Western” and Marxist economic as both agree that investment (capital) is an input into production and therefore part of the economy’s supply side, but neither includes consumption as an input into production—and therefore in both consumption is only part of the economy’s demand side but not of its supply side. Put in technical language, consumption is not an input into the production function—but for non-economists it is sufficient to understand that consumption is not part of the economy’s supply side.
As a result of investment being part of both the economy’s demand side and its supply side, but consumption being only part of the economy’s demand side, if there is an increase in investment demand, that is there is an increase in real expenditure on investment, there is also a direct increase in the economy’s supply side. However, if consumption is increased there is an increase in demand but not any direct increase in supply.
Under certain circumstances, analyzed below, an increase in demand caused by increasing consumption expenditure, may indirectly lead to an increase in production—but this is not at all automatic and also under other circumstances, because consumption is not an input into production, an increase in consumption demand may not lead even indirectly lead to an increase in production. In some circumstances an increase in consumption expenditure may simply create inflation, suck in imports, or both without an increase in production. But in all cases, any increase in output can only occur if there is an increase in the economy’s supply side (that is in labor, capital etc.). Consumption itself provides no input into production and no increase in productive capacity.
It is unnecessary here to discuss the differences between these concepts in “Western” and Marxist economic as both agree that investment (capital) is an input into production and therefore part of the economy’s supply side, but neither includes consumption as an input into production—and therefore in both consumption is only part of the economy’s demand side but not of its supply side. Put in technical language, consumption is not an input into the production function—but for non-economists it is sufficient to understand that consumption is not part of the economy’s supply side.
As a result of investment being part of both the economy’s demand side and its supply side, but consumption being only part of the economy’s demand side, if there is an increase in investment demand, that is there is an increase in real expenditure on investment, there is also a direct increase in the economy’s supply side. However, if consumption is increased there is an increase in demand but not any direct increase in supply.
Under certain circumstances, analyzed below, an increase in demand caused by increasing consumption expenditure, may indirectly lead to an increase in production—but this is not at all automatic and also under other circumstances, because consumption is not an input into production, an increase in consumption demand may not lead even indirectly lead to an increase in production. In some circumstances an increase in consumption expenditure may simply create inflation, suck in imports, or both without an increase in production. But in all cases, any increase in output can only occur if there is an increase in the economy’s supply side (that is in labor, capital etc.). Consumption itself provides no input into production and no increase in productive capacity.
The confusions in vulgar Western economic thinking
Both Marxist and serious Western economics understand this difference between the economy’s supply side and its demand side. But unfortunately, in popular, or “vulgar” Western economics, the two are confused by statements such as: “With consumption accounting for 67 percent of GDP growth.” This implies, because the economy is divided into consumption and investment, that consumption contributed 67 percent of GDP growth and, by implication, investment contributed 33 percent. But this statement is false. The correct statement is that “67 percent of economic growth was consumed and 33 percent was invested.” But because consumption is not an input into supply, consumption always contributes precisely zero percent to any increase into production. Consumption, consequently, always produces precisely zero percent of GDP—it may be the case that 67 percent of GDP is consumed, but consumption creates zero percent of that GDP production. As John Papola rightly put it: “The systematic failure…to distinguish between consuming and producing value is the single most damaging fallacy in [Western] popular economic thinking.”
This confusion over demand and supply sides of the economy, and therefore over the role of consumption and investment, then follows directly from statements such as “With consumption accounting for 67 percent of GDP growth.” If both consumption and investment are an input into production this suggests then one can replace the other. For example, if consumption and investment are both inputs into production, and therefore both are parts of the economy’s supply side, perhaps consumption could be increased to 80 percent of GDP, and investment reduced to 20 percent, and production growth would continue as before? But this is entirely false.
If consumption were increased from 67 percent of GDP to 80 percent, and total GDP remained the same, then certainly total demand would remain the same—because both consumption and investment are sources of demand. Total demand would remain the same, and simply its division between consumption and investment would change. But if investment were reduced from 33 percent of GDP to 20 percent, because consumption had been raised from 67 percent of the economy to 80 percent, then the inputs into production would have been radically reduced. And because inputs into production had been radically reduced then, other things remaining equal, the increase in GDP would be radically slowed. That is, consumption cannot substitute for investment in production, because consumption is not an input into production.
This is why, for clarity of thinking and policy making, it is necessary to entirely eliminate such statements as “consumption contributed 67 percent of GDP growth”—consumption always contributes zero percent of GDP increase. This confusion between the economy’s demand side and its supply side provided the economic rationale for the damaging consumer, that is demand side only, U.S. stimulus programs.
This confusion over demand and supply sides of the economy, and therefore over the role of consumption and investment, then follows directly from statements such as “With consumption accounting for 67 percent of GDP growth.” If both consumption and investment are an input into production this suggests then one can replace the other. For example, if consumption and investment are both inputs into production, and therefore both are parts of the economy’s supply side, perhaps consumption could be increased to 80 percent of GDP, and investment reduced to 20 percent, and production growth would continue as before? But this is entirely false.
If consumption were increased from 67 percent of GDP to 80 percent, and total GDP remained the same, then certainly total demand would remain the same—because both consumption and investment are sources of demand. Total demand would remain the same, and simply its division between consumption and investment would change. But if investment were reduced from 33 percent of GDP to 20 percent, because consumption had been raised from 67 percent of the economy to 80 percent, then the inputs into production would have been radically reduced. And because inputs into production had been radically reduced then, other things remaining equal, the increase in GDP would be radically slowed. That is, consumption cannot substitute for investment in production, because consumption is not an input into production.
This is why, for clarity of thinking and policy making, it is necessary to entirely eliminate such statements as “consumption contributed 67 percent of GDP growth”—consumption always contributes zero percent of GDP increase. This confusion between the economy’s demand side and its supply side provided the economic rationale for the damaging consumer, that is demand side only, U.S. stimulus programs.
The aim is consumption, but the means is investment
This same confusion of the supply and demand sides of the economy appears in other forms. For example, I read one recent article in the Chinese media which started by arguing, correctly, that the eventual benefit to humanity of all production is only in consumption. This is correct because, to take an example, the aim in constructing a railway is not at all to have steel lines or locomotives (means of production/investment), it is to transport food or other goods to consumers, to allow people to travel to work, to let them go on vacation etc.—that is, to enable consumption. But the article then went on to argue that because the ultimate goal was consumption therefore the intermediate stage of investment (e.g., building a railway) should be cut out and money should simply be put directly into consumption—for example coupons to purchase food, carrying out tourism etc.
But that argument is false. If a billion yuan is used to give consumer tokens for purchasing food, or a billion yuan is used to subsidize free or cheap travel for tourism, that is all used at once in consumption, but it does not increase the capacity of the economy to produce in the future. The food which is purchased, or the trips which are made for tourism, are not an input into production, and therefore do not produce anything—that is why they are consumption, not investment. But if a billion yuan is used to build a railway, or purchase machinery for manufacturing cars, then the productive capacity of the economy is increased—it will produce new goods and services in the future. This fact, that the contribution of consumption to an increase in production, will always be precisely zero, because consumption is not an input into production, is crucial for economic clarity.
Confusions over these elementary but crucial issues of economic theory as will be seen, determined the strategic failure of the U.S. stimulus packages. They rationalized the huge boost in consumption but no increase in supply and therefore are also crucial lessons for future stimulus packages for China in 2023.
But that argument is false. If a billion yuan is used to give consumer tokens for purchasing food, or a billion yuan is used to subsidize free or cheap travel for tourism, that is all used at once in consumption, but it does not increase the capacity of the economy to produce in the future. The food which is purchased, or the trips which are made for tourism, are not an input into production, and therefore do not produce anything—that is why they are consumption, not investment. But if a billion yuan is used to build a railway, or purchase machinery for manufacturing cars, then the productive capacity of the economy is increased—it will produce new goods and services in the future. This fact, that the contribution of consumption to an increase in production, will always be precisely zero, because consumption is not an input into production, is crucial for economic clarity.
Confusions over these elementary but crucial issues of economic theory as will be seen, determined the strategic failure of the U.S. stimulus packages. They rationalized the huge boost in consumption but no increase in supply and therefore are also crucial lessons for future stimulus packages for China in 2023.
Under what conditions can consumption increase supply?
Turning from these issues of economic theory to their practical effects in the U.S. stimulus packages this interrelates with the point in the business cycle at which these programs were launched. It was noted above that consumption, as it is not an input in production, cannot directly contribute to the supply side. But consumption can under certain conditions, by increasing demand, indirectly create increases in supply. But this is not automatic or necessary as it is subject to both physical and profitability constraints. Understanding both these distinctions, and the possible role of consumer stimulus, is therefore important.
First, if in any economic system there is spare capacity it is possible that increased demand resulting from increased consumption can result in extra supply to attempt fulfil this demand. But if there is no spare capacity then, until extra capacity is created by investment, there can be no increase in supply no matter what the increase in demand is. That is, there may be a physical constraint on increasing production. If there is an increase in consumer demand, but no ability in the short term to increase supply, what will be produced by the increase in demand is inflation, not an increase in production and GDP.
Second, for capitalist producers, if there is an increase in demand, it is not sufficient that there is unused capacity and therefore no physical constraint on increasing production. In a capitalist enterprise there will only be a meaningful increase in production if there is also an increase in profit—that is, there may be a profitability constraint on production if there is an increase in demand led by consumption even if spare capacity exists.
First, if in any economic system there is spare capacity it is possible that increased demand resulting from increased consumption can result in extra supply to attempt fulfil this demand. But if there is no spare capacity then, until extra capacity is created by investment, there can be no increase in supply no matter what the increase in demand is. That is, there may be a physical constraint on increasing production. If there is an increase in consumer demand, but no ability in the short term to increase supply, what will be produced by the increase in demand is inflation, not an increase in production and GDP.
Second, for capitalist producers, if there is an increase in demand, it is not sufficient that there is unused capacity and therefore no physical constraint on increasing production. In a capitalist enterprise there will only be a meaningful increase in production if there is also an increase in profit—that is, there may be a profitability constraint on production if there is an increase in demand led by consumption even if spare capacity exists.
Why the U.S. stimulus package was a strategic failure
Taking into account these fundamental conditions immediately makes clear why the U.S. stimulus programs to deal with the COVID pandemic were a complete failure in both the short term and strategically. At the end of 2019, immediately before the pandemic, the U.S. economy was growing above its trend rate of growth. Year on year growth in the 4th quarter of 2019, the last before the pandemic, was 2.6 percent, significantly above the U.S. long term average at that time of 2.1 percent. As the U.S. economy was already growing above its trend rate of growth when the pandemic hit it was unlikely that at this position in the business cycle there was meaningful spare capacity in the U.S. economy.
In the purely short term, obviously when the pandemic struck there was immediately a sharp fall in U.S. production—in the 2nd quarter of 2020 U.S. GDP was 9.6 percent below its level in the 4th quarter of 2019 prior to the pandemic. But U.S. recovery was rapid, in part because of the stimulus packages—by the 1st quarter of 2021 U.S. GDP had already regained its pre-pandemic level. But, as already analyzed, the U.S. stimulus packages were designed to be, and were, almost exclusively consumer focused. As a result, U.S. consumption, but not investment, continued to rise strongly even after the pre-pandemic level of GDP had been regained. By the 1st quarter of 2021 U.S. consumption was already $741 billion above its 4th quarter of 2019 level, and then it rose by a further $3,028 billion by the 4th quarter of 2022. In contrast U.S. net fixed investment rose by only $73 billion between the 4th quarter of 2019 and the 1st quarter of 2021. Then it actually fell by $166 billion by the 4th quarter of 2022—to finish $93 billion below its pre-pandemic levels.
This experience during the U.S. stimulus packages clearly illustrates the theoretical issue that increasing consumer demand does not automatically lead to an increase in productive capacity, in investment—substantially rising U.S. consumer demand did not lead to an increase in investment but was accompanied by investment failing even to increase by sufficient to replace capital depreciation.
In the purely short term, obviously when the pandemic struck there was immediately a sharp fall in U.S. production—in the 2nd quarter of 2020 U.S. GDP was 9.6 percent below its level in the 4th quarter of 2019 prior to the pandemic. But U.S. recovery was rapid, in part because of the stimulus packages—by the 1st quarter of 2021 U.S. GDP had already regained its pre-pandemic level. But, as already analyzed, the U.S. stimulus packages were designed to be, and were, almost exclusively consumer focused. As a result, U.S. consumption, but not investment, continued to rise strongly even after the pre-pandemic level of GDP had been regained. By the 1st quarter of 2021 U.S. consumption was already $741 billion above its 4th quarter of 2019 level, and then it rose by a further $3,028 billion by the 4th quarter of 2022. In contrast U.S. net fixed investment rose by only $73 billion between the 4th quarter of 2019 and the 1st quarter of 2021. Then it actually fell by $166 billion by the 4th quarter of 2022—to finish $93 billion below its pre-pandemic levels.
This experience during the U.S. stimulus packages clearly illustrates the theoretical issue that increasing consumer demand does not automatically lead to an increase in productive capacity, in investment—substantially rising U.S. consumer demand did not lead to an increase in investment but was accompanied by investment failing even to increase by sufficient to replace capital depreciation.
Therefore, because an essentially totally consumer focused U.S. stimulus was launched, creating a strong demand side boost, when the U.S. economy had already been growing above trend, and therefore spare capacity was small, and there was no increase in net investment, i.e., in capital stock and supply, the result was the huge U.S. inflationary wave already noted. As the Wall Street Journal editorial board, normally a firm supporter of the U.S., admitted, even if it didn’t accurately admit the reasons why: “This isn’t Putin’s inflation, this inflation was made in Washington.”
Strategic consequences for the U.S. economy
Turning from the short term to the strategic consequences for the U.S. economy these theoretical issues have clear medium- and long-term implications.
The short-term destabilization of the global economy caused by the U.S. stimulus packages, is extremely striking. But it is only an extreme illustration of the damage done by confusion over the role of consumption in the economy—this confusion also affects long term growth. Clarifying this theoretical conclusion leads to immediate factual, and therefore testable, conclusions which further clarify the reasons for the damaging strategic effects of the almost entirely consumer-based U.S. stimulus packages.
The prediction from economic theory is that because consumption is not an input into production, and investment is, then other things being equal the greater the share of consumption in the economy, and therefore the lower the share of investment, then over anything other than the short term the slower will be economic growth. Equally because, by definition, investment is an input into production, then, other things being equal, the higher the percentage of investment in the economy the more rapid will be economic development. As will be seen analysis of the U.S. economy fully factually confirms these theoretical predictions. This allows the long term strategic, as well as short term, failure of the U.S. stimulus packages to be clearly understood.
The short-term destabilization of the global economy caused by the U.S. stimulus packages, is extremely striking. But it is only an extreme illustration of the damage done by confusion over the role of consumption in the economy—this confusion also affects long term growth. Clarifying this theoretical conclusion leads to immediate factual, and therefore testable, conclusions which further clarify the reasons for the damaging strategic effects of the almost entirely consumer-based U.S. stimulus packages.
The prediction from economic theory is that because consumption is not an input into production, and investment is, then other things being equal the greater the share of consumption in the economy, and therefore the lower the share of investment, then over anything other than the short term the slower will be economic growth. Equally because, by definition, investment is an input into production, then, other things being equal, the higher the percentage of investment in the economy the more rapid will be economic development. As will be seen analysis of the U.S. economy fully factually confirms these theoretical predictions. This allows the long term strategic, as well as short term, failure of the U.S. stimulus packages to be clearly understood.
The slowing of the U.S. economy
Turning to medium/long term consequences, the changes in the structure of the U.S. economy which have been produced by the COVID stimulus packages have already been analyzed—that is they produced a further shift into consumption. But in addition to their negative short-term consequences how did these changes correspond, or fail to correspond, to the changes required to speed up U.S. economic growth over the medium and longer term—that is how do they strategically affect the U.S. economy? This was analyzed in detail in 引发世界经济危机的罪魁祸首是美国，而非乌克兰战争 so here only the main points are summarised—for other factual data please see that article.
Over the short term no single structural factor of U.S. GDP has a decisive influence on U.S. economic growth—as analyzed below this means, for example, that a consumer stimulus can have a short-term effect. However, if longer time periods are considered then the situation is entirely different. Taking a 10-year period, as would be predicted by economic theory, there is a positive correlation, to be precise 0.66, between the share of net fixed investment in the U.S. economy and GDP growth—a very high correlation. That is, the higher the percentage share of net fixed investment in U.S. GDP the faster the rate of U.S. GDP growth.
For present purposes it is unnecessary to determine why there is this close positive long-term correlation between net fixed investment and U.S. GDP growth—although the obvious explanation, in line with economic theory, would be the positive cumulative effect of high levels of fixed investment, an input into the economy’s supply side, in increasing U.S. capital stock. Nor is it even necessary, for present purposes, to determine the direction of causation between high levels of net fixed investment and high levels of GDP growth, or even to ascertain whether some third process determines both. It is simply sufficient to note that, due to this high correlation, the U.S. economy cannot achieve high levels of GDP growth without there also being high levels of net fixed investment in GDP. In other words, if over the longer term the U.S. economy is to grow more rapidly the percentage of net fixed investment in the U.S. economy must increase.
This, therefore, provides the fundamental criteria for evaluating the strategic effect of the U.S. stimulus packages to deal with the consequences of COVID on longer term U.S. economic growth. As already noted, these failed to raise U.S. net fixed investment—on the contrary U.S. net fixed investment fell as a share of U.S. GDP during these stimulus programs. Figure 12 shows the declining levels of U.S. net fixed investment during successive post-World War II business cycles, which explains the long-term slowdown in the U.S. economy. As the latest stage in this decline, U.S. net fixed investment was 4.8 percent of GDP in the 4th quarter of 2019, on the eve of the pandemic. This had fallen to 3.6 percent of GDP by the 4th quarter of 2022. Given that the closest correlation for U.S. GDP growth is with net fixed investment the U.S. stimulus packages will therefore fail to raise the rate of U.S. long term economic growth—in line with IMF projections of a continuing slowdown of the U.S. economy. That is, the stimulus packages were accompanied by a further fall in U.S. net fixed investment—which in turn will undermine U.S. long term growth due to the close correlation of U.S. GDP growth and U.S. net fixed investment. That is these consumer-based packages not only produced extremely damaging short term inflation but were a strategic failure for the U.S. economy.
Over the short term no single structural factor of U.S. GDP has a decisive influence on U.S. economic growth—as analyzed below this means, for example, that a consumer stimulus can have a short-term effect. However, if longer time periods are considered then the situation is entirely different. Taking a 10-year period, as would be predicted by economic theory, there is a positive correlation, to be precise 0.66, between the share of net fixed investment in the U.S. economy and GDP growth—a very high correlation. That is, the higher the percentage share of net fixed investment in U.S. GDP the faster the rate of U.S. GDP growth.
For present purposes it is unnecessary to determine why there is this close positive long-term correlation between net fixed investment and U.S. GDP growth—although the obvious explanation, in line with economic theory, would be the positive cumulative effect of high levels of fixed investment, an input into the economy’s supply side, in increasing U.S. capital stock. Nor is it even necessary, for present purposes, to determine the direction of causation between high levels of net fixed investment and high levels of GDP growth, or even to ascertain whether some third process determines both. It is simply sufficient to note that, due to this high correlation, the U.S. economy cannot achieve high levels of GDP growth without there also being high levels of net fixed investment in GDP. In other words, if over the longer term the U.S. economy is to grow more rapidly the percentage of net fixed investment in the U.S. economy must increase.
This, therefore, provides the fundamental criteria for evaluating the strategic effect of the U.S. stimulus packages to deal with the consequences of COVID on longer term U.S. economic growth. As already noted, these failed to raise U.S. net fixed investment—on the contrary U.S. net fixed investment fell as a share of U.S. GDP during these stimulus programs. Figure 12 shows the declining levels of U.S. net fixed investment during successive post-World War II business cycles, which explains the long-term slowdown in the U.S. economy. As the latest stage in this decline, U.S. net fixed investment was 4.8 percent of GDP in the 4th quarter of 2019, on the eve of the pandemic. This had fallen to 3.6 percent of GDP by the 4th quarter of 2022. Given that the closest correlation for U.S. GDP growth is with net fixed investment the U.S. stimulus packages will therefore fail to raise the rate of U.S. long term economic growth—in line with IMF projections of a continuing slowdown of the U.S. economy. That is, the stimulus packages were accompanied by a further fall in U.S. net fixed investment—which in turn will undermine U.S. long term growth due to the close correlation of U.S. GDP growth and U.S. net fixed investment. That is these consumer-based packages not only produced extremely damaging short term inflation but were a strategic failure for the U.S. economy.
Negative effects on U.S. growth
To clarify these trends further, it is possible to analyze the factors which are negative for U.S. growth. Again, there are no short-term correlations. But over the long term there are strong correlations. Strongest of all is the negative -0.63 correlation, over a 10-year period, between the percentage of GDP U.S. devoted to total consumption and U.S. economic growth—i.e., the higher the percentage of consumption in U.S. GDP the slower is long term U.S. economic growth. This entirely confirms factually the theoretical issues noted above—that because consumption is, by definition, not an input into production an increase in the percentage of consumption in GDP will lead to slower economic growth.
As already seen the U.S. stimulus packages raised the percentage of total consumption in U.S. GDP. As the closest negative correlation in U.S. GDP growth is between the percentage of total consumption in the U.S. economy and its economic growth these packages will therefore have a negative effect on long term U.S. economic growth. This explains the projections of slowing U.S. medium-long term growth already noted.
It is therefore clear that the U.S. stimulus packages, because they were concentrated on consumption, produced no fundamental increase in the share of net fixed investment in U.S. GDP. Given that net fixed investment has the strongest correlation with U.S. GDP growth these U.S. stimulus packages therefore produced no increase in long term U.S. GDP growth. That is, they were a strategic failure.
It is therefore clear that the U.S. stimulus packages, because they were concentrated on consumption, produced no fundamental increase in the share of net fixed investment in U.S. GDP. Given that net fixed investment has the strongest correlation with U.S. GDP growth these U.S. stimulus packages therefore produced no increase in long term U.S. GDP growth. That is, they were a strategic failure.
The distinction between the percentage of consumption in GDP and the growth rate in consumption
Clarifying the relation of consumption and economic growth, and eliminating the confused idea that consumption is an input into production and therefore contributes to GDP growth, has a further immediate consequence. It makes clear why it is necessary to avoid confusion between the two different issues of the rate of growth of consumption and the percentage of consumption in GDP—a confusion which sometimes appears in sections of China’s media. This distinction is obscured by an unclear phraseology of “increasing consumption,” without specifying if what is meant is increasing the percentage of consumption in GDP or increasing the rate of growth of consumption. This distinction is crucial because, as will be seen, the two move in opposite directions over the medium/long term—other things being equal, the higher the percentage of consumption in GDP then, except in the very short term, the lower with be the growth rate of consumption.
As already noted, the long-term growth rate of consumption in the U.S. economy is highly positively correlated with overall economic growth in the U.S. economy. But as already show, the higher the percentage of consumption in U.S. GDP the slower is the rate of U.S. economic growth. Other things being equal, therefore, a higher share percentage share of consumption in GDP, by slowing economic growth, will lead to a slower growth rate of consumption. This prediction from basic economic theory, is confirmed by the fact that the negative correlation of the share of total consumption in U.S. GDP and the rate of growth of consumption is an extremely high -0.79. That is, the higher the share of consumption in U.S. GDP the more slowly consumption, and therefore U.S. living standards, grows. The same processes will be seen to operate in China’s economy.
But it is the level and rate of growth of consumption, not the percentage share of consumption in GDP, which affects people’s real lives. This is indeed obvious. For example, a country such as the Central African Republic has an extremely high percentage of consumption in GDP, 99 percent, but is one of the poorest countries in the world, with a per capita GDP of $492 and its per capita consumption has fallen by 15 percent in the last 10 years. It would be absurd to tell the inhabitants of the Central African Republic that they had a high level of consumption because it is 99 percent of GDP! What matters to them is their extremely low level of consumption, due to the very low level of per capita GDP, and the extraordinarily low rate of growth of consumption.
The correlation of GDP growth and consumption growth.
In contrast, there is almost a perfect long-term correlation between U.S. GDP growth and growth of household consumption as shown in Figure 13. Taking a 20-year moving average, to remove short-term effects of business cycles, the correlation between U.S. GDP growth and U.S. household consumption is 0.97—an extraordinarily high figure, leaving no doubt as to the extremely high interrelation between U.S. GDP growth and the growth rate of U.S. consumption.
In summary, an increase in the share of consumption in U.S. GDP will lead to a slower rate of increase of consumption, and a higher rate of growth of GDP will be associated with a higher rate of consumption growth. This basic prediction of economic theory is fully factually confirmed for the U.S. and, as will be seen below, equally applies to China.
As already noted, the long-term growth rate of consumption in the U.S. economy is highly positively correlated with overall economic growth in the U.S. economy. But as already show, the higher the percentage of consumption in U.S. GDP the slower is the rate of U.S. economic growth. Other things being equal, therefore, a higher share percentage share of consumption in GDP, by slowing economic growth, will lead to a slower growth rate of consumption. This prediction from basic economic theory, is confirmed by the fact that the negative correlation of the share of total consumption in U.S. GDP and the rate of growth of consumption is an extremely high -0.79. That is, the higher the share of consumption in U.S. GDP the more slowly consumption, and therefore U.S. living standards, grows. The same processes will be seen to operate in China’s economy.
But it is the level and rate of growth of consumption, not the percentage share of consumption in GDP, which affects people’s real lives. This is indeed obvious. For example, a country such as the Central African Republic has an extremely high percentage of consumption in GDP, 99 percent, but is one of the poorest countries in the world, with a per capita GDP of $492 and its per capita consumption has fallen by 15 percent in the last 10 years. It would be absurd to tell the inhabitants of the Central African Republic that they had a high level of consumption because it is 99 percent of GDP! What matters to them is their extremely low level of consumption, due to the very low level of per capita GDP, and the extraordinarily low rate of growth of consumption.
The correlation of GDP growth and consumption growth.
In contrast, there is almost a perfect long-term correlation between U.S. GDP growth and growth of household consumption as shown in Figure 13. Taking a 20-year moving average, to remove short-term effects of business cycles, the correlation between U.S. GDP growth and U.S. household consumption is 0.97—an extraordinarily high figure, leaving no doubt as to the extremely high interrelation between U.S. GDP growth and the growth rate of U.S. consumption.
In summary, an increase in the share of consumption in U.S. GDP will lead to a slower rate of increase of consumption, and a higher rate of growth of GDP will be associated with a higher rate of consumption growth. This basic prediction of economic theory is fully factually confirmed for the U.S. and, as will be seen below, equally applies to China.
Part 3. The Implications for China
These theoretical issues, confirmed factually by the U.S. stimulus packages, can be applied to China and help clarify the discussion on its own stimulus programs.
First, regarding the position in the business cycle, the situation of China’s economy at the beginning of 2023 is significantly different to that of the U.S. when it launched its stimulus packages. In the 4th quarter of 2019, immediately before the pandemic struck, China’s annual growth rate was 6.0 percent. However, in the previous three years China’s annual average growth rate was 6.4 percent, and in the preceding five years it had been 6.6 percent. In short, when the pandemic struck China’s economy was growing significantly below trend—whereas when the pandemic struck the U.S. was growing significantly above trend. Furthermore, during the three years since the beginning of the pandemic China’s economy significantly slowed further—its annual average growth rate in 2020-2022 was only 4.3 percent. In summary China’s growth during the last period, before it launches any stimulus measures in 2023, has been significantly below trend.
First, regarding the position in the business cycle, the situation of China’s economy at the beginning of 2023 is significantly different to that of the U.S. when it launched its stimulus packages. In the 4th quarter of 2019, immediately before the pandemic struck, China’s annual growth rate was 6.0 percent. However, in the previous three years China’s annual average growth rate was 6.4 percent, and in the preceding five years it had been 6.6 percent. In short, when the pandemic struck China’s economy was growing significantly below trend—whereas when the pandemic struck the U.S. was growing significantly above trend. Furthermore, during the three years since the beginning of the pandemic China’s economy significantly slowed further—its annual average growth rate in 2020-2022 was only 4.3 percent. In summary China’s growth during the last period, before it launches any stimulus measures in 2023, has been significantly below trend.
Furthermore, during the pandemic the pattern of change in China’s economy was also completely different to the U.S. Over the whole period 2020-2022, calculated from the annual summary data published by the National Bureau of Statistics, China’s fixed asset investment rose by 13.4 percent while retail sales rose by 7.9 percent. Although China’s retail sales are a narrower category than the U.S. data for overall consumption, they are a sufficiently large part of consumption to make clear that during the pandemic China’s fixed investment grew more rapidly than consumption—the exact opposite of the U.S. pattern in the same period.
In addition, the fact that whereas the U.S. experienced very high inflation China’s producer price index has actually been falling since October 2022, combined with China’s low rate of consumer price inflation, is entirely in line with China’s lower than trend rate of growth—indicating both an absence of substantial inflationary pressures and the existence of spare capacity.
Therefore, China’s economy as it enters 2023 is in almost the exact opposite situation in terms of position in the business cycle to the U.S. when it launched its COVID stimulus packages.
These changes in the U.S. and China were therefore both in line with economic theory. They also determine the different situations regarding economic stimulus programs. It is clear that in the short-term China has the economic space to launch a program containing a significant consumer, that is demand side only, stimulus without the likelihood of this creating major inflation. Indeed, a stimulus for consumption is necessary for both economic and political reasons. Politically, the relatively low rate of increase in consumption during the pandemic period, compared to its previous growth rates, means that a rapid short-term increase in consumption will aid the population in recovery from the sacrifices of the three —which saved millions of lives but involved sacrifices in living standards. Economically, consumer industries have been growing more slowly than their historic rate creating negative pressure on them. A stimulus to consumption would therefore greatly aid output in the consumer industries.
A boost to consumption is also particularly appropriate for a stimulus program aimed to have relatively rapid results—as, in general, short-term increases in production in consumer facing industries can be more rapid than in capital goods industries as consumer facing industries, in general, are less capital intensive than investment ones. Therefore, output can be increased in a shorter period without the very high capital expenditures frequently required in investment industries.
In addition, the fact that whereas the U.S. experienced very high inflation China’s producer price index has actually been falling since October 2022, combined with China’s low rate of consumer price inflation, is entirely in line with China’s lower than trend rate of growth—indicating both an absence of substantial inflationary pressures and the existence of spare capacity.
Therefore, China’s economy as it enters 2023 is in almost the exact opposite situation in terms of position in the business cycle to the U.S. when it launched its COVID stimulus packages.
- The U.S. economy was growing above trend when it entered the pandemic and then launched a stimulus package overwhelmingly focused on the demand side—on consumption. As already noted, the result was predictable. With a large increase in demand, and no increase in net fixed investment, that is no increase in the supply of capital, the U.S. suffered extremely high inflation and low growth.
- China entered the pandemic growing below trend and its fixed investment, that is the supply of fixed capital, grew more rapidly than retail sales during the pandemic itself. China experienced more rapid growth than the U.S. and entirely escaped the inflationary wave in the U.S. China’s consumer price inflation in December was 1.8 percent and its peak inflation in that year was 2.8 percent, whereas U.S. consumer price inflation in December was 6.5 percent and its peak inflation during 2022 was 9.1 percent.
These changes in the U.S. and China were therefore both in line with economic theory. They also determine the different situations regarding economic stimulus programs. It is clear that in the short-term China has the economic space to launch a program containing a significant consumer, that is demand side only, stimulus without the likelihood of this creating major inflation. Indeed, a stimulus for consumption is necessary for both economic and political reasons. Politically, the relatively low rate of increase in consumption during the pandemic period, compared to its previous growth rates, means that a rapid short-term increase in consumption will aid the population in recovery from the sacrifices of the three —which saved millions of lives but involved sacrifices in living standards. Economically, consumer industries have been growing more slowly than their historic rate creating negative pressure on them. A stimulus to consumption would therefore greatly aid output in the consumer industries.
A boost to consumption is also particularly appropriate for a stimulus program aimed to have relatively rapid results—as, in general, short-term increases in production in consumer facing industries can be more rapid than in capital goods industries as consumer facing industries, in general, are less capital intensive than investment ones. Therefore, output can be increased in a shorter period without the very high capital expenditures frequently required in investment industries.
The forms of consumer stimulus
Regarding the form of consumer stimulus economic theory and analysis indicates, as already widely discussed in China, that this should aim to minimize the chances of an increase in resources for households being saved rather than spent and should aim to bring forward in time consumption that would occur in any case but at a later date. This includes measures such as price reductions, financed by subsidies that are limited in time, consumer tokens that must be used by a certain date etc. A number of such programs have been launched by Chinese regions. It is not possible by these means to 100 percent prevent “leakage” of such financial flows into saving but nevertheless theoretical issues are in line with the author’s personal experience that the bulk of such measures stimulate consumption and do not leak into saving.
Certainly, the present author does not have personal experiences of economic stimulus in an economy the size of China, but nevertheless his experiences in a very large city economy, London, are relevant. The author was in charge of London’s economic policy from 2000-2008 and London’s economy is larger than that of the majority of European countries—due to its extremely high level of productivity, with it being the only city in Europe that equals U.S. levels of per capita GDP. The author’s experience was entirely in line with the experience of Chinese regions that have launched steps to stimulate short term consumption via marketing, price reductions, coupons, and other steps. The most powerful specific experience of such consumer stimulus programs in London was in 2003 when the city suffered an extremely severe external economic shock due to the consequences of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. This invasion, as with COVID, was an extraneous blow, that is not due to normal economic processes in the business cycle.
London is one of the world’s largest internationally oriented city economies—in particular, one of the world’s most important financial centers and largest travel destinations for both business and tourism, and these form a large part of its economy. Fear of terrorism or military attacks during the Iraq war led to an extremely severe collapse of international, and to a lesser extent domestic, visitors. An indicator of the scale of this was that under this impact of the war the daily price of hotel rooms in London fell by 70-80 percent and those locations which, for branding reasons, refused to reduce their prices suffered 70-80 percent falls in visitors. Visits by domestic visitors also declined due to fear of terrorist attacks. This created serious downward pressure on London’s economy.
To meet this crisis no stimulus package was launched during the war itself, as no price or marketing incentive would lead to people travelling or going to visitor attractions if they believed they might be killed. But a stimulus package was prepared in advance for when the war ended. As soon as that occurred a consumer facing stimulus package was launched by London’s city government essentially similar to that launched by some Chinese regions and cities at the beginning of this year. This consisted of two elements. First, a major marketing campaign, financed by the city government, was launched promoting visitor attractions, restaurants, exhibitions etc. in the city. Second, in an interrelated move, subsidies were launched to allow temporary price reductions to visitor attractions, restaurants, exhibitions etc. In the case of London, the private sector companies involved in this were encouraged to offer temporary price reductions and the city government also gave a subsidy to such companies to make the price reductions still greater.
The results of this consumer facing program were extremely successful. Both international and domestic visitor numbers recovered extremely rapidly boosting economic recovery in the city. It is entirely possible some of this stimulus may have leaked into saving, but overall it is clear that the majority was used for consumption and the overall short term program was successful. Therefore, for both theoretical reasons and those of practical experience the present author is a strong supporter of launching consumer-oriented stimulus packages in the appropriate economic circumstances.
But as already analyzed any such consumer stimulus, that is one purely on the demand side, does not automatically increase supply. Therefore, except in conditions of deep economic depression, with enormous amounts of unused capacity, which does not exist in China at present, a purely consumer, that is demand side, stimulus will, outside of the short term, lead to putting back to use large amounts of spare capacity but only an increase in the supply side, which involves increased fixed investment, can sustain over the medium/long term an increase in production/GDP. Therefore, to judge the strategic effect of any stimulus program it is necessary to constantly measure not only the short-term effects on demand and consumption but also to see if it is producing an increase in investment.
Certainly, the present author does not have personal experiences of economic stimulus in an economy the size of China, but nevertheless his experiences in a very large city economy, London, are relevant. The author was in charge of London’s economic policy from 2000-2008 and London’s economy is larger than that of the majority of European countries—due to its extremely high level of productivity, with it being the only city in Europe that equals U.S. levels of per capita GDP. The author’s experience was entirely in line with the experience of Chinese regions that have launched steps to stimulate short term consumption via marketing, price reductions, coupons, and other steps. The most powerful specific experience of such consumer stimulus programs in London was in 2003 when the city suffered an extremely severe external economic shock due to the consequences of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. This invasion, as with COVID, was an extraneous blow, that is not due to normal economic processes in the business cycle.
London is one of the world’s largest internationally oriented city economies—in particular, one of the world’s most important financial centers and largest travel destinations for both business and tourism, and these form a large part of its economy. Fear of terrorism or military attacks during the Iraq war led to an extremely severe collapse of international, and to a lesser extent domestic, visitors. An indicator of the scale of this was that under this impact of the war the daily price of hotel rooms in London fell by 70-80 percent and those locations which, for branding reasons, refused to reduce their prices suffered 70-80 percent falls in visitors. Visits by domestic visitors also declined due to fear of terrorist attacks. This created serious downward pressure on London’s economy.
To meet this crisis no stimulus package was launched during the war itself, as no price or marketing incentive would lead to people travelling or going to visitor attractions if they believed they might be killed. But a stimulus package was prepared in advance for when the war ended. As soon as that occurred a consumer facing stimulus package was launched by London’s city government essentially similar to that launched by some Chinese regions and cities at the beginning of this year. This consisted of two elements. First, a major marketing campaign, financed by the city government, was launched promoting visitor attractions, restaurants, exhibitions etc. in the city. Second, in an interrelated move, subsidies were launched to allow temporary price reductions to visitor attractions, restaurants, exhibitions etc. In the case of London, the private sector companies involved in this were encouraged to offer temporary price reductions and the city government also gave a subsidy to such companies to make the price reductions still greater.
The results of this consumer facing program were extremely successful. Both international and domestic visitor numbers recovered extremely rapidly boosting economic recovery in the city. It is entirely possible some of this stimulus may have leaked into saving, but overall it is clear that the majority was used for consumption and the overall short term program was successful. Therefore, for both theoretical reasons and those of practical experience the present author is a strong supporter of launching consumer-oriented stimulus packages in the appropriate economic circumstances.
But as already analyzed any such consumer stimulus, that is one purely on the demand side, does not automatically increase supply. Therefore, except in conditions of deep economic depression, with enormous amounts of unused capacity, which does not exist in China at present, a purely consumer, that is demand side, stimulus will, outside of the short term, lead to putting back to use large amounts of spare capacity but only an increase in the supply side, which involves increased fixed investment, can sustain over the medium/long term an increase in production/GDP. Therefore, to judge the strategic effect of any stimulus program it is necessary to constantly measure not only the short-term effects on demand and consumption but also to see if it is producing an increase in investment.
Longer term growth
Although such short-term consumer stimulus programs can be successful at appropriate points in the business cycle, such as exist in China at present, nevertheless, to integrate these with economic strategy, it is simultaneously necessary to bear in mind the fundamental medium/long term economic issues.
First, other things being equal, what is being achieved by such consumer-oriented programs is to change in time when expenditure occurs—for example, this is achieved by a price and/or advertising incentive given for consumers to spend now and not to delay in time expenditure. But while experience shows this can have a significant short-term impact nevertheless over the medium/long term, if nothing else changes, expenditure will remain limited by income. The consumer stimulus may change in time the point at which expenditure takes place, which in some circumstances is extremely economically useful, but by its direct effect it cannot by itself alter the overall expenditure that takes place over time. Long term expenditure is determined by income. If everything else stays the same higher expenditure than normal in the short term will be accompanied by lower expenditure than normal later. Only an increase in income can create, other things being equal, an overall long-term increase in consumption. And such long-term increases in income are determined by economic growth and production.
Second, in anything other than the short term, that is while unused capacity is being put back to work, only an increase in investment, that is in supply, can increase output. If this does not occur then, as with the U.S. stimulus packages, the increase in demand from increased consumption will primarily, or even exclusively, over the medium/longer term produce inflation, not an increase in output.
It is on this point that there is a clear medium/long term issue in China’s economy, and therefore for its strategy, which differs significantly from the short term. While China’s fixed investment has grown more rapidly than consumption during the pandemic this is exclusively due to the extremely sharp fall in consumption’s growth rate—it is not at all due to an increase in the growth rate of fixed asset investment. Figure 14 shows that the annual rate of increase of China’s fixed asset investment in December 2022, at 5.1 percent, was actually slightly slower than the 5.4 percent in December 2019 on the eve of the pandemic.
First, other things being equal, what is being achieved by such consumer-oriented programs is to change in time when expenditure occurs—for example, this is achieved by a price and/or advertising incentive given for consumers to spend now and not to delay in time expenditure. But while experience shows this can have a significant short-term impact nevertheless over the medium/long term, if nothing else changes, expenditure will remain limited by income. The consumer stimulus may change in time the point at which expenditure takes place, which in some circumstances is extremely economically useful, but by its direct effect it cannot by itself alter the overall expenditure that takes place over time. Long term expenditure is determined by income. If everything else stays the same higher expenditure than normal in the short term will be accompanied by lower expenditure than normal later. Only an increase in income can create, other things being equal, an overall long-term increase in consumption. And such long-term increases in income are determined by economic growth and production.
Second, in anything other than the short term, that is while unused capacity is being put back to work, only an increase in investment, that is in supply, can increase output. If this does not occur then, as with the U.S. stimulus packages, the increase in demand from increased consumption will primarily, or even exclusively, over the medium/longer term produce inflation, not an increase in output.
It is on this point that there is a clear medium/long term issue in China’s economy, and therefore for its strategy, which differs significantly from the short term. While China’s fixed investment has grown more rapidly than consumption during the pandemic this is exclusively due to the extremely sharp fall in consumption’s growth rate—it is not at all due to an increase in the growth rate of fixed asset investment. Figure 14 shows that the annual rate of increase of China’s fixed asset investment in December 2022, at 5.1 percent, was actually slightly slower than the 5.4 percent in December 2019 on the eve of the pandemic.
The fall in the proportion of net fixed investment in China’s GDP It is also crucial to note that over the longer term the percentage of fixed investment in China’s GDP, in particular net fixed investment, has fallen very considerably. Figure 15 show that between 2009 and 2020, the latest available internationally comparable data, the share of net fixed investment in China’s economy fell from 26.2 percent of GDP to 16.5 percent of GDP—a huge fall of almost 10 percent of GDP. |  |
It as this point that any theoretical confusion between the economy’s demand and supply sides becomes crucial. If consumption were an input into production, that is into the economy’s supply side, then consumption could compensate for this fall in investment in terms of producing economic growth. But, as already seen, consumption is not an input into production and therefore contributes zero percent of production of GDP. The fall in net fixed investment therefore necessarily leads to fall in the rate of growth of GDP—as shown in Figure 16.
 | The percentage of net fixed investment in China’s GDP peaked in 2009 at 26.2 percent and fell by 2020, the latest available internationally comparable data, to 16.5 percent of GDP. Annual GDP growth peaked slightly earlier at 14.2 percent of GDP in 2007 and by 2020 had fallen to 2.2 percent—this last figure was certainly lowered by the COVID pandemic but the downward trend before this was clear. |
This shift is exactly as would be predicted by economic theory and as factually confirmed by the U.S. experience—other things being equal the lower the percentage of net fixed investment in GDP the lower will be the rate of GDP growth. The correlation between the two is a high 0.74. This is in line with the point that as consumption is not an input into production, into the economy’s supply side, it cannot substitute for, that is, be an alternative source of GDP growth, for investment. The long term, that is strategic, growth of China’s economy depends on investment.
Confusion over the percentage of consumption in GDP and the rate of growth of consumption It is at this point that another theoretical confusion referred to previously comes in, again with exactly the same consequences as in the U.S. This is that loose talk of “increasing consumption” obscures the difference between the two different things of the percentage of consumption in GDP and the rate of growth of consumption. |  |
As already seen in the U.S. these move in exactly the opposite direction—the higher the percentage of consumption in GDP the lower is the growth rate of consumption. This factual finding in the U.S. is in line with economic theory. Figure 17 shows that exactly the same applies in China—as would be expected. Figure 17 shows that, taking a two-year moving average to even out purely short-term fluctuations caused by the pandemic between 2020 and 2021, the latest available data, the percentage of consumption in China’s GDP grew sharply by 5.3 percent of GDP, from 49.5 percent of GDP to 54.8 percent. But accompanying this the growth rate of consumption fell sharply by 5.4 percent of GDP—from 10.1 percent a year to 4.8 percent a year. There was a strong, -0.76, negative correlation between the percentage of consumption in GDP and the rate of growth of consumption. That is, raising the percentage of consumption in China’s GDP led to a slower growth rate of consumption and therefore to a slower rate of growth of Chinese living standards—precisely as with the U.S.
Because the percentage of consumption in GDP and the rate of growth of consumption move in opposite directions it is necessary to clearly strictly distinguish the two. This real relation is confused by unclear formulas of “raising consumption” as this obscures that an increase in the percentage of consumption in GDP will lead to a lower rate of growth of living standards. Therefore, to take the phrase in one recent article, talk of China having historically been “tightening its belt” because of its low percentage of consumption in GDP is highly misleading. It is the high level of investment in China’s economy which has led to a rapid rate of economic growth and therefore a rapid rate of growth of consumption and therefore of China’s living standards. “Loosening the belt,” if by that is meant a higher percentage of consumption in China’s GDP, other things being equal, will lead to a lower rate of growth of consumption and therefore a lower rate of growth in living standards—and therefore, over time, to lower living standards than are possible with a lower percentage of consumption, and higher level of investment, in GDP.
Because the percentage of consumption in GDP and the rate of growth of consumption move in opposite directions it is necessary to clearly strictly distinguish the two. This real relation is confused by unclear formulas of “raising consumption” as this obscures that an increase in the percentage of consumption in GDP will lead to a lower rate of growth of living standards. Therefore, to take the phrase in one recent article, talk of China having historically been “tightening its belt” because of its low percentage of consumption in GDP is highly misleading. It is the high level of investment in China’s economy which has led to a rapid rate of economic growth and therefore a rapid rate of growth of consumption and therefore of China’s living standards. “Loosening the belt,” if by that is meant a higher percentage of consumption in China’s GDP, other things being equal, will lead to a lower rate of growth of consumption and therefore a lower rate of growth in living standards—and therefore, over time, to lower living standards than are possible with a lower percentage of consumption, and higher level of investment, in GDP.
 | Relation of GDP growth a consumption The reason why increasing the percentage of consumption in GDP will lead in China to a slower rate of growth of consumption, and therefore of living standards, precisely as in the U.S., is because of the close correlation of GDP growth with the growth of consumption—as shown in Figure 18. The correlation is 0.76. |
That is if GDP grows slowly so also will consumption. As investment is an input into production, increasing the percentage of consumption in GDP, and therefore lowering the percentage of investment, will lead to slower GDP growth—and therefore lower the rate of increase of consumption and living standards. This fundamental prediction of economic theory is confirmed factually just as much by China as by the U.S.
| Clarity on these issues then allows the interrelation between short term stimulus programs, to deal with the situation in 2023, and longer-term strategic goals to be clearly understood. |  |
A short-term consumer, therefore purely demand side, stimulus is highly desirable in order to put existing unused capacity back to work. But because consumption is not an input into production, and not part of the economy’s supply side, such a stimulus program will not by itself add to the economy’s productive capacity. Therefore, only if this increase in consumer demand leads to an increase in supply, which necessarily includes investment, will it lead to long term growth and therefore achievement of the strategic goals to 2035. The only way to know if this is occurring is to carefully factually monitor the factual situation regarding investment.
In regard to this, certainly various predictions, theoretical or factual, may be made but, as always, in the end “the proof of the pudding is in the eating.” If there is not an increase in investment created by the demand created by the consumer stimulus program, which is precisely what occurred in the U.S., then all that a prolonged consumer stimulus will create, once unused capacity is put back to work, is inflation—again this is what factually occurred in the U.S. and was entirely in line with economic theory. To achieve the strategic goals for 2035, doubling GDP/per capita GDP compared to 2020, which requires a doubling of the economy’s productive capacity, then a very large increase in investment is required. An increase in consumption, because it is not an input into production, will itself create no increase in the economy’s productive capacity—despite the fact consumption is the ultimate goal of economic activity.
Incorrect statements, such as that consumption accounted for 67, or any other, per cent of GDP growth, as sometimes appear in sections of the Chinese media, obscure this reality and helped provide a rationale for damaging programs and results such as were seen in the U.S. in the last period. Investment will account for a large part of the increase in productive capacity which is required to achieve the 2035 strategic goals, consumption necessarily will be zero percent of the increase in productive capacity necessary to achieve the 2035 goals.
Finally. for clarity, these issues, naturally do not mean that even in the short term any initial demand side stimulus should consist wholly of consumption—demand for investment increases overall demand just as much as does consumption demand. But this difference of the demand and supply sides of the economy becomes particularly clear over the medium/long term. Therefore, increase in consumption demand, if unaccompanied by increased investment, can only produce relatively short-term increases in output. An increased in investment, in contrast, because it increases not only demand, but supply can lead to a medium/long increase in output and, therefore achievement of strategic goals.
The strategic goals in the economy, in particular, therefore require an examination of the conditions which will create a sustained increase in investment. That large issue, however, has to be the subject of another article simply for reasons of word length.
In regard to this, certainly various predictions, theoretical or factual, may be made but, as always, in the end “the proof of the pudding is in the eating.” If there is not an increase in investment created by the demand created by the consumer stimulus program, which is precisely what occurred in the U.S., then all that a prolonged consumer stimulus will create, once unused capacity is put back to work, is inflation—again this is what factually occurred in the U.S. and was entirely in line with economic theory. To achieve the strategic goals for 2035, doubling GDP/per capita GDP compared to 2020, which requires a doubling of the economy’s productive capacity, then a very large increase in investment is required. An increase in consumption, because it is not an input into production, will itself create no increase in the economy’s productive capacity—despite the fact consumption is the ultimate goal of economic activity.
Incorrect statements, such as that consumption accounted for 67, or any other, per cent of GDP growth, as sometimes appear in sections of the Chinese media, obscure this reality and helped provide a rationale for damaging programs and results such as were seen in the U.S. in the last period. Investment will account for a large part of the increase in productive capacity which is required to achieve the 2035 strategic goals, consumption necessarily will be zero percent of the increase in productive capacity necessary to achieve the 2035 goals.
Finally. for clarity, these issues, naturally do not mean that even in the short term any initial demand side stimulus should consist wholly of consumption—demand for investment increases overall demand just as much as does consumption demand. But this difference of the demand and supply sides of the economy becomes particularly clear over the medium/long term. Therefore, increase in consumption demand, if unaccompanied by increased investment, can only produce relatively short-term increases in output. An increased in investment, in contrast, because it increases not only demand, but supply can lead to a medium/long increase in output and, therefore achievement of strategic goals.
The strategic goals in the economy, in particular, therefore require an examination of the conditions which will create a sustained increase in investment. That large issue, however, has to be the subject of another article simply for reasons of word length.
Conclusion
To summarize, the present world economic situation, is largely determined by the interrelation between two sets of stimulus measures. The first is the simultaneous inflationary wave and slowdown of production in the main Western economies which is inseparably bound up with the predictable failure of the U.S. stimulus programs launched to deal with the consequences of the COVID pandemic. Clarification of the reasons for this failure, in turn, has crucial lessons both for the short-term stimulus measures China’s economy requires in 2023 and their interrelation with the achievement of the strategic goals for 2035. In particular:
As the present global economic situation is largely defined by the by the extremely negative consequences of the U.S. stimulus programs, which was fully in line with economic theory, clarity on these issues is crucial both for achievement of China’s immediate economic targets in 2023 and the achievement of its strategic goals to 2035.
- As shown, confusion between the economy’s demand side and its supply side is extremely damaging. The facts regarding the results of the U.S. stimulus programs, and the issues involved for China, are entirely in line with both Marxist and serious Western economics. But they also show the dangerous errors of “vulgar” Western economics—errors which unfortunately sometimes appear in parts of China’s media.
- The negative aspects of the Western economies’ situation, the most severe stagflationary problems for forty years, was not caused by the Ukraine war—as this inflationary wave was already taking place long before that war started. It was directly caused by the major errors in the stimulus programs launched by the U.S. Frequently rationalized by the wrong idea that consumption can produce something, that is that it is an input into production, the U.S. launched a massive essentially exclusively consumer based, i.e., demand side only, stimulus. If such a stimulus had been launched when the U.S. had been growing below trend, and had spare capacity, then despite its theoretical confusions this stimulus package might have been effective—the impact of economic measures is determined by their practical content not by their theoretical economic rationale. But instead, this massive demand side only stimulus was launched when the U.S. economy was already growing above trend. The result was entirely predictable—with a huge increase in demand, and no increase in supply, the inevitable consequence was a huge inflationary wave, that is a short-term crisis. This inflation in turn led to sharply contractionary policies, notably steep interest rate rises, to attempt to bring it under control. These contractionary polices in turn slowed the economy—meaning that the stimulus packages were not only a short term but a complete strategic failure.
- China faces a sharply different practical situation. Its economy has been growing significantly below trend. A demand side stimulus will therefore find a situation where there is significant unused capacity. Under those circumstances a consumer stimulus, that is one solely on the demand side, is likely to be effective and necessary. Therefore, based both on considerations of economic theory and of personal practical experience, the present author strongly supports the idea of consumer stimulus as part of any overall stimulus program in China at present.
- A potential danger in China’s situation is of a different type. It is the confusion that appears in some sections of China’s media of repetition of the same confusions as in vulgar Western economic theory—the false idea that consumption is an input in production and therefore that consumption can produce something.
- The damaging practical consequences of this error are clear. A consumer-based stimulus launched in the current conditions of China’s economy, as already analyzed, should lead to a rapid and significant increase in production. But what will happen over the medium/long term will be determined by whether this demand side stimulus is accompanied by an increase in the economy’s supply side—which requires investment. The initial increase in output created by the consumer stimulus should not lead to damagingly high inflation in the short term for the reasons given, but after a certain period of time, exactly how long depends on how much spare capacity there is, unless there is an increase in investment, that is an increase in the supply side, there will either be slow growth, or inflation, or both—as in the U.S.
- The long-term implications for consumption of raising the percentage of consumption in GDP must be clearly understood. Other things being equal, over the medium/long term, the higher the percentage of consumption in GDP, because this lowers the percentage of investment, the lower will be the growth rate of the economy and of consumption. Over a longer period, such as the twelve years to 2035, increasing the percentage of consumption in GDP will lead to a lower level of consumption, and a lower standard of living, than with a higher percentage of investment, and therefore a lower percentage of consumption, in GDP. Those arguing for a higher percentage of consumption in GDP are in fact arguing in favor of a lower living standard by 2035 than would otherwise be the case. This is an inevitable consequence of the fact, demonstrated by economic theory, and confirmed factually by both the U.S. and China, that over anything other than the short term the percentage of consumption in GDP and the growth rate of consumption move in opposite directions—that is, the higher the percentage of consumption in GDP the lower will be the rate of growth of consumption.
- A consumption, that is purely demand side, stimulus is valuable in creating a rapid revival in 2023 by putting unused capacity back to work. But consumption, because it is not an input into production, can constitute nothing, that is precisely zero percent, of the doubling of productive capacity which is required to achieve the strategic goals to 2035. That doubling of productive capacity, however, requires a huge increase in investment. A necessary condition of the achievement of these strategic goals of 2035 is therefore creation of such investment—the conditions for achieving this, solely for reasons of space, requires another substantial article.
As the present global economic situation is largely defined by the by the extremely negative consequences of the U.S. stimulus programs, which was fully in line with economic theory, clarity on these issues is crucial both for achievement of China’s immediate economic targets in 2023 and the achievement of its strategic goals to 2035.
Author
John Ross is a senior fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He was formerly director of economic policy for the mayor of London.
This article was republished from Monthly Review.
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2/23/2023
Midwestern Marx Institute’s Endorsement of the Railroad Workers United Resolution in Support of Public Ownership
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The catastrophic train wreck in East Palestine, Ohio has received national attention. However, the disastrous damage the toxicity of the vinyl chloride has already produced on local’s health, pets, and environment – damages which can extend well over a 100 miles radius – have been a suppressed part of the coverage. This disaster and its effects, undermined by the media, the government, and Norfolk Southern, could have been prevented if the voices and demands of rail workers were heard and acted on. For years the workers at Railroad Workers United (RWU) have warned about the unsafe practices Class One carriers have proliferated in hopes of cutting production costs and thereby increasing their rate of profit. By using longer and heavier trains, an operating model known as “Precision Scheduled Railroading” (PSR), and continuing to petition the Federal Railway Administration for relief from historically necessary inspections, these companies continuously put the lives of workers, customers, and trackside communities at risk.
While rail companies and their shareholders rake in record profits, worker’s jobs are continuously cut and contracted out, leading to grueling schedules and worsening working conditions. Since 2019, twelve unions representing over 100 thousand workers have been fighting for a new contract, one which increases the quality-of-life provisions and overcomes the difficulties the companies’ production cuts have created. After three years of failed negotiations, the Biden administration – which claims to be the most pro-union ever – imposed on workers a contract they democratically voted against, and illegalized their ability to strike.
Railroad workers, whose hands create the infrastructure through which 61 tons of goods are shipped across the country, whose labor is the precondition for modern American life, have seen the fruits of their labor line the pockets of company owners and shareholders with billions of dollars. Meanwhile, this parasitical class of beings prevents workers from having the time off necessary to live decent lives and lobbies the government to the tune of tens of millions a year to represent their interest by enforcing their suppression and exploitation of workers.
The private ownership of rail – an industry so indispensable for society – makes profit, not public good, the sole purpose of its existence. With profit in command, disasters like that which occurred in East Palestine, Ohio will be commonplace, and worker’s rightful and democratic demands will continue to go unheard. Under the existing property relations in rail, expansion and development have become impossible – companies’ profit-oriented management has reached a point where it has become an obstacle in the way of progress.
The solution to hazardous railroad practices, worsening working conditions, and stifled development can be obtained only insofar as the ownership of rail is taken out of private hands which operate for the sake of profits for a few wealthy individuals, and is placed under public ownership and control. The nationalization of rail will bring forth a much-needed rejuvenation in the industry and will allow – for the first time since its temporary nationalization during WWI – for railroads to serve the American people, not employers and shareholders. The Midwestern Marx Institute, therefore, wholeheartedly endorses RWU’s resolution in support of the public ownership and control of rail.
Editorial Board,
Midwestern Marx Institute for Marxist Theory and Political Analysis
While rail companies and their shareholders rake in record profits, worker’s jobs are continuously cut and contracted out, leading to grueling schedules and worsening working conditions. Since 2019, twelve unions representing over 100 thousand workers have been fighting for a new contract, one which increases the quality-of-life provisions and overcomes the difficulties the companies’ production cuts have created. After three years of failed negotiations, the Biden administration – which claims to be the most pro-union ever – imposed on workers a contract they democratically voted against, and illegalized their ability to strike.
Railroad workers, whose hands create the infrastructure through which 61 tons of goods are shipped across the country, whose labor is the precondition for modern American life, have seen the fruits of their labor line the pockets of company owners and shareholders with billions of dollars. Meanwhile, this parasitical class of beings prevents workers from having the time off necessary to live decent lives and lobbies the government to the tune of tens of millions a year to represent their interest by enforcing their suppression and exploitation of workers.
The private ownership of rail – an industry so indispensable for society – makes profit, not public good, the sole purpose of its existence. With profit in command, disasters like that which occurred in East Palestine, Ohio will be commonplace, and worker’s rightful and democratic demands will continue to go unheard. Under the existing property relations in rail, expansion and development have become impossible – companies’ profit-oriented management has reached a point where it has become an obstacle in the way of progress.
The solution to hazardous railroad practices, worsening working conditions, and stifled development can be obtained only insofar as the ownership of rail is taken out of private hands which operate for the sake of profits for a few wealthy individuals, and is placed under public ownership and control. The nationalization of rail will bring forth a much-needed rejuvenation in the industry and will allow – for the first time since its temporary nationalization during WWI – for railroads to serve the American people, not employers and shareholders. The Midwestern Marx Institute, therefore, wholeheartedly endorses RWU’s resolution in support of the public ownership and control of rail.
Editorial Board,
Midwestern Marx Institute for Marxist Theory and Political Analysis
RWU Resolution:
An Open Letter to All Unions, Locals, Lodges, Divisions, Worker Organizations, Environmental Groups, Rail Advocates, Transportation Justice Folks & Others
Dear Friends and Fellow Workers:
In face of the degeneration of the rail system in the last decade, and after more than a decade of discussion and debate on the question, Railroad Workers United (RWU) has taken a position in support of public ownership of the rail system in North America. We ask you to consider doing the same, and announce your organization’s support for rail public ownership.
While the rail industry has been incapable of expansion in the last generation and has become more and more fixated on the Operating Ratio to the detriment of all other metrics of success, Precision Scheduled Railroading (PSR) has escalated this irresponsible trajectory to the detriment of shippers, passengers, commuters, trackside communities, and workers. On-time performance is suffering, and shipper complaints are at all-time highs. Passenger trains are chronically late, commuter services are threatened, and the rail industry is hostile to practically any passenger train expansion. The workforce has been decimated, as jobs have been eliminated, consolidated, and contracted out, ushering in a new previously unheard-of era where workers can neither be recruited nor retained. Locomotive, rail car, and infrastructure maintenance has been cut back. Health and safety has been put at risk. Morale is at an all-time low. The debacle in national contract bargaining last Fall saw the carriers – after decades of record profits and record low Operating Ratios – refusing to make even the slightest concessions to the workers who have made them their riches.
Since the North American private rail industry has shown itself incapable of doing the job, it is time for this invaluable transportation infrastructure – like the other transport modes – to be brought under public ownership. During WWI, the railroads in the U.S. were in fact temporarily placed under public ownership and control. All rail workers of all crafts and unions supported (unsuccessfully) keeping them in public hands once the war ended, and voted overwhelmingly to keep them in public hands. Perhaps it is time once again to put an end to the profiteering, pillaging, and irresponsibility of the Class One carriers. Railroad workers are in a historic position to take the lead and push for a new fresh beginning for a vibrant and expanding, innovative and creative national rail industry to safely, efficiently, and properly handle the nation’s freight and passengers.
Please join us in this historic endeavor. See the adjoining RWU Resolution in Support of Public Ownership of the Railroads, along with a sample Statements from the United Electrical (UE) and the Northern Nevada Central Labor Council. If your organization would like to take a stand for public ownership of the nation’s rail system, please click on the link below, fill out the form and email it in to RWU. We will add your organization to the list! Finally, please forward to others who may be interested in doing the same. Thank you!
In solidarity,
The RWU Committee on Public Ownership
[email protected]
202-798-3327
An Open Letter to All Unions, Locals, Lodges, Divisions, Worker Organizations, Environmental Groups, Rail Advocates, Transportation Justice Folks & Others
Dear Friends and Fellow Workers:
In face of the degeneration of the rail system in the last decade, and after more than a decade of discussion and debate on the question, Railroad Workers United (RWU) has taken a position in support of public ownership of the rail system in North America. We ask you to consider doing the same, and announce your organization’s support for rail public ownership.
While the rail industry has been incapable of expansion in the last generation and has become more and more fixated on the Operating Ratio to the detriment of all other metrics of success, Precision Scheduled Railroading (PSR) has escalated this irresponsible trajectory to the detriment of shippers, passengers, commuters, trackside communities, and workers. On-time performance is suffering, and shipper complaints are at all-time highs. Passenger trains are chronically late, commuter services are threatened, and the rail industry is hostile to practically any passenger train expansion. The workforce has been decimated, as jobs have been eliminated, consolidated, and contracted out, ushering in a new previously unheard-of era where workers can neither be recruited nor retained. Locomotive, rail car, and infrastructure maintenance has been cut back. Health and safety has been put at risk. Morale is at an all-time low. The debacle in national contract bargaining last Fall saw the carriers – after decades of record profits and record low Operating Ratios – refusing to make even the slightest concessions to the workers who have made them their riches.
Since the North American private rail industry has shown itself incapable of doing the job, it is time for this invaluable transportation infrastructure – like the other transport modes – to be brought under public ownership. During WWI, the railroads in the U.S. were in fact temporarily placed under public ownership and control. All rail workers of all crafts and unions supported (unsuccessfully) keeping them in public hands once the war ended, and voted overwhelmingly to keep them in public hands. Perhaps it is time once again to put an end to the profiteering, pillaging, and irresponsibility of the Class One carriers. Railroad workers are in a historic position to take the lead and push for a new fresh beginning for a vibrant and expanding, innovative and creative national rail industry to safely, efficiently, and properly handle the nation’s freight and passengers.
Please join us in this historic endeavor. See the adjoining RWU Resolution in Support of Public Ownership of the Railroads, along with a sample Statements from the United Electrical (UE) and the Northern Nevada Central Labor Council. If your organization would like to take a stand for public ownership of the nation’s rail system, please click on the link below, fill out the form and email it in to RWU. We will add your organization to the list! Finally, please forward to others who may be interested in doing the same. Thank you!
In solidarity,
The RWU Committee on Public Ownership
[email protected]
202-798-3327
2/22/2023
Asking the Oppressed to Be Nonviolent Is an Impossible Standard That Ignores History By: Justin Podur
Read Now
In January 2023, after five police officers killed Tyre Nichols, President Joe Biden quickly issued a statement calling on protesters to stay nonviolent. “As Americans grieve, the Department of Justice conducts its investigation, and state authorities continue their work, I join Tyre’s family in calling for peaceful protest,” said Biden. “Outrage is understandable, but violence is never acceptable. Violence is destructive and against the law. It has no place in peaceful protests seeking justice.”
In June 2022, when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Biden made the same call to protesters. “I call on everyone, no matter how deeply they care about this decision, to keep all protests peaceful. Peaceful, peaceful, peaceful,” Biden said. “No intimidation. Violence is never acceptable. Threats and intimidation are not speech. We must stand against violence in any form, regardless of your rationale.”
It is a curious spectacle to have the head of a state, with all the levers of power, not using that power to solve a problem, but instead offering advice to the powerless about how to protest against him and the broken government system. Biden, however, showed no such reluctance to use those levers of power against protesters. During the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 after the murder of George Floyd, when Biden was a presidential candidate, he made clear what he wanted to happen to those who didn’t heed the call to nonviolence: “We should never let what’s done in a march for equal rights overcome what the reason for the march is. And that’s what these folks are doing. And they should be arrested—found, arrested, and tried.”
In the face of murderous police action, Biden called on protesters to be “peaceful, peaceful, peaceful.” In the face of non-nonviolent protesters, Biden called on police to make sure the protesters were “found, arrested, and tried.”
Are protesters in the United States (and perhaps other countries where U.S. protest culture is particularly strong, like Canada) being held to an impossible standard? In fact, other Western countries don’t seem to make these demands of their protesters—consider Christophe Dettinger, the boxer who punched a group of armored, shielded, and helmeted French riot police until they backed off from beating other protesters during the yellow vest protests in 2019. Dettinger went to jail but became a national hero to some. What would his fate have been in the United States? Most likely, he would have been manhandled on the spot, as graphic footage of U.S. police behavior toward people much smaller and weaker than Dettinger during the 2020 protests would suggest. If he survived the encounter with U.S. police, Dettinger would have faced criticism from within the movement for not using peaceful methods.
There is a paradox here. The United States, the country with nearly 800 military bases across the world, the country that dropped the nuclear bomb on civilian cities, and the country that outspends all its military rivals combined, expects its citizens to adhere to more stringent standards during protests compared to any other country. Staughton and Alice Lynd in the second edition of their book Nonviolence in America, which was released in 1995, wrote that “America has more often been the teacher than the student of the nonviolent ideal.” The Lynds are quoted disapprovingly by anarchist writer Peter Gelderloos in his book How Nonviolence Protects the State, an appeal to nonviolent protesters in the early 2000s who found themselves on the streets with anarchists who didn’t share their commitment to nonviolence. Gelderloos asked for solidarity from the nonviolent activists, begging them not to allow the state to divide the movement into “good protesters” and “bad protesters.” That so-called “antiglobalization” movement faded away in the face of the post-2001 war on terror, so the debate was never really resolved.
For the U.S., the UK, and many of their allies, the debate over political violence goes back perhaps as far as the white pacifists who assured their white brethren, terrified by the Haitian Revolution, which ended in 1804, that abolitionism did not mean encouraging enslaved people to rebel or fight back. While they dreamed of a future without slavery, 19th-century abolitionist pacifists understood, like their countrymen who were the enslavers, that the role of enslaved people was to suffer like good Christians and wait for God’s deliverance rather than to rebel. Although he gradually changed his mind, 19th-century abolitionist and pacifist William Lloyd Garrison initially insisted on nonviolence toward enslavers. Here Garrison is quoted in the late Italian communist Domenico Losurdo’s book Nonviolence: A History Beyond the Myth: “Much as I detest the oppression exercised by the Southern slaveholder, he is a man, sacred before me. He is a man, not to be harmed by my hand nor with my consent.” Besides, he added, “I do not believe that the weapons of liberty ever have been, or ever can be, the weapons of despotism.” As the crisis deepened with the Fugitive Slave Law, Losurdo argued, pacifists like Garrison found it increasingly difficult to call upon enslaved people to turn themselves back to their enslavers without resistance. By 1859, Garrison even found himself unable to condemn abolitionist John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry.
The moral complexities involved in nonviolence in the antiwar movement were acknowledged by linguist, philosopher, and political activist Noam Chomsky in a 1967 debate with political philosopher Hannah Arendt and others. Chomsky, though an advocate for nonviolence himself in the debate, concluded that nonviolence was ultimately a matter of faith:
In June 2022, when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Biden made the same call to protesters. “I call on everyone, no matter how deeply they care about this decision, to keep all protests peaceful. Peaceful, peaceful, peaceful,” Biden said. “No intimidation. Violence is never acceptable. Threats and intimidation are not speech. We must stand against violence in any form, regardless of your rationale.”
It is a curious spectacle to have the head of a state, with all the levers of power, not using that power to solve a problem, but instead offering advice to the powerless about how to protest against him and the broken government system. Biden, however, showed no such reluctance to use those levers of power against protesters. During the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 after the murder of George Floyd, when Biden was a presidential candidate, he made clear what he wanted to happen to those who didn’t heed the call to nonviolence: “We should never let what’s done in a march for equal rights overcome what the reason for the march is. And that’s what these folks are doing. And they should be arrested—found, arrested, and tried.”
In the face of murderous police action, Biden called on protesters to be “peaceful, peaceful, peaceful.” In the face of non-nonviolent protesters, Biden called on police to make sure the protesters were “found, arrested, and tried.”
Are protesters in the United States (and perhaps other countries where U.S. protest culture is particularly strong, like Canada) being held to an impossible standard? In fact, other Western countries don’t seem to make these demands of their protesters—consider Christophe Dettinger, the boxer who punched a group of armored, shielded, and helmeted French riot police until they backed off from beating other protesters during the yellow vest protests in 2019. Dettinger went to jail but became a national hero to some. What would his fate have been in the United States? Most likely, he would have been manhandled on the spot, as graphic footage of U.S. police behavior toward people much smaller and weaker than Dettinger during the 2020 protests would suggest. If he survived the encounter with U.S. police, Dettinger would have faced criticism from within the movement for not using peaceful methods.
There is a paradox here. The United States, the country with nearly 800 military bases across the world, the country that dropped the nuclear bomb on civilian cities, and the country that outspends all its military rivals combined, expects its citizens to adhere to more stringent standards during protests compared to any other country. Staughton and Alice Lynd in the second edition of their book Nonviolence in America, which was released in 1995, wrote that “America has more often been the teacher than the student of the nonviolent ideal.” The Lynds are quoted disapprovingly by anarchist writer Peter Gelderloos in his book How Nonviolence Protects the State, an appeal to nonviolent protesters in the early 2000s who found themselves on the streets with anarchists who didn’t share their commitment to nonviolence. Gelderloos asked for solidarity from the nonviolent activists, begging them not to allow the state to divide the movement into “good protesters” and “bad protesters.” That so-called “antiglobalization” movement faded away in the face of the post-2001 war on terror, so the debate was never really resolved.
For the U.S., the UK, and many of their allies, the debate over political violence goes back perhaps as far as the white pacifists who assured their white brethren, terrified by the Haitian Revolution, which ended in 1804, that abolitionism did not mean encouraging enslaved people to rebel or fight back. While they dreamed of a future without slavery, 19th-century abolitionist pacifists understood, like their countrymen who were the enslavers, that the role of enslaved people was to suffer like good Christians and wait for God’s deliverance rather than to rebel. Although he gradually changed his mind, 19th-century abolitionist and pacifist William Lloyd Garrison initially insisted on nonviolence toward enslavers. Here Garrison is quoted in the late Italian communist Domenico Losurdo’s book Nonviolence: A History Beyond the Myth: “Much as I detest the oppression exercised by the Southern slaveholder, he is a man, sacred before me. He is a man, not to be harmed by my hand nor with my consent.” Besides, he added, “I do not believe that the weapons of liberty ever have been, or ever can be, the weapons of despotism.” As the crisis deepened with the Fugitive Slave Law, Losurdo argued, pacifists like Garrison found it increasingly difficult to call upon enslaved people to turn themselves back to their enslavers without resistance. By 1859, Garrison even found himself unable to condemn abolitionist John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry.
The moral complexities involved in nonviolence in the antiwar movement were acknowledged by linguist, philosopher, and political activist Noam Chomsky in a 1967 debate with political philosopher Hannah Arendt and others. Chomsky, though an advocate for nonviolence himself in the debate, concluded that nonviolence was ultimately a matter of faith:
“The easiest reaction is to say that all violence is abhorrent, that both sides are guilty, and to stand apart retaining one’s moral purity and condemn them both. This is the easiest response and in this case I think it’s also justified. But, for reasons that are pretty complex, there are real arguments also in favor of the Viet Cong terror, arguments that can’t be lightly dismissed, although I don’t think they’re correct. One argument is that this selective terror—killing certain officials and frightening others—tended to save the population from a much more extreme government terror, the continuing terror that exists when a corrupt official can do things that are within his power in the province that he controls.”
“Then there’s also the second type of argument… which I think can’t be abandoned very lightly. It’s a factual question of whether such an act of violence frees the native from his inferiority complex and permits him to enter into political life. I myself would like to believe that it’s not so. Or at the least, I’d like to believe that nonviolent reaction could achieve the same result. But it’s not very easy to present evidence for this; one can only argue for accepting this view on grounds of faith.”
Several writings have sounded the warning that nonviolence doctrine has caused harm to the oppressed. These include Pacifism as Pathology by Ward Churchill, How Nonviolence Protects the State and The Failure of Nonviolence by Peter Gelderloos, Nonviolence: A History Beyond the Myth by Domenico Losurdo, and the two-part series “Change Agent: Gene Sharp’s Neoliberal Nonviolence” by Marcie Smith.
Even the historic victories of nonviolent struggles had a behind-the-scenes armed element. Recent scholarly work has revisited the history of nonviolence in the U.S. civil rights struggle. Key texts include Lance Hill’s The Deacons for Defense, Akinyele Omowale Umoja’s We Will Shoot Back, and Charles E. Cobb Jr.’s This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed. These histories reveal continuous resistance, including armed self-defense, by Black people in the United States.
Even before these recent histories, we have Robert Williams’s remarkable and brief autobiography written in exile, Negroes With Guns. Williams was expelled from the NAACP for saying in 1959: “We must be willing to kill if necessary. We cannot take these people who do us injustice to the court. … In the future we are going to have to try and convict these people on the spot.” He bitterly noted that while “Nonviolent workshops are springing up throughout Black communities [, n]ot a single one has been established in racist white communities to curb the violence of the Ku Klux Klan.”
As they moved around the rural South for their desegregation campaigns, the nonviolent activists of the civil rights movement often found they had—without their asking—armed protection against overzealous police and racist vigilantes: grannies who sat watch on porches at night with rifles on their laps while the nonviolent activists slept; Deacons for Defense who threatened police with a gun battle if they dared turn water hoses on nonviolent students trying to desegregate a swimming pool. Meanwhile, legislative gains made by the nonviolent movement often included the threat or reality of violent riots. In May 1963 in Birmingham, Alabama, for example, after a nonviolent march was crushed, a riot of 3,000 people followed. Eventually a desegregation pact was won on May 10, 1963. One observer argued that “every day of the riots was worth a year of civil rights demonstrations.”
As Lance Hill argues in The Deacons for Defense:
Even the historic victories of nonviolent struggles had a behind-the-scenes armed element. Recent scholarly work has revisited the history of nonviolence in the U.S. civil rights struggle. Key texts include Lance Hill’s The Deacons for Defense, Akinyele Omowale Umoja’s We Will Shoot Back, and Charles E. Cobb Jr.’s This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed. These histories reveal continuous resistance, including armed self-defense, by Black people in the United States.
Even before these recent histories, we have Robert Williams’s remarkable and brief autobiography written in exile, Negroes With Guns. Williams was expelled from the NAACP for saying in 1959: “We must be willing to kill if necessary. We cannot take these people who do us injustice to the court. … In the future we are going to have to try and convict these people on the spot.” He bitterly noted that while “Nonviolent workshops are springing up throughout Black communities [, n]ot a single one has been established in racist white communities to curb the violence of the Ku Klux Klan.”
As they moved around the rural South for their desegregation campaigns, the nonviolent activists of the civil rights movement often found they had—without their asking—armed protection against overzealous police and racist vigilantes: grannies who sat watch on porches at night with rifles on their laps while the nonviolent activists slept; Deacons for Defense who threatened police with a gun battle if they dared turn water hoses on nonviolent students trying to desegregate a swimming pool. Meanwhile, legislative gains made by the nonviolent movement often included the threat or reality of violent riots. In May 1963 in Birmingham, Alabama, for example, after a nonviolent march was crushed, a riot of 3,000 people followed. Eventually a desegregation pact was won on May 10, 1963. One observer argued that “every day of the riots was worth a year of civil rights demonstrations.”
As Lance Hill argues in The Deacons for Defense:
“In the end, segregation yielded to force as much as it did to moral suasion. Violence in the form of street riots and armed self-defense played a fundamental role in uprooting segregation and economic and political discrimination from 1963 to 1965. Only after the threat of black violence emerged did civil rights legislation move to the forefront of the national agenda.”
Biden’s constant calls for nonviolence by protesters while condoning violence by police are asking for the impossible and the ahistorical. In the crucial moments of U.S. history, nonviolence has always yielded to violence.
Author
Justin Podur is a Toronto-based writer and a writing fellow at Globetrotter. You can find him on his website at podur.org and on Twitter @justinpodur. He teaches at York University in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change.
This article was produced by Globetrotter.
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2/22/2023
Michael Lebowitz, Beyond Capital: Marx’s Political Economy Of The Working Class By: Madelaine Moore
Read Now
| My first introduction to Michael Lebowitz’s Beyond Capital: Marx’s Political Economy of the Working Class was through social reproduction theory. Specifically Tithi Bhattacharya’s chapter ‘How not to skip class’ in Social Reproduction Theory uses Lebowitz as a basis for centreing social reproduction and class struggle across the social factory within a Marxist analysis. Reading it six years ago, alone, and at the beginning of my PhD was a very different experience to re-reading it this time with the collective wisdom of the PPE reading group. My notes from 2017 capture my insecurity with the theory but also desire to find a framework from which to build my own theoretical approach to understanding the role of nature and social reproduction within capitalism. |  |
Returning to the text in 2022, its unique take on some old Marxist questions as well as some weaknesses were more apparent. While some of the arguments working in the background to the book are of their time, in particular, the desire to offer a necessary Marxist antidote to the New Social Movement debates of the 1980s/1990s, many of Lebowitz’s arguments continue to press upon critical points in Marxist theory and have since been taken further by social reproduction theorists and others. Beyond Capital, first published in 1992 and then significantly revised in 2004, still offers a refreshing and critical intervention into why capitalism persists despite ongoing crises, and what is revealed when the working class is approached as subject instead of merely the object of capital reproduction and crisis. Underpinning these arguments is the age-old question of how to reconcile subjectivity and revolutionary consciousness with the abstract forces of capitalist reproduction.
Lebowitz bases his argument on the premise that Marx’s Capital was an unfinished project. What is missing, he suggests, is the book on wage labour where Marx would have competed the totality of capitalist reproduction by offering the standpoint of wage labour, through which class subjectivity could be analysed. Yet without this book we are stuck with a one-sided Marxism where only capital is subject. Within this missing book we might find the theoretical foundations to explore how the economic and political are integral to one another, as well as how the intertwined processes of domination, expropriation, and exploitation operate through the living complex human being behind the abstract notion of labour power. Ultimately, Lebowitz is trying to guard against the argument that what drives capital is capital where struggle is an after effect. Although the way he develops his argument, in particular the need to find a perfect mirror or other to existing one-sided categories, can feel forced at times, and certain discussions for example on value and competition remain undeveloped, these are barriers that can (and have) been overcome by others, rather than limitations of the argument itself. Drawing out from the specifics, the overall purpose of Beyond Capital as a treatise against capitalo-centricism, and the steps he takes to get there continue to open up debates in necessary ways.
Exploring the missing book on wage labour, Lebowitz begins with the question of needs, and demonstrates that working class needs, or socially necessary labour time, is socially and historically contingent. This flexibility is what distinguishes us from other animals, in that needs shift according to what is available. As a commodity, labour power is unique in that the price of labour power (our wage) can determine our value. Yet, within capitalism, the only way that workers can satisfy their needs is through wage labour and consumption through the market. Although this is a relatively straightforward argument, it is also the foundation for one of the red threads throughout the book: that there is an integral but contradictory relation between these categories within the totality of capitalism. In simple terms, the worker is both labour power and consumer, and although necessary needs are the result of class struggle, ‘each new need becomes a new link in the golden chain that secures workers to capital’, citing Lebowitz. As such, within capitalism, the capacity for workers to realise their needs relies upon capital as mediator, which is where capital’s power comes from.
Touching on, without fully entering, labour theory of value debates, what is suggested at here is an argument similar to Harry Cleaver on the value of labour for capital. When Lebowitz asks ‘Why, for example, does capital require a definite quantity of labour if the technical composition of capital is rising?’ his answer can be found in the way that new needs are produced and the reproduction of wage labour. For as long as capital remains mediator, what is reproduced – the value of labour for capital – is a relation of dependence. Rather than labour having a value as a definite input to production, the value of labour for capital is the power relation that is reproduced, and conversely according to Lebowitz:
Lebowitz bases his argument on the premise that Marx’s Capital was an unfinished project. What is missing, he suggests, is the book on wage labour where Marx would have competed the totality of capitalist reproduction by offering the standpoint of wage labour, through which class subjectivity could be analysed. Yet without this book we are stuck with a one-sided Marxism where only capital is subject. Within this missing book we might find the theoretical foundations to explore how the economic and political are integral to one another, as well as how the intertwined processes of domination, expropriation, and exploitation operate through the living complex human being behind the abstract notion of labour power. Ultimately, Lebowitz is trying to guard against the argument that what drives capital is capital where struggle is an after effect. Although the way he develops his argument, in particular the need to find a perfect mirror or other to existing one-sided categories, can feel forced at times, and certain discussions for example on value and competition remain undeveloped, these are barriers that can (and have) been overcome by others, rather than limitations of the argument itself. Drawing out from the specifics, the overall purpose of Beyond Capital as a treatise against capitalo-centricism, and the steps he takes to get there continue to open up debates in necessary ways.
Exploring the missing book on wage labour, Lebowitz begins with the question of needs, and demonstrates that working class needs, or socially necessary labour time, is socially and historically contingent. This flexibility is what distinguishes us from other animals, in that needs shift according to what is available. As a commodity, labour power is unique in that the price of labour power (our wage) can determine our value. Yet, within capitalism, the only way that workers can satisfy their needs is through wage labour and consumption through the market. Although this is a relatively straightforward argument, it is also the foundation for one of the red threads throughout the book: that there is an integral but contradictory relation between these categories within the totality of capitalism. In simple terms, the worker is both labour power and consumer, and although necessary needs are the result of class struggle, ‘each new need becomes a new link in the golden chain that secures workers to capital’, citing Lebowitz. As such, within capitalism, the capacity for workers to realise their needs relies upon capital as mediator, which is where capital’s power comes from.
Touching on, without fully entering, labour theory of value debates, what is suggested at here is an argument similar to Harry Cleaver on the value of labour for capital. When Lebowitz asks ‘Why, for example, does capital require a definite quantity of labour if the technical composition of capital is rising?’ his answer can be found in the way that new needs are produced and the reproduction of wage labour. For as long as capital remains mediator, what is reproduced – the value of labour for capital – is a relation of dependence. Rather than labour having a value as a definite input to production, the value of labour for capital is the power relation that is reproduced, and conversely according to Lebowitz:
For the worker, the value of labour-power is both the means of satisfying needs normally realised and the barrier to satisfying more – that is, is simultaneously affirmation and denial.
Thinking in more concrete terms, when wages decrease the quality of labour power may decrease, or when productivity rises the amount of labour needed to produce each product may decrease, but critically the wage relation is still reproduced. Again, gingerly opening a door to fierce feminist debates on unproductive/productive labour, without delving deep into their claims, Lebowitz concludes that ‘What we are presented with is productive labour for capital, labour which serves the need and goal of capital – valorisation,’ where this is made possible because of the reproduction of this relation of dependence.
To re-centre class struggle as a key dynamic rather than after-effect of capitalist reproduction, Lebowitz approaches needs from multiple standpoints, and by doing so demonstrates how needs for labour and needs for capital from these different standpoints are incommensurate. This is reflected in his concept of a political economy of wage labour as the “other” to the political economy of capital. While framed as the counter to capital and reflecting the above tensions, the political economy of wage labour remains within the totality of capitalism. It is not equal in power—even if his graphics seem to suggest some equality – a constant annoyance in the reading group!—and serves a necessary function in the reproduction of the system as whole. What this concept allows us to do is approach the multiple circuits of production and reproduction from different standpoints (here touching on although not referencing feminist standpoint theory as much as Lukács’ approach to proletarian praxis), which centres rather than sidelines working class experience, logics, and needs. As such, unlike some autonomists or feminist interventions, Lebowitz makes a convincing argument that these other circuits are not autonomous from capital but rather operate within the totality and remain mediated by the demands of valorisation.
However, this mediation does not mean that the political economy of wage labour is the same as the political economy of capital. The political economy of wage labour although essential to the reproduction of capitalism as a whole also exceeds it. Put differently, human experience is more than that which is visible on the terms of capital: concrete labour is not commensurate with abstract labour and it is this “extra” or messiness that Lebowitz, alongside many social reproduction theorists, are interested in. The worker is both wage labourer and non-wage labourer and this occurs through the same labouring body. There is—to borrow David McNally’s terms—a unity in difference within the totality, a totality understood here as a methodological premise that points to the way that the economic mediates and colours these other integral parts of the totality in complex and contradictory ways.
To re-centre class struggle as a key dynamic rather than after-effect of capitalist reproduction, Lebowitz approaches needs from multiple standpoints, and by doing so demonstrates how needs for labour and needs for capital from these different standpoints are incommensurate. This is reflected in his concept of a political economy of wage labour as the “other” to the political economy of capital. While framed as the counter to capital and reflecting the above tensions, the political economy of wage labour remains within the totality of capitalism. It is not equal in power—even if his graphics seem to suggest some equality – a constant annoyance in the reading group!—and serves a necessary function in the reproduction of the system as whole. What this concept allows us to do is approach the multiple circuits of production and reproduction from different standpoints (here touching on although not referencing feminist standpoint theory as much as Lukács’ approach to proletarian praxis), which centres rather than sidelines working class experience, logics, and needs. As such, unlike some autonomists or feminist interventions, Lebowitz makes a convincing argument that these other circuits are not autonomous from capital but rather operate within the totality and remain mediated by the demands of valorisation.
However, this mediation does not mean that the political economy of wage labour is the same as the political economy of capital. The political economy of wage labour although essential to the reproduction of capitalism as a whole also exceeds it. Put differently, human experience is more than that which is visible on the terms of capital: concrete labour is not commensurate with abstract labour and it is this “extra” or messiness that Lebowitz, alongside many social reproduction theorists, are interested in. The worker is both wage labourer and non-wage labourer and this occurs through the same labouring body. There is—to borrow David McNally’s terms—a unity in difference within the totality, a totality understood here as a methodological premise that points to the way that the economic mediates and colours these other integral parts of the totality in complex and contradictory ways.
| A key distinction of these different political economies that underpins the broad understanding of class struggle developed by Lebowitz are two currently integral yet contradictory “oughts”: 1) capital’s need for valorisation and 2) the worker’s own need for development alongside the ways in which this can occur through the same spaces, social relations, and bodies. This tension is the starting point for much social reproduction analysis produced since Beyond Capital, as captured by Tithi Bhattacharya’s question: |  |
what are the implications of labour power being produced outside the circuit of commodity production, yet being essential to it?
In looking at the complex and dual role that schools, hospitals, or water services play as sites of social reproduction, workplaces, but also necessary conditions for the reproduction of capitalism as a whole, we can begin to untangle the strategic complexities of class struggle and demands, but also return to Lebowitz’s driving questions – why does capitalism persist? And why is the working class not revolting?
As such, the crisis theory that is put forward is layered, dynamic, and can only be understood fully by approaching crisis from these different standpoints. Making a distinction between limits and barriers where limits tend to be turned into barriers that can be overcome, it becomes clearer how crises are central to the dynamism of capitalism and are more often crises in, rather than of, the system. Again, re-framing common categories through a new lens, Lebowitz argues that M-C-M’ – understood as the need for continuous growth – could be re-framed as growth – barrier – growth where ‘the story of capital within the sphere of production is that of its tendency to drive beyond all barriers.’ Although more implicit rather than explicit, this dovetails with much current debate on primitive accumulation as a necessarily continuous process, and could offer an interesting take on current discussions on de-growth, although neither are pursued in the book. While capital’s dynamism comes from its capacity to transform limits into barriers—creating new sites for accumulation, new needs, and new dependencies—the one limit for Lebowitz that cannot be overcome is that of the working class.
However, like all Lebowitz’s claims and going back to his original question of why the working class—the real limit—is not revolting, the answer is not straightforward. Even if we can analytically approach the working class as a unified subject, this does not mean it sees itself that way. As Lebowitz argues, ‘Once we consider the worker as subject, then the conditions within which workers themselves are produced (and produce themselves) emerge as an obvious part of the explanation for the continued existence of capitalism.’ If we are to take seriously the conditions within which the working class are (re)-produced, it is a subject mediated by structures of exploitation, oppression and domination. Offering a critical counter to more orthodox Marxist analysis of his time and another link to social reproduction theory, Lebowitz demonstrates how race and in particular gender divisions are not secondary struggles, because ‘as long as our subject is capital, it may be appropriate to consider these human beings only in their characteristic as wage-labourer. Yet, as soon as the subject becomes wage labour, it is necessary to consider the other relations in which people exist.’ There are multiple standpoints and strategic barriers within the working class. For example, wage labour for women may weaken patriarchal power relations within the household and could represent a way out of domestic slavery, while the family wage—a core tenet of welfare state policy—might strengthen the power of the male breadwinner model. While such binary terminology is of its time, the implication of this argument is that there is no singular experience of exploitation and that the male blue collar worker and his trade union is not necessarily the singular agent of change. As counter, Lebowitz calls on us to recognise all struggles against capital as the mediator of needs and tackle the separation of workers, or as Bhattacharya suggests against capital in general, as potential class struggles. It is the underlying power of capital as a whole that must be confronted, not only the power of individual bosses or capitalists. Ultimately, we need to go beyond merely economic struggles, and recognise the integral relation between the economic and political. However, how we do this, beyond developing a broad and inclusive understanding of the working class and class struggle that can include the home and neighbourhood, remains largely undefined.
To conclude, Beyond Capital remains an important intervention into Marxist theory and methodology. Lebowitz offers a refreshing take on longstanding questions around capitalism’s durability and the subjectivity of the working class. He opens analytical problems that others, especially social reproduction theorists, have taken further in fruitful ways. While we are left without a clear political strategy, we are given analytical tools to understand the working class as a diverse actor who equally struggles in their workplace, in their home, and in their neighbourhood. Moreover, the process of struggle, although not simple is productive, as through struggle the separation of the working class (the power of capital for Lebowitz) may be overcome and new subjects produced. As he suggests, the process of struggle itself is useful:
As such, the crisis theory that is put forward is layered, dynamic, and can only be understood fully by approaching crisis from these different standpoints. Making a distinction between limits and barriers where limits tend to be turned into barriers that can be overcome, it becomes clearer how crises are central to the dynamism of capitalism and are more often crises in, rather than of, the system. Again, re-framing common categories through a new lens, Lebowitz argues that M-C-M’ – understood as the need for continuous growth – could be re-framed as growth – barrier – growth where ‘the story of capital within the sphere of production is that of its tendency to drive beyond all barriers.’ Although more implicit rather than explicit, this dovetails with much current debate on primitive accumulation as a necessarily continuous process, and could offer an interesting take on current discussions on de-growth, although neither are pursued in the book. While capital’s dynamism comes from its capacity to transform limits into barriers—creating new sites for accumulation, new needs, and new dependencies—the one limit for Lebowitz that cannot be overcome is that of the working class.
However, like all Lebowitz’s claims and going back to his original question of why the working class—the real limit—is not revolting, the answer is not straightforward. Even if we can analytically approach the working class as a unified subject, this does not mean it sees itself that way. As Lebowitz argues, ‘Once we consider the worker as subject, then the conditions within which workers themselves are produced (and produce themselves) emerge as an obvious part of the explanation for the continued existence of capitalism.’ If we are to take seriously the conditions within which the working class are (re)-produced, it is a subject mediated by structures of exploitation, oppression and domination. Offering a critical counter to more orthodox Marxist analysis of his time and another link to social reproduction theory, Lebowitz demonstrates how race and in particular gender divisions are not secondary struggles, because ‘as long as our subject is capital, it may be appropriate to consider these human beings only in their characteristic as wage-labourer. Yet, as soon as the subject becomes wage labour, it is necessary to consider the other relations in which people exist.’ There are multiple standpoints and strategic barriers within the working class. For example, wage labour for women may weaken patriarchal power relations within the household and could represent a way out of domestic slavery, while the family wage—a core tenet of welfare state policy—might strengthen the power of the male breadwinner model. While such binary terminology is of its time, the implication of this argument is that there is no singular experience of exploitation and that the male blue collar worker and his trade union is not necessarily the singular agent of change. As counter, Lebowitz calls on us to recognise all struggles against capital as the mediator of needs and tackle the separation of workers, or as Bhattacharya suggests against capital in general, as potential class struggles. It is the underlying power of capital as a whole that must be confronted, not only the power of individual bosses or capitalists. Ultimately, we need to go beyond merely economic struggles, and recognise the integral relation between the economic and political. However, how we do this, beyond developing a broad and inclusive understanding of the working class and class struggle that can include the home and neighbourhood, remains largely undefined.
To conclude, Beyond Capital remains an important intervention into Marxist theory and methodology. Lebowitz offers a refreshing take on longstanding questions around capitalism’s durability and the subjectivity of the working class. He opens analytical problems that others, especially social reproduction theorists, have taken further in fruitful ways. While we are left without a clear political strategy, we are given analytical tools to understand the working class as a diverse actor who equally struggles in their workplace, in their home, and in their neighbourhood. Moreover, the process of struggle, although not simple is productive, as through struggle the separation of the working class (the power of capital for Lebowitz) may be overcome and new subjects produced. As he suggests, the process of struggle itself is useful:
It is not that the end to patriarchy or racism as such is incompatible with the continuation of capitalism but, rather, that the people who have struggled to end patriarchy and racism may be.
Beyond Capital helps us to understand why capitalism continues to persist despite endless crises, by drawing our attention to the messiness of human beings and the multiple circuits that reproduce capitalism as a complex and contradictory totality.
Author
Madelaine Moore Dr. Madelaine Moore is a post-doctoral researcher at Bielefeld University, Germany. Her research develops a political economy from below by exploring water governance and the emergence of eco-social policies through Marxist and Feminist theory. Her PhD, which explored struggles over the expropriation of water in Australia and Ireland, won the Jörg Huffschmid Award and she was a Rosa Luxemburg Foundation scholar. Her monograph A Time of Reproductive Unrest will be coming out in early 2023 with Manchester University Press in the Progress in Political Economy book series.
This article was republished from Progress in Political Economy.
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No to union repression in South Korea!
On January 18, 2023, the political police of the fascist South Korean regime, the NIS, raided the premises of the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU). An operation of this type has just taken place at the beginning of the week against the premises of the union in Busan. The KCTU union had seen its general secretary Han Sang-gyun sentenced to 5 years in prison and fined 500,000 won in 2016. Just over a month ago, when 25,000 South Korean truckers went on strike to better working conditions and wage increases, far-right president Yoon had threatened the strikers with 3 years in prison and a $22,000 fine if they did not stop the strike.
These offensives against the labor movement are led by new President Yoon Seok-youl, an ultra-fascist anti-Communist who was elected last year on a pro-business platform. His program included measures to intensify the exploitation of the working class, such as the transition to a maximum 69-hour work week or the abolition of the minimum wage. These methods of brutal repression against the labor movement obviously make us think of the various fascist dictatorships that South Korea has known. A reality far removed from the idyllic picture of the “great liberal democracy” sold by our champions of neoliberalism who have never set foot in Korea.
Yoon is also a declared admirer of the dictator Chun Doo-hwan known for his use of torture against trade unionists in the 80s. Yoon justifies his repressions by accusing the KCTU trade unionists of being “pro-North Korea” – the regime's magic pretext against any opponent – which has been illegal since the National Security Act (an anti-Communist law put in place by the fascist and puppet regime of Syngman Rhee) was put in place in 1948. McCarthyist hysteria in South Korea has therefore never stopped, it has only varied in intensity, especially when the democrats alternate with the conservatives nostalgic for the military dictatorship.
Indeed, anti-communism has been a constant since the South Korean regime, put in place by the United States, was created to divide the Korean peninsula and thus to destroy the popular aspirations of the Korean working people to sovereignty, to national independence and the construction of a new socialist society. The former collaborators of Japanese colonialism had been reused to lay the foundations of this new occupation regime, as in West Germany (FRG) where the former Nazis reconverted to democracy after a short passage in holy water had founded the FRG on the orders of Washington.
Recall that the Workers' Party of South Korea (Marxist-Leninist party) was banned by the National Security Act when it was the most influential party (360,000 members in 1947) in the part occupied by U.S. imperialism. Its members were moreover almost all exterminated by the puppet regime of Syngman Rhee and by the American army during the Bodo League massacre in 1950 (about 200,000 dead). Elements that curiously never appear in school textbooks in our country, in the same way as the Indonesian anti-communist genocide.
These offensives against the labor movement are led by new President Yoon Seok-youl, an ultra-fascist anti-Communist who was elected last year on a pro-business platform. His program included measures to intensify the exploitation of the working class, such as the transition to a maximum 69-hour work week or the abolition of the minimum wage. These methods of brutal repression against the labor movement obviously make us think of the various fascist dictatorships that South Korea has known. A reality far removed from the idyllic picture of the “great liberal democracy” sold by our champions of neoliberalism who have never set foot in Korea.
Yoon is also a declared admirer of the dictator Chun Doo-hwan known for his use of torture against trade unionists in the 80s. Yoon justifies his repressions by accusing the KCTU trade unionists of being “pro-North Korea” – the regime's magic pretext against any opponent – which has been illegal since the National Security Act (an anti-Communist law put in place by the fascist and puppet regime of Syngman Rhee) was put in place in 1948. McCarthyist hysteria in South Korea has therefore never stopped, it has only varied in intensity, especially when the democrats alternate with the conservatives nostalgic for the military dictatorship.
Indeed, anti-communism has been a constant since the South Korean regime, put in place by the United States, was created to divide the Korean peninsula and thus to destroy the popular aspirations of the Korean working people to sovereignty, to national independence and the construction of a new socialist society. The former collaborators of Japanese colonialism had been reused to lay the foundations of this new occupation regime, as in West Germany (FRG) where the former Nazis reconverted to democracy after a short passage in holy water had founded the FRG on the orders of Washington.
Recall that the Workers' Party of South Korea (Marxist-Leninist party) was banned by the National Security Act when it was the most influential party (360,000 members in 1947) in the part occupied by U.S. imperialism. Its members were moreover almost all exterminated by the puppet regime of Syngman Rhee and by the American army during the Bodo League massacre in 1950 (about 200,000 dead). Elements that curiously never appear in school textbooks in our country, in the same way as the Indonesian anti-communist genocide.
 | Yoon's election is a boon for U.S. imperialism. Indeed, he will intensify the purchase of arms from the U.S. military-industrial complex, which will delight the big capitalist groups of American gun dealers and promote a line aggressively towards the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) by reversing all the progress made by its democratic predecessor. Remember that this division set up by U.S. imperialism has always been denounced by the DPRK government. |
The historic leader of the People's Korea, Kim Il Sung, notably gave many speeches concerning the prospect of peaceful reunification. Yoon is obviously the man of the Chaebols (Big South Korean capitalist conglomerates) and an ardent supporter of the foolish pursuit of Washington's interests and therefore of maintaining tension with the "enemy" of the North responsible for all the evils of the Earth. . Indeed, in addition to the measures allowing the intensification of the exploitation of the South Korean proletariat, he pardoned the former CEOs of Samsung and Lotte.
The outspoken communist activists of the PRCF and the JRCF call for an outpouring of internationalist solidarity with the persecuted trade unionists in South Korea and more broadly with all the working people of South Korea who are fighting against capitalist exploitation and occupation. brutal attack on the Korean peninsula by the US military. Internationalist solidarity also with the DPRK which continues the construction of socialism despite the criminal economic sanctions and the threats of world war emanating from Washington from Ukraine to the Korean Peninsula via the Taiwan Strait.
Solidarity with South Korean trade unionists!
Stop brutal and criminal economic sanctions against the DPRK!
Down with the occupation of U.S. imperialism and long live Korean reunification!
The outspoken communist activists of the PRCF and the JRCF call for an outpouring of internationalist solidarity with the persecuted trade unionists in South Korea and more broadly with all the working people of South Korea who are fighting against capitalist exploitation and occupation. brutal attack on the Korean peninsula by the US military. Internationalist solidarity also with the DPRK which continues the construction of socialism despite the criminal economic sanctions and the threats of world war emanating from Washington from Ukraine to the Korean Peninsula via the Taiwan Strait.
Solidarity with South Korean trade unionists!
Stop brutal and criminal economic sanctions against the DPRK!
Down with the occupation of U.S. imperialism and long live Korean reunification!
Author
Initiative Communiste
This article was translated and republished from Initiative Communiste.
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Colombian President Gustavo Petro. Photo: Reuters.
This weekend, the president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, described the Peruvian police as “Nazis” for killing their own people.
“In Peru, they stomp their own people, like Nazis, breaking the American Convention on Human Rights,” said the president of Colombia.
In this sense, President Petro demanded that all governments in America, including the United States, apply the American Convention on Human Rights; since “it should not be applied only to leftist governments. Drop your double standards.”
“In Peru, they stomp their own people, like Nazis, breaking the American Convention on Human Rights,” said the president of Colombia.
In this sense, President Petro demanded that all governments in America, including the United States, apply the American Convention on Human Rights; since “it should not be applied only to leftist governments. Drop your double standards.”
El Presidente de Colombia Gustavo Petro contra el silencio de los medios: "La Policía del Perú marcha como nazis contra su propio pueblo, violando la Convención Americana sobre Derechos Humanos"pic.twitter.com/86sLz54FST
— Aníbal Garzón □ (@AnibalGarzon) February 12, 2023
Protests
Since last December, when the protests began, some 69 people have lost their lives, the majority as a result of repressive actions by the police.
Dina Boluarte’s coup regime sent about 10,000 troops into the streets to repress the protesters, who are demanding her resignation, the closure of Congress, and the release of the imprisoned President Pedro Castillo.
In addition, they demand the formation of a Constituent Assembly and justice for those who fell during the protests.
In the violent protests and clashes between demonstrators and the National Police, the press has also been affected due to the constant attacks by security forces. For this reason, both civilians and members of the press have requested international assistance..
Dina Boluarte’s coup regime sent about 10,000 troops into the streets to repress the protesters, who are demanding her resignation, the closure of Congress, and the release of the imprisoned President Pedro Castillo.
In addition, they demand the formation of a Constituent Assembly and justice for those who fell during the protests.
In the violent protests and clashes between demonstrators and the National Police, the press has also been affected due to the constant attacks by security forces. For this reason, both civilians and members of the press have requested international assistance..
Author
Milena Bravo
This article was republished from Orinoco Tribune.
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2/22/2023
Neruda was assassinated with a biological weapon, nephew denounces By: Juan M. Garcia
Read Now
Rodolfo Reyes, a lawyer and nephew of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, charged on Tuesday that the reports from two laboratories in Canada and Denmark confirm the assassination of the Nobel Prizewinner for Literature with a biological weapon.
In an exclusive interview with Prensa Latina, Reyes affirmed that the expert opinion delivered to the Supreme Court ratifies the presence in the remains of the writer and politician of a large amount of the Clostridium botulinum bacterium, which is incompatible with the life of any human being.
The bacterium, whose name is Alaska E43 and is toxic, was injected into Neruda’s body and caused his death, Reyes stressed.
Neruda died at the Santa Maria clinic in this capital, 12 days after Augusto Pinochet’s military coup against the Popular Unity Government of President Salvador Allende, and one day before a scheduled trip to Mexico.
“The cause of his assassination is out in the open. After Allende’s death and the assassination of Victor Jara, the other national icon that was alive was Pablo Neruda,” Reyes stated.
He recalled that the poet had been a candidate for the presidency, a senator, an ambassador, a consul, a member of the Communist Party, so he was a well-known politician, as well as a writer.
President Luis Echeverria had offered Neruda a plane to travel to Mexico, but it was not convenient for the dictatorship for him to leave Chile alive because he had unified many people against Augusto Pinochet, Reyes said.
Asked by Prensa Latina about the coincidence of these revelations on the 50th anniversary of the coup d’état, Reyes noted that this investigation, which began 14 years ago, will show that Neruda did not die of cancer, nor because of his age, but due to a direct intervention of Pinochet’s agents.
“They took his life,” he said.
“For me, as a nephew, it is an agreement to be able to rightly say that Neruda was assassinated, but, on the other hand, I feel very sorry that this great man has suffered the pain caused by poisoning,” he concluded.
The bacterium, whose name is Alaska E43 and is toxic, was injected into Neruda’s body and caused his death, Reyes stressed.
Neruda died at the Santa Maria clinic in this capital, 12 days after Augusto Pinochet’s military coup against the Popular Unity Government of President Salvador Allende, and one day before a scheduled trip to Mexico.
“The cause of his assassination is out in the open. After Allende’s death and the assassination of Victor Jara, the other national icon that was alive was Pablo Neruda,” Reyes stated.
He recalled that the poet had been a candidate for the presidency, a senator, an ambassador, a consul, a member of the Communist Party, so he was a well-known politician, as well as a writer.
President Luis Echeverria had offered Neruda a plane to travel to Mexico, but it was not convenient for the dictatorship for him to leave Chile alive because he had unified many people against Augusto Pinochet, Reyes said.
Asked by Prensa Latina about the coincidence of these revelations on the 50th anniversary of the coup d’état, Reyes noted that this investigation, which began 14 years ago, will show that Neruda did not die of cancer, nor because of his age, but due to a direct intervention of Pinochet’s agents.
“They took his life,” he said.
“For me, as a nephew, it is an agreement to be able to rightly say that Neruda was assassinated, but, on the other hand, I feel very sorry that this great man has suffered the pain caused by poisoning,” he concluded.
Author
Juan M. Garcia
This article was republished from Monthly Review.
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Railroad Workers United (RWU) condemns the dangerous and historically unsafe practices by Class 1 rail carriers that resulted in this catastrophe that will impact the community of East Palestine Ohio for many years, if not forever. The root causes of this wreck are the same ones that have been singled out repeatedly, associated with the hedge fund initiated operating model known as “Precision Scheduled Railroading” (PSR). But risky practices, such as ever longer and heavier trains even precede PSR. The train that wrecked is a case in point, 9300 feet long, 18,000 tons. Other hallmarks of modern day railroading include deep cuts both maintenance and operating employees, poor customer service, deferred maintenance to rolling stock and infrastructure, long working hours and chronic fatigue, limited on-the-job training and high employee turnover.
Norfolk Southern train NS 32N with 150 cars on the manifest, derailed on Feb. 3 at 8:55pm. It consisted of 3 locomotives 141 loads and 9 empties. The train had a crew of 3 at the time of the wreck, consisting of an Engineer, a Conductor and a Conductor Trainee. 20 of its loaded cars were considered Hazmat by the railroad. 10 of those hazmat cars were involved in the 50-car pileup. Of those 10, 5 cars contained Vinyl Chloride, all of which were damaged and/or burned, with one of those leaking by design to relieve explosive pressure.
At this time, the immediate cause of the wreck appears to have been a 19th century style mechanical failure of the axle on one of the cars—an overheated bearing—leading to derailment and then jackknifing tumbling cars. There is no way in the 21st century, save from a combination of incompetence and disregard to public safety, that such a defect should still be threatening our communities.
40% of the weight of NS 32N was grouped at the rear third of the train, which has always been bad practice and made more dangerous with longer heavier trains. This fact almost certainly made the wreck dynamically worse. But increasingly the PSR driven Carriers, driven to cut costs and crew time by any means necessary, cut corners and leave crews and the public at risk.
The crew was able to uncouple the locomotives and move them to safety, preventing an even bigger tragedy. This would not have been possible under the various management schemes now being proposed to operate such trains with single person crews. Further, because Train 32N carried the standard crew of two or more workers, they were able to immediately take the necessary emergency measures to ensure a safe and effective response.
The short-term profit imperative, the so-called “cult of the Operating Ratio”—of NS and the other Class 1 railroads—has made cutting costs, employees, procedures, and resources the top priority. In this case, NS and the other carriers have eliminated many of the critical mechanical positions and locations necessary to guarantee protection against these kinds of failures. Simultaneously, they regularly petition the regulators at the Federal Railway Administration for relief from historically required maintenance and inspections.
The wreck of Train 32N has been years in the making. What other such train wrecks await us remains to be seen. But given the modus operandi of the Class One rail carriers, we can no doubt expect future disasters of this nature.
Norfolk Southern train NS 32N with 150 cars on the manifest, derailed on Feb. 3 at 8:55pm. It consisted of 3 locomotives 141 loads and 9 empties. The train had a crew of 3 at the time of the wreck, consisting of an Engineer, a Conductor and a Conductor Trainee. 20 of its loaded cars were considered Hazmat by the railroad. 10 of those hazmat cars were involved in the 50-car pileup. Of those 10, 5 cars contained Vinyl Chloride, all of which were damaged and/or burned, with one of those leaking by design to relieve explosive pressure.
At this time, the immediate cause of the wreck appears to have been a 19th century style mechanical failure of the axle on one of the cars—an overheated bearing—leading to derailment and then jackknifing tumbling cars. There is no way in the 21st century, save from a combination of incompetence and disregard to public safety, that such a defect should still be threatening our communities.
40% of the weight of NS 32N was grouped at the rear third of the train, which has always been bad practice and made more dangerous with longer heavier trains. This fact almost certainly made the wreck dynamically worse. But increasingly the PSR driven Carriers, driven to cut costs and crew time by any means necessary, cut corners and leave crews and the public at risk.
The crew was able to uncouple the locomotives and move them to safety, preventing an even bigger tragedy. This would not have been possible under the various management schemes now being proposed to operate such trains with single person crews. Further, because Train 32N carried the standard crew of two or more workers, they were able to immediately take the necessary emergency measures to ensure a safe and effective response.
The short-term profit imperative, the so-called “cult of the Operating Ratio”—of NS and the other Class 1 railroads—has made cutting costs, employees, procedures, and resources the top priority. In this case, NS and the other carriers have eliminated many of the critical mechanical positions and locations necessary to guarantee protection against these kinds of failures. Simultaneously, they regularly petition the regulators at the Federal Railway Administration for relief from historically required maintenance and inspections.
The wreck of Train 32N has been years in the making. What other such train wrecks await us remains to be seen. But given the modus operandi of the Class One rail carriers, we can no doubt expect future disasters of this nature.
For More Information, Please Contact:
WASHINGTON, DC—RWU Special Safety Rep Fritz Edler 202-494-3848 [email protected]
LAS VEGAS, NV—RWU General Secretary Jason Doering 202-480-0587 [email protected]
DES MOINES, IA—RWU Co-Chair Ross Grooters 515-689-3229 [email protected]
SPARKS, NV—RWU Co-Chair Gabe Christensen 775-682-0889 [email protected]
RENO, NV—RWU Organizer Ron Kaminkow 608-358-5771 [email protected]
ATLANTA, GA—RWU Treasurer Hugh Sawyer 404-290-1961 [email protected]
POCATELLO, ID—RWU Steering Committee Member Paul Lindsey 208-317-7379 [email protected]
CHICAGO, IL—RWU Newsletter Editor Mark Burrows 773-486-7001 [email protected]
MILWAUKEE, WI—RWU Steering Committee Alternate JP Johnson 406-491-1791 [email protected]
CHICAGO, IL—RWU Member Marilee Taylor 773-405-5246 [email protected]
FORT MADISON, IA—RWU Member Jeff Kurtz 319-470-9990 [email protected]
SPARKS, NV—RWU Member Matt Parker 775-772-3675 [email protected]
TOLEDO, OH—RWU Member Matt Weaver 248-986-6079 [email protected]
BOSTON, MA—RWU Member Nick Wurst 508-335-8633 [email protected]
LAS VEGAS, NV—RWU General Secretary Jason Doering 202-480-0587 [email protected]
DES MOINES, IA—RWU Co-Chair Ross Grooters 515-689-3229 [email protected]
SPARKS, NV—RWU Co-Chair Gabe Christensen 775-682-0889 [email protected]
RENO, NV—RWU Organizer Ron Kaminkow 608-358-5771 [email protected]
ATLANTA, GA—RWU Treasurer Hugh Sawyer 404-290-1961 [email protected]
POCATELLO, ID—RWU Steering Committee Member Paul Lindsey 208-317-7379 [email protected]
CHICAGO, IL—RWU Newsletter Editor Mark Burrows 773-486-7001 [email protected]
MILWAUKEE, WI—RWU Steering Committee Alternate JP Johnson 406-491-1791 [email protected]
CHICAGO, IL—RWU Member Marilee Taylor 773-405-5246 [email protected]
FORT MADISON, IA—RWU Member Jeff Kurtz 319-470-9990 [email protected]
SPARKS, NV—RWU Member Matt Parker 775-772-3675 [email protected]
TOLEDO, OH—RWU Member Matt Weaver 248-986-6079 [email protected]
BOSTON, MA—RWU Member Nick Wurst 508-335-8633 [email protected]
This article was republished from Monthly Review.
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July 2020
TW: Mention of Suicide
In Dave Chappelle’s 2019 special Sticks & Stones, he opens with a joke about Anthony Bourdain taking his own life, despite having the greatest job in the world. He then explains a story about a friend who got into an ivy league school to study law but lost everything after an untimely divorce and now works at Foot Locker. The punchline was that Chappelle’s friend never once thought about taking his own life (despite Chappelle even suggesting it to him). Regardless of the joke’s content or the shock it is meant to provoke, the one thing that is glaringly missing from this bit is its abject lesson: He fails to mention that this is not simply a problem of “no one having a perfect life” but rather that there is nothing at the top to save us.
Stephen “tWitch” Boss took his own life earlier this month. Boss was an actor, TV producer, and all around established celebrity with a growing résumé. Dancing was what brought Boss into the spotlight and propelled him into a short life of stardom. His most notable credit being the DJ and co-host of The Ellen DeGeneres Show.
The outpouring of support for Boss’s family and those suffering among us has been prevalent all over social media. Unfortunately with that support comes several misunderstandings and misrecognitions of what suicide is and suicidality looks like.
For Bourdain, Kate Spade, Jak Knight, Chris Cornell, Don Cornelius (and the list goes on), fame, wealth, and riches offered no escape from the social reality which tries to suppress the things we actually struggle with everyday. Getting to the top, having the “greatest job in the world,” and having financial security are not substitutes for nor relieves us of what our labor costs us (let alone what it doesn’t give back) – what it took to get to the top, what wealth and security really mean for us, etc. The story we are sold about “working hard to succeed,” taking risks, and moving up (corporate) ladders falls apart in the face of these tragedies.
What does having a dream job mean if it cannot save us from ourselves? What does it mean to even have a perfect life? Is it success or is it not “suffering in silence?” And why are these two conflated as one in the same? Does this mean a “quiet mind” is only for the successful? It would appear not with the above examples but there is much more to explore here.
Stephen “tWitch” Boss took his own life earlier this month. Boss was an actor, TV producer, and all around established celebrity with a growing résumé. Dancing was what brought Boss into the spotlight and propelled him into a short life of stardom. His most notable credit being the DJ and co-host of The Ellen DeGeneres Show.
The outpouring of support for Boss’s family and those suffering among us has been prevalent all over social media. Unfortunately with that support comes several misunderstandings and misrecognitions of what suicide is and suicidality looks like.
For Bourdain, Kate Spade, Jak Knight, Chris Cornell, Don Cornelius (and the list goes on), fame, wealth, and riches offered no escape from the social reality which tries to suppress the things we actually struggle with everyday. Getting to the top, having the “greatest job in the world,” and having financial security are not substitutes for nor relieves us of what our labor costs us (let alone what it doesn’t give back) – what it took to get to the top, what wealth and security really mean for us, etc. The story we are sold about “working hard to succeed,” taking risks, and moving up (corporate) ladders falls apart in the face of these tragedies.
What does having a dream job mean if it cannot save us from ourselves? What does it mean to even have a perfect life? Is it success or is it not “suffering in silence?” And why are these two conflated as one in the same? Does this mean a “quiet mind” is only for the successful? It would appear not with the above examples but there is much more to explore here.
It’s a Matter of Worth
Often questions similar to “have you been having thoughts of worthlessness or that you would be better off dead?” pop up in mental health questionnaires or, after a celebrity suicide, we see social media posts saying “if you’re feeling worthless, just know that you matter.” We all seem to understand the idea of worth yet it remains so volatile when we consider it for ourselves. Whether at work or in the eyes of the state or socially, we tend to confront our worth every single day.
For example, if we think of worth in terms of value, a company’s valuation of us is considerably close to Marx’s notion of labor-time. In fact, in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Marx describes the idea of estranged labor as the effort we put into creating commodities which are sold by the companies we work for but remain alien to us the workers. Part of the problem of any job is that, over time, that particular labor is devalued through “deskilling” the labor itself, which means that the job becomes less specialized or falls into the realm of unskilled labor as it becomes more common or less valuable in the market. Because the products we create are estranged from us, it is our labor that is our commodity, and through devaluing labor our value decreases. This is reflected in both our wages and effort. However, what Marx’s notion misses is that
It is not simply that we appear as the current market’s valuation of our labor – i.e. the overall worth of our effort in the market – but determined by (and thus reduced to) how much time a job or company takes from us, sometimes “free of charge” as it were. Whether being asked to come in early or stay late, putting in extra time for longer commutes or public transit, or even going to therapy to ensure we can make it into work, our value – the form of our (marketable, personal) worth – is always less than our wages. Consider how a company’s view of our value directly impacts how much time we will have for the things we personally value outside of work. However, what is missing here but is added later from Marx’s notion of commodity fetishism is that we take our worth to be an external object that exists outside of the market, outside of the complex social interactions of people. Thus we tend to take what happens to our worth all too personally – we internalize the effects of exploitative labor as how we really are.
Talking about one’s worth is rarely a direct conversation. More often than not we talk to one another about our lives or complain about our jobs or voice anxieties over debt; however, even if we may suspect these things tie into one’s view of oneself, the connection is virtual – it feels unreal. In an analogous way, we can view the current ideology of mental health: On the one hand, it’s fair game for celebrities to talk about their (past) struggles with depression, addiction, eating disorders, etc. Because celebrities can openly talk about the antidepressants they’re on, we feel comfortable doing so as well. Depression, stress, and anxiety are no longer intolerable topics to be openly spoken of. On the other hand, current addictions, schizophrenia, borderline personality disorder, and even suicidality are topics meant to be tackled “behind closed doors” and solely with one’s doctor. This leaves one wondering: Is this the destigmatization we were fighting for? We can even go a step further and take note that effects of not (socially, familially, personally) addressing mental illness are often taken as the primary cause of one’s individual state of health – for example, the short-circuit that exists between mental illness and being homeless. Even studies are beginning to show the supposed separation of mental health from mental illness. The connection between so-called mental health and mental illness has become virtual.
We can see this mental health ideology at work in the role of police brutality today. On the side of the coin, we have the phenomenon of suicide-by-cop; and on the other, there is the recent uptick in police murdering “suspects” on mental health calls. What’s most concerning here is that the former acts to close the loop of this rise in deaths at the hands of police, as it is properly the effect of police brutality and the use of excessive force – i.e. someone who is suicidal but doesn’t want to take their own life knows that provoking an officer will result in being shot – but the latter, which once was a “cause” in this cycle – insofar as police are now “aware” that mentally ill individuals they are responding to may be a threat to their lives – now acts as a further effect of the former. This is all to say that the logic has doubled back on itself and, whereas suicide-by-cop was once the active participation of someone wanting to end their life, it is now the justified reason for excessive police force. Making a call to the police for a so-called mental health crisis immediately inflates the moment to expected violence, which ensures there is a “suspect” when they arrive on scene. This perversion of a mentally ill “suspect” into an immanently violent Other has reductive effects on worth as well, especially after the firing has started.
Also, it’s important to note that as more and more cities develop policing alternatives and unarmed response teams for mental health calls, the minimal difference between a police officer or a trained mental health professional responding is when that call is “non-violent.” Although this does reduce the amount of police intervention, the thing that gets overlooked here is the problem of mental health in general: Isn’t there something inherently violent, both subjectively and objectively, in mental health crises? From the subjective standpoint, do mental illnesses not enact some form of violence over our “free” selves, sometimes exploding in public spaces like schools and workplaces? From being suicidal to having homicidal tendencies to major depression to schizophrenia, there is a level of violence that cannot be fully accounted for in language – which is to say there is always some level of violence which can at least appear as externally threatening to another. From the objective point of view, there are at least two major factors to consider here: 1) Mental care is not affordable for (and thus not available to) everyone; and 2) this further obfuscates mental illness by splitting the conversation into violent and non-violent mental health situations, immediately equating “mental illness” to “inherently violent.”
Wages, the overall market value, the reductive worth we extract from our jobs, and even police violence are not all that determines personal worth, though.
For example, if we think of worth in terms of value, a company’s valuation of us is considerably close to Marx’s notion of labor-time. In fact, in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Marx describes the idea of estranged labor as the effort we put into creating commodities which are sold by the companies we work for but remain alien to us the workers. Part of the problem of any job is that, over time, that particular labor is devalued through “deskilling” the labor itself, which means that the job becomes less specialized or falls into the realm of unskilled labor as it becomes more common or less valuable in the market. Because the products we create are estranged from us, it is our labor that is our commodity, and through devaluing labor our value decreases. This is reflected in both our wages and effort. However, what Marx’s notion misses is that
It is not simply that we appear as the current market’s valuation of our labor – i.e. the overall worth of our effort in the market – but determined by (and thus reduced to) how much time a job or company takes from us, sometimes “free of charge” as it were. Whether being asked to come in early or stay late, putting in extra time for longer commutes or public transit, or even going to therapy to ensure we can make it into work, our value – the form of our (marketable, personal) worth – is always less than our wages. Consider how a company’s view of our value directly impacts how much time we will have for the things we personally value outside of work. However, what is missing here but is added later from Marx’s notion of commodity fetishism is that we take our worth to be an external object that exists outside of the market, outside of the complex social interactions of people. Thus we tend to take what happens to our worth all too personally – we internalize the effects of exploitative labor as how we really are.
Talking about one’s worth is rarely a direct conversation. More often than not we talk to one another about our lives or complain about our jobs or voice anxieties over debt; however, even if we may suspect these things tie into one’s view of oneself, the connection is virtual – it feels unreal. In an analogous way, we can view the current ideology of mental health: On the one hand, it’s fair game for celebrities to talk about their (past) struggles with depression, addiction, eating disorders, etc. Because celebrities can openly talk about the antidepressants they’re on, we feel comfortable doing so as well. Depression, stress, and anxiety are no longer intolerable topics to be openly spoken of. On the other hand, current addictions, schizophrenia, borderline personality disorder, and even suicidality are topics meant to be tackled “behind closed doors” and solely with one’s doctor. This leaves one wondering: Is this the destigmatization we were fighting for? We can even go a step further and take note that effects of not (socially, familially, personally) addressing mental illness are often taken as the primary cause of one’s individual state of health – for example, the short-circuit that exists between mental illness and being homeless. Even studies are beginning to show the supposed separation of mental health from mental illness. The connection between so-called mental health and mental illness has become virtual.
We can see this mental health ideology at work in the role of police brutality today. On the side of the coin, we have the phenomenon of suicide-by-cop; and on the other, there is the recent uptick in police murdering “suspects” on mental health calls. What’s most concerning here is that the former acts to close the loop of this rise in deaths at the hands of police, as it is properly the effect of police brutality and the use of excessive force – i.e. someone who is suicidal but doesn’t want to take their own life knows that provoking an officer will result in being shot – but the latter, which once was a “cause” in this cycle – insofar as police are now “aware” that mentally ill individuals they are responding to may be a threat to their lives – now acts as a further effect of the former. This is all to say that the logic has doubled back on itself and, whereas suicide-by-cop was once the active participation of someone wanting to end their life, it is now the justified reason for excessive police force. Making a call to the police for a so-called mental health crisis immediately inflates the moment to expected violence, which ensures there is a “suspect” when they arrive on scene. This perversion of a mentally ill “suspect” into an immanently violent Other has reductive effects on worth as well, especially after the firing has started.
Also, it’s important to note that as more and more cities develop policing alternatives and unarmed response teams for mental health calls, the minimal difference between a police officer or a trained mental health professional responding is when that call is “non-violent.” Although this does reduce the amount of police intervention, the thing that gets overlooked here is the problem of mental health in general: Isn’t there something inherently violent, both subjectively and objectively, in mental health crises? From the subjective standpoint, do mental illnesses not enact some form of violence over our “free” selves, sometimes exploding in public spaces like schools and workplaces? From being suicidal to having homicidal tendencies to major depression to schizophrenia, there is a level of violence that cannot be fully accounted for in language – which is to say there is always some level of violence which can at least appear as externally threatening to another. From the objective point of view, there are at least two major factors to consider here: 1) Mental care is not affordable for (and thus not available to) everyone; and 2) this further obfuscates mental illness by splitting the conversation into violent and non-violent mental health situations, immediately equating “mental illness” to “inherently violent.”
Wages, the overall market value, the reductive worth we extract from our jobs, and even police violence are not all that determines personal worth, though.
The Matter of Mattering
Although we are inundated with messages that we “matter” whenever Suicide Awareness Month rolls around or when someone of some fame takes their own life; the misgiving of such a message is that it takes itself too seriously. That is to say that such messages take on the role of counter-evidence, but what if the evidence for why we think we don’t matter is much more than not hearing that we simply matter? What if the state makes it clear that we matter less because of our skin color or what we’re able to do? What if the real evidence of how much we matter comes from the collective actions and words of those who believe we are deviants, don’t work hard enough, are lazy, are crazy and could snap at any second, etc.?
Such messages that we “matter” are, of course, not meant to be sufficient on their own; however, they are also ideology at its most basic definition, which is precisely the problem to begin with. When we hear claims that “hard work pays off” or “we have no one to blame but ourselves for failure,” we understand them to be ideological arguments that stem from an era of neoliberalism but unmasking these arguments as ideology does not take away their power. In fact, we tend to live by them regardless of whether we believe them or not. Likewise, when racist messages dominate the airwaves, the effects of those messages are not only found in violent outbursts against people, but a reflection of that very violence back into the ideology itself. For example, despite how much trans rights issues are in the national spotlight, the rates of deadly violence tend to still be increasing.
This violence gets reinscribed back into the narrative that already viewed trans people as sick perverts or deviants and now adds that they are expendable objects and that their deaths are part of the normal functioning of society. This adds a paradoxical dimension to the narrative that is both heavily indifferent and participatory. On the one hand, it should come as no surprise that because this violence is handled so indifferently that trans youth have shockingly high rates of suicide and that 82% of trans individuals have considered suicide. On the other hand, trans people experience much higher rates of sexual assault often by those who “officially” hate them – i.e. police, transphobes, etc. Even focusing just on the workplace, trans people are often denied employment or given less visible or back-of-the-house jobs which tend to pay less than their counterparts.
Similarly, this is why Native Americans, Black populations, and the impoverished have some of the highest suicide rates in this country.
If suicide is to be a matter of mattering, then the evidence to the contrary must begin with the social – the effort needs to be a political one, not a personal one. Ideology cannot be subdued by changes to belief but from changes in practice first.
Such messages that we “matter” are, of course, not meant to be sufficient on their own; however, they are also ideology at its most basic definition, which is precisely the problem to begin with. When we hear claims that “hard work pays off” or “we have no one to blame but ourselves for failure,” we understand them to be ideological arguments that stem from an era of neoliberalism but unmasking these arguments as ideology does not take away their power. In fact, we tend to live by them regardless of whether we believe them or not. Likewise, when racist messages dominate the airwaves, the effects of those messages are not only found in violent outbursts against people, but a reflection of that very violence back into the ideology itself. For example, despite how much trans rights issues are in the national spotlight, the rates of deadly violence tend to still be increasing.
This violence gets reinscribed back into the narrative that already viewed trans people as sick perverts or deviants and now adds that they are expendable objects and that their deaths are part of the normal functioning of society. This adds a paradoxical dimension to the narrative that is both heavily indifferent and participatory. On the one hand, it should come as no surprise that because this violence is handled so indifferently that trans youth have shockingly high rates of suicide and that 82% of trans individuals have considered suicide. On the other hand, trans people experience much higher rates of sexual assault often by those who “officially” hate them – i.e. police, transphobes, etc. Even focusing just on the workplace, trans people are often denied employment or given less visible or back-of-the-house jobs which tend to pay less than their counterparts.
Similarly, this is why Native Americans, Black populations, and the impoverished have some of the highest suicide rates in this country.
If suicide is to be a matter of mattering, then the evidence to the contrary must begin with the social – the effort needs to be a political one, not a personal one. Ideology cannot be subdued by changes to belief but from changes in practice first.
Reaching Out vs. Being Reached Out To
Back in 2018, after Bourdain and Spade’s deaths and the expected increase in social media posts imploring those “suffering” to reach out when we’re feeling suicidal, a wave of pushback started to appear: Many started to counter-argue that it wasn’t on us to reach out for help but for others to check-in on us. The practice of checking-in with those who have (if only temporarily) withdrawn socially or are at-risk is becoming very common. However, does this really change the coordinates of our current mental health (or mental care) crisis?
Shifting the responsibility of who is to check-in with who does little more than put us right back at the beginning of the same problem with which we started. The onus is no longer on those “suffering in silence” but on a presupposed (and consistent) healthy Other, who now shoulders the anxiety of impossible questions like “when should I check-in?” and “how often is often enough?” Not only are these “healthier” people just as susceptible to the anxiety, stresses, and even suicidal ideation that we are “suffering” from but this responsibility is already felt by them, even if it’s never spoken.
Consider how common feelings of guilt or being at fault over not having done enough are after someone takes their own life. Also consider how mental health professionals and clinicians have regular meetings with other psychologists to ensure their own health; or how common burnout is for crisis line workers. We also saw something similar during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic when health professional burnout could no longer be hidden and often had suicidal results. Such an examples illustrate how such responsibility – if only the feeling of responsibility – is already inscribed into the problem of suicide and that inverting the role of reaching out/checking-in is not sustainable, not without a complex structure to ensure everyone involved has some sort of therapeutic outlet.
Proper mental care is certainly not available to everyone and this is near the root of the issue to begin with, but the effort of a communal care strategy, for now, ought to be to help those receive proper care that need it instead of acting as a stand-in for it.
Shifting the responsibility of who is to check-in with who does little more than put us right back at the beginning of the same problem with which we started. The onus is no longer on those “suffering in silence” but on a presupposed (and consistent) healthy Other, who now shoulders the anxiety of impossible questions like “when should I check-in?” and “how often is often enough?” Not only are these “healthier” people just as susceptible to the anxiety, stresses, and even suicidal ideation that we are “suffering” from but this responsibility is already felt by them, even if it’s never spoken.
Consider how common feelings of guilt or being at fault over not having done enough are after someone takes their own life. Also consider how mental health professionals and clinicians have regular meetings with other psychologists to ensure their own health; or how common burnout is for crisis line workers. We also saw something similar during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic when health professional burnout could no longer be hidden and often had suicidal results. Such an examples illustrate how such responsibility – if only the feeling of responsibility – is already inscribed into the problem of suicide and that inverting the role of reaching out/checking-in is not sustainable, not without a complex structure to ensure everyone involved has some sort of therapeutic outlet.
Proper mental care is certainly not available to everyone and this is near the root of the issue to begin with, but the effort of a communal care strategy, for now, ought to be to help those receive proper care that need it instead of acting as a stand-in for it.
A Shift in Viewing Suicide
Although it often feels like it when addressing suicide, all is not lost. First, one of the biggest problems for how we talk about suicide is in how we anticipate death. Suicide is something we actively go through. It is the thing that often refers to something we are currently living with or through – i.e. being a survivor of suicide, regretting a suicide attempt, feeling suicidal. “Suicidal” is even an adjective that can only ever apply to something living. Suicide is a living process and not necessarily an end. For this reason, we must reconsider how we tend to fetishize one’s cause of death when we consider suicide. Whether we know of the means to how they took their life or only know their death was a suicide, focusing solely on this cause of death betrays a certain hopelessness we have in the cause(s) for living. This focus on the cause of death effectively reduces life to a single moment frozen in time. Rather than “how did they die?” we need to be asking “what caused them to keep on going?” in order to reimagine suicidality.
Second, the very real phenomenon that is burnout is a point of rupture in the current market system. Burnout has primarily been a problem for those in so-called unskilled roles or less visible jobs, such as lower paid health and in-home care positions; however, it is affecting more and more people across various industries. Companies, HR departments, and managers have no idea how to “fix” or subsume burnout and, what’s more, is that it cannot be covered up like it once was. To truly address burnout would require a radical shift in relations between people. Although burnout tends to affect feelings of hopelessness, it is an important moment that remains open – a wound in capitalist relations that cannot seem to heal itself. Burnout has already proven to be a focal point of organizing throughout history.
It is quite clear that suicide, at the personal level, is not universal. There are several, varied reasons for what brings someone to the end of their rope. This is why it is imperative that we focus on the form of suicide – by this, I mean the precise way we feel worth, how we consume to avoid depression, the costs of treating mental illness, etc. While the headlines that dominate most media outlets read about how younger generations don’t want to work, how another part of the Earth has died, how politically charged hate has erupted in violence, how more money is going to the military instead of toward housing or debt, how more and more public sources of food and water are poisoned, etc. It cannot be a shock to us any longer that suicide rates are increasing, that someone we know is closer to the end than we realize. Unless we begin seeing this as a political problem, suicide will come for all of us in the morning.
It is against this violent background of today which we must take Huey P. Newton’s notion of the revolutionary suicide to heart: “Revolutionary suicide does not mean that I and my comrades have a death wish; it means just the opposite. We have such a strong desire to live with hope and human dignity that existence without them is impossible.”
Second, the very real phenomenon that is burnout is a point of rupture in the current market system. Burnout has primarily been a problem for those in so-called unskilled roles or less visible jobs, such as lower paid health and in-home care positions; however, it is affecting more and more people across various industries. Companies, HR departments, and managers have no idea how to “fix” or subsume burnout and, what’s more, is that it cannot be covered up like it once was. To truly address burnout would require a radical shift in relations between people. Although burnout tends to affect feelings of hopelessness, it is an important moment that remains open – a wound in capitalist relations that cannot seem to heal itself. Burnout has already proven to be a focal point of organizing throughout history.
It is quite clear that suicide, at the personal level, is not universal. There are several, varied reasons for what brings someone to the end of their rope. This is why it is imperative that we focus on the form of suicide – by this, I mean the precise way we feel worth, how we consume to avoid depression, the costs of treating mental illness, etc. While the headlines that dominate most media outlets read about how younger generations don’t want to work, how another part of the Earth has died, how politically charged hate has erupted in violence, how more money is going to the military instead of toward housing or debt, how more and more public sources of food and water are poisoned, etc. It cannot be a shock to us any longer that suicide rates are increasing, that someone we know is closer to the end than we realize. Unless we begin seeing this as a political problem, suicide will come for all of us in the morning.
It is against this violent background of today which we must take Huey P. Newton’s notion of the revolutionary suicide to heart: “Revolutionary suicide does not mean that I and my comrades have a death wish; it means just the opposite. We have such a strong desire to live with hope and human dignity that existence without them is impossible.”
Author
Andrew Wright is an essayist and activist based out of Detroit. He has written and presented on topics such as suicide and mental health, class struggle, gender studies, politics, ideology, and philosophy.
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Joe Oliveira and his coworkers relied greatly on donations of food and gift cards after going on an unfair labor practice strike against multibillion-dollar specialty steelmaker ATI in 2021.
They cut household expenses to the bone, burned through their savings despite the public’s generous support of their cause, and held fundraisers to help one another cover mortgages and car payments during three and a half months on the picket line.
As much as the strike tested workers, however, it pressured ATI even more and ultimately enabled Oliveira and more than 1,300 other members of the United Steelworkers (USW) to secure long-overdue raises and stave off the company’s attempt to gut benefits.
Corporations so fear this kind of worker power that they’re asking the U.S. Supreme Court to rig the scales and help them kill future strikes before they even begin.
Glacier Northwest, a company in the state of Washington, sued the International Brotherhood of Teamsters seeking compensation for ready-mix concrete that went to waste amid a weeklong drivers’ strike in 2017.
The Washington Supreme Court threw out the case, but Glacier Northwest appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, betting a right-wing majority that’s already proven its animosity toward unions would seize the opportunity to kick working people once again.
Corporations anticipate that a ruling in favor of Glacier Northwest will encourage a frenzy of similarly frivolous claims against unions nationwide, bleeding precious resources and eviscerating workers’ right to strike.
The justices held arguments on the case on January 10, 2023, but it’s not known when the court will rule.
“That’s our greatest strength,” said Oliveira, vice president of USW Local 1357 in New Bedford, Massachusetts, pointing out that the right to strike helped working people over many decades win not only fair wages but also retirement security, safer working conditions, and fairness on the job.
“It’s rotten when it comes to that point,” he said. “It’s very hard on families. It’s not any fun. But I think it’s probably the greatest weapon we have in our arsenal.”
And it’s sometimes the only way to force employers like ATI to bargain in good faith.
The USW made progress toward a new contract with ATI before COVID-19 hit in 2020. But when negotiations resumed in 2021, the company demanded unnecessary concessions that not only failed to recognize the sacrifices workers made during the pandemic but also would have compounded the harm ATI inflicted on the union members with a months-long illegal lockout that began in 2015.
“There was absolutely no way we were going to go for that,” recalled Oliveira, noting his coworkers and USW members at several other ATI locations overwhelmingly authorized the strike and then stood strong together until ATI came to its senses and began bargaining in earnest.
The shared struggle brought workers even closer together.
Oliveira could scarcely believe his eyes when striking USW members from ATI locations in Ohio and Pennsylvania showed up unannounced at one of his own local’s fundraisers. They drove hundreds of miles to support their USW family.
And Oliveira recalled how his heart swelled when the president of a large Pennsylvania local—one with hundreds of members—stood up at a meeting and vowed to continue fighting until ATI agreed to job security language that the 60 union members in New Bedford urgently needed.
“He was adamant about that. It was an unbelievable moment for me. Being a small local, it meant a whole lot to us,” explained Oliveira, adding that the New Bedford representatives also “showed our integrity” by going to bat for language that workers in other locations wanted just as much. “I couldn’t be more proud to be a USW member.”
That’s exactly the kind of strength that Glacier Northwest and its pro-corporate allies hope to decimate with a Supreme Court ruling giving companies free rein to try to divide workers and suppress strikes, creating a sword that will hang over every union when its members are left with no choice but to consider striking.
Glacier Northwest failed to make adequate preparations for the strike, leaving it unable to deliver the concrete that remained in drivers’ trucks at the start of the walkout. The company now wants the union to pay for the undelivered concrete—an outrageous demand when the very purpose of a strike is to put economic pressure on unreasonable employers.
When planning a strike, unions often meet with management to discuss an orderly shutdown of operations because the workers, who care about returning to a safe plant when their strike ends, want to avoid damage to the furnaces, smelters, and other equipment where they work.
“If you’re worried about losing product, don’t be a jerk. Sit down with the union,” Oliveira said, stressing that unions strike only as a last resort.
While Glacier Northwest’s suit seeks to punish workers for striking, it’s increasingly common for employers to throw workers into the street with lockouts, refusing to let them do their jobs in an attempt to force concessions.
And Glacier Northwest’s alleged losses pale next to the harm companies intentionally inflict on workers, families, and communities during labor disputes.
After locking out about 1,200 USW members in Massachusetts in 2018, for example, National Grid brought in less experienced managers and scabs to perform the highly dangerous work of maintaining natural gas lines.
Besides depriving workers of their paychecks, National Grid callously cut off their health coverage, leaving families scrambling to care for grievously ill children.
“You’re basically just a number to them,” said one union member, explaining how National Grid ripped away his health insurance shortly after doctors found cancer in his young son’s kidney and lymph nodes.
The option to strike remains as crucial as ever, Oliveira observed, noting that employers are doubling down on union-busting efforts as more and more Americans seek to join unions in the wake of the pandemic.
An adverse decision in this case will be just another weapon that American companies will use to force their workers into less favorable contracts.
“We can’t afford to go backward,” Oliveira said. “We need to go forward. We need more rights, not less.”
They cut household expenses to the bone, burned through their savings despite the public’s generous support of their cause, and held fundraisers to help one another cover mortgages and car payments during three and a half months on the picket line.
As much as the strike tested workers, however, it pressured ATI even more and ultimately enabled Oliveira and more than 1,300 other members of the United Steelworkers (USW) to secure long-overdue raises and stave off the company’s attempt to gut benefits.
Corporations so fear this kind of worker power that they’re asking the U.S. Supreme Court to rig the scales and help them kill future strikes before they even begin.
Glacier Northwest, a company in the state of Washington, sued the International Brotherhood of Teamsters seeking compensation for ready-mix concrete that went to waste amid a weeklong drivers’ strike in 2017.
The Washington Supreme Court threw out the case, but Glacier Northwest appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, betting a right-wing majority that’s already proven its animosity toward unions would seize the opportunity to kick working people once again.
Corporations anticipate that a ruling in favor of Glacier Northwest will encourage a frenzy of similarly frivolous claims against unions nationwide, bleeding precious resources and eviscerating workers’ right to strike.
The justices held arguments on the case on January 10, 2023, but it’s not known when the court will rule.
“That’s our greatest strength,” said Oliveira, vice president of USW Local 1357 in New Bedford, Massachusetts, pointing out that the right to strike helped working people over many decades win not only fair wages but also retirement security, safer working conditions, and fairness on the job.
“It’s rotten when it comes to that point,” he said. “It’s very hard on families. It’s not any fun. But I think it’s probably the greatest weapon we have in our arsenal.”
And it’s sometimes the only way to force employers like ATI to bargain in good faith.
The USW made progress toward a new contract with ATI before COVID-19 hit in 2020. But when negotiations resumed in 2021, the company demanded unnecessary concessions that not only failed to recognize the sacrifices workers made during the pandemic but also would have compounded the harm ATI inflicted on the union members with a months-long illegal lockout that began in 2015.
“There was absolutely no way we were going to go for that,” recalled Oliveira, noting his coworkers and USW members at several other ATI locations overwhelmingly authorized the strike and then stood strong together until ATI came to its senses and began bargaining in earnest.
The shared struggle brought workers even closer together.
Oliveira could scarcely believe his eyes when striking USW members from ATI locations in Ohio and Pennsylvania showed up unannounced at one of his own local’s fundraisers. They drove hundreds of miles to support their USW family.
And Oliveira recalled how his heart swelled when the president of a large Pennsylvania local—one with hundreds of members—stood up at a meeting and vowed to continue fighting until ATI agreed to job security language that the 60 union members in New Bedford urgently needed.
“He was adamant about that. It was an unbelievable moment for me. Being a small local, it meant a whole lot to us,” explained Oliveira, adding that the New Bedford representatives also “showed our integrity” by going to bat for language that workers in other locations wanted just as much. “I couldn’t be more proud to be a USW member.”
That’s exactly the kind of strength that Glacier Northwest and its pro-corporate allies hope to decimate with a Supreme Court ruling giving companies free rein to try to divide workers and suppress strikes, creating a sword that will hang over every union when its members are left with no choice but to consider striking.
Glacier Northwest failed to make adequate preparations for the strike, leaving it unable to deliver the concrete that remained in drivers’ trucks at the start of the walkout. The company now wants the union to pay for the undelivered concrete—an outrageous demand when the very purpose of a strike is to put economic pressure on unreasonable employers.
When planning a strike, unions often meet with management to discuss an orderly shutdown of operations because the workers, who care about returning to a safe plant when their strike ends, want to avoid damage to the furnaces, smelters, and other equipment where they work.
“If you’re worried about losing product, don’t be a jerk. Sit down with the union,” Oliveira said, stressing that unions strike only as a last resort.
While Glacier Northwest’s suit seeks to punish workers for striking, it’s increasingly common for employers to throw workers into the street with lockouts, refusing to let them do their jobs in an attempt to force concessions.
And Glacier Northwest’s alleged losses pale next to the harm companies intentionally inflict on workers, families, and communities during labor disputes.
After locking out about 1,200 USW members in Massachusetts in 2018, for example, National Grid brought in less experienced managers and scabs to perform the highly dangerous work of maintaining natural gas lines.
Besides depriving workers of their paychecks, National Grid callously cut off their health coverage, leaving families scrambling to care for grievously ill children.
“You’re basically just a number to them,” said one union member, explaining how National Grid ripped away his health insurance shortly after doctors found cancer in his young son’s kidney and lymph nodes.
The option to strike remains as crucial as ever, Oliveira observed, noting that employers are doubling down on union-busting efforts as more and more Americans seek to join unions in the wake of the pandemic.
An adverse decision in this case will be just another weapon that American companies will use to force their workers into less favorable contracts.
“We can’t afford to go backward,” Oliveira said. “We need to go forward. We need more rights, not less.”
Author
Tom Conway is the international president of the United Steelworkers Union (USW).
This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute.
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2/18/2023
Chomsky and Prashad: Cuba Is Not a State Sponsor of Terrorism By: Noam Chomsky & Vijay Prashad
Read Now
Cuba, a country of 11 million people, has been under an illegal embargo by the United States government for over six decades.
Despite this embargo, Cuba’s people have been able to transcend the indignities of hunger, ill health, and illiteracy, all three being social plagues that continue to trouble much of the world.
Due to its innovations in health care delivery, for instance, Cuba has been able to send its medical workers to other countries, including during the pandemic, to provide vital assistance. Cuba exports its medical workers, not terrorism.
In the last days of the Trump administration, the U.S. government returned Cuba to its state sponsors of terrorism list.
This was a vindictive act. Trump said it was because Cuba played host to guerrilla groups from Colombia, which was actually part of Cuba’s role as host of the peace talks.
Cuba played a key role in bringing peace in Colombia, a country that has been wracked by a terrible civil war since 1948 that claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. For two years, the Biden administration has maintained Trump’s vindictive policy, one that punishes Cuba not for terrorism but for the promotion of peace.
Biden can remove Cuba from this list with a stroke of his pen. It’s as simple as that. When he was running for the presidency, Biden said he would even reverse the harsher of Trump’s sanctions. But he has not done so. He must do so now.
Despite this embargo, Cuba’s people have been able to transcend the indignities of hunger, ill health, and illiteracy, all three being social plagues that continue to trouble much of the world.
Due to its innovations in health care delivery, for instance, Cuba has been able to send its medical workers to other countries, including during the pandemic, to provide vital assistance. Cuba exports its medical workers, not terrorism.
In the last days of the Trump administration, the U.S. government returned Cuba to its state sponsors of terrorism list.
This was a vindictive act. Trump said it was because Cuba played host to guerrilla groups from Colombia, which was actually part of Cuba’s role as host of the peace talks.
Cuba played a key role in bringing peace in Colombia, a country that has been wracked by a terrible civil war since 1948 that claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. For two years, the Biden administration has maintained Trump’s vindictive policy, one that punishes Cuba not for terrorism but for the promotion of peace.
Biden can remove Cuba from this list with a stroke of his pen. It’s as simple as that. When he was running for the presidency, Biden said he would even reverse the harsher of Trump’s sanctions. But he has not done so. He must do so now.
Author
Noam Chomsky is a linguist, philosopher, and political activist. He is the laureate professor of linguistics at the University of Arizona. His most recent books are Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal: The Political Economy of Saving the Planet and The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power.
Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an 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 books are Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism and (with Noam Chomsky) The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power.
This article was produced by Globetrotter.
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