6/6/2022 There Are Better Ways for Societies to Address Inflation Than by Hiking Interest Rates. By: Richard D. WolffRead NowA deafening silence defines “debates” among U.S. leaders about stopping or slowing today’s inflation. Alternatives to the Federal Reserve’s raising of interest rates and curtailing money supply growth are ignored. It’s as if there were no other ways to rein in price increases except to add more interest costs to the already excess debts of workers and small and medium businesses. Were the last two and a half years of the deadly COVID-19 pandemic plus the economic crash of 2020 not sufficient enough burdens on Americans without piling on the additional burden of inflation that has been imposed by U.S. capitalism? As usual, the profit-driven concerns of big business and their result—a remarkably selective historical amnesia—fuel the silence about alternative anti-inflation policies. So too do the right-wing ideological blinders that now constrict U.S. politics. Yet, policy alternatives always exist, no matter how desperately partisans promoting one policy seek to obliterate debate and discussion of others. The narrow dogmatism of U.S. politics these days is on full display around the issue of an anti-inflation policy focused on raising interest rates. I will present three other anti-inflation policies that do not entail interest rate increases—there are many more—that could and should be part of today’s policy discussions. All have precedents in U.S. history. For the first, we return briefly to World War II. U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration grasped the risk of inflation during this period as the supply of many consumer goods shrank relative to the demand for them. The war effort was diverting many productive resources away from consumer goods and toward munitions and other defense products. Had the government allowed the market to handle the prospective shortage of consumer goods, an inflation of their prices would have resulted. Rich Americans would have bid up the prices of scarce consumer goods, rendering them unaffordable for middle- and lower-income people. That is how markets work. They favor the rich (who return the favor by funding economists and others to promote markets as marvels of “efficiency”). For Roosevelt’s government, the war effort required a national unity that the market threatened to replace with bitterness, envy, and division, pitting the poor and the middle class against the rich. The U.S. government thus substituted rationing for the market mechanism. It printed ration books containing ration stamps and distributed them across the U.S. population. Rationed goods could only be sold to those with ration stamps. No small irony (at least for those familiar with Marxism and socialism) attaches to the following: 1) the U.S. government distributed ration books according to people’s needs, and 2) the U.S. government’s explicit goal was to render the distribution of rationed goods (and especially food) “more fairly” than what the market would have done. Rationing forestalled the looming inflation. It could work equally well now to slow or stop inflation. Another anti-inflation policy, other than raising interest rates, came in August 1971, from Republican President Richard M. Nixon. Responding to serious inflation, Nixon declared a 90-day “wage-price freeze.” He and his advisers knew that U.S. wage and price controls had also been deployed during World War II. Some had even read John Kenneth Galbraith’s 1952 book, A Theory of Price Control, which showed how well such controls had worked during the war. As a result of Nixon’s action, employers on one side and employees on the other were formally denied the right to raise prices or wages, respectively. Any move to the contrary was seen as a criminal act, rendering the perpetrator subject to police arrest. In response to these measures, the inflation shrank, the stock market rose, and Nixon was reelected in 1972. For him, the policy worked. Other countries have also imposed wage-price freezes to similar effects. Each alternative policy to control inflation (raising interest rates included) has its particular strengths and weaknesses, virtues and flaws. Honest discussions of how to respond to inflation would involve comparing the strengths and weaknesses of all—or at least many different—policy options. Honest national leaders would not pretend only one policy exists. That approach—dominant in the United States today—yields both policy mistakes and leads to crucial opportunities being lost. It does, however, serve the interests of those who advocate for that one policy. There is a third alternative policy to controlling inflation as an inherent risk recurringly faced by a private enterprise capitalist system. If profit is the “bottom line,” if the system’s mantra is “charge whatever the market will bear,” and if rewards and punishments follow the rise and fall of profits that depend on prices, we can hardly be surprised when capitalists raise prices. Nor can we be surprised that when they do it, it both provokes and excuses others following suit. Inflation results from private capitalists’ pricing decisions. They are driven chiefly by their private profit calculations; they need not and do not generally take into account those decisions’ larger consequences (social as well as economic) such as inflation. The socialization of private capitalist enterprises is thus another anti-inflation policy. A government, for example, will generally consider the inflationary consequences of any set of price increases. On that basis, it can either limit or reject them. To the extent that the government is held accountable politically for inflation and its effects, it has an incentive to control them. The Fed is, at best, held accountable only indirectly. That helps explain why the Fed has repeatedly failed to prevent or control recessions and inflations across the last century. Of course, such socialization of private capitalist enterprises raises the question of how genuinely democratic the government is. Yet, the degree of genuine democracy the government upholds will influence all alternative anti-inflation policies. Across the United States, insurance, utility, and other public commissions limit private capitalist enterprises’ freedom to raise their prices in the markets they regulate. Private capitalists in such markets cannot raise prices without the permission of those commissions to do so. A government could establish all sorts of commissions in all sorts of markets with criteria for granting or refusing such permissions. Suppose, for example, that some or all food items were socially (democratically) deemed to be basic goods, such that no producer or seller could raise its prices without approval by a federal food commission. Fighting inflation could be among the approval criteria in this case (just as that is a criterion now for the Fed’s monetary policies). In most capitalist economies, the tiny class of employers (perhaps 1 percent of the total population) has enormous powers. That class 1) shapes wage and salary levels of their hired workers, 2) determines the quantities of all purchased inputs and all outputs, and 3) sets outputs’ prices. That tiny class includes many employers who justify their price increases by blaming them on input prices raised by other employers throughout the supply chain. More shrewdly, the employer class’s wiser members refocus blame instead on workers and wages, blaming them for the price increases even when, as now, wage inflation is far lower than price inflation. Of course, commissions to govern prices can be and have been “captured” by the industries they were established to control. Private capitalists have thus been able to weaken, render toothless, or even eliminate controls over them. While that is indeed true of the many state-level utility and insurance commissions, for example, it is no less true of the Fed vis-à-vis the nation’s major banks. Rationing systems and wage-price freezes can likewise be captured. Historically, the price gouging by and corruption of private capitalist industries have led to public demands that their businesses be transferred to government responsibilities. Capitalism’s undiminished profit drive then incentivized the affected industries to “capture” the government bodies charged with controlling them. The solution to that inherent contradiction of capitalism is surely not an endless series of oscillations between private and public control. That is what has failed in the capitalist system. Rather, the alternative solution that beckons is system change, putting all the workers in democratic control of the enterprises (instead of a tiny separate class of employers). A system based on a democratized workplace community interdependent with a democratized residential community offers a much better way to prevent and not merely “manage” inflations and recessions. AuthorRichard D. Wolff is professor of economics emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a visiting professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University, in New York. Wolff’s weekly show, “Economic Update,” is syndicated by more than 100 radio stations and goes to 55 million TV receivers via Free Speech TV. His three recent books with Democracy at Work are The Sickness Is the System: When Capitalism Fails to Save Us From Pandemics or Itself, Understanding Marxism, and Understanding Socialism. This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute. Archives June 2022
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Spring came early to Cuba on January 1st, 1959. Five years and five months of protracted, grueling conflict finally had come to an end, along with Batista’s military rule. The winter of Cuba’s brutal dictatorship had thawed. Not just had the 26th of July movement accomplished the improbable in usurping state power, but they were about to embark on the impossible: permanently existing outside of the United States’ hegemony. They had liberated themselves from Batista, and also from the ever-present system of neocolonialism which had plagued the island nation. The new government had immediately begun to expropriate foreign industry/means of production for the benefit of the poor. This, of course, was the declaration of war needed for America to pursue its policy of isolation and embargo[1]. 60 years on, the world has seen a shift from a bipolar dynamic to a US-led unipole, the projection of the US military across the entire globe and space, its continued growth as the richest country of all time, and still, a free Cuba just 90 miles from its own coastline. David and Goliath, with the exception of Goliath not being vanquished. While certainly a rousing story of an underdog victory, the unfortunate truth is that the United States is actually quite good at destroying revolutionary movements in its sphere of influence. The US’ foreign policy in Latin America is centered on the continued perpetuation of its own economic interests, even if it goes against the popular desires of a given country. That is why it’s subversive. The Cuban system/revolution is handled by the media in such a way as to establish a specific narrative. Media coalesces around this narrative, further entrenching it in the collective American consciousness. The purpose of this article is to explore this narrative and how the media’s handling of Cuba directly relates to foreign policy. Cuban-related media, in the form of music, film, and major news, tends to correlate around a specific narrative. In the United States, this narrative is antagonistic and may be summarized as follows: 1. Cuba is a threat to the American perception of human decency and rights. In fact, they stand opposed to human nature itself. 2. The so-called benefits of the revolution were of poor quality 3. If raw data contradicts the last point (literacy rates, life expectancy, etc.), then there exists an ulterior motive to the benefits. Moreover, whatever that ulterior motive is, it’s so horrendous that the pros don’t outweigh the cons. This is a narrative that has massive ramifications for America’s pursuit of its foreign policy in Latin America. Leftist/anti-imperial movements in Latin America can be easily delegitimized by simply copying-and-pasting a version of the Cuba narrative. Even without this narrative, any attempt on the part of a Latin American country to disengage with American neocolonialism, neo-imperialism, or neoliberalism will be met with violence, as demonstrated repeatedly throughout the region’s modern history. However, with the narrative comes the added ability to manufacture consent at home. Not just will US citizens be in favor of the forceful maintenance of hegemony, there’s even a chance people will volunteer as mercenaries (A la Soldiers of Fortune). At the very least, the narrative maintains a constant pool of terrified applicants willing to join the CIA, FBI, and other repressive organs of subversion to help stop the spread of communism. In reality, they’re doing nothing more than stopping human liberation. Presentation of the Cuban Revolution in American Media: An important note: My goal here is not to explain the mechanisms that allow seemingly independent journalism in the US to display a propagandized image of Cuba. I am simply going to describe this propaganda and its relation to the aims of US’ foreign policy. In the lead up to the 2020 Democratic primaries, Bernie Sanders faced controversy by praising communist Cuba’s literacy program. For context, almost immediately after achieving state power in Cuba, volunteer brigades diligently ventured into the countryside to teach people how to read and write. Cuba’s illiteracy rate plummeted from 23% to around 0%.[2] With economic planning, such a feat was accomplished. Underdevelopment was no longer a valid reason for people to not have access to the human right of education. Almost instantly after Bernie’s comments, major news sources began disseminating articles actively discrediting the literacy program. NBC promptly published an article by Yuri Pérez with the provocative headline: Yes, Bernie Sanders, Castro's literacy program was 'a bad thing.' I was indoctrinated by it.[3] Pérez describes the abject horror of learning the alphabet using “ ‘F’ for ‘Fidel’, the ‘C’ for ‘Castro’ and so on.” He continues to state that while education may seem like a good thing, it was really a tool to brainwash children by the regime. “The construction of the so-called socialist or communist society is a process of anthropological destruction. [To destroy] natural individual interests to pursue the collective goals of the revolution. But it's fundamental to human nature to have individualistic dreams and desires, and that nature is thus violated by the new order that sets government demands”. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what he’s claiming the goal of Cuba’s supposed indoctrination education was. Pérez mostly uses nebulous, lofty notions like “individualistic dreams and desires” and its unfalsifiable connection to “human nature”. Nevertheless, it was published by one of America’s largest news networks for millions who may not be familiar with the massive objective strides this exact system achieved. Concurrently, CNN published its own article in response to Sanders attempting to set the record straight on Cuba’s literacy campaign and education system[4]. While the last article was written as an ‘expert’ opinion (his personal experience in Cuba), it was still an opinion piece. CNN’s was written to sound more technical and balanced. With enough deep raking, one can uncover issues within any large-scale project, no matter how much of a net-good the project may have done. When something is controversial, it’s important to diligently look for the pros and cons. However, there is a difference between “fair and balanced” and cherry-picking for political expediency. As for the CNN article, it seems to be the latter. From the article, “In the years that followed the campaign, the Castro regime built schools in rural areas that hadn't had them before and made education completely free ... Today, while children in Cuba are required to attend school up to ninth grade, all schools are state-run and only offer a pro-government curriculum. Students start the day proclaiming, ‘We will be like Che.’” While this article at least presented the positives, it still went into a digression about the ‘innate indoctrination’ of Cuba’s education system. As the reader, I am left with a sense that Cuban schools are a repressive environment, although that really may not be the case. Students starting the day promising to be like a great national hero, to be a future leader, couldn’t be any more indoctrination than reciting the pledge of allegiance daily in American schools. Yet even the pledge is a relatively insignificant aspect of schooling, and an article detailing the pros and cons of the American school system highlighting that would clearly be cherry-picking and labeled “anti-American propaganda”. It begs the question, is the alleged indoctrination so massive that it must be brought up in an article about Fidel’s literacy campaign? It’s hard to imagine a school system so full of lies that it somehow discounts a totally separate volunteer campaign from the 1960’s. This obvious non-sequitur calls into question the truth of the article's claims. Again, even if the article were simply an exploration of the Cuban education system alone, it's still questionable why that modicum of indoctrination is being discussed when indoctrination is inherent to all country’s education systems, and likely ignored if the country were any but an enemy. Also, writers of CNN status are very aware of the psychology of words: specific word choices can elicit certain desired reactions. This is a simple skill for any professional writer. Using the word regime is one example of this word-choice. Had they used the term government, no connotation would have been left, positive or negative. With all of this in mind, the CNN article has the effect of building upon the Cuban narrative. I implied that bringing up indoctrination when discussing a country’s educational system may be irrelevant. This is because there’s a difference between true indoctrination and re-enforcing political ideals through education. The latter may superficially resemble the former, but it takes an intentional, rhetorical characterization by writers with an agenda. An important goal of any country’s education system is to form good citizens, a belief held by the likes of Eleanor Roosevelt. As such, a complete lack of any propaganda, even simply the personal biases of the teachers, is not realistic, nor even desirable. Teaching children certain political opinions is important, and in general, already done. Teaching children that racism is wrong, fascism is wrong, hurting people is wrong, etc. can be characterized as propagandizing an ideology. Using such language would just sound silly, yet that is exactly how Cuba’s educational system and literacy campaign have been rhetorically characterized by these articles as a part of American news. This creates a narrative which has real, material effects. A little over a week ago, the Governor of my home state established November 7th as “Victims of Communism Day”. Florida is home to many conservative Cubans and DeSantis’ new Memorial Day is highly related to denouncing Cuba specifically. This is foreign policy manifested. A common anti-communist tactic is to claim a moral equivalence between communism and fascism. Fascism is both a means and an end, both of which have caused intentional suffering to millions. Additionally, the end-goal of fascism, itself, is an ugly, violent society. Using fascism as a rubric, communism may be presented as an evil aberration of human ideology whose means are consciously twisted and whose end would be the society seen in 1984. Thanks to the predominance of the anti-Cuba narrative, it is much easier to sell this ‘equivalence’. This is precisely what Ron DeSantis has done with his new day of remembrance, although it's hardly unique. To contrast this narrative with reality, just one week prior to that, Cuba poured into the streets to celebrate May 1st: international worker’s day[5]. Cubans marched, sang, and danced to the drumbeat of worker solidarity and in honor of the Cuban revolution. Thanks to Cuba’s commitment to Marxian planning, their people are able to attain world-class standards of health and education despite being a developing country. To this end, Cuba has a comparable -and possibly higher- life expectancy to the United States itself. For the Cuban mother receiving medical supplies for her ill child, it may seem out of touch to suggest that she is the victim of an aborhhent ideology whose victims must be honored as if she were under a Nazi regime. It is precisely the ideological commitment to achieving the “communist society” which created the conditions for such potent collective goods in Cuba. With regards to a similarly-developed country like the Dominican Republic, there is no state-side clamor about the victims of capitalism beyond the exact voices DeSantis wishes to silence - the anti-capitalists/communists in America. Thanks to the narrative, he can crush these voices on the homefront. There is a way in which the articles I chose directly relate to “Victims of Communism Day”. For my research, I dove into the background of the writer for the NBC article, Yuri Pérez. Pérez holds the position of author within the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation[6], a DC based organization established by an act of Congress[7]. This organization has been criticized for using the incorrect Black Book of Communism statistic of 100 million murdered by communism[8]. Independent journalism is regularly contrasted with “state news”. “State news” being news consumed by a population whose content is purely a reflection of the state’s interests: a direct pipeline. As for the article written by Pérez, the reality becomes concerning. Pérez is an author for a quasi-US governmental organization that propagandizes against communism and has a history of misrepresenting facts (leveraging the Black Book of Communism). He then wrote for one of America’s largest news corporations. This is a dangerous pipeline, as it essentially allows the talking heads of foreign policy to dictate articles as if it were unbiased, independent journalism. All the while maintaining the false presentation of independent journalism. Through the work of Pérez’s organization, Ron DeSantis has given Floridians a day to remember the ‘victims of communism’. This will include mandatory grade-school education on the ‘dark truth of communism’. Ironically, propaganda in Cuban education was unpalatable for Pérez, yet this is a win for his group. When it comes to foreign policy, an important component is the manufacturing of narratives on the homefront to discredit our enemies. Despite Cuba representing a successful model for increasing healthcare, education, and ending US hegemony on their turf by nationalizing businesses (which, in turn, supports the first two), it would be irresponsible for the US to not campaign against it. With such campaigning, if another Latin American country decided to implement anything resembling Cuba’s model, there would be no shortage of America-side support for destroying it. One needs to look no further than a 20th century history book of Latin America. Especially countries like Chile, Guatemala and Nicaragua. Nicaragua, in particular, aimed to nationalize certain industries with the goal of funding social programs and empower the people of a peripheral nation to the United States’ hegemony. Without even declaring themselves communist or Marxists, the Sandinistas and their rational plans were disparaged in the United States. American news had already shown just how “evil” Cuba’s system was. It thus took little maneuvering on Reagan’s part to claim the Sandinistas were clearly aiming to build the kind of ‘autocratic, totalitarian, scariness’ seen in Cuba. Nor did it take much convincing to promote paramilitary death squads as “freedom fighters”. The result was the death of thousands of innocent people in Nicaragua and the beginning of the alliance between the CIA, Nicaragua fascists, and the crack epidemic in US inner cities.[9] A Postscript: Presentation of Cuba in Foreign Media:In analyzing the relationship between American news on Cuba with its subversive foreign policy in Latin America, it is important to compare how other countries view the island nation. The narrative of “Cuba=evil” is so ubiquitous in American society that it can be hard to forget that rational praise of Cuba isn’t unheard of in other countries. Even Bernie’s comments are by no means radical. After Fidel Castro’s death, Justin Trudeau extended his condolences to the Cuban people. He said, “It is with deep sorrow that I learned today of the death of Cuba’s longest serving President. Fidel Castro was a larger than life leader who served his people for almost half a century. A legendary revolutionary and orator, Mr. Castro made significant improvements to the education and healthcare of his island nation. While a controversial figure, both Mr. Castro’s supporters and detractors recognized his tremendous dedication and love for the Cuban people who had a deep and lasting affection for ‘el Comandante’.” [10] What is consistently sold domestically as a failed state whose repression knows no bounds, Cuba’s revolution has been seen as a source of hope for many throughout Latin America. Che Guevara has been this symbol specifically, representing the summation of that hope for a better, leftist future - A future of liberation. Che’s iconography is arguably even stronger than Cuba’s own. Even in America, wearing a Che shirt doesn’t cause much issue. This is despite the fact that wearing a Fidel shirt would almost certainly offend someone. However, respect for Che is palpable among many people throughout Latin America. This is reflected in their art. 2004’s The Motorcycle Diaries portrayed an intimate look into the experience which first radicalized Che[11]. This movie doesn’t show him as a wartime hero, but rather a politically misinformed young person who gains political consciousness. Seeing the abject suffering of indigenous people was a deep shock that forced him to re-evaluate his entire life. So much so, that he dropped everything to become the famous revolutionary. By centering the movie around this specific part of his life, the viewer can relate to Che and leave the theater questioning what cognitive dissonances they might be suppressing. The movie leaves you feeling inspired by Che, too. Che: I want to be useful, somehow. Silvia: You're wasting your time. Che: Why? Silvia: Life is pain. Che: Yeah, it's pretty screwed up. You gotta fight for every breath and tell death to go to hell.[12] From an American perspective, I could imagine how some would find this movie ‘propagandic’ because of the gulf between the way our societies deal with the Cuban revolution. Clearly, in other parts of the world, one doesn’t even have to be a socialist to agree with elements of the Cuban system or with the heroic resolve of Che. There is simply too much state-sponsored rhetoric in the United States to allow us the same privilege. Finally, I chose this movie to represent the artistic view of the Cuban revolution for two reasons. Che, as an icon, conveniently represents “Cuba” and with a Brazilian director, Argentine actors, Puerto Rican and Argentine-Cuban writers, and substantial funding from Peruvian and Chilean producers, there is no doubt about it. This is a thoroughly Latino movie. Non-negative displays of Cuba are difficult to show in the United States; an issue that faced the 2008 movie Che when attempted to be shown in Miami. This leaves to be perhaps the most famous depiction of Cuba in mainstream American film: Red Dawn. Cuba is shown as one of the main invading forces, subjugating and killing innocent Americans. Forcing children to take up arms in self-defense, and so on[13]. This is a massive departure to the positive, humanistic representation in The Motorcycle Diaries. This is merely an example of the United States’ media enforcing a narrative of resentment and fear for the small, developing country. Not just in the news, but strategically reinforced in the art we consume. To add more out-of-touch narrative manufacturing, Nicaraguan troops are also present in Red Dawn. Inexplicably, they joined the Soviet invasion of the US. This is despite the fact that the Sandinistas never declared themselves communists, were not really an ally of the Soviets beyond accepting aid (which they had from the United States as well), and the only wanton death was happening in its own territory in real life thanks to US-sponsored paramilitary groups. Perhaps, that could be taken as a sign that 1980’s Nicaragua was on the right track for dismantling hegemony if the media was actively elevating them to the level of Cuba. [1] Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 (22 U.S.C. 2370(a)(1)-(a)(2)) https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCODE-2010-title22/html/USCODE-2010-title22-chap32-subchapIII-partI-sec2370.htm, §2370.E for retaliation of expropriation [2] A. Lorenzetto and K. Neys “Methods and Means Utilized in Cuba to Eliminate Illiteracy: UNESCO Report.” UNESCO (1971) [3] Yuri Pérez,”Yes, Bernie Sanders, Castro’s Literacy Program was ‘a bad thing’” NBC (Feb. 28, 2020) [4] Nicole Gaouette and Patrick Oppmann, “What the Cuban literacy program Bernie Sanders praised was actually about” CNN (Feb 25, 2020) [5] “Cuba Celebrates International Workers’ Day With Mass Marches” teleSUR English (May 1, 2022) [6] https://victimsofcommunism.org/author/yuri/ Yuri’s author’s page. [7] Jonathan Rauch "The Forgotten Millions". The Atlantic. (December 2003) [8] Kristen Ghodsee and Scott Sehon "The merits of taking an anti-anti-communism stance". Aeon. (March 22, 2018) [9] Gary Webb “Dark Alliance: The CIA, The Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion.” Seven Stories Press. 1998 [10] Justin Trudeau, “Statement by the Prime Minister of Canada on the death of former Cuban President Fidel Castro” (Nov 26, 2016) https://pm.gc.ca/en/news/statements/2016/11/26/statement-prime-minister-canada-death-former-cuban-president-fidel [11] Salles, Walter, director. “The Motorcycle Diaries”. Buena Vista International, 2004. 126 minutes. [12] Salles, Walter, director. “The Motorcycle Diaries”. Buena Vista International, 2004. 126 minutes. [13] Milius, John, director. “Red Dawn”. MGM/UA Entertainment Company, 1984. 114 minutes. AuthorMy name is Jesse Jose Hernandez-Werbow. I am a Puerto Rican-american college student and a member of the PSL. A bit about my beliefs: I believe that the study of history is too unscientific and relies on rhetorical characterizations more often-than-not. The only proper way to understand history is through a clear, scientific methodology. This methodology was developed by Marx and utilized by some of the greatest philosophers since him. Further, Marx, Lenin, and Stalin developed scientific methodologies for all sorts of topics, including the science of revolution, the science of socialism/Marxian economics, and the study of imperialism: the greatest real-world contradiction. Through these methodologies, we can better understand the world around us and how to improve it. Archives June 2022 Next year marks the 120th anniversary of the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party. This was the famous Congress where the split between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks took place. Lenin’s ideas, of course, won out at this Congress, and he was supported by a man who was considered the “Father of Russian Marxism” and the founder of the first Russian Marxist group, The Liberation of Labor (1883). This was Georgii Valentinovich Plekhanov. Although Plekhanov later switched to the Mensheviks, Lenin still found him to be an ally on many issues — at least until 1914 when, like so many others, he ended up supporting the war. The passionate politics of those years now adorn the pages of history books and live on in the unending debates and fulminations of the ultra-left “Marxist” sects which dot the university campuses of Western Europe and the United States. We have little interest in Plekhanov as a political leader today, but his theoretical grasp of Marxism as a philosophy of liberation is practically unequaled. Along with Marx, Engels and Lenin, Plekhanov stands as one of the greatest teachers of Marxist theory produced by the working class movement. The term often used to characterize Marxism as a philosophy -- Dialectical Materialism — was first used by Plekhanov in 1891(it was coined earlier, however, by Joseph Dietzgen,1828-1888) . And Lenin said of his works: “You cannot hope to become a real, intelligent Communist without making a study — of all of Plekhanov’s philosophical writings because nothing better has been written on Marxism anywhere in the world.” Well over a century later this judgment can still stand. Plekhanov’s works stand, along with the great classics of Marx and Engels, as some of the clearest, most popular, and easiest to read introductions to the philosophy of human liberation. Some of Plekhanov’s most accessible works are Essays in theHistory of Materialism, The Monist View of History, Fundamental Problems of Marxism, The Materialist Conception of History, Art and Social Life and the essays “The Role of the Individual in History”and “For the Sixtieth Anniversary of Hegel’s Death.” The Hegel article is short and an excellent introduction. Here are a few of Plekhanov’s formulations of Marxism that have become well known even if their origins in his works have not. He wrote, “the appearance of Marx’s materialist philosophy was a genuine revolution, the greatest revolution in the history of human thought.” This shows great party spirit, but Darwinists might want to claim at least equal status (not to mention Copernicus). Marxism is a unified worldview. Can we graft other notions onto it, or drop parts we dislike? Can we have “Christian Marxism” or “Existential Marxism” and so forth? Plekhanov thinks not. There are no “best” and “worse” ideas of Marxism. He maintained “all aspects of the Marxist worldview are linked together in the closest way … and therefore one cannot arbitrarily eliminate one of them and replace it with a set of ideas equally arbitrary drawn from a completely different worldview.” Plekhanov also characterizes Marxist dialectics as the “algebra of revolution” and held that “dialectical materialism is a philosophy of action.” This became the basis of the notion of “the unity of theory and practice” in later Marxist thought. “After all,” Plekhanov wrote, “without revolutionary theory there is no revolutionary movement in the true sense of the word …. An idea that is revolutionary in its internal content is a kind of dynamite for which no other kind of explosive in the world can be substituted.” Among the many contributions to Marxist theory made by Plekhanov was an application of Marxism to a theory of art. Neither Marx nor Engels ever devised a theory of art. Nevertheless it is possible to deduce an art theory from the scattered references to art and comments about art and society found throughout their works. Three of Plekhanov’s works are especially important in this regard: Fundamental Problems of Marxism, Art and Social Life and his essay “The Role of the Individual in History.” Plekhanov sees nothing individualistic in the origin of art. Art arises from the historical development of a people or nation. In class-based societies no school or trend of art can become popular or be successful without representing the interests of some class or stratum of society. Plekhanov writes: “The depth of any given trend in literature or art is determined by its importance for the class or stratum whose tastes it expresses, and by the social role of this class or stratum…. in the final analysis everything depends upon the course of development and the relations of social forces.” It is Plekhanov’s view that art is part of the superstructure of society that is reared upon the social base, namely the mode of production. The production mode gives rise to the production relations which in capitalism lead to two great classes, the owners and the workers, and the history of the society is propelled along by the struggle between them. This struggle, in turn, gives rise to social antagonisms, contradictions, alienation and a host of vexing and unsettling events that disrupt the smooth functioning of the social whole — so desirable to the capitalists. This, at least is the model, empirical history is more complicated. The function of art is to address these problems and present “solutions”— that is, to emotionally affect people to struggle or to the acceptance of the current reality, depending on which class the artist is objectively representing (regardless of subjective intentions.) Another important aspect of Plekhanov’s philosophy of art is his view that since history and society create the problems that art attempts to resolve, art is consequently itself a social phenomenon that can be scientifically studied. In this view, artists should not be told what to create and how to create but be left to their own devices to reflect the reality they confront. This view was in conflict with the historical practice of some socialist states in which independent or individual artistic endeavors were discouraged and artists were expected to support the policies and viewpoints of the political leadership. Nothing in the works of Marx and Engels gives warrant for such practices in relation to artistic creation. Such overdetermination in the cultural and social milieu of the people in fact led to an alienation of the people from the political leadership and brought about its downfall. In Art and Social Life Plekhanov does not take sides on the two opposite views on the nature of art — the art for art’s sake view and the “utilitarian” view— i.e., that art must serve some socially useful purpose. Instead, Plekhanov describes the type of social environment, historically produced, which gives rise to one or the other view. Plekhanov has no interest in telling artists what they should do — he is only interested in delineating the types of societies in which these two outlooks occur and predominate. This is what Plekhanov concludes: ‘’The tendency of artists, and those who have a lively interest in art, toward art for art’s sake, arises when they are in hopeless disaccord with the social environment in which they live.’’ ‘’The so-called utilitarian view of art, that is to say, the inclination to attribute works of art the significance of judgment on the phenomenon of life, and its constant accompaniment of glad readiness to participate in social struggles, arises and becomes stronger wherever a mutual sympathy exists between the individuals more or less actively interested in artistic creation and some considerable part of society.’’ The proper role of the socialist state, I suggest, on the Plekhanov model is to allow the maximum possible artistic freedom, seeing the products of artistic creation as reelections of the true feelings and beliefs of various segments of society. In this sense artworks can be seen as ‘’alienation detectors,’’ on the one hand, or ‘’support detectors on the other. To censor artistic creation and prevent its expression simply covers over, without solving, the problems and contradictions in social reality that artworks bring to light. In a socialist state this creates needless alienation between the political and cultural needs of the people and can lead to the isolation and estrangement of the political leadership from its roots in the masses. Plekhanov’s contribution to the creation of a Marxist aesthetic is only one of the many reasons the reading and continuing study of his works is still relevant and important. 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. Pride month has become an ideological support for rainbow capitalism. Every year in June there is the use of Pride symbols in marketing and advertising campaigns, clearly evident in the big “Pride sales” conducted by companies to gain the attention of the public and get as many customers as possible. Rainbow-themed items from big corporations go hand in hand with Pride parades which – unlike the 1969 Stonewall riots that were a response to police brutality – routinely include gay police officers celebrating themselves and thus, support repressive state power. This contemporary form of Pride month is indicative of the pernicious manner in which neoliberal capitalism has hollowed out queer radicalism. According to Lisa Duggan, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer (LGBTQ) politics has been transformed into “homonormativity”: “a politics that does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions but upholds and sustains them, while promising the possibility of a demobilized gay constituency and a privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption.” Dominant sections of the gay movement have abandoned demands for anti-capitalist liberation and sexual freedom in favor of individual and family-based rights. The primary goals have been defined as: “same-sex marriage and family recognition rights, market/ cultural visibility, access to the military, and hate crime/safety legislation.” Same-sex marriage is a meek response to the ravages of contemporary capitalism, offering marriage as a privatized solution to peoples’ needs for childcare, healthcare, economic stability, and social recognition. This vision of family is accompanied by the notion of consumerism, which creates a model of a nice settled couple dedicated to accumulating property and possibly raising children. In this socially-sexually regressive architecture of gay existence, homosexual people are promised the life of a “good citizen” through the purchase of lifestyle commodities. This subordination of queerness to civic ideals of respectability, national-belonging, and support for the free market creates internal hierarchies within the LGBTQ community. Queers of color, trans people, bisexuals, people with low incomes or without social status, indigenous queers, people who are single or non-monogamous and working-class women are erased from the new lesbian and gay world of marriage and consumerism. Nationally, the mainstream LGBTQ movement has been assisting queer capitalism by welcoming multinational corporations to sponsor pride parades or celebrating gay consumer achievements “while ignoring the needs of the LGBT/queer poor and working-class people who make the rainbow paraphernalia and work in low-wage service or retail jobs and street economies in gay neighborhoods. When LGBT activism has promoted the gay consumer-citizen at the cost of more radical and marginalized voices, it has sought political goals that benefit the wealthiest LGBT people at the cost of most.” Internationally, LGBTQ politics has aligned itself with imperialist interests; racialized queers, and particularly those of North African, West Asian or South Asian ancestry, face a growing tide of Islamophobia from Global North-based lesbian and gay organizations whose political capital depends upon moral integration with Western frames of superiority. In the words of Kenyan Farrow: “As long as Western liberal democracies can name “gay rights” as the new litmus test for an appropriate twenty-first century democracy, we can obsess about “anti-gay” legislation in Nigeria and say nothing about the violence and economic exploitation of the Shell Oil Company on the land and bodies of Nigerians. We can be seduced by the international gay travel industry to visit “gay friendly” (and “post-racial paradise”) Rio de Janeiro, and say nothing of the massive police violence and genocidal removal of blacks from favelas in preparation for the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Summer Olympics.” The conservative orientation of homonationalist-imperialist rainbow capitalism derives from its exclusive emphasis on cultural visibility at the expense of socio-political progress. Margot Weiss writes, “LGBT campaigns for visibility – in the form of media visibility, marketing recognition, new gay-orientated business developments, or social recognition – have depended on the invisibility, criminalization, and abjection of queered others.” This neoliberalization of LGBTQ communities supports the privatization of public institutions and spaces, the coercive policing of immigrant, racialized, and criminalized bodies and the development of elitist gay and lesbian commercial marketplaces and neighborhoods. In opposition to this reactionary tendency, we need queer communism that can connect LGBTQ liberation to political struggles around race, poverty, capitalism, and imperialism. This Pride month should force us to realize the futility of the queer movement’s strategy of demanding “representation” and “inclusion” within capitalist society. Such a reformist perspective defangs the militancy of Pride month, reducing it to a glorification of the ability of queer people to assimilate and succeed under capitalism. This year’s Pride month should act as an active celebration of gay lives and struggle, and its historical intersections with class and race. As Sophie Monk and Joni (Pitt) Cohen elaborate: “The truth of Pride is a parade of queer capitalism, and therefore the ability of one form of queer life – predominantly wealthy, predominantly white and predominantly male – to immiserate and exploit others…Queerness must not be seen as a floating, purely identitarian category. It is constituted through its fundamentally classed, raced and disabled intersections; people live not simply as queers, but as poor, as female as people of color. We must strive not simply towards a liberation of people as queer, but a liberation of queer people. To simply eliminate queerness as an axis of oppression, would not constitute liberation for queers, since queer life is inevitably bound up with a variety of other oppressions. We do not consider it an achievement to raise queers to the same level of misery of straight people; we desire the eradication of the immiseration of queer people as a whole.” AuthorYanis Iqbal is an independent researcher and freelance writer based in Aligarh, India and can be contacted at yanisiqbal@gmail.com. His articles have been published in the USA, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India and several countries of Latin America. Archives June 2022 6/3/2022 How China strengthened food security and fought poverty with state-funded cooperatives. By: Joe ScholtenRead Now
The world faces a food crisis due to war, sanctions, and inflation. China has shown how to strengthen food sovereignty, while fighting poverty, with state-funded agricultural cooperatives, government crackdown on waste, and investment in technology.
The Covid-19 pandemic, the ensuing supply-chain crisis, and high rates of inflation around the world have led to rising food prices and fears of famine.
These cascading and interlocking problems have pushed governments to prioritize economic self-sufficiency and food security. China is leading the way in this struggle. Beijing has shown how to strengthen food sovereignty, and simultaneously fight poverty, with a multi-pronged approach that combines state-funded agricultural cooperatives, stockpiling of nonperishable staples, a crackdown on waste, and government investment in new technologies. While the United Nations warns of “the specter of a global food shortage,” the Chinese government has provided countries with an alternative model to meet the needs of their people. China successfully feeds its people during Covid-19 lockdowns
At the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, on February 24, 2020, Chinese President Xi Jinping delivered a speech on food security, outlining a series of both short- and long-term steps that would ensure a stable food supply for the major city of Wuhan.
At the time, Wuhan was under a harsh lockdown. Addressing food security was critical. The state’s program was ultimately successful. Although there were some problems with delivery, no one faced starvation during this harsh lockdown. The government managed to feed tens of millions of people. The strategy used in Wuhan was repeated later on in the pandemic. When cities like Xi’an or Shanghai faced lockdowns, local officials created similar networks of support to ensure that their tens of millions of residents had stable food supplies. While more 1 million people have died from the virus in the United States alone, Beijing’s zero Covid policy has saved countless lives. And it had the added benefit of strengthening China’s food sovereignty at a moment when the world was on the verge of a global crisis. Western sanctions and Ukraine war fuel global food crisis
The proxy war in Ukraine and the devastating Western sanctions imposed on Russia have led to concerns about global food supply. As of the end of 2021, Russia and Ukraine were responsible for nearly 30% of the world’s wheat exports.
Sanctions have created a significant burden for agricultural exports, as firms that attempt to pay for or facilitate payment to Russian businesses fear being targeted. Moreover, the fighting has shut down many ports used for export in Ukraine. This has led to warnings from the United Nations and other international institutions that, as soon as late 2022 and early 2023, there could be food shortages and even famines among the poorest nations in the world, while food prices skyrocket and become increasingly unaffordable in wealthier nations. These growing crises have made understanding China’s policy of food sovereignty even more relevant. China’s food security successes
China has viewed food security as an essential goal for much of its history. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization notes that the East Asian nation has only 10 percent of the world’s arable land, yet is able to feed its own population, which represents roughly 20 percent of the global population, producing approximately 25 percent of the world’s grain.
In theory, such a daunting global crisis of food production could be an existential threat to China. It has an enormous population with scarce arable land, and faces the possibility that a virus could hurt the capacity for workers to engage in agricultural work, while an external food crisis could hamstring the ability for the state to import supplies. Despite these material factors, however, there is a relatively low likelihood that China will face such a food crisis. How is this possible? Well before the pandemic began, Xi Jinping made a clarion call: “Chinese people should hold their rice bowls firmly in their own hands, with grains mainly produced by themselves.”
This quote was a clear call for food self-sufficiency – exactly the kind of policy that the US-dominated World Bank has fastidiously sought to curtail throughout much of the Global South.
Based on its model of socialism with Chinese characteristics, Beijing has pursued a development path that has made objective strides in food security, much to the displeasure of neoliberal financial institutions like the World Bank. From 2003 to 2013, Chinese grain output increased by roughly 50 percent, from 400 million tons per year to 600 million tons per year. The People’s Republic of China has made these enormous strides in food security in part because it is the largest agricultural subsidizer on the planet. This has led to attacks from the United States via the neoliberal World Trade Organization, which opposes Beijing’s agricultural subsidies. China’s remarkable accomplishments in agricultural production might be puzzling to some. After all subsidy isn’t unique to China; indeed, it’s a common feature of capitalist agricultural practices as well. However, there are distinct qualitative differences in Chinese agriculture practices that further show how it has made such resounding progress. China’s state-funded agricultural cooperative program
China’s agriculture is still significantly organized on the basis of cooperative farming. Nearly half of farms are agricultural cooperatives, which more than 2.2 million legally registered.
When President Xi came to power in 2013, he brought back a Mao Zedong-era system of state-run cooperatives to help fight poverty in rural areas while boosting agricultural output. From 2013 to 2019, the Chinese government rebuilt more than 10,000 primary supply and marketing cooperatives (SMCs), the South China Morning Post reported. There were nearly 32,000 SMCs across China as of 2019, in 95 percent of the country’s towns – a staggering increase from just 50 percent in 2013. The Post summarized, “Expanding that network is a key feature of Xi’s plan to revitalise the countryside – where the Communist Party of China has its roots – and deliver on his pledge to lift millions of people out of poverty, and narrow the income gap between rural and urban dwellers.”
The results of this program have been staggering. State-supported cooperative farming has successfully been able to revitalize communities.
This agricultural program was an essential part of how Beijing lifted more than 800 million people out of extreme poverty. The Chinese government has also directed its policies at trying to to reduce inequality between urban and rural areas. Two Assurances and Three Guarantees
Much of this framework food security would be difficult to replicate without two key elements of China’s socialist construction: state ownership of land, and economic five-year plans.
Indeed, “food and energy security” is one of the five main categories listed in Beijing’s 14th five-year plan. Additionally, the socialist state has a policy of “Two Assurances and Three Guarantees,” which the government describes as “assurances of adequate food and clothing, and guarantees of access to compulsory education, basic medical services and safe housing for impoverished rural residents.”
As a result, Beijing has taken concrete measures to ensure that the public is prepared for just the kind of food crisis that the world is seeing unfold.
The Chinese government has likewise long ensured that it has adequate agricultural reserves to weather a crisis. Reports indicate that Beijing has stockpiled enough rice and wheat to sustain the entire country for at least 18 months, in the event of an extreme crisis. In the latter half of 2020, the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, when the virus was nonexistent in China, the Communist Party passed laws requiring governments at local and state levels to have adequate reserves of staple foods and cooking oils. These laws stipulate that grains and oils are to be released in events of disasters, significant price disruptions, or other large emergencies. Crackdown on food waste and state investment in technology
At the same time, the Chinese state has taken measures to ensure that food waste is curtailed, that efforts to innovate in their food production technology are supported, and that workers who are essential in the process of delivering food are protected.
Beijing passed food waste laws that impose penalties on restaurants and commercial food enterprises which engage in wasteful behavior.
China has also systematically invested in new agricultural technologies, such as CRISPR. Beijing has adopted technology to its own material conditions, even finding ways to grow salt water-tolerant rice crops, to ensure that rising sea levels do not impact yields in agriculture.
This is all part of a state-driven process, to ensure that food security is maintained. Even US corporate media outlets like Bloomberg have begrudgingly admitted that China is quickly becoming a global leader in biotechnology. People’s War on Covid-19, hunger, and poverty
The People’s Republic of China has additionally expanded unions to commercial food workers and delivery workers, for popular apps like Didi and Meituan, to make sure that workers have higher wages and better conditions, and that food delivery can be maintained through a well paid and loyal workforce.
This has all been part of what Beijing calls its “People’s War on Covid-19,” whereby labor unions, non-governmental social institutions, and state bodies work together to collectively fight the virus. China is similarly creating a framework to wage a people’s war on hunger and food insecurity. The Chinese socialist system produces results. It utilizes state power to organize the people, gauges material conditions to determine long-term needs, and meet them. It succeeds in these goals where other political systems are failing. US set up for food crisis disaster
The contrast with the US system could hardly be more stark.
Washington helped to foment the food crisis in the first place, with draconian sanctions that are will it hard for poor countries to buy wheat and fertilizer. Food prices are rising rapidly inside the United States, due to a combination of general inflation and blatant price-gouging by corporations. Crop growing cycles are off to a bad start in 2022, with US agricultural production lagging behind its five-year average in planting goals. Transportation of goods has also become more precarious, as grueling working conditions have rendered significant shortages of truck drivers, thereby raising prices on consumers even further, as delays become more common for many goods. Farmers in the United States have raised alarms about the possibility of serious problems in food security. Meanwhile, Congress and US political leaders have failed to create a long-term strategy to address domestic food security needs. Instead, they have proposed a haphazard food aid plan that experts say does not apportion adequate sums of money. In a revealing comment at NATO headquarters in March, US President Joe Biden conceded, “With regard to food shortage, yes, we did talk about food shortages. And – and it’s going to be real. The price of these sanctions is not just imposed upon Russia, it’s imposed upon an awful lot of countries as well, including European countries and our country as well.” All signs indicate that a food crisis is coming. And unlike leaders in capitalist nations, the leadership of the Communist Party of China has used foresight, long-term planning, and methods of socialist construction to prepare. In much the same way that the People’s Republic of China successfully handled Covid-19, it is setting itself up to weather the crisis domestically – while still showing international solidarity abroad. As this crisis arises, let it not be forgotten that socialist leadership in China was responsible for ensuring its people were protected, and that it took concrete steps to ensure that it’s people would be safe, while the leadership of capitalist countries left their people to die. AuthorJoe Scholten is a writer and activist from St. Louis, Missouri.
This article was republished from Multipolarista.
ArchivesJune 2022 6/3/2022 Labor Activists Launch New Organization to Challenge AFL-CIO Foreign Policy. By: Kim ScipesRead NowEducational conference on April 9th which was part of an ongoing effort to expose AFL-CIO connection to U.S. imperialism in South America. [Source: Photo courtesy of Thomas O’Rourke] Labor activists from across the country, members of a number of unions, publicly announced the creation of LEPAIO, the Labor Education Project on the AFL-CIO International Operations, over the weekend of April 8-9. They held a press conference outside AFL-CIO headquarters on 16th Street in Washington, D.C., on April 8th, and followed with a four-hour educational conference at the University of the District of Columbia the following day. This is the first project to focus on AFL-CIO operations around the globe since efforts to pass the “Build Unity and Trust Among Workers World-wide” resolution at the AFL-CIO’s 2005 National Convention in Chicago. This new project, LEPAIO, is hoping to build support leading to the AFL-CIO’s 2022 National Convention in Philadelphia on June 12-15. Speakers at the educational conference spoke on a number of issues, noting that the education conference on April 9th came on the 20th anniversary of the attempted (but failed) coup against democratically elected President of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez. Speakers Margaret Flowers, William Camacaro, and James Patrick Jordan spoke of the on-going U.S. attacks on Venezuela that continue today, particularly through economic sanctions supported by the AFL-CIO. This writer later noted the similarities between the 2002 attempted coup in Venezuela and the 1973 Chilean coup that overthrew democratically elected Salvador Allende, about which the AFL-CIO’s involvement in the latter through its American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD) had been revealed by the late Fred Hirsch of Plumbers and Pipefitters #393 in San Jose, California, in 1974.
Hemson spoke about how the AFL-CIO had supported the apartheid regime, especially through the on-going support of Zulu Chief Gatscha Buthelezi. Buthelezi and his people had physically attacked COSATU (Congress of South African Trade Unions) members and affiliated unions in an internal war in the early 1990s in the province of Kwa-Zula/Natal. The AFL-CIO, ironically, had given Buthelezi the George Meany-Lane Kirkland Award for Human Rights in 1982. Chief Gatscha Buthelezi [Source: digitalarchive.tpl.ca] Lou Wolf of CovertAction Magazine talked about the CIA’s operations around the world, and AFL-CIO involvement in their operations. (For example, see Rob McKenzie’s new book, El Golpe: US Labor, the CIA and the Coup at Ford in Mexico, recently published by Pluto Press.) Lou Wolf speaking via Zoom. [Photo courtesy of Thomas O’Rourke] This author followed, talking briefly about the AFL-CIO operations in Chile, the Philippines and Venezuela. However, most of my talk was about current events, with the AFL-CIO’s Solidarity Center serving as one of the four core “institutes” of the Reagan administration-created National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Prior to the development of the NED, the U.S. would intervene in response to social crises in countries it deemed important to its global empire; this was the case in Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Brazil (1964) and Chile (1973)—all of which first the AFL and then the AFL-CIO participated in other than Iran—and in each case, overthrew the respective democratically elected government. [Source: wikipedia.org] However, exposures of these operations during the 1970s resulted in the development of the NED and a shift toward intervention before-hand, where they developed and/or found organizations that would support U.S. operations before a crisis would develop. (This happened after their work in El Salvador in the early 1980s, where they definitely intervened in response to the revolutionary upsurge.) NED has supported these organizations with considerable amounts of money so as to give them considerable sway in the future direction of their country. There are four “core institutes” of the NED: the international wing of the Democratic Party, the international wing of the Republican Party, the international wing of the US Chamber of Commerce, and the Solidarity Center of the AFL-CIO. These are the organizations at the heart of the NED and its operations. And whatever one thinks about either the Democrats or the Republicans, labor collaboration with the US Chamber of Commerce is despicable. That does not mean that the Solidarity Center’s particular operations are necessarily evil, as was true of predecessor “institutes” in Africa, Asia and Latin America; there have been some projects where they have been helpful or at least “not evil.” However, the fact is that the AFL-CIO is complicit in the NED, which is designed to maintain the dominance of the U.S. Empire and its capitalist infrastructure. Frank Hammer then discussed the assassination of his brother, Michael, along with two associates, in El Salvador while working on “land reform” for AIFLD in 1981. The U.S.-funded land reforms combined with right-wing military repression in the countryside were designed to defeat the revolutionary upsurge by the peasantry. Hammer noted that it was the oligarchs, that AIFLD was trying to protect, who were responsible for the assassination. Funeral proceedings for Michael Hammer who was assassinated after working on AIFLD land reform initiatives in El Salvador. [Source: arlingtoncemetary.net] Following Hammer, Carol Lang spoke about the Histadrut, a long-time colonialist project in Israel, designed to maintain Palestinian and Arab worker subjugation, and which has long been supported by the AFL-CIO, particularly by getting member unions to purchase Israel Bonds that support the apartheid state.
In short, what was presented was a vehement condemnation of the AFL-CIO’s international operations from a global perspective, and an argument that we cannot have a labor movement promoting popular democracy at home while supporting fascism elsewhere. We must unite directly with workers around the world and must do so if growing crises, like climate change, war, suppression of labor rights, etc., are to be challenged. In response, conference attendees (in person and via Zoom) passed a strong resolution that is now on the LEPAIO website: https://aflcio-int.education/. The Educational Conference in Philly will take place on Saturday, June 11, from 1:00-5:00 pm at The Ethical Society, 1906 Rittenhouse Square, Philadelphia, PA 19103. AuthorKim Scipes, Ph.D., is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Purdue University Northwest in Westville, Indiana. He is the author of the 2010 book, AFL-CIO’s Secret War against Developing Country Workers: Solidarity or Sabotage?, and of the 2020 article, “The AFL-CIO’s Foreign Policy Program: Where Historians Now Stand,” available on-line for free from the peer-reviewed journal Class, Race and Corporate Power (Political Science Department of Florida International University in Miami): https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/classracecorporatepower/vol8/iss2/5. He is also a member of the National Writers’ Union, AFL-CIO. Details on McKenzie’s book: London: Pluto Press, 2022 ISBN: 978 0 7453 4562 8 (paper). Kim can be reached at kimscipes@earthlink.net. This article was republished from CovertAction Magazine. Archives June 2022 6/1/2022 Two Great Tastes Part Two: The Introduction to Fischbach's La Production des Hommes. By: Jason ReadRead NowWhat follows is a draft of the translation of the introduction to Franck Fischbach's La Production des hommes: Marx avec Spinoza which will be published by Edinburgh University Press as Marx with Spinoza: Production, Alienation, History. Posted here in preparation for my forthcoming event with the Marx Education Project, and as part of the process of editing it. The relation of Marx with Spinoza has often been driven—most notably with respect to Althusser and the Althusserian tradition—by the project of “giving Marxism the metaphysics that it needs,” according to an expression used by Pierre Macherey specifically with respect to Althusser. The intention was laudable, but times having changed, our project can no longer be exactly that. We begin from the idea that the philosophy specific to Marx or the specifically Marxist philosophy is still largely unknown, that Marx as a philosopher is still largely and for the most part unknown. For a long time this was due reasons largely external to the thought of Marx: initially it was due to the urgency of militant practice, then it remains thanks to theme of the rupture with philosophy that is expressed by the eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach or in The German Ideology, any reading of Marx that is resolutely philosophical was suspected as being ideological. Then on the verge of orthodoxy, several authors—and not insignificant ones—both at the heart of the history of Marxism , and outside of it , have maintained that there is a critique of philosophy in Marx , this critique would still be a determinant practice of philosophy. However, the ignorance of “Marx’s philosophy” equally lies in reasons that internal to Marx’s work: the critical relation that Marx enters with philosophy implies in effect that the latter appears in terms of disconcerting new features, which are not those of a doctrine expressed as such (Marx, who never completed any of his grand works, always refused any dogmatic or systematic presentation of his thoughts), but are also not that of fragments. Neither systematic, nor fragmentary, philosophy with respect to Marx, appears diluted, omnipresent but always mixed and everywhere combined with elements of the discourse of history, of political economy, but also the sciences of nature and literature. It is not necessary to reconstruct or reconstitute the philosophy of Marx: that would suggest that it is only present in a fragmentary and dispersed state, and that it is necessary to reassemble and unify—which would lead to dogmatic and systemic presentation that is perfectly alien to the Marxist practice of philosophy. It would then be a matter of isolating—in the chemical sense of the term—the philosophy of Marx from the non-philosophical elements from which it is amalgamated, on the express condition of returning them to the “compound,” if only in order to see what it becomes and the effects of the philosophical "elements" when they come into contact with elements of another nature. The presupposition here is then quite different, it is no longer that of the dispersion of Marx’s philosophy in order to wait for it to be reassembled: it is that Marx’s thought is in its entirety (one could say from beginning to end) infused, traversed, saturated with philosophy, including and perhaps especially when it appropriates objects and immerses itself in discourses that our not immediately philosophical. It is a matter then of revealing—in the photographic and chemical sense of the word—the philosophy of Marx. It is necessary to have a revealer: for reasons to be explained in what follows, we turn to Spinoza for this role of developer of Marx’s philosophy, in a process which, it should be understood, that does begin with claiming that Marx is basically Spinoza or that Marx was spinozist. The book which you are reading is not a work on Marx and Spinoza, and treating them as two authors or of two “doctrines, “ there is no such equilibrium: it acts first as a book on Marx, but of Marx read in the light of Spinoza in the measure that, or, in this light, the thought of Marx can be seen clearly and properly philosophical. What result can we expect from such a process? To start off, in order to get to an anticipated fact, there is a simple idea that we find in Merleau-Ponty (but could equally be found elsewhere) “the history that produces capitalism symbolizes the emergence of subjectivity.” An equally simple question which could be posed is to know if this emergence is to the credit or blame of capitalism. For Merleau-Ponty it is clear that it is to its credit, and moreover that Marx himself credits capitalism with the emergence of a society conceived as a subject of its production of itself in which people conceive themselves as subjects. Also in this text when it is a question of Lukács, Merleau-Ponty recognizes that he had the merit of elaborating “a Marxism which incorporates subjectivity into history without making it an epiphenomenon.” As for us, we come to the idea here that, it is true that Marx makes the formation of subjectivity a phenomenon inseparable from the history of capitalism—and therefore something other than an “epiphenomenon” (on this point Merleau-Ponty is right)—it can be seen to be exactly the opposite with respect to the emancipatory process. The history of capitalism (from its formation up to its overcoming) is not that of the increase of the power of subjectivity as the condition of all liberation—the contradiction unique to capitalism is having formed at its center the condition of its overcoming. If Marx only said that, it would be a disarming simplicity, a childish dialectic which would not merit one to dedicate even an hour of time: capitalism has thus produced subjectivity, but it does not produce it without at the same time oppressing and repressing it; what is to be done is to free it. So that, from the retrospective point of view of a liberated subjectivity, a subject emancipated, capitalism appears after such a break as a mode of production which has made a decisive contribution—albeit negatively and in some sense despite itself—in the liberation of humanity finally a subject in and of itself. Depicted in such a way this simplistic version is not without its promoters (more within Marxism than in its adversaries), just because it is simple, nothing would be more false to than to seek in Marx yet another well-meaning description of emergence of the modern subject as a history of progressive liberation. This is why the contemporary exhaustion of metanarratives of emancipation fundamentally does not concern Marx, so that we cannot conclude from the exhaustion of the former the death of the latter. Because it is a different history that Marx relates to us: what he was concerned with was uncovering the links that inseparably connect the birth of modern subjectivity to economic, political, and ideological processes that have brought about the massive reduction of the majority of people to a total lack of power. It was his task to show that the “pure subjectivity” which is celebrated by theological, political, philosophical, moral, juridical (and nowadays psychologists and media) discourses—is in reality nothing other than the absolute naked exposure of human beings to powers of domination, constraint, and subjection without precedence in history. The problem for Marx was not to examine the possibilities of the liberation of a subjectivity formed in capitalism and oppressed by it, but to comprehend and expose the social, economic, and political processes that have the effect of reducing humanity to a complete individual and collective impotence. In forming subjectivity capitalism has not produced the basis of its proper negation: to the contrary it has engendered and produced an element absolutely indispensable to its own perpetuation. In brief, our analysis have brought us to conclusions opposed to Merleau-Ponty’s, notably when he writes, “historical materialism…states a kinship between the person and the exterior, between the subject and the object which is at the bottom of the alienation of the subject in the object and, if the movement is reversed, will be the basis for the reintegration of the world with man.” If this is alienation for Marx then one is at pains to demonstrate in what way it differs from Hegel. Merleau-Ponty adds, “Marx's innovation is that he takes this fact as fundamental, whereas, for Hegel, alienation is still an operation of the spirit on itself and thus is already overcome when it manifests itself.” Alienation is thus not radical when it comes to Hegel, and is such in the extent where it would be included in an act of spirit. Everything would thus play out in advance with respect to Hegel: if spirit is capable of going outside of itself, it is also always capable of being recovered and reestablished, of returning to itself to from itself posed by itself as something other than itself. The novelty of Marx consists, if one follows Merleau-Ponty, to not be given this facility, to not have immediately reduced the loss of the subject in the object to an act of the subject itself, but to have started from this loss as a fact, of the originary Faktum. Alienation would thus be a different and more series affair and would cease to be a sort of play of the subject with itself. This understanding of the “novelty” of Marx is not sufficient in our eyes, notably because it does not make it possible for us to comprehend the difference between Marx and Feuerbach, a difference that Marx never wanted to stop making. One could also ask if such a view of alienation as a “primitive fact” is compatible with a philosophy which moreover, cannot comprehend as alienation as anything other than the result of a historical process and not an ahistorical fact. This is why we interpret Marx’s concept of alienation not as a new version of a loss of the subject in the object, but as a radically new thought, of the loss of the essential and vital objects for an existence that is itself essentially objective and vital. Alienation would not be a primitive fact, but the result of a process that we describe (following Etienne Balibar ) as the becoming-labor of production. On the relation between “the person and the exterior,” Merleau-Ponty is right, but he does not see how this relation is radicalized by Marx: it is not necessary to restrict the “person” to the status of the subject. In other terms, the relation of humanity with the world is for Marx the fact that the human beings are immediately a being of the world, or, as he writes in the 1844 Manuscripts, an “objective being” conceived according to an expression of Spinoza reprised by Marx, part of nature (pars naturae, Teil de Natur). This leads Marx to totally rethink the concept of alienation: it is not the loss of subject in the object, rather it consists, for objective beings such as humans as a loss of their “essential objects” that is to say the loss of their proper objectivity (“because a being which has no object outside of itself does not have objective being” and “a non-objective being is a non being”) It is precisely this loss of objectivity that constitutes essentially the becoming subject of humanity, that is to say the formation of the modern subject: subjectivity befalls precisely the being from whom all objective dimension of his or her existence has been withdrawn, which all of its vital and essential objects (those which it depends on to persevere in its being) have been subtracted. Alienation is not therefore the loss of the subject in the object it is “the loss of object” for a being that is itself objective. But the loss of its objects and the objectivity of its proper being is also the loss of all possible inscription of one’s activity in objectivity, it is the loss of all possible mastery of objectivity, as well as other effects: in brief, the becoming subject is essentially a reduction to impotence. The becoming subject or the subjectivation of human beings is thus inseparable according to Marx from what is absolutely indispensable for capitalism, the existence of a mass of “naked workers”—that is to say pure subjects possessors of a perfectly abstract capacity to work—individual agents of a purely subjective power of labor and constrained to sell its use to another to the same extent that they are totally dispossessed of the entirety of objective conditions (means and tools of production, matter to work on) to put to actual work their capacity to work. Under these conditions, the perspective of emancipation and liberation cannot consist, according to an expression of Merleau-Ponty, in “the reintegration of the world in humanity,” but, to the contrary, in the reintegration of humanity in the world: it is not a matter of resorbing the object in the subject, but to the contrary of realizing the subject in the object, of desubjectivizing people and reobjectivating in the world which is no longer for them, but the conditions of which are in them, which are their at with which they are in a vital and objective relation of dependence. In brief, emancipation does not consist in in integrating the world into humanity but of realizing humanity in the world. It is necessary on this point, as well on others, to be attentive to the letter of Marx’s text, here for example in The Holy Family: “if man takes all knowledge, sensation, etc., from the sensible world, and the experience at the heart of the world, what matters, is how to organize the empirical world in such a way that man experiences it and becomes accustomed to what is truly human, let him experience his quality as a human being in the world…if human beings are made by experiences we must make experiences humanly.” To human beings grasped as a subject outside of the world, confronted with an alien objectivity that they must reintegrate into themselves, Marx opposes with the inverse process of the reinscription and reinsertion of humans in the world that are such that people are made in the world, the experience of their “human qualities,” or, that they can get used to what is human: if there is for Marx a humanization of the world, its precondition is the worlding of humanity. Only under precondition can make that one does not understand the humanization of the world as a human interiorization of the world, as a subjectivation of the object (that is to say as a purely speculative play of the subject with itself), but that one comprehends, to the contrary, that this process of humanization unfolds entirely in the immanence in a world understood as pure exteriority to itself, without interiority—and that implies and imposes a practical and active transformation of the world such that it is. To put it briefly, as Spinoza before him and as Heidegger after him, Marx does not begin with the subject, but from the world, a situation of the world understood as unlimited ensemble, without beginning or end, that is to say as a non-totalizable totality of social historical relations woven and knotted with their natural and living existence and determined to produce the means for the permanent perpetuation of their existence in the world. When one begins from the world and not the subject, from the exterior and not the interior, from a plane of immanence and not whatever position of exteriority, foundation or of transcendence, the task cannot be to bring back the exterior into the interior (interiorize the exterior), nor to return the world to the subject (subjectivize the object). Beginning from the exterior, from what Marx refers to as “circumstances,” that is to say from the world insofar as it is an unlimited ensemble of relations necessarily engendered by encounters that are themselves contingent, and, from that, arrives at human beings insofar as they are products of the same circumstances, which is to say at human beings that are always fundamentally beings affected, and therefore being for which the relation with the world is primarily of the order of an encounter with events that happen in the world,--thus starting from there, the task is, as Marx says, of forming these circumstances humanely. Which is to say what? Certainly not that one acts to transform the world in such a way that human subjectivity recognizes itself and rediscovers itself, is able to see the world as the moment of its own auto-objectification, in such a way that it is indispensable from its return to the self. Considering that human beings, in their existence in the world are not at all subjects exterior to the world, but are also products, themselves objective, of quotidian circumstances of events and encounters, in the sense of what happens to them from and in the world, “forming these circumstances humanely,” cannot mean for Marx forming circumstances in the manner in which they conform and are adequate to the essence of humanity already posed, this could not mean “giving circumstances a human form” since that would return to the supposition that the human form or essence can exist for and by itself independent of circumstances and before them—which Marx negates. To understand what is at stake here, it is necessary to proceed from the fact that in the world such that it is, the majority of the circumstances that effect human beings, most of the events that happen to them and the encounters that they undergo are not favorable or useful to human beings, that people are the products of circumstances, events, and encounters that are neither generally nor immediately favorable or useful. From there “forming circumstances humanly” is first to produce and engender as many situations as possible and to select the maximum of encounters that are useful and favorable to human beings, that is to say those that aid and affirm their existence and persevering in their being. The transformation of the world must first be grasped as its reorganization: it is a question of organizing the world in such a way that the events, circumstances and meetings favorable to human beings multiply in number and intensity to the point where human beings find in the world a human way of living. Far from starting from a predetermined essence of man that it would be a question of realizing in the world by transforming this world, and the world only, human beings, according to Marx, are only able to grasp what it is to be human under the conditions of organizing the world that events favorable and useful to human beings are multiplied. The concept of habit, introduced here by Marx, is decisive: it acts clearly as a reference to Aristotle’s concept of hexis via Hegel’s reprise of the same theme in the Introduction of to the Principles of the Philosophy of Right where Hegel, in defining the “world of spirit” or the objective spirit of “second nature,” indicates that the ethical world is that in which human beings actually form themselves as human through their integration into institutions (family, civil society, corporations, and, finally, the institution that encompasses the former and founds them, the state), within which they experience the repetition of always already objectified humanity. It is from this that Marx writes that it "what has to be done is to arrange the empirical world way that… man experiences and becomes accustomed to what is truly human in it.” Far from knowing immediately what it is to be human and deriving a practical norm from the knowledge of this essence in order to orient the transformation of the world to make it conform with what it must be, it is on the contrary it is through their experience of the world that human beings are susceptible to progressively understand what it means to be human. The difference with Hegel, however, is that this habit does not for Marx entail a reference to the problem of the institution of a second nature irreducible to a first nature: closer to Aristotle than Hegel, habit is considered by Marx to be the formation of a natural character which does not function as an essence valued as a norm superimposing itself, that is itself superimposed and finally substituting itself for nature. (On this point see Ogilvie's book on Second Nature) The formation of human character is not a function of the sense of humanity that is already present in the world and objectified in institutions of “second nature” that makes up “ethical life,” but it is a function of a model of the human which human beings become immanently aware of through their experiences of what suits them by nature, which is to say what is useful and favorable to them. The problem is thus for Marx to organize the world in such a way that one is able to accumulate as much as possible the events and opportunities in which human beings experience the more often what the 1844 Manuscripts calls their “activation” (Betätigung), which is to say a confirmation (Bestätigung) of themselves which is also a renewal of their being and an increase of their individual and collective capacity to act. It is then with subjectivity as with philosophy, if only because the second is essentially presented up to now as the thought of the first, one cannot realize it without negating it, and negate it without realizing it. Reobjectifying humans, that is to negate their subjectivity as otherworldly subjectivity, it is negating that they are subjects exterior to the world that act on it insofar as it is an object, but at the same time it is to adopt a point of view in which that which philosophers call “human subjectivity” appears as a reality that effectively and objectively exists in the world. What remains of what up until now has been called subjectivity when one undertakes making it worldly, objective, and natural? What follows is that activity (Tätigkiet), more specifically vital productive activity, is to be understood not as the production of objects by subjects (that is productive labor, which is not the same thing as productive activity) but as a production which is always in the same time self-production, as a production of things which is at the same time a production of the self by the self, thus confirmation and activation of the self. The activity by which human beings constitute themselves as objective beings, as things in the world, is thus at the same time the destructive activity from which, in the same world, constitutes the reduction of human beings to an impotence of a bare and otherworldly subjectivity. Human beings are only able to affirm their actual power to by destroying at the same time and effectively the real causes of their lack of power: that is why “The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.” If “communism the real movement that destroys the present state of things” it is in the sense in which it is the process of the negation and destruction of the actual circumstances which reduce human beings to impotence, which separate them from their power. This is not just a theoretical transformation, the act of shifting from a conception of themselves as subjects to a conception of themselves as “beings of nature,” but a practical transformation effectively lived as an increase of power, as the individual and collective appropriation of a hitherto unknown power. Communism is therefore the real process, the ethical experience conducted by which people in changing life also change their life. Returning human beings to the world: this was already the project of Feuerbach, except that for Marx it is not sufficient, all it can do is return to L’Anschaueung, that is an sensible intuition that is essentially contemplative and therefore passive. Overcoming this conception (that Spinoza calls imaginary) of human beings as subjects exterior to the world and for which there is an objective world, that can only be made by a massive transformation of their relation to humanity, that is to say a practical transformation of their consciousness of self, and therefore by an self-production and self-engendering of new ways of being a self and a thing in the world. This is what give philosophy, for Marx as well as Spinoza, a properly ethical transformation of the self, a radical modification of in theory and practice of the self and the world. But can one transform practically their way of being without at the same time revolutionizing the world, that is to say without reorganizing practically the space in which that self is proven and confirmed. To the question that Foucault poses, “How can the world be the object of knowledge and the at the same time the place of the subjects test?” and that he considered to be the fundamental problem of western philosophy, Marx, had he been able to respond, would state that the world, as the natural world, is not for beings that—as human beings—are themselves part of nature, an external object to know via tekhné, and that, as a historical world (but, to say the truth, it is always the same world that one acts in), it is not, in the actual state of things, a space where “oneself” can test itself as an ethical subject of truth --and that it can only become at the prices of its radical transformation. Moreover, from the point of Marx, the two aspects of the question formulated by Foucault are indissociable: the world can only become the space of the real and positive experience of the self, an experience which is also an affirmation of the self—on the condition of surmounting the conditions which make the world a simple object delivered over to tekhné or to subjects. These conditions have their existence primarily in the mode of production: it is in this element that reigns the conditions that reduce at one time the self to the impotence of the subject and the world to the objectivity of a manipulable object. These are the conditions that engender the separation between, one the one side, subjects as owners of purely subjective labor power, and, on the other, the objective conditions that put to work this power (in as much as these conditions appear that are less the conditions of the labor process than the conditions of the valorization of capital ). This separation makes it so that the subjective power of labor is defined as an impotent power, a power that can do nothing by itself because it is separated from the conditions of its proper objectivity. Conquering the objective conditions for an affirmative and powerful experience, that is to say the joy of the self in the world, making the conditions of individual and collective self-affirmation, that is what it means for Spinoza and Marx to change one’s life. AuthorJason Read is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern Maine. He is the author of The Micro-Politics of Capital: Marx and the Prehistory of the Present (SUNY 2003) and The Politics of Transindividuality (Brill 2015/Haymarket 2016) and a forthcoming collection of essays, The Production of Subjectivity: Between Marxism and Post-Structuralism (Brill 2022) as well as The Double Shift: Marx and Spinoza on the Politics and Ideology of Work (Verso 2023). He blogs on popular culture, philosophy, and politics at unemployednegativity.com. This article was republished from Unemployed Negativity. Archives June 2022 Police using guns, clubs, and tear gas attack marching strikers outside Chicago's Republic Steel plant, May 30, 1937. | Carl Linde / AP An earlier version of this article appeared in People’s Weekly World on May 31, 1997. South Chicago, Memorial Day 1937: Mollie West was there with a group of high school seniors. Curtis Strong was there for the hell of it. Aaron Cohen was there because of the responsibilities assigned to him by the Communist Party. “There” was the field fronting the Republic Steel plant in South Chicago, site of the Memorial Day Massacre of May 30, 1937. It was the first warm day of spring. Hundreds of steelworkers, on strike against the “Little Steel” companies and backed by hundreds of supporters, some dressed in their Sunday best, had come to assert the right of the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC) to establish a picket line at the gate of the Republic Steel plant. The line was never established. Before day’s end, they would be attacked by an army of gun-toting, stick-wielding Chicago cops. Ten men would be dead or mortally wounded, countless others severely beaten and many more temporarily blinded by tear gas. Mollie was walking near the front of the group when Chicago’s finest opened fire with tear gas and pistols. “I started to run and fell down. Several others stumbled on top of me. It wasn’t very comfortable,” Mollie said in a telephone interview from Chicago. “But it may have saved my life. And it certainly kept me from being beaten with those riot sticks the cops were using.” By the time Mollie came up for air, the worst was over. “It was unbelievable what I saw,” she said. “The place looked like a battlefield.” And she saw—or felt—something else: “I looked around to see a policeman holding his gun against my back. ‘Get off the field,’ he ordered, ‘or I’ll shoot you.’”
Several doctors had responded to the call for public support. “They never imagined that they would need to turn it into a field hospital,” Mollie said. “But they did—just like in M*A*S*H.” Curtis hadn’t planned on doing anything that day. He was working at the Gary Works of U.S. Steel and was an active SWOC member of what is now Local 1014 of the Steelworkers union. “I thought, why should I go? Shortly after General Motors capitulated to the Auto Workers union, U.S. Steel signed a contract with SWOC.” But ever one to seek adventure, Curtis decided to go, “I thought—what the hell, why not?” he said when reached at his home in Gary. “What started as a lark became one of the most damnable experiences in my life.” Curtis thought the first shots were meant to scare people. “I just knew that no one, not even Chicago’s notoriously anti-union police, would open fire on peaceful demonstrators who were demanding the right to put up a picket line at the Republic plant.” But he soon found out how mistaken he was. “A guy about six feet away from me was hit and I started to run—and damn fast. I had set state track records when I was in high school.” This article was part of the 2019 People’s World series: 100 Years of the Communist Party USA. Read the other articles published in the series. Aaron Cohen had been a coal miner in southern Illinois and a leader in the reform movement of the United Mine Workers of America. As such, he earned the wrath of one Van A. Bittner, UMWA district director, whose goons once beat Aaron within an inch of his life. But the heat of the class struggle can melt old relationships and forge new ones—and such was the case with Aaron Cohen and Van A. Bittner. By the time SWOC launched its drive to organize the steel industry, Bittner was running the show in Illinois and Cohen, then 28 years old, was a member of the Communist Party leadership in Chicago. Shortly after setting up shop, Bittner invited Aaron and Bill Gebert, head of Illinois CP, to a meeting where he asked Aaron to find SWOC organizers among the various nationality groups and to help get favorable coverage of the campaign in the foreign-language press. “It was a bit frosty at first,” Aaron remembers, “Bittner didn’t quite know how to deal with me. But I made the first move. I stuck out my hand and said something like, ‘We’re in this together, Van,’ and that was it.” Aaron, who now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, described the Memorial Day event as—at least in the beginning—a “jolly kind of affair. There was a holiday spirit. Guys were walking with their girlfriends. Some brought their families and picnic lunches. There was a baseball game and things for the kids to do.” The strike began at 11 p.m. on May 26 and police had prevented the union from establishing a picket line at the Republic plant. “So we decided that the whole bunch would go down and set up a mass picket line. After all, Mayor Kelly said SWOC had the right to picket,” Aaron said. Aaron, too, couldn’t believe what was happening. “But when Alfred Causey, who was standing less than arm’s length from me, fell with four bullets in his back, I became a believer.” Aaron’s voice hardened when he added: “There was Causey laying there dead—and they were still beating him.” When the group—“at least 1,000 strong” according to George Patterson, who led the demonstration—neared Republic property, they were met by police lined up for about a quarter of a mile “protecting” the mill. “For once, we had as many pickets as there were police,” Patterson said in his oral history of the massacre. “I went up to Police Commander Kilroy who was reading from a document. ‘I ask you in the name of the people of the State of Illinois to disperse,’ he read and dropped the paper to his side with a flourish.” There was no verbal command, Patterson remembered. “When Kilroy lowered the paper, all hell broke loose. Bullets were flying, gas was flying, and then the clubbing.” When Patterson stopped running, he looked at the carnage—at the young boy limping by, bleeding from a bullet wound in his heel, at men and women lying on the ground, some dead, others mortally wounded. Patterson said he “learned about death” on the prairie before the Republic plant. “It doesn’t take long to know when a man falls forward on his face that he’s been killed, he’s dead, he doesn’t move anymore.” Police may have been able to cover up the massacre had it not been for Orlando Lippert, a news cameraman for the Paramount Newsreel division and his motion picture camera. Within seconds—“fewer than seven,” Lippert told a Senate investigating committee—after the assault began, he had his camera grinding away, eventually shooting several magazines of film which he sent to New York. Paramount executives withheld the film, labeling it “restrictive negatives. Clips and printing of this material absolutely forbidden.” However, the film was subpoenaed by Sen. Robert La Follette’s subcommittee of the Senate Education and Labor Committee and shown to a closed-door meeting that included Commander Kilroy, Patterson, and several reporters, some of whom wrote stories of the events depicted in the film. A short clip of the film shot by Paramount cameraman Orlando Lippert, originally hidden from the public. | Illinois Labor History Society Republic Steel’s Tom Girdler was the lead dog in the employer’s sleigh team that not only provoked the strike but made plans to drown it in blood in a holy war to prevent “the Communists” from taking over. And they meant business. The La Follette hearings, which began on July 2, did more than expose the Memorial Day events. Committee investigators found that Republic was the largest buyer of tear and sickening gas in the country. Republic’s private arsenal was stocked with 552 revolvers, 64 rifles, 245 shotguns, and 83,000 rounds of ammunition. The other companies had similar arms caches.
— The Mohawk Valley Formula, with its “citizens’ committees,” back-to-work movements, and other strike-breaking techniques was applied with vigor. — “Friends of labor” in public office betrayed SWOC, as witnessed by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “curse on both your houses” remark at a press conference. Although the Little Steel Strike ended with only Inland signing an agreement, it has earned a place in the annals of the great battles of the American working class. In 1937—as they had been in the Great Strike of 1919—steelworkers were in the vanguard of the class struggle. AuthorFred Gaboury was a member of the Editorial Board of the print edition of People’s Weekly World/Nuestro Mundo and wrote frequently on economic, labor and political issues. Gaboury died in 2004. Here is a small selection of Fred’s significant writings: Eight days in May Birmingham and the struggle for civil rights; Remembering the Rev. James Orange; Memphis 1968: We remember; June 19, 1953: The murder of the Rosenbergs; World Bank and International Monetary Fund strangle economies of Third World countries This article was republished from Peoples World. Archives June 2022
Gustavo Petro just before casting his vote on Sunday, May 29, at Colombia's presidential elections first round. Photo: Reuters/Santiago Arcos.
Gustavo Petro and Rodolfo Hernández will be the candidates for a second round of elections for the presidency of Colombia, to be held on June 19. In yesterday’s elections, none of the candidates received the required majority of votes cast in order to win in the first round, defined in Colombian law as 50% plus one.
With 99.2% of votes counted, Colombia’s National Registry, the electoral authority, announced the candidates who will contest the second round. Gustavo Petro, candidate for the Historical Pact, obtained 8,479,095 votes, or 40.3% of the votes cast, while Hernández obtained 5,931,722 votes, representing 28.2%.
Although Petro’s result was expected, as he was the favorite in the polls, Hernández’s success, on the contrary, was surprising, given that he only became a contender during the last stretch of the campaign, when he began to approach the candidate of the right, Federico Gutiérrez, in the polls.
However, in the results this Sunday, Hernández managed to surpass Gutiérrez, who obtained 4,780,765 votes, equivalent to 23.98%, representing an important defeat for current president Iván Duque and his political mentor Alvaro Uribe.
Second round
Rodrigo Hernández became a controversial candidate, because his campaign was based on the fight against corruption while he faces investigations by the prosecutor’s office and the attorney general’s office for this very crime.
The results obtained this Sunday show that the second round will be tight, since Hernández could collect part of the votes from the right, as well as from those who oppose Gustavo Petro. Therefore, alliances will be the key for this second round. After finding out the results, the candidate Federico Gutiérrez announced that his coalition members will vote in the second round for Hernández, although Gutiérrez said that he will not be part of his government. “I have not spoken with Rodolfo, nor do we need to,” said Gutiérrez. “I want to express publicly that we do not want to lose the country or put the future of Colombia at risk, our families, and our children, and that is why Rodrigo and I will vote for Rodolfo next June 19.” Some analysts evaluate this almost automatic support for Hernández as evidence of both candidates’ (Hernández and Gutiérrez) representation of the interests of Colombia’s oligarchy and thus an early sign for those looking for a change to move to the alternative path offered by Petro. Other analysts see Hernández’s support as an indication that centrists and conservatives in Colombia will unite in the second round and present a challenge for Gustavo Petro. Some analysts evaluate this almost automatic support for Hernández as evidence of both candidates’ (Hernández and Gutiérrez) representation of the interests of Colombia’s oligarchy. In a political climate where the current right-wing regime is extremely unpopular, any link with the ruling conservatives could indicate to voters the class interests of the candidate, and work against Hernández at the polls. Gallup gave Duque a 76% disapproval rating in 2021. For voters seeking change, therefore, any association between Hernández and the status quo could benefit Petro. Other analysts see Gutiérrez’s support for Hernández as an indication that centrists and conservatives in Colombia will unite in the second round and present a challenge for Gustavo Petro. (RedRadioVE) by Ana Perdigón, with Orinoco Tribune content Translation: Orinoco Tribune Author
This article was republished from Orinoco Tribune.
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