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7/30/2022 Children as young as 12 working in Hyundai-owned plant in Alabama. BY: Zackery CorleyRead Now In this Jan. 27, 2011, file photo, a Hyundai Elantra, left, and Hyundai Sonatas move down the assembly line in the Hyundai manufacturing plant in Montgomery, Ala. The factory is supplied with parts from the Hyundai-owned SMART plant, a metal stamping facility where rampant exploitation of child labor has been exposed. | Mickey Welsh / Montgomery Advertiser via AP LUVERNE, Alabama—Children as young as 12 have been discovered working at a Hyundai-owned metal stamping plant in Alabama, and other workers at the factory estimate that as many as 50 underage people may have been employed at the facility. That according to a horrific exposé detailing the exploitation of child labor at a Hyundai subsidiary factory in the small Alabama town of Luverne published July 22 by Reuters. Investigating the disappearance of a child from a family of Guatemalan immigrants, the news agency discovered that this child, now 14, as well as her brothers, aged 12 and 15, had all worked at the SMART metal stamping plant in Luverne earlier in the year. The children were not attending school, spending their days instead working in the Hyundai-owned factory. This family’s experience is not an isolated case, however. Tabatha Moultry, another worker at the SMART plant, noted that the facility has a high turnover rate and that while she was employed there, she worked alongside a migrant girl who looked “11 or 12 years old.” When Moultry asked, the girl said she was 13. When outrage spilled out in the local news media after the revelations, the plant dismissed many underage workers who were on its staff. Both Hyundai and SMART deny accountability for the situation. The automobile giant claims it “does not tolerate illegal employment practices at any Hyundai entity.” SMART, in its statements, denies that it knowingly violated child labor laws and passes blame to the temp agencies it uses to find workers. SMART says it expects these agencies to “follow the law in recruiting, hiring, and placing workers on its premises.” The SMART plant in Luverne has been tagged with $48,000 in OSHA penalties since 2013. Notable among the inspections that produced these fines include amputation and crush hazards—dangerous enough even for trained adult workers, let alone children. SMART boasts that it has the capacity to supply the parts for up to 400,000 vehicles yearly. Pedro Tzi, the father of the three children profiled by Reuters, makes a living doing odd jobs in the construction and forestry industries. He previously worked at the SMART plant himself. Tzi expressed regret that his children had gone to work. He told Reuters that his family needed any income it could get of at the time. “All is over now,” he said. “The kids aren’t working, and in fall they will be in school.” The child labor practices at SMART came to light after Tzi’s daughter went missing. Another worker at the plant had tricked her into leaving with him, and both of them were intercepted in Athens, Ga. Tzi’s daughter told police officers on the scene that her kidnapper had been traveling looking for new work opportunities. The office Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall refused to comment on whether or not they have taken any action, despite having been previously informed by the police force of the town of Enterprise, which does not have jurisdiction over Luverne. The Alabama Department of Labor, however, announced that it would be cooperating with the U.S. Department of Labor and other agencies to investigate the child labor abuse at the SMART plant. The public response has been swift and overwhelming. The horrid tale went viral online, with many labor commentators, academics, politicians, publications, and others denouncing the Hyundai parts supplier. Alabama talk radio show host Jacob Morrison, from The Valley Labor Report, who is also Secretary-Treasurer of the North Alabama Area Labor Council of the AFL-CIO, took a strong stand on the refusal to comment by the attorney general’s office. He posted a July 25 video titled “Alabama Attorney General Doesn’t Care About Child Labor in His State." “It took 82 minutes, less than two hours, for him [Marshall] to jump into action to ensure that the law will force children in Alabama to carry incest and rape pregnancies to term,” Morrison said, referring to Marshall’s quick action following the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade. “Yet after five months, almost half a year, [his office] did not have a position…[to]…tell the press on the issue of child labor in a plant with rampant safety issues to include amputation hazards.” Josh Moon, a columnist for the Alabama Political Reporter, tweeted, “This is the sort of crap that happens when your AG [Attorney General] is more concerned with self promotion, meaningless grandstanding, and staffing an insurrection than just doing the job.”
“The only thing that will stop the greed of capitalism is us. Child labor laws are union made. Our rights are never absolute. The Labor Movement—working people—fought and died for our rights. It’s our turn to fight. Organize now. Organize everywhere.” An activist with the Communist Party USA in Alabama, Kent T., told People’s World: “We must remember that they [SMART] dismissed these child workers only when the public discovered what was happening and were disgusted,” Pointing to the conditions of the poor and immigrants face in the U.S., he said, “The poverty that forced these children into the factory in the first place should not exist in the richest country on earth. However, the people have power, and every injustice can be overcome with organization and unity.” People’s World attempted to ascertain what staffing agencies are currently being used by the SMART plant, with a particular focus on those agencies already known to be utilized by other automotive parts suppliers in Alabama. Unfortunately, or fortunately depending on your perspective, we could not find any current listings from any such agencies connected to the Luverne SMART plant as of press time. AuthorZackery Corley is an activist in Alabama. This article was republished from Peoples World. Archives July 2022
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The words of the Pope, which were warmly received in Cuba as they came from a dearest friend, stirred the hatred and the insults typical of the enemies of the Revolution.  I have a human relationship with Raul Castro, said Pope Francis. Photo: Estudio Revolución The enemies of Cuba felt uncomfortable with the answers of Pope Francis during a recent interview with TV network Univision when he said, "Cuba is a symbol, Cuba has a great history". The head of the Catholic Church also stated he rejoiced when an unprecedented process of normalization of the relations between the two countries began on December 17, 2014. With the usual viciousness that characterizes the Cuban extreme rightwing based in the United States and its cronies in several countries, they immediately launched an attack against the Pope. Some of the words uttered by the Pope took them to the paroxysm of rage, such as "I love the Cuban people very much. I had good human relations with Cuban people and also, I confess, I have a human relationship with Raul Castro." The Miami media tried to make believe that the Pope’s statements arouse discontent among the "Cuban people" and the international community. They even accused him, based on their particular opinion on the subject, of betraying the inhabitants of the Island, of "scandalizing" Christians and "disrespecting" the Church. Republican congressmen of Cuban origin said they were "deeply disappointed" by the Pope's failure to condemn the "atrocious abuses of the Castro regime" and to show solidarity with "the Cuban people's demands for freedom," according to the Los Angeles Times. Tamara Taraciuk, acting director of Human Rights Watch for the Americas, criticized the Pope's position on Cuba, and dared to call on him to play "an important role" in human rights issues. This is not the first time that the extreme right has attacked the Pope. The most conservative Catholics have always seen him as a Pope who is "too close to the poor," and some even labeled him a communist, as if being on the side of the vulnerable were not one of the central axes of Christian doctrine. The chorus of furies at the service of the discrediting campaigns against Cuban even went as far as, in their usual display of ignorance, bad taste and lack of ethics, referring to the "danger" that the Holy Father's pronouncement means, from the point of view of his infallibility. In the theology of the Catholic Church, papal infallibility constitutes a dogma declared in 1870 at the First Vatican Council. The Pope is preserved from committing an error when he promulgates to the Church a dogmatic teaching on matters of faith and morals, under the rank of "solemn pontifical definition" or ex cathedra declaration. Since it is considered a truth of faith, no discussion is allowed within the Catholic Church and it must be unconditionally complied with and obeyed. The Holy Father did not make an ex cathedra manifestation in his statement; only a group of haters could think something like that. What he did was to show, as a human being, his love and friendship to the Cubans, a people that welcomed him with immense affection when he visited the island. Pope Francis would say -as John XXIII once did before the students of the Pontifical Greek College- "Ío non sono infallibile, I am only infallible when I define ex cathedra, but I will never do it". The extreme rightwing based in Miami does not "forgive" the him for his meeting with the historic leader of the Revolution Fidel Castro Ruz when he visited Cuba in 2015. They also reproach him that in 1998, when he was Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Argentina, he wrote a book entitled Diálogos entre Juan Pablo II y Fidel Castro (Dialogues between John Paul II and Fidel Castro), in which he advocated a rapprochement with the Government of Cuba. Just as they "do not forgive" his opinions regarding Cuba, conservatives do not tolerate Francis' position in favor of peace, his support for the legalization of civil unions between people of the same sex, his defense of multilateralism and the need for a reform of the United Nations, which he stated unequivocally in his speeches at this organization, as well as in Fratelli tutti. In Cuba, his words were received as those of a friend consistent with his doctrines and faith. AuthorThis article was republished from Granma. Archives July 2022 7/30/2022 July 30, 2022- Studying society for the working class: Marx’s first preface to “Capital”. By: Derek Ford & "Liberation School"Read Now "Karl Marx, painted portrait," by thierry ehrmann. Source: Wikimedia. " This article was originally published on Liberation School on July 25, 2022" IntroductionIn the preface to the first edition of volume one of Capital, dated July 25, 1867, Marx introduces the book’s “ultimate aim”: “to lay bare the economic law of motion of modern society” [1]. Looking back 155 years later, it’s clear the book not only accomplished that aim but continues to do so today. In a few short pages, Marx introduces the method he used to study and present his research into the dynamics of capitalism, explains the reasons why he focused on England, distinguishes between modes of production and social formations (and by doing so refutes any accusations of his theory of history as progressing linearly through successive stages), identifies the capacities he’s assuming of the reader, affirms he’s interested in critiquing the structures of capital and not the individuals within it, and explains that the main function of the book is to help our class intervene in the constantly changing capitalist system. Capital’s method and audienceAfter a brief explanation about the first three chapters and how they differ from his previous work, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx briefly discusses his method and the difficulty it entails: “Every beginning is difficult, holds in all sciences” [2]. The value of science, after all, is to explain why things happen. Scientific analysis begins with something apparent in the world and abstracts from it particularly decisive elements that demonstrate why the phenomenon appears as it does, how and by what principles it functions, what impact it has on the world, etc. Because Marx is studying society, however, “neither microscopes nor chemical reagents are of use.” He has to develop another technique for studying the basic forms of capitalism, which he calls “the force of abstraction” [3]. While Marx’s method of abstraction is filled with nuances, it essentially entails breaking down the object of study into discrete elements or categories so we can have a more accurate–and politically powerful–understanding of it. But beginning with the basic “cell form” of capital–value–is indisputably hard. Marx encourages us to press on, reminding us that, save these opening chapters, the book “cannot stand accused on the score of difficulty.” “I pre-suppose,” he continues, “a reader who is willing to learn something new and therefore to think for himself” [4]. Difficulty is a relative term, so if we’re willing to challenge our preconceived conceptions of the world and use our critical faculties, he’s saying, we won’t find it too difficult. Marx didn’t write Capital to impress the political economists of his day but to arm our class with the theoretical tools necessary to overthrow capitalism, which means that the reader he is pre-supposing is a member of our class, the working class. England as the “chief ground” for Capital Not only does Marx not have recourse to scientific technologies, he doesn’t have the ability to isolate capital and place it in a laboratory setting. His task is different from scientist who “makes experiments under conditions that assure the occurrence of its phenomenon in its normality.” Unable to separate capital from the world or his own position, Marx’s task is exceedingly difficult: he’s analyzing something that’s in constant motion and that determines the society in which he lives. This partly explains why, “to examine the capitalist mode of production, and the conditions of production and exchange corresponding to that mode,” he turns to where capitalism’s “classic ground” was at the time: England. “That is the reason why England is used as the chief illustration in the development of my theoretical ideas,” he explains [5]. Yet there are other reasons for his focus on England. Not only was he living there at the time but, as he wrote in the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, “the enormous material on the history of political economy which is accumulated in the British museum” and “the favorable view which London offers for the observation of bourgeois society” made it an ideal case study [6]. Finally, the recent class struggles in England forced the state to establish “commissions of inquiry into economic conditions” carried out by people “as competent, as free from partisanship and respect of persons as are the English factory-inspectors, her medical reporters on public health, her commissioners of inquiry into the exploitation of women and children, into housing and food” [7]. The text and concepts of Capital are filled with the damning testimony of such inspectors, and Leonard Horner was one of his favorites. In the ninth chapter, Marx writes that Horner “rendered undying service to the English working-class. He carried on a life-long contest, not only with the embittered manufacturers, but also with the Cabinet” [8]. Horner used to be a capitalist businessperson himself, and wasn’t opposed to capitalism the way Marx was. He was distraught by the horrors produced by capitalism’s unchecked tendencies, but “was morally committed to the belief that profitability could arise from good working conditions and from educating the masses” [9]. Marx’s admiration of Horner and the factory inspectors, who were mostly civil servants or small capitalists, shows how struggles within the capitalist state can advance the socialist movement, and serves as a good reminder that we should draw on as many different sources in our own research as possible. The complexity of capitalist societiesIn England, as Marx says, the laws of capitalist production were most evident because it was there that, in the mid-19th Century, the system was most developed. And as he’ll show in the last part of volume one, English capital was developed because of, among other things, “conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder” as well as “slavery pure and simple” in the U.S. [10]. Despite being the most advanced manifestation of capitalism, however, Marx is clear that British society wasn’t completely defined by the capitalist mode of production. Although conditions in English factories were better than other European countries because of the Factory Acts, British workers “suffer not only from the development of capitalist production… Alongside of modern evils, a whole series of inherited evils oppress us, arising from the passive survival of antiquated modes of production, with their inevitable train of social and political anachronisms. We suffer not only from the living, but from the dead” [11]. This is one of several places where Marx makes clear his understanding of history and social transformation, an understanding that in no way assumes neat and clean breaks between different stages of history, with the latest stage annihilating the previous one. In fact, the first half of the very first sentence of Capital makes the same point but in understated terms: “The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails…” [12]. It’s helpful to distinguish between modes of production and social formations not only because the distinction is decisive analytically, but more importantly because it accounts for the coexistence of different modes of production in capitalist societies. It further corrects the erroneous view that Marx didn’t account for the relationship between capitalism and slavery by “assigning slave labor to some ‘pre-capitalist’ stage of history” [13]. In his preparatory notebooks for Capital, written before the outbreak of the Civil War, Marx asserted that the U.S. represented “the most modern form of existence of bourgeois society” [14]. This comes shortly after his explicit acknowledgment that “a mode of production corresponding to the slave” had to be created in “the southern part of America” [15]. That Marx expressly highlights how different modes of production exist together and foregrounds that, as large as capital was in England, it wasn’t the only game in town, demonstrates the seriousness with which he studies history. At the same time, he insists that workers in other countries “can and should learn from others” so they might “shorten and lessen the birth-pangs” of transformation [16]. “Follow your road, and let the people say!”For the last few paragraphs of this opening preface, Marx transitions into a more agitational style of writing. The first point, which crops up throughout the book, is that he refers to individual people “only in so far as they are the personifications of economic categories, embodiments of particular class-relations and class-interests.” He tells us he doesn’t romanticize the capitalist or landlord, but that the study of society can’t hold “the individual responsible for relations whose creature he socially remains, however much he may subjectively raise himself above them” [17]. In other words, the class struggle is a fight not to change individuals but to change the social systems that condition or determine our individual standing in society. As we saw with Horner, however, this doesn’t mean that Marx totally ignores individuals, but that classes–and not persons–have the political agency to transform social relations. Writing in London 155 years ago today, Marx saw evidence of transformation–even radical transformation–underway. He writes about “a radical change in the existing relations between capital and labour” on the European Continent before citing then-U.S. Vice President Benjamin Wade’s statement “that, after the abolition of slavery, a radical change of the relations of capital and of property in land is next.” Evidence, however, isn’t a guarantee of such change. They are only indications of radical possibilities: “They do not signify that tomorrow a miracle will happen. They show that, within the ruling-classes themselves, a foreboding is dawning, that the present society is no solid crystal, but an organism capable of change, and is constantly changing” [18]. Marx wrote Capital to help working and oppressed peoples determine the direction of change, and he closes the preface with a famous quote from Dante’s Divine Comedy: “Follow your road, and let the people say!” He ends, that is, by reminding us—the readers willing to challenge ourselves with this text—that how we use the weapon that is Capital is up to us. References [1] Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Vol. 1): The Process of Capitalist Production, trans. S. Moore and E. Aveling (New York: International Publishers, 1867/1967), 20. Available here. [2] Ibid., 18. [3] Ibid., 19. [4] Ibid. [5] Ibid. [6] Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, trans. N.I. Stone (New York: Lector House, 1859/2020), x. Available here. [7] Marx, Capital (Vol. 1), 20. [8] Ibid., 216, footnote 17. Available here, footnote 10. [9] Andy Merrifield, Marx Dead and Alive: Reading Capital in Precarious Times (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2020), 46. [10] Marx, Capital (Vol. 1), 668, 711. See also Pappachen, Summer. (2021). “What is Imperialism? An Introduction.” Liberation School, September 21. Available here. [11] Marx, Capital (Vol. 1), 20. [12] Ibid., 43, emphasis added. [13] Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1983/2000), 4. [14] Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), trans. M. Nicolaus (New York: Penguin Books, 1939/1973), 104. Available here. [15] Ibid., 98. [16] Marx, Capital (Vol. 1), 20. [17] Ibid., 21. [18] Ibid. AuthorDerek Ford Archives July 2022 7/28/2022 The Dialectical Ascension from the Abstract to the Concrete. By: Carlos L. GarridoRead Now In 1808 G. W. F. Hegel writes an article for popular dissemination asking the question “Who Thinks Abstractly?” His reply – “the uneducated, not the educated… good society does not think abstractly because it is too easy, because it is too lowly.”[1] For those unfamiliar with the usage of concrete and abstract in Hegel (or in Marxism), the response might serve as a shocking inversion of how popular consciousness conceives of the relation between abstract and concrete thought, and subsequently, between the types of people who think concretely and abstractly. The philosopher is often thought to be the one that thinks abstractly, contemplating things far away from what is thought to be concrete or sensually immediate. Plato’s analogy of the philosopher as a ship captain condemned for “stargazing” is the archetypical imagery for this stereotype.[2] What then is meant by abstract thinking? And why is it so ‘lowly’? One thinks abstractly when they allow themselves to pass judgement on facts in a manner which severs facts from the factors out of which they emerged. It is factors which allow facts to be facts (the reverse is, of course, also true). When we take things directly as we experience them and ask no further questions about the plethora of factors which created the conditions for the thing directly experienced, then we are thinking abstractly. Common sense has a saying for this mistake: ‘never judge a book by its cover’. The message here is clear – doomed to error is the judgement passed on superficial appearance.[3] A boxing judge cannot appropriately judge if they arrive to the fight in the 12th round. Likewise, a fact cannot be properly understood without knowledge of the determinations that allowed it to arise. For instance, Hegel looks at a murder and says that, One who knows men traces the development of the criminal's mind: he finds in his history, in his education, a bad family relationship between his father and mother, some tremendous harshness after this human being had done some minor wrong, so he became embittered against the social order — a first reaction to this that in effect expelled him and henceforth did not make it possible for him to preserve himself except through crime. — There may be people who will say when they hear such things: he wants to excuse this murderer![4] Setting aside the impressive, century-early psychoanalysis of the person who committed the murder, Hegel’s point is that context and history are ever-present in everyday affairs. The amputation of a thing or an event from the history and interconnections out of which it arose makes the genuine comprehension of that thing or event unfeasible. On the other hand, concrete thought is present when the thing or event under examination is treated comprehensively, in its development and interconnections. It is here wherein truth lies. As Hegel says in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, “the true is concrete… [and] the concrete is the unity of diverse determinations.”[5] An almost identical statement is repeated in the famous section on “The Method of Political Economy” from Marx’s Grundrisse, where he says that “the concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations… [a] unity of the diverse.”[6] Herein lies the difference between abstract and concrete thought. Abstract thought is comfortable with examining things divorced from their determinations, that is, from the dynamic (both immanent and external) factors which produce things. This form of reified thinking kills, it sucks the living spirit out of things and treats them as dead entities. Concrete thought, on the other hand, seeks to know things in connection to the relations and developments which produced it. Nonetheless, it can never start with that which is most concrete. When it attempts to do so it merely fondles an “imagined concrete,” a deceiving abstraction dressed in concrete clothing.[7] Concrete thought, instead, must be thought of as a process of ascension from the less concrete (the most abstract), to the most concrete. As Marx says, the “reproduction of the concrete by way of thought” is “not a point of departure” but the result of “a process of concentration.”[8] Concrete thought, then, contains abstract thought as a necessary moment in its ascension towards the concrete reproduction of the concrete. However, it overcomes this abstract immediacy by gathering the plethora of determinations which a thing presupposes in a manner which reproduces in the mind the active relations these determinations have with each other within a given totality. The dialectical method is precisely this – the method of the ascension from the abstract to the concrete. It is, as Hegel wrote, the “soul of all knowledge which is truly scientific,” and as Marx said, “the scientifically correct method.”[9] This does not negate the fact that the ascension towards the concrete reproduction of the concrete in thought is itself a process of mental abstraction. In the same way great joy produces tears and great sorrows smiles, this process of abstraction bears as a fruit its opposite – the concrete. As Evald Ilyenkov eloquently states – “the ascent from the concrete to the abstract and the ascent from the abstract to the concrete are two mutually assuming forms of the theoretical assimilation of the world… each of them is realized only through its opposite and in unity with it.”[10] Nonetheless, the antipode which ascends from the abstract to the concrete is the dominant, and hence, ‘scientifically correct’ one. Its opposite – the ascension from the concrete to the abstract – is a necessary mediation for the ultimate theoretical goal of reproducing the concrete concretely. In sum: concrete thought, the ultimate result of the dialectical ascension from the abstract to the concrete, reproduces in a comprehensive manner for the mind the complex movements and interconnections in which all phenomena in nature and society are embedded. In so doing, it provides the most scientifically apt method for understanding the world. Marxism, however, also serves as a guide to action, as an outlook which seeks to change (as opposed to merely interpret) the world; hence, the dialectical process of attaining a concrete reproduction of the concrete is always grounded on and aimed towards revolutionary praxis. Notes [1] G. W. F. Hegel. “Who Thinks Abstractly.” In Hegel: Texts and Commentary. Edited by W. Kauffman. New York: Anchor Books, 1966., pp. 462. [2] Plato. Complete Works. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997., pp. 1111. [3] This excludes, of course, a dialectical way of thinking about appearance, which sees appearance not as a distortion of essence, but each in an “essential relation” to each other – “what appears shows the essential, and the essential is in its appearing.” G. W. F. Hegel. The Science of Logic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015., pp. 419. [4] Hegel. “Who Thinks Abstractly.,” pp. 463. [5] G. W. F. Hegel. Lectures on the History of Philosophy Vol. 2. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974., pp. 13. [6] Karl Marx. Grundrisse. London: Penguin Books, 1973., pp. 101. [7] Ibid., pp. 100. [8] Ibid. [9] G. W. F. Hegel. Logic: Being Part One of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences. Oxford: Clarendon Press. § 81.; Marx. Grundrisse., pp. 101. [10] Evald Ilyenkov. The Dialectics of the Abstract and Concrete in Marx’s Capital. Delhi: Aakar Books, 2022., pp. 139. AuthorCarlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American PhD student and instructor in philosophy at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale (with an M.A. in philosophy from the same institution). His research focuses include Marxism, Hegel, early 19th century American socialism, and socialism with Chinese characteristics. He is an editor in the Marxist educational project Midwestern Marx and in the Journal of American Socialist Studies. His popular writings have appeared in dozens of socialist magazines in various languages. As a political analyst with a focus on Latin America (esp. Cuba), he has appeared in dozens of radio and video interviews around the world. Archives July 2022 7/27/2022 Book Review: The Weather Makers: How Man is Changing the Climate and What it Means for Life on Earth-Tim Flannery. Reviewed By: Thomas Riggins (7/7)Read Now Part 7 - ConclusionOne of the biggest problems facing the Biden administration is that of global warming and what to do about it. The Trump administration rejected the international agreement to try and remedy the problem (the Paris agreement) and a new international agreement must be reached. Paris is not, as it stands, adequate to do the job that must be done. Flannery, with respect to the earlier Kyoto agreement writes, "If we are to stabilize our climate, Kyoto's target [a CO2 emissions cut of 5.2%] needs to be strengthened twelve times over: Cuts of 70 percent by 2050 are required to keep atmospheric CO2 at double the pre industrial level." In order to save the planet, as we know it, environmentalists will have to fight powerful international cartels that profit from the use of fossil fuels. The energy lobby in the U.S. worked full time with the previous administrations to lie about, and distort the scientific. evidence of, global warming. These forces, and the politicians that front for them, have known for 50 years that their activities were killing the planet but the profits they were making were more important to them than the future existence of life on Earth. Recent actions by president Biden to increase oil and gas production shows that the US continues to ignore the warnings of science. Flannery pointed out that ever since 1977 when the New York Times ran a story ["Scientists Fear Heavy Use of Coal May Bring Adverse Shift in Climate"] there has been a battle plan in effect to suppress as much as possible the scientific evidence of global warming. The actions of previous administrations were a kind of culmination of these anti- scientific doings. The Bush administration, for example, suppressed or actually changed the wording and conclusions of scientific reports from NASA, the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency [read Destruction Agency under Bush], and the National Academy of Sciences, among others. Even lobbyists for the energy companies were amazed by the zeal of that administration to further their interests at the expense of the planet, one of whom remarked that it may be a long time before the energy sector has another President Bush "or Atilla the Hun." They didn't have to wait very long-- they got Trump. Biden however, talks the talk of climate change but doesn't walk the walk. It may be an illusion to support Democrats over Republicans in elections and expect any real change in policies. We may need an independent movement of a Left United Front to bring this about, but so far we only see de facto "support the Democrats" as the answer. You know something is wrong when your allies think of you as Atilla the Hun. The truth is that Bush, as well as his successors, and the Republicans generally spent their time in office (with the connivance of conservative and centrist Democrats) in acting in ways detrimental to 99% of the people of the earth and to enrich the upper 1%. But that 1% will suffer too if the atmosphere gives out. So, what is to be done? We have to hurry, and Flannery saw the two great problems as 1) how to decarbonize the transportation system, and 2) how to decarbonize the electricity grid. We should concentrate our efforts first on the electricity grid (to get rid of coal) and then tackle the transportation system to get rid of oil and gas. It may seem that we will never get rid of these three fuels but we must or we will literally be committing suicide. Our civilization is analogous to those people who smoke three packs a day-- they know what is going to happen to their lungs and would be simply insane not to quit. Flannery discussed several ways the power grid could be weaned from carbon. We could produce power by nuclear, hydrothermal, hydrogen, wind, solar (and also tidal action) methods and thus eliminate the need for coal, oil and natural gas. The risks of nuclear power make it the least desirable. I don't think we should be playing with it-- we don't know what to do with radioactive waste and when I read that the EPA plans to monitor waste dumps for 10,000 years, and will make rule changes after that period to cover the dumps for 1,000,000 years I think: Let's get real! The EPA is not going to be around for 10,000 years! One thing Flannery pointed out is that wind and solar energy can be produced locally and even by individuals and their families thus making for a decentralized system. If we go for nuclear or hydrogen power cells then "the big power corporations" will likely be in charge and survive. I think they should, if they survive, be placed under state control and treated as public utilities which should not be privately held for profit making. Socialist policies are always the best options. After dealing with the power grid, Flannery turned his attention to the transportation system. We will naturally have to develop alternatives to carbon based fuel-- and ethanol is not the answer. It is not cost effective, takes up too much land, and damages the food supply by taking food crops out of production in order to grow the crops to make ethanol. Rather we will have to use electric calls, hybrids, mincats [CAT stands for compressed air technology], hydrogen based fuel cells, and other non polluting methods to apply to transportation, as well as beef up our systems of public transportation. One thing we can be sure of is that time is running out. I think anyone interested in the problems of climate change and global warming should read Flannery's book. It was written before the global collapse of monopoly capitalism (2008+) and how the ongoing crisis will affect our ability to save the planet remains to be seen. AuthorThomas Riggins is a retired philosophy teacher (NYU, The New School of Social Research, among others) who received a PhD from the CUNY Graduate Center (1983). He has been active in the civil rights and peace movements since the 1960s when he was chairman of the Young People's Socialist League at Florida State University and also worked for CORE in voter registration in north Florida (Leon County). He has written for many online publications such as People's World and Political Affairs where he was an associate editor. He also served on the board of the Bertrand Russell Society and was president of the Corliss Lamont chapter in New York City of the American Humanist Association. He is the author of Reading the Classical Texts of Marxism. Archives July 2022 7/26/2022 Is commodity production the correct axis to assess the strategic value of professions from the perspective of revolutionary potential and/or leverage to expropriate capital? By: Wade T. PatonRead Now It's time to assess whether productivity is a useful metric in determining revolutionary potential and/or if it informs us on any profession's strategic value to expropriate capital. Revolutionary potential and strategic value from the perspective of effective labor militancy has changed in the past three decades. Why? Because the international economy underwent an information technology revolution which changed its very structure. We now have a delicate yet complex supply chain that works on a 24 hour cycle. The most obvious and public facing example of which is Amazon. Their supply chain is a microcosm for the entirety of international logistics. But to understand how this change in the international business cycle requires we adapt our analysis we must first discuss what the supply chain looked like prior to its current incarnation, what caused the shift and how the supply chain works now. In 1983 big retailers like Sears would estimate product demand quarterly. They'd send manufacturers their 'guess' for how much product they'd need over the next 3 months & purchase what they guessed would be enough to keep their racks/floor space full. This led to an entire overstock industry. Companies like Sears and KMart couldn't afford to have empty racks/floor space so they bought in bulk more than they could sell as their business model. And anything they couldn't sell in season they offloaded to bulk discount stores like Ross, Burlington Coat Factory, etc., as a loss. This made each quarter a gamble as projected earnings could falter in any season and then the surplus of overstock in the warehouses could amass into extreme profit losses, even if they could offset costs by selling said surplus to bulk discount stores. Oftentimes there was so much surplus of unsold commodities that bulk discount stores didn't have the capacity to buy more and the excess would rack up costs as unmovable products in warehouses. The ultimate loss was that product caught in this limbo more than often found its way into landfills. On the other extreme end, if a company experienced an excess of demand then they could experience a shortage of product that amounted to lost money in operating costs that could reach such severity levels that any profit made was offset. This led the commercial retail industry's labor market to fits of instability as in either case, retail workers were laid off in droves. Enter Walmart. Apart from the reasons Walmart gives for its initial success (customer focused advertising campaigns/direct mail ads, a focus on pricing controls by purchasing and selling low cost imported goods and building warehouses that were close to its stores), what's really important is how it started an information technology/automation revolution that changed the model for the entire international supply chain. Walmart eliminated the guesswork that most retailers were subject to by streamlining their logistics through a computerized communications network that automated how shelves were stocked. It revolutionized the warehouse industry and made it so that the second a product was purchased their computing systems instantly sent a request to the warehouse to replace the item. This gave Walmart an advantage by providing them an almost real time picture of demand. They only stocked the shelves in accordance with what was bought. Anything that stayed on the shelves too long, they stopped carrying. Anything they couldn't keep on the shelves long enough, they adjusted by increasing the amount ordered. Overstock was all but eliminated and so too were the excess costs of overstocked warehouses as well as selling to bulk discount stores at a loss. Overnight other box stores started to fold as their outdated supply chain practices cost them greatly while Walmart seemingly provided more to the consumer for less without disruption to availability or having to deal with the pushy desperation of retail sales trying to offload unpopular/unwanted overstock on them. Any chain that failed to adopt Walmart's new automated logistics disappeared. Gone were the days of the overstock profit loss. But why is this important? Because every last industry in existence was also forced to abandon their logistical model for the automated logistical system Walmart pioneered. And this is how and why every industry operates on the 24 hours supply chain cycle. Every business going forward was put on notice. Either streamline your supply chain to meet demand as close to real time as possible.., or stagnate and wither. Now how does this affect productivity and why does it matter to the subject of assessing productivity value as a means for revolutionary potential? It marks a departure from commodity production having the lion’s share of importance to the capitalist system. Wealth generation is now dependent on a tightrope balance. In short, the strength of this new supply chain is also its weakness. Almost ANY disruption to the supply chain in the previous era could be waited out as warehoused overstock of product was used to stall strikes and militant labor action. In juxtaposition, in this era a single day's worth of disruption to the supply chain can SERIOUSLY damage the capitalist class. The revolutionary potential, strategic value and degree of leverage a profession has is now only weighted by its relative ability to disrupt essential sectors of the supply chain (for the purposes of expropriating capital). And the reason we measure strategic value this way is because expropriation of capital is the first order of process in sublating the capitalist system. History has proven time and again that class collaboration is a ruling class trap. Therefore our first priority must always be to dislodge our class enemies wherever they hold power to influence. That said, a profession that produces a commodity can be qualitatively measured for its strategic value in three ways; the degree of importance the commodity being produced plays in the operation of the supply chain, the relative size of the labor pool capable/qualified for the labor in relation to the demand for it, and how essential the particular industry is to the supply chain as a whole. So let's break that down. A clear example of an essential and productive profession is the energy worker. We’re talking refinery workers, drillers, extractors, etc. Without fuel for transportation and electrification there IS NO supply chain. We’re all very aware of this and are quite comfortable assessing the leverage they possess to expropriate capital, their revolutionary potential and their strategic value. Now consider the factory worker that produces fidget spinners. If all the producers of fidget spinners were to go on strike the supply chain would carry on without a hiccup. Thus the strategic value of their productivity is not important at all. Their factories could close and not a single monopolist, imperialist or capitalist of any note or importance would suffer in the least. They could strike forever and the system would remain unmoved. So as we see here, the value of productivity from a strategic and revolutionary approach, is only as relevant as its ability to expropriate/leverage power away from capital. But let us be VERY clear, a worker’s value as it pertains to the disruption and expropriation of capital is NOT their only virtue. The aforementioned point made is only to demonstrate how productivity is the wrong axis to evaluate the measure of power any single profession or industry has in expropriating capital. Now let’s examine the service sector in the same manner. Since the international economy shifted into operating in a 24 hour supply cycle, productivity as a metric has been somewhat diminished. It’s now only a small portion of what can disrupt the supply chain. These days flight attendants can go on strike and shut down half the supply chain. This is why they, as service workers, can be and currently are more revolutionary than say.., a sex toy factory worker. And that's why their union is far more militant and has become far more influential in these past years. If you need proof, look only to the time the flight attendants union put an end to gov't shutdowns just by threatening to go on strike a couple of years ago. So now we see that there are productive AND service professions/industries essential to the 24 hour supply chain cycle that can disrupt and expropriate the power of imperialists, monopolists & capitalists. But despite spending all this time explaining why we should be assessing occupations/industries based on their strategic value we must also consider another metric. Because the truth is that only a small portion of the working classes occupy professions critical to the international supply chain and thus they are a minority easily crushed. Truth is service work, like that done by the barista, and commodity production as done by the factory worker making fidget spinners, really doesn't affect the economy in any substantial way. Neither could strike to any effect and both add marginal value to products they deliver. That said, their value lies in their solidarity. In coordination, the least essential workers are still needed to be a bulwark for the more strategically potent and revolutionary professions that will be doing the lion's share of expropriation. They are, in fact, ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY! Labor history is chock full of examples that prove this. In the history of labor militancy, any time strategic professions/trades were used to disrupt capital to make labor gains without popular support or a massive mobilization of labor from other unions to defend them, the bourgeoisie has been able to crush them by mobilizing the military, mercenaries, and police. And any time the masses have revolted without planning around labor militancy.., without using strategic leverage to expropriate capital and coordinating a defense based on protecting that maneuver, the event typically dissipates with the ruling class managing to recuperate the struggle without compromising anything but token symbols. So just because some professions carry with them greater strategic value to expropriation doesn’t mean they’re capable of accomplishing their purpose without protection. And this is why all workers of any kind are still essential. Marx himself stated it best when he said, “communists everywhere support EVERY revolutionary movement against the existing social & political order. In all these movements they bring to the front the property question as the leading question, no matter what its degree of development at the time.” In some ways, we need to radicalize the leverage-less masses more so because they have the most grueling and punishing of jobs.., that of sentinels. They have to absorb the unbridled aggression of capital in the defense of the strategic minority. However, we cannot ignore that most service work and even some productive work of little to no revolutionary relevance WILL phase into obsolescence as we expropriate capital from our ruling class. To this end we all must acknowledge that we’re not trying to preserve the current system but transform it. Socialism will require us to unleash productive and creative forces. To this end we must prepare to transition our honored labor sentinels (in particular the non-essential service workers & non-essential commodity producers) into professions where production is the primary concern. China’s cultural revolution proved that communism/socialism is not possible in poverty. Instead, the only way to achieve a lasting and stable socialist society is to produce in such an abundance that all needs for a state wither away. I say this to acknowledge that Marxism-Leninism is dialectical. And what’s true in one phase of sublation may cease to be in a new phase. Therefore, we should not seek out ways in which to disagree. Instead, we MUST understand one another and synthesize the bigger picture. We must always look to the past to understand the motion of history, be mindful of the present so as to adapt to our material reality and make use of scientific socialist theory to sublate the current world order into one that serves the people. AuthorWade T. Paton is a reformed intelligence analyst and US Army veteran. He is the lucky husband to a wonderful wife, proud father of two children and dedicated member of the Communist Party USA. When he isn’t serving his community, he can usually be found playing video games with the kids or down at the VFW talking Marxism with his working class brothers and sisters. Archives July 2022  With the rise of China as an economic powerhouse, much attention is being paid to the country’s model of “market socialism”. For the Global South, it is being touted as a method to develop productive forces and reverse the imperialist erosion of social wealth. An important conceptual proposition of this economic discourse is the existence of an interventionist state that can dissociate markets from capitalism and utilize them as a means to serve the ends of socialism. Here, state planning and the market economy are harmoniously conjoined as distinct modes that can be made to work together for the construction of a solid national productive base. This theoretico-practical unification of state regulation and market dynamism is said to be based on the historical fact that markets existed in the slave economies of the ancient world, e.g., Rome and Greece, and in the feudal economies of the Middle Ages. Since market economies have preceded the capitalist mode of production, market socialists suggest that a socialist mode of production can utilize them for collective goals of liberation. However, the abstract positing of a general and trans-historical market – one that has endured throughout successive modes of production – is an erroneous analytical operation. As Utsa Patnaik writes: “If we make no distinction between commodity production and capitalist production; and as a corollary, if we fail to distinguish between those ancient forms of money-capital engaged exclusively in trade and usury, and money-capital engaged in capitalist production proper – then we give up, in effect, the very attempt to apply those analytical categories to the domain of economic history, which serve to distinguish between differing socio-economic formations.” To distinguish between pre-capitalist and capitalist markets, we need to examine their historical texture and economic structure. In pre-capitalist societies, the market was governed by a logic of economic transaction which emphasized the recycling of wealth in the process of circulation. Elites felt no need to maximize profits through the systematic application of technological improvements. In the words of Ellen Meiksins Wood, “exploitation took the form of direct surplus extraction by coercive force. To increase their surpluses, exploiters needed to improve not the productivity of the producers’ labor so much as the effectiveness of their own coercive powers of appropriation.” This changed under capitalist markets, which are defined by competition among producers. Such market competition entails a degree of economic coercion on the producers, which means that each producer/capitalist becomes a personification of capital, an agent upon whom the capitalist totality imposes the imperative of accumulation. Wood notes: “Only capitalist appropriation depends on market competition and therefore on the systematic improvement of labor productivity. Only capitalism, then, depends on constantly improving the forces of production. And only in capitalism is it necessary to grow just to stay in the same place.” The subjection of producers to competition leads to the creation of “strategies that lead to success in market competition—specialization, accumulation, enhancing labor-productivity, adopting low-cost techniques, moving in and out of various lines in search of profit, and so on. The result, of course, is a uniquely dynamic system which has produced a historically unprecedented tendency to self-sustaining growth and constant revolutionizing of the forces of production”. When market socialists talk about the deployment of market for the construction of Third World socialism, it is the capitalist market they are talking about as it is only under capitalist social relations that market mechanisms can lead to the continuous revolutionization and strengthening of productive forces. The use of pre-capitalist market mechanisms carries no economic relevance since it can’t provide the productive resources necessary for the provision of basic necessities, the reduction of working hours, and the enhancement of cultural and educational life. Now, in the context of an imperialist world-system characterized by the core capitalist countries’ efforts to under-develop the Global South, there is nothing wrong per se with the Third World Left’s use of market for the development of productive forces. But what is problematic is the establishment of market as a necessary complement to state planning. Instead, what we need is the conceptualization of market and planning as a contradictory combination specific to a transitional stage, one whose tensions have to be intensified in favor of the elimination of the former. As Che Guevara puts it: “We understand that the capitalist categories are retained for a time and that the length of this period cannot be predetermined, but the characteristics of the period of transition are those of a society that is throwing off its old bonds in order to move quickly into the new stage. The tendency should be, in our opinion, to eliminate as fast as possible the old categories, including the market, money, and, therefore, material interest — or, better, to eliminate the conditions for their existence.” In order to hasten the demise of capitalist categories, socialists need to undermine the law of value, according to which commodity exchange must take place according to socially necessary labour times established competitively on the market. Guevara tried to erode the law of value by treating Cuba as one big factory and work as a social duty. Helen Yaffe elaborates what this means: “The Plan sets worker production ‘norms’, based on socially necessary labour time, but workers are urged to surpass these in order to increase economic efficiency. The challenge is to transform the value added to production by the worker above his own subsistence from ‘surplus value’, as under capitalism, into ‘surplus product’ under socialism and to move from production for exchange, to production for use. Under capitalism, the workers’ surplus is the product of exploitation because it does not belong to them. Under socialism, it is a contribution to social production – they work for themselves as part of a collective society. The surplus is distributed according to criteria determined by the plan. Workers’ management is essential under socialism because it ensures workers’ ownership of the means of production. The masses must participate collectively in devising the plan, establishing the norms and in daily decisions concerning production and consumption.” Here, what is evident is the fact that planning comes to be the political regulator of socialist society, using democratic management and socio-pedagogical laboratories to increase productivity. In this way, “capitalist mechanisms (profit motive, material incentives, market-exchanges, competition)” come to be replaced with “administrative controls (the plan, the budget, supervision and audits, workers’ democracy)”. The centrality of politics in the socialist mode of production can be better understood by drawing a distinction the dominant and determinant instances of a society. A socialist society – like any other society – is a totality structured in dominance. Among the various structural instances, one instance will have the dominant role: contradictions at other levels will find themselves displaced to this instance (thereby averting a revolutionary rupture) or many contradictions may become condensed in this instance (producing the possibility of a revolutionary rupture). The dominant instance will vary according to the social formation, but in all cases its role is determined – in the last instance – by the economy. In other words, the economy exercises its effects indirectly by determining the specific efficacy of other instances. Drawing on these theoretical tools, we can say that socialism is a transitional mode of production in which the economy is transformed in such a way that political and ideological struggles come to occupy the dominant place, becoming the principal weapon through which capital’s hegemony is destroyed and a new mode of production is created. The dominance of politics in socialist transitions is confirmed by historical experience. Unlike the bourgeoisie, who started to economically undermine the pre-capitalist relations of production long before gaining political control, the proletariat has had to seize political power from the capitalist state to launch the revolutionary process of communist transformation. In the current conjuncture, the Left, while recognizing the temporary historical necessity of a socialist market economy, needs to move beyond that transitional discourse and put emphasis on politics as a revolutionary method for the dissolution of the law of value. AuthorYanis Iqbal is an independent researcher and freelance writer based in Aligarh, India and can be contacted at [email protected]. His articles have been published in the USA, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India and several countries of Latin America. Archives July 2022  Police officers help firefighters to extinguish a fire in Thrakomakedones, near Mount Parnitha, north of Athens A comment on the first part of the “Ecological Catastrophe, Collapse, Democracy and Socialism” debate The following commentary was written by Marxist thinker and author of Marx’s Ecology John Bellamy Foster on the first part of the debate “Ecological Catastrophe, Collapse, Democracy and Socialism” between the renowned American intellectual Noam Chomsky, the Chilean exponent of the new ideology of Collapsist Marxism Miguel Fuentes and climate scientist Guy McPherson. (The debate “Ecological Catastrophe, Collapse, Democracy and Socialism” can be read at the website of Marxism and Collapse.) One of the main achievements of John Bellamy Foster’s critical commentary is explaining his position on this debate by developing his own ideas in relation to what for him would constitute the most urgent task of the moment: to respond to the ecological catastrophe and the danger of an imminent civilisational collapse from an ecosocialist perspective. I accept much of what Noam Chomsky, Miguel Fuentes, and Guy McPherson say, but do not agree completely with any of them. My view of the planetary ecological emergency starts with the world scientific consensus, insofar as that can be ascertained, and draws on the long critique of capitalism developed most centrally by historical materialism. In terms of the scientific consensus on climate change, the reports of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are most important. The planetary emergency is not, however, confined to climate change, and also encompasses the entire set of planetary boundaries that are now being crossed, demarcating the earth as a safe home for humanity. Most of my comments here, though, will center on climate change. In terms of the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report, published over the course of 2021-2022, it is no longer possible for the world entirely to avoid crossing the 1.5° C increase in global average temperature. Rather, in the most optimistic IPCC scenario (SSP1-1.9) the 1.5° C mark will not be reached until 2040, global average temperatures will go up a further tenth of a degree by mid-century, and the increase in global average temperature will fall again to 1.4°C by the end of the century. We therefore have a very small window in which to act. Basically, meeting this scenario means peaking global carbon emissions by 2030 and reaching net zero carbon emissions by 2050. All of this was outlined in the first part of AR6 on the Physical Science Basis published in August 2021. This was followed by the publication of the IPCC’s Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability report in February 2022, and its Mitigation report in April 2022. Global surface temperature changes relative to 1850-1900 (IPCC, 2021)  Each IPCC assessment report (AR1-AR6) has three parts, each of which is published separately and is introduced by a “Summary for Policymakers,” followed by a series of chapters. In the IPCC process scientists, reflecting the scientific consensus, write the whole draft report. But the “Summary for Policymakers” for each published part—the only section of the overall report that is widely read, covered by the press, and constitutes the basis for governmental policies—is rewritten line by line by governments. Hence the published “Summary for Policymakers” is not the actual scientific consensus document, but rather the governmental consensus document that displaces the former. Especially with respect to issues of mitigation, related to social policy, governments can obliterate the entirety of what the scientists determined. Capitalist world governments were particularly worried about, part 3 of AR6 on Mitigation, as drafted by scientists as of August 2021, since it was by far the most radical IPCC treatment of the mitigation issue, reflecting the fact that revolutionary-scale transformations of production, consumption, and energy use (both in terms of physical and temporal scales) were now needed if the 1.5°C pathway was to be reached—or even in order to keep the increase in global average temperature well below 2°C. This is considered the guardrail for avoiding irreversible out-of-control climate change, which, if crossed, would likely lead to a global average temperature of 4.4°C (best estimate) by the end of the century, leading to the collapse of global industrial civilization. Chapter I of the AR6 Mitigation report went so far as to question whether capitalism was sustainable. Anticipating that governments were prepared drastically to alter the scientific consensus “Summary for Policymakers”, scientists associated with Scientific Rebellion (linked to Extinction Rebellion) leaked the scientific consensus report for part 3 on Mitigation in August 2021, days before the release of part 1 of the report on The Physical Science Basis. This action allowed us to see the radical social conclusions of the scientists in Working Group 3, who well understood the enormous social transformations that needed to take place to stay within the 1.5°C pathway, and the inability of existing and prospective technologies to solve the problem, independently of transformative social change. The scientific consensus Summary for Policymakers for part 3 on Mitigation also pointed to the importance of vast movements from the bottom of society—involving youth, workers, women, the precarious, the racially oppressed, and those in the Global South, who had relatively little responsibility for the problem but were likely to suffer the most. All of this was eradicated, and in many cases inverted, in the published governmental consensus “Summary for Policymakers” in part 3 of AR6 on Mitigation, which was almost a complete inversion of what the scientists had determined. For example, the scientific consensus draft said that coal-fired plants had to be eliminated this decade, while the published governmental consensus report changed this to the possibility of increasing coal-fired plants with advancements in carbon capture and sequestration. The scientific consensus Summary for Policymakers attacked the “vested interests.” The published version removed any reference to the vested interests. More importantly, the scientific consensus report argued that the 1.5°C pathway could be reached while dramatically improving the conditions of all of humanity by pursuing low-energy solutions, requiring social transformations. This, however, was removed from the published governmental consensus Summary for Policymakers.
The world scientific consensus itself in this planetary emergency is being sacrificed to what ecologist Rachel Carson called “the gods of production and profit.” The only answer, as in the past, is a social earthquake from below coupled with volcanic eruptions in every locale forming a revolt of the world’s population, emerging as a new, all-encompassing environmental proletariat. There are incredible obstacles before us, not least of all the attempts of existing states to mobilize the right-wing elements of the lower-middle class, what C. Wright Mills called “the rear guard of the capitalist system,” generating a neo-fascist politics. Nevertheless, we are facing a historically unprecedented situation. A Global Ecological Revolt is already in the making. Hundreds of millions, even billions, of people will enter actively into the environmental struggle in our time. Whether it will be enough to save the earth as a home for humanity is impossible to tell. But the struggle is already beginning. It is possible for humanity to win, and our choice as individuals is how we join the struggle. It is clear from the world scientific consensus as embodied in the Mitigation report that a strategy of capitalist ecological modernization, financed by global carbon taxes and the financialization of nature, is something that is too little and too late—and relies on the juggernaut of capital that is already destroying the earth as a home for humanity—on the pretense that saving the climate can all be made compatible with the accumulation of capital. What Robert Pollin and Noam Chomsky have advanced in terms of green taxes and a global Green New Deal that depends primarily on decoupling economic growth from greenhouse gas emissions through technological change—basically a strategy of capitalist ecological modernization with some just transition features, is not sufficient to deal with the crisis at this point—and would at best give us a little more time. Even this, though, is being resisted by the vested interests as a threat to the system. The capitalist class at the top is so intertwined with fossil capital as to be incapable of even a meaningful strategy of climate reform. It is prepared to drag its feet, while building fortresses to safeguard its own opulent conditions, stepping up its looting of the planet. This is not quite a suicidal strategy from the standpoint of the self-styled “masters of the universe”, because they have already largely separated themselves in their consciousness from humanity, the earth, and the future. In contrast to Chomsky, Fuentes and McPherson, though realistic on many points, seem, in different ways, to have given up. Yet, humanity as a whole has not yet nor will it ever give up. As Karl Marx said quite realistically, in confronting the destruction that British colonial rule unleashed on the Irish environment and population in his day, it is a question of “ruin or revolution.” We know now that even in the most optimistic scenario whole constellations of ecological catastrophes are now upon us in the next few decades. This means that human communities and populations need to organize in the present at the grassroots for survival at the local, regional, national, and global levels. Issues of survival are bearing down the most on marginalized, precarious, oppressed, and exploited populations, although ultimately threatening the entire chain of human generations. It is here we must take our stand. As the great Irish revolutionary James Connolly wrote in his song “Be Moderate,” “We only want THE EARTH.” —John Bellamy Foster, June 10, 2022 AuthorJohn Bellamy Foster, professor of sociology at the University of Oregon, is editor of Monthly Review, an independent socialist magazine published monthly in New York City. His research is devoted to critical inquiries into theory and history, focusing primarily on the economic, political and ecological contradictions of capitalism, but also encompassing the wider realm of social theory as a whole. He has published numerous articles and books focusing on the political economy of capitalism and the economic crisis, ecology and the ecological crisis, and Marxist theory: (with Brett Clark) The Robbery of Nature: Capitalism and the Ecological Rift; The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology; (with Paul Burkett) Marx and the Earth: An Anti-Critique (2016); The Theory of Monopoly Capitalism: An Elaboration of Marxian Political Economy (New Edition, 2014); (with Robert W. McChesney) The Endless Crisis: How Monopoly-Finance Capital Produces Stagnation and Upheaval from the USA to China (2012); (with Fred Magdoff) What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism: A Citizen's Guide to Capitalism and the Environment (2011); (with Brett Clark and Richard York) The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth (2009); (with Fred Magdoff) The Great Financial Crisis: Causes and Consequences (2009); The Ecological Revolution: Making Peace with the Planet (2009); (with Brett Clark and Richard York) Critique of Intelligent Design: Materialism versus Creationism from Antiquity to the Present (2008); Ecology Against Capitalism (2002); Marx's Ecology: Materialism and Nature (2000); (with Frederick H. Buttel and Fred Magdoff) Hungry for Profit: The Agribusiness Threat to Farmers, Food, and the Environment (2000); The Vulnerable Planet: A Short Economic History of the Environment (1999); (with Ellen Meiksins Wood and Robert W. McChesney) Capitalism and the Information Age: The Political Economy of the Global Communication Revolution (1998); (with Ellen Meiksins Wood) In Defense of History: Marxism and the Postmodern Agenda (1997); The Theory of Monopoly Capitalism: An Elaboration of Marxian Political Economy (1986); (with Henryk Szlajfer) The Faltering Economy: The Problem of Accumulation Under Monopoly Capitalism (1984). His work is published in at least twenty-five languages. Visit johnbellamyfoster.org for a collection of most of Foster's works currently available online. This article was republished from Monthly Review. Archives July 2022 Workers at two stores among the hundreds of Trader Joe’s locations nationwide are hoping to join a newly formed independent union.  There was a big lie that modern corporations sold to American workers in the late 20th century and into the first decade of the 21st century: It was that profit-driven entities could make both employees and customers happy enough that no interventions like worker unions or strong federal regulations were needed. Modern companies like Apple, Google, Starbucks, and Trader Joe’s perpetrated this lie, obscuring their business practices with a veneer of progressive ideals and referring to staff with euphemistic titles like “partners,” “associates,” or “crew members.” Indeed, many workers employed within this slice of the American corporate world were often relatively content—until now. Alongside the recent pro-union activity at more than 150 Starbucks cafés across the United States is a newfound awareness among some workers at the Trader Joe’s grocery chain that a union may also be in their best interest. Unlike corporations like Starbucks or Amazon where attempts to unionize have a long history, Trader Joe’s workers have traditionally been content. In 2003, when tens of thousands of grocery store workers in Southern California—home of the original Trader Joe’s—went on strike for better working conditions and pay, Trader Joe’s workers, who were not unionized, sat out the labor strife. Indeed, before the pandemic, Trader Joe’s was considered one of the best retail workplaces in the U.S. The employee resource website Glassdoor gives the grocery chain high marks year after year, making Glassdoor’s annual Best Places to Work list for 2011-2013 and 2017-2022. One Trader Joe’s employee told Business Insider that the part of their job they enjoyed most was customer interaction: “As long as I make sure the customer is having a great time, and I’m emphasizing Trader Joe’s values, I can talk to people about whatever I want.” Workers also cited good hourly wages, health insurance benefits, and retirement benefits as reasons to love their employer. Why then, in 2022, are workers at a Trader Joe’s store in Hadley, Massachusetts, voting to join a newly formed independent union called Trader Joe’s United? And why are their colleagues at a store in Minneapolis looking to do the same? According to Sarah Beth Ryther, an employee of the aforementioned Minneapolis Trader Joe’s and an organizing member of Trader Joe’s United, the reputation that her employer enjoyed “was once well-deserved.” But, since the COVID-19 pandemic began, she explains that “there’s been an erosion of some of the benefits,” and “there’s been a kind of degradation in the situation in the workplace that has led some of us to understand and see that the [company’s] narrative no longer aligns with the truth.” Indeed, the company began cutting workers’ benefits years ago. In 2013, Trader Joe’s stopped offering health insurance plans to part-time employees. It did so based on the fact that workers could potentially obtain plans through the Affordable Care Act, cynically taking advantage of a government program aimed at helping the uninsured. Boasting about 530 stores in 43 states—more locations than Whole Foods—Trader Joe’s, like many grocery companies, has thrived during the COVID-19 pandemic, earning $16.5 billion in revenues in 2020. But instead of sharing some of that wealth with workers, the corporate chain continued slashing benefits. “Several years ago, the benefits were really good,” says Ryther, adding, “There was a 15 percent guaranteed retirement match.” But then in more recent years, she says that coverage was reduced to 10 percent. This past January, workers at the company discovered that their retirement match was further cut by half, to 5 percent. “As of right now,” says Ryther, “there is no guaranteed retirement contribution.” Wages are also a huge issue. “The pay structure is set up so that some folks who have worked for the company for several years make less than people who are hired now,” says Ryther. Ryther also takes issue with the fact that there is no job security at her workplace. “Trader Joe’s is an ‘at-will’ company, which means they can let folks go for no reason or small reasons.” Union membership can bring contracts that prevent workers from being fired without cause—a critical protection for those active in labor organizing. Rather unsurprisingly, Trader Joe’s reportedly began engaging in union-busting tactics as soon as it was clear that employees were agitating for better working conditions. Several workers at the Hadley store who wore Trader Joe’s United pins said they were retaliated against and sent home before their shifts were over, even though wearing pro-union insignia is protected by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). There was similar retaliation against workers at a Vermont store, with one worker even being fired. Employees filed a complaint to the NLRB and won. Ryther, like many young workers around the country who have no direct experience with unions, says it has been a journey for her and her colleagues; they have been working since February to educate themselves “about what unions are, what a union could mean for Trader Joe’s and for our daily work life.” When the Hadley store’s union election date was set for late July, a Trader Joe’s spokesperson named Nakia Rohde sent an email to workers saying, “We are happy the dates have been set. Trader Joe’s is a great place to work, and we look forward to our Crew Members having a chance to vote on keeping things as they are or being represented by this SEIU-backed group.” Ryther says she had never even heard of SEIU, the Service Employees International Union, a well-established and large union that happens to be a favorite target of right-wing media. Indeed, Trader Joe’s United is not affiliated with SEIU or any existing union. The company’s reference to SEIU was likely a sly bid to undermine the newly formed independent union. But, like many corporations whose progressive façade is crumbling in the eyes of their young workers, Trader Joe’s may well lose the battle over unions. One former worker at a Florida store, Noella Williams, who resigned in protest of numerous concerns, published a litany of complaints this past June, adding to the company’s eroding reputation and confirming the views of many disgruntled workers. For most of her fellow workers, “it’s a no-brainer” to unionize, says Ryther, who hopes her Minneapolis store colleagues will soon follow in the footsteps of their counterparts in Hadley, Massachusetts, with a union election date. “We are very, very, excited to be able to vote in this election,” she says. AuthorSonali Kolhatkar is the founder, host and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute. This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute. Archives July 2022 7/25/2022 Book Review: Fascist Ideology: Territory and Expansionism in Italy and Germany ,1922-1945. Reviewed by: Thomas RigginsRead Now This book by Aristotle A. Kallls is an interesting book on the state of bourgeois research and theories about fascism. It is doubtful if Marxists, especially those familiar with the works of Georgi Dimitrov, will learn much from it. Although in recent years some Marxists {MINOs) and even some Marxist parties have begun to use the term “fascism” indiscriminately and in ways foreign to Dimitrov. Kallls informs us that there is still no “lasting consensus about what ‘fascism’ reality represents.” His purpose is to analyze fascist expansionism as ideology and as action That is, his book seeks to tell us how “domestic and international factors” affected the ability of German and Italian fascism to carry out their ideological goals and expansionist policies. But lacking “a consensus about what ‘fascism’ really means” Kallis can only discuss his subject in the abstract theoretical terms of bourgeois scholarship. He appears unaware of one of the major discussions on the nature of fascism — namely, Georgi Dimitrov’s report to the Seventh World Congress of the Communist International given on August 2, 1935. For Marxists, the class character of fascism — “what it really represents” — is not an issue . Dimitrov’s definition of fascism “as the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital,” applies to “classical” fascism (Italy and Germany) but also to such recent fascist regimes as Suharto’s Indonesia and Pinochet’s Chile, as well as Franco’s Spain. Lacking a Marxist understanding of the nature of fascism and its role in maintaining a crisis ridden capitalism, Kallis is often reduced to trying to explain events by reference to the “personalities” of Hitler and Mussolini rather than seeing them as class responses to the growth of revolutionary class consciousness within the working class. In the US this is manifested in blaming Trump as a person rather than a cog in a system. As Dimitrov points out, fascism comes to power when the bourgeoisie is “no longer in a position to maintain its dictatorship over the masses by the old methods of bourgeois democracy and parliamentarism." Kallls, however, never mentions the central role of finance capitalism in the workings of fascism. He writes that “personal charisma remained the most powerful unifying force” of the Italian and German regimes. Some on the left should keep this in mind before throwing around the term “fascism” with respect to the Republicans (Trump was a close call) and other right wing, reactionary, racist authoritarian movements. Finance capital has chosen Biden as its leader and is quite content to run its terroristic foreign policies offshore through imperialist channels using the Democratic Party (and the Republican as need be) and those who support it and the bourgeois democracy the capitalist ruling class uses to maintain its control over the working class. Another aspect of Kallis theory is that fascism is just a special case of the generic tendency of monopoly capitalism and its financial component (“Imperialism” and “Globalization”). Research is being done to determine if fascist expansionism was due to “generic fascist values” or developed out of the pre-fascist tendencies of Italian and German historical development. With qualifications, he concludes that “the notion of generic fascist expansionism can be a valuable tool for analysis.” Be that as it may, such a generic notion of fascism can obscure that it is finance capital’s “innate tendency” to expand its economic and political control in order to dominate the world’s markets, and that fascism is simply a special case of the generic tendency of monopoly capitalism and its financial components (‘Imperialism’ and ‘Globalization’). German Finance capital, for example, attempted to dominate central and eastern Europe from the mid-nineteenth century on. World War II, as World War I before it, was the action of a weak financial capitalism that could only see itself expanding by means of military force. (This is not to endorse the view that Germany alone was responsible for either WWI or II.) The same expansionist goals are pursued today by German capital and its Social Democratic allies. One has only to look at its role in the breakup of Yugoslavia, the stationing of German troops outside its borders (as junior partner — but for how long — of US imperialism), the destruction of the the German Democratic Republic (DDR) and the expansion of the euro (the reincarnation of the Deutsche Mark). All this points to the conclusion that fascist expansionism was not so much generic in the nature of fascism as in the nature of capitalism. Kallis’ book would have been more useful for present day activists and students of fascism if its subject matter had been presented in light of the Marxist theory of the state in relation to imperialism and war, especially as found in the works of Lenin and Dimitrov, But then Fascist Ideology would not just be another tome in the library of bourgeois historiography. AuthorThomas Riggins is a retired philosophy teacher (NYU, The New School of Social Research, among others) who received a PhD from the CUNY Graduate Center (1983). He has been active in the civil rights and peace movements since the 1960s when he was chairman of the Young People's Socialist League at Florida State University and also worked for CORE in voter registration in north Florida (Leon County). He has written for many online publications such as People's World and Political Affairs where he was an associate editor. He also served on the board of the Bertrand Russell Society and was president of the Corliss Lamont chapter in New York City of the American Humanist Association. He is the author of Reading the Classical Texts of Marxism. Archives July 2022  “...If a Communist took it into his head to boast about his Communism because of the ready-made conclusions he had acquired, without putting in a great deal of serious and hard work, without understanding the facts which he must examine critically, he would be a very deplorable Communist. Such superficiality would be decidedly fatal.” VI Lenin said that in a speech to Soviet students learning Marxism in 1920. It applies to today, in the USA, as much as it did to those days of the first worker state. It is much easier to talk the talk than it is to walk the walk. It is easy to one day wake up and say, “I think I will call myself a Communist today.” From there, we could buy a t-shirt with Karl Marx’s face on it, and we could put a little hammer and sickle emoji in our Twitter profile, and we could tell everyone we believe in Communism. But would this make us a Communist? A Communist means more than that. A Communist must hold his or herself to the highest standard possible, even if the Party they belong to has not yet rebuilt itself into an institution capable of demanding they do so. The Bolsheviks did not gain the support and respect of the working masses of the Soviet Union by bragging and talking down to them. They led by example. An American Communist must do the same. For every fifty people I see calling themselves Communists, usually only one actually carries themselves as such. So let’s go over a few qualities a Communist must have, because it is very easy, as noted above, to simply say we are a thing. It is quite another to embody that thing and become a person worthy of leading the working classes, worthy of the word Communist.
Above all, a Communist needs to prove to the rest of the working masses of their society that they are not just worthy of their respect, but of leading them into revolution and a new state that is genuinely of, by, and for the people. A Communist does NOT demand respect without earning it like a petulant child, all the while telling the masses how horrible they are for not being as enlightened as we think we are. The contradictions of capitalism are growing more acute every day. We have run out of time to waste. The time for childishness and larping is over. The time for action is now. Onward to socialism. AuthorNoah Khrachvik is a proud working class member of the Communist Party USA. He is 40 years old, married to the most understanding and patient woman on planet Earth (who puts up with all his deep-theory rants when he wakes up at two in the morning and can't get back to sleep) and has a twelve-year-old son who is far too smart for his own good. When he isn't busy writing, organizing the working class, or fixing rich people's houses all day, he enjoys doing absolutely nothing on the couch, surrounded by his family and books by Gus Hall. He is an editor at Midwestern Marx. Archives July 2022  Photo composition showing pool balls with flags of different countries. China, Russia and the US are the biggest balls while Japan, India, South Korea, UK, Germany and France follow in size along 21 smaller flags. Photo: Russian International Affairs Council. 1.- During the Middle Ages and early modern period, the West occupied a marginal position in the world-system. In the Middle East, China, Japan and India, productive forces were equally or more developed. The emergence of capitalism in Europe was driven by intensifying class antagonisms between the feudal ruling classes and peasants and artisans, which resulted in the victory of the latter. Similar conflicts in China, Japan, India and the Middle East could not create a bourgeois rupture due to the entrenched power of landed elites and state bureaucracies, which discouraged merchants and craftspeople from investing in the development of the means of production. In contrast, the relative economic backwardness of northwest Europe gave rise to a fragmented and decentralized political superstructure, which aided the maturation of capitalist tendencies more than in the rest of Eurasia. The economic power that Western Europeans gained from capitalist growth was used to block indigenous capitalist tendencies throughout the globe. 2.- Early capitalism’s foreign intrusions into pre-capitalist structures took place in the framework of the mercantilist system of Atlantic Europe. Colonialism, the slave trade and the plantation-slave system directed by the mercantilist state established politico-economic superiority over the non-European world, thus facilitating capital accumulation. The profits earned by the great trading chartered companies of mercantile capitalism fueled the formation of industrial capitalism, which signified a shift from dominance over trade to control of industrial manufacturing. Consequently, the non-European countries came be to treated as a source of raw material and as a dumping ground for finished commodities. This contrast between the industrialized centers and the peripheries that were denied industrialization was reproduced through a change in the dynamics of capitalist competition. 3.- Capitalism invariably proceeds in the direction of a constant fall in prices because of a constant rise in production and a constant increase in the number of enterprises. With the progressive sharpening of competition, there arrives a historical moment characterized by the aggregation of different individual capitals. This tendential movement toward the concentration and centralization of enterprises displaced the era of free competitive capitalism at the beginning of the last quarter of the 19th century, thus birthing an economy dominated by an industrial-financial oligarchy organized into a military-industrial complex. The division between monopoly and non-monopoly firms corresponds to the division between First and Third World societies. 4.- Monopoly can only redistribute the total surplus value available to capital as a whole, which is determined by the total magnitude of socially necessary labour carried out beyond that necessary to provide for workers’ consumption. This capacity of monopoly capital to appropriate extra surplus-value (i.e. that above the average rate) is essentially determined by the degree of domination in the labour process. Such dominance is ensured by the continuous development of advanced means of production and advanced skilled, scientific and technical labour. In “Imperialism and the Development Myth,” Sam King writes that the “the complexity and scale of the production process has reached such a high degree that meeting its needs and developing it further requires such a scale of resources that it can only be advanced under the leadership of one institution: the highest and most powerful institution of capitalist imperialism, the imperialist state.” 5.- The Global North’s monopoly over the labour process has built a hierarchical and polarized world division of labour, in which the Global South specializes in the simplest primary/productive activities. A model of export extractivism has been established, in which the rent derived by the comprador elites from property in natural resources has greater relevance than the profits from industrial investment. Moving up the value chain to a position alongside that of core capitalist countries entails bringing an end to the imperialist division of labour and freeing humanity’s accumulated social achievements from monopoly control. Such anti-imperialist efforts were undertaken by the post-WWII national liberation movements, which adopted Third World internationalism to break the autonomous power of imperialist capital over politics, production, and distribution. However, those attempts faced many difficulties. Overcoming the global division of labour implies the development of highly skilled labour, which can be done only through the general social development of the entire country. The generation of such social capacity can’t be accomplished merely through the expropriation and nationalization of private property; it requires vigorous human development in a historical context dominated by the imperialist monopolization of scientific knowledge. 6.- In the current conjuncture, imperialist capitalism is being upheld by USA, Europe, and Japan, which possess monopolies over advanced technologies, natural resources, global financial systems, communications, and arms of mass destruction. Geopolitical challenges to these monopolies are rising. In China, the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat – involving the crucial role of a strong planning system – has allowed the country to keep hold of a sizeable chunk of overall surplus value and to create partnerships with multinationals that enable it to acquire modern technology. In Russia, far-reaching structural tensions with the US are highlighting the contradiction between external opposition to imperialism and an internal regime based on Western-allied comprador oligarchy. Thus, there is a possibility that growing Global North hostility – in the form of financial sanctions – will force sections of the Russian bourgeoisie to move toward a form of state capitalism. The consolidation of a Sino-Russian bloc, in addition to radical reverberations in Latin America and other Third World regions, can facilitate the multipolarization of the world order and create openings for socialist transitions. AuthorYanis Iqbal is an independent researcher and freelance writer based in Aligarh, India and can be contacted at [email protected]. His articles have been published in the USA, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India and several countries of Latin America. This article was republished from Orinoco Tribune. Archives July 2022 7/21/2022 Climate catastrophe vs. super profits: the real worries of the ruling class. By: Lotta AngantyrRead Now The devastating effects of global warming are being felt by billions of people all around the world. Meanwhile, capitalist fat cats are openly downplaying the risk of entire cities being buried beneath the rising oceans as a trifling inconvenience. Like Emperor Nero before them, the rulers of this destructive system are fiddling – this time – as Rome drowns. While countless people are at risk of flooding from rising sea levels in the near future, billions are already feeling the effects of drought. Due to rising temperatures and extreme heat, the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) estimates that more than 2.3 billion people are right now facing water stress. Among these, almost 160 million children are exposed to severe and prolonged droughts. Capitalism, and its reckless exploitation of the planet in the name of profit, is denying people the most basic necessities of life, and transforming whole swathes of the earth into deserts. Sub-Saharan Africa has been especially badly ravaged by water scarcity. In May, the Horn of Africa saw its worst drought in four decades and up to 20 million people could go hungry this year as a result. A full 40 percent of Somalia's population now face acute food insecurity. But this crisis is not limited to the African continent. In mid June, Europe had an unusually early and extreme heatwave, with record temperatures in the western and central regions. On 16 June, France saw temperatures of 40°C, which is the earliest point in a year that this has been reached since records began. Wildfires have been spreading in Spain and Germany, with many people being ordered to flee their homes to escape the flames. The burning of fossil fuels is the biggest driving force behind global warming. Reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) say that to limit global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels (the limit set by the Paris Climate Accords), greenhouse gas emissions need to be reduced by 43 percent by 2030 and reach ‘net zero’ by 2050. This means completely negating the production of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, resulting from human activity. To meet net zero by 2050, the International Energy Agency concluded in their report from last year that there could be no new oil or gas fields, or coal mines dug. Meeting any of these goals would require a radical and rapid transition away from fossil fuels towards alternative energy sources. Under the profit-driven capitalist system, we are not only failing to make the necessary progress, but going into reverse. Although many companies have set targets for cutting their greenhouse emissions, there are no serious plans to follow them up. A study from the New Climate Institute said that the biggest top 25 corporations (including Google and Amazon) are not merely just failing to meet their own targets, but routinely exaggerate their (insufficient) progress. This goes to show that any so-called climate regulation will remain a dead letter while the means of production are controlled by a minority of profiteering parasites. The real worries of the ruling class According to HSBC's Stuart Kirk, the discussion about the risks of climate change is getting “out of hand” / Image: Screen Grab The truth is that, while a section of the ruling class is alarmed at the prospect of climate change, the system as a whole is driven first-and-foremost by an insatiable lust for short-term profits. And some of the most degenerate and short-sighted capitalists take a totally cavalier attitude to climate change: downplaying the danger it poses, or denying it altogether. For example, at a Financial Times conference earlier this year, HSBC’s (ironically titled) Global Head of Responsible Investments, Stuart Kirk, held a presentation with the title: “Why investors need not worry about climate risk”. According to Kirk, the discussion about the risks of climate change is getting “out of hand”. He went on to say: “25 years in the finance industry, there is always some nut job telling me about the end of the world… but what bothers me about this one [risk of climate change] is the amount of work these people make me do. The amount of regulation coming down the pipe. The number of people in my team and at HSBC dealing with financial risks from climate change. Last night targets fell 25 percent. 25 percent! And people are asking the boards of US companies to spend time dealing with climate risk.” We all shed a tear for the red tape imposed on fatcat bankers like Stuart Kirk, all in the name of trivial matters like the potential destruction of human civilisation! He continued: “We’ve got regulators in the US trying to stop us. We have the China problem. We’ve got a housing crisis looming [by which he means a collapse in the property market, rather than a crippling shortage of affordable housing]. We’ve got interest rates going up. We’ve got inflation coming down the pipe and I’m being told to spend time, time and time again looking at something that’s going to happen in 20 or 30 years, hence the portionality is completely wack!” Indeed, why worry about the problems of a couple of decades from now, when there are profits to be made today? The Global Head of Responsible Investments at HSBC can’t see any reason why he needs to worry about global warming, because human beings are tremendously adaptable, to the point of being able to live under water! “Human beings have been fantastic at adapting to change, adapting to emergencies. We will continue to do so. Who cares if Miami is six metres under water in 100 years? Amsterdam has been six metres under water for ages and it's a really nice place.” In other words: what are a few drowned cities compared to HSBC’s investment portfolio? This kind of staggering hubris quite openly put the fate of the human race second to the bottom line of the big banks. These scandalous remarks show an appalling and cynical attitude towards the future of the planet and the life sustained by it. Carbon bombsThe capitalists are reluctant to relinquish the superprofits provided by the fossil fuel industry. In the past three decades ExxonMobil, Shell, BP and Chevron have made almost $2tn in profits. BP’s CEO Bernard Looney, described the company as a cash machine. As a consequence, they are studiously ignoring the devastating implications of scaling up production of fossil fuels.  The 12 biggest oil companies are prepared to spend $103 million a day for the rest of the decade to exploit new fields of oil and gas / Image: Public Domain An investigation by the Guardian shows that plans for the new oil and gas projects will in the next seven years produce a volume of greenhouse gases equivalent to China’s CO2 emission over the last decade. Included in the plans are 195 so-called carbon bombs, which are oil and gas projects that each produce at least a billion tonnes of CO2 emissions over their lifetimes, denotating with a highly destructive impact on the climate. The US, Canada and Australia have the biggest expansion plans for the number of carbon bombs and also give the world’s biggest subsidies for fossil fuels per capita. The 12 biggest oil companies are prepared to spend $103 million a day for the rest of the decade to exploit new fields of oil and gas. These plans will make it impossible to limit global heating. So while we are heading towards a climate catastrophe, world leaders are hiding their heads in the sand. Despite the fact that oil and gas industries are responsible for 60 percent of fossil fuels emissions, there was no mention of oil and gas in the COP26 final deal. Many of the richer countries who on the one had cynically describe themselves as ‘climate leaders’, are also the biggest players in building carbon bombs. Back in 2020, when Joe Biden was running for president of the USA, he was calling for a transition from oil and gas and breaking America's dependence on fossil fuels. Today, with its 22 carbon bombs, the US has the potential to pump out 140bn tonnes of CO2, four times more than what the whole world emits yearly: more like a carbon nuclear warhead. These big imperialist countries are now using the war in Ukraine to justify their plans to expand the oil and gas industry. In March, Biden announced a deal with Europe that will guarantee long term demand for American fossil fuels until at least 2030. In the first four months of 2022, the US sent almost three quarters of all of its liquefied natural gas to Europe. Biden’s energy secretary Jennifer Granholm last month said, in a room full of oil and gas executives, that the US was now on a “war footing”. She continued: “In this moment of crisis, we need more oil supply . . . That means you, producing more right now, where and if you can.” In other words, as soon as US imperialist interests came under threat in Ukraine, all of Biden’s talk of being the ‘climate president’ evaporated like so much hot air. Super profitsMany oil and gas bosses are shedding tears over the war in Ukraine – tears of joy – because it has exacerbated the already rising inflation of gas and oil prices, which means bumper profits for them and their shareholders.  Between January and March, Shell made $9.1bn in profit / Image: Public Domain In the first three months of 2022, the 28 largest producers of fossil fuels made close to $100bn in combined profits. Between January and March, Shell made $9.1bn in profit, which is almost three times higher than what they made in the same period 2021. Exxon also made a threefold increase with $8.8bn in profits. BP made $6.2bn, making its highest first-quarter profits in a decade. At the same time as the BP’s Chief financial officer, Murray Auchincloss, said: “it’s possible that we’re getting more cash than we know what to do with”, up to 40 percent of British households risk ending up in fuel poverty in October. These bloodsuckers fatten themselves on the death, destruction and poverty created by an imperialist war, while disregarding the dire implications for future generations. As always, it is the working class that has to pay for the crisis of capitalism. Both in terms of living with the catastrophic effects of climate change, and enduring the economic shocks that are forcing millions into poverty. Meanwhile the bosses will pocket their billions, without a care for the implications. Capitalism is unable to save the planet. On the contrary, it is the biggest threat to human civilisation and will always prioritise profits over the planet and people's lives. Instead of leaving the climate fight up to the bosses and politicians, the working class and its organisations must fight to take control of the economy, placing production into its own hands by expropriating the profiteers. Only by controlling the polluting industries and the big banks can we fully transform society according to a general plan for the benefit of the planet and human need. This is the only way to avert the slide into barbarism to which capitalism condemns us. AuthorLotta Angantyr This article was republished from in Defense of Marxism. Archives July 2022 7/21/2022 Cuba Should Be Removed from the U.S. List of State Sponsors of Terrorism. By: Roger Waters, Vijay Prashad and Manolo de los SantosRead Now The United States maintains a list of countries that it considers as “state sponsors of terrorism.” There are currently four countries on that list: Cuba, North Korea, Iran and Syria. The basic idea behind this list is that the U.S. State Department determines that these countries have “provided support for acts of international terrorism.” Evidence about those “acts” are not provided by the U.S. government. For Cuba, there is not one shred of evidence that the government has offered any such support to terrorism activities, in fact, Cuba has—since 1959—been a victim of acts of terrorism by the United States, including an attempted invasion in 1961 (Bay of Pigs) and repeated assassination attempts against its leaders (638 times against Fidel Castro). Cuba, rather than exporting weapons around the world, has a long history of medical internationalism with Cuban doctors and medicines being a familiar sight from Pakistan to Peru. In fact, there is an international campaign for Cuban doctors to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Why would a country that floods the world with health care be targeted as a state sponsor of terrorism? Washington’s Vindictiveness Cuba was not on the state sponsor of terrorism list from 2015 onward, when President Barack Obama removed Cuba from that list (it was first added to the list in 1982 by President Ronald Reagan). In his last week in office, and days before Joe Biden was inaugurated to replace him, former President Donald Trump put Cuba back on the list on January 12, 2021. The comments made by then-U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo provide a strange justification for this action: despite Cuba having been removed from the list in 2015, five years previously, Pompeo said that “[f]or decades, the Cuban government has fed, housed, and provided medical care for murderers, bombmakers, and hijackers.” The phrase “for decades” suggests that the Trump administration went back beyond 2015, not assessing the situation in Cuba during the five years since it was removed from the list but going back to an era before Obama’s action. There was no new evidence of anything having changed since 2015, which showed that Trump’s actions were purely political (to curry favor with the hard-right wing that continues to want to conduct regime change in Cuba and to nullify as many of Obama’s policies as possible). The United States has carried out a blockade against Cuba since 1959 when the Cuban Revolution began a process to transform the country that was ruled by gangsters (including the U.S. mafia) into a country that tended to the needs of its people. The revolution developed programs for literacy and health care and for building up the cultural confidence of the people long suppressed by Spanish and U.S. colonialism. The United States elite was eager to snuff out the example of Cuba, which showed that even a poor country could transcend the socioeconomic conditions of poverty. Each year since 1992, almost all the countries in the world—184 out of 193 at last count—vote in the United Nations General Assembly to condemn the blockade of Cuba. Remove Cuba From the List The designation of Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism by the United States deeply harms the ability of the Cuban government and its people from carrying on with the basic functions of life. The immense power of the United States government over the world financial system means that banks and traders refuse to do business with Cuba since they are afraid of retaliation by the United States government for breaking the blockade. It is stunning to learn that because of this blockade, and despite the murmurs from the U.S. government about medical exceptions, firms refuse to sell Cuba raw materials, reactive agents, diagnostic kits, pharmaceutical drugs and devices, and a range of other materials necessary for operating Cuba’s excellent but stressed public science and health care system. U.S. President Joe Biden can remove Cuba from this list with a stroke of his pen. It’s as simple as that. When he was running for the presidency, Biden said he would even reverse the harsher of Trump’s sanctions and revert to the policies of the Obama administration. But he has not done so, which might be for reasons of political expediency. There is a streak of vindictiveness that runs through U.S. policies against Cuba, an island that proved during the pandemic that its revolutionary process cares for its people. The example of public health care in Cuba, despite being a small island nation, should be exported around the world. The country is not a state sponsor of terrorism but a state sponsor of global well-being. AuthorVijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is the chief editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest book is Washington Bullets, with an introduction by Evo Morales Ayma. This article was produced by Globetrotter. Archives July 2022  A worker at the International Paper mill in Prattville, Alabama, was performing routine maintenance on a paper-making machine in mid-June when he discovered liquid in a place it didn’t belong. He stopped work and reported the hazard, triggering an inspection that revealed a punctured condensate line leaking water that was hotter than 140 degrees and would have scalded the worker or fellow members of the United Steelworkers (USW). Instead of causing a serious health and safety risk, the leak was repaired without incident. “We fixed the issue,” recalled Chad Baker, a USW Local 1458 trustee and safety representative. “It took about 30 minutes, and we continued on with our work, and nobody got hurt.” Unions empower workers to help build safer workplaces and ensure they have the freedom to act without fear of reprisal. No one knows the dangers of a job better than the people facing them every day. That’s why the USW’s contract with International Paper gives workers “stop-work authority”—the power to halt a job when they identify a threat and resume work after their concerns have been adequately addressed. “We find smaller issues like that a lot,” Baker said, referring to the leaky condensate line. “Most of the time, they’re handled in a very efficient manner.” Workers forming unions at Amazon and Starbucks, among other companies, want better wages and benefits. But they’re also fighting for the workplace protections union workers enjoy every day. Amazon’s production quotas resulted in a shocking injury rate of 6.8 per 100 warehouse workers in 2021. That was more than double the overall warehouse industry rate and 20 percent higher than Amazon’s 2020 record, according to an analysis of data the company provided to the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Driving for Amazon is also perilous. About 20 percent of drivers suffered injuries last year, up 40 percent from 2020, with many of these workers reporting that they felt pressured to take unnecessary risks, like forgoing seat belts and skipping breaks, to meet the company’s relentless delivery schedules. Unions fight against all of this. They enable workers to hold employers accountable. That’s why Amazon and other companies pull every trick in the book to try to keep workers from organizing. “We talk. We come up with solutions,” Baker said of Local 1458 members. “It’s kind of hard for the company to disagree with us when we’re all saying the same thing. That commands respect. One of the biggest pluses we have is not being able to be run over.” Baker is one of seven USW members serving as full-time, company-paid safety representatives at the mill, positions that are shared by Local 1458, which represents maintenance workers, and by Locals 462 and 1978, which represent workers in other jobs. They make the rounds of the complex every day to look for hazards, communicate with members and address safety issues, noted Local 1458 President Chad Manning. “You can actually solve the problem when you have the right people involved, who are the people doing the work,” he explained. After workers expressed concern about shoulder injuries, for example, the union persuaded International Paper to replace the manually operated elevator doors with automatic doors. Some workers wear heavy insulated suits to protect them from fire, chemical exposure and other dangers. After union members cited mobility constraints in the bulky suits assigned to them, they worked with the manufacturer, who sent representatives to the mill, to design a better version that International Paper ultimately purchased. With the union’s help, workers also successfully fought for handrails, better lighting and other measures that contribute to a safer workplace and environment. When incidents occur, unions play a major role in investigations that uncover the root causes and work toward eliminating and controlling the hazards. Researchers at the University of Minnesota studied data on more than 70,000 workplaces and found that the unionized locations were 30 percent more likely to have experienced state or federal inspections for safety violations. That’s because unions help members understand their rights and protect them from retaliation. “At the end of the day, it’s the voice. You have one,” Manning observed. “In non-union shops, you don’t have that. You have a good opportunity of being fired if you voice your opinion.” Unions continually seek new approaches for enhancing health, safety and environment. Later this year, the USW will hold a series of trainings to bring additional protections to the growing number of members working in hospitals, nursing homes and other health care settings. These sessions will focus on developing solidarity around safety as well as on hazard identification, incident investigation and holding employers accountable. Then these workers will go back to their workplaces, advocate for their coworkers and encourage them to do the same. “Everybody has something to bring to the table,” explained Melissa Borgia, a member of USW Local 7600, which represents thousands of workers at Kaiser Permanente facilities in southern California. Borgia, who works in membership administration at Kaiser, volunteered to help implement the program because of the pandemic, assaults on health care workers and other dangers her coworkers face. “There is no better time than now,” she said. “This is where the spotlight is.” In Prattville, soaring summer temperatures in the last week of June exacerbated the threat of heat stress at the paper mill. Baker collaborated with the company to purchase tens of thousands of dollars in cooling fans, and now, union safety representatives will continue to monitor conditions and keep workers safe. “We try to work together,” Baker said of management. “Everyone wins when we’re safer.” AuthorTom Conway is the international president of the United Steelworkers Union (USW). This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute. Archives July 2022 |
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