Former Brazilian President Luíz Inácio Lula da Silva (known as Lula) runs about on stage at the Latin America Memorial in São Paulo. He was there on August 22, 2022, speaking at a book launch featuring photographs by Ricardo Stuckert about Lula’s trips around the world when he was the president of Brazil from 2003 to 2010. Lula is a man with a great deal of energy. He recounts the story of when he was in Iran with his Foreign Minister Celso Amorim in 2010, trying to mediate and end the conflict imposed by the United States over Iran’s nuclear energy policy. Lula managed to secure a nuclear deal in 2010 that would have prevented the ongoing pressure campaign that Washington is conducting against Tehran. There was relief in the air. Then, Lula said, “Obama pissed outside the pot.” According to Lula, then-U.S. President Barack Obama did not accept the deal and crushed the hard work of the Brazilian leadership in bringing all sides to an agreement. Lula’s story puts two important points on the table: he was able to build on Brazil’s role in Latin America by offering leadership in far-off Iran during his previous tenure as president, and he is not afraid of expressing his antipathy for the way the United States is scuttling the possibility of peace and progress across the world for its own narrow interests. The book release took place during Lula’s campaign for president against the current incumbent—and deeply unpopular—President Jair Bolsonaro. Lula is now in the lead in the polls ahead of the first round of Brazil’s presidential election to be held on October 2. Fernando Haddad, who ran against Bolsonaro in 2018 and lost after receiving less than 45 percent of the vote, told me that this election remains “risky.” The polls might show that Lula is in the lead, but Bolsonaro is known to play dirty politics to secure his victory. The far right in Brazil, like the far right in many other countries, is fierce in the way it contests for state power. Bolsonaro, Haddad said, is willing to lie openly, saying offensive things to the far-right media and then when challenged about it by the mainstream media, he tends to feign ignorance. “Fake news” seems to be Bolsonaro’s best defense each time he is attacked. The left is far more sincere in its political discourse; leftists are unwilling to lie and eager to bring the issues of hunger and unemployment, social despair and social advancement to the center of the political debate. But there is less interest in these issues and less noise about them in a media landscape that thrives on the theatrics of Bolsonaro and his followers. The old traditional right is as outflanked as the far right in Brazil, which is a space that is now commanded by Bolsonaro (the old traditional right, the men in dark suits who made decisions over cigars and cachaça, are unable to supplant Bolsonaro). Both Bolsonaro and Lula face an electorate that either loves them or hates them. There is little room for ambiguity in this race. Bolsonaro represents not only the far right, whose opinions he openly champions, but he also represents large sections of the middle class, whose aspirations for wealth remain largely intact despite the reality that their economic situation has deteriorated over the past decade. The contrast between the behavior of Bolsonaro and Lula during their respective presidential campaigns has been stark: Bolsonaro has been boorish and vulgar, while Lula is refined and presidential. If the election goes to Lula, it is likely that he will get more votes from those who hate Bolsonaro than from those who love him. Former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff is reflective on the way forward. She told me that Lula will likely prevail in the election because the country is fed up with Bolsonaro. His horrible management of the COVID-19 pandemic and the deterioration of the economic situation in the country mark Bolsonaro as an inefficient manager of the Brazilian state. However, Rousseff pointed out that about a month before the election, Bolsonaro’s government—and the regional governments—have been rolling out policies that have started to lighten the burden on the middle class, such as the lifting of taxation on gasoline. These policies could sway some people to vote for Bolsonaro, but even that is not likely. The political situation in Brazil remains fragile for the left, with the main blocs on the right (agro-business, religion and the military) willing to use any means to maintain their hold on power; it was this right-wing coalition that conducted a “legislative coup” against Rousseff in 2016 and used “lawfare,” the use of law for political motives, against Lula in 2018 to prevent him from running against Bolsonaro. These phrases (legislative coup and lawfare) are now part of the vocabulary of the Brazilian left, which understands clearly that the right bloc (what is called centrão) will not stop pursuing their interests if they feel threatened. João Paulo Rodrigues, a leader of the Landless Workers Movement (MST) is a close adviser to the Lula campaign. He told me that in the 2002 presidential election, Lula won against the incumbent Fernando Henrique Cardoso because of an immense hatred for the neoliberal policies that Cardoso had championed. The left was fragmented and demoralized at that time of the election. Lula’s time in office, however, helped the left mobilize and organize, although even during this period the focus of popular attention was more on Lula himself rather than the blocs that comprised the left. During Lula’s incarceration on corruption charges, which the left says are fraudulent, he became a figure that unified the left: Lula Livre, “Free Lula,” was the unifying slogan, and the letter L (for Lula) became a symbol (a symbol that continues to be used in the election campaign). While there are other candidates from Brazil’s left in the presidential race, there is no question for Rodrigues that Lula is the left’s standard-bearer and is the only hope for Brazil to oust the highly divisive and dangerous leadership of President Bolsonaro. One of the mechanisms to build the unity of popular forces around Lula’s campaign has been the creation of the Popular Committees (comités populares), which have been working to both unify the left and create an agenda for the Lula government (which will include agrarian reform and a more robust policy for the Indigenous and Afro-Brazilian communities). The international conditions for a third Lula presidency are fortuitous, Rousseff told me. A wide range of center-left governments have come to power in Latin America (including in Chile and Colombia). While these are not socialist governments, they are nonetheless committed to building the sovereignty of their countries and to creating a dignified life for their citizens. Brazil, the third-largest country in the Americas (after Canada and the United States of America), can play a leadership role in guiding this new wave of left governments in the hemisphere, Rousseff said. Haddad told me that Brazil should lead a new regional project, which will include the creation of a regional currency (sur) that can not only be used for cross-border trade but also for holding reserves. Haddad is currently running to be the governor of São Paulo, whose main city is the financial capital of the country. Such a regional currency, Haddad believed, will settle conflicts in the hemisphere and build new trade linkages that need not rely on long supply chains that have been destabilized by the pandemic. “God willing, we will create a common currency in Latin America because we do not have to depend on the dollar,” said Lula in May 2022. Rousseff is eager for Brazil to return to the world stage through the BRICS bloc (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), and offer the kind of left leadership that Lula and she had given that platform a decade ago. The world, Rousseff said, needs such a platform to offer leadership that does not rely on threats, sanctions and war. Lula’s anecdote about the Iran deal is a telling one since it shows that a country like Brazil under the leadership of the left is more willing to settle conflicts rather than to exacerbate them, as the United States did. There is hope, Rousseff noted, for a Lula presidency to offer robust leadership for a world that seems to be crumbling due to the myriad challenges such as climate catastrophe, warfare and social toxicity. AuthorVijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is the chief editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including "The Darker Nations" and "The Poorer Nations." His latest book is "Washington Bullets," with an introduction by Evo Morales Ayma. This article was produced by Globetrotter. Archives September 2022
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9/10/2022 The Bewildering Vote in Chile That Rejected a New Constitution By: Taroa Zúñiga Silva & Vijay PrashadRead NowOn September 4, 2022, more than 13 million Chileans—out of a voting-eligible population of approximately 15 million—voted on a proposal to introduce a new constitution in the country. As early as March, polls began to suggest that the constitution would not be able to pass. However, polls had hinted for months at a narrowing of the lead for the rejection camp, and so proponents of the new constitution remained hopeful that their campaign would in the end successfully convince the public to set aside the 1980 constitution placed upon the country by the military dictatorship led by General Augusto Pinochet. The date for the election, September 4, commemorated the day that Salvador Allende won the presidency in 1970. On that date, those who wanted a new constitution suggested that the ghost of Pinochet—who overthrew Allende in a violent coup in 1973—would be exorcized. As it happened, Pinochet’s constitution remains in place with more than 61 percent of voters rejecting the new constitution and only 38 percent of voters approving it. The day before the election, in the municipality of Recoleta (a part of Chile’s capital city of Santiago), Mayor Daniel Jadue led a massive rally in support of passing the new constitution. Tens of thousands of people gathered in this largely working-class area with the hope, as Jadue put it, of leaving behind the “constitution of abuses.” It, however, was not to be. Even in Recoleta, where Jadue is a popular mayor, the constitution was defeated. The new constitution received 23,000 more votes than Jadue had received in the last election—a sign that the number of voters on the left had increased—but the vote to reject the constitution was larger, which meant that new voters made a greater impact on the overall result. On September 7, Jadue told us that he was feeling “calm,” that it was a significant advance that nearly 5 million Chileans voted for the constitution and that “for the first time we have a constitutional project that is written and can be transformed into a much more concrete political program.” There is “no definitive victory and no definitive defeat,” Jadue told us. People voted not only on the constitution but also on the terrible economic situation (inflation in Chile is more than 14.1 percent) and the government’s management of it. Just as the 2020 plebiscite to draft a new constitution was a punishment for former President Sebastián Piñera, this was a punishment for the Boric government’s inability to address the problems of the people. Jadue’s “calm” stems from his confidence that if the left goes to the people with a program of action and is able to address the people’s needs, then the 5 million who voted for the constitution will find their numbers significantly increased. Within hours of the final vote being announced, analysts from all sides tried to come to terms with what was a great defeat for the government. Francisca Fernández Droguett, a member of the Movement for Water and Territories, wrote in an article for El Ciudadano that the answer to the defeat lay in the decision by the government to make this election mandatory. “Compulsory voting put us face to face with a sector of society that we were unaware of in terms of its tendencies, not only its political tendencies but also its values.” This is precisely what happened in Recoleta. She pointed out that there was a general sentiment among the political class that those who had historically voted would—because of their general orientation toward the state—have a viewpoint that was closer to forms of progressivism. That has proven not to be the case. The campaign for the constitution did not highlight the economic issues that are important to the people who live at the rough end of social inequality. In fact, the reaction to the loss--blaming the poor (rotear, is the disparaging word) for the loss—was a reflection of the narrow-minded politics that was visible during the campaign for the new constitution. Droguett’s point about compulsory voting is shared across the political spectrum. Until 2012, voting in Chile was compulsory, but registration for the electoral roll was voluntary; then, in 2012, with the passing of an election law reform, registration was made automatic but voting was voluntary. For such a consequential election, the government decided to make the entire voting process mandatory for all Chileans over 18 years old who were eligible to vote, with the imposition of considerable fines for those who would not vote. As it turned out, 85.81 percent of those on the electoral rolls voted, which is far more than the 55.65 percent of voters who voted in the second record turnout in Chile during the presidential election in 2021. A comparison between the second round of voting during the presidential election of 2021 and the recent vote on the constitution is instructive. In December 2021, Chile’s President Gabriel Boric—leading the center-left Apruebo Dignidad coalition--won 4.6 million votes. Apruebo Dignidad campaigned for the constitution and won 4.8 million votes. That is, the Apruebo Dignidad vote in December 2021 and the vote for the new constitution was about the same. Boric’s opponent—José Antonio Kast—who openly praised Pinochet—won 3.65 million votes. Kast campaigned against the new constitution and was defeated by 7.88 million voters. That is, the votes against the constitution were twice more than the votes that Kast was able to garner. This figure does not register, as Jadue told us, as a shift to the right in Chile, but rather is an absolute rejection of the entire political system, including the constitutional convention. One of the least remarked upon elements of political life in Chile—as is in other parts of Latin America—is the rapid growth of evangelical (notably Pentecostal) churches. About 20 percent of Chile’s population identifies as evangelical. In 2021, Kast went to the thanksgiving service of an evangelical congregation, the only representative invited to such an event. Forced to vote in the polls by the new mandatory system, a large section of evangelical voters rejected the proposal for a new constitution because of its liberal social agenda. Jadue told us that the evangelical community failed to recognize that the new constitution gave evangelicals “equal treatment with the Roman Catholic Church because it ensured freedom of worship.” Those who were not in favor of the constitution began to campaign against its liberal agenda right after the constituent assembly was empaneled. While those who were in favor of the new constitution waited for it to be drafted, and they refrained from campaigning in the regions where the evangelical churches held sway and where opposition to the constitution was clear. The constitution was rejected as an expression of the growing discontent among Chileans regarding the general direction of social liberalism that was assumed by many—including the leadership of Frente Amplio—to be the inevitable progression in the country’s politics. The distance between the evangelicals and the center-left is evident not only in Chile—where the results are on display now—but also in Brazil, which faces a consequential presidential election in October. Meanwhile, two days after the election, school children took to the streets. The text they circulated for their protest bristles with poetry: “in the face of people without memory, students make history with organization and struggle.” This entire cycle of the new constitution and the center-left Boric government began in 2011-2013, when Boric and many of his cabinet members were in college and when they began their political careers. The high school students—who faced the brutal police and now answer to Boric—want to open a new road. They were dismayed by an election that wanted to determine their future, but in which they could not participate due to their age. AuthorTaroa Zúñiga Silva is a writing fellow and the Spanish media coordinator for Globetrotter. She is the co-editor with Giordana García Sojo of Venezuela, Vórtice de la Guerra del Siglo XXI (2020) and is a member of the Secretaría de Mujeres Inmigrantes en Chile. She also is a member of the Mecha Cooperativa, a project of the Ejército Comunicacional de Liberación. This article was produced by Globetrotter. Archives September 2022 A key concept in Karl Marx’s Capital is widely misunderstood In Part Eight of Capital, titled “So-called Primitive Accumulation,” Marx describes the brutal processes that separated working people from the means of subsistence, and concentrated wealth in the hands of landlords and capitalists. It’s one of the most dramatic and readable parts of the book. It is also a continuing source of confusion and debate. Literally dozens of articles have tried to explain what “primitive accumulation” really meant. Did it occur only in the distant past, or does it continue today? Was “primitive” a mistranslation? Should the name be changed? What exactly was “Marx’s theory of primitive accumulation”? In this article, written for my coming book on The War Against the Commons, I argue that Marx thought “primitive accumulation” was a misleading and erroneous concept. Understanding what he actually wrote shines light on two essential Marxist concepts: exploitation and expropriation. This is a draft, not my final word. I look forward to your comments, corrections and suggestions. On June 20 and 27, 1865, Karl Marx gave a two-part lecture to members of the International Workingmen’s Association (the First International) in London. In clear and direct English, he drew on insights that would appear in the nearly-finished first volume of Capital, to explain the labor theory of value, surplus value, class struggle, and the importance of trade unions as “centres of resistance against the encroachments of capital.”[1] Since an English translation of Capital wasn’t published until after his death, those talks were the only opportunity that English-speaking workers had to learn those ideas directly from their author. While explaining how workers sell their ability to work, Marx asked rhetorically how it came about that there are two types of people in the market — capitalists who own the means of production, and workers who must sell their labor-power in order to survive. “How does this strange phenomenon arise, that we find on the market a set of buyers, possessed of land, machinery, raw material, and the means of subsistence, all of them, save land in its crude state, the products of labour, and on the other hand, a set of sellers who have nothing to sell except their labouring power, their working arms and brains? That the one set buys continually in order to make a profit and enrich themselves, while the other set continually sells in order to earn their livelihood?” A full answer was outside the scope of his lecture, he said, but “the inquiry into this question would be an inquiry into what the economists call ‘Previous, or Original Accumulation,’ but which ought to be called Original Expropriation.” “We should find that this so-called Original Accumulation means nothing but a series of historical processes, resulting in a Decomposition of the Original Union existing between the Labouring Man and his Instruments of Labour. … The Separation between the Man of Labour and the Instruments of Labour once established, such a state of things will maintain itself and reproduce itself upon a constantly increasing scale, until a new and fundamental revolution in the mode of production should again overturn it, and restore the original union in a new historical form.” Marx was always very careful in his use of words. He didn’t replace accumulation with expropriation lightly. The switch is particularly important because this was the only time he discussed the issue in English — it wasn’t filtered through a translation. In Capital, the subject occupies eight chapters in the part titled Die sogenannte ursprüngliche Akkumulation — later rendered in English translations as “So-called Primitive Accumulation.” Once again, Marx’s careful use of words is important — he added “so-called” to make a point, that the historical processes were not primitive and not accumulation. Much of the confusion about Marx’s meaning reflects failure to understand his ironic intent, here and elsewhere. In the first paragraph he tells us that ‘ursprüngliche’ Akkumulation is his translation of Adam Smith’s words previous accumulation. He put the word ursprüngliche (previous) in scare quotes, signaling that the word is inappropriate. For some reason the quote marks are omitted in the English translations, so his irony is lost. In the 1800s, primitive was a synonym for original — for example, the Primitive Methodist Church claimed to follow the original teachings of Methodism. As a result, the French edition of Capital, which Marx edited in the 1870s, translated ursprüngliche as primitive; that carried over to the 1887 English translation, and we have been stuck with primitive accumulation ever since, even though the word’s meaning has changed. Marx explains why he used so-called and scare quotes by comparing the idea of previous accumulation to the Christian doctrine that we all suffer because Adam and Eve sinned in a distant mythical past. Proponents of previous accumulation tell an equivalent nursery tale: “Long, long ago there were two sorts of people; one, the diligent, intelligent and above all frugal elite; the other, lazy rascals, spending their substance, and more, in riotous living. … Thus it came to pass that the former sort accumulated wealth, and the latter sort finally had nothing to sell except their own skins. And from this original sin dates the poverty of the great majority who, despite all their labour, have up to now nothing to sell but themselves, and the wealth of the few that increases constantly, although they have long ceased to work.” “Such insipid childishness is every day preached to us in defense of property,” but when we consider actual history, “it is a notorious fact that conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, in short, force, play the greatest part.” The chapters of So-called Primitive Accumulation describe the brutal processes by which “great masses of men [were] suddenly and forcibly torn from their means of subsistence, and hurled onto the labor-market as free, unprotected and rightless proletarians.” “These newly freed men became sellers of themselves only after they had been robbed of all their own means of production, and all the guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal arrangements. And this history, the history of their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire.” Marx’s account focuses on expropriation in England, because the dispossession of working people was most complete there, but he also refers to the mass murder of indigenous people in the Americas, the plundering of India, and the trade in African slaves — “these idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation.” That sentence, and others like it, illustrate Marx’s consistently sarcastic take on primitive accumulation. He is not describing primitive accumulation, he is condemning those who use the concept to conceal the brutal reality of expropriation. Failure to understand that Marx was polemicizing against the concept of “primitive accumulation” has led to another misconception — that Marx thought it occurred only in the distant past, when capitalism was being born. That was what Adam Smith and other pro-capitalist writers meant by previous accumulation, and as we’ve seen, Marx compared that view to the Garden of Eden myth. Marx’s chapters on so-called primitive accumulation emphasized the violent expropriations that laid the basis for early capitalism because he was responding to the claim that capitalism evolved peacefully. But his account also includes the Opium Wars of the 1840s and 1850s, the Highland Clearances in capitalist Scotland, the colonial-created famine that killed a million people in Orissa in India in 1866, and plans for enclosing and privatizing land in Australia. All of these took place during Marx’s lifetime and while he was writing Capital. None of them were part of capitalism’s prehistory. The expropriations that occurred in capitalism’s first centuries were devastating, but far from complete. In Marx’s view, capital could not rest there — its ultimate goal was “to expropriate all individuals from the means of production.”[2] Elsewhere he wrote of big capitalists “dispossessing the smaller capitalists and expropriating the final residue of direct producers who still have something left to expropriate.”[3] In other words, expropriation continues well after capitalism matures. We often use the word accumulation loosely, for gathering up or hoarding, but for Marx it had a specific meaning, the increase of capital by the addition of surplus value,[4] a continuous process that results from the exploitation of wage-labor. The examples he describes in “So-called Primitive Accumulation” all refer to robbery, dispossession, and expropriation — discrete appropriations without equivalent exchange. Expropriation, not accumulation. In the history of capitalism, we see a constant, dialectical interplay between the two forms of class robbery that Peter Linebaugh has dubbed X2 — expropriation and exploitation. “Expropriation is prior to exploitation, yet the two are interdependent. Expropriation not only prepares the ground, so to speak, it intensifies exploitation.”[5] Expropriation is open robbery. It includes forced enclosure, dispossession, slavery and other forms of theft, without equivalent exchange. Exploitation is concealed robbery. Workers appear to receive full payment for their labor in the form of wages, but in fact the employer receives more value than he pays for. What Adam Smith and others described as a gradual build up of wealth by men who were more industrious and frugal than others was actually violent, forcible expropriation that created the original context for exploitation and has continued to expand it ever since. As John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark write in The Robbery of Nature: “Like any complex, dynamic system, capitalism has both an inner force that propels it and objective conditions outside itself that set its boundaries, the relations to which are forever changing. The inner dynamic of the system is governed by the process of exploitation of labor power, under the guise of equal exchange, while its primary relation to its external environment is one of expropriation.”[6] In short, Marx did not have a “theory of primitive accumulation.” He devoted eight chapters of Capital to demonstrating that the political economists who promoted such a theory were wrong, that it was a “nursery tale” invented to whitewash capital’s real history. Marx’s preference for “original expropriation” wasn’t just playing with words. That expression captured his view that “the expropriation from the land of the direct producers — private ownership for some, involving non-ownership of the land for others — is the basis of the capitalist mode of production.”[7] The continuing separation of humanity from our direct relationship with the earth was not and is not a peaceful process: it is written in letters of blood and fire. That’s why he preceded the words “primitive accumulation” by “so-called.” Notes [1] Quotations from Marx’s 1865 lectures, “Value, Price and Profit,” are from Marx Engels Collected Works, vol. 20, 103-149. Quotations from “So-Called Primitive Accumulation” are from Marx, Capital vol. 1 (Penguin, 1976) 873-940. [2] Marx, Capital vol. 3, (Penguin, 1981) 571. [3] Ibid, 349. [4] See chapters 24 and 25 of Capital vol. 1. [5] Linebaugh, Stop Thief! (PM Press, 2014), 73. [6] Foster and Clark, The Robbery of Nature (Monthly Review Press, 2020), 36. [7] Marx, Capital vol. 3 (Penguin, 1981) 948. Emphasis added. AuthorIan Angus This article was republished from Climate & Capitalism. Archives September 2022 9/10/2022 Bringing Workers’ Rights Into a Constitution? An Innovative State Ballot Proposal Could Offer a New Path for Labor By: Tom ConwayRead Now Chris Frydenger’s young coworkers at the Mueller Company performed the same work and brought the same dedication to their jobs as he did, but the manufacturer’s two-tier wage system exploited newer hires by paying them thousands less each year. Outraged by the unfairness, Frydenger and the entire membership of United Steelworkers (USW) Local 7-838 in Decatur, Illinois, took a stand during contract negotiations a few years ago and not only beat back the inequitable pay system but also won younger members catch-up raises of more than 21 percent. That collective victory remains one of the proudest moments in Frydenger’s life. And now it’s fueling his fight to make worker power a constitutional right in his home state. A November 8 referendum will give Illinois voters the opportunity to enact a “Workers’ Rights Amendment” to the state constitution, enshrining in the state’s highest law Illinoisans’ freedom to join unions and bargain collectively for better lives while also barring future legislation that would erode worker strength. The ballot question passed the Legislature on a bipartisan basis last year, a sign of how much the measure reflects the people’s will. As they educate more voters about the referendum, Frydenger and other activists find almost unanimous support for a measure that would give workers greater control of their destinies, beyond the clutches of CEOs, pro-corporate politicians and other anti-labor forces. “I can’t imagine why anybody wouldn’t be in support of this,” said Frydenger, grievance chair and Rapid Response coordinator for Local 7-838, who’s canvassing neighborhoods, distributing leaflets and making phone calls to make sure workers know that their very futures are on the ballot this year. The Workers’ Rights Amendment would help future generations negotiate the family-supporting wages needed to sustain the middle class and the nation’s economy. It would safeguard Illinoisans’ right to a voice on the job, including the freedom to call out unsafe working conditions without fear of reprisal. And it would ensure workers can band together, as Frydenger and his colleagues did, to hold employers accountable. Frydenger recalled the local’s negotiating committee tossing a pile of worker surveys on the bargaining table—all demanding elimination of the two-tier wage system—and telling management there’s no way union members would ever vote for a contract that retained it. The constitutional amendment has deep emotional meaning to Frydenger, who observed that it would confer “sacred,” “fundamental” and “essential” status on workers’ rights at a time that more and more Americans view union membership as the path forward. “Every time I turn on the news, I see an Amazon location or another Starbucks store voting in a union,” he said, noting that a new Gallup poll released on August 30 showed that 71 percent of Americans support organized labor, the most since 1965. “I think the pandemic showed people that their employers didn’t care about them as much as they thought they did,” Frydenger said. “It’s up to us to secure our rights in the workplace.” Even in Illinois, a strong union state, workers must remain on guard against efforts to rig the scales against them. Just a few years ago, a pro-corporate, anti-union governor proposed so-called “right-to-work zones” where organized labor would have been forced to represent workers regardless of whether they actually joined unions, a scheme intended to divide workers and undermine their collective power. “In an era when corporate-bought politicians and lobbyists are doing everything in their power to undercut workers’ rights, this would really help us level the playing field,” explained Aaron Sutter, incoming vice president of USW Local 4294, which represents hundreds of members at Cerro Flow Products in Sauget, Illinois. Sutter, raised by a postal worker and a public school teacher, grew up knowing that union wages “kept my household running and fed me every night.” But not until he took a job at a nonunion package delivery company with abusive managers and shoddy equipment did he fully understand the role unions play in protecting workers and helping them obtain their fair share. He vowed never to work in a nonunion shop again. “We’re living at a time when a pizza party is the most appreciation you can get without collective bargaining,” observed Sutter, who’s going door to door to educate voters about the amendment. The referendum requires a supermajority of votes for passage, but that also means anti-union forces would face an uphill battle if they ever tried to alter or repeal it. An attempted rollback would almost certainly be doomed to fail, Sutter said, predicting voters will guard it as zealously as Social Security and Medicare. Cathaline Carter, a retired union schoolteacher and member of the Steelworkers Organization of Active Retirees in Chicago, feels strongly about the amendment because of what organized labor has done for generations of her family—and what it has the potential to do for generations more. Carter’s uncle, Robert Jenkins, left rural Mississippi in the 1940s with little more than the shirt on his back and found his way to Chicago, where he took a union job at Youngstown Sheet and Tube. He worked his way up to crane operator, earning good wages that enabled him to buy a house, start a family and break into the middle class. Union contracts also gave him the resources to help to relocate other family members, including Carter’s mother, to Chicago. Carter and other members of the extended family then followed in Jenkins’ footsteps, lifting themselves up with union work of their own and building on the progress he made. “It gave him status in life,” she said of Jenkins’ union job. “He had things that people are struggling to have now.” AuthorTom Conway is the international president of the United Steelworkers Union (USW). This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute. Archives September 2022 The majority of Americans are feeling worried about paying for housing in the coming year, according to a Freddie Mac poll conducted between June 6-10; Freddie Mac is a market financing company sponsored by the U.S. government. Of the 2,000 adults surveyed, 62% said they are somewhat or very concerned about whether they will be able to pay for housing next year; 69% said they are somewhat or very worried about higher housing prices, in general. The highest concerns, however, were regarding an impending economic recession, to which 84% of respondents voiced their worries, in addition to 77% worried about increasing interest rates. Half of the respondents, furthermore, said they are worried about losing their jobs. In addition, 58% of respondents said that their rent has increased in the past year, in conjunction with the hiking inflation rates. About 6% of respondents said that their rent had increased by 30% and beyond. Almost 20% of respondents said that the rent increase rendered them “extremely likely” that they will miss a rent payment, while 38% said that the new pricing will make it somewhat likely. 61% of respondents said that at times, they do not have enough to cover basic necessities, such as food and housing, or are living payday to payday to have “just enough money to get by.” In April, experts said that spiraling inflation and mortgage rates, along with a housing affordability crisis caused by low inventory, shockingly high rents, and a reduction in real earnings, might lead to a recession. Mortgage rates in the United States reached a 12-year high last week, while home prices established a new high in March, according to industry group data released in April. This comes while inflation is at a 40-year peak, yet real wages continue to decline month after month, according to the Labor Department. High demand, escalated pricesFalling inventory has stoked increasing demand and caused home prices to escalate at a robust pace, according to Zillow. Total housing inventory at the end of March totaled 950,000 units, down about 10% from one year ago when it stood at 1.05 million, according to the NAR. Another indicator of the severity of the difficulty for homebuyers is that residences stayed on the market for an average of 17 days last month. According to the NAR, 87% of homes sold were on the market for less than a month. In February, Zillow, an American tech real-estate marketplace company, reported that residences nationwide went under contract in 11 days, which is six days quicker than February 2021 and 25 days faster than February 2020. Zillow analysts point to generational demographics, citing a big wave of Millennials entering their peak home-buying years. Simultaneously, Baby Boomers are more active in the housing market than more recent generations. As more people gain clarity on their employment agreements, they too will be seeking to make long-term housing decisions, which will have the effect of maintaining demand. AuthorAl Mayadeen is an Arab Independent Media Satellite Channel. Republished from MROnline.org (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). Originally published by Al Mayadeen on August 16, 2022. this article was republished from Arkansas Worker. Archives September 2022 Incarcerations, brutality, and torture are common in the U.S. Activists claim that this amounts to a war waged against racially marginalized, poor, and working-class people. The very laws and government agencies created to protect the people in the United States are increasingly being weaponized against those who are often marginalized in society: people of color, the poor, and the working class. In just the last few months, there have been many incidents of this kind of violent abuse of power. On July 28, the state of Alabama performed a “botched” execution on Joe Nathan James Jr., who journalists believe may have suffered medical malpractice akin to “torture” for hours before his death. On August 12, around midnight, a police officer threatened to kill a Black pregnant woman during a traffic stop in Florida. On August 18, far-right-wing Governor of Florida Ron DeSantis announced that 20 formerly incarcerated people would be arrested for the crime of voting, as the U.S. severely restricts the right to vote for the tens of millions of former prisoners. Within the same week, three police officers were captured on video brutally beating a homeless man in Arkansas on August 21. “We’re in a state of genocidal war,” said former political prisoner Jalil Muntaqim to Peoples Dispatch. Muntaqim was and still is a fighter for Black liberation who spent 49 years in prison, which activists claim was due to his political work as a member of the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army. Alongside the label of political prisoner, Muntaqim also identifies himself as a prisoner of war. The belief shared by many that the U.S. is at war with a subset of its own people is not a fringe idea. “End the War on Black People” is a policy platform of the Movement for Black Lives, a major organization within the Black Lives Matter movement. “Stop the War on Black America” was a popular slogan in several uprisings against police brutality, from the killing of Michael Brown in 2014 to Amir Locke’s murder in 2022. In recent months alone, there has been enough evidence to support this belief that the U.S. is waging a war against its people. Who Polices the Police? According to the data project Mapping Police Violence, police killed at least 1,144 people in the U.S. in 2021, which is approximately three people per day. Every few weeks there is a police murder that triggers mass outrage, such as the killing of Jayland Walker who was found with more than 60 bullet wounds on his body, or Amir Locke who was killed seconds after waking up, or 15-year-old Brett Rosenau who was burned alive during a botched SWAT-team raid. Two cases of police brutality have generated outrage most recently. In Florida on August 12, police officer Jason DeSue was driving in his car when he told Ebony Washington, a Black mother who was four months pregnant and driving with her three children, to pull over for speeding. Instead of following instructions immediately, Washington waited until reaching a well-lit area to pull over. “It was dark [and I was] with my kids. I felt uncomfortable. I didn’t want to be able to not have anyone else around,” she said afterward in an interview. DeSue reacted drastically to Washington’s decision. Body camera footage shows DeSue telling her over loudspeakers, “Pull the vehicle over, or I’ll put you into the ground.” Once Washington did finally pull over, DeSue pulled out his gun. He then handcuffed her roughly despite her pregnancy. DeSue eventually released Washington after giving her a ticket for speeding. Nino Brown, a longtime activist against police brutality and a fighter for the freedom of political prisoners, said, “That this police officer came at her [Washington] ‘guns blazing’ with his weapon already drawn tells us everything you need to know about how the police treat African Americans in this country: the police operate as a Gestapo force in our communities—they shoot first and ask questions never.” A video of three Arkansas police officers brutally beating Randall Worcester, taken on August 21, went viral. Despite being the victim of a brutal assault, Worcester was the one charged with “second-degree battery, resisting arrest, refusal to submit, possessing an instrument of crime, criminal trespass, criminal mischief, terroristic threatening and second-degree assault,” according to KARK. DeSue resigned after drawing scorn for pulling a gun on Washington, and the three officers in Arkansas—Thell Riddle, Levi White, and Zack King—have now been suspended. This is the extent of their accountability thus far, even though some people are demanding criminal charges against the three police officers. The fact that these officers are facing any punishment at all may be related to the existence of video evidence, which in past cases of police violence, such as in George Floyd’s murder, generated enough outrage to result in police accountability. Without video evidence, police often take charge of the narrative, labeling brutality with insidious neutral terms such as “officer-involved shooting” rather than “police killing.” Before the video of Floyd’s murder was released to the world, the Minneapolis Police Department press release of May 26, 2020 read, “Man Dies After Medical Incident During Police Interaction.” Persecution of Prisoners Follows Them to the Grave There is an untenable double standard of justice for police officers who act with legalized impunity and those they ostensibly protect and serve. Although police rarely face criminal charges for brutality, people who are convicted of a crime, many of whom are racially marginalized and are in deep poverty, are punished mercilessly by the state. Such is the case for prisoners who face the death penalty, which in the U.S. is most commonly carried out by administering a lethal injection. Although this method appears to be humane, death by lethal injection has been increasingly proven to be a torturous process. As the death penalty comes under more scrutiny, major pharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer are banning the use of their drugs in lethal injections. As a result, states such as Alabama are turning to lower-quality medications, like midazolam, which according to Robert Dunham, executive director of the nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center, “is not an appropriate drug to be used for execution purposes.” As Dunham told the Independent, “Studies now show this three-drug process [of lethal injection] is the equivalent to waterboarding, suffocation and being chemically burned at the stake.” Even beyond the pain and suffering caused by the contents of the lethal injection, corrections departments have botched executions. Journalist Elizabeth Bruenig wrote in the Atlantic about how after prisoner Joe Nathan James Jr. was executed using lethal injection, an autopsy revealed that the Alabama Department of Corrections took hours to find an entry point for the injection, torturing James in the process. “My initial impression of James was of someone whose hands and wrists had been burst by needles, in every place one can bend or flex,” Bruenig wrote. Meanwhile, many of those who were incarcerated at one point may find that their state-sanctioned punishments are not over yet. This was the case for the 20 people, all formerly incarcerated, who were recently arrested in Florida for so-called voter fraud. As NPR reported, however, “According to court documents, though, some of the 20 individuals told law enforcement officials that they thought they were able to vote when they cast ballots.” (In Florida, voting rights were recently restored to felons except those convicted of murder or a sexual offense cannot vote—the latter point cited by Governor DeSantis in response to criticism of the recent disenfranchisement crackdown.) Desmond Meade, president of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, told Democracy Now that Floridians “are now being dragged from their homes in handcuffs because all they ever wanted to do was participate in democracy.” Florida Governor Ron DeSantis bragged about the arrests, stating, “Today’s [August 18] actions send a clear signal to those who are thinking about ballot harvesting or fraudulently voting. If you commit an elections crime, you will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.” A Cruel Double Standard DeSantis’ words are telling. The so-called “elections crimes” will be “prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” and yet there is still no word about criminal charges against officers Jason DeSue, Thell Riddle, Levi White and Zack King for the violent crimes of assault and battery they committed. Meanwhile, despite “cruel and unusual punishment” being prohibited as per the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, prisoners are enduring torturous executions. Some argue that torture, execution, imprisonment, and brutality against racially marginalized, poor, and working-class people amounts to war. Some, like Muntaqim, have worked to hold the entire U.S. state accountable for genocide, and have sought to question the legitimacy of the laws and agencies governing the people in the United States. Muntaqim said, “It’s important for us to recognize that we, Black people in this country, must seek out other means of survival. Other means of prosperity. Other means from which we can govern ourselves.” AuthorNatalia Marques is a writer at Peoples Dispatch, an organizer, and a graphic designer based in New York City. This article was produced in partnership by Peoples Dispatch and Globetrotter. Archives September 2022 9/7/2022 The New Yorker and The “New” Cold War Propaganda (Part 5). By: Thomas Riggins [5/5]Read NowTrump, Putin, and the New Cold War - The New Yorker (Part 5)This is the fifth part (of 5 ) of a paragraph by paragraph commentary on a recent article posing as journalism in the March 6, 2017 issue of The New Yorker. I hope to demonstrate that this article is basically a totally mendacious concoction of cold war US propaganda constructed out of unsubstantiated opinions expressed by US government officials and various journalists and others who are hostile to the current Russian government. I hold that no self respecting journalist would write an article such as this New Yorker piece and palm it off on the public. My commentary is also an object lesson on how to distinguish between reportage that at least attempts to be unbiased and obvious nonobjective propaganda. You will know more about Trump, Putin and the New Cold War from the commentary than you will ever know from the original article. Active measures were used by both sides throughout the Cold War. In the nineteen-sixties, ... Evan Osnos joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2008, ... newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/06/trump-putin-and-the- Section Five “Turbulence Theory” This last section contains 16 paragraphs. 1. The Russians were “gleeful” over Clinton’s loss as they saw theTrump victory as upsetting the established political consensus in Washington. [Putin may have felt his ambitions to have normal relations with Washington and the EU and lower the hostile actions of NATO would be possible to achieve. If so, it appears he was mistaken] . 2. The “News of the Week '' anchor Dmitry Kiselyov, revealed how benighted the social consciousness of many in the Russian elite has become since the demise of the Soviet state. Their ambassador to the US has either failed to enlightened them about Trump’s base or he has been ignored, as Kiselyov informed his audience that Trump’s views revealed neither any racism nor sexism, only “a real man” who believed in the family (with three wives to show it), as proved by the fact he doesn’t approve “of protecting the rights of gays and lesbians.” I’m surprised this reactionary commentator even thinks gays and lesbians have rights to protect. 3. The article now does an about face. Having spent four sections insinuating that Putin and the Russians were a major cause of Trump’s victory it declares it’s not so after all. They were factors (even this is unproved) but not “the dominant force.” The most important factor is ‘’resentment.” This sentiment has resulted from “the effects of globalization and deindustrialization.” Resentment has caused the rise of the right in Europe and the US. So, let’s forget about the DNC and the election. The real problem is a paranoid fear that Putin is out to take over the world and Trump lacks the cojones to stop him. We shall see this is not a real fear but is totally concocted as an excuse to try and hold together militarily a teetering world order constructed by the ‘West” after WWII in order to ensure American and European control of the world economy: an order that is unraveling because capitalism cannot regulate itself and is resulting in war, famine, pestilence, and environmental destruction on an apocalyptic scale. The authors assert “many fear that Trump cannot be counted on” to defend the West: he says (or said) nice things about Putin, also about Brexit, and has “doubts” about NATO — oh my, what is the world coming to? If Trump backs away from the usual US stance re NATO and the Russian “Threat” [Russia has been a threat, it seems, since Peter the Great, whatever system it has: feudal, communist, or capitalist] then, we are told by a British ex deputy commander of NATO “it gives Putin all kinds of opportunities.” For example, he might not have to invade the Baltic states to dominate them. [No evidence is presented that Putin has any plans, or even desires, “to invade” the Baltic states but that’s the excuse for NATO’s build up. Would it signal the imminent fall of the West if Trump and Putin agreed to de-escalate the tensions along the Russia border?] The general also says there may be a “re-nationalization “ of Europe if Trump doesn’t stand up for keeping the EU together. 4. An “advisor” to Reagan and Clinton is quoted. The author has a habit of selectively quoting journalists, “advisors,” generals, etc., with whom he happens to agree. He evidently believes it makes his article more credible. He simply ignores equally qualified, or more qualified sources, whose opinions would under cut his viewpoint. He shares this methodology on “fair and balanced” reporting with Fox News. Anyway, the advisor ponders how long Angela Merkel can “hold out against” Trump. She is alone in Europe and Putin will soon be seen as “the preeminent power in Europe.” Germany versus Russia; we’ve been here before. A conservative German news weekly is quoted (“Der Spiegel”) to the effect that Germany must stand up to Trump who is turning into “a danger to the world.” Well that lets Putin off the hook (Russia is a “regional power” remember.) 5. Next up on the New Yorker’s Fantasy Island is the Clinton advisor “Strobe Talbott who really does have an almost apocalyptic vision of what the future portends ( we could have been saved this by HRC!). Talbott thinks that Trump (who had one casual encounter some years ago with Putin) is a “pal” of Putin’s [they have a “perverse pal-ship”] and that Trump has an “almost unfathomable respect” for Putin. Because of this we may have a “second Cold War” [why if they are pals?] and we may lose it! Trump is also putting “the world in danger” because he doesn’t respect [i.e., has called into question NATO and the world wide net of American military bases] the world order established by the “political West “(the US) over the last 70 years. It doesn’t occur to Talbott (or the author) that it is precisely that political world order, sustained by American hegemony, which is beginning to unravel of its own accord by its failure prevent worsening climate change and to provide economic security for hundreds of millions of people because of growing inequality, that is putting “the world in danger.” Trump is a symptom not a cause. Talbott doesn’t see this. He sees that we may lose our position in the world and it will take years, and years to regain it: “we the United States and we the champions of the liberal world order.” We, the liberal order that put Pinochet in power in Chile, killed 5 million Vietnamese peasants in a colonial war, lied and invaded Iraq and virtually destroyed the Middle East in a trumpeted up war, who can’t even properly feed, clothe, house and medically care for our own people properly: we are doomed because Donald Trump suggested he could sit down with Putin and make a “deal.” 6. If Talbott is not enough we are treated to the totally ridiculous musings of one of the corrupt oligarchical Yeltsin regime’s former ministers who has resettled in Washington and who tells us the “same people'' [he means kind of people] are in the Kremlin as in the White House. Trump’s people and Putin’s “like each other and feel that they are alike”. I can just imagine Putin watching Trump and reading his tweets, rubbing his hands together in glee and thinking, “That Trump, he’s just like me!’’ The two groups “ care less for democracy and values, and more for personal success . however that is defined.” That also pretty much describes Yeltsin, Clinton and most politicians; but it’s how “success” is defined that is really important and whether or not your personal success coincides with that of your country and its people or not. 7. The author now decides, towards the end of an article that pounded away on the trope of Russian interference, that maybe it’s not the “master narrative” of Trump’s victory after all. While, he says Russia’s tampering with our election “appears convincing” [to those at any rate who are convinced by hearsay, speculation, bare assertions and the lack of any definite proof] it is nevertheless the case that Trump “is a phenomenon of America’s own making.” In fact, he could have junked all of the previous paragraphs and said all he had to say in these last 10 paragraphs which conclude the article. 8. A long paragraph using McCarthyite guilt by association techniques to suggest that maybe the “phenomenon” is not so American after all. Examples: Putin likes Tillerson types (Trump’s first Secretary of State) as they “don’t talk about human rights.” Trump didn’t make any negative , comments about Russian court cases i.e., Russia’s internal affairs (Putin “controls” the courts) involving charges against an opposition figure charged with fraud (he was convicted after the charge had been overturned by another court — Putin’s “control” of the courts must have slipped up the first time). “The Russians see friendly faces in the Administration.’’ [Why no Gerasamov type frowns? ] Tillerson , when he was CEO of Exxon, had a “close relationship” with the head of the state oil company who is both rich and close to Putin. Michael Flynn was paid a $40,000 fee by “the Russian propaganda station RT” to attend an anniversary celebration dinner (he sat next to Putin). [RT is partially funded by the government as is PBS, is the latter “the American propaganda network”? Is the BBC “the UK propaganda network”? It seems any news outlet subsidized by a “hostile” government is automatically a “propaganda” outlet. Radio Havana: propaganda. Radio Free Cuba: news and entertainment.] 9. Obama, near the very end of his term, expelled 35 Russian officials and closed a couple of Russian diplomatic compounds as a result of the allegations of Russian election hacking. Initially Russia said it would retaliate but later Putin reversed this. During this period Michael Flynn and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner had contact with Russia’s ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak. Michael Flynn lied to Vice-President Pence about his meeting and had to resign as a result. Obama had placed sanctions against Russia and Flynn is suspected to have had inappropriate conversations with Kisyak. But the reason he was fired was for lying to the Vice-President. 10. Over the years Trump has made contradictory statements regarding Russia and Putin. He has said he has and hasn’t met Putin. Basically it seems this confusion has developed as a result of the 2013 Miss Universe contest which was held in Moscow. Investigations are in progress to sort all this out. 11. By early 2017 US officials had collected multiple examples of contacts between “Russians” and Trump “associates.” What remains to be seen, as a result of the called for investigations, [there is apparently not enough evidence at present to draw any conclusions even though “conclusions” have been drawn all over the place] is if there is any proof “for potential illegal or unethical entanglement with Russian government or business representatives.” [Well, the use of the word “potential” muddies the water as there is always the “potential” for people to collude in improper behavior; the investigations need a stronger resolution such as finding they actually colluded in such behavior. Mixing up governmental activities with private business dealings is also problematic. There is a big difference in working against your own government and engaging in corrupt business practices. Finally, “illegal’’ practices and “unethical” practices should not be lumped together. So far, nothing has been proven!] 12. A question is posed by one of Obama’s top advisors: Celeste Wallander. The question assumes that there will be some proof of Putin’s election hacking. Putin recently stated there can be no proof since he ordered no hacking. The question: “Will Putin expose the failings of American democracy or will he inadvertently expose the strength of American democracy?” [It would have to be inadvertent since it’s difficult to see the strength of a “democracy” in which the person with the lesser number of votes wins and the one with the most votes loses.] 13. It seems the Russians were “stunned” by Trump’s victory. [Who wasn’t?] The authors tell us the “working theory” of the agents involved in the Russian election interference case is that it wasn’t a well thought out plan but it was improvised. [ When all is said and done, I think we will find out it was the US government’s charges of Russian hacking and election tampering that were improvised and not well thought out.] 14. Mr. Trump (and Mr. Putin) learns a lesson. Being a candidate and being a President are qualitatively different. Candidate Trump made comments making it seem as if he really wanted to reset the US relations with Russia and move from an offensive hostile approach towards lessening tensions and more respect and cooperation. In other words he would not act as if the US was the world’s policeman and other countries could like it or lump it. But this would violate the 70 year old “world order” set up by a bipartisan Republican/Democratic foreign policy elite and constructed by the US based on its becoming the only world superpower and whose interests were paramount. The Russians, thinking this was his intention, initially praised his victory over HRC. But the US intelligence community and national security apparatus went to work blowing up a Trump/Russian electoral conspiracy theory that makes it impossible for Trump to fundamentally change the direction of US foreign policy with regard to Russia. The Russians have realized this and “the Kremlin ordered television outlets to be more reserved in their coverage of the new President.” 15. Next we get some totally unreliable hearsay via Konstantin von Eggert who hosts a television show in Russia. He says a friend told him that he saw an “edict” sent to state owned media. The friend told him the edict amounted to “no more Trump.” Von Eggert then explains what the “implicit” meaning of the edict (which he never saw) means; in fact he tells us what “the Kremlin has apparently decided.” [It’s fairly obvious that the author is not too scrupulous with regard to the sources of credible “evidence” of what the “Kremlin” is thinking. So, let’s forget von Eggert’s speculations and simply report that Russian state media has toned down its uncritical coverage of Trump.] 16. The last paragraph ends the article, not with a bang but a whimper. The editor of the anti-Putin “Echo of Moscow”, Alexey Vendiktov, with “deep contacts” in the elite, makes some “suggestions” which the author evidently thinks we should take seriously. Vendiktov suggests that Putin supported Trump because he upset the traditional [cold war] elite in the US with his unconventional foreign policy views. It’s also unclear how important a world power Russia really is — “So, well then we have to create turbulence inside America itself .” [So it all boils down to Putin’s inferiority complex.] The final suggestion is once America “is beset by turbulence” it will close “up on itself — and Russia’s hands are freed.” Freed for what? Our whole problem with Russia is that the US wanted a free hand in Georgia, Syria, and Ukraine (it already has one in the Baltic states and East Europe) and our “free hand” resulted in negative discriminatory behavior against the Russian speaking minorities in Georgia and Ukraine who fought back and elicited counter meddling by Russia to our meddling and the same in Syria where Russia intervened to help an ally and to protect its naval base on the Syrian coast. The US wants a free hand to continue its encirclement of Russia with military bases (we are already moving into former Soviet republics in Central Asia) and the sponsorship of anti-Russian governments along Russia’s borders. The New Yorker may support these foreign policy objectives of the US and the New Cold War we are launching but they are naive in the extreme to think publishing disinformation articles such as this will dissuade the Russians from defending their legitimate state interests from the machinations of US superpower hegemony. This is the end of part five and the last part of this article. From reading part five of The New Yorker Article you will not have learned anything at all about whether or not the Russian government or Putin had anything to do with the "hacking" of the DNC or if they interfered with our elections. In fact, there is nothing in the whole article regarding Putin and the alleged hacking of our election process except innuendo and unproven assertions. And this is The New Yorker! Once upon a time, not that long ago, it was a better and more reliable source of information. Seymour Hersh, where are you? 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. With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the West – led by the American empire – has tried to press for a belligerent solution to the crisis, speaking to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regime only through the language of sanctions and weapons. Refusing to address Moscow’s security concerns regarding the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the core capitalist countries of the Global North have chosen to portray Putin’s government as an ideological pariah that needs to be excluded from the international diplomatic community. This has entailed characterizing the Russian ruling dispensation as “fascist” – an accusation that instantly delegitimizes negotiations with the entity that carries that label. Western denunciations of Russian fascism are incorrect because they fail to understand the complexity of Putin’s regime. After the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), Russia entered a severe economic crisis. Boris Yeltsin – the man who conducted a coup against the Soviet Union – became the favored puppet of the US and sold off the wealth of his country at ridiculously low prices to a group of oligarchic cronies. The legalized robbery of the nation’s social wealth reversed many of the gains of the USSR. Life expectancy rates dropped, Russian military power suffered drastic setbacks, and economic sovereignty got compromised through privatization, which converted Russia into a playground for Western capitalists. Yeltsin’s brutal destruction of the Soviet Union was domestically propped by two different factions of the ruling class. State capitalists (insiders) controlled large-scale industry – natural resources, energy, metallurgy, engineering – while private capitalists (outsiders) dominated banking, consumer goods, the media. In “Russia Without Putin: Money, Power and the Myths of the New Cold War,” Tony Wood notes: “One group tended to own physical assets, the other financial wealth. For much of the 1990s, economic conditions favored the ‘outsiders’: industrial production was crippled, and those with access to large reserves of cash had the edge.” On top of economic advantages, the outsiders benefitted from the political changes that accompanied the downfall of the USSR. In the words of Wood: “Insiders, as their name suggests, tended to be better connected to the regional and national government apparatus, often through informal ties forged in the Soviet era.” The dissolution of the Soviet Union unleashed chaos in the state bureaucracy and disrupted the connections of the insiders. This allowed the outsiders to penetrate state institutions and forge business links. However, the politico-economic dominance began to falter with the rouble crash and debt default of 1998. The crash meant: a) the disappearance of the economic privileges of the outsiders who owned financial wealth; and b) currency devaluation, which improved Russian domestic production by making imports more expensive, strengthening the insiders who had assets in manufacturing, agriculture, food processing and distribution, etc. “The surge in raw materials prices after 1999,” writes Wood, “hugely accelerated the reshaping of the Russian elite that began with the rouble crash. In 1997, only a few of the top ten oligarchs had interests outside banking or the media. After the turn of the century, almost all of the top ten owed their wealth to metals or mineral resources”. With the revival of domestic industry and the increase in energy prices, the balance tilted in favor of the insiders, who used their growing economic power to prevent private capitalist interests from accessing state power. Putin represented this shift in class forces, pushing forward a state capitalist agenda that involved recentralizing power in the state and curtailing the political ambitions of outsiders. Unlike Yeltsin’s compradorized system, this kind of statist neoliberalism possesses political and administrative coherence as it is based on the existence of a solid bureaucracy whose consolidated institutional capacity allows it to gain profit from exploitative ventures in extractive sectors. The relative stability of this arrangement has meant that Putin’s system has a margin of diplomatic leeway in its relations with the West. This leeway has been utilized by Russian rulers to make the country a regional power. In this way, geopolitical power has been used as a way to deal with citizens’ anti-neoliberal sentiments and restore their national pride. As Ilya Budraitskis comments, “Putin’s rule… [is a] kind of amalgamation of neo-liberal practices and pro-market ideas with the spirit of the so-called patriotic opposition to this market transformation.” Putin’s geopolitical project of reinstating Russia’s international position is driven by the following logic: “to survive, Russia can only be a strong state, that is, a great power abroad, and a quite uncontested regime at home. For that, it needs law and order, unity more than diversity, respect from foreign countries and its own citizens, and a renewed sense of honor and dignity.” These ideological imperatives are satisfied by “anti-Western and antiliberal attitudes, Soviet nostalgia, and a classic, state-centric vision of Russia.” As is evident, Russia does not have fascism. Instead, it pragmatically operates according to multiple ideologies that can challenge the legitimacy of the US-led world order and thus, help combat imperialist attacks against Russia. Western observers have accused Russia of being fascist because they overemphasize the conservative and authoritarian elements that compose Putinism. What they overlook is the fact that these ideologies are said to be against the excessive liberalism and globalism of the West. Thus, what matters for Putin is a sovereignist position against the West, one that uses patriotism against an interventionist Western liberal order. The hegemony of patriotic opposition to imperialism means that the normative core of Russian ideology is not genocidal hatred against an Other and a will to create a new xenophobic culture, all of which are essential ingredients of fascism. Rather, the Putinist worldview utilizes notions of Russian uniqueness – whether it be in the form of national history and culture, illiberalism, or Soviet nostalgia – to undermine the current West-centric world system. Far from resulting in fascism, the perspective of a distinct Russian civilization has shown itself capable of acknowledging the country’s multinational and multiconfessional character. The Duma has repeatedly rejected bills that ask “for the recognition of ethnic Russians as having rights superior to those of citizens belonging to ethnic minorities”. Further, on the international front, the Putinist narrative is accepts “a Herderian perception of the world, according to which each “civilization” or “culture” represents the diversity of humanity and should be celebrated for its uniqueness—hence the active role played by Moscow in any international project based on the notion of a “dialogue of civilizations.”” To conclude, Putin’s geopolitical opposition to the American empire – materially rooted in neoliberal statism – has given rise not to fascism, but to Realpolitik that deploys ideological plurality to contest the West’s hegemonic narratives. AuthorYanis Iqbal is an independent researcher and freelance writer based in Aligarh, India and can be contacted at yanisiqbal@gmail.com. His articles have been published in the USA, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India and several countries of Latin America. It’s safe to assume we’re all feeling pretty crappy after the most recent supreme court ruling overturning Roe v Wade, right? Well I hate to say it, but what is actually happening in the US is much deeper than the loss of bodily autonomy for women. What we’re witnessing in real time is capitalism in crisis. If it wasn’t already obvious, hopefully it’s crystal clear now. We do not live in a democracy. Sure we have popularity contests that cost millions, and even billions, of dollars depending on the office, but the elected leaders who purchase their positions of power do not represent us (the laboring class). They represent their wealthy donors (the ruling class). The facade of elections simply serves as a way to hide our government of, for and by the oligarchs. That being said, we’re currently witnessing the ruling class openly undermine the democratic political system designed to keep us enslaved to capitalist rule. By using an unelected body of judges to overturn the constitutional right to an abortion that is supported by a majority of people, and on the heels of an election where a majority of voters turned out for politicians who support access to safe abortions, the ruling class is giving us a glimpse at how weak their economic and political systems truly are. The overturning of Roe is an essential step the capitalist class had to take in order to preserve itself and it is only going to get worse from here. Less Imperialism = Less ProfitsCapitalism is defined by the need for never ending profits. Traditionally it has been the role of the US government, via the military and CIA, to ensure endless profits by opening new markets in developing countries for exploitation by US corporations. Today, however, American Imperialism is on the decline. A few examples of this decline are the failed US backed coup in Venezuela, proxy war with Russia via Ukraine, failed Summit of the Americas, and jailing of the former Bolivian president for participating in a US led coup in 2010. With this decline, a new multipolar world order is on the rise. Much of the global south is aligning with China who is offering a different path than that of the US. Where allegiance to the US is marked by exploitation of domestic markets by multinational corporations, China is offering an alternative choice defined by mutual benefit. From the commitment to build 1,000 new schools in Iraq or the massive infrastructure investment known as the Belt and Road initiative linking nearly all of the Asian continent and much of the global south, a new option is available to the world. The global community is quickly pulling away from the system of exploitative capitalism that is exported by the US. This new world order deprives US oligarchs their usual means of pursuing more profits. At this point you might be thinking “ok, so American Imperialism is on the decline. How does that relate to Roe v Wade? Capitalism can’t possibly be at fault for the loss of bodily autonomy. Radical Right wing ideology has been trying to strip this constitutional protection for decades. It has to be religious fanatics. Not capitalists.” Economics Gives Rise to the PoliticalTrue, radical right wing ideology is winning, but it is important to acknowledge that it is only winning because the ruling class is allowing it to. The marriage between the radical right and the ruling class is a relationship of convenience. For a number of reasons I won’t go into here, much of the voting base that makes up the political right does not consider, or merely accepts as unchangeable, the material conditions of their everyday lives. They instead define themselves by the social issues that are fed to them via their religious and political leaders. Have you ever noticed that even when right wing voters win elections they’re still angry? The election of Donald Trump couldn’t ease their anger and hatred towards “the other.” This is because social issues will never improve the material conditions of their everyday lives. Social issues may define them and their communities, but it will never materially improve their lives. They may be thrilled to have Trump as president, but they still don’t have access to health care or a livable wage. The ruling class depends on this. As Karl Marx teaches us, it is economics that gives rise to the political. As long as the wealthy can keep this voting base obsessed with the political (social issues), and ignorant to the economic, they can maintain their power over society. This is especially true given that our political system disproportionately favors land over people and capital above all else. (Quick side note: the liberal left does this as well in order to protect capitalism, but that is a convo for another column). This is further evidenced by the ruling class's attitude towards social issues. Truth be told, the wealthy know how to use social issues to their economic advantage. Meaning they understand how economics is foundational to the political. Just look at how multinational corporations handle racial and gender equity. They’re more than happy to celebrate pride month or make big public statements saying Black Lives Matter. When Roe was overturned they were tripping over themselves to virtue signal their support for reproductive healthcare by offering to financially cover the costs when employees need access to abortion services. The ruling class will enthusiastically point to their Black, Brown, gay, transgender, female or non-binary work forces in order show support for these communities while simultaneously making donations to extreme right wing politicians who want to marginalize these same communities. The ruling class only cares about social issues as long as it serves their economic interests. They will accept equity and diversity so long as it does not affect the economics of capitalism. The radical right wing stance on abortion is a natural ally to the economic interests of the ruling class when it needs to create more for-profit markets. When it is marketable, the wealthy appear very socially liberal. When profits are in jeopardy they will quickly ally themselves with conservatives. The Big PictureSo to bring this back to Roe v Wade let’s recap. US Imperialism is on the decline. This denies capitalists their traditional means of accessing new markets they can exploit and extract profits from. This decline is pushing the ruling class to look for new markets within the US. What better way to create a new for profit market than to use a radical political base, hyper-focused on social issues, to turn rights and protections into for-profit business ventures. The overturning of Roe has implications so far reaching we’ve barely scratched the surface in public discourse. The right to privacy, bodily autonomy, marriage equality, access to reproductive healthcare, freedom from religious oppression, and more fall within the scope of Roe. These are only surface level examples that do not fully capture the loss of individual liberties we are currently experiencing. The important takeaway is these rights guaranteed to us by the constitution are being stripped away and will soon be offered back to us via a monthly subscription. “You don’t want your health insurance provider to have complete access to all your medical records? For $59.99 per month we’ll give you privacy and protect your medical records!” We could easily brainstorm more ways that capitalism will sell our rights back to us but I don’t want to depress you anymore than I already have. Considering how human suffering is already a for profit venture (ex: health care, housing, poverty) it’s easy to see how dark our future is going to become if we continue to allow capitalism to exist. The need for more profits cannot be overcome by small incremental reforms. As soon as the profits of the ruling class are threatened by system change our rights will begin to look more like business opportunities and not constitutional guarantees. It is quickly becoming the only place left for capitalism to extract more profits. We Can End CapitalismTo try and end on a more positive note I’ll point out that while dark days are ahead we are witnessing the decline of capitalism. It cannot go on forever and if we read the classical texts of socialism/communism we can clearly see that society goes through natural states of movement. Society will never reach a stage of full development where nothing ever changes. Capitalism is not the end stage of societal development. It is simply one phase that comes before the next one and the next stage of development is socialism. We can speed this transition if we begin to see our neighbors through the lens of class struggle. Stop classifying your fellow laborers as Dem/Rep or liberal/conservative. Instead consider them for the allies that they are. Class struggle is the most fundamental fight there is. The more we understand this the easier it will be to unite and overthrow our oppressors. AuthorAdam Hall This article was republished from Candler Red. Archives September 2022 This article deals with the views of Santiago Carrillo (1915-2012), former general secretary of the Spanish Communist Party (1960-1982) and one of the founders of “Eurocommunism” as expressed in his book Eurocomunismo y Estado, translated into English as Eurocommunism and the State (1978). Carrillo maintained that the conditions in Western Europe were so changed after WW2 that many of the views of Lenin and of the CPSU no longer applied to this area. Rather than simply following the line of the Soviet Union, national parties should develop Marxism according to their own history and special circumstances. As Carrillo wrote in his introduction: “It must be recognised, however, that the approach to the problem of the State in the following pages involves a difference from Lenin’s thesis of 1917 and 1918. These were applicable to Russia and theoretically to the rest of the world at that time. They are not applicable today because they have been overtaken in the circumstances of the developed capitalist countries of Western Europe. What has made them inapplicable is the change in economic structures and the objective expansion of the progressive social forces, the development of the productive forces (including nuclear energy), the advance of socialism and decolonisation, and the defeat of fascism in the Second World War.” At least that is how the world looked to Carrillo in 1976. Much of this is questionable today when the economic structures have still to recover from the economic crisis initiated in 2008; the so-called expansion of the progressive social forces has called forth a revitalized ultra-right and new fascist movements; the productive forces have become responsible for the climate crisis which threatens our civilization; nuclear energy has become a threat and must be replaced wherever possible; the collapse of the Soviet Union and the east European “socialist” countries has halted any advance of socialism that Carrillo had in mind; decolonization has been replaced by neocolonialism in the guise of “globalization,” and fascism seems to be having a comeback after its defeat in the Second World War. Perhaps Lenin is not as out of date as Carrillo thought. In any event, many of Carrillo's ideas are still around today and to a greater or lesser degree have influence in Communist and socialist parties here and abroad. We shall now look at each of the six chapters of his book. I do not propose a commentary, but rather some observations based on hindsight concerning major points put forth by Carrillo in the 1970s and how well they have, or have not, withstood the test of time. Chapter One “The State Versus Society.” Point 1.) “The capitalist state is a reality. What are its present characteristics? This is the problem of every revolution, including the one we propose to carry out by the democratic, multi-party, parliamentary road.” [p.13] In the half century since this was written there has not been one successful revolution to establish a socialist state by the means suggested by Carrillo. This is a position that has its origins in the revisionism of Eduard Bernstein and his book Evolutionary Socialism and all attempts to establish a socialist state by these means have been aborted. In the U.S. the ultra-right has grown and captured the Republican Party and made inroads in the Democratic Party as well. Fascist movements have grown in and outside of Europe, and within and without bourgeois democratic governments. Ministerialism, Opportunism and Pragmatism are rampant in many Communist and socialist parties and there is no real empirical evidence in support of Carrillo’s ideas for a peaceful road to socialism. This doesn’t mean such a road is impossible, but few parties have advanced very far along it and most have programs that actually help to perpetuate the capitalist state despite high sounding slogans and party programs giving lip service to Marxism. Point 2.) “Socialist relations of production which rest on an insufficiently-developed basis of the productive forces can only have formal socialist aspects in the same sense as we refer to the formal freedom of bourgeois society.” [p.14] Two points are to be made here 1. Carrillo is pointing out that the Soviet Union has backward productive forces relative to the advanced capitalism of the West. 2. It has formal but not actual socialism in the same way bourgeois “democracy” is not really actually democracy but a capitalist control system to keep the working class in its place. Real democracy will only exist under socialism — real democracy doesn’t exist in the Soviet Union either. This is why Communists in the West should not just follow the Soviet model. Carrillo seems to overlook the fact that his model of evolutionary socialism relies on not formal but real democracy and this undermines his peaceful road theory. The Soviet Union would eventually collapse due to – among other things – its inability to move from formal to actual socialist relations of production. Point 3.) “From the formal Marxist point of view Kautsky was right in affirming that in Russia the conditions did not exist for achieving socialism in 1917. But the formal Marxism of Kautsky could not be applied to the revolutionary crisis in Russia in 1917.” [p. 18] The role of Lenin was to adapt Marxism to Russian conditions. This was a revision of original Marxism and produced Marxism-Leninism. Carrillo thus replies to his critics that his “revisionism” is no different than that of Lenin. He is adapting Marxism to the special conditions in Europe which are totally different in the 1970s than they were in Russia in 1917. Point 4.) “Marxism is based on the concrete analysis of concrete reality. Either it is this or it is pure ideology (in the pejorative sense of the term) which sets reality aside and is not Marxism; and the reality of the present day in Spain, Europe and the developed capitalist world has very concrete peculiarities which we cannot avoid.” [p.19] Well, times have changed in the last fifty years. The road to socialism based on the ideals of capitalist democracy and elections has led to the possibility of a fascist takeover. Even if prevented this time around we should not deceive ourselves that this is the only, or even the best way, to think about establishing socialism. Point 5.) “In essence, the attitude of Marx, Engels, and Lenin towards the state defines it as an instrument of the domination of one class over others, stressing particularly its coercive character….The present day state state….is still the instrument of class domination defined by Marx, Engels, and Lenin; but its structures are far more complex. More contradictory, than those known to the three Marxist teachers, and its relations with society have quite different characteristics.” [pp. 20,22] Carrillo starts with the orthodox Marxist view of the state but begins to morph into class collaboration which orthodox Marxists still believe is the road to defeat, not to socialism. The next point begins to make this clear. Point 6.) “In the old days, the liberal bourgeois State presented the outward appearance of an arbiter state, which mediated between the opposing classes. When it intervened against the workers’s protests utilizing brute force or class legislation, it did so in defense not only of one group of privileged capitalists but of all the other groups and classes of society, of principles which were challenged only by the conscious proletarian minority.” [p.24] This is not correct. It was not just the workers being oppressed by the State and everybody else being helped by it. The farmers, peasants, minorities, and small businesses were also having their interests sacrificed to the interests of the big capitalists. Marx, Engels, and Lenin were fully aware of this. Carrillo gets down to business with the next point. Point 7.) “Conversely, the state appears today, ever more clearly, as the director State in all spheres, particularly that of the economy. And since it is the director State which no longer serves the whole of the bourgeoisie, but only that part which controls the big monopolistic groups….it is now confronted, in its capacity as such a State, not only by the advanced proletariat but also directly by the broadest social classes and strata including part of the bourgeoisie: it is entering into direct conflict with the greater part of society.” [p.24] But this is not a new phenomenon. The so-called old State also functioned this way. The main difference, Lenin pointed out, is that financial capital has replaced the older capital dominated by the big monopolies and has become international so that Spain, etc., and the other developed nations are part of a globalized capitalist system dominated by the US and its junior partners the EU (AKA Germany), Japan and UK and its allies Australia, Canada, New Zealand. The class struggle has become internationalized as well. As far as the US is concerned there is no advanced proletariat (due to no CP around that wants to carry out this function) and no confrontation. Many socialists are telling the workers to support one capitalist party against the other, without explaining to them the deeper background and why they are both ultimately enemies – even when as a tactic they must sometimes support one rather than the other. This is to the right of Euro-Communism! Point 8.) Carrillo thought that this new (really the same as the old) contradiction between the State and the various classes and strata outside of the big monopoly bourgeoise “can and must culminate in a crisis within that apparatus” I.e., the State workers come from the working and middle class and have to serve the interests of the monopoly ruling class, not their own. ”It follows from this that the ideological and political currents which are developing in society have new possibilities of penetrating the State apparatus and winning important sectors of it.” [p.26] Well, in the US there is no sign that this is happening. Those on the left who try to build alliances or coalitions with the Center (an unreliable hodgepodge of conservative and liberal forces, none really progressive) find themselves increasingly irrelevant as they have played down Marxism and conceded the ideological battle ground to the Center in order not to alienate it. This blunts the developing consciousness of the workers from adopting advanced Marxist ideas and leaves them open to the neoliberal ideology of the two-party system. Nor do other advanced capitalist countries appear to have had their state apparatuses penetrated by forces hostile to their ruling class. The class struggle appears confined to the electoral arena (it occasionally breaks out in strikes, but these end with the ruling class still in control). Point 9.) With reference to the crisis associated with capitalism, Carrillo thought these, along with “the thought-provoking actions of the vanguard forces, will undoubtedly lead to a more widespread and general understanding and to a clearer definition of the conflict between the great majority of society and the present powers of the State”. [p.26] What we have seen, however, is the growth of the ultra-right and fascist forces in Europe, and especially in the US, and a fightback led by the traditional Establishments not vanguard forces. In some areas the role of a party as a “vanguard” is played down in order to attract centrist allies (a bit of a deceit it would seem). So much for Carrillo’s first chapter. It appears as if the world did not live up to his expectations. We shall look at his next chapter in Part Two on “The Ideological Apparatuses of the State”. 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. The conversation we're not having. As much as I dislike corporate media, such as the Washington Post, this tweet by one of their reporters reminded me of an important conversation we should be having. In the nation of “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” most people believe poverty is a choice individuals make. Time and again I hear people defend this trope about hard work by stating “if people don’t want to live in poverty they need to work harder.” It doesn’t matter that most people receiving government assistance have jobs or that the minimum wage is considered below the poverty line in most states. These champions of the “hard work” mantra simply ignore the fact that when someone does work hard and “pull themselves up” they’re cut off from the services that were actually enabling them to work in the first place for the crime of earning a living barely above the poverty line. We tell ourselves these lies about hard work because it is less painful than the truth: we choose, as a society, to have poverty. For the past 60+ years top eCONomists who serve as advisors to presidents of both parties and chair members of the federal reserve have been utilizing an economic theory known as Non-Accelerating Inflationary Rate of Unemployment (NAIRU). In short, this theory states that there is a certain rate of unemployment that is acceptable and should be maintained in order to prevent certain amounts of inflation. The federal government (being the one trick pony that it is) accomplishes this “acceptable rate” of unemployment via interest rates. If interest rates are low, money is cheap to borrow. People will take out loans to start new businesses and existing businesses will take out loans to expand operations. Thus more jobs are created. The reverse is true when the feds want to raise the unemployment rate. Increased interest rates means less borrowing and fewer jobs are available. A government that uses an economic strategy that actively keeps some people unemployed and in poverty should stir a rage within you. If human suffering doesn’t do it, have no fear! It gets better. Or should I say worse? The manner in which the feds (meaning the federal reserve and by extension the federal government) determines if a higher unemployment rate is necessary centers around inflation and wages. When more jobs are available than there are workers to fill them, employers have to compete for labor by increasing wages. If wages go up people have more money to spend. The price of some consumer goods goes up with the increased demand brought on by more disposable income in the hands of wage workers. The feds therefore conclude that in order to keep inflation at an acceptable level they must use unemployment to keep wages down. More workers competing for fewer jobs means people will accept lower pay. Again, if this mind numbingly stupid and overly simplified interpretation of inflation isn’t enough to make you angry at our economic and political system then I hope this next point will. The Fed considers higher wages paid to the laboring class as the primary cause of inflation. It does not consider the greed of the ruling class as a cause of inflation. Even though this is literally the exact scenario playing out right now in real time. Prices have risen across the board and the flow of money to the top 1% has accelerated since the pandemic began. Some of the wealthiest people in the world have doubled their net worth in the past two years. Meanwhile worker wages have seen a marginal increase for the first time in several decades (which has been all but eliminated due to price increases), and yet we’re told it’s the wages paid to workers that caused this inflation? Give me a fucking break. The Fed is being played like a fiddle by the ruling class. They (the bourgeoisie) know they can raise prices at their own discretion and the government will blame worker pay as the culprit for higher prices. Workers making more money is unacceptable to the ruling class. They’ve spent decades rolling back the gains made by laborers following the great depression. As soon as workers make the slightest bit of economic progress here comes the Feds ready to play the important role of oppressor to the laboring class. Our institutions tell us it’s not our fault there are people living in poverty. Meaning you shouldn’t feel bad because it’s up to individuals as to whether or not they live in poverty. In the most literal way possible this is correct. I doubt any of you are riding around town trying to find ways to create poor people. But this focus on individuals is ultimately a distraction. The ruling class wants you to blame your neighbor instead of looking more closely at our economic and political systems. When we hold up a microscope to our capitalist system we see that poverty is literally baked into the shit cake we call an economy. You cannot have a small fraction of the population accumulating more and more wealth without creating poverty. Understanding that we can, as a society, choose a different economic and political system is a direct threat to capitalist power. So as the feds set us up for another recession let’s make sure we’re having the right conversations about the unemployed. Poverty is not a choice made by individuals. It is a choice made by societies. AuthorAdam Hall This article was republished from Candler Red. Archives September 2022 Sri Lankan university students take part in a demonstration in Colombo on Aug. 18. Recent news of people overrunning the presidential palace in Sri Lanka, followed by President Gotabaya Rajapaksa fleeing the country, took Western media by storm. What is not reported is the ongoing police repression by the current president, Ranil Wickremesinghe. His latest attack took place on a peaceful protest Aug. 18 that was organized by the Inter-University Students Federation (IUSF) in Colombo, along with other progressive forces and artists. Witnesses say they were attacked unprovoked, and individuals were chased, beaten and arrested. Some of them were kidnapped by unidentified militia and held for hours in undisclosed locations. Many progressive organizations and union leaders have condemned the police repression and demanded immediate release of those who were arrested. They are also demanding an investigation into the incident. After Gotabaya’s resignation and exit, it was time for Sri Lankans to decide the next steps towards the future. There was hope of a real change in the country. However, this new hope was short-lived. It turns out that when Gotabaya left the country, he had carefully planned to secure his family’s and his close allies’ future by handing over power to official opposition leader Ranil Wickremesinghe. Even though Gotabaya is very unpopular at this time, he was elected by the majority of Sri Lanka’s radical Buddhist nationalists. His political party still holds a majority of seats in parliament. Furthermore, when it was time to select the new president, it was clear that the decision was carefully orchestrated in order to preserve the status quo. People’s demands disregardedWhen the people of Sri Lanka came out to the streets, they demanded not only the exit of the president, they demanded the exit of all members of the parliament, who maintained the corrupt system cycle after cycle. Their demands were very clear: They wanted the current government gone and those who were responsible for the crises and corruption prosecuted. However, these demands were blatantly disregarded by President Wickremesinghe in attempting to form a national government with his own agenda, so he can continue to stay in power without calling for a general election. So far he’s done this by getting votes from the former president’s parliamentary allies, promising to secure their futures and thus avoid prosecution. But all progressive forces in Sri Lanka are demanding that Wickremesinghe should not stay in power, unelected for the remainder of the term, which is three more years. He must start the election process. Since the uprising began on July 9, there have been many protests by various progressive forces. These protests have been brutally suppressed by Sri Lankan police, who portray the protests as a fascist rampage similar to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. The current government in Sri Lanka is using the same methods that the U.S. often uses to track down and prosecute its political opponents. For example, they arrested the internationally recognized trade union leader Joseph Stalin and held him in custody for weeks. It was only after international pressure that his release was secured. Security forces try to disperse university students in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Media ignores repression To the surprise of many, these latest police repressions were not widely reported in the Western media. The news is not being prioritized by social media, and there is no mention by major outlets like CNN and BBC. The kind of media presence we saw leading up to the resignation of Gotabaya disappeared without explanation. Moreover, the current government, in attempting to appease the International Monetary Fund, is considering privatizing national assets in Sri Lanka. On top of that, the government has borrowed money from many pension/retirement funds that belong to the workers and trade unions and is now in the process of canceling 20% of those debts. This will significantly reduce retirement funds for people who worked their entire lives. After the Cuban Revolution, a journalist asked Fidel Castro why he didn’t kill the former dictator Batista. He explained that killing Batista wouldn’t change anything, since the capitalist class would simply replace him with another and the cycle would continue. “The only way we can change that is to change the system itself. And that’s what we did.” The uprising in Sri Lanka was not a revolution like in Cuba. It’s also true that Western forces took advantage of the situation and even manipulated the situation through social media. But no one can deny the fact that people rose and demanded change. It is the lack of real political organization that held them back. Progressive forces in Sri Lanka know this. They have been consistently speaking out and continue to reorganize the struggle in an attempt to build new leadership. Over the last 40 years, Sri Lanka lost generations of youth to the civil war and the rebellion during 1989-1991. Now, decades later, there is a whole generation of youth out of work and without any hope. They continue to come out against the repression. Therefore, there’s a real fear that the current government will resort to the brutal methods used during the repression of the 1989 rebellion. The silence of the Western media during this latest wave of repression is appalling. Authorthis article was republished from Struggle La Lucha. Archives September 2022 A common criticism against Marxism from many liberal intersectionalists (e.g. liberals who embrace the theory of intersectionality) is that it is either class-reductionist or prone to class-reductionism. There are different versions of the class-reductionism criticism, but the general criticism is that Marxism tends to “reduce” different forms of oppression into class and economic oppression. This reduction, the argument continues, functions as a poor translation that leaves out unique characteristics of each form of non-class oppression. In essence, Marxism is blind to the sui generis status of each form of oppression apart from class oppression. Its analysis or approach is a reductive one size fits all approach. One primary example of the alleged failure of Marxism is to explain racial oppression in such a way that is sensitive to it being sui generis oppression relative to class oppression. Many critics of Marxism (such as liberal intersectionalists from the idealist school of Critical Race Theory) argue that Marxism’s standard explanation of racism or white supremacy fails because it can’t fully or satisfactorily account for how white workers are active participants of racial oppression. The assumption behind this criticism is the perception that Marxism seems to insist that class antagonism between the proletariat and capitalists is not only a fundamental conflict, but it is the only genuinely real conflict (this is a false assumption, but I’ll explain later why). But if this is the case why are workers of one race oppressing workers and petty-bourgeoisie of another race? How can Marxism account for the racial antagonism in which workers of one race actively oppress workers (and other social classes) of another race? One of the standard Marxist accounts is that racial oppression from white workers stems from their false consciousness that conceals or obscures real class antagonism between them and the white bourgeoisie. False consciousness of exploited workers is essentially when workers consciously or unconsciously accept an ideology whose origin is ultimately from the ruling class and whose function is to redirect the frustration of one’s plight, much of which stems from conditions of class exploitation, towards a false culprit as a scapegoat. But many find this account unconvincing because it either downplays the moral responsibility of white workers by falsely portraying them as unwitting accomplices of racial oppression or excuses them for their racial oppression. There is an element of truth to the objection that Marxism is “class reductionist,” but at the same time it distorts what Marxism is. In particular, the element of truth is that Marxists believe that class struggle is the fundamental and primary contradiction. When people hear this, they think Marxists believe that the struggle between the proletariat and bourgeoisie is the most important contradiction and everything else needs to be understood through the lens of this contradiction. But this couldn’t be further from the truth. In Domenico Losurdo’s book Class Struggle, the author points out texts where Marx and Engels discuss different struggles such as national oppression (e.g. the British Empire oppressing Irish people), women’s oppression, racial oppression, class exploitation by the bourgeoisie against the proletariat in the western metropole, and so on. Marx and Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto that “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle,” yet Marx and Engels discussed national oppression, women’s oppression, racial oppression (e.g. racialized slaves), and so on. Are Marx and Engels being inconsistent? Losurdo proposes that Marx and Engels have an expansive conception of class struggle which subsumes various social struggles such as national oppression, women’s oppression, racial oppression, and so on as species of class struggle. What they all have in common is that there is a dialectical dynamic between exploited versus exploiter. Women were compulsory domestic laborers who used their domestic labor to produce surplus value for their patriarch. Colonized and oppressed nations produce and export commodities with surplus value for the oppressor nation. Racialized slaves produced surplus value for the white plantation owners (even when slavery was abolished, racial oppression continues in the form of super-exploitation). The proletariat produced surplus value to be turned into profit by the capitalists. What all struggles have in common is the class dynamic between exploiter vs. exploited. This class analysis doesn’t artificially transform all struggles into one undifferentiated, uniformed, and homogenous struggle, but at the same time it recognizes that each is its own species that belongs to class struggle. But why try to attempt to subsume all oppression under class struggle? What is the motivation behind this ambitious approach? And what does this Marxist approach to class struggle have to say about white supremacy? It seems unusual and artificial to try to classify all of these forms of oppression under class struggle. In order to answer these questions, it’s important to understand the historical materialist understanding of society and how it motivates an expansive class analysis. According to historical materialism, all societies require a way of organizing instruments of production and distribution of goods and services with use-value (something has use-value when it satisfies perceived desires, needs, or appetite relatively common in society) in order for society to continue to exist and develop. Without any way of organizing instruments of production and distribution of goods and services with use-value, society will cease to exist. There could be no culture, no religion, no holidays, no festivals, no art, and so on. Why? Because at the end of the day everyone needs to eat, clothe themselves, and sleep under a roof and people can only do these things when they have a functioning economy. Everything that we value as a society is not possible without an organization of the instruments of production and distribution of goods and services with use-value. So far, I’m discussing “organization of production and distribution of goods and services with use value,” but what does this have to do with class and class analysis? In particular, what does class have anything to do with it? Where “class” enters into the picture is how society’s productive forces, which are instruments for production and distribution of goods and services with use value, are organized in terms of a social structure of ownership and division of labor, both of which determine whether or not it is a class-structured society. If productive forces are owned by an entire society of people such that the economic and material value of what everyone produces is accumulated and enjoyed by everyone in some way, then such a society more or less lacks a class structure. A proto-communist society (what Marx and Engels called “primitive communism”) such as some (if not all) of the hunting and gathering tribes is an example in which essential tools of labor are shared by a tribe and the proceeds of their labor is reallocated to everyone so an entire tribe can survive. However, if a huge concentration of productive forces are privately owned by a minority group of people (private owners), forcing the rest of the population to exchange their labor with private owners for something of subsistence-value, as long as the majority laborers utilize their labor to produce things with surplus value for private owners to accumulate in the form of private wealth, such a society has a class structure. In other words, if there is a group of people who must work to survive for a group of private owners and a portion of the fruits of their labor is accumulated in the form of private wealth by private owners, it is a class-structured society. All class-structured societies have exploiters and exploited groups. Such groups are social classes. Their class is relational. There can’t be exploited groups without exploiter groups and vice versa. The specific form class structures takes are significantly determined by how well developed or advanced productive forces are in society. A capitalist society is one that has a specific form of class structure different from the class structure of a feudal society. But both have exploited and exploiter groups in which the former utilize its labor to produce some kind of surplus value for the latter. Whether or not a mode of production has a class structure, there needs to be a mode of production in the first place in order for society to exist. In this sense, a mode of production constitutes a material base of society. A material base is a concrete foundation upon which everything else of society rests upon. Again, the reason why Marxists believe a mode of production constitutes the material base is that without it society can’t exist. Without any way of organizing productive forces for production and distribution of goods and services with use-value, people can’t feed themselves, clothe themselves, shelter themselves, and so on. Every society needs a group of people (usually a majority group) to engage in some form of labor to produce and distribute goods and services so that everyone can survive. Without agriculture, construction, textile industries, a complex supply chain, stores that distribute products through sale, and so on (all of which organizes productive forces to produce and/or distribute things with use-value), there is no food, shelter, clothes, and other necessities people need to survive. Furthermore, when society develops, there is an increasing need for a division of labor in which one group of laborers directly extract resources from nature, another group use their labor to transform raw materials into tangible social goods and services for society to consume, a further group that distributes such goods and services, and so on in order for society to not only survive but develop. This is why a mode of production is understood by Marxists as a material base or a material foundation upon which society rests upon to exist. If a mode of production is the foundation of society and it happens to be a class-structured mode of production, then the class structure of society that organizes productive forces through ownership relations (property relations), division of labor, and so on constitute the foundation of society as well. If this is the case, then any attempt to understand society, any attempt to understand oppression in society, while leaving class-structure out of the analysis is not only foolish, but it creates a huge hole in one’s analysis. This is why Marxists insist that any attempt to understand race, gender, nationality, religion, and any ascriptive identity requires at least some level of class analysis. But what is the role of language, culture, religion, ethnicity, gender, family, the state, and so on in society? Aren’t those important too? Many have accused Marxists of economic determinism or the view that the mode of production determines everything else in society such that they are more or less epiphenomenal. However, this is far from true. Friedrich Engels wrote in one of his letters that Historical Materialism allows that everything else in society that depends on the mode of production has some causal efficacy and agency in shaping or influencing the development of a class-structured mode of production. Engels writes: “According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. Other than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase. The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure — political forms of the class struggle and its results, to wit: constitutions established by the victorious class after a successful battle, etc., juridical forms, and even the reflexes of all these actual struggles in the brains of the participants, political, juristic, philosophical theories, religious views and their further development into systems of dogmas — also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their form. There is an interaction of all these elements in which, amid all the endless host of accidents (that is, of things and events whose inner interconnection is so remote or so impossible of proof that we can regard it as non-existent, as negligible), the economic movement finally asserts itself as necessary. Otherwise the application of the theory to any period of history would be easier than the solution of a simple equation of the first degree. Almost everything that rests upon the mode of production constitutes what Engels calls the superstructure. A superstructure consists of institutions, arts, ideologies, traditions, laws, the state, and so on. Engels emphasizes that a superstructure isn’t epiphenomenal or passive with respect to the material base, but rather it retains its own causal potency and power to influence or shape an economic mode of production. While the mode of production gives rise to the superstructure, the superstructure in turn influences, shapes, reinforces, maintains, and sometimes harms the mode of production that gave rise to it in the first place. For instance, laws passed by the legislative branch of the state can influence what commodities are prohibited from trade, regulate businesses to be healthy and safe for consumers, and guide courts on resolving disputes between capitalists on issues such as copyright rights. Another example is Christmas. Christmas is a holiday tradition in which most western and some non-western capitalist countries celebrate and this holiday is part of the superstructure. Western capitalist societies inherit Christmas from their economic predecessor (i.e., feudalism) where the church and clerical class were part of a feudal landowning class and taught not only Christianity, but carried out the practice of celebrating Christmas. When feudalism more or less experienced decline, capitalism inherited Christmas and now Christmas functions as a holiday when people buy commodities as gifts for their family, friends, romantic partners, and so on. Christmas is part of the superstructure, but it plays a role in increasing profits for capitalists, since it’s a holiday when they’re selling more commodities than other days to consumers. Overall, the superstructure isn’t an epiphenomenal after-effect of an economic mode of production. On the contrary, the superstructure retains its own causal power or efficacy as if it is its own agent, but it can’t exist without an underlying mode of production. Again, if everyone stops working for an extended period of time until commodities, including ones for subsistence, run out, civic institutions, arts, ideologies, states, and so on lose power because they can only exist when people survive. They acquire their power from an economic mode of production functioning at all. At the same time, in any society with an underlying mode of production that is class-structured, superstructures can’t be understood without any class analysis. Class struggle not only takes place at the level of a mode of production, but it also continues to happen in the level of a superstructure. This conforms to the dialectical view that all things carry within themselves an internal contradiction. Society contains within itself an internal contradiction, the primary contradiction being class. The superstructure too carries an internal contradiction which is a class contradiction between an exploiting class on one hand and an exploited class on the other hand. Under a class structured society such as capitalism, the ruling class, in particular the capitalist exploiters, maintain cultural, ideological, and institutional hegemony over the superstructure. One of the reasons why the capitalist class is called the ruling class by Marxists is that they have cultural, institutional, ideological, and de facto political hegemony at the level of the superstructure. The ruling class under capitalism has an overall hegemony in society precisely because they have a monopoly over the private ownership of productive forces that give them sufficient power to dominate and structure society at the level of the superstructure. Since the ruling class has sufficient power to dominate and dictate how the superstructure operates, they can introduce many possible building blocks of the superstructure that enable them to maintain their class hegemony. One of the possible building blocks of the superstructure is White Supremacy. But White Supremacy isn’t just a single building block, but a tapestry of building blocks of the superstructure. It contains many buildings blocks such as institutional, ideological, aesthetic, cultural, legal, sociopsychological, and political ones. White Supremacy is constitutive of the bourgeois cultural hegemony under capitalism. But where does it come from? What are its functions? What is White Supremacy exactly? White Supremacy is essentially any ideological, political, aesthetic, legal, civic, sociopsychological, and institutional instrument of the ruling class for class collaboration among social classes of European descendants who would be classified as “white.” White supremacy presupposes an essentialist racial classification, an ideological and social bourgeois construct, so that social classes of one race, in particular the white race, collaborate together where the ruling class is positioned at the epicenter of class collaboration. However, one of the insights of Marxism is that while social classes can and do collaborate together, such collaboration can’t constitute a natural and permanent alliance because there is no equilibrium or balance between exploited and exploiting classes. There is always an underlying class antagonism at the subterranean level of class collaboration. It is like an underground volcano that is about to erupt at any moment. So how can the ruling class ensure that class antagonism that exists between exploited and exploiting classes is controlled and suppressed? White supremacy qua class collaboration is not only collaboration on various social classes based on their perceived shared race, but it is also class collaboration against a perceived common threat. One seemingly unrelated theory (and it’ll be clear why it’s actually relevant) discussed by Tommy J. Curry is the social dominance theory in which in-group males and females perceive out-group males as a cultural and biological threat. The out-group males are targeted by ingroup males and females. The effect is that the social cohesion of the in-group retains its integrity because of a perceived common threat. Curry applies Social Dominance Theory to explain how black men, out-group males, are targeted by white people, in-group males and females, because black men as an out-group is perceived as a common threat to white people. Curry’s discussion on the application of social dominance to explain racial oppression contains insights that Marxist theorists can use to understand the mechanism of white supremacy as a form of class collaboration. In particular, among the various social classes (exploited and exploiter classes) of European-descended peoples, the ruling class of the group uses the racial classification system to classify various social classes of European-descended people under the same race “white” as an in-group as a groundwork for class collaboration. By creating an in-group as a groundwork for class collaboration, the European-descended ruling class also creates an out-group of different groups, classified under races other than white. This bourgeois creation of a racialized dynamic in-group and out-group gives the ruling class of European descended people, classified as “white,” superstructural class power to trigger class collaboration of social classes of “white” people against a racialized out-group (especially racialized out-group males). White supremacy is dialectical insofar as it necessarily involves a contradiction between an in-group and out-group, based on a bourgeois racial classification system. The racial contradiction between an in-group and out-group is a bourgeois artifact that creates an artificial social cohesion within a “white” in-group, which in turn suppresses a dormant class antagonism between exploited and exploiting classes of the “white” in-group, while at the same time dehumanizes a racialized out-group as a “subhuman” threat. It is precisely by dehumanizing a racialized out-group, especially racialized out-group males as Curry points out, that triggers class collaboration among exploited and exploiting classes of the “white” in-group in order to create an artificial social cohesion that suppresses an underlying and dormant class antagonism between them. Ultimately, white supremacy renders class antagonism dormant in order to prevent class solidarity among all working class communities. How does the perpetuation of racial antagonism occur? Again, recall that I said that white supremacy is superstructural. White supremacy involves civic institutions, ideologies, aesthetics, the state, laws, and so on to maintain class collaboration among social classes of the white in-group against dehumanized and racialized out-groups. The superstructure of white supremacy gives the white ruling class power to maintain its ruling class hegemony. Concretely, this means criminal “justice” system, implicit racialist ideologies propagated by bourgeois propaganda, discriminatory practices in housing industry, and so on are all superstructural phenomena that function to dehumanize a racialized outgroup to trigger class collaboration among various social classes of the white in-group in order to render class antagonism and class solidarity among all working class communities dormant. In the final analysis, it is the capitalist white ruling class who benefits most from white supremacy. White supremacy as a superstructure helps maintain the capitalist mode of production. It originally functions to maintain the slavery mode of production that mingles or mesh with the developing capitalist mode of production in United States as well as facilitate settler-colonial expansion (this is something Gerald Horne discusses) against indigenous peoples. It originally contributed to the development of capitalism in a heterogeneous early settler slave-owning capitalist society, but now it primarily maintains class hegemony of the ruling class over a capitalist system. In essence, white supremacy has a singular class character: it is bourgeois through and through. What Marxists believe is that it is only the revolutionary proletariat who overthrows the bourgeoisie and establishes political supremacy of the proletariat (e.g. also known as “dictatorship of the proletariat”) that can deliver the final death blow against white supremacy. A revolutionary proletariat that establishes its own state power for the toiling and laboring masses smashes the bourgeois state machinery as well as other bourgeois institutions to undermine the underlying superstructural basis for white supremacy. Overall, white supremacy loses institutional and systemic power because the revolutionary proletariat smashes the state and institutional machinery. It is only through a socialist revolution, participated by working class communities of all races, on par with the Rainbow Coalition led by Fred Hampton, that can take down white supremacy. AuthorPaul So is a graduate student who studies philosophy in a PhD program at University of California Santa Barbara. While Paul’s research interests mostly lie within the tradition of Analytic Philosophy (e.g. Philosophy of Mind and Meta-Ethics), he recently developed a strong passion in Marxism as his newfound research interest. He is particularly interested in dialectical materialism, historical materialism, and imperialism. Archives September 2022 Chart shows percentage of public support for unions over the years. WASHINGTON —Public support for unions has hit its highest point since 1965, the Gallup Organization’s annual poll says, as respondents approve of unions by a 71%-26% margin, with the rest undecided. That ties the 1965 figure of 71% support, Gallup reported. Then, 19% of the public opposed unions, with the rest undecided. The all-time records in the union support-opposition poll, which started in 1936, were 75%-18% in 1953 and 75%-14% in the first of three surveys in 1957. The rest of the respondents were undecided. AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler lauded the results, which she said reflect the facts on the ground, in increased enthusiasm and organizing. That’s been especially true among low-wage exploited workers. “After a year of victorious strikes, record union election filings and relentless efforts from corporate billionaires to silence workers, today comes as no surprise. Working people recognize the need for a collective voice—and it shows. We are stronger in a union,” Shuler declared. The 71% support, plus or minus a percentage point or two, held across the board among men and women and by race. The variations came in party preference. Democrats supported unions by an 89%-10% margin while Republicans were at 58%-42%. Independents were close to the overall figures (68%-28%). Even self-described conservatives backed unions, 54%-44%, Gallup reported. The high support comes despite low union density. Gallup reported that 16% of respondents were either union members (6%) or had a family member unionist (7%) or both were (3%). Gallup’s surveyors called 1,006 people by phone and the top-line 71% support figure is subject to a 4% plus-or-minus error. “Better pay and benefits” was the top reason (65%) unionists gave for joining up, followed by worker rights and representation (57%), job security (42%), better pensions and retirement benefits (34%), a better work environment (25%), fairness and equality at work (23%) and health and safety protections (9%). Only one in 20 unionists cited “unions having a positive effect on the country. There was one warning flag for union organizers, but not in the top-line union approval poll: Some 58% of the un-organized don’t want to be union members. That figure conflicts with other surveys the AFL-CIO has cited in the past. By contrast, in this survey, one of every nine of those unorganized workers told surveyors they are “extremely interested” in joining unions. AuthorMark Gruenberg is head of the Washington, D.C., bureau of People's World. He is also the editor of Press Associates Inc. (PAI), a union news service in Washington, D.C. that he has headed since 1999. Previously, he worked as Washington correspondent for the Ottaway News Service, as Port Jervis bureau chief for the Middletown, NY Times Herald Record, and as a researcher and writer for Congressional Quarterly. Mark obtained his BA in public policy from the University of Chicago and worked as the University of Chicago correspondent for the Chicago Daily News. This article was republished from People's World. Archives August 2022 |
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