Foot Notes

Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Harvard University Press, 1982), 13. 

Patterson, 20–21.

David M. Lewis, Greek Slave Systems in Their Eastern Mediterranean Context, c.800-146 BC, First edition. (Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2018), 34.

Lewis, 39.

​​Kostas Vlassopoulos, “Greek Slavery: From Domination to Property and Back Again,” The Journal of Hellenic Studies 131 (2011): 195.

Edward E. Cohen, Athenian Economy and Society: A Banking Perspective (Princeton University Press, 1992), 61–109.

Mirko Canevaro, “The Public Charge for Hubris Against Slaves: The Honour of the Victim and the Honour of the Hubristēs,” The Journal of Hellenic Studies 138 (2018): 100–126.

Lewis, Greek Slave Systems in Their Eastern Mediterranean Context, c.800-146 BC, 42–43.

​Lewis, 54.

​Lewis, 42.

David M. Lewis and Mirko Canevaro, “Poverty, Race, and Ethnicity,” in A Cultural History of Poverty in Antiquity (500 BCE – 800 AD), ed. Claire Taylor (Bloomsbury).


Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1995), 324.

​Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia: An Annotated Edition, Notes on the State of Virginia (Yale University Press, 2022), 249.

Lewis and Canevaro, “Poverty, Race, and Ethnicity,” 7.

Lewis and Canevaro, 4.

​Josiah Ober, “Inequality in Late-Classical Democratic Athens: Evidence and Models,” in Democracy and an Open-Economy World Order, ed. George C. Bitros and Nicholas C. Kyriazis (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2017), 129–129.

​Vincent J. Rosivach, “Enslaving ‘Barbaroi’ and the Athenian Ideology of Slavery,” Historia: Zeitschrift Für Alte Geschichte 48, no. 2 (1999): 129.

Peter Kolchin, American Slavery, 1619-1877 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), 242.

​Lewis and Canevaro, “Poverty, Race, and Ethnicity,” 15.

​Thomas Harrison, “Classical Greek Ethnography and the Slave Trade,” Classical Antiquity 38, no. 1 (2019): 36–57.

​Lewis and Canevaro, “Poverty, Race, and Ethnicity,” 29–30.

​Lucia Cecchet, “Poverty as Argument in Athenian Forensic Speeches,” 2013, 61.

​Ober quoted in Mirko Canevaro, “Democratic Deliberation in the Athenian Assembly: Procedures and Behaviours towards Legitimacy,” Annals HSS 73, 2019, 3.

​Mogens Herman Hansen, The Tradition of Ancient Greek Democracy and Its Importance for Modern Democracy, Historisk-Filosofiske Meddelelser 93 (Copenhagen: Det Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskab, 2005), 8.

​Lewis and Canevaro, “Poverty, Race, and Ethnicity,” 29–30.

The history of Marxism has a parallel history of counter-Marxism — intellectual currents that posture as the true Marxism.

Even before Marxism came into being as a coherent ideology, Marx and Engels devoted an often-neglected section of their 1848 Communist Manifesto to debunking the existing contenders for true socialism.

As the workers’ movement painfully sought a system of beliefs to animate its response to capitalism, the ideas of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels gradually won over workers, peasants, and the oppressed. It was not an easy victory. Liberalism — the dominant ideology of the capitalist class — served workers and peasants in their fight against absolutist tyranny.

With capitalism and liberal institutions firmly established, anarchism — the ideology of the disgruntled petty-bourgeois — rivalled Marxism for the leadership of the workers’ movement. Contradictorily, embracing extreme individualism and Utopian democracy distilled from capitalism, yet voicing a bitter hatred of capitalist institutions and economic arrangements, the anarchists failed to offer a viable escape from the crushing weight of capitalism.

Once Bolshevism seized power in 1917, the workers’ movement found an example of real-existing-socialism led by real-avowed-Marxists, a powerful beacon for the way forward in the struggle against capitalism. The victory of the Russian Revolution established Marxism as the most promising road for an exploited majority, with Leninism the only successful ideology for revolutionary change and socialism. To this day, Leninism has remained the only proven guide to socialism.

Immediately after the revolution, rival “Marxisms” sprang up.

The failure of subsequent European revolutions outside of Russia, especially Germany, sheared away numerous intellectuals, like Karl Korsch and György Lukács,who imagined a different, supposedly better, path to proletarian revolution. Buoyed by material support from benefactors, university appointments, and the many eager sponsors of class betrayal, critics and detractors of Leninism abounded.

Especially in the West — North America and Europe– where the working class was significant and growing dramatically, dissidence, class betrayal, and opportunism proved disruptive forces in the world Communist movement, forces that capitalist rulers were eager to support. Young people, inexperienced workers, aspiring intellectuals, and the déclassé, were especially vulnerable to the appeal of independence, purity, idealism, and liberal values. Money, career opportunities, and celebrity were readily available to those who were willing to sell these ideas.

Indeed, not every critic of Marxism-Leninism — revolutionary Communism — was or is insincere or without merit, but honesty demands recognition that no real advocate for overthrowing capitalism could achieve prominence, celebrity, or a mainstream soap box in the capitalist West. He or she could be a curiosity or a token for the sake of appearances — a stooge.

Conversely, any intellectual or political figure who does achieve wide-spread prominence or influence cannot represent a serious, existential challenge to capitalism when the road to prominence and influence is patrolled by the guardians of capitalism.

Nonetheless, the workers’ movement has been plagued by divisive ideological trends or fads spawned by independent voices who, wittingly or not, are exploited by and render service to the capitalist class.

In the West, it is almost impossible to be a young radical and not be tempted by a veritable ideological marketplace of putative anti-capitalist or socialist theories, vying with one another for allegiance. Since the demise of unvarnished, real-existing socialism in the Soviet Union and the disorientation of many Communist and Workers’ parties, the competition of ideas has created even more confusion.

Clearly, the working-class movement, the revolutionary socialist movement, needs guidance to avoid distractions, bogus theories, and corrupted ideas. The march of political neophytes through the arcade of specious, fantastic ideas is a great tragedy, especially regarding those ideas posing as Marxist.

*****
Happily, a new generation of Marxist thinkers are challenging the allure of Marxist pretenders, more specifically, those associated with what has come to be called “Western Marxism.” A sympathetic Wikipedia article offers about as accurate a definition of the words as one might want:  “The term denotes a loose collection of theorists who advanced an interpretation of Marxism distinct from both classical and Orthodox Marxism and the Marxism-Leninism of the Soviet Union.” It couldn’t be made clearer: Western Marxism is anything but the Marxism-Leninism that has buttressed worker-engaged revolutionary parties since the time of the Bolshevik revolution!

Marxist historian and journalist, Vijay Prashad, gave a seminar at the Marx Memorial Library on November 21, 2022, in which he excoriated the Western Marxism of the 1980s:

Prashad places the influential works of Hardt and Negri and Deleuze and Guattari in the same post-Marxist mix.

He regrets the multiculturalism turn because it ”basically took the guts out of the anticolonial, anti-racist critique, at the global level you had the arrival of ‘postcolonial’ thought, and also ‘decoloniality’ — in other words, let’s look at power, let’s look at culture, but let’s not look at the political economy that structures everyday life and behavior and reproduces the colonial mentality; that has to be off the table… So, we entered into a kind of academic morass, where Marxism was not, in a sense, permitted to enter.”

Prashad might well have added the intrusion of rational-choice theory into Marxism in the 1980s, an uninvited analysis of Marxist theory through the lens of methodological individualism and liberal egalitarianism. One leading exponent of what came to be called “analytical Marxism” eviscerated the robust Marxist concept of exploitation by proving that if we have inequality as an initial condition, we will quite logically reproduce inequality– a trivial derivation with little relevance to understanding the historically evolved concept of labor exploitation..

Prashad might have noted the continuing influence of postmodern relativism upon Marxist theory in the 1980s and beyond, a denigration of any claim that Marxism is the science of society. For the postmodernist, Marxism can only be, at best, one of several competing interpretations of society, coherent within Marxist circles, but forbidden from making any greater claim for universality. Moreover, the postmodernist denies that there can ever be any valid overarching theory of capitalism, any “metanarrative” that plots a socio-economic system’s trajectory. While its flaws can not be addressed here, the late Marxist historian Ellen Meiksins Wood exposed the academic trend with great clarity.

Another excellent, contemporary critique of Western Marxism can be found in the writings of Marxist author Gabriel Rockhill. Rockhill skillfully and thoroughly discredits the Frankfurt School of neo-Marxism, especially its most celebrated thinkers, Hockheimer, Habermas, Adorno, and Marcuse, exposing their fealty to various sponsors. Those who paid the bills enjoyed sympathetic ideas, an outcome often found with the practitioners of Western Marxism.
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Rockhill also does  a scathing exposé of today’s most prominent Marxist poseur, Slavoj Žižek. I was happy to heap praise on Rockhill’s deflation of Žižek’s unmatched ego in an earlier post. Both Rockhill’s unmasking of the Frankfurt School and his destruction of the Žižek cult are essential reading in contesting Western Marxism.

Western Marxists can conveniently overlook capitalism’s history of genocidal, undemocratic, and exploitative sins while excoriating the Fidelistas for settling accounts with a few hundred Batista torturers. They deplore the sweeping changes that Soviet and Chinese Communists implemented in agriculture to overcome the frequent famines that devastated their countries when the changes unfortunately coincided with severe famines, as though great change for the better could evade natural events and tragedy anywhere but in their imagination.

They turn a blind eye to the human costs imposed on humanity by ruling elites’ resistance to great change, while denouncing revolutionaries for seeking that change and risking a better future. Western Marxism diminishes the great accomplishments of real existing socialism, while relentlessly denouncing the errors incurred in socialist construction. Garrido effectively underscores the necessary pains and errors in realizing a new world, in escaping the clutches of ruthless capitalism.
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As Garrido notes:

He eloquently summarizes:

I might add that it is also a commonplace for Western Marxists to invest heavily in other-people’s-socialism. Rather than engaging their own working classes, Western Marxists fight surrogate struggles for socialism through the solidarity movement, picking and choosing the “purest” struggles and debating the merits of various socialisms vicariously.
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Garrido elaborates on socialism-as-an-investment-in-identity:

The success of socialism would entail a loss of selfhood, a destruction of the socialist-within-capitalism identity. The socialism of the West is grounded on an identity which hates the existing order but hates even more the loss of identity which transcending it would entail.

Garrido’s objectives are not completed with his masterful dissection of Western Marxism. In addition, he devotes great attention to Western Marxism’s critique of the Peoples’ Republic of China (PRC) in a section entitled China and the Purity Fetish of Western Marxism. Of course, he is correct to deplore Western Marxism’s unprincipled collaboration with bourgeois ideologues in attacking every policy or act of Peoples’ China since its revolution in 1949. As with the USSR, any honest, deeply considered estimation of the trajectory of the PRC must — warts and all — see it as a positive in humanity’s necessary transcendence of capitalism.

As anti-imperialists, we must defend the PRC’s right (and other countries’ rights) to choose its own course.

As Marxists, we must defend the Chinese Communist Party’s right to find its own road to socialism.

But Garrido goes further, by mounting an impassioned, but one-sided defense of Chinese socialism. As a militant advocate of the dialectical method, this is an odd departure. As esteemed Marxist R. Palme Dutt argued in the 1960s, the pregnant question for a dialectical materialist is Whither China? not: Does the PRC measure up to some pure Platonic form of socialism? 

A more balanced view of the PRC road would reference the significance of the Communist Party’s overwhelmingly peasant class base in its foundation, its engagement with Chinese nationalism, and the strong voluntarist tendency in Mao Zedong Thought. It would consider the 1960s’ break with the World Communist movement and the rapprochement with the most reactionary elements in US ruling circles in the 1970s, capped by the shameful material support for US and South African surrogates in the liberation wars of Southern Africa. PRC was funding Jonas Savimbi and UNITA while Cuban internationalists were dying fighting them and their apartheid allies. Which suggests the question: Could Peoples’ China do more to help Cuba overcome the US blockade, as did the Soviet Union?

A fair account would address the PRC invasion of Vietnam in 1979 and Peoples’ China’s unwavering defense of the Khmer Rouge. Surely, all these factors play a role in assessing the PRC’s road to socialism.

These uncomfortable facts make it hard to agree with Garrido that the PRC has been “a beacon in the anti-imperialist struggle.”

Of course, today is another matter. My own view is that the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party is “riding the tiger” of a substantial capitalist sector, to use imagery reminiscent of high Maoism. How well they are riding it is in question, but they are indeed riding it. There are many promising developments, but also some that are worrisome.

In any case, the comrades who are critical or skeptical of the Chinese road should not be summarily swept into the dustbin with Western Marxism.

Garrido brings his purity fetish home when he discusses US socialist organizing. He casts a critical eye on the class character of most of the US left, rooting it in the petty-bourgeoisie and the influence of petty-bourgeois ideas. He locates the conveyor for these ideas in academia, the media, and NGOs. Additional material support for petty-bourgeois ideology comes from non-profit corporations and, of course, the Democratic Party.

The petty-bourgeois bias of the US left reinforces its hyper-critical attitude toward movements attempting to actually secure a socialist future. Wherever socialists or socialist-oriented militants tackle the enormous obstacles before them, many on the left will insist that they adhere to courteous liberal standards, an unrealistic demand guaranteeing failure. Garrido mocks the insistence on revolutionary purity: “…the problem is that those things in the real world called socialism were never actually socialism; socialism is really this beautiful idea that exists in a pure form in my head….”

The purity fetish of the middle strata extends to radicals who scorn workers as “backward” or “deplorable.” Garrido counters this purity obsession with a wonderful quote from Lenin: one “can (and must) begin to build socialism, not with abstract human material, or with human material especially prepared by us, but with the human material bequeathed to us by capitalism.”

Regarding the Trump vote and the working class, Garrido scolds the US left:

While not all of the left is guilty of this failure, the charge is not far off the mark.

Finally, Garrido faults much of the US left for its blanket dismissal of progressive trends and achievements in US history. Many leftists debase heroic struggles in US history by painting a portrait of a relentless trajectory of reaction, racism, and imperialism. Garrido correctly sees this as an instantiation of a negative purity fetish– denouncing every page of US history as fatally wanting and inauthentic: “…purity fetish Marxists add on to their futility in developing subjective conditions for revolution by completely disconnecting themselves from the traditions the American masses have come to accept.”

While this is true, it must be remembered that there is always the danger that US history would be celebrated so vigorously that the country’s legacy of cruelty and bloody massacre might be muted by patriotic zeal. During the Popular Front era, for example, Communist leader Earl Browder’s slogan that “Communism is twentieth century Americanism” invested too much social justice in Americanism and too little in Communism.
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US history and tradition is contradictory and Marxists should always expose that contradiction– a legacy of both great, historic social change and ugly inhumanity. The country’s origin shares a tragic settler-colonial past with countries like Australia and South Africa in its genocidal treatment of indigenous people. Those same settlers established or tolerated the brutal exploitation of Africans forced into chattel slavery. While we could lay the blame at the doorstep of the US ruling class, it is US history as well.

At the same time, the US revolution was the most radical for its time and every generation produced a consequential movement to correct the failings of the legacy or advance the horizon of social progress. An emancipating civil war, the expansion of suffrage, workers’ gains against corporations, social welfare and insurance, and a host of other milestones mark the peoples’ history.

While writing and reflecting on the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution (Echoes of the Marsellaise), Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm couldn’t help but be struck by the lesser global influence of the earlier US revolution upon nineteenth-century social change. He thought that reformers and revolutionaries of the time could recognize their point of departure “more readily in the Ancien Régime of France than in the free colonists and slave-holders of North America.” Undoubtedly, the stain of the genocide of indigenous peoples and brutal slavery influenced that disposition.

Indeed, Hobsbawn’s observation underscores the contradictory character of the US past. It is not a “purity fetish” that explains this judgment, but the cold, harsh facts of US history.

Nonetheless, it is appropriate for Garrido to remind us of the many revolutionaries — Marx, Lenin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, William Z Foster, Herbert Aptheker, Fidel, and more — who have both drawn inspiration and offered inspiration from the victories of the people as well as the fierce resistance to ruling-class oppression contained in US history. He effectively cites Communist leader Georgi Dimitrov who rejects the practice of national nihilism — the denigration of all expressions of national pride and accomplishment. Within every national identity is an identity to be celebrated in its resistance to oppression and its dedication to a better way of life. Workers must draw national humility from the failures of the past, while drawing national pride from the victories over injustice. A left that attends to only one and not both will fail the working class.

*****
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Western Marxism — Marxist scholasticism, disconnected from revolutionary practice — distracts far-too-many well-meaning, hungry-for-change potential allies on the arduous road to socialism. It is heartening to find voices rising to challenge the sterile, obscurantism of this distraction, while defending and promoting the tradition of Marxism-Leninism and Communism. We should encourage and support Marxists like Prashad, Rockhill, and Garrido in conducting this struggle.

The author of a study on the people killed indirectly by the War on Terror calls on the U.S. to step up reconstruction and assistance efforts in post-9/11 war zones. 

Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. (Filetime, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)

The post-9/11 War on Terror may have caused at least 4.5 million deaths in around half a dozen countries, according to a report published Monday by the preeminent academic institution studying the costs, casualties, and consequences of a war in which U.S. bombs and bullets are still killing and wounding people in multiple nations.

The new report from the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs shows “how death outlives war” by examining people killed indirectly by the War on Terror in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen.
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“In a place like Afghanistan, the pressing question is whether any death can today be considered unrelated to war,” Stephanie Savell, Costs of War co-director and author of the report, said in a statement. “Wars often kill far more people indirectly than in direct combat, particularly young children.”

The publication “reviews the latest research to examine the causal pathways that have led to an estimated 3.6-3.7 million indirect deaths in post-9/11 war zones,” while “the total death toll in these war zones could be at least 4.5-4.6 million and counting, though the precise mortality figure remains unknown.”
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As The Washington Post — which first reported on the analysis — details:

According to the report, “The large majority of indirect war deaths occur due to malnutrition, pregnancy and birth-related problems, and many illnesses including infectious diseases and noncommunicable diseases like cancer.”

One 2012 study found that more than half of the babies born in the Iraqi city of Fallujah between 2007 and 2010 had birth defects. Among the pregnant woman surveyed in the study, more than 45 percent experienced miscarriages in the two-year period following the 2004 U.S. assaults on Fallujah. Geiger counter readings of depleted uranium-contaminated sites in densely populated Iraqi urban areas have consistently shown radiation levels that are 1,000 to 1,900 times higher than normal.

The study also found that some deaths “also result from injuries due to war’s destruction of infrastructure such as traffic signals and from reverberating trauma and interpersonal violence.”

Savell said that “warring parties who damage infrastructure with an impact on population health have a moral responsibility to provide quick and effective assistance and repairs.”

“The United States government, while not solely responsible for the damage, has a significant obligation to invest in humanitarian assistance and reconstruction in post-9/11 war zones,” she added. “The U.S. government could do far more than it currently is to act on this responsibility.”
​
This article is from  Common Dreams.

This article was republished from Consortium News. 

Famous for his song “This Land Is Your Land” and for adopting the slogan “This Machine Kills Fascists” on his guitar, the great American folk singer Woody Guthrie was an authentic American dissident and radical.

As a member of the Communist Party, he supported militant labor strikes and spoke out against U.S. foreign policy.
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A mere month after the dropping of atomic bombs on two Japanese cities, Guthrie—who served with the Merchant Marines during World War II—wrote a series of songs in The Yank Weekly, which lamented the destruction in Hiroshima and called for the immediate abolition of nuclear weapons.[1]

Subsequently, Woody was part of a songwriters’ collective, considered seditious by the FBI, that supported the 1948 presidential campaign of Henry Wallace, who advocated for peace with Russia and the dismantling of the worldwide network of U.S. military bases.

More than a dozen songs found at the Woody Guthrie Center Archives in Tulsa, Oklahoma, show that Woody criticized the Korean War in terms that anticipated the New Left critique of the Vietnam War.
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In “Bye Bye Big Brass,” (1952) Woody imagined a scenario in which he is shipped off to Korea and, rather than kill a Chinese soldier he encounters, he sits and talks with him by a campfire. After getting to know one another, the two hide out together and fight back against the U.S. Army when it tries to capture them.

In “Hey General Mackymacker” (1952), Woody exposed the lies of General Douglas MacArthur who repeatedly claimed that the U.S. was winning the war and would be home by Christmas, but did not specify to which Christmas he was referring. Woody also condemned MacArthur for threatening to use the atom bomb again, this time on North Korea and China.[2]
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If Woody were alive today, he would surely see through the lies of MacArthur’s heirs and the folly of the U.S. government provoking a potential nuclear war, and be horrified by the U.S. government’s support for a regime in Ukraine that has been infiltrated by the far right and suppresses workers’ rights.
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Woody would likely also have deep misgivings that a center created in his honor awarded its tenth anniversary prize to Pussy Riot, a punk rock group that supports the government in Ukraine and the overthrow of the Russian government, in line with the goals of U.S. foreign policy.

While fashioning themselves as anti-war, Pussy Riot is in fact pro-war because they advocate for Ukraine’s victory in the conflict over Russia and not a peace settlement, which Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, backed by the U.S., has so far refused to negotiate.

By branding Putin solely responsible for the war, Pussy Riot ignores Ukrainian and U.S. government provocations. They show an egregious double standard in purporting to be against dictatorship and fascism while wanting you to stand with Ukraine when its government has a) banned 12 opposition parties; b) shut down independent media; c) banned churches affiliated with Russia; and d) carried out wide-scale detentions, acts of terrorism, assassinations, and car bombings directed at political opponents and extending into the Russian Federation.

A zealous war hawk who has supported missile strikes in Russia and the bombing of an oil pipeline that transfers Russian oil into Hungary according to classified U.S. intelligence documents, Zelensky has further passed regressive new labor laws right out of Chiang’s playbook, and sold out Ukraine’s economy to foreign interests in the way that Chiang did.

Woody’s love of Russia was evident in a November 1942 ode that he wrote to Lyudmila Pavilchenko, a famous Russian sniper said to have killed over 300 Nazis who had invaded her homeland. Woody wrote:

“Miss Pavilichenko’s well known to fame;

Russia’s your country, fighting is your game;

The whole world will love her for a long time to come

​For more than three hundred Nazis fell by your gun.”[4]

While it cannot be predicted if Woody would have written any odes to Russian snipers who have killed Azov battalion neo-Nazis in the current war, it’s almost certain that he would have opposed the fascists on the Ukrainian side who slaughtered trade union activists in Odessa after the 2014 Maidan coup, and have terrorized the people of Eastern Ukraine since that time.

Pussy Riot first made a name for themselves in February 2012 when they disrupted a service at Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour and performed an obscenity-laced song called “Punk Prayer,” which attacked the Orthodox Church’s support for Vladimir Putin.

Several weeks after the cathedral stunt—which was broken up by church officials—Maria “Masha” Alyokhina, Yekaterina Samutsevich and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova were arrested and charged with “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred.”

They were subsequently held without bail until their trial when they were convicted and sentenced to two years in prison.

While many Russians believed that the sentence was too severe, a large number also believed that Pussy Riot’s actions were a gross offense to the Orthodox faith and that the group engaged in other vulgar public acts that were morally offensive. These have included filming videos where members of the band kissed Russian police officers in public, urinated on a portrait of Putin, and burned him in effigy.
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Elena Doshlygina, a Russian language professor at the University of Tulsa, told me: “To me this group [Pussy Riot] is totally disgusting. [Nadezhda] Tolokonnikova was previously a member of the Voina group. They organized a sex orgy in the Zoological Museum, very close to Red Square, in 2008. I believe it’s associated with the Moscow State University [the most prestigious university in Russia]. Actually my ancestor, [Sergei] Buturlin, a well-known ornithologist donated and sponsored part of his collection in the museum. What Pussy Riot did is a total insult to me. They are vulgar and totally immoral. I can’t even send you the links. They are all so horribly pornographic. There were also other performances before the Church, totally vulgar and disgusting. I resent the fact that they are presented with awards as heroes for the fight for democracy.”

Obviously Pussy Riot is receiving so many awards is because their political message denigrating Vladimir Putin accords with U.S. regime change designs. These stem from a desire to turn back the clock to the 1990s when foreign capitalist interests were able to exploit Russia economically and begin to take control over its abundant natural resources.

Putin may have authoritarian features, but he has restored Russia’s economic sovereignty and regional power while effectively withstanding the U.S. sanctions and enhancing Russia’s trading relations with China.

If a U.S. punk group pulled the kind of stunts as Pussy Riot targeting churches and government officials, it is unlikely they would receive any major awards; rather their members would likely be imprisoned like Pussy Riot was in Russia and be treated like delinquents.
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The fake progressive veneer of musicians like Sting, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Madonna was evident in their support for Pussy Riot and call for their release when they were jailed; human rights groups also designated them prisoners of conscience and Time magazine put them on the cover as 2012’s Women of the Year.

In 2013, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a CIA offshoot that promotes political propaganda and supports dissidents in countries targeted by the U.S. for regime change, sponsored a forum that idealized Pussy Riot.

This breeds suspicion that Pussy Riot may have received covert NED assistance—though this is difficult to verify, as the NED does not disclose the groups to which it provides funding.
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Journalist Tony Cartalucci found an indirect connection in that Pussy Riot members associated with Alexei Navalny, an agent of U.S.-funded sedition who formed a political organization, Democratic Alternative, that received NED funding.[5]

Cartalucci also found that a woman heading Pussy Riot’s support campaign in Finland, Oksana Chelysheva, was a board member of the Russian-Finnish Civic Forum, which was also funded by the NED, and George Soros’s Open Society Foundation, which is linked to the CIA. Chelysheva was additionally a member of the Russian-Chechen Friendship Society, which was funded by the U.S. State Department to promote Chechen terrorist propaganda.

Pussy Riot’s visit to Tulsa to receive the Woody Guthrie Prize on May 6, tellingly, was financed by George Kaiser, an oil billionaire and chief financier of the Democratic Party in Oklahoma whose foundation may be used as part of some kind of quid pro quo to advance CIA projects—including a cyber-security program at the University of Tulsa, which received a National Security Agency (NSA) excellence award and hosted CIA Director John F. Brennan.[6]

Kaiser financed the building of the Woody Guthrie Museum, which opened in 2010. The Kaiser Foundation’s executive director, Ken Levit, served as CIA Director George Tenet’s Special Counsel from 1998 to 2000.[7]

Very clearly Pussy Riot’s visit to Tulsa and its receipt of the Woody Guthrie Prize had an explicitly political agenda: to use the name of a legendary anti-war folk singer to undercut the U.S. anti-war movement and promote solidarity among people who identify as leftists for the war in Ukraine as well as for U.S. regime change designs in Russia, which is the end goal of the war.
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At the concert on May 6 in Tulsa’s Cain Ballroom following their receipt of the Woody Guthrie Prize, Pussy Riot band members displayed pro-Ukrainian t-shirts and waved the Ukrainian flag—as did some members of the audience.

The musical quality of the show was dubious—nowhere close to Woody Guthrie’s level or that of previous Guthrie Award recipients like Bruce Springsteen and John Cougar Mellencamp—though it was rather entertaining to watch.[8]

At a key moment, Pussy Riot brought out and then proceeded to urinate on and then destroy a portrait of Vladimir Putin.

Pussy Riot also condemned Russian atrocities in Bucha—though independent investigations determined that the majority of civilian deaths there were likely caused by the Ukrainians—and the Russian takeover of Crimea, when Crimeans voted overwhelmingly to rejoin Russia which they had historic and economic ties to.
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Part of the Pussy Riot show was a narration of their story of arrest following the 2012 Moscow Cathedral stunt and the hardship that the young women experienced in a prison in the Urals, which they likened to a Soviet-era Gulag.

At one point, a photo was shown of Vladimir Putin with Belarus’s socialist leader Alexander Lukashenko, whom Pussy Riot also hates.
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This aligns very neatly again with the position of the U.S. State Department, which has supported numerous color revolutions directed against Lukashenko because he has resisted NATO expansion and the penetration of the Belarusian economy by U.S. corporations.

Pussy Riot advocates for revolution, but the book Riot Days, written by band member Maria Alyokhina, does not explain what economic model they would pursue that would improve the quality of life of the Russian people.[9]

While some aspects of their anger at the Putin government and advocacy is justifiable, one is left with the impression that they just want to sow anarchy for anarchy’s sake.
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In a forum at Tulsa’s Circle Cinema, Pussy Riot members admitted that the group was anti-intellectual and tries to play off people’s emotions. They urged Oklahomans to oppose abortion restrictions but had nothing critical to say about U.S. foreign policy and seemed to possess only a limited understanding of world geopolitics.

Members of Pussy Riot speak at forum at Tulsa’s Circle Cinema on May 7. [From left to right: Diana Burkot, Olga Borisova, Maria Alyokhina. [Source: Photo Courtesy of Jeremy Kuzmarov]​

One of the girls, Diana Burkot, recounted how her father supports the Russian Special Military operation in Ukraine and has basically disowned her. I felt sorry that while some of her values to me seem good, she is being used by U.S. oligarchs and arch-imperialists of the George Kaiser ilk who want to destroy her homeland so they can dominate Eurasia, loot Russia like they did in the 1990s, and sustain a unipolar world order dominated by the U.S.

In an interview before the show with Bob Santelli, executive director of the Bruce Springsteen Archives and Center for American Music at Monmouth University (NJ), Pussy Riot band members said that Russia has become totalitarian under Putin.

One of the political prisoners whose plight Pussy Riot spotlighted at the show, Alexei Navalny, was arrested on what appears to be legitimate embezzlement charges and is a Western backed political operative who received funding from the NED and British intelligence agents.
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If an American in the pay of foreign intelligence agencies were similarly spreading anti-U.S. invective and working to bring down the U.S. government, he would likely meet the same fate as Navalny, if not worse.

The prize should have gone to a dissident American singer/songwriter who, in Woody’s spirit, is trying to challenge the U.S. permanent warfare state, grip of Wall Street, and new Cold War in a renewed climate of McCarthyism.[10]

Someone like David Rovics, a protest singer and truth-teller like Woody who has eloquently spoken out against U.S. policy in Ukraine. Or better yet, Roger Waters, the co-founder of Pink Floyd, who has endured denunciations and blacklisting for his condemnation of U.S. and NATO policy in Ukraine and support for Palestinian rights and Julian Assange.

Instead of choosing to honor these true embodiments of Woody Guthrie’s spirit, we have the sad spectacle of Guthrie’s offspring teaming with a billionaire oil tycoon to host an event headlined by artists known for their crude vulgarity whose political message perfectly aligns with the State Department and CIA.
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And we have counter-cultural types who attended the event waving the flag of a country where fascists were empowered in a CIA-backed coup, and which has provoked a conflict that is leading us toward World War III and potential nuclear Armageddon.

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1. Woody admired Albert Einstein and supported the peaceful use of atomic energy. ↑
2. See Jeremy Kuzmarov, “Hey Hey General Mackymacker, Ho, Ho Mr. Lovitt:” Woody Guthrie’s Forgotten Dissent From the Atomic Bomb to the Korean War,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, April 1, 2018, https://apjjf.org/-Jeremy-Kuzmarov/5133/article.pdf. In “Hey General Mackymacker,” Woody wrote: “Hey Diggedy Mackymacker, sez Christmas I’ll walk home, but you did not say which Christmas. Boy I’d just like to know will I be walking or will I be running? Hee, Hee bigshot Monkey Machrel, if we atom bomb these communists [as MacArthur had advocated], and then they atom bomb us, nobody will be running.” ↑
3. Kuzmarov, “Hey, Hey General Mackymacker, Ho Ho Mr. Lovitt.” This and other Woody Guthrie songs are available at the Woody Guthrie Center Archives in Tulsa, Oklahoma. ↑
4. Lyrics are on display at the Woody Guthrie museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The song continued:
   “ In your mountains and canyons quiet as the deer
   Down in your big trees knowing no fear
   You lift up your sight. And down comes a Hun
   And more than three hundred Nazi dogs fell by your gun
   
   Fell by your gun, yes
   Fell by your gun
   For more than three hundred Nazis fell by your gun.” ↑
5. At a Q&A session following their release of a new anti-war video at Tulsa’s Circle Cinema, Pussy Riot member Olga Borisova said that she had had drinks at a bar in Tbilisi, Georgia with Evan Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal reporter accused of being a spy. The implications of this meeting are uncertain. ↑
6. Kaiser secured control of the Board of Directors at the University of Tulsa, where the author previously taught. In 2012, the NSA and U.S. Cyber Command named TU “a National Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Operations,” following other “nods of approval” from DoD and the U.S. Secret Service, which has a facility on campus. And just last November, the Department of Homeland Security backed the school’s efforts “to build up the nation’s cyber workforce.” ↑
7. Levit was thanked at the Pussy Riot Prize ceremony, along with George Kaiser, for helping to bring Pussy Riot to Tulsa. ↑
8. Nadezhda Tolokonnikova admitted that “we don’t really do folk, but we don’t really do punk either, we simply scream and protest as loud as we can, and hope we can show others they can do the same.” ↑
9. Maria Alyokhina, Riot Days (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2017). ↑
10. Woody was himself a victim of McCarthyism; his songs were banned in Oklahoma throughout much of the second half of the 20th century. ↑​​

Although she’s been dead for almost six decades, it looks like Elizabeth Gurley Flynn is still getting under the skin of right-wingers. Just two weeks after it was installed, a historical marker commemorating her birth in Concord, N.H., has been demolished on the order of Republican state officials.

The green and white cast iron plaque—the kind you see on the side of highways or in public places noting where significant events occurred or famous persons once lived—was erected on May Day in downtown Concord, where Flynn was born in 1890.

The sign was barely bolted into place before conservatives demanded its removal, embarrassed apparently that the state might recognize someone who devoted her life to fighting for workers’ rights, women’s right to vote, birth control, civil liberties, and economic equality. But it was Flynn’s leadership in the Communist Party USA that really boiled their blood.
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“This is a devout communist,” complained Joseph Kenney, a Republican member of the Executive Council, the five-person body that approves state contracts, judicial nominees, and other positions. “How can we possibly promote her propaganda, which still exists now through this sign in downtown Concord?”

Flynn earned her Rebel Girl nickname doing battle against the same kind of reactionary politics expressed by Kenney. She made her debut as an activist at the age of 15, giving her first public speech, “What Socialism Will Do for Women,” at the Harlem Socialist Club in New York.

Two years later, at just 17, she was already a full-time organizer for the Wobblies, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a revolutionary labor group that sought to organize all workers into “One Big Union.” She traveled from one end of the country to the other, organizing restaurant workers in New York, garment workers in Pennsylvania, weavers in New Jersey, miners in Minnesota, Montana, and Washington State.

She was immortalized in song for her exploits by famed songwriter Joe Hill, who penned “The Rebel Girl” in 1915, giving Flynn the monicker that would follow her for the rest of her life.

With bosses and their hired guns in local police departments determined to muzzle anyone demanding rights for workers, the IWW faced many free speech fights. City councils were pressured by employers to ban organizers from speaking in the streets.

During one such battle in Spokane, Wash., Flynn chained herself to a lamppost so the cops wouldn’t be able to drag her off to jail as easily. There, she gave a fiery speech demanding freedom for workers to organize and publish their views. She’d end up behind bars more than ten times during her years with the IWW.

With the first Red Scare in full swing following the Russian Revolution, constitutional freedoms like speech, press, and assembly were under attack across the United States. Workers and their organizations were the primary targets, and foreign-born immigrant workers faced mass deportations. This prompted Flynn and others to found the American Civil Liberties Union to defend democracy against right-wing reactionaries.

She also pushed the ACLU to take an active role in fighting for women’s rights, particularly access to birth control and the right to vote.
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When Italian anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were framed up on murder charges in 1920, Flynn became a leader in their defense campaign and helped turn their case into an international cause célèbre.

During the global fight against Hitler fascism and Japanese imperialism during World War II, Flynn played a key role on the home front. She led struggles for equal pay for the women who replaced men on the assembly lines and agitated for day care centers for these working mothers.

In 1942, she ran for Congress in New York, making unity in the fight against fascism and the battle for equality at home the primary planks of her campaign. She earned 50,000 votes.

After the war, Red Scare repression returned. A dozen top leaders of the CPUSA were arrested in 1948 and accused of violating the Smith Act under the false charge of “conspiring to advocate the overthrow the government by force and violence.” The Rebel Girl was a central leader in the movement to defend not only the Communist leaders but also the First Amendment from those who wanted to see it destroyed.

When a second wave of anti-communist arrests was launched in 1951, Flynn was thrown in jail with 16 other party members. At the opening of her federal trial, she declared:
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“We are not a criminal conspiracy, but a working-class political party devoted to the immediate needs and aspirations of the American people, to the advancement of the workers, farmers, and the Negro people, to the preservation of democracy and culture, and to the advocacy of socialism.”

Nine months later, the court handed down a guilty plea, and Flynn was sent to Alderson Prison in West Virginia for the next two years—along with Claudia Jones and Betty Gannett, two other women party leaders charged under the Smith Act.

As Prisoner #11710, Flynn set down on paper the details of life in a federal women’s correctional facility, published later as My Life as a Political Prisoner: The Alderson Story. She detailed not only the physical brutalities of incarceration but also its psychological toll:

“The heavy shadow of prison fell upon us in those three days—the locked door and the night patrol. The turning of a key on the outside of the door is a weird sensation to which one never became accustomed. One felt like a trapped animal in a cage.”
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She also took the opportunity to expose the classist and racist nature of America’s prison-industrial complex. “No rich women were to be found in Alderson,” she wrote, highlighting how the prison system mostly consumed poor and working-class women, the majority Black and Spanish-speaking with past lives defined often by abuse, mental illness, or drug addiction.

Over 25,000 people turned out for her state funeral in Moscow’s Red Square. Her remains were returned to the U.S., where they were buried in Chicago’s Waldheim Cemetery, near the Haymarket Martyrs and other labor heroes.

Flynn described herself as a “professional revolutionary, an agitator” against the injustices of capitalism, racism, and misogyny. As Prof. Mary Anne Trasciatti wrote: “It is no exaggeration to claim that Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was involved in almost every major campaign of the U.S. left in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century.”
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And it is that life lived in struggle which so irritates conservatives in New Hampshire; they simply can’t stand for the erection of a historical marker that might remind people of such a figure or prompt them to learn more about her, or, heaven forbid, follow in her footsteps.

So, it is no surprise that Gov. Chris Sununu quickly acted on the demands of his fellow Republicans on the Executive Council who said the historical marker in Concord was “inappropriate, given Flynn’s communist involvement.” Since the marker was on state property, his office had power to order its destruction.

Sununu’s spokesperson, Ben Vihstadt, said on Monday, “All policies and guidelines were followed in removing this controversial marker.

Supporters of accurate history differ with Sununu. They accuse the state of violating its own rules for the markers, rules which say that markers can only be “retired” if they “contain errors of fact, are in a state of disrepair, or require refurbishment.” None of those apply in the Flynn case.
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“We still say that under the department’s own guidelines, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn’s birthplace in Concord is a fitting location for a historical marker,” said Mary Lee Sargent, a former U.S. history teacher and labor and women’s rights activist.

With the intervention of Sununu and reactionaries at the highest levels of state government, that tradition is over. Anti-communism may have won out, but perhaps there is a silver lining.
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Thanks to all the media coverage conservatives have generated with their contrived controversy, more people will probably learn about Elizabeth Gurley Flynn from articles like this one than would have ever read a plaque at the courthouse in downtown Concord.

Good morning to everybody. We are going to go back to Hegel, but it’s always useful to contextualize the reading of a text like this, and to keep the text itself and our reading of it grounded in the reality that we live, including the ideological reality of this time. And so without going for too long, I just wanted to talk about the Cornel West event that we attended at the University of Pennsylvania, and there were a lot of questions that we had afterwards and perhaps we could even you know go through some of those questions again because they are very fascinating and they are philosophical and they do relate to Hegel, the Science of Logic, the whole concept of a philosophical system which I would wish to explain in a moment. 

And then a little talk about unified theories, and the reason I just wanted to touch on that is because in a certain sense we in the Free School are attempting to forge a unified theory of Lenin and Du Bois, or you know the revolutionary and Marxist tradition of Europe and of the Russian Revolution, and the Black Radical Tradition which is grounded in Du Bois, but I’ll come back to that.

​Just some things before we read – [I want to] talk a little bit about how we should look at this great work. Frankly, as a not yet complete work, and I think Hegel saw it that way himself – a work in progress. But let’s talk about Cornel West. Last Thursday we attended a really, I think important, lecture by Cornel West. You know, the two most important public intellectuals in the United States today are Noam Chomsky and Cornel West. And there are many, many things philosophically that they hold in common, I think. And there are differences, I also think. As you know, Noam Chomsky is more a social scientist, a cognitive scientist, a theorist of language and grammar and semiotics, et cetera. Cornel West is a philosopher, a pure philosopher. It was a very fascinating lecture. I had not seen Cornel West in a couple of years in person and I’ve only kind of kept up with him in relationship to his political commentary, in effect, as you know, his anti-Trump politics and his claim that Trump is a neo-fascist thug and so on. Which then pushes him of course towards Bernie, and I think that’s a real trap given Bernie’s recent political practice relative to Robert Kennedy’s announcement of his presidency challenging Biden from a very progressive point of view, an anti-war, anti-militarist, anti-corporatist state position. 

And Biden could not hardly announce his candidacy before Bernie is endorsing him. I mean in good faith you could have waited at least. I mean, how do you just so quickly and easily jump on the Joe Biden bandwagon, and this is the most dangerous presidency in the history of the country threatening war on two continents just because Trump is an alleged fascist, so I got to go with the guy that’s pushing the world toward maybe a nuclear confrontation. Well it doesn’t make any sense, but it does make a lot of sense if you know that Bernie Sanders is a fake socialist, a fake progressive and a political opportunist of the worst type. And I don’t see any other way to put it. We cannot excuse and we cannot apologize for it. 

Cornel, and this was the sad thing – although Cornel’s lecture stayed at the level of philosophy – and theology by the way – he did say in passing that Biden would be better than Trump without making the argument. I think it was some of that which left most of us, and not quite me – I’m a bit biased for reasons that I’ll try to explain – but most of the people in the Free School who were there found the lecture unfulfilling, I’ll use that language. People can use their own. That Cornel’s brilliance, you know, you get a cat with a huge brain and all of this philosophy and literature and theory packed. A guy who also has, apparently, what is a photographic memory.
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So he’s a formidable thinker, really a formidable thinker with a big heart. He’s not satisfied with confining himself to his academic office or to a university. He goes into the world, engages with the world, and I should tell you, sometimes putting his own life in jeopardy. There was an instance in about 1998 at the Black Radical Convention in Chicago, and he and I happened to be there and together, and a guy stepped to Cornel in a threatening way. And I happened to step to the guy before he could, you know, accost Cornel. And I never forgot, Cornel was a bit shaken I guess you might say. And he said, you know, “I’m a Christian, but I’m not a pacifist,” you know, blasé blasé blasé. But I’m just saying that to say, I’m certain that for all kinds of reasons, a lot of people feel, because he is accessible, he is in the world, he usually travels alone. Although I kind of sense this time he had a security person with him to help him out, just in the event that somebody stepped to him. But I just say all of that to say that the man has a heart and he has a lot of heart. He’s not a punk. He’s not afraid in that regard. And even in my own case at Temple University, he was so gracious to support me and to even come to a rally that we held, and then to appear at the [Free School’s] Black Radical Tradition conference and speak. 

​And so I’m a little biased because of all of that. Although of course philosophically, we’re not on the same page. And just in his lecture, his determining category is the category “catastrophe.” And his narrative is, how do you live a principled life in the face of social catastrophe? And then along with that, a principled moral life in the face of so many people bending to the politics of the dominant class. 

And so he is, when he speaks – and he deploys everybody from Chekhov to William James to Kierkegaard – I mean, I’m sitting there and I’m saying, “Oh, I’m hating, man. I’m never gonna be able to know all of that.” And then I’m saying, “I got to put some respect on your name.” I mean just to have achieved that, you know, is quite a bit. And to have achieved all of that knowledge and not used it for his own academic promotional reasons, as y’all know, he left Harvard in the early 2000’s I think because the then-president called Cornel, and this when Cornel was a tenured professor, a full tenured professor in fact, at Harvard. And Lawrence Summers, who was the president – he called Cornel in to his office and tried to, to say intimidate is not really the word – literally to put him in his place, literally saying, “You should be grateful that you have this position at Harvard, and you should thank us, meaning we the white establishment, every day of your life. And therefore we want you to cease this engagement with the hip-hop generation, with the younger generation and withdraw into doing polite and acceptable academic things.” 

I don’t know what Cornel says but I do know that Cornel can curse. He’s from the hood, you know, Sacramento, so he knows how to curse like I curse. And he may have cursed him out and told him to kiss his behind, and then left Harvard and took a position at Princeton. I don’t know whether Richard Rorty was still around, the philosopher, or who was around but they told him, “Look man, you don’t have to put up with that, come to Princeton.” And then he went to Princeton, and then a few years, maybe ten years later, the black people in particular at Harvard said, “Larry Summers is gone and we want you back here and we will guarantee you tenure, that you will get your tenure back.”

So when he went back to Harvard, everybody said, “Oh, yeah, Cornel’s back at Harvard.” You just assumed he had tenure. But he didn’t have tenure. And I put that on the shoulders of the black professors who told him to come back, and did not do what they needed to do to guarantee tenure. Tenure would give him the protection that a person like him needs because he’s going so much against the grain on so many things.

Then it turns out, about two years ago, it comes out Cornel doesn’t have tenure. And they’re telling him, “Well, we’ll give you a year-by-year contract and don’t worry about it.” And at that point he left Harvard and took a position at Union Theological Seminary. I think that’s where he began his teaching career and that’s where he is today. But you know, with all of that he maintained his dignity and this is important. When you’re betrayed, and he had to be betrayed in that “come back to Harvard” thing. And humiliation in a certain sense, you know ‘cause a lot of people who for jealousy, envy, just don’t like you ‘cause they just don’t like you kind of thing. “You’re too large, talk too much,” all that, were on the sidelines snickering and laughing. You know how that goes, I won’t go into that.

​But he handled himself with dignity, he goes back to Union Theological Seminary and hasn’t missed a beat. He continues to be Cornel West and to do what Cornel West does as an intellectual and a public intellectual and a figure that lives with integrity and creates these wide discursive spaces where people like us can both agree and disagree. You see what I’m saying, by keeping the door to discourse, and serious discourse – you know, not just some Afro-centrism kind of, you know, “We are Africans,” and all of that – but drinking from the deep wells of human knowledge wherever he can find it. And of course no one person in his brain can grasp the totality of human civilizations and knowledge, I mean, when I think about string theories and their claim of ten dimensions of space and time, you know I’m often reminded of the Bhagavad Gita, which talk about seven time dimensions. But anyway, I mean, just to wrap your head around the Bhagavad Gita and Plato’s dialogues and Martin Luther, I mean, come on. You need an army of intellectuals who live monastic lives to grasp all of that. 

But Cornel, unafraid, unashamed, drinks from the wells of knowledge. And of course he could be canceled, just like, you know, “Why are you quoting Plato? He supported a slave-owning society and plus he’s a white man, and a man.” You know, that kind of cancel culture dismissal. Or his thing with Chekhov. But he doesn’t seem to be fazed by it. He continues pushing this high level of discourse, trying to make what is in the end a principled, moral, ethical argument about how to live a life that resists injustice at this time. 

Now, having said all of that, Cornel West is a combination of what we call neo-pragmatism which is a unique American philosophy; pragmatism arose in the United States as a philosophical movement in the middle of the 1800s. It morphed in the 1960s and 1970s into what we call neo-pragmatism. The fundamental argument of neo-pragmatism – first of all it is American but it’s also English, it’s an English American, we call it Anglo-American philosophical move. As you know, the English philosophers going back in many ways to the beginning, we talk about George Berkeley or David Hume, John Locke – the beginning of English serious philosophy – has always staked out its differences with European rationalism. In particular what they call philosophy that attempts to build systems. In our case Kant and Hegel.
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Pragmatism, and usually the founder of pragmatism is usually associated with a man named [Charles Sanders] Peirce, whose work I really don’t know, I have to be honest with you. And then further developed by Du Bois’s mentor at Harvard, William James. But what pragmatism argues is that it philosophizes from the standpoint of the ordinary human being, not from the standpoint of a supposed rational system of philosophy and of knowing. 

Thus it claims to be a democratic philosophy, a philosophy that upholds, I think Cornel has used this word, plebeian democracy, the democracy of the ordinary person. Hence, they often say it is philosophy without foundations, without prior assumptions, without categories. We’ve gone a bit through this, that Kant and Hegel think through categories. For instance the categories of time and space, the category of being, the category of non-being. Each appeals, Kant and Hegel, to logic. Different logics, of course. Hegel, we know, dialectical logic. Kant, more traditional. 

Each, Kant and Hegel, were trying to align philosophy with science, in particular Newton and Copernicus but Newton in particular. And to align science with philosophy, and this is why Hegel said that philosophy is a science. I think Kant would have agreed with that. Hegel said it is the science of sciences; another way of saying that – it is the scaffolding upon which the meaning of scientific experiments and the meaning of scientific discoveries can be elucidated.

This is a huge undertaking by the way, huge undertaking, and remains a part of the way we in the Free School think. We’ll come back to that. But Cornel starts from a pragmatist point of view – that it is the individual seeking meaning in a world that does not in and of itself provide meaning. That is why if you listen to Cornel, there is always on the edge, if you will, or suggesting, that we live on the edge of suicide, of you know, what Jean-Paul Sartre talked, being and nothingness. And how do we realize our being? It is through more moral engagement with a world that will not give us meaning. It is living in good faith, moral good faith in a world where things are commodified, where money trumps principle and hence bad faith. You operate without a moral imperative, without a moral intentionality, you see where I’m coming from. 

So, neo-pragmatists. Richard Rorty is big in Cornel West’s graduate studies at Princeton. Richard Rorty is the famous academic philosopher, a neo-pragmatist at Princeton. He wrote his last book, a small book but I think a very important and should-be famous book entitled Achieving Our Country. The title of the book he takes from James Baldwin. And Rorty attacks the intelligentsia and the academics who have abandoned the working class. It is a great book, a great manifesto which takes, you know, the whole question of the plebeian or democratic thrust in philosophy, I think, to an important place of engagement. But this is Cornel, you know a plebeian – a people’s philosophy, a people’s framing. Framing philosophical and moral issues from the standpoint of the ordinary person.

And that is why I think he has this great fidelity, this great commitment to the blues – with critique, and I didn’t quite agree with his critique. But the blues, which is the narrative of the ordinary people. The blues, talking about navigating the narration of disappointment, but the narration of overcoming, of resilience, of “I’m still here in spite of everything.” He considers the blues to be a very high expression of living morally in a world that tries to undermine your efforts to do that. You know, the pressure is to sell out all the time. But here’s the blues man, the blues woman saying that we can still be principled in spite of the pressure to sell out.

​So Cornel calls himself a blues man of the mind. He has such interesting formulations. But he sees himself as a blues man and as a traveling musician. He also sees himself in relationship to the blues and John Coltrane. And this scaffolding, this architecture of morality coming out of black resistance is so much a part of him and the way he lives. And you know, even as he talked about music you all might remember, and he really digs Philadelphia, loves Philadelphia because of Philly’s music. And he says Philadelphia’s a soulful city. And he mentioned the O’Jays – and his soundtrack by the way, is the same soundtrack as the Free School. The same music that we listen to, he was gesturing to. The Isley Brothers – did he mention “Harvest For the World”? One of those great calls to morality to resistance. And of course he talked about Stevie Wonder’s love song “Love’s in Need of Love.” You know, which is like us. 

And the moderator, who I was not too thrilled by. (‘Cause I know some people weren’t there, so I’m filling in, creating a picture.) But the moderator, when Cornel was talking about the O’Jays and the Isley Brothers, [the moderator] tried to say Meek Mills. Now how do you get from that, to that? I don’t see it. But Cornel resisted it, you know in his generous way of course without saying, “I disagree,” but just saying the music that he stands upon. And he’s absolutely right about this, he’s absolutely right. That blues, jazz and R&B is still the strong hand in our music and poetry. 

But along with neo-pragmatism [for Cornel] is existentialism, a contemporary form of existentialism, and this is again where I would find myself in a bit of a difference with Cornel. For him, the important existentialists would be people like Karl Jaspers and Albert Camus, not Jean-Paul Sartre, the radical, the communist, the socialist, the anti-colonialist. Not Jean-Paul Sartre, but Albert Camus who in fact opposed the Algerian independence movement. Oh by the way this is something that James Baldwin spoke about as well in one of the essays in No Name in the Street, I think the first one entitled “Take Me to the Water.” Jimmy Baldwin did not like Albert Camus either and felt, like Sartre, that Albert Camus was pro-colonialist and operated in bad faith. 

So it is this sense of the absurd, and in philosophical and existentialist terms, the absurd means non-being or no meaning or lack of meaning. You see what I’m saying. And so it is this tightrope that Cornel navigates upon. To me, it is interesting, it is dramatic, it is exciting. Like I said, “I got to put some respect on your name, hometown. You know, you remain so energized, so hopeful, so alive, you know what I’m saying?” Where it would be easy to say, to throw in the towel, “I’ve been doing this for too long you know. Three of my marriages broke up because of this, I’m going to throw in the towel.” But he stays real, he stays alive and he remains who he is. And welcomes difference and critique. That’s the positive thing. 

​Philosophically, and in terms of social theory, I feel that his approach does not account for a big part of human history including the Russian and Chinese revolutions, the revolutionary leaderships of these movements and their philosophies and theories. It does not account for philosophies paralleling science, or philosophies in the Hegelian or Kantian sense attempting to correct science, and to clarify for scientists and non-scientists what the discoveries of science suggest, in scientific terms and in human terms. That tradition is usually associated with what is called rationalism although it’s much, much more than that. Can you see what I’m saying?

Cornel’s position is more in the English American tradition of empiricism, pragmatism and existentialism. There is not … I guess we could put it this way using what we’ve already read in Hegel. There is not, in pragmatism and neo-pragmatism – in fact they reject the whole concept of mediation – it is all resolved at the level of the immediate, and of the individual. And not to mention, that English philosophers – I would say everybody from John Stuart Mill through Bertrand Russell and up to till present, have always smeared Hegel as somehow being the source of authoritarianism and even Nazism. That the rationalist tradition, especially as it crystallizes in Hegel’s philosophy, can only lead to anti-democratic practices and that to return democracy to philosophy, you have to separate philosophy from what is called the rational tradition, or thinking through categories. We can come back to that.

So it is a claim and I think this is a problem for Cornel because it generalizes, in fact reduces the question of democracy to an Anglo-Saxon practice. That everything that is not Anglo-Saxon in its theory and practice of democracy is by definition authoritarianism. Well does that sound familiar? Yes it does, because that’s the paradox that the Biden administration and the US ruling class tries to present us with. Either Anglo-Saxon democracy or authoritarianism. Either John Locke and John Stuart Mill – or Hitler. I won’t say my friend, but a guy that I follow, Lex Fridman is always doing, sadly, this conjunction of Mao, Stalin and Hitler – they’re all the same, you know. But that’s the Anglo-Saxon smearing of human revolutionary aspirations. 

So when you listen to Cornel, he is operating and thinking within the folds of Anglo-American philosophy, and hence the unusual in the political arena that does not fit the narrative of Anglo-American democratic theorizing and narrative is thereby authoritarian and even neo-fascist. And I want to underline the unusual, because the thing of Anglo-American philosophy has become a dogma rather than a project of scientific critique, of democracy and the possibilities of changing it, of advancing it. 

I just want to say a couple of few other things. In this sense, and people who were there, we saw a crescendo in his narrative, and to me it was exciting because I’m trying to, you know – all of these people, you know, I read, I know a little bit about. But he seemed to weave this narrative out of all of these thinkers from Chekhov to Kierkegaard to William James, and just, I mean just unbelievable, man. That’s why I said, “I got to put some respect on your name.” But in the end, he reaches the apogee and he couldn’t go any further. And then it had to be a repeat. It had to be a re-do, re-saying of similar things that he had previously said because he refused to go to the world of contradiction, of possibility, of danger. He stayed within this beautiful narrative, this exciting narrative that he started with.

​The other thing is his constant referencing and gesturing to Christianity, in the sense of liberation Christianity or Black Christianity. No problem. As we all know through our own experiences and observations, that Black religion is a religion of resistance, that being is realized in-becoming as Martin Luther King said in one of his graduate school papers. Being is in-becoming. That for Black Christianity, the end is not an end, it is the beginning of something new. And he’s right about that. But then, to me there’s a paradox between Anglo-American political theory and philosophy, and Black Christianity, which is not grounded in the individual or not grounded as Cornel West suggested, in fake hope in the future. It is futuristic but not this Disneyland futurism of the standard ruling class narrative in this country. 

And just my last point, I think he gets King wrong. King was not a naive pacifist. If you want any evidence of that just listen to the speech “Why I Oppose the War in Vietnam.” King understood St. Thomas Aquinas’s differentiation between just and unjust wars. I don’t think that Cornel understands the actual and practical real-life meaning of that as it relates in particular to the Ukraine War. Is Russia an imperialist nation, as he says? Or is Russia defending itself against the imperialism, militarism and aggression of the United States. Were the Vietnamese waging a just war? Were Koreans waging a just war? Were they waging a war for peace?

King understood that. He understood the difference between just and unjust wars. And I think that rather than pigeonholing King into this nebulous, ill-defined category of pacifism – you know, King was far too philosophically developed to be reduced to that. What Cornel has not considered is that King in fact was a theorist and practitioner of the struggle for democracy. A peaceful means, a political rather than a civil war path to the democratic and political transformation of the American nation; to disarm the ruling elite in its efforts to pit black against white in the struggle to change the country, for black and white people.

That is what King was saying. He was a theorist and a practitioner of the struggle for democracy. The concept of love. You cannot, in King’s sense, appeal to pragmatist or neo-pragmatist philosophers, or to English theorists of liberal theory or society, to understand King’s concept of love and the Beloved Community. It seems that Cornel missed a tremendous opportunity to further develop, to further deepen, to further extend his own theory of moral behavior and moral action. 

How beautiful might it have been if he could have turned or extended that discourse to King’s notion of the Beloved Community, which goes hand-in-hand with his idea of the means to radical transformation as important – this is King – as important as the ends themselves. So King was talking about a democratic path to achieve a new democracy, that unites and transforms the people in the process. I don’t think the philosophies that ground Cornel necessarily predisposed him to that kind of Kingian or even Baldwinian thinking. I’ll stop there and just say that we had a rich discussion for the time that it lasted on Thursday evening.

Talk of economic issues in the media often gives the distinct impression that what is being discussed is obvious—or at least beyond control—though it rarely is. It is always conveyed by talk, but the suggestion is that there is really nothing to discuss, think about, let alone contest or even object to. Consider, as the case in point now, the state of the economy and the continuous talk of inflation which has persisted since the onset of the Covid 19 pandemic. The virtual consensus of experts and elites on this topic is that inflation is happening and that it is obviously a bad thing, though they do not go into any further detail. Who could disagree with the claim that we want a good economy, rather than a bad one? Inflation means consistently and rapidly rising prices. And this might seem to be something which is obviously bad for everyone. Yet there is no further discussion of the inflation of prices of which kinds of things, or for whose harm or benefit changes will occur, as though they were all the same. Occasionally, however, the opinion-doctors, political-economic elites, and managers make statements which make one wonder: Good or bad in what sense? Good or bad for whom? And such occasions must be seized upon. For instance, it is claimed, workers’ wages and employment are simply too high, because they are causing inflation, which is bad. But anyone who works for a living is right to be suspicious here. In what follows, several such conspicuous statements will be considered as the expressions of class warfare which they are.

To begin, let’s get clear on what “inflation” is supposed to mean and the ways in which it might be good or bad and for whom that would be so. Inflation is supposed to be the general, consistent, and rapid rise in prices. The neo-liberal view which now dominates mainstream opinion is what economists call “monetarism” or the so-called quantity theory of money. And in the terms of that view, inflation is characterized as “too much money chasing too few goods”. On the basis of this view, there are two ways in which inflation can be counteracted: one can decrease the amount of money in circulation, or one can increase the amount of goods which are produced and offered for sale in the market in relation to money, such that there is not “too much money chasing too few goods”.

The mainstream view that one hears in the media only advocates the first way (“less money”). And it could be pursued in three versions: by cutting public, government spending; or by creating unemployment, which decreases consumer spending; or by increasing the rate of interest that the federal reserve pays to the holders of bonds (i.e., monetized government deficits made into interest paying debts). Increasing the rate of interest on government bonds is meant to have the same effect as the first two versions of this solution (“decreasing money”), because it is supposed to redirect money away from investment in the economy or demand for products—into bond-holding. Wealthy people putting money into bonds, instead of investing it into production which would employ workers who are the consumers of products, would mean less money is fueling demand in relation to the supply of those goods. And so it is supposed to “cool off” the inflation of prices of products.
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It is curious that influential voices and powerful interests never advocate that we simply adopt the second way that their formula also includes. They never suggest that we simply increase the amount of goods which are produced and offered for sale on the market in relation to money and demand, even though it would increase the aggregate wealth and prosperity of the nation. In other words, you could also decrease inflation by producing something! And this is a conspicuous fact which requires deeper consideration, because it suggests that someone benefits while others lose in that particular kind of “solution”. There is more to the matter than the mainstream view presents to the untrained eye. And so, it is worth asking who says so and why they might put it that way. In other words, cui bono? ​

One must step back to consider the issue on a larger scale to clarify the deeper political-economic significance of the discussion—and cut through the noise which is obscuring the issue.

Prominent voices often claim that government spending or “printing money” causes inflation. Yet matters are not quite so simple. One must note that the amount of real goods, products, is the term in relation to which there is too much or too little money in circulation in an economy, such that their prices rise or fall. Moreover, when the government spends, it does not spend money that it gathers by taxing the population. Rather, government spending creates money, and taxation destroys money, but private banks also create money when they lend credits to someone which correspond to the debts of other people that they also create. This is obviously politically significant.

Even Alan Greenspan himself has clearly stated that it is not simply the amount of government spending or money-creation which causes problems. Government spending or creation of money by itself, such as the Covid 19 Stimulus checks, does not automatically increase prices of real goods for consumers across the board for everyone. (Private banks, which also create money, can also contribute to inflation, and we should criticize them for that.) Understanding the causes at work here requires that we take a step back and consider the matter more deeply.

The determinant factor in relation to which prices rise or fall is not simply the amount of money in circulation but also the amount of goods in circulation—or the level of production in an economy, because economies can produce more or fewer goods in relation to which there is “too much” or “too little” money in circulation. First, recalls the standard story of “supply and demand”. When supply exceeds demand, the story goes, prices fall, and when demand exceeds supply, prices rise. In order to understand inflation, however, one must not only consider the quantity of money spent or “printed” into existence, or even simply the brute supply and demand of products, but rather what macroeconomists call “effective demand” in relation to the supply of products as well. Effective demand is demand which has buying power, disposable income (e.g., wages), or money to back it up, money with which one actually pays for products, which makes that demand “effective”. Otherwise, moneyless demand or absolute human needs as such, which doesn’t have money to back it up, are on par with an impotent wish which cannot realize itself in the economy—and thus cannot even end up in capitalists’ profits or rentiers’ monopoly rents.

If worker-consumers suddenly have more money or disposable income such that they are willing and able to buy and pay for more goods with that money, however, effective demand would increase in relation to the supply of goods which have been produced. In this case, the companies which produce those goods would respond, in the first instance, by increasing production to meet that increased demand. Companies, which are motivated by profit-seeking, will attempt to increase their profit by producing more products for sale first, before they simply raise prices of products. But then, when those companies reach the point at which they cannot easily produce any more, when they are have reached their capacity, they will respond to increased effective demand for their products in the market by simply raising the prices of their products in order to obtain more profit, if they know they can squeeze more money out of worker-consumers.[1] In other words, inflation is what happens when customers’ effective demand bids up prices on the market after the present capacity has been reached. And this is why increasing the money in circulation by itself is not sufficient to cause the inflation of prices; and, for the same reason, decreasing the amount of money in circulation by itself is also not enough to decrease prices. Here one must not lose sight of the fact that companies ultimately decide to raise their prices to obtain higher profits. That is, profit-seeking companies decide to raise prices in a way which we call “inflation”. They could also change their capacity. So, inflation is neither natural nor an automatic mechanism. Rather, it is the political core of the “private” sphere of the economy in capitalist societies. And price-gouging is all the easier for companies which are basically monopolies, who are fleecing workers who live from paycheck to paycheck. If there is someone to blame, one could start with them.

In this light, it is clear why government spending, the creation of more, new money, does not cause inflation by itself. If that money were promptly hoarded—put under a mattress somewhere in Kansas, for example—or if it were immediately paid to a creditor to cancel a debt, then it would hardly remain in circulation long enough to bid up prices (i.e., inflation). Hence the creation of money per se does not automatically lead to inflation, because it is not necessarily an excess of money in relation to the amount of real goods on offer in the market. Indeed, many stimulus payments were immediately paid to creditors to cancel debts (i.e., debt deflation) or were spent on unproductive speculative assets (e.g., cryptocurrency, Gamestop shares). Money itself is not the only cause.

In order to focus the issue at hand as clearly as possible in political terms, one must reformulate the question. It is not simply “who does inflation hurt, and who does it help?” Rather, the question is, what kinds of inflation are there, which kinds of inflation are discussed, which kinds are not discussed, and who do the different kinds of inflation help or hurt? Indeed, some kinds are discussed and some kinds aren’t. Ultimately, the issue of “inflation” is a question of the distribution of wealth in society, and this is why the rich are so furious about it.

When the prices of financial or real assets, such as stocks or real estate increase (i.e., “asset-price inflation”), this helps the class of asset owners who gain and benefit from the purchase and resale of those assets (“arbitrage”, “capital gains”), and this kind of inflation is neither discussed nor targeted, no doubt because the people whom it helps have more influence over the media. For example, people who are already wealthy benefit from the increasing prices of stocks or real estate, if they are involved in buying the said assets at a lower price and selling them at a higher price. Hence they do not complain, but rather silently pass over the inflation of these prices. When the prices of real goods increase, however, this is discussed and targeted, not because it hurts working people who do not benefit from asset-price inflation, but because it hurts the value or relative buying-power of the assets of the owner class—and hence their wealth or political-economic power. In other words, if the prices of consumer goods increase, but the prices of assets of wealthy people remain the same, then the relative value of their assets (i.e., buying power and political power) has decreased. It does not matter to the wealthy interest groups if the increased prices of consumer goods only hurt the class of ordinary worker-consumers, who comprise the overwhelming majority of the population. And so, this issue only appears in the media at all to the extent that they can use it for their own interests.

The asset owning class only dislikes rising prices of consumer goods, and it likes rising prices of financial and real assets, because it’s in its political-economic interest. In order to see how this is the case, imagine that suddenly the prices of all products were doubled or even tripled, but wages paid to workers who consume those products were also increased in the same proportion. Let’s say, for example, that the cost of a gallon of milk is $3 in the first week of the month, $6 in the second week, $12 in the third week, and $24 in the final week; and let’s imagine that the minimum wage, meanwhile, is at $15 per hour in the first week, $30 in the second, $60 in the third, and $120 in the final week. This clearly would be a case of so-called hyper-inflation. And if we only look at the absolute figures, then these do look like radical increases. But looked at in relation to one another, we see that the proportions between the costs of goods and the money with which one buys them (i.e., wages, the cost of labor) have not changed at all. Indeed, nothing has really changed. Neither the seller of milk nor the buyer has been harmed—or helped. If wages remain the same, while prices go up, then the real wage of working people falls, which is to say that they get less of the total wealth, while someone else would be getting more. This is why talking heads claim that inflation hurts working people. But if the price labor—i.e., wages—and prices of consumer goods go up, then this would not hurt workers or producers, because, in fact, this question is a matter of the distribution of wealth. Generalized inflation of goods as well as wages of labor does not hurt worker-consumers or producers. It only hurts people whose income is derived from the ownership of financial or real assets (i.e., creditors or landlords).

For instance, in the example just given, it would be much easier for a worker who previously earned $15 per hour and now receives $120 per hour to pay his or her rent or debts at the end of the month than it was at the beginning—eight times easier, in fact. And the landlord or the creditor would receive the same amount of money (e.g., $1000), but it would be less valuable, or it would be able to buy fewer goods than before, because prices are eight times greater now. It’s no problem for all consumers to pay four times as much money for milk, if they are also receiving four times as much wages from their employers. And it would not even hurt the milk-producers, if they would be getting four eight times as much revenue as well. But it would hurt people who do nothing and receive their income passively merely because they own some piece of property, given the current conventions in our society. Indeed, this change would economically and political break those rentiers as a class almost immediately, because the buying power of their fixed incomes would have fallen eightfold. Given that they are the powerful interests which have captured our public institutions, however, they have every incentive to crush such a development, even if doing so hurts working people. This is why financial interests try to squeeze workers’ real income from one side by trying to increase unemployment or lower wages and thereby trigger the kind of deflation that benefits that class, while industrial monopolies squeeze workers’ real income from the other side when they engage in the kind of price gouging which motivates rentiers and talking heads to speak in favor of deflationary recessions. Worker-consumers are the center of this tug-of-war over the distribution of aggregate wealth.

The discussion about inflation is really about a deeply political conflict over distribution of the wealth which labor produces not only in America but all over the world. But what is occurring now is also something more specific. Inflation is not only a matter of class conflict. The war on inflation is also a class war. Though it might not be obvious, it is waged for the interests, power, and wealth, which is just power itself, of an already wealthy minority—not for, but rather against, that of the majority of the population. On the one hand, there is the class which “owns” nearly everything, while there is also the managerial class which “controls” nearly everything for the sake of the former, and on the other hand there is, finally, the working class that “owns” nothing more than the ability to work, which it sells just to survive. Inflation of the kind at issue only harms those persons whose income is fixed in contracts such as landlords or creditors, the class of so-called rentiers, the recipients of rent or interest, which Thorstein Veblen called “absentee owners”, the recipients of “passive, unearned income”—who Lenin once described as “living by ‘clipping coupons’”. In more contemporary terms, it is the so-called FIRE sector (i.e., finance, insurance, and real estate), those who aim to “get something for nothing” and always simply charge as much and “whatever the market can bear”. 

And it is important to note that this is not merely a recent feature of contemporary society. Rather, it is an ideology which goes all the way back to the beginning. As John Jay once put it: “Those who own the country ought to govern it.” Similarly, James Madison states: “…if elections were open to all classes of people, the property of the landed proprietors would be insecure. […] our government ought to secure the permanent interests of the country against innovation. […] [it] ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority. […] The Senate ought to represent the opulent Minority…” And indeed, the protection of the asset-owning class and its opposition to the vast majority of the American population is even written into the Constitution itself: “…nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.”
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Surely, this could never be openly acknowledged in such plain terms. So, experts code matters in technical jargon which few can understand and which makes the situation appear to be a natural matter of course, which has the effect of bypassing any critical discussion or political opposition. One must keep calm and carry on, as the saying goes, or simply obey. Yet the road being advocated by political-economic elites and managers is only good for the class of owners of financial assets — which are just equal to other people’s liabilities — not for everyone else. This is why canceling private debts is equivalent to liquidating the wealth and control of the owner class over society, on the one hand, while fighting inflation means defending the economic power of the class of persons whose income is extracted by owning financial or real assets (e.g., lenders or landlords), on the other. This is why the fight against inflation is done primarily for the advantage of the “rentiers”, “absentee owners”, recipients of “passive, unearned income”, to the disadvantage of normal working people and even industry. Indeed, these people hate inflation and love deflation of prices, as economic experts constantly attest to. It is a good thing for them. They have a vested interest in lobbying the state to act in ways that benefit them and promote their economic interest, rather than that of the majority of people who live in a very different situation and perhaps do not even understand the economic situation at all. And indeed, that is exactly what they are doing and what is happening in the argument about inflation. It is not a neutral economic mechanism at stake here, but a deeply political fight over wealth.

It is often claimed and considered a good thing that the Federal Reserve is “independent”. But independent of what? It is said that it is independent of “political interference”, though this can hardly be true, if it is serving the political-economic interests of the class of asset-owners, not those of the majority of working people who do not own considerable financial or real assets from which they receive their income. Its sole mission of controlling inflation is often discussed in the language of “price stability”, which sounds as though it is good for everyone, though, recall, a rapid rise of prices across the board primarily hurts rentiers and helps everyone else. The Federal Reserve is “independent” from the political sovereignty and control of the majority of the American population, it is anti-democratic, and it does not serve the interests of most people. This is clear from the fact that the government does actually not perform its stated dual-task — not only price stability, but also a policy of full employment. Indeed, now it is explicitly contradicting it by trying to create unemployment. Regarding price stability, inflation and deflation should both be considered equally evil, but only inflation is said to be an evil, because it hurts the wealth, power and interests of the asset-owning class, while deflation helps them. Regarding full employment, powerful voices sacrifice it to the detriment of the livelihoods of the working class, to boost the wealth and power of the asset-owning class, because it is of no use to them. In other words, the class of asset-owners want prices to fall (deflation) not to rise (inflation), because it makes their financial assets more valuable and increases the buying power of their fixed incomes. That is, the livelihoods of working people must be sacrificed to the inflation gods to protect the value of the assets of the wealthy and powerful elites of this country, whose opinions are heard in the media—and no one else’s.

Let’s consider how some prominent voices – whose opinions influence political decisions and economic outcomes – are very selective about the ways in which they suggest we must deal with inflation. It is not only curious, but also to be expected, in light of what has just been said. And the opinion of “experts” is virtually unanimous here. There is the mainstream assumption of orthodox theory, that there is a natural “trade off” between employment and prices, standing behind it, the so-called “non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment”, NAIRU.[2] This is the basis on which talking-heads proclaim that the only solution is that workers must make sacrifices, rather than wealthy asset-owners. It is the basis on which talking-heads say the problem primarily hurts working people, and the solution is fewer jobs, more unemployment, and lower wages. Hence their perspectives and prescriptions are clearly suspicious.

The influential economist and political advisor, Lawrence (“Larry”) Summers, for example, has repeatedly stated that drastic action of a very specific kind must be taken on the issue of inflation. The way to solve the problem, he claims, which ostensibly hurts everyone generally, yet particularly working people the most, is to create more unemployment, according to Summers. Yes, you heard that correctly: the way to stop hurting working people is to create unemployment among workers. Most recently, he made this argument on Jon Stewart’s Apple TV series, though he has also been making this argument for a while. Somewhat earlier this year, he already claimed that “there’s going to need to be increases in unemployment to contain inflation.” He states:

We need five years of unemployment above 5 percent to contain inflation—in other words, we need two years of 7.5 percent unemployment or five years of 6 percent unemployment or one year of 10 percent unemployment. We are unlikely to achieve inflation stability without a recession of a magnitude that would take unemployment towards the 6% range. 

As Summers sees it, 6% unemployment will be necessary to achieve a level of inflation which he thinks is more desirable, which is 2%. Coincidentally, this is the percentage of the population which would benefit most from his advice—the asset-owning or ruling class of this country.

Similarly, the chair of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, a lawyer (not an economist), has claimed that “reducing inflation” will require “below-trend growth”, which will “bring some pain to households and businesses. These are the unfortunate costs of reducing inflation. But a failure to restore price stability would mean far greater pain”. Certainly, not painfulful costs to himself, though. Claims such as these, that a better economy requires more unemployment and “pain”, are curious, because this is surely not better not for the unemployed. Presumably, the story would go, it would be better for everyone else if we just sacrifice a few victims — 6% or about 20,000 people — to the fickle and mysterious gods of the market, which is a small price indeed to pay for those who do not pay or suffer at all. In other words, aristocracy is great, as long as you belong to it.

More recently, however, the Federal Reserve has indicated that it will pause its increases in interest rate hikes, which have been the most radical action since the “Volcker shock” of the Reagan era, which also tried to decrease inflation by causing a recession—by pushing the damage off onto working people. The real reason for doing so, which might be obvious to anyone who understands and is paying attention, is that those actions have caused massive financial crises. (In the 1980s it was a crisis of the so-called savings and loans institutions.) After years of zero interest rates inaugurated by Barack Obama, which were meant to save the financial sector from collapse after the Crisis of 2008, rather than ordinary citizens, the Fed has now backed itself into a corner: it can only try to stop inflation by raising rates on bonds. But if it raises rates on bonds, then investors will pull their money out of banks to buy those new bonds which have higher interest rates, and so their banks, which hold the older, devalued bonds, will not have enough reserves on hand to pay up. This means they will come up short on reserves and become illiquid or insolvent—as the recent series of bankruptcies and bank-runs since Silicon Valley Bank have shown. The consequence is potentially another general financial crisis.

The pressing question here is just: for whom is the “better economy”, which experts and elites seek by tinkering with interest rates on government bonds, “better” or “best”? This is arguably a case in which the cure prescribed is worse for the patient than the disease. Why not rather a cut for the asset owning class? The answer here is obvious. Because they have captured the institutions which are making the decisions.
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Simply put, the public, state-financial institutions in this country have been captured and are working for the interests of the private class of asset-owners—to keep the value of their assets inflated (equity, rents, stocks, bonds, interest), to keep their capital gains high, and to force the costs of unemployment and lower wages on the working majority. And here we reach the uncomfortable moment when Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s definition of “fascism” appears simply to be a description of the dominant brand of finance-capitalism: “ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power”.[3]

If we accept for the sake of argument that inflation is just “too much money chasing too few goods”, then there are clearly two possible cures. The first would be to cut the amount of money in circulation that is “chasing” after goods. And one could do this in a number of ways, as I have already said: by cutting government spending, by creating unemployment which cuts consumer spending, or by increasing interest rates on bonds to attract money out of markets for goods into speculative markets in search of capital gains. This would favor and distribute wealth to the asset-owner class which already has political control of public institutions. On the other hand, however, inflation could also be stemmed by increasing the amount of products on the market which are being chased by money. The amount of products is not fixed, but rather variable, in the short run, and in the longer run, even the capacity of the economy to produce more is variable, rather than fixed. Indeed, in order for capacity to be fully utilized and full employment to be obtained, it must be constantly expanded.[4] So, instead of simply cutting spending, it is possible simply to increase production so that effective demand does not exceed supply and cause inflation. If the well-being of the majority of Americans is really what is at stake, only the second option is the one to take.

Indeed, it is worth asking why the creditor-class of asset-owners consistently dislikes the option of increased production and increased government spending (i.e., currency creation, public deficits). The short answer is that their maximum relative benefit occurs only if the credits and debts which are created are those issued by private banks, which pay higher interest to them, and if the economy deflates, because  public government deficit spending and inflation only benefits the vast majority of the population, but not themselves, as they might not get so much interest from it. The political character of the debate is clearest here.

Their howling about inflation is arguably unwarranted, however. If maximum capacity is not exceeded, and if what is occurring is not just price-gouging, then the problematic inflation in question will not follow. If there are fears of inflation, then just produce more or increase capacity! Doing so would benefit worker-consumers, and indeed it would benefit the majority of the population disproportionately. It would even benefit industrial capitalists as well but not at all the asset-owning class, the wealthiest minority. The owners of financial and real assets (e.g., real estate) do not stand to benefit from public spending (i.e., government deficit spending), because they do not get any interest payments from credit creation which is public, rather than private, unless they buy the bonds which the government is currently choosing to offer at abnormally high rates of interest to induce recessions—with massive collateral damage to the financial sector itself. And so, it is clear that the policy prescriptions of elites like Summers or Powell are motivated by their own class interests, or those of whoever pays them (i.e., patronage networks), rather than any neutral or objective view of the entire economy and the wellbeing of everyone in it. The powerful voices which represent the asset-owning class do not like any possible “solution” from which they do not immediately benefit.

In this light, the problem of inflation — higher prices — is just the problem that we are not producing enough and a fight over the distribution of wealth. The class of owners and the political class always oppose public spending because they have little to gain from the increasing industrial prosperity of a nation which they have struggled to deindustrialize for their own gain. Payments for goods made in China might no longer benefit them. And so they are ready to hang American worker-consumers out to dry. The private financial sector  does not benefit at all from public deficit spending, though they profit immensely from increasing private consumer debt. Yet if the state spends less for the benefit of the majority of the population, then the private financial sector of banks will benefit more.
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Things don’t have to be this way, as Michael Hudson often puts it. At full employment a country could also tax its highest incomes—to stem inflation but keep the entire working class employed at a decent standard of living. Conservatives might complain that taxing high incomes — the mythical “job creators” — will harm productivity and everyone else, because, if they cannot spend their wealth, then it will not “trickle down”. But this is generally false: whatever money they have must also have “trickled up” (i.e., effective demand) and cannot circulate at all if it concentrates at the top. Or rather, it is true only if the wealthiest citizens of a country invest their wealth and income into productive activities which produce real goods and actually employ working people who are also consumers of products. But the ultra-wealthy do not do so. They buy unproductive assets for “capital gains” (i.e. arbitrage). Thus a financialized economy such as the United States of America depends upon the underdeveloped economies of other countries for its industrial products. Archetypically, the owner-class invests in assets already in place instead of real production or employment—in speculation in property, in rent-seeking assets like shares or intellectual property rights, in cryptocurrency, and ultimately in asset-price inflation which forces working people out of home ownership (“gentrification”). These do not produce or employ anyone, but simply redistribute wealth upward, where it permanently stays. These voices have long since ceased to be pro-capitalist, but rather are now clearly reactionary, neo-feudalist advocates of the rent-seeking class. The classical mythology which was meant to legitimate capitalist development was that workers would get an absolutely larger piece of a (relatively smaller) pie which was growing. Neoliberals today, however, are happy to get a greater share in the distribution of pieces of a rapidly shrinking national pie, which is a fact that financialization and deindustrialization have positively contributed to, and leave only crumbs to be “equitably” distributed amongst the rest. The reason to tax that wealth and income at the top, then, would not be to fund anything through the state. The state does not need revenue, which it produces. We need to “stop pretending that we need them to pay for the good society”. Rather, the reason to tax the wealthiest members of society would be the functional outcome to which it would give rise: destroying their wealth and power, as well as cooling off the inflationary economy, without sacrificing working people to involuntary unemployment—the abolition of the kind of inequality which makes modern economies fail and functioning republics impossible. And the fact that someone like Summers thinks creating 6% unemployment obviously is the solution, but taxing the wealthy obviously is not a possibility, shows how this is a matter of class warfare.

The reason why the battle over inflation is class warfare conducted by the class which already owns all the wealth against the class which does not own any wealth, but produces it, is that inflation is a matter of the distribution of extant wealth, rather than the production of wealth for everyone. And indeed, the interest of the wealthy consists in deflation which means less for the workers, while inflation which means less for the wealthy and more for the workers. But there is also a further political dimension at stake here. It is the reason why industrial capitalists sacrifice a portion of their own potential profits in their class-alliance with rentiers to control and dominate the working class which they exploit. And were it not politically efficacious in certain respects, it would be deeply irrational in economic terms.
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In his essay, Political Aspects of Full Employment, Michael Kalecki clearly outlines this political-economic situation in a way that helps us make sense of Summers’ argument—that it would be good to have more unemployment, much as Marx and Luxemburg also emphasize that capitalists want unemployment. There are two reasons at work here. First, business management likes unemployment for political reasons, because it is easier to control workers if they can be threatened with being fired, only if there is someone ready and happy to take their job. Solidarity among workers does not benefit the rich. If there is full-employment, that is, then there is no one ready to take the job of a worker who management would like to discipline, and their threats are powerless. Second, the owner class of rentiers, which hates inflation, and likes deflation for the reason that it increases the value of their assets, also likes unemployment. In his essay, Kalecki writes:

Is it any wonder, then, that people like Summers or Powell, the mercenary guardians of the owner-class, make the arguments which they make? They simply expresses the interest of the alliance of big business and rentiers. This is the context in which Marxists, socialists, leftists, and the rest must all hear statements such as Summers’s claim that “there’s going to need to be increases in unemployment to contain inflation” and that we need a “recession” in order to have a good, working economy. An economy that is good for whom? An economy that works for whom? Clearly, if he is railing against an economy that manages to keep full employment at decent wages, then he is not talking about an economy that is good and works for the majority of the population which is the working class. Rather, he is openly advocating that the majority of the population which is the working class works for an economy which is really only goods for the wealthy minority of the asset owning class. He does so in a coded language which few seem to understand. But he is illustrating perfectly the political problem which Kalecki points out. Thus it must be heard as the piece of class warfare that it is. And once we recognize it for what it is, we can expect nothing more from this approach to politics and economy than the black cloud of managed decline which is looming on the horizon. The time to change course is indeed at hand, though we can expect no changes from those who currently hold any power.

​[1] “When demand rises, some combination of output and price increases will absorb the increased demand, with the proportions varying across industries up to the point of economy-wide full employment. Once that is reached, only prices can rise because firms cannot find more resources to produce more” (Mitchell, Wray, Watts, Macroeconomics, 240). “…if an economy could meet the growth in nominal expected demand by rapidly expanding the capacity to produce goods and services, [then] an inflationary gap would not open. […] Circumstances change somewhat when the economy approaches full productive capacity. Then the mix between output growth and price rises becomes more likely to be biased toward price rises (depending on the bottlenecks in specific areas of productive activity. At full capacity, GDP can only grow via inflation (that is, nominal values increase only). At this point, the inflationary gap is breached” (Mitchell, Wray, Watts, Macroeconomics, 260-1).

[2] Equally perverse is the mainstream view of “full employment”, which is meant to be achieved when the total of real wages which capitalist employers are willing to pay is divided among everyone who needs to work. Cf. Leftwich, Sharp, Miree, Economics of Social Issues (1980), 274: “The economic aspect of unemployment originates from a situation in which the quantity of labor demanded [by capitalists] is less than the quantity [of labor] supplies [by workers] at the market wage rate. This results in involuntary unemployment”. “The general solution to involuntary unemployment is a reduction in real wage rates until the amount of labor demanded equals the amount supplied. In a competitive market, the reduction in real wage rates would take place automatically” (ibid., 287). In other words, lower wages for the employed so the unemployed get something too—never mind whether this might present a catastrophic lack of effective demand! For a contemporary discussion of this view from a macroeconomic perspective, cf. Mitchell, Wray, Watts, Macroeconomics (2019), 169- 70 and chapters 11-14; on “NAIRU”, cf. ibid., 283f.

[3] This might come as no surprise to anyone who is familiar with the founders actual statements about their hostility to majority-rule. John Jay reportedly said: “Those who own the country ought to govern it.” And James Madison similarly stated: “if elections were open to all classes of people, the property of the landed proprietors would be insecure. […] our government ought to secure the permanent interests of the country against innovation. […] [it] ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority. […] The Senate ought to represent the opulent Minority…” (https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-10-02-0044) 

[4] Cf. Kalecki 1990, 161: “In order for existing capital equipment to be fully employed, it must be continually expanded, since then retained profits are invested. If these investments are not made, profits fall, and along with them the employment of existing plants. [/] Let us assume, as often happens in the USA, that two competing railway lines run between two cities. Traffic on both lines is weak. How does one deal with this? Paradoxically, one should build a third railway line, for then materials and people for construction of the third will be transported on the first two. What should be done when the third one is finished? Then one should build a fourth and a fifth one. . . . This example, as we warned, is paradoxical, since unquestionably it would be better to undertake some other investment near the first two railway lines rather than build a third one; nevertheless, it perfectly illustrates the laws of development of the capitalist system as a whole”.