Left Voice

RBG or Not, Abolish the Supreme Court

Sat, 19 Sep 2020 03:23:10 GMT

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (RBG) passed away on Friday night at age 87, sending millions into a panic about the future of reproductive rights. Her death and the subsequent fear shows the immense power that the Supreme Court wields and why we must abolish it.

Ginsburg died of complications of metastatic pancreatic cancer after battling the disease on and off for the past 20 years. She was the second woman ever on the Supreme Court and had developed a reputation as a “feminist” and “progressive” figure. Liberals called her “notorious RBG”; two films were made about her; and people even regularly dressed up as her for Halloween. Without a doubt, RBG was a pop culture icon. While RBG will be remembered for her more progressive Supreme Court decisions, there were others that progressives and even some socialists will more likely push under the rug. Take City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation of New York, where RBG and the whole Supreme Court ruled against tribal sovereignty.

RBG’s death and the coming struggle over her replacement highlight once again the complete bankruptcy of the liberal electoral strategy for defending our basic rights. If the plan was just to hope that RBG didn’t die before Biden was elected, it was a bad plan. Relying on undemocratic institutions such as the Supreme Court, or capitalist parties like the Democrats, is no mechanism for change.

RBG’s death opens a huge crisis for the political regime. It seems almost certain now that Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, and the rest of the Republican Party will begin very quickly to look for ways that they can push through their nominee. However, this is a hypocritical move for the Republicans who blocked Merrick Garland from the Supreme Court while Obama was president under the excuse that the elections were too close and it should wait until after the election.

There will be no such talk now. The Republicans are going to try to push through a replacement.

The decision about who to place on the Supreme Court is exceedingly important in part because it is not out of the question that the results of this election will be decided by the Supreme Court. Democrats and Republicans have assembled an army of constitutional lawyers, ready to contest the elections. After all, it was the Supreme Court that decided the 2000 election. Rather than counting the votes in Florida, the Supreme Court handed the election to George W. Bush, and Al Gore obediently accepted the results.

We could see a similar scenario this time, but in a much more volatile situation. Many are arguing that Trump may try to hold onto the presidency even if he loses. After all, he has spent the past few weeks positioning himself to challenge the validity of the election, predicting “election mayhem.” He’s already attacking mail-in voting and looking for ways to stop people from voting in the midst of the pandemic. And throughout all of it, Trump encourages the far-right wing militias that have been mobilizing, attacking, and killing protesters.

We say in no uncertain terms: we defend the right to vote. Elections shouldn’t be decided by judges that no one elected. And you know what institution has stood on the opposite side of that fight? The Supreme Court. From the Citizens United decision that allowed unlimited corporate money in politics to the 2000 Election, the Supreme Court has been integral in maintaining the lack of democracy in the United States, where we don’t even decide elections by the basic principle of the popular vote. We must already begin to organize with this message: people have the right to vote, to have their votes counted, and no unelected body of nine people should decide any election.

At the same time, an electoral strategy to defend our basic rights is doomed to fail. If defending reproductive justice or even democracy relies on an 87-year-old staying alive, it doesn’t work. And having RBG on the Supreme Court was certainly no bulwark against undemocratic decisions. After all, she was on the court in the Bush v. Gore decision. But it is indeed true that the working class and oppressed generally, as well as our basic right to vote, are under attack. We should respond accordingly, strengthening the organization of the working class and oppressed and not the institutions that oppress us, which include the Supreme Court and the Democratic Party.

Joe Biden and the Democrats will seize upon this to make the case once again that Biden will protect us from Trump, the rising right, and challenges to reproductive rights in the Supreme Court. They will look at the right-wing offensive against abortion and, as always, tell us to make sure that we vote. But the fact of the matter is that reproductive rights have been under attack for decades, no matter who has been in the White House. And while it’s no secret that the Trump administration has attacked reproductive rights and positioned itself as anti-abortion, it is even more hypocritical to say we should vote for Biden to defend reproductive rights.

After all, Biden famously supported the Hyde Amendment until it became politically untenable for his campaign. Further, Roe v. Wade was later undermined by other Supreme Court decisions like Planned Parenthood v. Casey. As Yekaterina Oziashvili wrote, “While it is a fact that Roe v. Wade has drastically improved the lives of millions of women and working-class people in general, many have drawn the wrong lesson from the decision. Rather than seeing it as one step in the right direction, they infer that the Supreme Court is the main, if not the only, defender of democratic rights; and it is this erroneous conclusion that leads to demobilization.” The truth is that it’s up to us to defend reproductive rights and the rights of the working class and oppressed.

To that end, we must recognize that the Democrats, for all their nice words about supporting the right to choose, are also our enemies in this fight. After all, there is a fair share of anti-abortion Democrats, and Nancy Pelosi herself has said that abortion is not a central issue for her party. It is a capitalist party and exists to protect the interests of capital. While the Democrats use issues like reproductive rights to win elections, they aren’t on our side in the fight to protect abortions. For example, they defend the private health system that makes abortions unaffordable, and they do nothing about the continual exploitation of women’s labor in the capitalist economy. The Democrats have shown time and time again that they do not care about the interests of working people, women, immigrants, and people of color.

Over the next few weeks, the discussion will be dominated by who will replace Ginsburg. As socialists, we can’t get stuck in that debate. The Supreme Court is an illegitimate, undemocratic, and oppressive institution. Why should nine unelected people who are paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and serve for life get to decide whether we have the right to an abortion? Why should they decide whether we can be fired for being queer? Why should they get to decide anything about our lives?

The Supreme Court was created to protect the interests of the ruling class. It has ruled time and time again against the working class and oppressed. When the Supreme Court has come down on the side of progressive causes, it was only because of pressure from movements in the streets, not some abstract concept of “justice.” That certainly was the case with the civil rights movement and the reproductive justice movement. And how just, after all, is an institution that includes among its ranks at least two men accused of sexual assault? We cannot sit by and hope that this or that justice doesn’t die just because they are the only thing standing between us and our basic civil rights. The only way to fix the Supreme Court is to abolish it.

These are scary times, and the Democratic Party is trying to use that fear to drum up support for Biden, telling us that he is the only thing that stands between us and a far-right government. But history shows us that the only way to fight the right wing is to build the left and strengthen the organization of the working class. Biden,the Democrats, and the Supreme Court won’t save us, and they won’t protect us. Only the unified force of the working class and the oppressed has the numbers and power to fight back right-wing attacks. We shouldn’t sit idly in fear as the capitalists and their politicians bicker about which unelected judge should serve a life term on the Supreme Court. It’s time to mobilize, shut down the economy through strikes, and demand the abolition of the Supreme Court. It does not serve us. Its time is up.

New Department of Labor Rules Put Parents Between a Rock and a Hard Place

Fri, 18 Sep 2020 20:28:55 GMT

Since the beginning of the pandemic, governments and employers have been trying to keep as many people at work as possible to keep production flowing and profits up. We saw this especially over the summer, when certain states resisted partial shutdown for as long as possible, and reopened very quickly, leading to a rise in coronavirus cases. However, a big obstacle to sending people back to work is childcare; in order for parents or other caregivers to go back to in-person work, their children need to go back to in-person school. With many school districts operating on a fully-remote or hybrid schedule this fall, the Department of Labor is actively pressuring working parents to send their children back to school in person, even when they have the option to keep them home. This policy clearly shows the government’s vested interest in prioritizing profit over people’s safety.

Beginning April 1, the Families First Coronavirus Response Act (FFCRA) provided two weeks of paid leave at 100 percent pay, to be used at the employee’s discretion, for workers who are unable to do their jobs for Covid-related reasons, including having to care for children whose schools are closed. Primary caregivers of children whose schools are closed are eligible for an additional twelve weeks at two-thirds of their regular pay — a pay cut that makes this option inaccessible for many families, especially families living on a single income.

However, in late August and then again on September 11, the Department of Labor issued additional “clarifications” (restrictions, really) on who is eligible for these benefits. Many school districts are proceeding with a hybrid learning model paired with an option for fully-remote learning, and some of the new guidelines are specifically intended to dissuade parents from choosing remote learning over hybrid classes. The fully-remote options have been extremely popular in areas where they are being offered, with, for example, 42 percent of families in New York City choosing all-remote learning and similar numbers elsewhere. But now, families who choose to keep their children at home will not be eligible for paid leave under the FFCRA.

Implications for Families

There are many reasons that parents may choose remote learning for their children. Congregating indoors for long periods of time is fundamentally more risky than staying at home, even though the exact level of risk varies across individual circumstances. Twelve weeks of paid leave would enable someone to stay home with their child for most or all of the rest of the calendar year (again, only if they can afford losing one third of their pay), depending on the school’s calendar. Under the new restrictions, however, families are robbed of even that level of flexibility. Unless a family can afford one caregiver taking extended unpaid leave (and many families only have one caregiver), they will be forced to either send their children into school for hybrid learning or leave their children at home unsupervised.

Under the Department of Labor’s new guidelines, most parents — or at least, the parents fortunate enough to still be employed — who have this option will have their decision made for them. Most parents cannot afford three months of unpaid leave, with no unemployment benefits. Those who criticize mask mandates due to infringements on their “freedom” ought to be much more concerned about this — a lack of freedom with very real material consequences, as some number of those children will inevitably contract coronavirus and bring it home to their families. Even if that number is very small, it is unacceptable. But in most areas, it is unlikely to be small.

Teachers, students, and school staff around the country are sharing images on social media of the wholly inadequate safety conditions at their schools. Some places lack functional sinks or soap dispensers in the bathrooms. Some places have newly-installed hand sanitizer dispensers, but these dispensers are empty. Some places that have been allegedly “deep cleaned” have obvious signs that no such cleaning occurred. Many schools lack the physical space to hold socially-distanced classes, and even more lack the staff to do so. School custodians are reporting that even if they had the necessary staff to fully clean their buildings before school starts, they don’t have enough supplies. Currently, coronavirus cases are growing at a rate of five percent or higher in eleven states, up from eight states last Friday. Total case counts in these states remain low compared to earlier in the year, but as we know from March and April, the rate of growth can increase very quickly.

This is not the only rule affecting paid leave for childcare, however. Parents are also not allowed to take paid FFCRA leave for childcare if another care provider is available. What exactly counts as “available” and who counts as a “child care provider” is wide open for abuse by employers eager to deny these benefits to their employees. The broad definitions of these terms could classify many families as having an “available childcare provider,” making them ineligible for paid leave when no such provider is actually available. The Department of Labor’s FAQs say that “child care provider” includes “individuals paid to provide child care, like nannies, au pairs, and babysitters. It also includes individuals who provide child care at no cost and without a license on a regular basis, for example, grandparents, aunts, uncles, or neighbors.” In other words, the Department of Labor is outsourcing the cost of child care onto underpaid, exploited professional care workers and spreading the remaining labor across the rest of the working class in the form of extended family members and other care networks.

Under this definition, a family member — say, a grandparent — who normally picks up a child from school and watches them for a few hours in the afternoon before their parent gets home, could now be expected to watch the child for the full duration of the parent’s workday. While the grandparent would not be legally obligated to do so, this could still be cause for denying a parent’s request for paid leave under the law. This is an enormous amount of additional labor, which neither the government nor the parent’s employer will pay for.

The same applies even in the case of professional childcare. In that situation, the family must replace the time the child would normally be in school by paying for a professional babysitter themselves. In the U.S., the average hourly wage for a babysitter to watch one child was $16.43 in 2018. With a federal minimum wage of $7.25/hour and with the average hourly wage for all American workers at $27.16, this is simply not affordable for most families. While many families would undoubtedly find ways to minimize the number of hours they need to pay for childcare (likely through the help of unpaid relatives or friends), a single parent making average wages without other childcare options would still be spending more than half of their income on childcare alone — and that’s if they only have one child. Workers already pay for public education via their taxes, so the parent is essentially paying for someone to supervise their child twice-over.

The Problem of Childcare Under Capitalism

This problem is merely a new manifestation of an existing form of exploitation. Capitalism incentivizes the bourgeoisie to maximize profits in any way possible — the most gain for the least cost. Capitalists need to pay workers — either directly through wages or indirectly through government services, paid for by tax dollars which are taken out of wages — only as much as they need to survive at a high enough standard of living to prevent them from demanding better. Marxist feminist Lise Vogel argues that children are a particular annoyance to this system, because children consume resources without being able to work, and require care from adults who could otherwise be part of the workforce. Capitalists are therefore incentivized to “resolve” this problem by either monetizing as much of the childrearing process as possible for their own gain or by convincing the working class that providing for children is nobody’s responsibility but their own — not their employer’s, and not the government’s.

Many aspects of traditional gender roles serve in this capacity, such as the notion that women are biologically predisposed toward motherhood and ought to find domestic tasks inherently satisfying. This is not to say that people don’t love their children or find joy in parenthood. However, by naturalizing childcare as an individual obligation rather than a social one (i.e., a community is responsible for caring for all children in that community), this stereotype places moral blame (for being “irresponsible”) on parents who struggle to financially support their children while exempting capitalists from any responsibility toward their employees’ children. And until effective birth control and safe and legal abortions are easily accessible for everyone, parenthood is not always a freely-made individual choice.

It’s important to remember that wages do not change relative to how many children a worker has. Some individual employers may offer childcare-related benefits, or may consider children in salary negotiations, but the widespread notion of a “family wage” (i.e. a wage intended to sustain a worker and their entire immediate family) is a thing of the past, if it ever existed at all. So, by using the FFCRA rules to force families to pay for childcare out of their own pockets or rely on their loved ones for unpaid labor, capitalists are able to retain more of their profits without paying them back to the workers via paid leave.

The Department of Labor has not implemented these restrictions on paid childcare leave out of necessity, but out of deference to capitalist interests. The most lucrative companies generate billions of dollars in profit — not revenue, but pure profit — every year. For workers at smaller companies unable to pay for leave themselves, the FFCRA could pay for leave through a wealth tax. There is more than enough money to provide paid childcare leave for everyone who needs it. A socialist society would redistribute labor across people able to work while those who need to stay home for safety or caregiving reasons could do so without penalty. But we don’t need to overthrow capitalism in order for families to stay home with their kids — that could happen right now.

Finding childcare for online learning while the parent or other caregiver goes back to work is one option for families, but it’s an option many families will not be able to afford. The other option — which benefits the capitalists even more — is for parents to send their children back to school for hybrid learning, freeing up the parents to continue producing profit for the capitalists. These new “clarifications” on FFCRA paid leave create a win-win scenario for capitalists, and a lose-lose scenario for the working class. It’s yet another burden on people already suffering and struggling to make ends meet under the pandemic and economic crisis, but it’s a perfectly logical solution for a system built upon our backs.

Popular Radicalism in the 1930s: The History of the Workers’ Unemployment Insurance Bill

Fri, 18 Sep 2020 18:40:45 GMT

A revised version of this article originally appeared in Monthly Review Online

At a time when unemployment is skyrocketing and millions of out-of-work Americans have been abandoned by the federal government, it may be of interest to consider how an earlier generation responded to an even greater crisis, the Great Depression. In particular, we might draw inspiration from the remarkable story of the now-forgotten Workers’ Unemployment Insurance Bill that was introduced in Congress in 1934, 1935, and 1936.

Despite essentially no press coverage and extreme hostility from the business community and the Roosevelt administration, a popular movement developed in support of this bill that had been written by the Communist Party. The mass pressure that was brought to bear on Congress secured a stunning victory in the spring of 1935, when the bill became the first unemployment insurance plan in U.S. history to be recommended by a congressional committee (the House Labor Committee). It was defeated in the House — by a vote of 204 to 52 — but the widespread support for the bill was likely a factor in the easy passage later in 1935 of the relatively conservative Social Security Act, which laid the foundation for the (admittedly puny) American welfare state.

Aside from its direct legislative importance, the Workers’ Bill is of interest in that it shows just how left-wing vast swathes of the U.S. population were in the 1930s and can become when a political force emerges to articulate their grievances. Endorsed by over 3,500 local unions (and the conventions of several international unions and state bodies of the American Federation of Labor), the bill also had wide support from practically every unemployed organization in the country, fraternal lodges,, and groups representing veterans, farmers, people of color, women, and youth. Across the country, millions of citizens signed petitions and postcards in support of it. And this was all despite the active hostility of every sector of business and government.

It is puzzling, then, that historians have almost entirely overlooked the Workers’ Bill. For instance, in his book Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression, Alan Brinkley doesn’t devote a single sentence to it. Neither does Robert McElvaine in his standard history, The Great Depression: America, 1929–1941. David Kennedy devotes half a sentence to it in volume one of his Oxford history of the Depression and World War II, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War. Instead, the less sophisticated and less radical Townsend Plan for old-age insurance, which was proposed around the same time and was widely publicized in the press, tends to monopolize historians’ attention (only to be ridiculed). The neglect of the Workers’ Bill lends credence to a still-dominant interpretation of the American citizenry during the Depression and throughout its history, viz. as being relatively centrist, “individualistic,” and conservative, especially in comparison with the historically more “socialist” populations of Western Europe.

Brinkley sums up this strain of thinking derived from the postwar “liberal consensus” school of historiography, which still influences pundits, politicians, and academics:

The failure of more radical political movements to take root in the 1930s reflected, in part, the absence of a serious radical tradition in American political culture. The rhetoric of class conflict echoed only weakly among men and women steeped in the dominant themes of their nation’s history; and leaders relying upon that rhetoric faced grave, perhaps insuperable difficulties in attempting to create political coalitions.

This is a simplistic interpretation. For one thing, there is a serious radical tradition in American political culture, as embodied, for example, in the Populist movement of the 1890s and the Socialist Party and IWW of the early twentieth century. But even insofar as a case can be made that “the rhetoric of class conflict echoe[s]…weakly,” it is plausible to understand this fact as simply a reflection of the violent repression of class-based movements and parties throughout American history. When such movements have a chance to get their message out, they attract substantial support — precisely to the extent that they can get their message out. There is no need to invoke deep cultural traditions of individualism or a lack of popular understanding of class. One need only adduce the skewed distribution of resources, which prevents leftists from being heard.

In this article I’ll tell the story of the Workers’ Unemployment Insurance Bill, both to fill a gap in our historical knowledge and because it resonates in our own time of troubles and struggles.

Fighting for the Workers’ Bill

As soon as the Communist Party had unveiled its proposed Workers’ Unemployment Insurance Bill in the summer of 1930, as the Depression was just beginning, it garnered extensive support among large numbers of the unemployed. The reason isn’t hard to fathom: it envisioned an incredibly generous system of insurance. In the form it would eventually assume, it provided for unemployment insurance for workers and farmers (regardless of age, sex, or race) that was to be equal to average local wages but no less than $10 per week plus $3 for each dependent; people compelled to work part-time (because of inability to find full-time jobs) were to receive the difference between their earnings and the average local full-time wages; commissions directly elected by members of workers’ and farmers’ organizations were to administer the system; social insurance would be given to the sick and elderly, and maternity benefits would be paid eight weeks before and eight weeks after birth; and the system would be financed by unappropriated funds in the Treasury and by taxes on inheritances, gifts, and individual and corporate incomes above $5,000 a year. Later iterations of the bill went into greater detail on how the system would be financed and managed.

Had the Workers’ Bill ever been enacted, it would have revolutionized the American political economy. It was a much more authentically socialist plan than existed in the Soviet Union at the time, where only 35 percent of the customary wage was paid to those not working, and that for a limited time (unlike with the Workers’ Bill). Nor was the Soviet insurance system administered democratically by workers’ representatives.

The Communist Party’s policies in the 1930s are hardly above criticism, but this bill that the party wrote was surely a step in the right direction.

By 1934, when the bill had become widely enough known to be critically examined by economists and other intellectuals, it was frequently criticized for incentivizing malingering. Its defenders — and by then it was advocated by many left-wing economists, teachers, social workers, lawyers, engineers, and other professionals — replied that this supposed flaw was in fact a strength. By withdrawing workers from the labor market, it would force wage rates to rise until they at least equaled unemployment benefits. “The benefits to the unemployed,” economist Paul Douglas noted, “could thus be used as a lever to compel industry to pay a living wage to those who were employed.” It was the abolition of poverty and economic insecurity that was envisioned — by a frontal attack on such fundamentals of capitalism as the private appropriation of wealth, determination of wages by the market, and maintenance of an insecure army of the unemployed.

The Unemployed Councils were at the forefront of agitation for the proposed bill, but it was also publicized through other auxiliary organizations of the Communist Party, in addition to activists in unions. As mass demonstrations for unemployment relief became more frequent — daily “hunger marches” in cities across the country, occupations of state legislative chambers, marches on city halls, “eviction riots” — the demand for unemployment insurance echoed louder and farther every month. From Alaska to Texas, requests for petitions flooded into the New York office of the National Campaign Committee for Unemployment Insurance. United front conferences of Socialist and Communist workers’ organizations took place from New York City to Gary, Indiana and beyond. In February 1931 delegates presented the Workers’ Bill and its hundreds of thousands of signatures to Congress, which ignored them.

So activists continued drumming up support for the next few years. Hunger marchers in many states demanded that legislatures pass versions of the bill; two national hunger marches the Communist Party organized in December 1931 and 1932 gave the bill further publicity; delegates periodically presented more petitions to Congress, and campaigns were organized to mail postcards to legislators. Despite the fervent hostility and smear campaigns of the national AFL leadership, several thousand local unions eventually endorsed the bill, especially after it had been sponsored, in 1934, by Representative Ernest Lundeen of the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party. Its newfound national prominence in that year gave the movement greater momentum, and a new organization was founded to lend the bill intellectual respectability: the Inter-Professional Association for Social Insurance (IPA). Within a year the IPA had dozens of chapters and organizing committees around the country, as distinguished academics like Mary Van Kleeck of the Russell Sage Foundation proselytized for the bill in the press and before Congress.

Meanwhile, conferences of unemployed groups grew ever larger and more ambitious. For instance, in Chicago in September 1934, hundreds of delegates from such groups as the National Unemployed Leagues, the Illinois Workers Alliance, the Eastern Federation of Unemployed and Emergency Workers Union, and the Wisconsin Federation of Unemployed Leagues — in the aggregate claiming a membership of 750,000 — endorsed the Lundeen Bill (as it was now called) and made increasingly elaborate plans to pressure Congress for its passage.

Congress took essentially no action on the bill in 1934, so Lundeen reintroduced it in January 1935. This would become the year of the “Second New Deal,” when the Roosevelt administration turned left in response to massive discontent and disillusionment with its policies. Senator Huey Long had become a hero to millions by denouncing the wealthy and proposing his Share Our Wealth program, an implicit criticism of the New Deal’s conservatism. The “radio priest” Father Charles Coughlin had acquired heroic stature among yet more millions by constantly “talking about a living wage, about profits for the farmer, about government-protected labor unions,” as one journalist put it. “He insists that human rights be placed above property rights. He emphasizes the ‘wickedness’ of ‘private financialism and production for profit.’”

The tens of millions of people who flocked to the banners of Huey Long and Father Coughlin — not to mention the Communist Workers’ Bill (or Lundeen Bill) — put the lie to any interpretation of the American people as being irredeemably conservative or wedded to capitalism. During the Great Depression, arguably a majority wanted the U.S. to become, in effect, a radical social democracy, or a socialist democracy.

The hearings in 1935 that were held before the Labor subcommittee on the Lundeen Bill are a remarkable historical document, “probably the most unique document ever to appear in the Congressional record,” at least according to the executive secretary of the IPA. Eighty witnesses testified: industrial workers, farmers, veterans, professional workers, African-Americans, women, the foreign-born, and youth. “Probably never in American history,” an editor of the Nation wrote, “have the underprivileged had a better opportunity to present their case before Congress.” The aggregate of the testimonies amounted to a systematic indictment of American capitalism and the New Deal, and an impassioned defense of the radical alternative under consideration.

From the representative of the American Youth Congress, which comprised over two million young workers and students, to the representative of the United Council of Working-Class Women, which had 10,000 members, each testimony fleshed out the eminently class-conscious point of view of the people back home who had “gather[ed] up nickels and pennies which they [could] poorly spare” in order to send someone to plead their case before Congress. At the same time, the Social Security Act — known then as the Wagner-Lewis Bill, since it hadn’t been passed yet — was criticized as a cruel sham, “a proposal to set up little privileged groups in the sea of misery who would be content to sit on their small islands and watch the others drown” (to quote a professor at Smith College). What most Americans wanted, witnesses insisted, was the more universal plan embodied in the Lundeen Bill.

Interestingly, most congressmen on the subcommittee were sympathetic to this point of view. For instance, at one point the chairman, Matthew Dunn, interrupted a witness who was observing that all the members of Congress he had talked to had received far fewer cards and letters in support of the famous Townsend Plan — which the press was continually publicizing — than in support of the more radical Lundeen Bill. “I want to substantiate the statement you just made about the Townsend bill and about this bill,” Dunn said. “May I say that I do not believe I have received over a half dozen letters to support the Townsend bill… [But] I have received many letters and cards from all over the country asking me to give my utmost support in behalf of the Lundeen bill, H.R. 2827.”

Many of the letters congressmen received were probably in the vein of this one that was sent to Lundeen in the spring of 1935, when Congress was considering the three competing bills that have already been mentioned (the Wagner-Lewis, the Townsend, and the Lundeen):

The reason I am writing you is, that we Farmers [and] Industrial workers feel that you are the only Congressman and Representative that is working for our interest. We have analyzed the Wagner-Lewis Bill [and] also [the] Townsend Bill. But the Lundeen H.R. (2827) is the only bill that means anything for our class… The people all over the country are [waking] up to the facts that the two old Political Parties are owned soul, mind [and] body by the Capitalist Class.

As stated above, while the House Labor Committee recommended the Lundeen Bill, it was — inevitably — defeated in the House. Being opposed by all the dominant interests in the country, it never had a chance of passage. But as far as its advocates were concerned, the fight was not over. Throughout the spring and summer of 1935 the flood of endorsements did not let up. The first national convention of rank-and-file social workers endorsed it in February; the Progressive Miners of America followed, along with scores of local unions and such ethnic societies as the Italian-American Democratic Organization of New York (with 235,000 members) and the Slovak-American Political Federation of Youngstown, Ohio. Virtually identical state versions of H.R. 2827 were, or already had been, introduced in the legislatures of California, Oregon, Utah, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and other states. Conferences of unions and fraternal organizations were called in a number of states to plan further campaigns for the Workers’ Bill.

In January 1936, Representative Lundeen introduced the bill yet again, this time joined by Republican Senator Lynn Frazier of North Dakota. It didn’t even make it out of committee this year, and was never introduced again.

Despite its failure, the Workers’ Unemployment Insurance Bill was a significant episode in the 1930s that deserves to be remembered. Both substantively and in its popularity, a case can be made that it was more significant than the Social Security Act and the Townsend Plan, its two main competitors.

Addressing the Working Class

As a coda to this forgotten story, which reinforces the lesson that most working-class Americans were and are quite left-wing in many of their values and beliefs, we might consider an unusual incident that occurred in March 1936. Earl Browder, head of the American Communist party, was, bizarrely, invited by CBS to speak for fifteen minutes (at 10:45 p.m.) on a national radio broadcast.

He seized the opportunity for this national spotlight and appealed to “the majority of the toiling people” to establish a national Farmer-Labor Party that would be affiliated with the Communist Party, though it “would not yet take up the full program of socialism, for which many are not yet prepared.” He even declared that Communists’ ultimate aim was to remake the U.S. “along the lines of the highly successful Soviet Union”: once they had the support of a majority of Americans, he said, “we will put that program into effect with the same firmness, the same determination, with which Washington and the founding fathers carried through the revolution that established our country, with the same thoroughness with which Lincoln abolished chattel slavery.”

According to both CBS and the Daily Worker, reactions to Browder’s talk were almost uniformly positive. CBS immediately received several hundred responses praising the speech, and the Daily Worker, whose New York address Browder had mentioned on the air, received thousands of letters. The following are representative:

Chattanooga, Tennessee: “If you could have listened to the people I know who listened to you, you would have learned that your speech did much to make them realize the importance of forming a Farmer-Labor Party. I am sure that the 15 minutes into which you put so much that is vitally important to the American people was time used to great advantage. Many people are thanking you, I know.”

Evanston, Illinois: “Just listened to your speech tonight and I think it was the truest talk I ever heard on the radio. Mr. Browder, would it not be a good thing if you would have an opportunity to talk to the people of the U.S.A. at least once a week, for 30 to 60 minutes? Let’s hear from you some more, Mr. Browder.”

Sparkes, Nebraska: “Would you send me 50 copies of your speech over the radio last night? I would like to give them to some of my neighbors who are all farmers.”

Arena, New York: “Although I am a young Republican (but good American citizen) I enjoyed listening to your radio speech last evening. I believe you told the truth in a convincing manner and I failed to see where you said anything dangerous to the welfare of the American people.”

Julesburg, Colorado: “Heard your talk… It was great. Would like a copy of same, also other dope on your party. It is due time we take a hand in things or there will be no United States left in a few more years. Will be looking forward for this dope and also your address.”

In general, the main themes of the letters were questions like: “Where can I learn more about the Communist Party?”, “How can I join your Party?”, and “Where is your nearest headquarters?” Some people sent money in the hope that it would facilitate more broadcasts. The editors of the Daily Worker plaintively asked their readers, “Isn’t it time we overhauled our old horse-and-buggy methods of recruiting? While we are recruiting by ones and twos, aren’t we overlooking hundreds?” Again, one can only imagine how many millions of people in far-flung regions would have been quickly radicalized had left-wing leaders been permitted the national radio audience that Huey Long and Father Coughlin were.

But such is the history of workers and marginalized groups in the U.S.: elite efforts to suppress the political agenda and the voices of the downtrodden have all too often succeeded, thereby wiping out the memory of popular struggles. If we can resurrect such stories as that of the Workers’ Bill, they may prove of use in our own age of crisis, as new struggles against authoritarianism begin.

Denver BLM Activists and PSL Members Arrested, Charged with Multiple Felonies

Fri, 18 Sep 2020 15:09:35 GMT

On September 17, six protest leaders, including four members of the Party of Socialism and Liberation, were arrested in Denver, Colorado in a coordinated police action. Those arrested are now being threatened with a litany of bogus felony charges, including “kidnapping.” Four of the arrested individuals — Russel Ruch, Lillian House, Joel Northam, and Eliza Lucero — are protest leaders who have denounced the crimes of the Colorado police, most notably the racist murder of Elijah McClain. The repression against these activists, and many others, is nothing short of police-state retribution. As a PSL statement noted,

“This attack on the Denver anti-racist movement and the PSL is part of a concerted national assault on the Black Lives Matter movement, an attack driven directly from the White House, from Governor’s mansions, and from local police chiefs and police departments around the country.”

It is clear from the manner of the arrests that the Denver area police are trying to punish and intimidate activists. Russel Ruch, for instance, was followed to Home Depot and arrested in the parking lot; Lillian House was surrounded by five police cars as she was driving; and a S.W.A.T team was sent to Joel Northam’s home. According to the 30-page long arrest affidavits, the police used livestream footage, call transcripts, and social media posts to build a case against those arrested. These coordinated arrests, which utilized both surveillance and brute force, aim to instill fear in every Denver area activist. “Protest, and you could be next” is the message being sent. And the absurd list of felony charges, known as “charge stacking,” means the arrested activists could be facing years, if not decades, in prison.

The arrest of these protest leaders in Denver are part of a larger nationwide crack-down on the Black Lives Matter movement. Across the country, protesters have been snatched off the streets by the police or federal forces in unmarked vehicles. In New York City, the NYPD used facial-recognition software to find and harass a Black Lives Matter activist. And earlier this month, in Washington, federal marshals gunned down Portland activist Michael Reinoehl without warning as he walked to his car.

Left Voice denounces the attempts to repress or otherwise intimidate anti-racist, anti-police activists. It is unacceptable that the state, under direction from both Republican and Democratic Party leaders, targets and intimidates activists fighting for racial justice, while the murderers of Elijah McClain, Breonna Taylor and many more walk free. The real threat to public safety can be found in every police precinct, every city hall, and every seat of political power.

Drop the charges against Denver PSL activists — Free all the arrested protesters!

To sign the PSL’s petition to have the charges dropped, click here
To donate to the PSL’s legal defense, click here

1,800 North Carolina Nurses Go Union in Landslide Victory

Thu, 17 Sep 2020 20:33:11 GMT

National Nurses United (NNU) — indeed, the entire labor movement — won a huge victory today in Asheville, North Carolina. Results of a union certification election were announced early this morning, and some 1,800 nurses at Mission Hospital will now be represented by the union. It comes at a moment of growing union combativity after decades of decline and complacency. And for healthcare workers fighting on the front lines against the coronavirus pandemic, it is especially significant.

Could this be an augur of things to come? Organizing the organized is of central importance in the fightback against the bosses, and especially in the midst of the deepening economic downturn that the capitalists aim to put on the backs of the working class.

Mission Hospital is owned by HCA Healthcare, the largest hospital corporation in the United States. It’s the company once run by Senator Rick Scott of Florida, who as CEO presided over the largest Medicare fraud in U.S. history — HCA pleaded guilty in 2000 and paid $1.7 billion in fines. More recently, HCA has been receiving money from the government — our money — in the form of nearly $1.5 billion in pandemic-related CARES Act grants, with much more likely to come.

Installing a nurses union in an HCA hospital is a big deal. Fewer than 40 of the company’s 184 hospitals have any unions at all. Unions don’t just benefit nurses but are also a boon to the healthcare system as a whole. In addition to helping secure and protect better wages, benefits, and working conditions for the nurses themselves, the existence of a nurses’ union routinely leads to greater productivity, better training, less turnover, and nurses staying at the hospital longer — all of which benefit patients.¹

Management Intimidation

HCA acquired Mission Hospital in February 2019 in a corporate takeover of what had been a community hospital. Nurses and the community noted a rapid decline in patient care conditions in the next few months, and the nurses began their drive for union representation. The hospital is the only acute care facility in the area.

HCA pulled out all the stops to keep the nurses’ union out. The company went above and beyond the usual hiring of $400-an-hour union-busting law firms and consultants to sway the vote through intimidation and other means — including meetings inside the hospital nurses were required to attend. HCA used the pandemic itself to undermine the union election. When nurses filed with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) in March, the company petitioned the NLRB to delay the vote because of coronavirus.

The Trump administration was complicit, having revised NLRB rules to make such “pandemic delays” petitions permissible from the bosses. Nurses had to wait months to vote instead of just a few weeks, and management took advantage of the extra time to up the efforts to squash the organizing effort. But in the end, it failed: Mission nurses voted overwhelmingly, 965 to 411, in favor of the union — a 70 percent landslide.

In a press release issued today, the NNU said the victory at Mission Hospital is “the first private sector hospital union election win in North Carolina” and “the largest at any nonunion hospital in the South since 1975.” And “For labor as a whole, it is also believed to be the largest union election win in the South in 12 years.”

Unionize the South!

The importance of union breakthroughs in the South cannot be overstated. It is the least-unionized part of the United States — a legacy that exists for complex reasons that include so-called “right-to-work” laws that destroy the collective power of bargaining units when unions do win certification elections, along with the collusion of the church and state in the country’s most conservative region to paint unionization as somehow “anti-American” and “socialist.” South Carolina and North Carolina have the lowest unionization rates in the United States, at 2.2 and 2.3 percent of the workforce, respectively. By comparison, Hawaii and New York, the most unionized states, stand at 23.5 and 21.0 percent, respectively.²

Nurses at Mission, said the NNU, “endured months of delay before the election was held in a state with the second lowest unionization rate in the country. They confronted a regulatory climate hostile to unions and workers’ rights passed down by corporate interests and the Trump administration. They also faced the added challenge of conducting a huge union organizing campaign in the midst of the most dangerous pandemic in a century.”

The Mission Hospital nurses and their union persevered, at a critical moment for the labor movement and the working class as a whole. They are an example to all of us of the fighting spirit that needs to be imbued in the unions right now, to build a strong, independent, class-based fightback against the bosses.

Lesley Bruce, a Mission RN, put it well in the NNU press release. “We’re all thrilled that we’ve finally won. … This victory means we can use our collective voice to advocate for patient safety and safer staffing. I can’t wait to see what improvement we’ll win together.”

Notes [ + ]

1.	↑	Dale Belman, “Unions, the Quality of Labor Relations, and Firm Performance,” Unions and Economic Competitiveness (1992): 41–107.
2.	↑	U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Union Members Summary,” Economic News Release, January 22, 2020.

The West Coast Is Not Alone: Mass Fires Rage in Brazil

Thu, 17 Sep 2020 17:42:13 GMT

As the sky turns red across the West Coast and the effects of the massive forest fires are felt across the country, there is a less-talked-about fire raging right now. This one is in the Pantanal of Brazil, or the Brazilian wetlands. The area burning is near Brazil’s western border with Bolivia and Paraguay. It has been on fire since mid-July. An area bigger than New York City has been charred: more about 5 million acres.

The Pantanal is the world’s largest wetland. It is home to thousands of indigenous people — many of whom continue to live off the rich resources of the land. It’s also home to wildlife, including the jaguar, the capybara, rare birds, and more. The Panatal is home to 1,200 vertebrate animal species, including 36 that are endangered. The images are startling: forest animals caught in the flames, walking bewildered in the ashes. Their lungs are full of smoke. There is no food.

So far this year, there have been 2,534 recorded fires in the Pantanal. That is more than double the number of fires in all of Brazil recorded last year. They are the most numerous and largest fires recorded in the country in decades.

These fires result from the warming temperatures caused by climate change. Floods that used to cool the region and help control forest fires are long gone. Scientists blame this on the warming of the Atlantic Ocean.

But these fires are not just a result of climate change; they were set on purpose. According to the Integrated Multiagency Operational Coordination Center (Ciman-MT), people are setting the fires to clear a pasture area for cattle. And beef is a Brazilian cash crop that creates huge profits for local and foreign agribusiness, which has long played a central role in destroying Brazilian natural resources.

The sector of the bourgeoisie represented by agribusiness pressures governments to further deforestation in order to guarantee grazing areas for cattle and plantations. In fact, as Brazilian socialist Leticia Parks explains, the large lands owned by agribusiness have not been touched by the fires — which were set strategically.

This is part of a conscious attack on indigenous people and the environment. In fact, under the administration of President Jair Bolsonaro, attacks on indigenous people have increased. These fires are just another attack.

The fires are a direct result of government policies. In 2020, in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul alone, where 65 percent of the Pantanal is located, fines for deforestation and illegal burning decreased by 22 percent compared to the same period in 2019. From the beginning of the year to September 14, 50 vegetation-related fines were imposed, while in the previous year this number was 64. The workers at Ibama, the Brazilian Institute of the Environment, have denounced the lack of inspections — it is clear that the agency is bending to political pressure. Yet workers who have spoken out have been prosecuted by the Bolsonaro government.

As Parks, who is running for City Council in São Paulo, says, “This is a policy of extermination. … Indigenous people have the right to self-determination, and the working class stands side by side with them in defending the environment and land. In order to save the environment, we need to overthrow the Bolsonaro government as well as this system that exploits the planet and the working class. We want to change the system.”

Support Imane Boun — Harassed by the Right With Government Support!

Thu, 17 Sep 2020 17:03:25 GMT

On September 11, a wave of Islamophobic attacks began to be unleashed against Imane Boun, a precarious Algerian-born French student known for offering low-budget recipe ideas on Instagram. The assault came in the form of a murderous tweet by Judith Waintraub, a journalist for Le Figaro, France’s oldest national daily newspaper, with the largest circulation of any in the country.¹ Waintraub dared to equate Boun with the terrorist attacks of “September 11” because she wears a headscarf.

Waintraub’s tweet aroused the anger of many on social media, with thousands of reactions denouncing her hateful remarks. But a large swath of the political and media class came to Waintraub’s defense, especially after some of the denunciations of her were characterized as death threats. These defenders included many leading figures: Aurore Bergé, a member of the French National Assembly and close ally of President Emmanuel Macron; Gérald Darmanin, France’s minister of the interior; Manuel Valls, prime minister of France from 2014 to 2015; French Senate president Gérard Larcher; and Zineb El Rhazoui, a Moroccan-born French journalist and former columnist for Charlie Hebdo.² The media that covered the affair were similarly defensive of Waintraub, including Le Parisien, Le Figaro, HuffPost, and LCI. For her part, Imane, faced with the outpouring of hatred triggered by the journalist’s tweet, deleted her Twitter account after thanking her many anonymous supporters.

This racist attack against a student is unacceptable. We condemn it.

In the context of Macron’s security offensive, this attack perfectly illustrates the reactionary climate the government, the right wing, and the extreme Right are seeking to impose in France. At a moment when a bill against “separatism” is being prepared that is aimed primarily at Muslims, the politicians and the mainstream media are ready to use any means to advance this dynamic.

Last year, Emmanuel Macron launched open hostilities against Muslims by calling for the expulsion of the “Islamist hydra.” This was followed by a period of Islamophobic tension that culminated in the attacks on the mosque in Bayonne,³ and then the historic demonstration against Islamophobia that brought out more than 20,000 marchers in Paris on November 10, 2019.

As a new period opens in the security offensive, we cannot just wait for renewed attacks by the extreme Right or the establishment of some system of legal exceptions for Muslims. All the organizations of the Left and far Left, along with the trade unions, must take a stand and denounce this attack, but also open a discussion on how we can create a collective response to the racist policies of the government and its many allies.

First published on September 15 in French in Révolution Permanente.

Translation: Scott Cooper

Notes [ + ]

1.	↑	Translator’s note: Le Figaro’s editorial line is typically characterized as “center-right,” and the newspaper is notorious for its hostile views regarding immigrants.
2.	↑	Translator’s note: Rhazoui, who is a vocal critic of Islam, notably told one media outlet, “We investigated the ideological background of young Imane, and obviously — like all those who insist on pushing the right to wear the veil — she is an Islamist activist, proselytizing and extremely radical.
3.	↑	Translator’s note: On October 28, 2019, an elderly man tried to set fire to a mosque in the southwestern town of Bayonne. He was interrupted by two men, who he then shot and seriously injured.

On Neuralink: Elon Musk, Neurodevices, and Their Implications

Thu, 17 Sep 2020 13:50:28 GMT

Elon Musk is not known for his modesty, and Neuralink, his move from rocketry into neurotechnology, is being presented with all his characteristic hype. Essentially, Neuralink is a relatively small flexible mat (described as the size of four dollar coins) into which 1,024 fine electrodes are woven. With the mat stitched into the brain, the electrodes are able to record the electrical signals from the groups of neurons with which they make contact. These signals, via a computer interface, might be able to drive prosthetic limbs or other external devices. But Musk’s claims go further, suggesting that in due course the device will be able to treat mental illness, read thoughts, and ultimately fuse a person’s consciousness with the power of the computer, a form of bio-artificial intelligence – the transhumanists’ wet dream and bioethicists and philosophers’ nightmares.

Time for a reality check. Musk’s device, in terms of the number and size of the number of electrodes it contains, is indeed a step up from those currently in use, which hold 64 electrodes. But this is a technical, not a conceptual advance. The goal of being able to read and interpret the brain’s electrical language, and to use these signals to manipulate objects in the external world, or reciprocally, to change a person’s thoughts or behavior by using the electrodes to drive the neurons, is not new, but dates back to the early days of neuroscience. Back in the 1960s neurophysiologists were planning implants of electrodes into the visual cortex, hopefully to help the blind to see, whilst one flamboyant Spanish researcher (Jose Delgado) implanted radio-controlled electrodes into the motor cortex of a bull, and dressed in bullfighter kit, entered the ring with it. He filmed the charging bull being stopped in its tracks by the radio signals, and claimed that the technology would open the door to a ‘psychocivilised society.’

Technology has advanced way beyond these early efforts, financed extensively by military agencies like DARPA. On the one hand, there has been the pressing need to find medical treatments for the large numbers of US soldiers returning from Afghanistan and Iraq brain damaged by having been blown up by the roadside IEDs. On the other, DARPA seeks to use brain-computer interfaces to enhance the brain power and speed of decision making for its ‘war fighters’ while also looking for microwave technologies that might be powerful enough to disorient their enemies. As usual, technological advance both reflects and helps shape the social order in which it is embedded.

These are among the drivers which have made possible the brain implant systems in use today; technologies which are also rapidly finding civilian clinical uses. Brain computer interfaces coupled with well engineered artificial limbs enable the lame to walk, though not yet the blind to see. Deep brain electrical stimulation through implanted electrodes is now a standard procedure in the treatment of Parkinsonism, and transcranial magnetic stimulation can be effective in treating depression. One could envisage a medical future where having a brain implant is no more remarkable than having a heart pacemaker. In that sense, many of us in the privileged developed world (myself included) are already bionic. My pacemaker is simultaneously an alien object embedded in my chest, and also functionally part of my identity as much as my bio-heart is. But this is far from approaching Musk’s (or Delgado’s) promethean promises.

To see why, remember that rocket science – or electric cars – are human made devices whose functional mechanisms and engineering and theoretical underpinnings are well understood. By contrast, brains and the bodies in which they are embedded are dynamic, evolved, and constantly changing systems. At whatever scale their workings are studied, from the single nerve cell or synaptic junction to the ten billion neurons and hundred trillion synapses packed into the kilo and a half of the brain, we still have no theory by which we can understand how brain processes translate into human consciousness. Artificial intelligence is just that – artificial, and to speak of computers as conscious is to mistake a metaphor for a statement of identity.

This is of course a well-worn debate within the neurosciences, and I doubt whether 1,024 electrodes, any more than 64, will resolve it. Musk’s shareholders presumably think differently; paper fortunes will go on being made as share prices boom; clinical developments will probably occur – and any technology which helps overcome the human costs of brain injury and mental distress should be (cautiously) welcomed while being on our guard against the dystopian threats of becoming zombies controlled through implanted electrodes or chips.

For the Planet, There Is No "Lesser Evil”

Wed, 16 Sep 2020 21:14:26 GMT

By now, most people in the United States recognize that the climate crisis poses the greatest threat to humanity and nature. Faced with a president who continually dismisses the dangers of global warming and has taken numerous measures to expand fossil fuel production, many progressives and even some on the Left have declared the need to vote for Biden as the “lesser evil” in November. Noam Chomsky went so far as to label the Republicans “the most dangerous organization in human history” because of Trump’s aggressive pro-fossil fuel agenda. Chomsky pleads for those on the Left to cast their vote for Biden.

But what will change if Joe Biden is in the White House?

Each season brings new and more severe manifestations of our rapidly warming planet. California is experiencing its largest wildfire season ever. More than 4.5 million acres have burned — that’s more than twice the previous record. Half of the 10 largest fires in California’s history have happened this year. While the West Coast burns, the East Coast is being pummeled by unprecedented storms.

This year began with equally horrific fires in Australia. Millions of Californians, like tens of millions of others around the world, are feeling the impact of climate change each day.

We know the author of this destruction. It is the responsibility of an anarchic and reckless economic system: capitalism. And the world’s largest capitalist power, the United States, is chiefly to blame. Democrats would have you believe that it was solely the Trump and Bush administrations that pushed an anti-climate agenda. In fact, the climate crisis we are experiencing is the result of decades of bipartisan policy directed at extracting and burning the greatest amount of fossil fuels.

We do not deny Trump’s criminal actions toward climate and nature. He withdrew from the Paris Climate Agreement, and has weakened regulations on oil and gas drilling and on emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases. (In fact, as the crisis has led to a massive drop in oil prices, emissions of methane gas, which is especially damaging to the climate, have exploded.) Trump lifted various drilling bans in place in Alaska and on other protected public lands.

These actions, apologists for the Democratic Party say, are reason enough to vote Biden. But a look at the record of the Democrats, particularly the Obama Administration, makes clear what a Biden administration is likely to do. While Biden’s agenda is not as brazen as Trump’s, a Biden presidency would keep us on the current path toward catastrophic levels of warming.

Crude oil production increased each year that Obama was president, a fact about which he seemed extremely proud. In 2012, Obama bragged that his administration had already helped build enough oil and gas pipelines to “encircle the Earth and then some.” By the end of his eight years in office, oil production had increased by more than 80 percent. Obama also oversaw a continuing boom in natural gas extraction, based largely on an expansion of fracking.

Obama touted the Paris Agreement as an international treaty that would limit carbon emission. But it was never more than tepid and largely symbolic. At the COP21 in Paris, it was the United States under Obama that blocked any language suggesting binding targets for reductions. Instead, each government was allowed to set its own “national” goals with no consequences for exceeding targets. And even if all countries do comply with their voluntary goals, which most never even seriously attempted, it would not keep global warming under 2°C — a point at which climate change becomes irreversible. Taken together, the so-called Intended Nationally Determined Contributions would lead to warming as high as 3°C.

Obama was not the only Democratic president to neglect the climate change emergency. Under Clinton, greenhouse gas emissions rose by an estimated 700 million metric tonnes — far more than during the terms of either his Republican predecessor or successor. During Bush II’s two terms, in comparison, emissions went up less than half that amount — 235 million tonnes.

Have things changed since then? Unfortunately not. Biden still fails to call for the kind of rapid economic transformation necessary to prevent the worst effects of climate change. One of the most notable things in the Democratic Party platform released this summer was the removal of a promise to end fossil fuel subsidies — although Biden had to recommit the following day when confronted with outrage from voters. While he has refused to endorse the Green New Deal by name, he touts a $2 trillion climate plan that supporters have called “transformative.”But crucially, this plan is based on continued private ownership of industry and the so-called “free market,” relying on mechanisms such as carbon trading and corporate subsidies. Biden is offering a neoliberal version of the Green New Deal, which itself is not nearly far-reaching enough to confront the severity of the crisis we face.

The crises confronting humanity are unprecedented. People in the Pacific Northwest need N95 masks to go outside, not only to protect themselves against a deadly virus but also to block the smoke and ash in the air from the raging wildfires. These dystopian scenes promise to become more frequent each year. Climate change is a reality that will soon come to govern our daily lives in the form of wildfires, hurricanes, rising seas, droughts, and floods. Meanwhile, the Democrats offer us a candidate who promises billionaires that “nothing will fundamentally change” if he is elected.

For once, we can assume Biden is telling the truth. Humanity’s only chance for survival is radical change to our economic system. We need a planned economy under democratic control that transitions immediately away from fossil fuels in order to halt the destruction. The planet can’t afford the “lesser evil.”

The Fight to Kick Cops Out of Unions Is a Fight Against the Union Bureaucracy

Wed, 16 Sep 2020 18:29:13 GMT

In the eight minutes and 46 seconds that Derek Chauvin had his knee on George Floyd’s neck, a long-standing truth became undeniable: that the police exist to protect not people but private property, and that they do this at the expense of working people, particularly Black and Brown folks and other marginalized identities. The police are not subject to the same “justice” they inflict on working people at gunpoint or with a knee on the neck. Floyd’s death, and the deaths of those before and after him, threw the capitalist state into the spotlight, laying bare its contradictions for the working class and oppressed to see.

Against a backdrop of pandemic and economic crisis, the anti-racist movement that Floyd’s death sparked, a movement led by a vanguard of radicalized Black youth, has drawn broad sectors into the streets day after day to face off against this state. In the last four months, the biggest protest movement in the United States’ history has ripped back the layers of racism and exploitation wrapped around capitalism’s rotten core.

One of the contradictions revealed by the movement is the role that police unions play in enabling cops to beat, harass, and kill with impunity. The labor movement’s efforts to expose the vital work that police unions do to protect the guard dogs of capital have implicated the leaderships of the country’s largest unions, showing the part that the union bureaucracy plays in converting one of the most powerful weapons of the working class into a tool of capitalist subjugation.

Police, Cop Unions, and Class Antagonisms

If the police exist in capitalist society to protect social, political, and economic relations in favor of the ruling class — those who have a monopoly on wealth, property, power, and violence — then cop unions exist to protect police in this role as the armed wing of the capitalist state.

As Lenin put it in The State and Revolution, “The state is a product and a manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms.” In our own society, the capitalist state in its various forms emerged from the conflicting interests between those who own both the things we need to survive and what we need to produce them, and those of us who produce those things and are forced to sell our labor to gain access to them. By their very nature, these class differences cannot be resolved: the ruling class maintains its place in society through the systematic exploitation and immiseration of the working class along multiple lines.

The state — made up of government, laws, the bureaucracy, the army, the police, and various other institutions — enforces these class differences. As Lenin continues, “The state is an organ of class rule, an organ for the oppression of one class by another; it is the creation of ‘order,’ which legalizes and perpetuates this oppression by moderating the conflict between the classes.” In other words, the state mediates the irreconcilable antagonisms that exist between classes by combining both concession and repression. The police exist to carry out the latter.

In the United States, this repression takes on a particularly racist character. Modern-day police departments emerged from the process of industrialization and later the abolition of slavery, which required a separate, systematized force of armed guards to protect private property and keep the working class in line. In the South, slave patrols evolved into full-time police forces to enforce Black Codes and keep Black people subject to incredible exploitation at the hands of bosses even after the formal bonds of slavery were broken. From its inception, policing has existed to guard the interests of the bourgeoisie, enforcing the antagonisms engendered by capitalism. It does so by protecting private property (criminalizing theft and trespassing) and by dividing the working class along racial lines (by disproportionately and systematically policing Black and Brown people).

In carrying out this role, the police exist as an entity “above” society, an entity that requires special methods and authority to impose order on society where there are none. Consequently, as Lenin explains, quoting Engels, “Special laws are enacted proclaiming the sanctity and immunity of the officials.” This ranges from qualified immunity, which ensures that police are not subject to the same laws as the rest of society, to the emergence of police unions in the late 19th century.

Cop unions developed as a way of normalizing and formalizing the function of police in society as the guard dogs of capital against the working class. Their mandate is to make sure that the police can do their job without facing legal or economic repercussions. Cop contracts are negotiated with this guiding principle in mind, ensuring ample protections and funds for cops who come under scrutiny. For example, many cop contracts give cops the ability to appeal complaints — including instances of brutality — at multiple levels with union-appointed arbitrators. This allows the union disproportionate control over the grievance process, ensuring that it resolves in favor of cops who are then put back onto the streets to harass working people. In fact, cops who are organized in unions have more complaints issued against them than cops who do not organize in unions, and they are far less likely to see those complaints sustained.

Further, police unions fundraise for cop-friendly politicians who in turn refuse to prosecute killer cops or pursue cases of police brutality, and who protect the interests of the cops at the highest levels of the U.S. government. For example. “Top Cop” Kamala Harris was endorsed by San Francisco’s police union in her campaign for district attorney in 2003; during her tenure as DA she routinely refused to intervene in police brutality cases. The International Union of Police Associations, which organizes in the federation, endorsed Donald Trump’s reelection campaign in late 2019, citing his support for increased police funding and other pro-cop reforms. And last month, in the middle of the uprising against police brutality, the NYPD’s union announced its wholehearted endorsement of Trump, saying: “We’re fighting for our lives out there. … We need your strong voice across the country. … You’ve earned this endorsement. [We’re] proud to give it.” These endorsements, along with the millions of dollars in campaign donations and lobbying efforts to push pro-cop legislation in Congress, allow cop unions to prevent even the most milquetoast attempts at police reform. Cop unions make what little accountability the justice system pretends to enforce impossible to pursue, and they actively work against any attempt within the labor movement to organize against police violence.

Although most cops organize in independent organizations, cop unions represent a small but influential minority in the country’s largest unions, organizing alongside the same workers they harass and arrest. They represent a constant rightward pressure within the labor movement that union leaderships have proved time and time again unwilling to challenge, against the interests and efforts of rank-and-file union members.

In this way, police unions equip the cops with privileges that the working class does not and cannot share. Though cops may organize in the same organizations as janitors, teachers, and nurses, only police unions can spend union money to prevent their members from going to jail for murder or assault. This stems not from police union staffers’ particular organizing prowess, but from the function that the police perform in capitalist society. Capitalism needs the police to function — to protect and serve the haves at the expense of the have-nots. Police unions allow them to carry out this task with the consent of the working class, erasing class lines and blunting one of the most important weapons of the working class in favor of the bourgeois state.

Cops in Unions and the Extension of the State

Though police in the United States have developed their own organizations to protect their interests since the late 19th century, their entry and participation in the wider labor movement is a more recent development. For example, the International Union of Police Associations (IUPA) entered the AFL-CIO only in 1979; the International Brotherhood of Police Officers became an affiliate of SEIU only in 1982.

This is part of a larger process of a bureaucratization and “statization” of the organizations of the working class that began in the early 20th century and was revitalized once again with the advent of the neoliberal era and the retreat of the labor movement in the second half of the 20th century. Along with the vast expansion of the union bureaucracy and its direct ties to the state, the organization of cops within unions of workers is one more avenue through which the state encroaches on the terrain of the working class and gains wider influence and power, restricting the ability of working class movements to maneuver and organize. It opens a space for the state to use the labor movement to act in its own interests out in the open, hand in hand with union leaderships.

In his Prison Notebooks, Antonio Gramsci described this process as an “extension” of the state beyond the bounds of the “apparatus” of government and its institutions into broader sections of civil society, including organizations that are organic to the working class, like unions. As Matías Maiello and Emilio Albamonte explain in Socialist Strategy and Military Art, “The powerful emergence of the workers’ movement with its organizations in the 20th century, and especially the triumph of the October Revolution, transformed the political structures of domination of the bourgeoisie with respect to the previous model of the ‘Liberal state.’” In other words, the expansion of the state was a reaction to the massive proliferation of workers’ organizations and the labor movement in the 20th century; this is most clearly manifested in the bureaucratization and nationalization of unions.

As Maiello and Albamonte go on to explain, a similar process took place in the latter half of the 20th century. The development of capitalism in the neoliberal era and in the wake of the degeneration of the workers’ states led to both the further expansion and division of the working class, which resulted in the further corruption or statization of workers’ organizations into “direct agents of the neoliberal ‘counter-reforms’” and the evolution of new forms of bureaucratization, including the emergence of cop unions and later their incursion into larger federations of workers. This marked a huge leap forward in the expansion of the state into the workers’ movement.

The organization of cops in unions paves the way for the police to repress the working class with the consent of labor leaders. Characterizing cops as workers, it erases the lines between the allies of the working class and its enemies. But more than that, the organization of cops in unions is a direct intrusion by the state into one of the most strategically important tools that the working class has to organize and fight for its interests against the bosses, the state, and capitalism itself. It artificially equates the interests of workers with the interests of the state, the foremost mechanism of the working class’s oppression under capitalism.

Two Sides of the Same Capitalist Coin

The part the union bureaucracy plays in this process cannot be understated. As Trotsky wrote, “There is one common feature in the development, or more correctly the degeneration, of modern trade union organizations in the entire world: it is their drawing closely to and growing together with the state power.”

We see this in every aspect of the stranglehold that the union bureaucracy has on unions across the country, from the large salaries union bureaucrats rake in every year to the massive amounts of money and resources unions funnel back into the state proper, mostly in the form of unions’ donations to the Democratic Party. While less than one-tenth of the AFL-CIO’s budget goes toward organizing more workers in unions, for example, over 35 percent of its funds are directed toward political activities: these include lobbying, campaigning, endorsing, and donating to Democratic Party politicians who have ensured the steady decline of the labor movement hand in hand with Republicans. Rather than organizing workers to fight independently for their interests, union leaders funnel energy back into legitimizing the state, reinforcing the logic that class divisions don’t exist and that one bourgeois party or this or that bourgeois politician can fight in the interests of working people.

The presence and power of cop unions is just one more example of the ties the union bureaucracy has to the state. It’s not just that unions want to keep hold of their membership numbers and dues among the coveted public sector. Having cops in unions shifts the balance of forces in favor of the bourgeoisie, obscuring class distinctions and further dividing and delegitimizing the labor movement. It ties the fates of workers to their oppressors, undermining efforts to organize independently of them and ensuring their continued exploitation.

When rank-and-file members of Writers Guild of America, East, passed a resolution to kick the International Union of Police Associations (IUPA) out of the AFL-CIO, its efforts were blocked by the union federation’s leadership at every level. As the board of the AFL-CIO said in a response to the resolution,

We believe the best way to use our influence on the issue of police brutality is to engage our police affiliates rather than isolate them. Many of our unions have adopted a code of excellence for their members and industries that could and should be applied to those who are sworn to protect and serve. … We believe the labor movement must hold our own institutions accountable.

At once blocking the resolution to disaffiliate the IUPA and doubling down on the argument that cops are workers too, the union bureaucracy is standing in the way of the labor movement’s participation in the national movement against police brutality and institutionalized racism. Meanwhile, police organizations are holding their own “Blue Lives Matter” counterprotests, standing up for white supremacy and attracting and emboldening the Far Right.

But this complicity on behalf of the union bureaucracy should come as no surprise. Its refusal to recognize that cops are not workers, and moreover, its insistence on fighting to protect the rights of cops to organize, reveals the role the union bureaucracy plays in society: to mediate class conflict in capitalists’ favor and defang workers’ struggles. Consequently, the fight to kick cops out unions is a fight against the union bureaucracy and vice versa.

A Fight for Hegemony within the Labor Movement

Put simply, kicking cops out of unions is an existential question for the labor movement, one that has been brought to the fore by the Black Lives Matter movement, and as the economic crisis intensifies, this question is becoming increasingly urgent. The outpouring of rage that has rocked the United States for the past four months has forced the labor movement to look inward and to challenge the notion that cops are part of the working class. But it has also created a countertendency from within, backed up by the unions and bureaucracies that fight to protect the police.

Despite their statements of solidarity, union leaders across the country have shown that their allegiance lies not with the rank-and-file members who suffer daily at the hands of police terror, but with the state that engenders that violence. And so the fight to kick cops out of unions is a fight for leadership within unions: will unions be tools of the capitalist state to pacify the labor movement, or will they struggle to become independent fighting bodies of the working class that organize against racism, sexism, homophobia, and all capitalist oppression, wherever it appears?

Kicking cops out of unions is an essential step in forcing the state to retreat from the labor movement and in regaining a foothold for the working class from which organize, unify, and fight back against capitalist attacks. Expelling cops from the organizations of the working class can only strengthen the labor movement, arming it to organize independently of the capitalists. Not only will police no longer be able to use the resources of the working class to continue to kill, harass, and imprison Black people, but the fight to disaffiliate cop unions will draw clear class lines, with cops and union bureaucrats standing very clearly opposite the working class.

There is a growing movement within the rank and file of the United States’ unions to disaffiliate police and other law enforcement organizations from their numbers. In early June, the Martin Luther King County Labor Council voted with overwhelming support to expel the Seattle Police Officers Guild — which represents about 1,300 officers — from the union. The second-largest local teachers’ union in the nation, United Teachers Los Angeles, voted in June to kick cops out of schools and “redirect funding to mental health and counseling.” More recently, SEIU’s Drop the Cops campaign released a set of demands this summer calling on the SEIU and other unions to expel police from their ranks and to adopt a Movement for Black Lives platform. Hundreds of people from across the country attended a virtual town hall to discuss the fight against racism and police terror and to commit to fighting to clean up the house of labor. These examples from rank-and-file members of unions are a direct challenge to the despotic control of the unions by bureaucrats who serve the interests of the police who terrorize Black and Brown, trans*, and other working people in the United States and the interests of a system that sustains itself on the exploitation of the working class.

For all those who consider themselves revolutionary socialists, it is imperative to take up the call to kick cops out of unions and to link the labor movement with the anti-racist movement still raging in the streets. There is no room to equivocate: cops are not workers — they are our enemies. There is no protecting their right to organize or justifying their role in capitalist society. It is opportunistic deception and an insult to the hundreds of thousands of people taking to the streets in defense of Black lives to put forward any position other than the abolition of the police and the capitalist system it upholds.

For the anti-racist movement to continue in the midst of an all-encompassing election between two Blue Lives Matter tickets, it is imperative that the labor movement take bold steps to carry the struggle forward, starting with the fight to expel police from worker organizations. As we continue down the road of a deep economic crisis, we can expect to see further austerity measures that will result in declining working and living conditions for the working class and an increase in repression from the armed wing of the state — the police — to enforce those policies when workers fight for their lives. This will undoubtedly mean increased attacks against Black and Brown people who bear the brunt of the crisis.

And when people who have lost their wages as a result of layoffs can’t pay their rent, who is it that will come to evict them? The police. When workers organize strikes to protest layoffs and wage cuts, who is it that will come to shut them down? The cops. Therefore, the fight to kick cops out of unions — to weaken unions’ links with this arm of the state — is a crucial strategic step toward strengthening the labor movement in preparation for the coming crisis.

Capitalism Is Fanning the Wildfire Flames

Tue, 15 Sep 2020 23:20:31 GMT

Tens of thousands of buildings have been destroyed and dozens of people have been killed by one of the worst wildfire outbreaks in California and Oregon history. Dozens more are still missing. Smoke from the fires covers cities from Los Angeles to Vancouver. People are wearing N95 masks not only against the coronavirus, but also against the thick smoke. The air quality has gotten so bad that it’s off the EPA’s air quality scale. An estimated 500,000 people in Oregon are on evacuation notice. Over 900,000 acres of Oregon and 3.1 million acres of California have burned.

Berry Creek, a town in Northern California, was completely destroyed by the fires. “The school is gone, the fire department’s gone, the bar’s gone, the laundromat’s gone, the general store’s gone,” says one local resident. In the state of Washington, over 930 square miles have been burned. Areas of the state not on fire are still choking on smoke that’s blowing in from Oregon and California. At least one person has died from the fires in Washington.

Capitalism is Fueling Climate Change

Climate change is affecting the earth more in 2020 than ever before. The increased number of tropical cyclones (four in the Atlantic at the time of publication), the coronavirus pandemic, and the extreme dry conditions and heat waves amplifying the California fire season are all effects of global warming. L.A. County blew past its temperature record, hitting 121 degrees Farenheit in one town in early September. Temperatures in the three digits have been frequent in the region lately. There may be the temptation to view the extreme devastation of 2020 as an outlier, but science indicates that these disasters will get worse. The evidence points to one particular culprit: greenhouse gas emissions.

Some people blame individual choices for climate change — if only individuals would decide to fly less or eat less meat! While we all must do what we can to reduce our impact on the environment, the average human has nowhere near enough power to stop climate change, nor change how the economic system works. After all, global shutdowns of economic activity due to the coronavirus have likely only reduced carbon emissions by a mere five percent in 2020, showing the limits of individual actions in combating climate change. Capitalist governments subsidize the fossil fuel and big agricultural industries, making a greasy burger cheaper and more available than locally-sourced fresh fruits, vegetables, and healthy proteins. The small number of people who do have that power are driven by a relentless obsession with ever more profit.

The U.S. in particular lags even other capitalist nations in public transit and public health development, while the U.S. military is one of the world’s greatest contributors to climate change. The ruling class pushes ever-bigger houses that consume more energy to heat and cool indoor volume that is uninhabited most of the time. People are encouraged to buy multiple gas-guzzling SUVs and other excesses that are profitable to capitalists, but which no one really needs to live a healthy and fulfilling life.

The effects of capitalism on the climate continue with the corruption of the political system, where corporate interests block democratic initiatives like banning methane fracking or disposable plastic bags. Even our would-be savior from the Trump regime — the Democratic Party — has no interest in ending U.S. imperialism, meaningfully addressing the housing crisis, nor taking serious action on the climate emergency.

We already have the means to feed everyone, but much of it goes to waste. Instead of investing in sustainable mass transit, capitalism presents a steady supply of new “green” cars that keep pushing highly individualized consumption and will just shift the problem from fossil fuels to lithium and rare earth metals. Capitalism is fuelling climate change — it is incapable of providing a solution.

Fight Capitalism With Socialism

The solution to climate change isn’t yet another new product to be sold for profit, nor is it another neoliberal attempt at “market-based” regulation that will be too little, too late. Only by restructuring the economy to meet human need — not corporate greed — while respecting the sacred land and environment that keeps us all alive can truly stop this climate nightmare. In other words, we need to fight for socialism, and for a system which is compatible with the survival of humanity and the environment, with sustainability at its core. Together, we can rebuild our global economy to put science and humanity first, and we can have both better lives and a healthier planet.

The image used in this article is licensed by its creator under a CC BY-SA 4.0 International License. No changes have been made to the image.

ICE’s Forced Hysterectomies Are Part of a Long History of State Sterilization of Women of Color

Tue, 15 Sep 2020 17:17:42 GMT

“When I met all these women who had had surgeries, I thought this was like an experimental concentration camp. It was like they’re experimenting with our bodies”.

“Everybody [the off-site doctor] sees has a hysterectomy – just about everybody…That’s his specialty, he’s the uterus collector. Everybody’s uterus cannot be that bad.”

“[A detainee] was originally told by the doctor that she had an ovarian cyst and was going to have a small twenty-minute procedure done drilling three small holes in her stomach to drain the cyst. The officer who was transporting her to the hospital told her that she was receiving a hysterectomy to have her womb removed. When the hospital refused to operate on her because her COVID-19 test came back positive for antibodies, she was transferred back to ICDC where the ICDC nurse said that the procedure she was going to have done entailed dilating her vagina and scraping tissue off.”

Yet another detainee spoke about not being properly anesthetized during the procedure, and heard the doctor tell the nurse he had mistakenly removed the wrong ovary, resulting in her losing all reproductive ability.

These are the horrific reports and testimonies from detainees and workers at Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) concentration camps according to whistleblower Dawn Wooten, a nurse at Irwin County Detention, an ICE facility in the state of George, about the illegal, unethical, and violent procedures being performed on detainees without their consent. These are sexual assaults perpetrated by the state.

Wooten filed a complaint revealing the atrocities taking place in the detention center she works at, which is run by the private corporation La Salle Corrections. “I’ve had several inmates tell me that they’ve been to see the doctor and they’ve had hysterectomies and they don’t know why they went or why they’re going,” Wooten said in the report. The whistleblower complaint was filed by several advocacy groups who bolstered Wooten’s claims with the testimonies of immigrants and another nurse who wished to remain anonymous.

LaSalle released the following statement in response to the countless reports of abuses: “LaSalle Corrections is firmly committed to the health and welfare of those in our care. We are deeply committed to delivering high-quality, culturally responsive services in safe and humane environments.” LaSalle runs eighteen detention centers in the South which can hold over 13,000 people.

The people in these ICE detention centers are incarcerated while they await a determination of their immigration status or potential deportation. Detention of immigrants has skyrocketed in the past few decades under both Republican and Democratic administrations, with the average daily population of detained immigrants going from 5,000 in 1994, to 19,000 in 2001, and to over 39,000 in 2017. Clearly, the policy of increasing detentions is bipartisan. ICE runs the detention system, but subcontracts the majority of detention to private prison companies who make profits from contracts with the government by filling the beds with undocumented immigrants.

As this whistleblower complaint makes clear, ICE detention centers are government-run concentration camps that brutalize, assault, and terrorize undocumented immigrants.

Inhumane Conditions In Detention Centers

Dawn Wooten’s complaints do not only address the hysterectomies and deeply neglectful gynecological care occurring in the ICE detention center. She also speaks about the inhumane response to the coronavirus and gross disregard for the immigrants detained there. Social distancing is impossible in a crowded detention center. While ICE claims that 31 people at the Irwin facility have tested positive for the virus, Wooten believes that number is a lie: at least 50 people have tested positive.

In fact, immigrants at Irwin have been protesting since the start of the pandemic. In April, a video surfaced of detained women speaking out in protest at the Irwin facility. They crowded around the camera holding signs that read, “Help us please” and spoke about chilling conditions in the detention center, including overcrowding and lack of sanitation. The protesting migrants were retaliated against with solitary confinement, leaving family members and lawyers frantic. At the men’s section of the Irwin facility, there were hunger strikes and protests throughout the summer, highlighting the overcrowding and increasingly dangerous conditions.

But it’s not just Irwin facilities: around the country, there are reports of cruel and inhumane conditions in detention centers. People are denied all kinds of reproductive care in the detention centers. ICE has denied treatment to detained women with cancer, brain tumors, and breast cysts. A detention center is even tracking migrant girls’ periods to prevent them from getting abortions. Just last year, 4,500 immigrant children filed a complaint saying they were sexually abused while in ICE custody, including many who were assaulted by ICE and/or by guards and other personnel in a detention center.

A Long History of Sterilizing Women of Color

The gynecological abuses in ICE detention centers are in line with a long history of the US government sterilizing women of color — particularly Black, Latina, and indigenous women. This includes the early 20th century eugenicists who promoted the sterilization of poor Black women as a way to “cure” the population of poverty. Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, was among those who supported racist eugenics. Alex Stern wrote in Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in America, “In the early 20th century across the country, medical superintendents, legislators, and social reformers affiliated with an emerging eugenics movement joined forces to put sterilization laws on the books. Such legislation was motivated by crude theories of human heredity that posited the wholesale inheritance of traits associated with a panoply of feared conditions such as criminality, feeblemindedness, and sexual deviance. Many sterilization advocates viewed reproductive surgery as a necessary public health intervention that would protect society from deleterious genes and the social and economic costs of managing ‘degenerate stock’.” As early as 1907, some states had instituted public policy that gave the government the right “to sterilize unwilling and unwitting people.” This included people who were seen as “insane,” “feeble-minded,” “dependent,” and “diseased.”

But this was not the work of rogue scientists. Sterilizations were government policy and were used against Black, Latina and indigenous people, as well as working-class white women and disabled women. These sterilizations were coerced in several ways. There were those who didn’t have the procedure explained to them — they simply woke up to find out they were sterilized. There are those who were threatened with welfare being cut off if they did not undergo the procedure. Some women were never told anything at all. This became so widespread in Mississippi among women of color that it was known as a ”Mississippi appendectomy.” These actions were not limited to the early 20th century. In the 70s under the Nixon administration, Medicaid funds were put towards the Family Planning Services and Population Research Act which offered sterilizations to low-income women, especially women of color.

For example, in North Carolina, 7,600 people were sterilized between 1929 and 1974. Over half of these individuals were Black, although Black people make up only a fourth of the population. Elaine Riddick, a victim of forced sterilization in North Carolina, described the process: “Got to the hospital and they put me in a room and that’s all I remember…When I woke up, I woke up with bandages on my stomach.” She didn’t find out she was sterilized until after the procedure. One can imagine the women in ICE detention centers describing the exact same thing.

A third of women in Puerto Rico were sterilized from 1930 to1970 due to the initiatives of the U.S. government who claimed that there were just too many poor people on the island and not enough jobs. Puerto Rico’s poverty, however, is a direct result of its exploitation as a U.S. colony. Thousands of men were sterilized as well, with many unaware that the procedure would be carried out. Women were also experimented on in unsafe human trials for birth control, resulting in three deaths.

Indigenous women have also been subjected to forced sterilizations, especially under Nixon’s policies in the 1970s. While there aren’t definitive numbers, it is estimated that between 25 to 50 percent of Native women were sterilized. Among the most brutal stories are of two fifteen-year-old girls who went into the hospital for tonsillectomies and came out with tubal ligations. The youngest reported sterilization was of an 11 year old indigenous girl.

Forced or coerced sterilizations are not a thing of the past. Not only are they being performed in ICE detention centers, but they are also performed in prisons. California prisons authorized sterilizations of nearly 150 female inmates between 2006 and 2010. The Center for Investigative Reporting exposed that the state paid doctors $147,460 to perform tubal ligations that former inmates say were done under coercion.

The State is Responsible

It is hard to fathom the invasive violation that forced sterilization represents. It is institutional sexual assault not by an individual, but by the state. And not just any state: A capitalist state ´ built on racism and caging people of color, and which is spending millions of dollars to build private prisons to detain families who are coming to the U.S. to work, fleeing the brutal conditions created by U.S. imperialism.

This is a state that sexually assaults Black, Brown, Indigenous, and poor women as part of the project of criminalizing the poor and blaming women of color for poverty. Poverty is not a result of the reproductive choices of women of color; rather, it exists because it is immensely profitable for capitalists to hyper-exploit those at the bottom, and because the state refuses to provide services for poor and working-class people.

Sterilizations are the consequences of the government blaming women of color and poor women for poverty, rather than the capitalist state. It is part of the state policy of criminalizing the poor migrants from semi-colonial countries by putting them in cages for immigration that U.S. imperialism causes. It is part of a policy of blaming women for poverty because it’s more expedient and cheaper for the U.S. capitalist state to sterilize women of color than it is to take care of their reproductive needs. It’s a brutal, racist, and inhumane logic, a logic that says that women of color having babies is the root cause of their material conditions, not U.S. imperialism, and not a state that refuses to provide services unless it can turn a profit.

These sterilizations have been maintained and upheld by both parties. And today’s abusive system of private ICE detention centers, which make huge profits from government contacts, have been expanded by both political parties. For those detained, deported and brutalized under Clinton, Bush, Obama and Trump, there is no “lesser evil” between the Democrats and Republicans: they all built and support the same system of concentration camps.

In the midst of a brutal pandemic that has already killed almost 200,000 people in the US, all detained migrants should be set free, and the concentration camps must be shut down. All people, whether documented or undocumented, should have free access to healthcare, including to reproductive healthcare. It is clear that reparations should be paid to all of those people brutalized by the detention centers — reparations paid for by the private corporations that run the detention centers and their millionaire CEOs.

Massachusetts Teachers Refuse to Enter Unsafe Schools

Tue, 15 Sep 2020 13:44:14 GMT

The number of Covid-19 cases in Massachusetts is again on the rise. The uptick prompted Gov. Charlie Baker to roll back limits on outdoor gatherings — from 100 down to 50 people — and postpone indefinitely the second step of Phase 3 of the state’s reopening plan.

Despite the rise, public schools are reopening in communities around the state, many with hybrid models of remote and in-person learning. The Massachusetts Teachers Union advocated throughout the summer for remote learning exclusively for the start of the school year until districts could ensure fully safe reopenings. Teachers have expressed concern that school districts, underfunded for more than a decade and with many buildings in desperate need of repairs, won’t be able to supply classrooms adequately with the fresh and ventilated air that has been shown to mitigate the spread of the virus. Despite this, about 70 percent of school districts in Massachusetts have settled on plans that would bring students back into the classroom part- or full-time.

As one teacher in Methuen, a small city north of Boston, told Left Voice, “The schools have vacillated back and forth with scheduling and whether things will be hybrid or just remote. The only thing certain in the planning seems to be making sure we’re around to fulfill our daycare function, without real concern for teachers’ or students’ health.”

Last week, teachers in Andover, Massachusetts, north of Boston, held a work safety action. On their first day of work, in advance of students returning, nearly half of Andover’s teachers refused to enter school buildings for training sessions, citing unsafe conditions and no confidence in the superintendent. Teachers set up chairs and laptops outside of the high school, with every intention of completing a full day of work. Matt Bach, president of the Andover Teachers Union, said, “We don’t believe that the district has prepared the buildings for a return to in-person learning.”

This action is similar to ones taking place in other cities and states around Massachusetts and the country. Teachers in Sharon, Massachusetts, south of Boston, are also refusing to enter school buildings, and the district is seeking to have their action declared a strike as well. On Monday, September 14, teachers set up pickets outside of New York City schools to protest unsafe reopenings. Although NYC schools had only been open for a few days and students had not yet returned, 55 people already tested positive for Covid-19.

Massachusetts law forbids strikes by public sector employees, and the Commonwealth Employment Relations Board declared the Andover work-safety action an illegal strike. In its decision, the state labor board found the Andover Education Association “unlawfully induced, encouraged and condoned that strike,” saying the union’s claim that members were able to perform all the duties required of them on those days remotely was “inaccurate.”

Gov. Baker applauded the board’s decision to pursue legal action against the union and its striking teachers, demonstrating his disdain for teacher, student, and staff safety. The board and the state have clearly positioned themselves on the opposite side of workers.

More than six months into the pandemic, it is glaringly obvious that Massachusetts state officials have dealt with school reopenings haphazardly and insufficiently. Although state officials asked for plans from superintendents regarding in-person and remote learning details, they neglected to ask where students would be on the days they weren’t in school. As a result, paid child care centers are opening in some school buildings and community centers that are supposed to be closed due to the pandemic. And in some Massachusetts districts, parents are required to pay upwards of $346 per week for this glorified daycare! Meanwhile, teachers who are giving lessons “remotely” are required to come to the school buildings to do so.

Gov. Baker has commended school districts on their reopening plans despite the absurdity of having in-person “remote” lessons, both for students and teachers, which will inevitably cause cross-contact and a rise in cases within schools and their surrounding communities.

The planned opening of schools in Dedham, on the south side of Boston, has already been pushed back because of a spike in coronavirus cases. “We have been telling the school administration this is a huge mistake for weeks,“ a Dedham elementary school teacher told Left Voice in a brief phone interview.

As teachers, students, and staff members are forced to go back to school in unsafe conditions, we must support their fight for remote learning until schools can truly reopen safely for all teachers, students, staff, and community members. As one retired Massachusetts teacher wrote in a letter to the Boston Globe, “I taught for 35 years in Massachusetts as a proud union member. And, yes, my daughter is a teacher, And, yes, my grandsons are assigned to attend a school that is 115 years old with no HVAC system, and the windows don’t open. Let’s disrupt that death trap.”

Let’s indeed disrupt this capitalist death trap — with the strength of the working class!

Not Until It’s Safe: Educators and Community Protest Rushed School Reopening

Mon, 14 Sep 2020 16:30:37 GMT

In the four days that New York City teachers and staff have been back at work at public schools across the city, 55 people have already tested positive for Covid-19. These cases are spread across all five boros (as of 10am on 9/14/20), and they represent the teachers and staff infected before even a single student has arrived for instruction. This morning pickets sprung up at several schools for a day of action organized by the Movement of Rank and file Educators (MORE), the social justice caucus of the United Federation of Teachers (UFT). At PS 139 in Brooklyn, where a staff member tested positive on Friday, MORE members, parents, students, locals from the community, and DSA members gathered together in support of the teachers, who were working outside the school in protest of the clearly unsafe reopening. School safety officers, temperature readers in hand, scanned the foreheads of anyone entering the building.

This day of action comes on the heels of a September 1 deal between the Department of Education (DOE) and UFT leadership that was struck without input from rank-and-file teachers, who were shocked to learn the threat of a strike vote had been taken off the table without their consent and that they were expected to return to work in person on September 8. New York City is the only large urban public school system returning to some form of in-person learning this fall, despite calls from teachers and parents alike to begin the school year with fully remote learning. This deal, struck by UFT President Michael Mulgrew, is a complete betrayal of the rank and file educators working on the front lines.

In front of several media outlets, UFT chapter leader Megan Jonynas read the statement written by the PS 139 community, addressed to Mulgrew, DOE Chancellor Richard Carranza, and Mayor Bill de Blasio. (Mulgrew was expected to be in attendance outside the school, but failed to show.) The statement focuses on a lack of staffing: both custodial, to properly clean and disinfect the schools, as well as teachers, who are expected to teach in person and online at the same time.

The statement also expresses concerns about a lack of transparency and guidance from the city when it comes to handling safety protocols and PPE distribution when schools reopen for in-person instruction on September 21. “Gyms and restaurants preparing for indoor dining have more safety guidelines than schools do,” one teacher said. “I would love more than anything to be teaching in front of my students. I hate remote learning. But I also don’t want a second wave of Covid,” added another. Public schools lack access to the resources for health and safety that wealthy private schools, like PolyPrep, can purchase. While PolyPrep has a rapid-test machine to test anyone who enters the school building, as well as contact tracing sensors, underfunded public schools are still waiting on sufficient basic PPE.

Before the teachers began their outdoor work day, community supporters participated in several chants, including “safe schools now,” “not until it’s safe,” and a modification of a popular street protest chant: “1. We are the people 2. Say it louder 3. We want safety 4. our students.”. The fundamental demand of “safety” has been overlooked by the DOE and UFT leadership in their deal, only vaguely addressing the concern of ventilation in old buildings with “ventilation checks,” which have not proven very thorough thus far.

This morning, Mayor de Blasio addressed the 55 positive tests by saying, “Some people will test positive. And those folks will immediately get support. After two weeks, those professionals will come back to work — and they’ll complete the entire school year.” The mayor fails to take into account how one case may spread to others in the confined space of a classroom, or how those who test positive will be affected in their home life, outside of the work environment. Studies continue to show the long-lasting health impacts of Covid, and those impacts are experienced at higher rates among poorer communities where people live most densely. Mayor de Blasio’s response dismisses the very real health risk that public school teachers and staff, as well as students and their families, are facing as we are one week away from a partial return to in-person learning. His entire focus is to get the working class back to work, regardless of safety or health risks.

School reopening advocates (in addition to the mayor) have argued that getting kids back in school will make it possible for parents to head back to work — prioritizing profits over safety. The Department of Labor has stated that parents whose children have access to in-person learning are no longer eligible for paid leave. This places an additional financial burden on working families. While the Mayor suggests that the majority of families want to return to in-person learning, the system is set up to make that the default: families must choose to opt-out of in-person learning, rather than opt-in.

This creates greater opportunity for health risks to teachers and students (and therefore family members) alike, leaving working class families at the mercy of the DOE. It is the responsibility of all working-class New Yorkers to stand in solidarity with the teachers and staff of public schools in demanding fully remote learning until safe reopening conditions are properly established.

Who’s Funding the Trump and Biden Campaigns?

Mon, 14 Sep 2020 15:18:19 GMT

When Trump announced his 2016 presidential run, he pretended he was above special interests, saying he would use his own money instead of relying on donors. Biden is also acting like he is free from special interests, saying he’ll fight for an “economic recovery for working families.”

This is all a bad joke. Both campaigns are being openly bankrolled by the ruling class: real estate moguls, financiers, and tech company CEOs, for example.

In other words, the 2020 election is a spat among parts of the ruling class over who is going to better help their interests — especially the endless, catastrophic accumulation of profit. And it’s all perfectly legal. The American political system is working exactly as it is supposed to. For example, even though campaign finance law doesn’t allow any one person to give more than $5,600 directly to a presidential candidate’s campaign, so-called Super-PACs (“independent” organizations that are crucial to reelection campaigns) can raise unlimited funds from anyone.

In other words, the U.S. is hardly democratic. But its political system is the perfect shell for capitalism, since it makes it so easy for the ruling class to use the money it’s made off the backs of workers to control the political machine.

Trump’s Money

Trump’s reelection campaign — so far hauling in $1.21 billion — is being bankrolled by the U.S. ruling class.

By the end of February, 80 billionaires had donated to his campaign. That’s about one out of every 10 U.S. billionaires. Combined, those 80 individuals have a net worth of around $210 billion. Overall, the money for Trump’s campaign is primarily coming from donors in the financial, insurance, energy, and real estate sectors, with hefty donations also coming out of the construction and healthcare industries as well.

For example, by the end of February, J. Joe Ricketts — founder of the financial services company TD Ameritrade — and his wife Marlene had given about $1 million, as had Andrew Beal (owner of Beal Financial Corporation) and Dennis and Phyllis Washington (heads of Washington Companies, which includes companies in mining, construction, and other industries).

Significant parts of the ruling class started breaking towards Trump during his first term. Over half of the billionaires currently bankrolling his reelection did not donate to him during his bid for president in 2016. This shouldn’t surprise us: Since being elected on a chaotic, vaguely populist platform, Trump has made it his mission to woo the ruling class while also pretending to care about “average” (which to Trump means white and male) workers. For example, his administration drove a historic tax cut for the ruling class, pushed to dismantle the already-weak Affordable Care Act as a gift to health insurance agencies, and attacked worker rights and protections.

Biden’s Money

But over the summer, other segments of the ruling class that had so far stayed out of the election fray began breaking for Biden. In fact, Biden’s fundraising has tremendously accelerated in recent months compared to Trump’s. This is probably in part because of increasing alarm among segments of the ruling class as Trump shows his inability to maintain social stability in the midst of the largest protest movement in the history of the United States. But it’s also of course because of Biden’s own efforts to woo business and finance moguls.

Even at the end of February, though, Biden had more billionaires donating to him than Trump (94, or 12% of the U.S. total). This number has gone up dramatically since then. By August, Biden had 131 billionaire patrons (as opposed to Trump’s 99) — or in other words, about one out of every five billionaires in the United States.

Part of this increase is because of his choice of Kamala Harris as his running mate. At the time, liberals were gushing about Biden’s “progressive” choice. But Biden’s choice was far more cynical: Harris is a cop, and choosing her is a signal to the ruling class that Biden too will crack down on the uprising against the police. And Biden chose the person who had been leading the race for super-rich supporters — obviously in a bid to get those donors to bankroll him, too.

Just like with Trump, a major chunk of Biden’s cash in this campaign is coming from the financial sector, ensuring that Biden will continue to be the lapdog of Wall Street capitalists. In fact, donations are going to both Trump and Biden from the heads of the financial firm The Blackstone Group (a move repeated in companies like Facebook and Estee Lauder) — hedging their bets by putting money down on both of the capitalist candidates. But big tech billionaires have been increasingly donating to Biden. This isn’t much of a surprise given how cozy Harris has been with this part of the ruling class since she became California’s top cop. Top donors to Biden include hedge-fund manager Jim Simons, who has given over $3 million; CEO of Twilio Jeff Lawson and his wife Erica Lawson, who have given about $1.25 million; and Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, who has given about 1.5 million.

It’s Time to Break with the Capitalist Parties

From CNN to Fox News, from The Wall Street Journal to The New York Times, and from Trump, Biden, and Obama alike, we’re being sold the idea that the choice between Trump and Biden is a stark one between life-and-death: the most important election in history.

But both Biden and Trump are lackeys of the ruling class. They’re each scrabbling for the cash of financial and business elites in the U.S. and working hard to convince the ruling class that they’ll be a better lapdog in office.

This election is a lovers’ quarrel among the rulers. The only hope for the working class and oppressed is to create an independent, revolutionary, working-class party fighting for socialism against the capitalists and their lackeys in both parties.

"This is Not a Country, This is a Mass Grave With a National Anthem”: Anti-Police ...

Sun, 13 Sep 2020 21:14:18 GMT

His name was Javier Humberto Ordóñez — the father of two young boys, ages 11 and 15, and one exam away from a law degree.

During the early morning hours of Wednesday, September 9, 46-year-old Ordóñez and his friends were drinking at an apartment in Bogotá, the capital city. Venturing out to get more alcohol, the men were confronted by police enforcing bans on public drinking and purchasing alcohol after 9 p.m during the pandemic. The ensuing altercation, captured on video, shows the police repeatedly submitting Ordóñez to shocks from a stun gun as he pleaded, “Please, no more, I’m suffocating.” Ordóñez was taken into police custody and died at a hospital several hours later.

“No one deserves to die this way,” said Eliana Garzón, his sister-in-law.

Within hours, massive protests erupted in several Colombian cities, including Medellín, Pereida, and Ibague — anti-police uprisings like those that have gripped the United States and much of the world this summer. The next afternoon, protesters in the Engativa neighborhood of west Bogotá destroyed the police precinct of the officers responsible for Ordóñez’s death. By early Thursday morning, dozens of police stations had been set on fire or vandalized. Some burnt police precincts have been repurposed into places for communities to gather, with makeshift libraries (like the “Biblioteca Popular” in Soledad), DJs spinning records, and communal discussions.

Some see the protests — which have resulted in at least 13 deaths — as a continuation of anti-government protests spurred in late 2019 by trade unions frustrated with the policies of President Ivan Duque’s right-wing government. Then, protesters accused accused the government of failing to protect indigenous leaders and social activists from violence, cutting funds from public education, and being nonchalant in implementing certain aspects of the 2016 Peace Agreement with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), a left-wing guerrilla group that waged a half-century-long war against the government. Colombia’s Covid-19 lockdown and its devastating impact on an economy that relies heavily on tourism have only worsened tensions, which clearly spilled over in spectacular fashion last week.

Young Colombians are also tired of the coordinated violence reminiscent of the worst years of the Civil War, when guerilla groups, paramilitaries, and cartels would duke it out for territory, trafficking routes, and crops. Just this year, nearly 100 human rights advocates have been murdered, on top of the murder of 41 former FARC guerillas — despite their “official” amnesty spelled out in the peace agreement. In a particularly harrowing August incident in Samaniego, eight young people were killed at a party when four gunmen stormed a house and began shooting. The massacre had all the makings score settling among rival gangs — something parents of the victims deny. Incidents like these have galvanized protesters to march with powerful signs, such as one in Bogotá that read: “Esto no es un país, es una fosa común con un himno nacional” (“This is not a country, it is a mass grave with a national anthem”).

While the protests of 2019 were unprecedented for a country long mired in political violence, the social explosion of the last few days has the potential of bring left-wing politics forward in a way the country hasn’t seen since the 1960s, when groups such as FARC and the National Liberation Army (ELN) emerged in the aftermath of the Cuban Revolution. According to Sergio Guzman, a political analyst who heads the Colombia Risk Analysis group, these protests are the “start of a much bigger period of political unrest” that may disrupt plans to reopen the Colombian economy.

Colombia’s Defense Minister, Carlos Holmes Trujillo, made a weak — if not insulting — statement on Ordóñez’s death aimed at quelling the rightful rage of protesters: “I apologize on behalf of the national police for any violations of the law … by any member of the force.” He made no mention of the police terror protesters have faced on the streets (as of Thursday, 66 people had bullet injuries) and no concrete commitment to reforming Colombia’s police force, which functions under the auspices of the Ministry of Defense. According to Bogotá mayor Claudia Lopez, the police were not authorized to fire at the protesters, which raises the question: What is the logic of attacking protesters, already angered to the core by decades of violence on behalf of state actors, with more violence?

There should be no surprise at the revolutionary fervor on Colombia’s streets. It is part of a worldwide proletarian narrative being written in real time. Breathing has become an apt motif for the year 2020, from George Floyd begging for his life with the words “I can’t breathe,” to Ordóñez pleading “please … I’m suffocating,” to the Covid-19 pandemic that has killed upwards of a million people and shows no signs of dissipating, and to the massive climate fires burning on the U.S. West Coast. Neoliberal capitalism has been constraining the masses from breathing for decades. The pandemic-fueled global economic downturn has made this glaringly obvious, with inequality along racial and class lines reaching untenable heights. The masses are reacting with a militancy unseen since the 1960s, and they show no signs of abating.

From Bogotá to Brooklyn, and from Medellín to Minneapolis, mere reform as an option is being relegated to the burning dustbin of history. The people of Colombia have long been forced into a violently enforced slumber, but now they shout, “¡Ni un paso atrás!” (“Not a single step backwards!”)

The Vietnam War: Brutal, Criminal, Imperialist

Sun, 13 Sep 2020 16:49:04 GMT

A media blitz has once again been launched by pearl-clutching liberals thinking they have finally found the worst thing Donald Trump has ever said. On September 3, The Atlantic published an article highlighting a series of statements and actions from Trump that showcase disrespect for American veterans. The story was immediately made the biggest news of the week. Fox News’s Jennifer Griffin added to the controversy by sharing that a former senior official with the Trump administration claimed the president once said of the Vietnam War, “It was a stupid war. Anyone who went was a sucker.”

The establishment has used this as another of many opportunities to reinforce America’s military culture, with neoliberal warhawk, Pete Buttigieg, hot on the press circuit and the pro-war, never-Trump conservative think tank, The Lincoln Project, getting pictures of veterans to trend on Twitter under the hashtag WeRespectVets. This rush to defend the honor of veterans is not actually based in any serious empathy for people who have been subjected to warzones, but instead a hollow attempt to score points in an election. The go-to response of Trump’s opponents in government and media obscures the violent imperialism and working-class exploitation of the United States military. Democrats and Republicans alike have made their careers and maintained their global power off of hawkish foreign policy. The war machine relies on support, or at least complacency, from the masses who gain nothing but misery from war, which is why politicians and their corporate media lackeys have spent more than a week pushing back against Trump’s public comments that highlight the real and pervasive threat of the military-industrial complex.

No one should believe that Trump’s comments make him a leader or even participant in the fight against the military industrial complex. His administration has been especially antagonistic to Venezuela, Iran, and China. However, although his statements are not coming from any place of anti-war morality, it would be a mistake to invalidate them entirely because it is rare that a break in the one-sided narrative of U.S. military propaganda is launched to such a large audience.

In fact, “stupid war” would be a generous description of what the United States did to Vietnam. A more fitting description would be, the atrocious, illegal reign of terror on a country fighting for its independence.

At the time, the narrative was that any country’s attempts to establish communism was part of a larger Soviet plot to take over the world. President Truman would go on to establish the Truman Doctrine, which provided military aid to any country fighting communism. More accurately, it provided military aid to any nation trying to suppress a movement challenging Western capitalist hegemony. This has remained the backbone of U.S. foreign policy to this day.

The theory of Monolithic Communism has since been debunked. Disagreements among communists in various countries were quite common and under Stalin the Soviet Union took a nationalist approach to revolution.

Historians have uncovered the fact that even during the Cold War, the vast majority of officials in Washington understood that there was no great plot of Soviet world domination. In his book The Jakarta Method,¹ journalist Vincent Bevins provides a deep dive into the realities of C.I.A. plots during the Cold War and reached the conclusion that what threatened the United States the most was the thought of people around the world seeing a successful, peaceful communist government reaching the same or even greater economic prosperity as capitalist countries.

The magnitude of war crimes to which U.S. troops and their allies subjected the civilian population of Vietnam is hard to understand for anyone who has never been a civilian in a military occupation. The closest an American can likely come to understanding what the people of Vietnam experienced is by reading historian Nick Turse’s Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam.² Turse spends close to 300 pages highlighting stories of Vietnamese civilians who were terrorized and killed during the war. His research is collected through extensive interviews with American Vietnam veterans, Vietnamese civilians, and historical records. Most Americans are familiar with the atrocity that was the My Lai massacre, a largely reported event in which U.S. troops mass murdered South Vietnamese civilians. What Turse reveals is that My Lai level atrocities were the norm, and the American method of war in Vietnam was intentionally curated from the top down to encourage racist, unrestrained torture and brutality towards anyone Vietnamese, North or South, guerrilla, woman, old man, or infant.

Despite the lengths the U.S. military went in its attempt to gain control over Vietnam, it would go on to lose spectacularly. There are two key reasons for this. The first is that the United States underestimated the Vietnamese fight for independence. This was a country that spent much of its history occupied, and having just had a glimpse of its independence after defeating the French occupation in 1954, the Vietnamese people were not about to be ruled by another foreign invader. Through determination for independence and well-organized guerilla tactics, the people of Vietnam would go on to shock the world by expelling a powerful empire from their land.

Of course another important factor in Vietnam’s victory was the anti-war movement within the United States. Anti-war activism was not new within the United States, but it rose to never before seen heights in 1964 to 1973. People did not just draft dodge, they burned their draft cards in the streets. Students organized a national walkout and Ohio University was forced to close due to the strength of continued student organizing. The support of Vietnam veterans for the anti-war movement was essential. The hellish conditions of war that veterans were subjected to mixed with their disgust and regret for the treatment of the Vietnamese people would result in a mass march on Washington, a six day protest in D.C., and nearly 420,000 cases of desertion by soldiers.

The Vietnam War provides a compelling example of how a well-organized fight for independence can prevail and why it is essential for Americans to show solidarity with international causes. It makes sense that a magazine like The Atlantic and those who take The Atlantic seriously would want to push the much less challenging narrative that veterans are great and the president is terrible for not gushing over people’s service to the military industrial complex.

Of course there are genuine reasons to be disgusted by the president’s contempt. While their actions abroad should never be depicted as noble, many Vietnam veterans were young working-class individuals drafted into service under threat of imprisonment for refusing to serve. Even now, while the United States has no formal draft, many veterans are subject to a predatory economic draft which promises college education and financial stability to impoverished Americans, disproportionately focusing on Black and Brown communities. Individuals lacking in class consciousness and means of survival are easy targets and even if they are never subjected to war, the training they go through is a form of brainwashing with a serious mental toll, relying on psychological abuse, social isolation, and physical exertion to break down the critical reasoning skills and moral compasses of young people in one of the most important stages of their neurological development. This is its own unique form of violence on the working class and the left should fiercely oppose it.

Still, it is important that we oppose the military’s exploitation of working-class Americans in a way that does not disregard the humanity and experiences of the people in countries that U.S. troops terrorize. The term, “bringing the war home” is used to describe the experiences of American veterans who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), but little emphasis is placed on the Vietnamese, Iraqis, Afghans, Syrians, Palestinians, and countless other populations whose homes are actually turned into war zones. Almost half a century has gone by since the Vietnam War ended, but the impact of chemical warfare still damages the health of Vietnamese people on a grand scale.

Like all presidents, Donald Trump has no interest in seriously opposing war. His categorization of dead veterans as suckers and his description of the Vietnam War come from his economic privilege which has allowed him to get away with holding views of disgust for anyone or anything that does not directly benefit him. Still, the words themselves are not the problem. The Vietnam War was an evil imperialist endeavor. While many Americans were swindled into fighting through a mixture of a coercive draft and clever propaganda and would later speak out against the war, that does not change the fact that the conflict was not morally gray. The Vietnamese side was fighting for their independence after centuries of foreign occupation. The United States was a foreign enemy invading people’s homes and subjecting them to nightmarish tyranny. It is right for people to be disgusted with the Vietnam War. The only noble thing about it was that the Vietnamese forces won independence against an imperial superpower, with the help of Americans who chose to fight along their own shared struggle with the Vietnamese instead of fighting along mindless patriotism. Any other depiction of the war is an act of imperialist propaganda.

Notes [ + ]

1.	↑	Vincent Bevins, The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade & The Mass Murder Progrm That Shaped Our World (New York: PublicAffairs, 2019).
2.	↑	Nick Turse, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2013).

Uneven Development and Imperialism Today: Engaging with the Ideas of David Harvey

Sun, 13 Sep 2020 14:54:28 GMT

Those of us who think that the old categories of imperialism do not work too well in these times do not deny at all the complex flows of value that expand the accumulation of wealth and power in one part of the world at the expense of another. We simply think the flows are more complicated and constantly changing direction. The historical draining of wealth from East to West for more than two centuries, for example, has been largely reversed over the last thirty years.¹

David Harvey, author of the above statement, highlights that the reconfiguration of the international division of labor over the last decades, associated with the internationalization of production I have analyzed previously, has produced in some countries this reversal of the development-underdevelopment pattern of polarity that is of imperialist capitalism since the late 19th century. A few years ago, Harvey’s suggestion provoked a polemic with John Smith, author of Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century.²

As I already pointed out during this controversy, Harvey’s assertion taken in the strictest sense is not confirmed. If we consider as a bloc all the dependent countries (typically characterized by the multilateral agencies as “emerging” and “developing” countries, or “middle income” and “poor” countries, etc.), they have continued to “drain” wealth towards the rich countries during the last decades. I based this on a 2015 study that reconstructs the net results of global licit and illicit financial flows — including “development aid,” wage remittances, net trade balances, debt services, new loans, foreign direct investment (FDI), portfolio investment, and other flows.³ The study estimated that between 1980 and 2012, “emerging and developing countries” lost $3 trillion in net transfers to rich countries. On average, since 2000, transfers represented more than 8 percent, per year, of the GDP of the affected countries. China represents no less than $1.9 trillion of the total transferred during those years. To give you an idea, China’s economy today is worth $12.5 trillion.

To this negative result of net transfers should be added another “drain” the study considered: the outflow of capital (the “flight” so well known in Argentina), which during the same period amounted to $13.4 trillion — or $10.6 trillion when China is excluded. These figures show that there was no reversal.

Discordant Rhythms

Harvey points to the way in which some Southeast Asian countries have become dynamic centers of world capital accumulation. Of course, it is China that is at the center of his conception, because with its specific historical conditions — the 1949 revolution that allowed for national unity after the break with imperialism and the expropriation of the landowners, along with the fact that Chinese Communist Party itself has commanded the gradual capitalist restoration while maintaining until today state ownership of broad sectors of its economy — it stands out as a clearly exceptional case. But Harvey points out, in another article that is part of his polemic with John Smith, that China is not alone: “Add in South Korea, Taiwan and (with a little geographical license) Singapore, and you have a real power block [sic] in the global economy.” He concludes, “If we look back at the world as it was ordered in, say, 1960, then the astonishing rise of East Asia as a power center of global accumulation will be blindingly obvious.”⁴

Thus, considered not in a strict sense but as a way of highlighting a relatively new phenomenon, Harvey’s statement takes on another meaning and becomes even more relevant. Indeed, within a few decades, a pole of capital accumulation was formed in Southeast Asia that clearly gained some global prominence, especially in the production and international trade of manufactured goods. That space was gained to the detriment of manufacturing both in the imperialist countries, which relocated, and in other dependent countries, as was the case for the Southern Cone of Latin America — Argentina and Brazil saw their industrial productive capacities deteriorate over the past 50 years, although to different degrees.

We can clearly observe how in the last 20 years the relative weight of the rich (imperialist) countries and the rest of the world has changed in terms of foreign direct investment from these countries (destined to productive enterprises, either by starting them up from scratch or by acquiring some participation in local companies) and, to a lesser extent, in the return flow from these countries to other countries. The consequence of direct investment abroad is that the capitalists doing the investing appropriate a part of the surplus value generated in those places where they make their investments.

Before we continue, some clarifications are necessary. While up until 50 years ago foreign investment was carried out almost exclusively in the form of capital flowing from the imperialist countries that were scouring the rest of the world in search of profits — for which they would go not only to the dependent countries but also, in good measure, to other imperialist countries — this has changed over the last decades. As a result of the greater general economic opening, of the liberation of capital flows, and of the greater scale achieved by some firms in dependent countries, global investment has become more complex. Today, many “emerging” and “developing” countries also export capital — that is, their residents make foreign direct investments. Most of these are in other “emerging” and “developing” countries, but some make their way to the develop economies.

That is why the hierarchy of countries today is not about whether they export capital, but the degree to which they do so and the net result between capital “exported” and taken in. A country with an intake of foreign investment greater than its outtake generates more surplus value for foreign capital at home than its own capital generates abroad.⁵ Dependent economies generally receive more foreign investment than they send abroad, while imperialist countries tend to strike a balance between the volume of capital exported and that which they receive.

With these clarifications, we can see how foreign direct investment (henceforth, FDI) reflects the emergence of a new pole to which Harvey refers. According to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), 90 percent of FDI in the year 2000 still originated in rich countries, with more than a third (36%) of total FDI originating in the United States. By 2019, the richest countries accounted for only 75 percent of FDI, and the United States share had fallen to 22.3 percent. So, while these figures indicate that the rich countries are still overwhelmingly the source of most FDI, they also show a marked decreasing trend. That has taken place mainly in the last decade: in 2010, the developed countries still accounted for 85 percent, with the United States around 24 percent.

If the more developed capitalist countries fall back, who picks up their lost percentage? What increased was FDI by residents of “emerging” and “developing” countries. In 2000, they held 8 percent of global FDI stock, but that figure grew to 22.9 percent by 2019. China accounts for a significant part of the increase. Its stock of FDI in other countries increased 71-fold in 18 years, from almost negligible outward investment in the year 2000 totals to 6 percent of the international total today. When we disaggregate by country, we can see that only the United States and the Netherlands — which together with Japan and Great Britain are characterized by a considerable expansion of their firms abroad — are rich countries with a higher FDI percentage than China.

If we now analyze where the investments have been directed, we also see that the participation of the most developed capitalist countries as a destination for investment has been reduced: from absorbing 78% of the stock of FDI in 2000, they went up to 66.5% in 2019. The US went from being a recipient of 37% of investment in 2000 to 25.9% in 2019, with the peculiarity that it grew strongly in participation since 2010 (when it had 17% of the total), instead of regressing. Although China was already a major investment destination in 2000, when home-based FDI accounted for 2.6%, it increased to 5% of the total.

Here we are considering all the foreign investment stock. But it must be emphasized that this underestimates the importance acquired by some dependent countries in the development of new productive enterprises established by imperialist capital. The reason for this underestimation is the enormous weight foreign investment plays not in developing new enterprises but rather in mergers or purchases of existing enterprises — what Marx defined as the “concentration” and “centralization” of capital.⁶ If we only consider FDI destined for the establishment of new productive projects — that is, if we discount that slated for mergers and acquisitions of companies — the weight of China, South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore and other countries as a destination (and, in part, also as an origin) of FDI is even more considerable.

It is in this sense that Harvey’s statement about a partial reversal in the drainage of historical wealth could be considered valid: the fact that this “periphery” has become a receptacle for capital on a larger scale, hand in hand with an increase in investment by local capitalists (and in China, above all, by public enterprises), and at the same time these countries have increased their weight in the generation of capital exported to other countries.

Another dimension that could favor Harvey’s assertion appears when we analyze the participation in industrial production in the countries he mentions and in the “emerging” world as a whole. This is a terrain that historically the imperialist countries had reserved for themselves. But since the 1980s, the big multinationals have increasingly located these activities in some emerging economies through the development of global value chains. The fragmentation of production processes and the international dispersion of tasks and activities within them has led to the emergence of production systems without borders — which can be sequential chains or complex networks, and which can be global, regional, or involve only two countries. These systems are commonly referred to as global value chains. ⁷ Between 1991 and 2016, the number of manufacturing jobs worldwide increased from 322 to 361 million. But in the developed countries it fell from 107 to 78 million, while it increased in the rest of the world from 215 to 279 million.⁸ In 1950, only 34 percent of industrial employment was outside the developed countries, and in 1980 it was still only 53 percent.⁹

In the mid-1970s, the share of low- and middle-income countries in manufacturing exports averaged 5 percent, while today it has reached 35 percent. The remaining 65% is traded by high-income countries, which in 1970 exported 96 percent of manufacturing. The growth in the share of low- and middle-income countries is explained centrally by China, which in 1990 exported 1.17 percent of manufactures, but since has gone on to become by far the leading exporter in general and in manufacturing in particular. In 2018, China exported 14 percent of all manufactured goods, followed by Germany (9.26%), the United States and Canada. (8.63%), Japan (4.67%), and France (4.04%).

We are seeing, as Harvey argues, that some economies grow and accumulate at the expense of others, and that those that are showing the most dynamic growth in GDP, manufacturing exports, or foreign investment are not at the center but are a rather limited sector of the periphery.¹⁰

Does it follow, as Harvey argues, that the “old categories of imperialism do not work too well in these times”? There are several reasons why that would be a hasty and erroneous conclusion.

The Broken Ladder to Development

The first thing to point out is that beyond the case of China, which is clearly exception because of the revolution-restoration dialectic by which it is characterized, the rest of the countries that make up the short list on which Harvey relies to refer to a reversal have each depended as well on unusually favorable geopolitical circumstances that have allowed them to sustain developmentalist policies more consistently. These include South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan. Unlike other countries, the United States considered them “safeguard[s] against the ascendance of communist forces. Some of them, including Japan during the post-World War II reconstruction, “were given the opportunity to protect their industries and were provided special access to US markets” — that is, they were not conditioned in their development to the domestic market. ¹¹ Only from such exceptional conditions did the cases of rapid industrialization, the so-called “tigers,” arise.

This importance of the geopolitical dimension to circumvent, at least in part, what for other countries in similar circumstances were iron conditions is a first refutation of the idea that one would have to discard the “old” categories of imperialism to understand current developments.

Second, the “power block [sic] in the global economy” to which Harvey refers is clearly a dimension of recent trends in capital accumulation. But to understand it fully, we must contrast it not only with the relatively lesser economic dynamism of the imperialist countries, but also with the results produced by the penetration of imperialist capital and the generation of value chains in other latitudes. There we see that in this era, the “categories” of imperialism function fully, although they do so with the specific features of the period, characterized in particular by the internationalization of production. This means that, unlike the situation up until the 1970s, there has been a clear increase in the number of countries integrated into the production of manufactured goods, and even that improve their position in the so-called indices of “economic complexity.” But, also unlike 50 years ago, these are no longer clear indicators of any development.

If we look beyond the handful of countries Harvey names, what do we see? Export-oriented industrialization, which many countries stimulated and was promoted by development agencies and multilateral organizations modeled after the example of the Asian “tigers,” had as its starting point closing the possibilities of sustaining what had been import substitution industrialization (ISI).¹² ISI began to develop in different dependent countries between the 1930s and 1950s as a way to supply internal markets. As Gary Gereffi argues, “The death knell for ISI, especially in Latin America, came from the oil shock of the late 1970s and the severe debt crisis that followed it.”¹³

Gereffi continues, “Under pressure from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, many developing countries made the transition from ISI to export-oriented industrialization (EOI) during the 1980s.”¹⁴ But the paradigm of “export-led manufacturing development” became something to be emulated not only by countries that had developed some level of industrialization between 1930 and 1970 (some of which would, in fact, end up being left behind in this new wave), but also by other countries that entered into new waves of late industrialization. As Smith argues, “For nearly half a century, export-oriented industrialization has been the only capitalist option for poor countries without abundant natural resources.”¹⁵

The attempt by many countries to imitate the path of export industrialization increased competition to offer multinational companies the best conditions for investment and organization of global supplier networks. On the one hand, more countries competed to attract the same investments; on the other hand, a growing group of multinational companies¹⁶ grew ever more concentrated, especially in the higher links of the value chains. The size of the firms and their structure became increasingly complex, integrating suppliers and subcontractors into their networks. Internationalization and the concentration and centralization of capital were inseparable, producing firms of increasingly gigantic scale. Successive waves of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) during the 1980s and 1990s accelerated the centralization of capital (a concept Marx refers to as the integration of existing firms). The “explosion of M&A activities at the end of the twentieth century has produced unprecedented levels of concentration in almost all of the high value-added, high technology parts of the world economy.”¹⁷ Some 25 percent of the volume of M&A involved international operations, reflecting the fact that centralization crossed borders.¹⁸. However, “large multinational firms based in high-income countries dominated cross-border transactions.”¹⁹ General Electric carried out no fewer than 183 M&A deals in those years and the Dutch firm Koninklijke 301. The balance of this centralization was that, by the beginning of the new millennium, 1,000 industrial firms were carrying out 80 percent of global manufacturing production, while the 300 largest companies on the planet were managing 25 percent of productive assets. The internationalization of production meant an increase in the proportion of surplus value produced worldwide that is appropriated by the multinational firms, the overwhelming majority of which are based in the imperialist countries.

Nolan, Zhang, and Liu characterize as these large firms as “system integrators” that acquired a command role over others in the international arena, and Nolan describes that they “constitute the … ‘organizing brains’ at the apex of extended value chains.”²⁰ These firms have an advantage in their capability to raise finance for large new projects, and the resources necessary to fund a high level of R&D spending to sustain technological leadership, to develop a global brand, to invest in state-of-the-art IT and to attract the best human resources.²¹ In each productive sector, a few firms survive. For example, in the automotive sector, of 42 independent manufacturers in the United States, Western Europe and Japan in 1960, 15 remain. There is an even greater preponderance of leading firms in other areas. The last few decades have seen “a drastic increase in the intensity of competition,”²² but it is a game between fewer players.

Competition from many poor and low-wage developing countries to attract capital for industrial development, while fewer and fewer firms dominate these industries, tipped the balance in favor of the latter. The “success” of “developing” countries in attracting multinationals interested in reducing costs had perverse effects. As the costs global companies faced in those countries (lower because the multinationals “carry” their productivity but pay less for the value of the labor force) became those that determined international prices of goods produced in the global chains, there was a deterioration in the terms of trade that was unfavorable to developing countries. This was a direct consequence of the fact that they were the links in the global industrial chains. What does this mean? Basically, that although they export more manufactured goods, the value exported increases less than proportionally (or, in the worst-case scenario, it can even fall). Therefore, as the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) recognized, only those countries capable of “increasing the technological content of exports and upgrading quality can offset persistent declines in terms of trade.²³ These efforts to exit the so-called “race to the bottom” — competing for lower costs (which always leads to downward pressure on wages) — and instead join the “race to the top” also became increasingly difficult as more countries attempt similar strategies. Therefore, the asymmetric relationship between the leading firms in value chains and their suppliers tends to be reproduced in new areas.

Therefore, although a sector in the dependent (“developing”) countries increased its share of so-called manufacturing value added (MVA), which is the indicator of how much of the value generated in a chain a country “captures,” this is progress full of contrasts. As noted by UNIDO, more than two-thirds of the increase in developing countries’ share of MVA is explained by China, which exported less than 1 percent of total manufacturing in 1990 and now generates 24.4 percent of industrial value added. More importantly, “industrialized economies still dominate world MVA, largely through the manufacture of medium-high and high-tech products” while “developing and emerging industrial economies produce largely basic consumer goods, although their share of medium-high and high-tech products increased sharply between 2005 and 2015.²⁴ Several studies on value chains show that the relationship between increases in manufacturing value added and what is called “upgrading” — a term used to refer to a qualitative increase in a country’s productive capacity — has become more diffuse. Only a handful of countries can show some level of upgrading, and in almost all cases it is quite limited.²⁵

This weak connection is characteristic of much of the industrialization produced in low-income countries in recent decades. Most of it has been driven by the expansion of “special economic zones,” one of the many names for spaces freed up for multinational companies and their partners to form value chains, avoid taxes, forego labor and environmental regulations, and so on. This has produced, in most cases, the opposite of any “industrial system” in newly industrialized countries.²⁶ One consequence of this lack is that “it is the requirements of expanded reproduction of the relations of production in the core countries that determine both the characteristics of the production process and the activities that are profitable to carry out.”²⁷

It is the multinational companies that dominate the value chains that define what is produced, how it is produced, and with what inputs, which makes it difficult to form sectoral production complexes.²⁸ This is evidence of the regeneration, in new forms, of dependent, subordinate, and disjointed patterns of accumulation.

The Wealth of Nations?

In short, the “drainage reversal” to which Harvey refers can be applied only to a handful of countries, and only if we do not consider his statement in a strict sense, because in reality the drainage continues to be unfavorable even for some of the recently developed countries that have risen the most with respect to per-capita production, productivity, and so on. The true part of the Marxist geographer’s assertion is that we should not have a stagnant image of development in the imperialist countries and uniform underdevelopment across the rest of the planet. Some countries have advanced enough to check off several boxes, and this partially affects the “balance of power” with respect to the imperialist powers. But at the same time, it must be stressed that none of them could be explained were it not for a highly unusual combination of determinations (beginning with China) that illustrates, more than refutes, the persistence of the “old categories of imperialism” Harvey is quick to dismiss.

We must not draw the wrong conclusions from the image of imperialist countries with relatively weak economic growth, while the economies of some Asian countries are growing at higher rates. The multinational companies, almost all based in the imperialist countries, command a good part of the profits from this growth, and although they reinvest them in part in these same countries to sustain their global expansion, they also return in various ways to the imperialist countries themselves or go to tax havens. The same offshore destination play an important role in the profits of the local capitalist classes in the most “successful” emerging countries, such as Argentina, which in this respect behave no differently than other bourgeoisies.

What happened with per-capita GDP per capita shows quite convincingly how productive internationalization has worked. The gap between the richest economies and the rest of the developing world, if we exclude China, not only did not close, but it has increased almost continuously in the last 60 years. Not surprisingly, UNCTAD states that “the global economy does not serve all people equally. Under the current configuration of policies, rules, market dynamics, and corporate power, economic gaps are likely to increase.”²⁹

As we see, the world today is not one of dissolved hierarchies, but rather perpetuates them in a modified form according to the more globalized conditions of capital accumulation. In this framework, the relative rise of some Asian economies that Harvey seeks to highlight is a reality that shows the complexity of the strata in the world economy; the other fact of this reality is that productive internationalization has benefited the multinationals of the imperialist countries, although they have been downgraded when it comes to growth. In this way, multinational capital based in the imperialist countries has been a big winner of the period.

In these same countries we also find some of the losers, absolute or relative, of the period. These are the less transnationalized sectors of the bourgeoisie that suffer from competition with capital from the rest of the world, and the labor force whose income has been stagnant for decades. Along with the lasting effects of the Great Recession, these are some of the breeding grounds of sovereignty and nationalism running through the United States (which will continue to affect the country’s politics even if Trump loses) and Europe — the latter a subject for future articles.

In most of the dependent capitalist countries, raising the levels of “development” under the conditions of a capitalist world economy that tends to reproduce the development gaps with extremely limited modifications is as elusive under the conditions of productive internationalization as it had been throughout the 20th century. Nevertheless, the “successful” countries serve as a model. International organizations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the development agencies of the United Nations, as well as the bourgeoisies of the dependent countries, continue to push these success stories to propose apparently attainable goals. This serves to give ideological support to the subordinate classes regarding the “need” to make “sacrifices” in terms of income and living conditions, and to accept “modernizing” reforms to imitate these examples — which in reality rarely reached their levels of development thanks to these recipes, but rather to the margins they had to eke out of them.

For the working classes and the poor, this road can only be a “race to the bottom.” Breaking with imperialism — and with the local bourgeoisies that are increasingly integrated into it — is the only way to get out of the vicious circle of dependence and backwardness.

First published in Spanish on August 30 in Ideas de Izquierda.

Translation: Scott Cooper

Notes [ + ]

1.	↑	David Harvey, “A Commentary on A Theory of Imperialism,” in Prabhat Patnaik and Utsa Patnaik, A Theory of Imperialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 169. Claudio Katz is another author who has recently made similar statements; see “América Latina en el capitalism contemporáneo. II – Geopolítica, dominación y resistencias” (“Latin America in contemporary Capitalism. II – Geopolitics, Domination, and Resistance”), blog post, March 7, 2020.
2.	↑	John Smith, Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century: Globalization, Super-Exploitation, and Capitalism’s Final Crisis (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016).
3.	↑	Centre for Applied Research (Norwegian School of Economics), Global Financial Integrity, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Instituto de Estudos Socioeconômicos, and Nigerian Institute of Social and Economic Research, “Financial Flows and Tax Havens: Combining to Limit the Lives of Billions of People,” December 2015.
4.	↑	David Harvey, “Realities on the Ground: David Harvey Replies to John Smith,” Review of African Political Economy, 2018.
5.	↑	The degree to which this occurs will depend, obviously, on the return on investment of each country. Two countries, A and B, may have equal cross-border foreign investments, but if in country A the return on B’s capital is 10 percent per year, while in country B the capital return A realizes is 8 percent, B will be enriching itself at the “expense” of A. As Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy have pointed out on several occasions, the United States has benefited significantly, over several decades, from this difference between the return on its foreign investments and the return on the foreign investments of other countries in the United States. Translator’s note: Duménil and Lévy are French economists at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS, National Center for Scientific Research) in Paris. See their book The Crisis of Neoliberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011.
6.	↑	Marx, Capital, Book I, chapter 25, “The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation.”
7.	↑	United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, Global Value Chains: Investment and Trade for Development, World Investment Report 2013.
8.	↑	United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), Demand for Manufacturing: Driving Inclusive and Sustainable Industrial Development, Industrial Development Report 2018, 158.
9.	↑	Smith, Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century, 101.
10.	↑	Limited because, as Ajit Ghose writes, “What appears to be a change in the pattern of North-South trade is in essence a change in the pattern of trade between industrialized countries and a group of 24 developing countries … The rest of the developing world, in contrast, remained overwhelmingly dependent on export of primary commodities.” See Ajit K. Ghose, Jobs and Incomes in a Globalizing World (New Delhi: Bookwell, 2005), 12. That said, it is also true that, as John Smith writes, “many other smaller nations have made a brave effort to reorient their economies to the export of manufactures and play host to manufacturing enclaves, also known as export processing zones” (Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century, 51–2.). In this sense, the search for export insertion has been generalized in the dependent countries, beyond that the number of those that developed major projects has been limited, and the number of those that achieved this through a substantial increase in their per capita product has been reduced even more.
11.	↑	Zak Cope, The Wealth of (Some) Nations. Imperialism and the Mechanics of Value Transfer (London: Pluto Press, 2019), 31.
12.	↑	Translator’s note: The policy of import substitution industrialization by countries promotes establishing domestic production to replace the need for foreign imports, and is thus aimed as well at diminishing overall foreign dependencies. While it is a principle feature of development economics in the 20th century, its origins go back much further. For instance, Alexander Hamilton was a major proponent of such a policy at the time of the establishment of the United States in the late 18th century.
13.	↑	Gary Gereffi, Global Value Chains, Development, and Emerging Economies: Redefining the Contours of 21st Century Capitalism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 344.
14.	↑	Gereffi, Global Value Chains, 345.
15.	↑	Smith, Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century, 51.
16.	↑	In 1976, there were some 11,000 multinational companies operating globally, with 82,600 subsidiaries. By 2010, those numbers had reached 103,788 and 892,114, respectively. See United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), Non-Equity Modes of International Production and Development, World Investment Report 2011.
17.	↑	Peter Nolan, Jin Zhang, and Chunhang Liu, The Global Business Revolution and the Cascade Effect: Systems Integration in the Global Aerospace, Beverage and Retail Industries (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 3.
18.	↑	United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), Cross-border Mergers and Acquisitions and Development, World Investment Report 2000, 107–8.
19.	↑	Nolan et al., The Global Business Revolution …, 17.
20.	↑	Peter Nolan, Is China Buying the World? (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2012).
21.	↑	Nolan et al., The Global Business Revolution …, 28.
22.	↑	Peter Nolan, Is China Buying the World? (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2012).
23.	↑	UNIDO, Demand for Manufacturing, 12.
24.	↑	UNIDO, Demand for Manufacturing, 162–4.
25.	↑	William Milberg and Deborah Winkler, Outsourcing Economics: Global Value Chains in Capitalist Development (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 255.
26.	↑	For a discussion on lack of an “industrial system” in the peripheral countries of the value chains, see Enrique Arceo, El largo camino a la crisis. Centro, periferia y transformaciones de la economía mundial [The Long Road to crisis: Center, Periphery, and Transformations of the World Economy] (Buenos Aires: Cara o Ceca, 2012, 217. Jorge Schvarzer is among the other authors who have highlighted this need to think about industry in a systemic way; see his La industria que supimos conseguir. Una historia político-social de la industria argentina [The Industry We Were Able to Achieve: A Political and Social History of Argentine Industry] (Buenos Aires, Ediciones Cooperativas, 2000).
27.	↑	Arceo, El largo camino a la crisis, 218.
28.	↑	Translator’s note: A sectoral production complex is one that contains one or more sectors of production that are linked by a common resource base and common economic relations.
29.	↑	United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), Financing a Global Green New Deal, Trade and Development Report 2019, 41.

"The Power Of Example And The Example Of Power” – Colin Powell on Joe Biden at the DNC

Sat, 12 Sep 2020 21:36:58 GMT

The 2020 DNC may have ended over two weeks ago, but its inanity and pantomiming still haunt U.S. politics. The mostly-remote dog-and-pony show coalesced around the image of the liberal establishment and its talking-head, Joe Biden, as the country’s white knight-in-waiting. Predictably enough, each day was chock-full of an elite mixture of politicians, celebrities, and celebrity-politicians customarily nodding approval to abstractions like inclusivity and equality, promising to rehabilitate “the soul” of the nation, and studiously occluding any discussion of programs that might actually better the lives of working people.

Now, such tone-deafness and gestural dreck should be expected of a political party that has flagrantly run ramshod over its less well-heeled constituency’s needs since the 1970’s, thereby sending many voters either rightward or altogether out of the two-party purview. In a morbid way, it’s logical enough, if not inevitable, that a cadre of conservative chicken-hawks and pundits would eventually be invited to speak at the DNC.

This year, that moment arrived.

Of the right-wing stalwarts invited to this year’s mid-August convention (anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ former presidential candidate John Kasich and Atlantic Council Board of Directors member Susan Molinari among them), perhaps none were so notable as George W. Bush cabinet member Colin Powell, whose speech on the second night landed just shy of the 3-minute mark and was book-ended by a moving anecdote highlighting how his immigrant heritage would eventually inspire him to become the sheepish war criminal he is today.

To some degree, Powell’s lofty messaging carried a refrain that would be echoed throughout the convention: Joe Biden will restore order, honor, and a farrago of other metaphysical American values to the White House. Unique to the former Secretary of State’s speech, however, was that he spent the bulk of his stage time filtering this shop-worn liberal bromide through a foreign policy lens. Indeed, Powell seemed less invested in Biden’s prowess as a domestic president than as an international commander-in-chief, hailing Biden as a leader “we will all be proud salute,” who will “support our troops,” “stand with our friends, and up to our enemies,” address “climate change and nuclear proliferation,” and in a Russiagate-tinged sleight to the incumbent, “trust our diplomats and our intelligence community, not the flattery of dictators and despots.”

Notwithstanding the obvious fact that we probably shouldn’t trust Colin Powell when he waxes poetic about the scruples of U.S. state intelligence (his alibi for the Iraq war is that former CIA director George Tenet lied to him) or the dangers of nuclear weaponry, his characterization of Biden, a man that has gloated time and again about the size and breadth of his foreign policy portfolio, checks out.

A particularly telling moment in the speech came as follows:

I support Joe Biden because on Day One he will restore America’s leadership and our moral authority. He’ll be a president who knows America is strongest when, as he has said, “We lead both by the power of our example and the example of our power.”

As if it couldn’t be spelled out any more clearly, Powell is admitting that Biden will be more willfully and effectively hawkish than Trump. You need not look beyond Biden’s relatively recent remarks slamming Trump for being soft on Russia and Venezuela to corroborate this claim. But Biden’s hits on his opponent are just the tip of the iceberg. From taking a consistent hardline approach to military and economic interventions in the Global South, to displaying a fawning, weak-in-the-knees response at the opportunity to sell a disastrous Iraq occupation to the American public, Joe Biden thoroughly embodies a part of what Donald Trump has–wittingly or unwittingly–disrupted during his 4 years in office, what Beltway traditionalists on either side of the aisle are, with an almost libidinal urge, champing at the bit to reprise: a stable military state, a dependable “example of power.”

Right now, it’s rather safe to say that both the power of a U.S. example and the example of U.S. power have seen better days. Soft power (power derived from abstract resources, such as culture or values, characterized by its ability to attract and seduce) and hard power (power derived from force, such as military threats or economic barriers, characterized by its ability to pressure and coerce) are, after all, codependent concepts, so when Trump came along and ham-fisted his response to the most economically and socially damning pandemic in modern history, then doubled-down on his support of our racist policing system, the ideological disruptions in tow could only ripple out against what they are supported by and supporting – a state-owned monopoly on violent conflict resolution.

Louis Althusser theorized how any successful hegemonic sovereignty must strike a balance between state ideological and repressive apparatuses, between passive and active forms of dominion. He suggested that any state forced to rely too heavily upon one or the other for too long a period will become submerged in unmanageable crises and eventual insolvency.

Good arguments could be made that we’ve arrived at this critical juncture of misproportion, or that at least we’re seeing its beginning. Historical processes are, of course, long, arduous, and admittedly difficult to examine at their onset, so what a post-Covid globe looks like is anyone’s guess. Still, by Powell placing so much emphasis on Biden’s record as a reliable imperialist who can at once ensure domestic reconciliation, it’s reasonable to assume that the Beltway Blob has sensed the same.

After all, Trump’s foreign policy has been colored by erratic and unhinged decisions that leave even his allies uneasy, and his recent national directives and endorsements have effectively destabilized the country’s reputation to the point where just about every center-lane politician in DC is on edge, wondering whether our “moral authority” has indeed runs its course, frantically searching the crumbling labyrinth they helped create for a safe way out.

As Powell–one of the architects of arguably the most pernicious foreign policy decision of this century–pointed out last week to a digital room full of Democratic operatives, Biden is that way out: a harbinger of the good old days when U.S. global hegemony was supposedly honorable, a force for good, a reason to be united. At the very least, Biden would make our foreign meddling look professional.

Ironically, in this one instance, why shouldn’t we believe him?

Steve Biko: Murdered by South African Cops On this Day in 1977

Sat, 12 Sep 2020 20:38:13 GMT

On September 12, 1977, South African police murdered Bantu Stephen Biko — known to the world as Steve Biko. He was a few months shy of his thirty-first birthday. An important leader of the anti-apartheid movement, he had been arrested a month earlier at a police roadblock after violating his banning order — which forbade him from traveling.

Steve Biko was a leader of the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM), a tremendously important part of the anti-apartheid movement that is far less known than Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC). The BCM emerged from grassroots activists in the period following Mandela’s imprisonment and the banning of the ANC and the Pan Africanist Congress after the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre.

Initially linked to Christianity, it very rapidly became what was arguably the most radical element of the anti-apartheid movement. “Black Consciousness” — a specific rejection of white liberals and their “condescending” values — was expanded by Biko and others into a powerful ideology centered on smashing apartheid and moving South Africa to socialism. In 1968, Biko spearheaded the founding of the South African Students’ Organisation (SASO) as an alternative to the multirace National Union of South African Students. SASO took up Black Consciousness as its central tenet. Strongly influenced by the Black Power movement in the United States, Biko popularized the slogan “Black is Beautiful” in South Africa — and worked tirelessly to promote the ideas of Black Consciousness as widely as possible.

The BCM adopted “Black man, you are on your own” as a rallying cry, and taught at every turn that what people needed to confront was “the System” that propped up apartheid — and that it was more than just a racist system, but also a capitalist system of exploitation. In 1972 and 1973, the BCM played a central role in a large protest and strike wave that broke out, especially in the city of Durban, and that eventually involved more than 100,000 workers. The BCM’s participation, and especially its powerful call for Black leadership of unions, led in part to a government clampdown. Virtually the entire leadership of SASO was banned, with the government describing as “treasonous” the development of “consciousness” by Black South Africans.

It was the BCM that sparked the Soweto uprising of Black schoolchildren in 1976 — a key moment in the anti-apartheid struggle — against the imposition of Afrikaans as the language of instruction in Black schools. That uprising, and the massacre of 176 demonstrators by the South African Security forces in response, spurred rebellion across South Africa.

Biko wasn’t at the Soweto uprising, because in 1973 the South African government had placed him under a banning order, characterizing him as a subversive. This placed harsh restrictions on his activities and ability to travel in the country. He did violate the ban several times, leading to being detained and beaten on multiple occasions.

The specific circumstances around Biko’s death in 1977 are notable. He had traveled to Cape Town, where one of his aims was to meet with Neville Alexander — a Trotskyist leader in South Africa. Alexander refused the meeting, not for political reasons but because he suspected that police monitoring of Biko’s movements would put him at risk, as well. On the way back, Biko and his traveling companion Peter Jones confronted the roadblock and were taken into custody. Biko was murdered by the cops on September 12; Jones was held for 533 days, interrogated and tortured repeatedly before being released.

The importance of Black Consciousness to the ultimate victory of the anti-apartheid forces in South Africa cannot be overstated. The BCM played a significant role in unraveling many of the social restraints that apartheid placed on Black people in general and that had repercussions within the struggle. For instance, it empowered regular folks in the townships to recognize that they did not need to wait for exiled or imprisoned leaders to liberate them, and that their own mass action was necessary, in the streets, to fight the apartheid regime. BCM leaders preached a sort of “fearlessness” that led to numerous confrontations with police and the army; these emboldened people and made the overall movement even stronger by demonstrating to the state that people were “ungovernable” under apartheid.

Almost without exception today, Trotskyists in South Africa — no matter the international organization with which they may be affiliated — trace their political origins in their own country back to the Black Consciousness Movement.

On this day, the anniversary of his murder by the cops, we declare: Steve Biko, Presente!