Groveling at the Feet of Greed: How U.S. Politicians Sacrifice Lives for Profit and Power

By Peter S. Baron

U.S. foreign policy has consistently exposed the cowardly and self-serving opportunism of our political leaders, who are driven by the interests of their corporate elite overlords. From the earliest days of the Republic, American interventions abroad have prioritized the elite class’s accumulation and consolidation of profit and power over human rights and international stability. Politicians, ever ready to serve corporate interests, have implemented policies designed to expand market access, control vital resources, and maintain global dominance, all while cloaking their actions in the rhetoric of democracy and security.

American politicians, as executors of this foreign policy, perpetuate wars, coups, and economic sanctions, ensuring a steady stream of blood money to their elite patrons. They manipulate public sentiment and suppress dissent to create a facade of national interest that conceals the true beneficiaries of these policies. The cumulative devastation from the African Slave Trade to the genocide in Gaza exposes the moral bankruptcy of a foreign policy rooted in murder and torture for profit and power. This grotesque complicity demands a radical rethinking of America's role in the world, prioritizing human dignity over corporate greed.

A History of Exploitation: From Slavery to Modern Conflicts

The pattern of exploitation, intrinsic to American capitalism and imperialism, traces back to our earliest days as a new nation. Understanding this continuum helps explain ongoing atrocities in places like Gaza, where marginalized lives remain collateral damage in the pursuit of profit and power.

The African Slave Trade, beginning in the 16th century, was an era of unparalleled brutality that resulted in the deaths of approximately 1.5 to 3 million African people. This brutal chapter in history was propelled by European powers and elite colonists, whose capitalist ambitions demanded a massive labor force to produce surpluses of profitable crops like sugar, cotton, and tobacco. Africans were enslaved and forcibly torn from their homes, families, and cultures, then transported across the Atlantic under the most inhumane conditions imaginable. Packed like cargo in the filthy holds of ships, many died from disease, malnutrition, and abuse. Those who survived the harrowing journey were sold like cattle, treated as mere property, stripped of their humanity, and forced to toil under relentless, brutal conditions.

The dehumanization and commodification of millions of men, women, and children generated immense wealth for European and American economies, laying the very foundation for modern capitalism.

In what is now the contiguous United States, the Indigenous population was decimated from over 5 million before European contact to fewer than 238,000 by the late 19th century, a near-total annihilation that subjected indigenous communities to unimaginable horrors—relentless warfare, violent displacement, and the deliberate introduction of diseases to which they had no immunity. The forced removal and extermination of Indigenous peoples was justified by U.S. expansionist policies under the guise of "Manifest Destiny." Americans were supposedly destined to occupy and control the land across the American continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Driven by a relentless capitalist hunger for land and resources, the U.S. government and settlers aggressively seized vast territories for agriculture, mining, and real estate ventures in a calculated effort to pave the way for capitalist development.

The American Revolutionary War resulted in approximately 25,000 American deaths, around 24,000 British deaths, and about 7,500 Hessian (German) mercenary deaths, totaling approximately 56,500 fatalities. British trade policies were designed to keep the colonies economically dependent on Britain, restricting their ability to trade freely and forcing them to benefit the British economy. These policies included excessive taxation, which disproportionately burdened the lower classes in the colonies, fueling their anger towards both the elite in the UK and their colonial counterparts.

However, as the revolution progressed, the colonial elite seized control of the revolutionary committees and assemblies. This allowed them to hijack the grassroots demands for liberty and self-determination, twisting the revolutionary fervor to serve their own selfish economic interests. The common colonists were thrust into a violent and bloody struggle, duped into believing they were fighting for genuine freedom. However, the revolution ultimately served only to enrich and empower the wealthy American elite, betraying the common people and stripping them of the promised economic and social gains.

Elite leaders such as Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and James Madison ensured the founding documents would usher in a political structure that safeguarded the interests of property owners and the wealthy. The original Constitution included mechanisms like the Electoral College and the Senate, which diluted the direct influence of the popular vote and ensured that power remained concentrated among the elite.

In essence, the rich leaders of the revolution, like George Washington who was one of the wealthiest men in the colonies, sought to dismantle British control to establish a capitalist economy where private property and free enterprise reigned supreme. Washington, often lauded for his prudence in declining to rule as King, certainly did not forgo the opportunity to live like one. He paid himself a Presidential salary that amounted to 2% of the total budget of the newly established American nation.

The US Civil War, which claimed between 620,000 and 850,000 lives, was fundamentally a battle between the Southern elites' agrarian economy based on slavery and the Northern elites' industrial economy based on wage labor. Southern landowners accumulated wealth through the brutal exploitation of enslaved people on plantations that produced cash crops like cotton and tobacco. The relentless drive for profit under capitalism pushed these enslavers to seek expansion into new American territories, a practice that Abraham Lincoln aimed to halt.

Northern elites, driven by the same capitalist commitment, were invested in expanding industrial capitalism, which relied on wage labor. They saw slavery as an economic hindrance to their vision of a more profitable and adaptable workforce. Wage labor allowed Northern industrialists to exploit workers without the legal and logistical constraints of slavery, offering a more scalable and flexible labor force for factories and industries. Workers could be hired and fired based on demand, paid only when needed, and subjected to poor working conditions without the need for lifelong ownership.

The North's victory dismantled the Southern slave-based economy, ending the agrarian capitalist model and paving the way for industrial capitalism to dominate. This shift facilitated rapid industrial growth and infrastructure development, promoting a capitalist economy based on wage labor. After approximately a decade of Reconstruction efforts, Northern industrial powers strengthened their influence over key economic sectors such as manufacturing, railroads, and finance. Subsequently, they withdrew their support for Reconstruction, allowing the South to effectively reinstitute slavery through the systems of sharecropping and convict leasing.

The Spanish-American War of 1898, which led to approximately 60,000 Spanish deaths and 3,200 American deaths, was driven by the U.S. desire to expand its influence and open new markets for American goods. The war was partly fueled by the sensationalist journalism of the time, which drummed up public support for intervention in Cuba's struggle for independence from Spain. However, underlying this public sentiment were strong economic motivations. The U.S. sought to protect its investments in Cuba and to gain control of other Spanish colonies like Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. The acquisition of these territories allowed the U.S. to expand its reach into new markets, securing strategic locations for military and trade purposes, thereby furthering American capitalists’ economic and strategic interests.

The US-Philippine War, which occurred from 1899 to 1902, caused around 220,000 Filipino deaths. This war was driven by the U.S.'s desire to establish a foothold in Asia, opening up new markets and resources for American businesses under the guise of "civilizing" and democratizing the region. Following the Spanish-American War, the U.S. took control of the Philippines, facing resistance from Filipino nationalists who sought independence. The brutal suppression of the Filipino independence movement demonstrated the lengths to which the U.S. would go to maintain its new colonial possessions.

During World War I, the federal government registered about half a million "enemy alien" civilians, monitored many of them, and sent around 6,000 German Nationals and German-American men and a few women to internment camps. The camps were harsh and inhumane, with poor living conditions, inadequate food, and rampant disease. Internees were subjected to forced labor and constant surveillance, stripped of their freedoms under the guise of protecting the nation. Perhaps, more strikingly, the government seized vast amounts of private property, often with dubious connections to the war effort, amassing assets worth over half a billion dollars—nearly the entire federal budget before the war.

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By seizing the businesses and properties of German Americans, the American elite removed economic competition and consolidated control. Xenophobia was used as a tactic to create an ideological construct where the German American community was scapegoated, symbolizing both external and internal threats. This strategy reinforced national cohesion by projecting fears onto a racialized other, uniting the nation against a common enemy.

Following the Pearl Harbor attack, American elites and their obedient politicians deflected public anger away from their own profit-driven actions that had escalated tensions with Japan. The greedy capitalist elite, desperate to control vital resources like oil and rubber from Southeast Asia, had imposed crippling economic sanctions on Japan. A State Department memorandum a year before Pearl Harbor laid bare their true motives: fear of losing access to lucrative markets and essential materials in Asia. These ruthless measures posed a clear and potent threat to Japan's very existence, intentionally provoking them into war. Instead of holding these capitalist vultures accountable, the government cowardly redirected blame onto Japanese Americans, shielding the true culprits behind this manufactured conflict.

Thus, echoing the strategic motivations behind the internment of German Americans during World War I, the U.S. government initiated the internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II. These camps were dehumanizing, with families torn from their homes and businesses, stripped of their rights, and confined in remote, desolate locations. The deplorable conditions lacked adequate shelter, food, and medical care. People lived in overcrowded barracks, surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards, enduring extreme weather and a constant sense of fear and uncertainty.

The Korean War, which raged from 1950 to 1953, was a horrific conflict that resulted in approximately 2.5 million deaths, leaving the Korean peninsula in ruins and its people devastated. This war, driven by the U.S. aim to contain Soviet influence and protect global capitalist interests, reveals that the Cold War was essentially a series of hot wars, with Soviet and American elites fighting proxy battles around the world. After World War II, Korea was divided into two zones, with the North under Soviet influence and the South under American control. The American aim was to establish a capitalist South Korea that could serve as a bulwark against Soviet influence, ensuring a market-friendly environment beneficial to American economic interests. The war saw relentless bombings, mass executions, and widespread atrocities. Entire cities were leveled, and countless civilians were caught in the crossfire, subjected to unimaginable suffering.

In Guatemala in 1954, the U.S.-backed coup of Jacobo Árbenz set the stage for decades of brutal conflict and repression, including the Guatemalan Civil War, that led to the deaths of between 140,000 and 200,000 people. The overthrow of President Jacobo Árbenz was a direct response to his land reform policies that aimed to redistribute land to impoverished peasants, which threatened American corporate interests, particularly those of the United Fruit Company.

The US-backed Indonesian genocide from 1965 to 1966 resulted in the deaths of between 500,000 and 1 million people. The U.S. supported General Suharto's rise to power as part of a broader strategy to eliminate communist influences in Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim-majority country and a region of significant geopolitical importance. Suharto's regime, with U.S. backing, targeted members of the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) and suspected leftists, resulting in mass killings and widespread atrocities. The elimination of communist influences in Indonesia helped to secure a stable and capitalist-friendly regime that ensured a favorable environment for American economic interests and multinational corporations in Southeast Asia.

The Vietnam War, from 1955 to 1975, resulted in approximately 2 million deaths. The U.S. intervened to prevent the spread of communist influence in Southeast Asia, crucial for protecting global capitalist interests. The Domino Theory suggested that if one country fell to communism, others in the region would follow, threatening capitalist markets and investments.

The war was characterized by extensive bombing, chemical warfare, and brutal ground battles, leading to immense destruction and loss of life. The U.S. aimed to support a non-communist government in South Vietnam to maintain a strategic and economic foothold. Th U.S. government installed Ngo Dinh Diem as the leader of South Vietnam in 1954, a man who aided the French colonizers in rounding up independence fighters during Vietnam’s revolution and who was living in Lakewood, New Jersey prior to being installed as President of South Vietnam. Villages were razed, civilians massacred, and entire regions devastated by napalm and Agent Orange.

As part of the Vietnam War, the U.S. bombing campaigns in Cambodia and Laos from 1969 to 1973 resulted in 500,000 deaths. These, known as Operation Menu and Operation Freedom Deal, were aimed at destroying North Vietnamese supply routes, particularly the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which ran through these countries. The campaigns involved extensive use of carpet bombing and chemical defoliants, causing widespread civilian casualties and long-term environmental harm. In total, U.S. dropped 2,756,941 tons of bombs, more than all of the bombs dropped by the Allies in World War II.

The Bangladesh famine of 1974, which claimed up to 1.5 million lives, was tragically induced by U.S. policies that prioritized geopolitical interests over human suffering. During the Bangladesh Liberation War, the U.S., driven to uphold global capitalism through their Cold War alliances, supported the Pakistani government with aid and arms, enabling Pakistan to brutally suppress the independence movement in East Pakistan, now Bangladesh.

The conflict ravaged the region, leading to widespread devastation and economic collapse. When Bangladesh finally achieved independence, it was left in ruins, its infrastructure destroyed, and its economy in shambles. The newly formed government struggled desperately to address the famine that followed. Fields lay barren, markets were empty, and the people starved. During the height of the famine, the U.S. withheld 2.2 million tons of food aid as a means to pressure the Bangladeshi government into aligning with American political and economic interests.

The haunting images of skeletal children did nothing to stir the cold, calculating hearts of American politicians, who shamelessly grovel at the feet of greed. As expected, their consciences, deeply buried beneath their unwavering service to those who relentlessly pursue profit, remained impervious to the suffering they inflicted. The elite relied on their unwavering commitment to corporate profit and control over the global order, and these politicians met those expectations without hesitation.

The $8 trillion U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, part of the broader War on Terrorism, has resulted in over 900,000 deaths over the ensuing years. Initially justified as a response to the September 11 attacks, aimed at dismantling Al-Qaeda and toppling the Taliban, this intervention was heavily influenced by imperialist strategic interests. Afghanistan's critical location in Central Asia made it a prime target for projecting U.S. power and influence, surrounded by key nations like Iran, Pakistan, China, and the Central Asian republics. Establishing a foothold in Afghanistan provided the U.S. a strategic base to manipulate regional dynamics and counterbalance rivals such as Iran and China. Additionally, the prolonged military occupation and reconstruction efforts were a boon for American corporations involved in defense, security, and infrastructure, including then Vice President Dick Cheney's Halliburton.

The U.S. interventions in Iraq, including the Gulf War in 1991 and the Iraq War in 2003, resulted in catastrophic human losses, with approximately 100,000 deaths the Gulf War and 600,000 deaths from the Iraq War. These interventions were driven by strategic interests in Iraq's vast oil resources, with the U.S. aiming to control and secure these assets for capitalist benefits. The Gulf War was initiated to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait, a key oil-producing country, thereby protecting U.S. allies and ensuring the stability of global oil supplies. The 2003 invasion of Iraq, under the pretext of eliminating weapons of mass destruction, was similarly motivated by the desire to gain control over Iraq's oil fields and to establish a compliant government that would favor U.S. economic interests. Here too, the Vice President Dick Cheney's former company, Halliburton, made a staggering $39.5 billion from contracts related to the Iraq War, many of which were awarded without competitive bidding.

The devastation caused by these wars was immense: infrastructure was obliterated, cities were reduced to rubble, and millions of civilians were caught in the crossfire or suffered from the resulting chaos and instability, with 5 million displaced. The prolonged occupation and the dismantling of its military and governmental structures created a power vacuum and widespread chaos. This environment facilitated the rise of extremist groups, with ISIS eventually forming from the remnants of al-Qaeda in Iraq and other militant factions.

The NATO intervention in Libya in 2011, which led to approximately 22,000 deaths, was officially framed as a humanitarian effort to protect civilians during the uprising against Muammar Gaddafi's regime. However, beneath this veneer of humanitarianism lay significant strategic and economic interests, particularly related to Libya's vast oil reserves. Libya, boasting the largest proven oil reserves in Africa, was a crucial supplier of oil to Europe. The NATO-led intervention resulted in the overthrow of Gaddafi but also plunged the country into chaos, leading to prolonged instability and conflict. This destabilization allowed multinational corporations easier access to invest in and exploit Libya's oil resources. Moreover, the intervention had dire consequences for the social fabric of Libya. The power vacuum and ensuing chaos led to the re-emergence of open-air slave markets, where human beings are being bought and sold like commodities for as little as $400.

The ongoing genocide in Gaza is simply another manifestation of the capitalist ethos that permeated the violence described above. The U.S. government's complicity in perpetuating violence and destruction is driven by economic and geopolitical imperatives just like those we have discussed above. American taxpayer-funded military aid to Israel supports a relentless campaign against Palestinians, masked as a security measure but fundamentally rooted in capitalist and strategic interests. This alliance between American and Israeli elites consolidates control over critical resources and trade routes, enriching defense contractors and entrenching regional dominance. Innocent civilians bear the true cost: tens of thousands killed, homes and infrastructure decimated, and entire communities obliterated.

Collective Disengagement: Standing Up to Oppression and Building a New Future

The elite sustain this centuries long pattern of calculated violence by manipulating our collective psychology. They justify their acts of violence and war, while those who denounce such atrocities and propose new ways of organizing society are marginalized and discredited. Public sentiment is meticulously crafted through propaganda that narrows the range of acceptable discourse and paints revolutionary voices as unrealistic, insane, or dangerous.

Their fearmongering is particularly effective because it exploits our vulnerable position in a systemically competitive society. Those who have the least are warned they can't afford to join the courageous revolutionaries and risk losing what little they have, even though they stand to gain the most. Meanwhile, those with some financial security are told that embracing revolutionary ideals would plunge them into the struggles faced by those below them. The truth is, these revolutionary ideals would remove us from the cutthroat competition that characterizes the current world order. Such actionable ideals promise a world where no one has to live in insecurity or fear of losing everything. By fostering cooperation instead, we can create a society where everyone's needs are met, and the constant anxiety of survival is abolished.

The elite's hostility towards so-called 'radical' ideas is not simply a matter of ideological disagreement. They are acutely aware of the power, practicality, and rapid spread of these revolutionary concepts, and they fear how quickly they can be implemented. Thus, they ensure such dissent is systematically suppressed through state-sanctioned violence, creating a climate of acquiescence. This dual approach of bounded discourse and suppressed dissent ensures that transformational ideas are marginalized and genuine social change is hindered. Through this method, the ruling class engineers a grotesque charade where the only permissible political stances are those fundamentally devoted to perpetuating corporate dominance and expanding capitalism.

But their manipulation runs deeper—they sell us these contrived choices! They cleverly associate being a Democrat with specific cultural values and being a Republican with others. Glossy advertisements and sleek marketing campaigns flaunt both celebrities and everyday people who embody these fabricated values, pushing products that supposedly define liberal or conservative lifestyles, along with their various subcultures.

Every purchase we make, whether it's a hybrid car adorned with progressive bumper stickers or a pickup truck flaunting patriotic decals, feeds into this fabricated dichotomy. We're not just voting with our wallets; we're being coerced into aligning our self-worth and identity with these consumer choices. It's a grand illusion where both sides, despite their apparent differences, funnel us into the same exploitative system.

We’re bombarded with slogans and images that blend politics with consumerism. "Vote blue, buy green." "Real Americans wear red." It's a relentless cycle where we are implored to buy products that signify our 'values'—values crafted in boardrooms to serve corporate interests.

Every vote, every purchase, every piece of cultural paraphernalia we adorn ourselves with is a cog in their profit machine. The elites sit back, watching us dance to their tune, our dissent muted, our choices orchestrated, our lives commodified. This is a profound violation of our autonomy and dignity, a testament to the insidious power of corporate hegemony.

It’s time we reject the individuals who are “leading” our country, recognizing them as the spineless and avaricious opportunists they repeatedly prove themselves to be. They do not look out for “American interests.” They look out for elite interests. The elite are fully aware of the destruction and death they cause. They wield force not just because it’s effective but because it sends a chilling message to those of us who see through their charades. They know that some of us can see their justifications for war—drenched in pompous, misleading rhetoric of spreading democracy or protecting American interests—for the sham that it is. They want us to understand that if we challenge them, they can and will bring hell upon earth. They will kill without hesitation.

Yet, they have a vulnerability. To oppress and kill, they need us to do their bidding. They need us to ship the bombs, to provide political support, to play their rigged game. They require vast numbers of soldiers to sign up, commit these atrocities, suffer from PTSD, and then be discarded when they return and seek help. It's time we stand together and refuse to be pawns in their murderous schemes. We must take this stand for ourselves and for humanity. By building networks of mutual aid and supporting each other, we can create the solidarity needed to resist their exploitation and implement new, just ways of organizing society.

Our collective power lies in our ability to say no. By refusing to participate in their wars, by resisting their propaganda, we can dismantle their power. The elites rely on our complicity, our labor, and our silence to maintain their dominion.

Imagine we chose to serve each other instead! Picture the strength of a unified populace, rejecting the exploitation and brutality inflicted in our name. We must rise together, in defiance of the so-called leaders who have sacrificed their integrity on the altar of capitalism. For every life shattered by their betrayal, for every dream crushed under the weight of their gluttony, we must unite. It is our duty to reclaim the values they have perverted, the future they threaten, and the planet they are setting aflame with their endless pursuit of profit. We owe it to ourselves and to the world to disrupt this cycle of violence and build a new social order that values human dignity over capital. Now is the time to come together and take action.

Peter S. Baron is the author of “If Only We Knew: How Ignorance Creates and Amplifies the Greatest Risks Facing Society” (https://www.ifonlyweknewbook.com) and is currently pursuing a J.D. and M.A. in Philosophy at Georgetown University.

The Unbearable Emptiness of Voting

By Roger Williams

Election season makes me feel like the kid who doesn’t have a stuffed animal on “bring your teddy bear to school” day. Everyone else has a favorite who they can tell good stories about and cuddle with, but I don’t so I feel left out. But then I remember that there are good reasons to resist getting pulled down by the undertow of elections.

Like cute stuffed animals, politicians make people feel good while having a marginal effect on positive social change. The main differences between stuffed animals and politicians are that 1) stuffed animals are actually cuddly, and 2) people don’t invest vast amounts of political hope and agency in stuffed animals. I recognize that arguing against what many people hold dear makes me kind of a grump, but I at least aspire to be one who is not stuck in idle criticism but is proposing alternative ideas. The particular variety of grumpiness that I espouse is one grounded in grassroots social movements that focus on direct action independent of party politics.

The prickly issue of politicians relates fundamentally to questions of the leftist orientation to the state. The cheery reformer smiles big and promises to make the system work for you. The grouchy revolutionary rolls their eyes and gets back to trying to transform the system from the ground up. The recent prominence of social democratic politicians on the left, like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has provided a big platform for the cheery reformers to make their case to the public. They speak of universal healthcare, free college, and many other nice things.

What of the curmudgeons? In rejecting electoralism do they abhor healthcare and cherish student debt? Do they ignore the plight of the masses by focusing only on long-term goals at the expense of the need for immediate material reforms? Are the grouches ruining socialism? As a card-carrying grouch myself, let me soothe your fears and dispel some mistaken notions about political crankiness.

First, grouches like free and universal health care as much as starry-eyed reformers. It’s just that the grumps think that running election campaigns are a much less effective strategy to secure positive reforms. The grouches drastically de-center voting and object to giving time or money to political candidates and instead focus on building grassroots organization to be able to take mass disruptive actions like work stoppages and civil disobedience to win demands. Second, while less the focus of this article, building grassroots social movements is the only way to increase raw working class power that makes more complete social transformation possible in the long-term.

Granted, the state is an enigmatic beast, and politicians are strange and unwitting creatures. The level of discourse in movement spaces about the merits of electoral strategy often regrettably devolves into sparring aphorisms such as “all politicians are sellouts”, “we can’t ignore political power”, “The Democratic Party is the graveyard of social movements”, “Do you want Trump to win?”

This essay attempts to spell out the revolutionary grump’s critique of electoralism by showing how the institutions of voting, election campaigns, and politicians make citizens into political bystanders and undermine their ability to effectively implement popular reforms. These critiques are distinct from but complimentary to the much more widespread objections of how electoral politics under capitalism are dominated by the wealthy through corporate lobbying and shady campaign funding. I contend here that such movements comprise the true architecture of positive social change that lies behind the shimmering facade of electoralism.

Representative democracy? Harumph

The ideal of representative democracy is that elected officials govern in the interests of the population or at least in the interests of their constituents and voters. In practice, there is an immense gap found between polls of public opinion and existing policy. The reformers think the state can be fixed and made to embody the public interest, while the revolutionaries are unconvinced. Before getting to the heart of the critique of electoralism, it’s worth briefly reviewing the evidence that our government does not embody the democratic rule of the people.

In a recent paper, political scientists Miles Gilens and Benjamin I. Page perform a large-scale quantitative analysis of public opinion data compared to legislative policy and conclude “that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens.. have little or no independent influence.”

To take just one important example, why is the US the only wealthy industrialized country in the world that doesn’t offer universal healthcare? From 2008-10, the only time when major healthcare reform seriously made it on the table in over 50 years, 77% of Americans polled said that it was the government’s responsibility that everyone’s basic healthcare needs be met, 73% supported a public option for the government to compete with private insurance plans, and 60-70% across a series of polls showed support for single-payer healthcare.

The resulting Affordable Care Act produced none of these basic and overwhelmingly popular reforms. Instead, the continued defectiveness of our healthcare system is evident today with 30 million Americans still lacking health insurance, 44 million additional Americans remaining under-insured, and an average of 20% of all people with health insurance forgoing or delaying treatment each year for a “serious condition” because of high costs. Healthcare offers a stark illustration of the public opinion-policy gap, but similar discrepancies can be found across the most important policies in the country, including defense spending and wars, higher education funding, and climate change.

Despite the insistence by some that the high school civics class theory of politics holds true, most Americans have a pretty low (and perhaps accurate) estimate of the quality of our governing institutions. Public approval for Congress over the recent decades has mostly oscillated between 10-30% and only 34% of Americans think the two major parties adequately represent the people.

While public opinion data alone provides neither a sufficient analysis nor a coherent vision for leftist politics, it’s often considerably more reasonable than the policies actually in place and provides a useful starting point for understanding the inequalities of power in society. That voting for mainstream politicians as a way to implement popular policies is not what it’s advertised to be is the unifying starting point for the buoyant reformer and grave revolutionary alike. That voting can not be fixed is the less obvious but central thrust of the grump’s grumpiness.

Voting? Phooey

Voting is a tactic for creating social change that involves expending virtually no effort. Yet, the common-sense notion that if you want something you have to work for it holds true in the realm of social change as much as anywhere else. When people tell me that all (or much of what) we need to do to change the world is check a box for a few minutes at a time once every 2-4 years, I wonder how that actually works. The pen may at times be mightier than the sword, but is the fill-in-the-bubble quiz called a ‘ballot’ really mightier than all of society’s billionaires, militarism, structural racism, and gender violence?

“But what about all the deliberation, debate, and discourse that goes into voting? Surely that’s an effortful endeavor?” Surely, but deliberation, debate, and discourse are prerequisites for political action of any kind, so the only distinguishing feature of voting is that the act itself requires no effort.

“But by engaging in debate with others and also encouraging people to vote, doesn’t voting then become a kind of mass collective action that’s exactly what’s needed to change society?” Mass collective action is not inherently progressive or effective, even if collective action of a certain kind is precisely what’s needed to create social change. I find little conceptual distinction between the millions of people who buy Coca-Cola (over the greater evil of Pepsi) every day as a collective action from those millions who vote. Individuals buying and drinking Coca-Cola is not the cause of society’s problems, but neither is it the solution. If anything, millions of people acting as mere aggregated sums through the institutions of the status quo is a prime way the status quo is perpetuated, not challenged.

“But don’t we need some way for the population to interface with governing institutions to influence their functioning and to ensure that they are run according to the desires of the citizens?” Yes, but the best way to make that mode of interfacing as meaningless as possible is to make the form of interaction between the government and the citizens as narrow as possible, such as voting. I agree that we need to interface with existing governing institutions, but voting is the least effective way of doing so.

“But if we don’t vote, the bad guys will take over!” Scaring people into voting is no way to create change nor prevent disaster but rather glosses over deeper problems of the political system that voting doesn’t address. However, for those who truly believe some politician is not as bad as the other one, it’s not that I disagree. Despite my many grumblings, I don’t insist that voting is entirely futile, just that it’s mostly so. If you think it’s worth the minuscule effort, go for it and don’t feel bad about it. I’m just critical of the widespread belief that voting will have more of a positive effect than a normal effort-to-reward calculus would indicate. The degree that voting is overvalued as a form of political engagement is the degree it displaces other more effective forms and forestalls social change.

“People died for the vote.” More than just that, they fought for the vote. The point that people fought and died for the vote and then won is less an argument about how voting is the most important thing. Rather, it’s more an argument that when people expend effort to build social movements to fight for a better world, then they win things.

“Social movements aren’t magic pixie dust that you can just sprinkle on every social-historical problem and expect it to go away.” As a tentative definition of social movements to ground these critiques of electoralism, let’s try this: Social movements are rooted in webs of mass-oriented organizations that build bases in communities and move with those communities towards direct action that disrupts the status quo, such as the strikes of the 1930s labor movement and the mass civil disobedience of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement. They are characterized by a disconnect between official policy and shifting popular sentiments, where a significant (but not necessarily majority) degree of public sympathy gives mass actions legitimacy. Such mass action is channeled towards those in power demanding that they alter formal policy but also is channeled towards the base by reshaping ideas and practices of political agency and self-determination.

So are social movements magic pixie dust? “Yes” in that they actually are the source of past positive social change and have the potential to create such change in the future, but “No” in that they are in any sense a cheap short-cut. Social movements take a lot of work, but it’s the actual work of making a difference. Voting, on the other hand, might more fully be characterized as magical in that it doesn’t have any real-world effect of its own and its presumed consequences are based on misperception.

Elections? Bah humbug

There’s a number of defining elements of electoral campaigns that are inimical to social change. These elements are the same ones that corporations use to create markets of passive consumers focused around brand identities, shallow exchange transactions, and individualized consumption.

Every political campaign relies on constructing a branded cult of personality around a candidate. Because sound-bites are an inadequate medium for presenting policy ideas, political campaigns come to revolve more around a candidate’s personality than their policy proposals and political records. This isn’t the fault of any individual politician; it’s the logic that all political campaigns have to apply if they want to maximize their appeal and exposure to fit the requirements of using mass media.

So the vast majority of voters come to know a politician through a picture of their smile as plastered across mailers and TV ads, a couple slogans like “tough on crime” or “tax the rich”, and a few labels such as “experienced”, “outsider”, “bipartisan”, “progressive”, “movement-oriented”, and so on. This political packaging comes to stand in for actual policy records and political relationships that might be indicative of future governance. Biden’s recent presidential campaign had little to say about his role in financial deregulation that paved the way for the 2008/9 financial collapse or the 1994 Crime Bill that helped super-charge mass incarceration. While I am more sympathetic to many of Bernie Sanders’ policy proposals, his campaign ads certainly didn’t focus on some of the less flattering parts of his political record, such as his past symbiotic relationship with an arms manufacturer or close friendship and political alliance with a Vermont billionaire developer. As corporations know very well, the best way to maximize appeal and exposure to mass markets (millions of voters are treated like millions of any other kind of customer) is to build a brand around a simple object that is injected with surface-level emotional appeal, however loosely that is tied to the rational interests of the consumer.

The most devious and disastrous aspect of the individualizing nature of the election campaign is that it encourages people to outsource their political agency to a politician. It’s the politician who has to promise they’ll fix things, and the citizens come to see themselves as largely passive consumers whose only meaningful participation is choosing one political brand over another. All of the laziness entailed in merely voting is converted into a mindset that it’s the politician’s responsibility, and not ours, to fix things. Rather than expressions of the general will of the citizenry, elections are mass disavowals of political responsibility.

Since the vote itself is such a narrow form of political engagement, and it’s the quantity of votes that determines the victor of the contest, election campaigns are organized around maximizing narrow engagement. A former long-time political campaign consultant commented:

[Obama for America (OFA)] organizers would often counsel campaign volunteers to stay away from engaging in discussions about specific issues and instead focus on sharing the “story of self,” the “story of us,” and the “story of now.” This methodology is intended to engage the prospective voter at an affective level much like a 12-step group speaker or a born-again Christian sharing her story of how she found Jesus…. I am critical of the manner that OFA used [this] methodology to short-circuit a perfectly legitimate way of facilitating the raising of critical consciousness (a long-term proposition) for the short-sighted aim of mobilizing the electorate for an election-night win.

The democracy-lessness of such frothy conversation has also been studied academically, as this study found that TV ads, campaign mail, and even the gold standard of door-to-door canvassing in the context of an election campaign were found to have virtually no persuasive effect on changing people’s minds about candidates or issues. The only thing it does have an effect on is the likelihood that the person will show up at the polling station on election day. This makes the dominant interface between election campaigns and citizens into a short-term transaction to get a commitment from someone that they’ll vote, just as corporations need to get you to the cash register or the Amazon check-out page. This kind of shallow interaction with complex issues as the primary form of campaign communication displaces institutional possibilities for deeper intellectual engagement with and political organizing around issues.

The other dominant form of “action” around political campaigns is the rally. Like voting, attending political rallies doesn’t involve much active participation. Whether it’s the candidate themselves or one of their surrogates who’s speaking, attendees typically sit or stand around for an hour or two while somebody talks at them. The content of the rally is typically an embellished verbalizing of the politician’s platform decorated with the occasional jab at rival candidates. This kind of event further encourages the projection of values and hopes onto an aspiring public servant who “does stuff” while the citizen-voter doesn’t have to.

The fact that electoral campaigns happen in short bursts in between long intervals of 2-4 years means that the infrastructure formed around these political candidates is fleeting and ill-suited for creating meaningful change. Furthermore, all the other groups and communities that get sucked into electioneering see their primary concerns and activities momentarily shoved aside while getting so-and-so into City Hall or the White House is prioritized.

An example from my personal experience comes from time I spent in 2013-14 in Occupy Homes Minnesota (OHMN), an anti-eviction group that used direct action to keep banks and sheriffs from forcibly taking people’s houses. When a local socialist ran for a seat on the city council and claimed to be a part of the grassroots movement, much of the paid and unpaid leadership of OHMN diverted resources away from home defense and towards neighborhood canvassing for his election, depriving the org of much of what it needed to actually fight off the banks in a tense period when eviction rates were still high. The candidate ended up losing, but that hardly mattered as the OHMN leadership’s decision to neglect its own mission and base for a few crucial months severely weakened an already struggling group. The organization collapsed and dissolved shortly after.

Politicians? Baloney

Just as the market is only one part of the economy over which corporations wield power, so are election campaigns just one stage of the life-cycle of the politician where leftist forces are systematically weakened. Even when the less shitty politician does win the election, they are immediately put under the extreme constraints of trying to govern in a capitalist society and many of their campaign promises are instantly hollowed out despite a politician’s best intentions.

While far from a radical platform, Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign literature sounds surprisingly progressive with his message of expanding many social programs, reforming the health care system and making health care a “right”, and taxing the rich. A few days before Clinton’s inauguration, his chief economic advisor Robert Rubin, a former co-chairman of the board of Goldman Sachs, and Federal Reserve head Alan Greenspan, a committed Ayn Rand acolyte, told Clinton that the budget deficit was too big and that the only way to avert a debt crisis was to slash government spending, causing him to temper some campaign promises and reverse others. In 2008 Obama campaigned on a popular message of getting people through the deepest economic recession in 80 years, but upon entering office he bailed out the banks and corporations while barely lifting a finger to save homeowners or aid the unemployed.

While we’ve come to expect such disappointment from Democrats, the same dynamic plays out repeatedly among socialist politicians in advanced capitalist countries. In France, Socialist Party President Francois Hollande won the presidency in 2012 on a message of anti-austerity reform, but upon entering office and even having a majority in parliament, turned around and cut corporate taxes and slashed social spending. Before him, France’s other most recent socialist president Francois Mitterand (1981-95) attempted to implement steep reforms early in his first term but then under pressure from international finance and a lagging economy he instituted a nation-wide wage-freeze, cut social spending, and came to symbolize the normalization of austerity within formerly left European political parties.

The Greek Socialist Party Syriza’s time in power from 2015-19 is perhaps the most famous illustration of the abject failure of left politics in the electoral arena, as it repeatedly caved to austerity demands of the European Union, gouging out social programs and privatizing many of Greece’s public assets. The social democracies of Northern Europe have been in retreat since the 1970s as social democratic parties make concessions to austerity and are increasingly losing parliament seats to centrist and even right-wing parties, turning their backs on the social movements that provided the pressure that led to their enviable social programs in the first place. While socialist politicians and political parties have never really controlled governments in the US to the extent they have occasionally in European countries, the evidence across the pond suggests that even if socialists were able to take over the US government, only disappointment would follow.

While the electoral contest tends to reward those who highlight style over substance, at bottom it’s not an issue of a politician’s individual moral integrity but rather of the way the whole electoral and political system is constructed to remove as far as possible the vote from actual governance in the form of determining and implementing policy. Despite good intentions, politicians have given socialism a bad name.

Political parties? Pffft

“If a politician betrays their constituents, they’ll vote them out and get someone who truly represents them.”

That sounds reasonable, but there are a number of reasons this is ineffective as a lever of meaningful democracy. First, with most terms of political office lasting 4 years, that’s a tremendously long time to wait and for politicians to have free reign before they’re “voted out next time”. Second, there’s no official way in the US for citizens to directly recall politicians. There are highly bureaucratic and lengthy methods for other politicians to unseat a particular politician, but they are very rarely used and almost always for scandals instead of the routine betrayal of the very campaign promises that got them elected in the first place. Lastly, politicians aren’t stand-alone agents but belong to political parties whose interests they are both beholden to and charged with safeguarding, and these political parties exert strong control especially within a rigid two-party system. More often than not, if one politician goes away there’s a “next-in-line” who’s not substantially different because the party is a moderating force. Think of Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden coming after Obama, all of whom advocate largely the same unpopular policies, such as private health insurance.

“But people also choose which politicians stand for election through primaries and caucuses, ensuring democratic principles are maintained.”

The further one gets away from general elections and into intra-party politics, the deeper one gets into other mechanisms for choking democracy, such gatekeeping, rules-manipulation, and back-door dealing. Sure, a few committed super-citizens can go to every caucus meeting and try to out-politic the entrenched politicking careerists, but the deck is stacked here as it is at every other level of the process. It’s a lonely path as the further you go into the machine the further you get from the actual communities you live and work in.

“But this is where politics happens and so this is the necessary terrain of struggle. You have to struggle somewhere, and the deck is stacked everywhere, so why not direct our efforts at the parties that control the government?”

The labyrinth backwaters of political parties are where a certain kind of politics happens, but it’s an elite kind of politics, where functionaries compete for the approval of party funders and power-brokers. Occasionally an insurgent politician can make it through the maze and get into office, but what alternative forms of politics are sacrificed in the process?

Grassroots social movements focus their politics in the workplaces, the neighborhoods, and the streets. These are the spaces and communities where people are rooted, where their relationships are organic, and where the exercise of power is most impactful. Unions, strikes, community groups, pressure campaigns, civil disobedience, these are the forms and tactics of and for the grassroots. Yes, much of this power needs to be directed at political parties and the government, but it’s more effective to do so from the outside where grassroots movements find fertile soil rather than from inside where the toxic sludge corrodes all it touches.

Social movements? Aww man, do we have to?

“All of the good policies that have come into the world were by definition written into law by some politicians at some point, right? What was it those politicians did that we need our politicians to do today?”

That’s true. But if our purpose is to answer the bigger question of how to make the world a better place and not to confine ourselves to smaller questions of which politician to praise and vote for, then we have to re-frame things. Do politicians cause social change? They’re a part of the overall vehicle of social change, but are they a major and irreplaceable part like the engine or a minor and interchangeable part like the ashtray?

The conjuring trick here is that politicians make it look like they do most of the work that leads to policy change. When a popular policy is passed they get a photo op and put pen to paper though it was actually the hard work and struggle of thousands of community activists that actually made the policy possible. Politicians are paid fine salaries and benefits, get their own offices in fancy buildings, and receive a lion’s share of the credit when something positive happens. Grassroots organizers are often acting without being paid for it, doing so in much less glamorous settings, facing much higher risks, and are mostly nameless and faceless outside of the communities they are fighting alongside. Despite appearances, whether a politician works hard or not has negligible influence on policy outcomes compared to the vibrancy of the social movement and the communities where 99.9% of the actual important work gets done.

Consider two pivotal moments that fundamentally altered social relations in the US and led to era-defining legislation on labor unions and civil rights. The labor movement didn’t acquire rights by voting for politicians to give them rights: Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidential campaign in 1933 didn’t even mention worker rights, he supported an auto industry proposal in March 1934 that allowed company-run worker “unions”, and even refused to endorse Senator Robert Wagner’s collective bargaining legislation circulating in Congress in early 1934. Roosevelt’s labor secretary Frances Perkins said, “I’d rather get a law than organize a union” to address worker grievances and keep them from striking, preferring paternalistic government over the idea of allowing workers to have their own independent organization and power. Only after the largest sustained strike wave in US history rocked the country in mid-1934 and was threatening to go even bigger in what was already a crisis of profit of the Great Depression were major concessions granted for union rights in the National Labor Relations Act signed by Roosevelt in 1935.

It wasn’t the politicians who led the charge that resulted in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or the Voting Rights Act of 1965, but rather a social movement of community activists in the black freedom movement. Before becoming president and signing those bills, Lyndon B. Johnson spent two decades as a reliable pro-segregationist congressman of the Southern Democratic faction and was known for using the n-word profusely. Upon entering national politics, where he’d have to appeal to a broader social base than was needed to be elected as a Texas congressman, black social movements had by then shifted the national consciousness on race to the degree that he needed to become more tolerant publicly and willing to compromise with movement demands. Even then, Johnson was constantly at odds with civil rights leaders over the timing and priorities of these pieces of legislation.

In contrast, what’s notable about the failure of European socialist politicians mentioned above in the period from the 1970s to the present is that there were not social mobilizations and uprisings comparable to earlier periods of the 1930s and 1960s. That lack of robust popular struggle independent of the state is largely responsible for the failures of European socialist politics of the last 50 years.

While it may not be uniquely the fault of socialist politicians that there weren’t ground-shaking social movements in the streets during their time in power, radical politicians have always helped foster the superstition that elections are an important and essential part of social change, thus directing away emphasis and energy from grassroots activity. Every social gain and loss can be summarized in the same broad strokes, where politicians always have played bit parts behind the lead of mass movements.

“Well, you’re just describing the worst parts of elections, but not all politicians have to use that playbook. Good politicians can run campaigns in a way that uses only the good and none of the bad.”

While political campaigns that look and feel like a McDonald's ad campaign are the norm, certainly some politicians have tried to break the mold to be a “different” and “good” politician. They try to focus on deep rather than shallow engagement, to center ideas about society and policy instead of surface-level emotional manipulation, to emphasize longer-term engagement and give people meaningful ways to participate beyond merely voting. But do these politicians ever succeed in living up to this ideal?

“But shouldn’t we keep trying til we get it right?”

That’s what a lot of people will do. But there’s an alternative. If we take the prototype of the bad electoral campaign and turn it inside-out by doing exactly the opposite of everything that’s bad about them, what we end up with is not a good political campaign but rather a grassroots social movement without the unavoidable electoral focus on elevating a single person’s ideas and character and without succumbing to the pressures placed on us by playing by the rules of pacifying state institutions.

There’s obviously a wide spectrum of opinion on how useful politicians are. Kind of like my arguments above about voting, I don’t think politicians are in themselves bad and I recognize that occasionally they can have a small effect on things. But just like many people see voting as the most important part of social change and I see it as among the least important parts of social change, so many see politicians as the most important factors of social change and I see them as among the least important factors. Despite my crankiness I’m not anti-politician in the strict sense that I think they’re bad people as individuals, I just can’t discover any historical evidence or theoretical argument to be pro-politician either.

“But can’t we combine the best elements of social movements with the best elements of political campaigns and do them together?”

Certainly politicians that want to present themselves in a progressive light will try to attach themselves to social movements and will say that they are part of the movement. But if the arguments presented here have any validity, electoral campaigns have almost nothing to add to social movements because social movements are already all the good things we want and need to create social change.

Each element of an election campaign is just a worse version of that element of a social movement: Elevating the individual politician vs. community agency; the narrow engagement of the vote vs. kinds of community engagement and collective action needed to disrupt the status quo and win demands; investing resources in political ad campaigns vs. grassroots organizational infrastructure and support; etc… No matter how much a politician tries to be the exception, there are underlying institutional pressures baked into the rules of the game for electoral campaigns that are of a fundamentally opposite nature to the best practices needed to build effective grassroots movements.

Of course, left politicians are aware of anti-electoral sentiments, and so they, without fail, will claim that they’re “community-oriented”, “a servant of the people,” “in it for the right reasons”, “committed to social movements”, and so on. Or to take a famous recent campaign slogan, “Not me, us.” Good intentions aside, that’s not how elections work. Politicians get people to give them thousands or millions of dollars for staff and campaign ads about them and ask everyone to give them access to immense state power for which there are few formal mechanisms of accountability to voters.

I’m not claiming these politicians are Machiavellian but just that by trying to squeeze the rhetoric of a social movement within an electoral campaign they end up losing all the parts of a social movement that make it meaningful and then succumb to all of the authoritarian forces that make government slimy and coercive. I can recognize that not all politicians are the same, but I can also recognize that they are all seeking entry into the same political system and are subject to all the same constraints. Social movements, on the other hand, are the dominant form that democratic politics takes outside of the state and are the major determinant of the constraints within which all politicians operate.

“But we need state power to allocate resources. That’s why we need to run politicians so that they can work the inside track while we work the outside track.”

If politicians caused good policy, this would be sensible. But just as prominent examples were noted above of supposedly better or left politicians doing bad things in office, there are plenty of examples of politicians rightly considered bad by the left being forced into doing good things. That Republican Dwight Eisenhower’s political platform in 1956 contains striking similarities with Bernie Sanders’ in 2020 is not because Eisenhower was a radical but because the social movements that created the best of the New Deal reforms, many of which remained wildly popular, circumscribed the political boundaries that all politicians had to act within. The difference between Eisenhower winning in 1956 and Bernie losing in 2020 is far less an illustration of individual political acumen or ineptitude but of the relative power of social movements in those eras.

That Richard Nixon spent his first years as president in the late 1960s trying to pass a version of universal basic income which would have been the largest redistribution of wealth to the poorest citizens in US history is not because old Dick had a big heart, but because he was staring down the largest and most militant social movements since the 1930s and needed to pander to and compromise with more radical demands. That Nixon also created the Environmental Protection Agency via executive order and signed the act that created the Occupational Safety and Health Administration is again a tribute to the grassroots activists of the 1960s and 70s and has little to do with Nixon’s personal qualities as a politician. Once again, social movements are the dominant, short-term, and long-term cause of better policy, to which politicians are not even second fiddle but perhaps the ninth or tenth.

Even though the historical examples I draw from are mostly at the federal level, it’s merely for the convenience of using widely known reference points. Against the claim that one can have more of an effect on policy by engaging elections at the local level, all of the anti-electoral arguments made here apply equally to all levels of government because, despite differences in scale, the mechanisms and elements of elections are largely the same (voter as passive consumer, politicians as corporate brands). School boards are one of the most local levels of government and the school board members in my city almost all belong to the same party and yet routinely violate their own stated principles on issues such as school privatization and unions. When local activists and groups have mobilized and shut down meetings in protest, school board members have consistently caved to grassroots pressure and reversed their votes.

Just because I don’t think leftists should focus on elections doesn’t mean there won’t always be a constantly replenishing pool of political candidates maneuvering to be the next social movement darling. If you, like me, can’t entirely erase the notion that politicians have some effect, even if very small, there’s still no reason to invest energy in politicians. Left politicians need social movements but social movements don’t need politicians. If social movements are strong, politicians will come begging for support and will consult movements for fear of incurring their wrath. Social movements don’t have to give anything up in return for this or that politician doing what social movements demand.

In summary, social movements are not only the cause of good policy, but obedient left politicians are a side-effect of strong, independent social movements anyway. Social movements should focus on building a base and moving towards collective disruptive action, and if politicians want to tag along they can but social movements shouldn’t divert any of their precious attention away from their true object.

Social Movements? Ugh, okay fine

Many people see general critiques of politicians as valid but still maintain that sometimes there are some good politicians worth supporting. As I said above, I’m not inherently anti-politician when looking at the individual themselves. But here’s the rub: leftist forces in society have a limited amount of resources to put into efforts for social change, and so the campaigns of politicians compete directly with grassroots organizations for volunteer time and donations.

While not anti-politician at an individual level, I’m anti-giving resources to election campaigns of politicians at the social level because politicians will always be less effective at creating change than social movements. This point belies the common excuse made for electoralism as a form of harm reduction. If harm reduction is supposed to have a positive net effect by decreasing the amount of bad in the world, actual harm reduction would come from engaging social movements because only they are actually effective.

I don’t consider a vote a resource at any meaningful level because voting takes so little effort, and so I’m not against voting for politicians because you think one’s better than another. But when it comes to actual resources, every donation or afternoon committed to social movements will do more to shift the balance of power in society to create change than commitment to a political campaign can do.

“But power! You’re forgetting power! If political office were so ineffectual why do politicians wield so much power?”

It may seem confusing that politicians both have lots of power and are virtually useless at creating positive social change. Why is this? Despite appearing as contradictory claims, the idea that politicians are powerful and can’t create change are two sides of the same coin. Much of what gives politicians their power is precisely the passivity with which the masses interact with the state, as described above in relation to voting, election campaigns, and political parties. Rather, those parts of society that do have influence on the state, such as the wealthy and other elites, maintain that influence because of all the active ways they engage with the state formally and informally. Such active elite practices include more above-ground methods such as campaign spending, lobbying, and corporate-politician partnership organizations like the American Legislative Exchange Council, but also more below-ground mechanisms such as overlapping social and professional networks, capital strikes against government initiatives, and the revolving door between corporate and political careers.

It’s not just that the elites are “doing it right” in their active engagement with the state while masses are “doing it wrong” in their passive engagement with the state. When the masses are directed to engage politics through voting and attending a political rally, while elites get round-the-clock back-door access to politicians, we can start to see how the very structures of the state that appear natural and democratic are rather manufactured and imbalanced. The state structures discussed here are not peripheral or tangential to the functioning of the state, but rather voting, elections, and politicians are the foundational and governing institutions of the state. If those institutions are shown to be vacuous or at the very least disempowering, what are we to make of pretensions to representative democracy?

Manufactured imbalance against democracy is the state, and all attempts to use the state for positive change are constricted by this stark fact. Social democratic and socialist politicians largely accept these structures of the state and seek to use them, as undemocratic as they are, for good things. But the anti-electoralism critique advanced here suggests that it isn’t possible to create positive change using undemocratic methods. Rather the deeper kind of democracy that fuels social movements through mass participation is what really harnesses popular power for social change.

In spite of the official notion that the government is a reflection of the wants and needs of its citizens, in reality it is not a neutral tool that can be applied effectively to any task that the population or elected officials seek. A screwdriver is very bad at pounding in a nail. So while the state is a very powerful tool for elites to govern in their interest, it is a very shoddy tool for trying to create a better society that benefits everyone. With some strain even a screwdriver can pound a nail partway into a board, but the limits are real and severe. The many failures of socialist politicians recently in power in Europe are illustrative.

“So how can mass-based social movements acquire influence over state resources needed for large-scale popular reforms in the short- and medium-term if the state has built into it a bias against democracy?”

A useful analogy can be made between the grassroots fight against corporate abuse and the grassroots fight against government abuse. The modern-day corporation is a nakedly anti-democratic institution where shareholders give dictatorial powers to top executives to run things while employees are expected to do what they’re told. No one suggests that the left should focus on trying to seize higher-level management positions at WalMart in order to change WalMart’s policy from the inside and from the top down. Rather, unions and direct action by workers and affected communities are correctly identified as the effective way to fight corporate harm. Similarly, the fight against harms imposed by our government is better led by grassroots social movements than by trying to install in the government higher-level managers who will fix the problems from the inside and from the top down.

Do we want our movement towards social change and the content of social transformation to be based on the idea of choosing the right leader to give executive and legislative power to, who promises to fight on our behalf? Or do we want to concentrate our forces on the base, to build a movement rooted in the self-determination and collective action of whole communities? Should we be spectators or agents in the struggle for making a better world? In the words of civil rights organizer Ella Baker, “Strong people don’t need strong leaders.” That quote, especially as applied to politicians, encapsulates everything this essay is trying to articulate.

“You’ve been swooning over social movements this whole time but haven’t even shown how they do all these supposedly great things.”

The good news is that learning about social movements is more exciting than scrutinizing all the ins-and-outs of why voting isn’t effective. The best place to learn about what social movements are and what they’ve accomplished is by learning about their history. While I’ve used the labor movement of the 1930s and the civil rights movement of the 1960s as examples, every major beneficial historical change in the US has been accomplished through social movements in some form.

It’s true that all social movements are multidimensional and have elements within them that have tended towards political elections, but all social movements have also had strong anti-electoral tendencies as well. There’s a reason why narratives about social change in the 1930s that came about from labor struggle highlight strikes and unions and not the various left and labor political parties of the day. Similarly, while some in the Civil Rights Movement, like Bayard Rustin, wanted to reorient the struggle towards working within the Democratic Party, many in the base and the leadership were resistant. Neither Martin Luther King Jr. nor Ella Baker were opposed to electoralism in the strong sense I’m advocating, but they were at pains to keep their movement independent of political parties and instead focus on mass direct action. King held a press conference in 1967 to put down rumors and push back against the pressure he faced from his more electorally-focused friends and supporters about running for president, “I have come to think of my role as one which operates outside the realm of partisan politics.”

Rather than seeing electoralism as a necessary part of social movements, it is better seen as an extraneous factor when we recognize how social movements have actually produced change. Social movements are complex and no one has the power to design them exactly to their own liking, but we can engage with and boost those parts of social movements that we find most effective.

Conclusion

Have the grumps won you over? With people so polarized on this issue, I hardly aim to change anyone’s mind. But if low approval ratings of our governing institutions and low voting rates are indicative of a popular discontent with politics as usual, maybe there’s a broad audience willing to entertain ideas about why politicians aren’t hot stuff.

We’ve looked at allegedly progressive politicians passing good reforms (FDR and labor rights, LBJ and civil rights), bad politicians passing good reforms (Eisenhower maintaining New Deal social spending, Nixon implementing the EPA and OSHA), supposedly better politicians passing bad reforms (Clinton, Obama, Mitterand, Hollande), and have just glossed over the more obvious cases of bad politicians passing bad reforms (like Trump’s tax cuts for the rich). In each case closer inspection reveals that the specific person in office had a profoundly insignificant impact on the overall trajectory of positive change compared to the size and assertiveness of social movements that existed alongside them.

Rather than continuing to buy into the myth that voting “does anything”, we’d be better off trying to make a better world by getting together with others to do something. The art of social movements obviously involves more than just “doing something”, but recognizing that “doing something” is going to be what it takes is a good first step. With actual effort and a little practice, doing something as a strategy for change might actually work. Politicians pee into the wind while social movements drop anvils from the sky.

A Modest Proposal for Global Egalitarianism

By Hank Pellissier

Editor’s Note: The ideas and proposals expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect those of the Hampton Institute.

Walking under the freeway past the homeless encampment, you hear a voice, “I need 50 cents.” Ignoring the beseecher, you scan the news on your smartphone: Jeff Bezos now has $300 billion. Ahead, you see a struggling woman forced into an ICE van, next to signs promoting two candidates you despise but realize will control your future.

Does society have to be like this?

No. This essay will present an option, grounded in justice and liberty.

Global Egalitarianism is a political philosophy structured on the moral ideal of truly establishing all human beings as equals. 

We believe that concept, don’t we? All humans are equal in importance. This maxim inspired American and French revolutions, abolition of slavery, the women’s suffragette movement, gay rights, and every effort to overthrow a tyranny. 

All People Are Equal is the compassionate principle of modern, democratic civilization - we embrace this belief and expect others to react with anger if this ethos is violated. 

Earth should be an Egalitarian Planet. But it isn’t. 

Equality is distant dream today due to economic, social, and political institutions that divide rich and poor, powerful and powerless, bordered nations from bordered nations. 

In our 2020 world, people aren’t equal. The power of a rural, single mother in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is insignificant compared to a man addressing his cabinet at 1900 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington DC. 

• The richest 1% earn 26.3 times more than the bottom 99%.

• There are 2,095 billionaires, but 71% of people live on less than $10 a day.

• There are more slaves on Earth than ever before.

• One person has visited every nation on Earth but millions have never been out of their village.

• 750 million people would emigrate, if they could.

• 52% of people are dissatisfied with their democracy, and 71 nations aren’t democratic.

• 4.5 million Americans have PhDs, but 775 million people in the world are illiterate.

Let us obsolete these depressing statistics and establish global egalitarianism instead, using the tools of Wealth Redistribution, Open Borders, and Pure Democracy. 

WEALTH REDISTRIBUTION

Robin Hood is an egalitarian champion because he ‘robbed from the rich and gave to the poor.’ Many others - like Juraj Janosik (Slovak folk hero), Phoolan Devi (‘Bandit Queen’ of India), and Jose Mujica (President of Uruguay) conducted illegal philanthropy similar to the fictitious yeoman of Sherwood Forest. Today the most laudable proponent of wealth redistribution might be Kshama Sawant of Seattle; she spearheaded the movement for $15/hour minimum wage and she’s presently seeking to nationalize Amazon.

“Redistribution” evokes fear and rage in the upper class; clutching their pearls they hiss, “I worked hard for my money” despite 60% of US wealth being inherited. Most middle income people also bristle when ‘leveling’ is considered - it’s derided as communist thievery to support ‘lazy people.’

Truth is, economic history is a long tragedy of powerful entities enriching themselves by stealing from the poor and middle class. Ethical people are appalled that peasants worked 4 unpaid days a week for their landlord, but today’s situation, where Warren Buffett ($82.47 billion) pays less taxes than his secretary is identically unjust.

The rich don’t need all their money; they just buy unnecessary toys with it, like 169 cars, or giraffes ($40,000 - $80,000) and platinum Arowana fish ($300,000), or a kitchen remodel every three years. I know a man living alone in a $40 million house; his beach town has 147 homeless people. Money doesn’t even ‘buy happiness’ - researchers discovered that more wealth simply creates more want. 

The “Happy Nations” list exhibits the smallest divide between rich and poor. Happy Nations have a smaller ratio between CEO & worker salaries - in #1 Finland the average CEO salary is $99,515 - in #18 USA it is $820,616.

How rich or poor would everyone be if wealth was divided equally, amongst the world’s inhabitants? What’s the PPP per capita? The answer is $17,110 - similar to China and Costa Rica. Plus - if the world had ‘open borders’ - economists estimate global wealth would elevate 50%—150%. For simplicity’s sake, let’s just double the first figure, for $34,220 - a digit between the economy of delightful Slovenia and popular Portugal. 

This figure would lift 2.7 billion people out of their present-day poverty, and of course, lower spoiled others to a more modest standard of living. Solid gold toilets would lose their customers - egads!

How can money be redistributed? Multiple methods exist; let’s quickly discuss a few:

Reparations - Fairness requires that assets stolen from a region are returned, in full, even if the assets were stolen many years ago. Unpaid labor should also be recompensed. It’s evident that Africans and Diasporans of African descent deserve retribution for the enslavement, exploitation, and colonization of their continent. India also deserves to be paid back ($45 trillion?) for the precious treasures the British overlords robbed during colonization, plus the 15-29 million Bengalis who starved to death in the World War II era famine, due to food diverted by Winston Churchill. Similarly, the Dalits (untouchables) deserve compensation from their oppressors for the subjugation they’ve endured. 

Armenians and Greeks deserve reparations from Turks; Congolese deserve reparations from Belgium (King Leopold enslaved the populace on rubber plantations and killed 10 million); South Africans deserve reparations for apartheid; Native Americans deserve reparations from European invaders; Jamaica deserves reparations from Britain; South Korea deserves reparations from Japan; Vietnam deserves reparations from the USA; Serbia deserves reparations from NATO, and Haiti deserves reparations from France. 

Land Reform - Property is overly-owned by the already-prosperous, who enrich themselves further via rentals and extracting resources. Revolts are launched to distribute land fairly, but not often enough and they aren’t always successful. (Model land reforms occurred in Cuba and South Korea.) Oftentimes, land reform is stymied by foreign powers who want to continue gorging themselves with the status quo. Guatemalan and Chilean leaders, for example, wanted land reform but were overthrown by USA-instigated coups. 

Land could be distributed equally, globally. The figures on this are fantastic. If 7.8 billion people divided all the habitable land on Earth, there’d be 2.3 acres per person, claims a University of Texas study.

The Federal Land Dividend strategy of Zoltan Istvan is also worth considering. His idea is to lease USA public land (the government owns 40% of USA acreage, worth $150+ trillion) to provide $1,000 month dividends to citizens. This proposal is a fusion of UBI, Nationalization, and Land Reform tactics. 

Nationalization - Public ownership of a region’s resources and industries is a sure-fire way to equitably distribute profit. Norway’s nationalization of its North Sea oil serves as an exemplary example; the profits guarantee the citizenry with free health care, free education, and pensions. Similar situations are evidenced elsewhere: Bolivia nationalized gas, petroleum, hydroelectricity, and lithium - the latter move led to Evo Morales’s ousting in a coup engineered by US shenanigans. Cuba nationalized all private businesses and factories, including 36 US-owned sugar mills; this led to its decades-long pariah status. Chile nationalized copper; Mexico and Venezuela nationalized oil; Pakistan nationalized steel mills; Quebec province in Canada nationalized hydroelectric; Sri Lanka nationalized tea, rubber, and cocoa; Italy nationalized Italia airlines; India nationalized banks, etc. 

Nationalization exists worldwide, but still, only a small fraction of resources are publicly owned. Far more could be done. The Socialist Alternative party has an egalitarian agenda: they want the 500 biggest corporations in the USA to be publicly owned. Nationalization is fairer than today’s system where products are created by billionaires who pay workers demoralizing salaries. (Apple workers in China work 60 hour weeks for low pay in unsafe conditions). 

Taxation - Progressive income tax, wealth tax, property tax, inheritance tax, sales tax, value-added tax (VAT), and other levies can be used to encourage wealth redistribution. The USA rich were taxed up to 91% in the 1950’s, an era with far better economic equity than today. French economist Thomas Piketty believes “billionaires should be taxed out of existence”; his viewpoint is supported by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “No billionaires”, in my opinion, is a very permissive limitation. I personally think no one needs more than $10 million - this easily guarantees you ‘never have to worry about money again.’

Wages - Minimum wage and maximum wages policies can be used to level the financial field. Luxembourg has the highest minimum wage in the world per nation - $14.12 an hour - but in the USA, that’s topped in at least 17 cities that offer $15/hour or more. If personal wealth, globally, was capped at $34,220 annually, as I previously suggested, $20/hour in a 36-hour work week would be sufficient. Maximum wages only exist in Cuba - this strategy was voted on in Switzerland in 2013 but it failed to pass, receiving just 34.7% of the vote. An obviously target for maximum wage limits is the USA, where corporate CEOs are paid 361 times more than workers.

Universal Basic Income - UBI has accelerated quickly from ‘crazy idea’ to ‘practical solution.’ Early implementations in Canada, Namibia, Finland, Alaska and Stockton, California, suggested its potential. Andrew Yang campaigned for President with UBI as his signature goal. 20th century proponents like Martin Luther King Jr. and Richard Nixon suggest UBI’s major party appeal; Libertarians also appreciate its ability to reduce welfare bureaucracy. UBI guarantees citizenry - either all or selected segments - a monthly check to spend as they please. The Covid-19 pandemic sharply increased interest in UBI; by September 2020 policies were planned for Spain and 20-30 USA cities. 

Corporate Sharing & Worker Power - Germany gives workers significant representation in management, with 50% of the supervisory board of directors elected by labor. Their seat at the table guarantees they won’t be mistreated, like warehouse workers at Amazon, who are automatized and “treated like robots” - or at Tesla, oft-accused of racial hostility and discrimination. Strong unions also provide “higher wages, better benefits, increased economic mobility, and reduced poverty.”

Communes & Cooperatives - Numerous egalitarian communities exist, where members live and work together, sharing labor and profit from their enterprises. Examples include Twin Oaks Intentional Community in Virginia, Hutterite colonies in Canadian and US prairie states, and kibbutzim in Israel. Cooperatives and collectives also thrive worldwide, with research indicating they are more productive than hierarchal companies. Spain has more than 18,000 co-operatives, a legacy from the anarcho-syndicalist movement that preceded the Spanish Civil War. 

OPEN BORDERS

Open Borders are essential in creating Global Egalitarianism. Allowing free and easy immigration to every corner of the planet will deliver these benefits:

• People with specific job skills can relocate to an area where their potential can be maximized.

• People seeking education in their field of interest can move to receive the training they want.

• Commercial items can be transported easily without punitive tariffs and inspections.

• Economists claim Open Borders would elevate global wealth by 50% - 150%. This seems obvious: today millions are unable to produce their potential because they live in environments unsuitable to their skills.

• People with an aversion or disinterest in the culture of their homeland can relocate easily to other cultures where they can intellectually and emotionally thrive.

• People trapped in an overpopulated region or an area ‘going underwater’ due to climate change, can settle smoothly into a safer or less-crowded geography.

• Dangerous mindsets like patriotism, nationalism, and xenophobia will be avoided if everyone can relocate internationally, establishing cordial relationships across the globe.

• War between hostile nations will become increasingly rare if individuals see themselves as global citizens, instead of warriors for a single state.

• Understanding and empathy for all humanity will be elevated if borders are eliminated. Today’s demarcation of WE vs. THEM promotes dehumanization and suspicion of the ‘other.’

• 10. Cultural forms and intellectual ideas will flourish if access is enhanced.

Arguments against Open Borders are listed below, with rebuttals. 

Criminals will escape their homelands and invade unsuspecting neighboring nations!

   — Easily preventable. Access to international travel can be denied to those with a criminal record.

Immigrants from impoverished lands will migrate and seize all the best jobs in foreign lands.

   — Studies indicate most people choose not to move. Example: residents from the impoverished state of West Virginia ($24,774 per capita) seldom relocate 500 miles to the wealthy state of Connecticut ($76,456 per capita). This objection also lacks the morality that global egalitarianism requires. Is it ethical to deprive someone of livelihood because they didn’t grow up as your neighbor? Should their value be lessened because they’re categorized with the subhuman label of ‘alien’? Thirdly, immigrants are generally hired in employment niches the natives lack sufficient numbers to fill. Example: USA needs computer engineers, who are subsequently hired from China, India, Russia, etc. 

Local Culture will be destroyed. 

   — This is the weakest argument of all, as anyone who has eaten a juicy fish taco in Minnesota can testify. Culture survives because it provides joy and speaks to the human condition. Ghanaians celebrate both Christian and Muslim holidays, because they’re all fun. Music, art, cinema, literature and cuisine always borrow across borders: Cubism was inspired by West African masks; the violin (invented in Italy) is instrumental in Chinese concerts; spicy peppers, originating in Peru, are essential in Korean cooking; Nobel Prize novels and Oscar-winning films are applauded everywhere. 

PURE DEMOCRACY

Global Egalitarianism requires huge improvement in politics so all people are truly equal. Most democracies in the world are terrifically flawed; many have been re-classified as ‘oligarchies’ - rule by the rich. Pure Democracy is a goal no nation has yet attained, or is even close to. Achieving this has to be done incrementally. Below are suggestions in approximate order:

• Abolish Anti-Democratic Institutions. Many systems today subvert the will of the majority. These institutions need to be eliminated, or drastically reformed. In the USA this initial step requires abolishing the Senate and the Electoral College, electing Supreme Court justices, and transferring commander-in-chief powers from the President to the House of Representatives.

• Campaign Finance Reform. Political contests need to be publicly-financed - no outside money at all. Candidates abusing this must be disqualified.

• Abolish Lobbyists. Politicians cannot accept funding or favors from corporations and special interest groups; this obviously influences their votes. Washington DC needs to cleanse itself from all potential bribery.

• Ranked Choice Voting. This helps select politicians the majority can at least tolerate, and it eliminates the need to vote for ‘the lesser of two evils.’

• Adopt the Parliamentary System. Presidential government (adopted by 52 nations) is far less democratic than the Parliamentary system, enjoyed in 102 nations. The Parliamentary system enables smaller party representation, it reduces the power of the Executive branch, and it encourages multi-party collaboration.

• Encourage Secessions. Individual political power is elevated if the citizen belongs to a smaller group. A voice is more likely to be heard if it is one voice out of 100,000 - 10,000,000 instead of one voice out of 300,000,000 - 1,300,000,000. Eight of the Top Ten “Most Democratic Nations” have 10 million people or less, and none has more than 35 million people. To guide the world towards this, support separatist groups in Catalonia, Galicia, Flanders, Scotland, Chiapas, California, Texas, and Darfur - and support the desire of Berbers, Kurds, Yakuts, Batwa, Canarians, Balinese, Karenni, Assamese, Uygurs, Punjabi, Rwenzururu, and dozens of other ethnicities to govern themself.

• Demand Initiatives and Referendums (also known as Proposition or Plebiscites). “R & I’s’ provide ballot measures to the citizenry, so they can directly vote on reforms advanced by other citizens. (Surprisingly, 24 states do not even offer this option) Switzerland and Ireland offer the most referendums in Europe. In Asia, The Philippines is prolific with plebiscites.

• Poli Sci Education Required? Fear of ‘mob rule by idiots’ is often just elitism, but it would be alleviated if citizens has to pass information and logic tests for the right to vote.

• Abolish Politicians. Representative democracy is flawed because politicians are often narcissistic, authoritarian, and corrupt. If direct democracy referendums are in place, there’s no need for conniving intermediaries.

• Emulate Rojava Communalism - Rojava - the Kurdish autonomous zone in northern Syria - governs itself with a ‘communalist’ structure, designed by American political philosopher Murray Bookchin. Rojavans enjoy enormous power at the community level; its ‘bottom-up system’ provides a voice to everyone. The long-term goal of communalists is to organize Earth’s inhabitants into thousands of self-governing communities that are intrinsically linked into non-competitive, ever-large confederacies.

CONCLUSION

Do you find these utopian ideas preposterous? Science fictional? A wonky, cringe-inducing re-write of John Lennon’s “Imagine’?

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

Disillusionment with the status quo, twinned with social media, can create rapid change.

Global Egalitarianism is the future we need.

References

Introduction

Jeff Bezos - $300 billion https://www.ccn.com/jeff-bezos-300-billion-amazon-becomes-worlds-8th-largest-economy

Global Egalitarianism https://globalegalitarianism.wordpress.com/about/ https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-1-4020-9160-5_96 https://simoncaney.weebly.com/global-egalitarianism.html

equality inspires revolutions, etc. https://www.nps.gov/revwar/unfinished_revolution/01_all_men_are_created_equal.html

richest 1% earn 26.3 times more than bottom 99% https://www.fool.com/investing/2019/07/29/5-mind-blowing-statistics-about-the-richest-1.aspx

2,095 billionaires https://indianewengland.com/2020/04/forbes-releases-34th-annual-list-of-global-billionaires-includes-several-indians-and-indian-americans/

71% of people live on less than $10 a day https://money.cnn.com/2015/07/08/news/economy/global-low-income/index.html

more slaves on Earth than ever before https://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/slaves-time-human-history-article-1.3506975

One person has visited every nation on Earth https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/news/man-has-visited-every-country-in-the-world/

750 million people would emigrate, if they could https://news.gallup.com/poll/245255/750-million-worldwide-migrate.aspx

52% of people are dissatisfied with their democracy https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2020/02/27/satisfaction-with-democracy/

71 nations aren’t democratic https://www.reference.com/world-view/countries-democracy-8f9e05f7d96a76e7

775 million adults are illiterate https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/global-rate-of-adult-literacy-84-per-cent-but-775-million-people-still-cant-read/article4528932/#:~:text=There%20are%20775%20million%20people%20in%20the%20world,in%20their%20footsteps%20because%20they%20aren%27t%20attending%20school

Wealth Distribution

Juraj Janosik (Slovak folk hero) https://www.slavorum.org/juraj-janosik-legendary-slovak-thief-turned-hero/

Phoolan Devi (‘Bandit Queen’ of India) https://www.britannica.com/biography/Phoolan-Devi https://medium.com/@mishra18tanvi/phoolan-devi-the-real-bandit-queen-of-india-2fb09b35d17f

Jose Mujica (eventual President of Uruguay) https://nationalinterest.org/commentary/jos%C3%A9-mujica-uruguays-robin-hood-guerrillas-9066

Kshama Sawant of Seattle - $15/hour minimum wage https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2014/05/kshama-sawant-seattle-socialist.html

nationalize Amazon https://theoutline.com/post/6587/nationalize-amazon-make-bezos-our-bitch?zd=1&zi=ys72jrku

60% of US wealth inherited https://evonomics.com/americans-get-rich-stay-rich/

peasants had to work 4 days a week unpaid for their landlord http://www.lordsandladies.org/serfs.htm#:~:text=The%20daily%20life%20of%20a%20serf%20was%20dictated,the%20lord%27s%20mill%2C%20and%20pay%20the%20customary%20charge.

Warren Buffett pays less in taxes than his secretary is identically unjust https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/338189

unnecessary toys… like 169 cars https://www.thethings.com/priciest-cars-jay-leno-owns-and-cheapest/

giraffes ($40,000 - $80,000) https://www.exoticanimalsforsale.net/giraffe-for-sale.asp

Asian Arowana fish ($300,000) https://nypost.com/2016/06/05/this-fish-is-worth-300000/

beach town has 147 homeless people https://www.latimes.com/socal/daily-pilot/news/story/2019-10-01/aliso-viejo-denounces-federal-judges-statement-alleging-it-dumped-homeless-in-laguna-beach-shelter

more wealth simply creates more want https://www.livescience.com/10881-global-study-money-buy-happiness.html

“Happiest Nations” https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurabegleybloom/2020/03/20/ranked-20-happiest-countries-2020/#29f843517850

#1 Finland the average CEO salary is $99,515 https://www.payscale.com/research/FI/Job=Chief_Executive_Officer_(CEO)/Salary

#18 USA it is $820,616 https://www.salary.com/research/salary/benchmark/chief-executive-officer-salary

per capita income - $17,110 - similar to China and Costa Rica https://www.worldometers.info/gdp/gdp-per-capita/

Open Borders - global wealth would elevate 50% - 150% https://openborders.info/utilitarian/#:~:text=Utilitarian%20justifications%20for%20open%20borders%20hinge%20on%20the,economic%20production%20%28see%20our%20double%20world%20GDP%20page%29

Reparations

Africans deserve reparations https://nehandaradio.com/2020/05/25/tafi-mhaka-europe-should-pay-reparations-for-colonising-africa/

India deserves reparations https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-33618621

Dalits (untouchables) deserve compensation https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/india-dalits-reservation-representation-suraj-yengde-6523483/

Armenians deserve reparations from Turks https://ahvalnews.com/armenians-turkey/turkey-may-face-reparation-demands-after-us-recognises-armenian-genocide-turkish

Greeks reparation from Germany https://breakingnewsturkey.com/world/greece-demands-germany-pays-war-reparations

Congolese reparations from Belgium https://www.africanexponent.com/post/9792-will-belgium-ever-apologize-to-drc-and-pay-reparations

South Africans reparations for apartheid https://www.egalitarianplanet.org/south-africa-reparations-for-aparthied

Native Americans reparations from European imperialists https://study.com/academy/lesson/native-american-reparations.html

Jamaica reparations from Britain https://moguldom.com/189262/jamaica-wants-britain-to-pay-billions-in-reparations-for-slavery/

South Korea reparations from Japan https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2019-08-17/japan-korea-and-the-tquestion-of-how-to-pay-for-historic-wrongs

Vietnam reparations from the USA https://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/18/opinion/the-forgotten-debt-to-vietnam.html

Serbia reparations from NATO https://europediplomatic.com/2019/09/15/moscow-suggests-us-reparations-for-yugoslavia-bombings/

Haiti reparations from France https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/01/haiti-reparations-france-slavery-colonialism-debt/

Land Reform

Cuba land reform https://cubaplatform.org/land-reform

South Korea land reform https://www.economist.com/asia/2017/10/12/for-asia-the-path-to-prosperity-starts-with-land-reform https://www.iol.co.za/capetimes/opinion/sa-could-model-its-land-reform-on-the-success-achieved-in-south-korea-10450729#:~:text=South%20Korea%E2%80%99s%20land%20reform%20is%20regarded%20as%20one,impact%20on%20agricultural%20productivity%2C%20which%20later%20sustained%20poverty-reduction

Guatemalan coup https://www.umbc.edu/che/tahlessons/pdf/historylabs/Guatemalan_Coup_student:RS01.pdf

Chilean coup https://foodfirst.org/publication/agrarian-reform-and-counter-reform-in-chile/

7.0 billion people divide Earth - 2.3 acres each https://foodfirst.org/publication/agrarian-reform-and-counter-reform-in-chile/

The Federal Land Dividend - Zoltan Istvan https://www.businessinsider.com/basic-income-with-federal-land-dividend-2017-7

Nationalization

Norway nationalization https://mg.co.za/article/2011-09-08-oil-together-now-nationalisation-lessons-from-norway/

Bolivia nationalization https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/bolivias-nationalization-oil-and-gas https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bolivia-power-nationalization-idUSTRE64013020100501

Bolivia coup engineered by US for lithium https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/12/morales-claims-orchestrated-coup-tap-bolivia-lithium-191225053622809.html

Cuba nationalizes 36 US-owned sugar mills http://en.cubadebate.cu/news/2015/08/10/cuba-nationalizes-us-companies/

Chile nationalized copper https://www.chemeurope.com/en/encyclopedia/Chilean_nationalization_of_copper.html

Mexico and Venezuela nationalized oil https://www.yahoo.com/news/brazil-venezuela-mexico-three-ways-nationalize-oil-150004780.html

Pakistan nationalized steel mills https://www.egalitarianplanet.org/pakistans-nationalized-steel-mills

Quebec nationalized hydroelectric https://www.egalitarianplanet.org/hydro-qubec-why-nationalize-the-electricity-sector

Sri Lanka nationalized tea, rubber, and cocoa http://teasrilanka.org/history

Italy nationalized Italia airlines https://www.businessinsider.com/alitalia-nationalized-by-italy-history-2020-3

India nationalized banks https://www.oneindia.com/feature/full-list-of-nationalised-banks-in-india-2718000.html

Socialist Alternative wants the 500 biggest corporations in the USA to be publicly owned https://www.socialistalternative.org/about/

Apple workers in China work 60 hour weeks for low pay in unsafe conditions https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/mediatechnologyandtelecoms/electronics/9174900/Apples-Chinese-staff-work-60-hours-a-week-independent-audit-finds.html

Taxation

US rich were taxed up to 91% in the 1950’s https://americansfortaxfairness.org/tax-fairness-briefing-booklet/fact-sheet-taxing-wealthy-americans/

Thomas Piketty “billionaires should be taxed out of existence” https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/12/billionaires-should-be-taxed-out-of-existence-says-thomas-piketty.html

‘no billionaires’ - Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/24/politics/bernie-sanders-ultra-wealth-tax-billionaires/index.html https://dailycaller.com/2019/10/02/aoc-billionaires-should-not-exist/

$10 million - ‘never have to worry about money again.’ https://www.getrichslowly.org/is-10-million-enough/ 

Wages

Luxembourg minimum wage - $14.12 an hour https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-countries-with-the-highest-minimum-wages.html

USA 17 cities with at least $15/hour minimum wage https://time.com/3969977/minimum-wage/

vote in Switzerland 2013 failed, receiving 34.7% of the vote https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/24/switzerland-votes-against-cap-executive-pay

USA CEOs are paid 361 times more than workers https://popularresistance.org/why-are-ceos-paid-361-times-more-than-their-average-employees/

Universal Basic Income

UBI in Canada https://www.egalitarianplanet.org/mincone-experiment-in-dauphine-manitoba

UBI Namibia https://www.egalitarianplanet.org/ubi-in-nambia

UBI Finland https://basicincome.org/news/2019/04/finland-further-results-from-the-famous-finnish-ubi-experiment-published/

UBI Alaska https://www.egalitarianplanet.org/alaskaubi

UBI Stockton, California https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-02/stockton-extends-its-universal-basic-income-pilot

UBI Martin Luther King Jr. https://www.egalitarianplanet.org/martin-luther-king-jr

UBI Richard Nixon https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/05/richard-nixon-ubi-basic-income-welfare/

Libertarians UBI https://www.libertarianism.org/columns/libertarian-case-basic-income

UBI Spain https://www.businessinsider.com/spain-universal-basic-income-coronavirus-yang-ubi-permanent-first-europe-2020-4

UBI 20-30 USA cities https://www.economist.com/united-states/2020/08/08/universal-basic-income-gains-momentum-in-america

Corporate Sharing and Worker Power

Germany worker representation - 50% of the supervisory board of directors https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-08-24/why-german-corporate-boards-include-workers-for-co-determination#:~:text=Wherever%20on%20that%20spectrum%20your%20views%20lie%2C%20it,or%20require%20some%20such%20form%20of%20employee%20%E2%80%9Cco-determination.%E2%80%9D

Amazon workers “treated like robots” https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/feb/05/amazon-workers-protest-unsafe-grueling-conditions-warehouse

Tesla accused of racial hostility and discrimination https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-04-12/tesla-workers-claim-racial-bias-and-abuse-at-electric-car-factory

Union benefits https://www.americanprogressaction.org/issues/economy/reports/2016/06/09/139074/unions-help-the-middle-class-no-matter-the-measure/

Communes and Cooperatives

Twin Oaks Intentional Community in Virginia https://www.twinoaks.org/

Hutterite colonies http://www.hutterites.org/

Kibbutzim https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/history-and-overview-of-the-kibbutz-movement

collectives more productive than hierarchal companies https://cccd.coop/news/%EF%BB%BF-worker-cooperatives-are-more-productive-normal-companies

Spain 18,000 co-operatives https://www.theguardian.com/social-enterprise-network/2012/mar/12/cooperatives-spain-mondragon

Open Borders

Open Borders General Info https://openborders.info

Open Borders elevate global wealth 50% 150% https://openborders.info/double-world-gdp/

USA imports computer scientists   https://www.prb.org/usforeignbornstem/

Cubism inspired by West African masks https://www.pablopicasso.org/africanperiod.jsp

Pure Democracy

Abolish Anti-Democratic Institutions https://hankpellissier.com/sixteen-reforms-to-improve-usa-democracy

Ranked Choice Voting https://www.fairvote.org/rcvbenefits#:~:text=%20Benefits%20of%20Ranked%20Choice%20Voting%20%201,more%20voices%20are%20heard.%20Often%2C%20to...%20More%20

Superiority of the Parliamentary System https://lebassy.blogspot.com/2006/07/superiority-of-parliamentary-system.html

“Most Democratic Nations” https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/democracy-countries

Separatist and Secessionist groups https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secession

24 states do not have Referendums and Initiatives https://ballotpedia.org/States_without_initiative_or_referendum

Switzerland and Ireland offer the most referendums in Europe https://inews.co.uk/news/long-reads/switzerland-held-9-referendums-already-2016-11727#:~:text=Switzerland%20has%20been%20holding%20referendums%20since%20the%2018th,to%20the%20polls%20more%20often%20than%20the%20UK.

Rojava Communalism https://itsgoingdown.org/the-communes-of-rojava-a-model-in-societal-self-direction/ https://politicalviolenceataglance.org/2020/08/20/the-two-faces-of-kurdistan/ https://roarmag.org/essays/communalism-bookchin-direct-democracy/

Murray Bookchin https://www.britannica.com/biography/Murray-Bookchin

How the Poor Continue to Die

By Kevin Van Meter

Republished from The Institute for Anarchist Studies.

Humanity has entered a period “where every day people are dying among strangers.”[1]  

Daily life itself has become “strange” and isolating as social distancing and quarantine measures are being lifted, then reenacted.  Federal troops operating as secret police in an attempt to occupy American cities, are repelled by protestors and the populace.  News cycles shriek and squall with nearly every pontification from the political class as they continue to carry out their “sacred mission,” which in recent memory is accompanied by squealing ineptitude in regard to improving the actual conditions of life.  Or, maybe they are not inept.  Months ago, at the onset of the pandemic, pundits and politicians had already declared that testing, treatments, and vaccines would not be offered to everyone.    

A pervasive level of violence, of frivolous intrusions into the routine behaviors of people of color, of a cruel disgust directed toward unhoused and poor peoples, of an impulsive need to regulate the expressions of those outside the gender binary, of a paranoid animosity toward immigrants and “antifa” and the “other” is being expressed by a particular sector of the population.  This sector – overwhelmingly good Christians, white, and middle-class – have been expressing this violence to such an extent that everyday life has been saturated by it.  For us “others” it is omnipresent, for many “others” it has been this way for five hundred years.  Yet, the poor continue to die, often “among strangers.”                      

In 1929 George Orwell was down and out in Paris and witness to the goings-on at a hospital that served the poor.  Seventeen years later he drew on his initial observations along with scribbled notes to complete the article “How the Poor Die.”  These words, published during the aftermath of the second World War, deserve our full attention in this moment: “However great the kindness and the efficiency, in every hospital death there will be some cruel, squalid detail, something perhaps too small to be told but leaving terribly painful memories behind, arising out of the haste, the crowding, the impersonality of a place where every day people are dying among strangers.”[2]  Then, as now, the gallant efforts of medical personnel, front-line and essential workers are often performed with kindness and efficiency, and with haste.  Nonetheless, the poor died in 1929 and 1946 in the ways they have continued to die, have always died.  In hospitals amongst strangers and in the streets, shanty towns and derelict apartments, in asylums and prisons, reservations and Bantustans. And if at all possible, in these same places, amongst relations, chosen as well as blood.    

Currently the cruelty of COVID-19 is compounded not just by social isolation but the realization that those who will die from this disease will do so among strangers.  On ventilators, in isolation units, in nursing homes, without the comfort of loved ones or human touch.  If the projections are correct, even with the recommended medical and social interventions, the dead will overwhelm the living.  It is likely that you, the humble reader, will be called upon to bury the departed, deceased, dead.        

As the dead overwhelm the living, dead labor will attempt to overcome living labor. “Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour,” Karl Marx notoriously quipped, “and lives the more, and more labour it sucks.”[3]  What has become clear to large swaths of the populace, not just devotees to hundred and fifty year old texts, is that value and wealth in a capitalist society (the portion consumed in production and reproduction is dead labor) are produced only through the efforts and expended capacities of the working-class (which is living labor).  As Marx offered, “We mean by labour-power, or labour-capacity, the aggregate of those mental and physical capabilities existing in the physical form, the living personality, of a human being, capabilities which [they] set in motion whenever [they produce] a use-value of any kind.”[4]  And the great promise of Marx, of all revolutionaries, is that we will produce ‘goods and services’ useful to human beings in accordance with their needs and all of our abilities collectively.   

An economic system hell bent on endless growth has seemingly been replaced, possibly only temporarily, by shortsighted kleptocracy.  Extending well beyond the current administration, bourgeois society has embraced law breaking for themselves and harsh, hard-hearted punishment of the poor for minor property and drug “crimes.”  While this has always been, the contemporary American political class now flaunts its wrongdoings in full view.  With the endless accumulation of capital cast aside for the immediate acquisition of wealth, the imposition of work has become more malicious.  Front-line and essential workers and those in the service industry are being forced back to work at the threat of being destitute, with mass evictions looming.  The tiny deaths of exhaustion and daily injury have been replaced by the alternating certainty of death by starvation or death by pandemic.  Major retailers call them “heroes” as they take away their hazard pay.  And even school children, the sacrificial but essential workers of the future, are being sent back to their desks as home instruction and homework has not been sufficiently disciplinary.  All of this is evident with the return of a slogan, a capitalist maxim: Arbeit macht frei, or work will set you free. 

Pandemic and poverty is becoming plague and privation; those who are penniless will soon face famine. Without work there are no wages, without wages there are few ways to obtain the means of survival, the means of reproducing life itself.  Nevertheless, social reproduction is essential, and the work required – often unwaged, racialized, and gendered – is indispensable.  Since workers expending labor-power in the production process is how capitalism produces value, social reproduction is central to the capitalist mode of production.  As a result, the worksite where this is produced has become of key interest to the bourgeoisie.  Feminist scholar Silvia Federici noted this in the historical record: “The body, then, came to the foreground of social policies because it appeared not only as a beast inert to the stimuli of work, but also as the container of labor-power, a means of production, the primary work-machine.”[5]  The body as machine has been a central metaphor of our capitalist society, now the cogs are being discarded willy-nilly with automation and information computational processes that require fewer and fewer workers.  

Of the numerous realities the pandemic has uncovered, few are as stark as how front-line, essential, service industry workers are not just seen as replaceable but as expendable.  And many are out of work.  When a member of the working-class is without wages and the paltry handouts from the government vanish, reproduction of one’s biological functions and faculties are still required.  Working in front-line, essential, service industries is work as is seeking to obtain work in such sectors.  Working to reproduce one’s own capacities is work as is working without a wage to reproduce waged workers along with the “nonwaged, underwaged, not-yet waged, and no-longer waged,” to quote a contemporary feminist scholar.[6]  Hence, all of life has become work, with its simultaneous, and seemingly contradictory absence and total permeation.  Returning to Marx again:      

“the working day contains the full 24 hours, with the deduction of the few hours of rest without which labour-power is absolutely incapable of renewing it services.  Hence it is self-evident that the worker is nothing other than labour-power for the duration of [their] whole life, and that therefore all [their] disposable time is by nature and by right labour-time, to be devoted to the self-valorization of capital.”[7]  

Our whole lives have been subsumed by capitalism, and now, for far too many of our fellow human beings, death has become just as alienating.  

* * *

In collective, common, liberatory moments of ‘great kindness and efficiency,’ ‘amongst relations, chosen as well as blood,’ we are given a glimpse of “a paradise of unbroken solidarities.”[8]  However, the means of communication, mutual aid, and social relations required to build such a paradise are often destabilize by the very forces that should be constructing them.  

Another underling reality exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic is final confirmation that the Left in the United States has been historically defeated, the working-class decomposed.  Although generalized austerity, violent repression, mass incarceration, direct attacks on unions and community-based organizations, restructuring of everyday life toward neoliberal and individualistic ends, culture wars, drug wars, endless wars against the populace are partially to blame.  But the Left must take responsibility for its internal operational failures, nonsensical squabbles, unprincipled and self-servingly middle-class politics.  This has left working-class and poor people to their own defenses, with limited material resources, against the pandemic and unfolding crises.  In effect, the poor continue to die in part due to this ineptitude, purity politics, and too often defenses of middle-class ideals and irrelevant academic ideas.  

To define such a sector of the body politic would take many more words than can be allotted here.  Simply put, this includes those who are “practically minded” members of the Democratic Party establishment all the way leftward to include some of the newly articulated Democratic Socialist alternatives, along with much of organized labor, the non-profit sector, as well as do-gooders and providers of social services.  Where the formal Left begins and the bureaucrats, bourgeoisie, social workers, and middle managers of our misery end is unclear, as they are often indistinguishable and hence what that follows is imprecise.  Beyond the established Left there are ongoing mutual aid efforts, wildcat and rent strikes, and uprisings amongst everyday people, often led by young Black insurgents.  These radical, revolutionary, and daring, spontaneous but still organized, abolitionists, anti-capitalists, and commoners are outside of the formal body politic.

Defensive and self-serving reactions in the guise of “What about small landlords?” and “What about family owned businesses?” have erupted on the Left in response to calls for rent strikes, paid sick leave, hazard differentials, and a little workplace democracy with the same veracity as “What about good cops?” and “Don’t all lives matter?” on the right.  Universal demands for income, healthcare, and housing seemingly require an addendum that first we must distinguish between who are the deserving and who are the undeserving poor.  Then, typed into the social media fields of too many who know better: “I support unions but just not at my business or workplace,” “I support tenants’ rights but just not my tenants,” “I support Bernie but what about these horrible ‘__________.’”  While I am paraphrasing, we will get to those who fill these blanks shortly.  Since we have addressed how the middle-class Left and the bourgeoisie defends itself against the rabble informally, we must look at their formal practices.                 

Saving “establishments,” from restaurant chains to retail stores, “public infrastructure” from universities to the library and post office, “private associations” from business improvement districts and landlord lobbying groups to social service non-profits, as well as the facades of representative democracy and private property, are being managed by grinning neoliberal “little Eichmann’s.”  Or, possibly worse, those who wish they were.  Deep austerity measures have been instituted by and throughout these establishments, infrastructures, and associations while money flowing into them has been accumulated by bureaucracies impervious to worker or citizen demands.  

All of life has become work, and to manage this all of life has been infected by bureaucracy.  What is bureaucracy and why is it so pervasive?  Member of the French group Socialisme ou Barbarie, Claude Lefort, has an answer: “one overlooks the fact that in one and the same movement the bureaucracy establishes itself at the heart of social life and presents itself as an end, that it responds to a technical need and subordinates it to the imperative of power.”[9] Bureaucracies, even progressive and liberal ones, have sought to silence working-class voices: in social services they sought to silence those of unemployed people and welfare recipients, in trade unions expressions of working-class self-activity, political parties those of the masses, universities those of faculty and student shared governance, corporations those of workers initiatives and demands, healthcare those of the ill and infirm, landlords those of their tenants, the legal system and prisons those of prisoners, and then there are others.  At the moment you can hear bureaucrats mumbling out of the side of their mouths, a proverb: “we have effectively silenced them in life, how dare they not be silent in death.”              

Moreover, the desperate need to feel “right” and “moral” is cover for those who ignore structural inequalities and stark differentials of power that exist and are now amplified in our society.  Far worse, after five hundred years of struggle against capitalism and the state most of the Left is willfully ignorant how social change occurs.  Nearly immeasurable personal choices and consumerist acts – such as voting, buying local, eating vegan or organic, riding bikes, being sustainable or peaceful or mindful or, which is by far the worst, conscious – are held as the apex of political action.  Or, maybe by appealing to the “better natures” of bosses and landlords, billionaires and politicians or “speaking truth to power,” things will progress, improve, change.  Worst still, if our arguments are right and true, clear and concise, we will win in the free marketplace of ideas.  And finally, as a great comedic mind once offered, “rights are the last resort of a [person] with no argument” and the Left’s call for “rights” ignore how often they are suspended in times of crisis or have never existed for large swaths of the planet’s populace.  This should be absolutely apparent to anyone who has been on the streets of a supposedly liberal Pacific Northwest city over the past few weeks, or has simply been observing.  Now, that we have considered how the Left views how the actual lives and deaths of working-class and poor peoples as externalities in formal ways, the maliciousness of their informal practices should be noted too.  

A self-serving and moralistic politics has dominated the Left as of late, where faux outrage meant to condemn the personal lifestyles and decisions of the target while holding one’s own personal lifestyles and decisions as morally superior.  Meaning, the illusion of choice and free will results in a working-class bartender being scolded by their middle-class customer, who is in the midst of guzzling down another twenty-dollar cocktail, for taking a cheaper Uber / Lyft home after a twelve hour shift rather than the more expensive local cab company.  Notions of self-care, GoFundMe campaigns for medical bills, Buzzfeed articles and similar lists given as commandments – “20 Books You Must Read this Year,” “6 ways to be antiracist, because being ‘not racist’ isn’t enough” – are individual solutions, often impossible ones, to what are social problems.  These developments are often coupled with a crises of representation and measure along with the disappearance of class as an operating category.  ‘Interlocking oppressions’ and ‘identity’ were to augment and complement class as “new measures of oppression and inequality,” to use the apt words of Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, rather than replace it.[10]  Or, in fact, it is the middle-class assumptions of the contemporary Left and radical forces that have placed various issues outside of, above, and primary to class because it allows the middle-class to claim legitimacy within a fundamentally unjust and undemocratic system at the expense of working-class and poor peoples.  It is as if the Left has forgotten that, “Immigrant issues, gender issues and antiracisms are working-class issues.”[11]  Nevertheless there are issues neighboring these too.              

Behind call outs, privilege politics, and reinvigorated essentialisms, one can hear the tired slogans: “Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is gonna win!” and “Fight the People!”  According to various factions that splintered the Students for a Democratic Society in 1969, of which the Weather Underground is the most pernicious, the American war in Vietnam was bad, so the Vietcong was good; politically conscious radicals were good, white working-class people were bad.  Purges, purity tests, self-criticism, or better off self-flagellation, immediately followed such recitations.  

Not then, and certainty not now, have such measures resulted in strong liberatory movements much less substantive, material or otherwise, gains for oppressed and working-class people.  Nor have movements themselves found transformative ways to address internalized oppression and behaviors, even with the gallant efforts led by women and trans people of color.  After fifty-years of such politics, one would think with the clearly observable historic defeat of Left and radical forces with the rise of incipient fascism other avenues would be explored, other ideas rediscovered and developed, other strategies and tactics deployed.  

In the streets many revolutionaries now call forth “fire from heaven,” not out of revenge or resentment but for our very survival.  Emile Zola was not so forgiving in Germinal: “There he stood with arms raised like an inspired prophet of old, calling down the wrath of God upon the murderers, foretelling the age of justice and the coming extermination of the bourgeoisie by fire from heaven, since it has committed the foulest crime of all and caused the workers and the penniless of the world to be slain.”[12]  Though, what is to be done when those who “caused the workers and the penniless of the world to be slain” are not just the political class, the bourgeoisie, Republican governors and liberal mayors but our fellow citizens?  Fellow citizens refusing to wear masks, coughing in the faces of essential workers and spitting on cashiers, setting up roadblocks to harass those fleeing wildfires, driving through crowds of protestors and arming themselves against their neighbors.  And, with particular vitriol, calling for and in some cases actively exterminating Black and Indigenous people of color, trans women of color, immigrant children, the elderly and infirm.  

As I have claimed herein, the Left not only lacks a concept of social change, it is entirely unprincipled.  But even without principles the Left is being educated nightly as it is struck over the head by police batons.  And the radical and revolutionary movements are discovering its principles and power in concert with thousands of others who have set the fires from heaven upon police stations. Banks, bosses, landlords will burn too.  

Where does one find prospects and possibilities within this plague?  Now, as always, in the new struggles that are emerging, and new social antagonisms being expressed.  As I sat down to write this it is the multitudinous mutual aid projects growing in barren landscapes, then those standing “with arms raised.”

For those of us who are radicals and revolutionaries, we will be called to do immoral things in this crisis. Immoral by the standards of the Left and progressive moralists and possibly immoral by our own standards.  It is clear that the Democratic Party establishment and Left which aligns itself with it has made peaceful revolution impossible.  Whereas the Left is more interested in its own self-preservation and defense of its position in the capitalist, white supremacist, heteronormative, settler colonial, property owning systems then a substantive redistribution of wealth, land, power.  Whereas much of the radical Left would rather confront each other over perceived slights than directly confront power and construct counterpowers.  Currently the streets of Portland, Chicago, New York along with the streets of rural towns are all bursting with protestors. They are refusing to delegate responsibility for their futures to agencies outside of themselves, to representatives and non-profits, to the so-called official organizations of the working-class.  However, now, rather than dying amongst strangers, thousands of unhoused, poor, women, trans and gender non-conforming people, people of color, Indigenous, immigrant, imprisoned, “others,” and militant accomplices who accompany them have chosen the possibility of death rather than certain death so that they may live. So that we all may live.     

An organizer, autonomist, and author, Kevin Van Meter is the author of Guerrillas of Desire: Notes on Everyday Resistance and Organizing to Make a Revolution Possible (IAS/AK Press, 2017), co-editor of Uses of a Whirlwind: Movement, Movements, and Contemporary Radical Currents (AK Press, 2010), and is currently writing his next book Reading Struggles: Autonomist Marxism from Detroit to Turin and Back Again (Forthcoming, AK Press, 2021-2022).  Van Meter can be reached via his website: www.readingstruggles.info.   

Notes

[1] George Orwell, “How the Poor Die” in In Front of Your Nose, 1945-1950: The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, eds. (Boston: David R. Goodine, 2000), 232.

[2] Ibid. 

[3] Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1, Ben Fowkes, trans. (London and New York: Pengiun Books, 1990), 342. 

[4] Marx, Capital, Volume 1, 270. 

[5] Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 2004), 137-138. 

[6] Kathi Weeks, The Problem With Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries (Durham and London” Duke University Press, 2011), 121.  

[7] Marx, Capital, Volume 1, 375. 

[8] Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Build in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster (New York: Penguin Books, 2009), 3. 

[9] Claude Lefort, “What is Bureaucracy?” in The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism, John B. Thompson, ed. (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1986), 119-120.

[10] Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (ed.), How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017), 4.

[11] Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016), 216.

[12] Emile Zola, Germinal (London and New York: Penguin Books, 1988), 413. 

Their Violence and Ours

By Nathaniel Flakin

Republished from Left Voice.

Capitalist politicians of all stripes are condemning “violence.” But they never mean the daily violence committed by the police. They are condemning resistance against state violence.

Bourgeois society has a very funny way of talking about violence. In the aftermath of the police murder of George Floyd, as thousands poured into the streets to demonstrate their anger and demand justice, the bourgeois press was publishing articles with headlines like this: “Violence erupts in Minneapolis following black man’s death in police custody.”

What a strange formulation! Not only does the headline conceal how this “death” happened. Apparently it is not “violence” if a state functionary chokes a restrained man to death. No, “violence” only began after that. 

This bias underscores the way that bourgeois society operates. A Black man being murdered by the state is just a normal day; but people taking things from a Target store without paying is a catastrophe. People are expendable; but property is sacred. 

Indeed, capitalist society treats all kinds of systemic violence as so completely natural that it does not even deserve the term. A police murder in broad daylight might, if there are sufficient protests, be condemned as “excessive force.” But what about when police do follow all rules and regulations? When they evict a family from their home, for example — is that not violence? What about a store preventing hungry people from getting food? What about a government allowing 100,000 people to die of a pandemic? Is that not violence?

The German communist poet Bertolt Brecht put it succinctly: “There are many ways to kill. They can stab a knife in your guts, take away your bread, decide not to cure you from an illness, put you in a miserable house, torture you to death with work, take you to war, etc. Only a few of these are forbidden in our state.”

In response to the protests, bourgeois politicians are speaking out against violence. But of course they do not mean the daily violence committed by the police. They are not referring to the massacres committed by the U.S. military or the economic havoc wreaked by American corporations. No, their main concern, almost inevitably, is property damage.

The U.S. Representative from Minneapolis, the progressive Democrat Ilhan Omar, for example tweeted out on Thursday: “We should and must protest peacefully. But let us end the cycle of violence now.” Atlanta’s Democratic Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms said: “This is not in the spirit of Martin Luther King Jr.”

But what was the spirit of Martin Luther King Jr.? He was not a socialist, but he understood that oppressed people must stand up to their oppression. For this, he was condemned by the powers that be for his supposed “violence.” On April 12, 1963, a group of eight clergymen called on King to cancel planned demonstrations for civil rights in Alabama. They called demonstrations “unwise and untimely” because they  “incite to hatred and violence, however technically peaceful those actions may be.” They denounced the mobilizations as “extreme measures” and proposed that Black people should “peacefully obey” while relying on courts.

King, of course, did not follow this advice. He defended riots as “the language of the unheard” and went on to denounce the U.S. government’s horrific violence in Vietnam. It was only after his murder that King was transformed into a harmless icon — an angelic figure who supposedly preached nothing but passive resistance

Progressive Democrats like Omar are not calling for peace — they are calling on people to peacefully obey the system that is murdering them. Omar wants the U.S. federal government to investigate police murders. Yet decades of police “reforms” have only shown that this institution cannot be reformed. The Minneapolis Police Department is headed by a Black cop who once sued the department over its racist practices. And yet: the capitalist police, even with the most enlightened leadership, can have no other function than protecting capitalist property. This means oppressing the poorest sectors of the working class, especially Black people.

As socialists, we do condemn violence — we condemn the violence that the capitalist system commits against billions of people every day. We do not condemn it when working-class and poor people begin to defend themselves against the system’s violence.

A riot serves to get the attention of the ruling class. It might even force them to make concessions. But a riot cannot end the system of oppression and exploitation. For that, we need to combine the rage on the streets of Minneapolis with socialist organization. Democratic Party politicians (even the ones that call themselves “socialists”) will always call on people to accept the institutions that oppress them. Real socialists, in contrast, want to build up organizations that are independent of the ruling class, their state, and all their parties.

A tiny minority of capitalists exploits the labor of the huge majority of people. In order to maintain their rule, they maintain an enormous repressive apparatus, including police, jails, armies, judges, etc. — that is their state. The capitalists are driving our entire civilization to a catastrophe. But they will never relinquish power voluntarily. Throughout history, no ruling class has ever given up without being toppled. As Karl Marx wrote, “Violence is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one.” This is why the working class needs to confront the capitalists’ bodies of armed men.

When working people set fire to a police station, the capitalists’ media will call this “violence” — but it is nothing more than self-defense against the daily violence perpetrated by capitalism. We must get rid of the capitalists’ state, and replace it with a society run by working people themselves. That is the essence of socialist revolution. And the fires on the streets of Minneapolis show that the deepening crisis of capitalism is pushing U.S. society just a little bit closer to that end.

Black Politicians: White Supremacy's Indirect Rulers

By Christian Gines

The Black Community is an internal colony within America. We have a Perpetual Foreigner status and are treated as such. We are socially, politically, educationally, and economically deprived. We have no self-determination. Where there is institutional racism, there is colonization. U.S. Imperialism affects black people abroad just as much as it does at home, and it is sustained in one fundamental way: Black Politicians. Black Politicians are the faces of white supremacy in the black community. They uphold the same structures that we need to dismantle under the guise of them having to “play ball,” which they claim will lead to “useful” compromise. That approach only benefits the individual and not the entire race. Black Politicians are colonial masters. They are indirect rulers and one of the biggest roadblocks to Black Liberation.  

Black Visibility does not equal Black Power. Just because we have black people that look like us in office or in power doesn't mean that it will benefit us. Just because you have a Black face on a white-supremacist system doesn't mean that white supremacy is over. It has just adapted to the conditions of society. Take the state of Mississippi, for example. Mississippi has the most black politicians in office. Yet, the state still has one of the highest poverty rates, one of the lowest education ratings, worst healthcare systems, and more than half of our renters are at stake of homelessness because of Covid-19. If we have a black person in power implementing the same policies that the white people are implementing, then that representation has no worth to us. What is good for America does not equal what is good for black people. That representation is only worth something to the white-supremacist structure which benefits from the facade of progress by placing a black face on racism and oppression. 

Black Politicians are the same as the indirect rulers that were in colonies during the Scramble for Africa. They come to us saying that they “see us, hear us, and are going to do something about it.” Then they get into office and say that they can't speak up about an issue plaguing the black community because if they speak up, they will be ousted from the club. They claim that they won't have a seat at the table anymore. That shows you the fundamental problem right there. Black Politicians don't really exercise any real power for the community. They are more interested in their individual wealth and comfort than actually fighting for any real change. They are no more than puppets that, instead of being loyal to the constituents that put them into office, are loyal to a political party. They are more worried about personal status than changing the status quo. 

Take the Congressional Black Caucus, for example. The Congressional Black Caucus is dominated by politicians who are more worried about their corporate interests and filling their pockets than actually representing the Black Community's interests. Take the race of Jamal Bowman and Eliot Engel. Jamal Bowman was a black progressive candidate running against the incumbent Eliot Engel, who is a moderate white politician. In this race, the CBC decided to endorse Eliot Engel instead of Jamal Bowman. This example right here goes to show you what the goal of black politicians is to protect the status quo of the White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy. They are elected to do the bidding of the ruler. Same as colonial masters. They co-opt revolutionary language to benefit the goals of neoliberalism. 

Look at Jim Clyburn, who was a Freedom Rider and participated in the civil rights movement. When young, he put in work and likely had revolutionary tendencies and thoughts. His effectiveness, though, after being brought into the Democratic Machine, has gone to waste. He no longer articulates the ideas and needs of the black community. What he does now is silence black radical thought and dissent. Take for instance what he said about the protest happening around Defunding the Police. He stated that "Nobody is going to defund the police." That statement is very disingenuous, seeing that most of the protesters are calling for defunding if not abolition. He is doing his job as a colonial master. He is watering down the movement and  trying to subside the black masses by getting us to settle for incremental change instead of fighting to dismantle current systems of oppression. 

Joe Biden picking Kamala Harris as his running mate displays this indirect rule the most. Right now, we are going through a global uprising against policing and prison systems, with people advocating for the abolition of both. During this time, Joe Biden decides to choose a candidate who is known for criminalizing black and brown bodies by keeping innocent people in jail for labor, defending the three-strike system, withholding police misconduct information, defending the death penalty, defending prosecutors falsifying confessions, and a myriad of other things. This shows you the logic of the Democratic Party. They see black people as political pawns who they can manipulate into giving their undying support to the party by just nominating a black woman as Vice President without substantial policy promises. And this strategy has worked. People who were calling for the abolition of police and prisons in June and July are now the same people supporting the Vice Presidential pick of Kamala Harris.

In Black Power, Kwame Ture quoted Machiavelli in saying, "And here it should be noted that a prince ought never to make common cause with one more powerful than himself to injure another unless necessity forces him to it.… for if he wins you rest in his power, and princes must avoid as much as possible being under the will and pleasure of other." This is the reckoning that the Black Community has to have because when we hear talks about “harm reduction,” what harm is actually being reduced. Bombs are still going to be dropped, people are still going to get shot by police, people will still be in jail under both presidents. Harris is deliberately being used to sideline the discussions of real change that we need because we have a black face as the possible second-in-charge of the oppression. We had a black face as the head of America for eight years, and the black community's situation did not get better. Black Lives Matter started under his presidency, and he was hesitant to speak about it, let alone offer substantial change. The Flint Water Crisis was under his presidency, and he didn't provide any substantial change. Not to mention, he dropped 72 bombs a day on the Global South and helped coordinate the outright destruction of one of Africa’s most prosperous nations in Libya. Black faces in high places are just brokers of White Supremacy sold with the guise of progress. 

We don't need Colonial Masters and empty representation. It's not about having a Black person in a position of White Supremacy. We need new institutions in place and new systems that will actually bring about change. Black people are not politically, socially, and economically depressed because of our character or work ethic. Black people are politically, socially, and economically depressed because we are a colonized community. The indirect ruler does not make any colonized situation better. It is just cheaper and easier than having white men run everything in the colony. If we ushered an end to colonization, then we would have an end to our economic serfdom, exploitation, and oppression. We have just as much right to self-determination and freedom than any other colonized group has, and having Black faces doing the bidding of the White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy is not the way to achieving that liberation and freedom.

“Trump’s America” IS America

It's important for us to understand that "Trump’s America" IS America. There is no differentiating. As a matter of fact, based on the country's history, Trump is about as "American" as it gets - greedy, racist, classist, misogynistic, corrupt, dominating, controlling, sadistic, elitist.

America is a settler-colonial nation that was built on the backs of Native genocide and African enslavement, continuing into modern times through intricate systems of institutional white supremacy. The founders of this country were elitists and aristocrats who used their wealth to dominate others while arranging a system of immense privilege for those like them. It is a capitalist country that has been built from the toil of the working majority for centuries - masses of people who have received very little (and continue to receive very little) in return. It is an imperialist country that has bombed, colonized, and obstructed democratic movements throughout the global south and middle east for over a century. It is a misogynistic country that waited 150 years before allowing women to vote, confined women to second-class status after, and continues to breed patriarchal values that are dangerous to working women in everyday life.

"Trump's America" IS America.

Trump has continued to oversee the corporate coup started under Reagan and carried forward under the Bushs, Clinton, and Obama - a coup that is merely an inevitable late stage of capitalism, whereas wealth and power have been concentrated into a fusion of corporate governance and creeping fascism.

Trump has continued America's illegal and immoral wars abroad, same as his predecessors.

Trump has continued "starving the beast," following the neoliberal blueprint of the last 40 years by siphoning public funds into private hands.

Trump has continued the mass deportation policies implemented under Obama.

Trump has continued the attack on civil liberties started under W. Bush in the wake of 9/11.

Trump, in his role as president, carries the torch of draconian, racist, classist criminal justice policies created under Reagan.

Trump carries the torch of mass incarceration and austerity policies created under Clinton.

Trump has continued serving Wall St. and his pals/donors in the profit industries, like all of his modern predecessors.

Trump, like all presidents before, SERVES CAPITAL - not people.

He may not be the polished statesman that we've become accustomed to - those who exhibit "stability" and "civility" while acting as the figureheads of systemic brutality - but make no mistake: Trump is as American as it gets. However, "America" is largely a myth in itself, something fed to the masses from above by the wealthy and powerful few who have always demanded our loyalty despite their everyday crimes against us and our class counterparts the world over. Most Americans are despised by those who run the country from their pedestals, those who benefit from its brutality, those who gouge us at every turn, those protected by an ever-thinning, reactionary, "middle-class" buffer.

To rid ourselves of Trump and all he represents, we must rid ourselves of "America" as we know it - the myth, the systems it facilitates (capitalism/imperialism, colonialism, white supremacy, patriarchy), and all of the severity that comes with it. This is a hard truth to accept, especially since it goes against everything we have been conditioned to believe. But it is a truth that must be understood and dealt with if we are to ever win a just world.

All power to the people.

Romania: Thirty Years Removed From Socialism

By Patricia Gorky

Originally published at Liberation News.

Thirty years ago, the socialist government of Romania was overthrown in a military coup d’etat.

Industrialization had transformed the lives of millions of Romanians during the country’s socialist period. But the later years were marked by strict rationing and frequent shortages as the government sought to pay off its foreign debt. Romanian people hoped that their lives would improve after 1989. But life today is much worse than even the most economically-deprived times of the 1980s. A 2010 poll revealed that 63 percent of Romanians say that life was better under socialism.

Romania’s capitalist politicians search everywhere for a scapegoat to evade self-incrimination. The Financial Times states that “Romania has evolved into a democracy and strengthened ties with the West, joining EU and NATO. But its transition was always incomplete.” What is meant by “incomplete” is never defined.

Communists, and executed President Nicolae Ceausescu in particular, are the usual targets. As part of the ongoing demonization campaign, former military prosecutor Dan Voinea made a ludicrous statement to the Financial Times: “The communists remain in power until this very day, but without the names.”

A Marxist approach requires us to understand the struggle between the working and owning classes. When the communists came to power, they dispossessed the wealthy nobility, clerics and bourgeoisie of their property. Land was collectivized, as well as all major industries, and the economy was centrally planned. Millions of dwellings were built for workers, and everyone had the right to a job.

The socialist Romanian government transformed a largely agrarian society, and made great gains in industrial production. What’s more, they accomplished this feat within mere decades while under constant attack by the West. The capitalist account of Romania’s history ignores the vast achievements of socialism only to focus on its problems and shortcomings, many of which originated from the global situation at the time.

Romania’s socialist origins: Armed insurrection spurs Red Army’s arrival

Unlike the popular revolutions in Russia, China, Cuba and others that brought communists to power, the key factor to Romania’s socialist transformation was the victory of the Soviet Union in World War II.

During the war Romania had been ruled by a fascist military dictatorship in an alliance with Nazi Germany. General Ion Antonescu was not a passive supporter of Nazi Germany. His support was originally based on the fascist Iron Guard. Antonescu sent hundreds of thousands of ethnic minorities to their deaths in concentration camps. This included Jewish and Roma people, as well as communists. Romania’s military was a key participant in the fascist invasion of the Soviet Union, which eventually took 27 million Soviet lives.

As the war went on, internal resistance to the dictatorship grew even as communists were driven underground. The Soviet Union began to turn the tide of war, delivering defeat after defeat to the fascist alliance. On Aug 23, 1944, a broad anti-fascist coalition led by the Communist Party arrested the dictator-general and locked him in a safe. This insurrection sped the Red Army’s advance into Bucharest days later. The Romanian army switched sides in the war and now fought as an ally of the Soviet Union.

Like so many other countries in Eastern Europe, post-war governments were primarily shaped by the militaries that liberated them from fascism – the Soviet Union in the East and the U.S. / Britain in the West. The U.S. and British governments made clear that they would tolerate no governments other than those specifically chosen by the imperialists in their “sphere.” This was evident in the cases of Italy and Greece in particular, where the British military directly intervened to crush the communists, who had led the partisan resistance to fascism and were already in control of many areas.

But instead of a capitalist government, the Soviet Union oversaw the formation of socialist governments in Eastern Europe that would serve the interests of the working class.

The Soviet Union had been pushed to the verge of annihilation not just by the German military, but by the resources and industrial capacity of essentially all of continental Europe. The Nazi war machine had relied on the militaries of Romania, Italy, Hungary, Slovakia and Croatia, as well as key agricultural and oil output from Romania. Fascist resurgence was a possibility too deadly for the Soviet Union to allow.

After years of fascist dictatorship, there was no pre-war “democratic” government to go back to. The largely-discredited monarchy and bourgeois parties had the support of the West, but these very parties had been responsible for Romania’s fascist takeover.

Key support from the Soviets, whose Red Army remained in Romania after the defeat of the fascists, was given to the National Democratic Front, a coalition led by the Romanian Communist Party (PCR).

The Communist Party’s general secretary, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, had been a railway worker and PCR militant. He was born in 1901, and began working at the age of 11 years old, a situation all too common for youths of his time. For his part in organizing strikes in 1933 he was sentenced to 12 years’ hard labor. While in prison he was elected to the central committee of the PCR.

Nicolae Ceausescu, another party leader, was born in 1918, and was a shoemaker’s apprentice in Bucharest from the age of 10. He began revolutionary activity early, and was in and out of prison organizing strikes and sabotage against the Nazi-allied government. At age 22, Ceausescu was in Jilava prison when it was invaded by members of the fascist Iron Guard, who slaughtered 64 of the other prisoners before they were stopped.

In 1946, nearly 7 million people voted for the National Democratic bloc. This election had the highest number of participants in the country’s history. The new government forced the abdication of the reactionary monarchy. Two years later the PCR would merge with the social democrats to form the Romanian Workers’ Party (PMR).

‘Not just a dream’; industrializing an agrarian society

The tasks of the country were enormous. Industrial output was halved by the war and the population had been reduced from nearly 20 million to less than 16 million. More than 700,000 had died. The vast majority of the people were peasants who worked on farms, and had a life expectancy of 42 years.

At once the government set upon an electrification plan, and laid the foundation for the development of industry. Farmland owned by a small, rich minority was confiscated and collectivized. Extravagant castles and mansions were seized from the parasitic nobility and used for museums and other public institutions.

Four decades of socialist development would transform Romania from a country that imported 90 percent of machinery to a country that manufactured its own. Social services and education radically improved health: life expectancy increased by 30 years. More than 5 million jobs were created, and industrial output rose by more than 650 percent since 1950.

Housing was a major priority for the state. By 1980, the socialist government had built 4.6 million homes for people. Scanteia newspaper reported how a communist of the old underground “felt the need to touch and caress the bricks of the first apartment blocs to be built for steelworkers, so he could convince himself that they were not just a dream”.

Pregnant women and mothers were accorded rights that even bourgeois reviewers noted as “comprehensive and generous.” Women were given fully-paid maternity leave of 112 days. And with no loss to benefits, “mothers were permitted to take a leave of absence from work to raise a child to the age of 6, or they could request half-time work.”

Still a developing country suffering from centuries of underdevelopment, Romania strove to become a medium-developed country and narrow the gap between it and the West. For Gheorghiu-Dej and Ceausescu after him, lessening ties with Moscow was seen as necessary to attain that goal.

Division in the socialist camp

After the war the Soviet Union imposed war reparations on the country (along with other formerly fascist states) to repay part of the immense damage caused by the war. Although the aggregate reparations amounted to just one-fifth the actual cost of destruction suffered by the Soviet Union, these reparations strained the fragile economy of Romania. This likely did not improve the public view of the USSR. There were still Soviet troops in Romania, and Moscow exercised a direct intervention in the economy through the Sovrom joint-stock partnerships over Romania’s major industries.

Stalin’s death in 1953 and the subsequent shifts in the Soviet Union impelled the divide further. Gheorghiu-Dej and Ceausescu negotiated the buyout of the Sovroms at great cost.

But in 1955, Romania joined the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance, also known as the Warsaw Pact, with the USSR and other countries of the eastern European socialist bloc.

At the same time, Romania’s leaders began to establish economic ties with capitalist and imperialist countries in order to lessen ties with the Soviet Union. In 1958 with Chinese support, Gheorghiu-Dej negotiated the removal of Soviet soldiers from Romanian soil, the only East European country to do so. As the Sino-Soviet split divided the Socialist Bloc between Moscow and Beijing, Bucharest maintained neutrality.

In 1964 the PMR adopted Gheorghiu-Dej’s theses that emphasized national independence and sovereignty, equal rights, mutual advantage, non-interference in internal affairs, and observance of territorial integrity. When Gheorghiu-Dej died in 1965, Ceausescu redoubled the steps towards nationalism. The PMR renamed itself the Romanian Communist Party (PCR), and the country became the Socialist Republic of Romania to signify a step forward.

1970s and 1980s; ‘Maverick’ Romania turns West

The 1970s was a period of tremendous growth and development for the country. Vast natural resources paired with Western trade concessions and foreign credit brought Romania’s most prosperous years since World War II.

But in many ways the country’s leadership held positions that were reactionary and opportunistic. The “independence” put forward by Gheorghiu-Dej and later Ceausescu became more and more allied with U.S. imperialism. Romania recognized West Germany, and became the only socialist country to maintain diplomatic relations with Israel. When the CIA overthrew the democratically-elected socialist president of Chile, many socialist countries severed diplomatic relations. Yet Romania maintained them.

These steps convinced the U.S. government that Ceausescu could be influenced and worked with to a certain extent. He was labelled a “maverick” by the U.S. press and internal CIA documents. They eagerly sought to distance Romania from the Soviet Bloc. In 1969, U.S. President Richard Nixon made a state visit to Romania, the first visit of a U.S. president to a socialist country, three years before his famed visit to China.

Romania would go on to join imperialist financial agreements including taking loans from the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. The U.S. welcomed each of these moves, but other than high interest loans they gave Romania nothing of substance in return. What the U.S. really wanted was the overturn of the progressive social system and the return of capitalist exploitation and oppression.

But the coup d’etat of 1989 could not have succeeded without an accumulation of errors on the part of the country’s leaders. The government’s vacillation between the imperialist and socialist camps was one such example.

The late 1970s and early 1980s ushered in a series of crises that rocked the Romanian economy. A devastating earthquake hit Bucharest in 1977, followed by the global economic crisis. For much of the 1970s the Romanian government had been able to export key commodities like oil at high prices. But when prices slumped, suddenly Romania lost a significant source of revenue. Foreign credit that had previously offered an attractive path to development became an obstacle to the country’s survival.

Romania borrowed from the IMF, whose loan terms are designed to enslave governments in a cycle of debt by imposing crippling interest rates and severe austerity on the people. They remain a key tool for imperialists today that limit a country’s development. For the Romanian government, foreign debt had become a trap from which they desperately worked to extricate themselves.

Beginning in the early 1980s, the Romanian government rationed electricity, heat, gasoline and food – the first time since the early postwar years. Agricultural goods were exported to pay down the loan, rendering certain food items like meat and milk scarce. People arrived home in the cold winter only to have the heat shut off after a few hours. Even radio and television transmissions were restricted to preserve energy.

These were difficult years for the Romanian people. Other countries like Poland and Hungary which had taken out similar loans were not even able to pay the interest. Romania paid back the principal as well.

Meanwhile the capitalist reforms in the Soviet Union gave fodder to reactionary elements across Eastern Europe. At the same time, the West’s cultural cold war continued, particularly enticing young people in the socialist camp with pro-capitalist propaganda.

December 1989 and the military coup d’etat

By April 1989, the Romanian government declared the country free of Western debt. The Grand National Assembly enacted a ban on taking on any further foreign credits. Yet the rationing of food and energy continued. Perhaps this was an effort to impel the economy further, but these austerity measures were self-defeating.

These decisions made by the country’s leaders could only have further isolated much of the working class.

The imperialist media seized upon any sign of discontent in the Socialist Bloc. So did the U.S. government, which had financed counterrevolutionary organizations throughout Eastern Europe since the end of World War II. The imperialists carefully studied each manifestation. A 1987 classified CIA document outlined a number of possible situations that would lead to the downfall of the Romanian government given the prospect of the coming winter. Stunningly, one of the scenarios in this “winter thinkpiece” would play out almost exactly as occurred two years later: In this scenario, a group of striking workers would establish a national organization to coordinate protests. “Pragmatic” opponents of the Ceausescus in leadership would remove him from office, with support of the Securitate or military. The new government would ease restrictions on food and energy to placate most workers.

Instead of a strike in a major factory, the disturbances would arise around a reactionary Hungarian cleric in the western city of Timisoara. And one such “Council of National Salvation” was formed not from any workers’ group but from the top military brass, who began operating as a council six months before the coup.

Timisoara is a cosmopolitan city in western Romania near the Hungarian border. In 1989 there were 1.7 million Hungarians who lived in the region. Bourgeois elements in Hungary long promoted counterrevolutionary propaganda, including alleged grievances against the Hungarian minorities.

The eviction of a counterrevolutionary cleric on Dec. 16 sparked protests in Timisoara. Confrontations ensued between rightwing protestors and security forces, but there were few casualties. There was no massacre as was repeated by the imperialist press. The New York Times published hysterical reports of “mass graves in Timisoara” holding thousands of people, and the Hungarian media claimed that 60,000 had been killed. All of this was later revealed to be false.

Protests grew around the country. On Dec. 20 the military, foreshadowing its coming betrayal, withdrew from Timisoara. This was a boon to the counterrevolution; mobs of people ransacked the local Communist Party headquarters. The unrest was serious enough for Ceausescu to cut short a state visit to Iran and return to the capital.

Up to this time, the clandestine counterrevolutionary Council of National Salvation had been operating for 6 months prior. Their pre-December activities are not known, and there were a number of such councils. The most prominent included a former ambassador to the United States; a disgraced PCR politician who would become the new government’s president; and at least 4 military generals, including a retired general who had made previous attempts against Ceausescu.

On Dec. 21, Ceausescu appeared before a mass rally in Bucharest. He announced considerable increases in the minimum salary, child subsidies and pensions. He denounced the actions in Timisoara of a group who wanted to place the country again under foreign domination. In what would be prophetic words, Ceausescu spoke: “Some would like again to reintroduce unemployment, to reduce the living standards of the people, and in order to dismantle Romania, to dismember Romania, to put our independent people and nation in danger.”

His speech was interrupted by protestors, and his disoriented response to the heckling was disproportionately publicized by the imperialist media. People remained in the streets, and clashes with the authorities took place. Imperialist propaganda outlets like Radio Free Europe broadcasted false reports of a “massacre” in Bucharest, and workers from around the city poured into the streets the next day. Many of the people protesting had legitimate grievances that were built up over years of austerity.

But the protests quickly devolved into fascist violence when the military defected. Rightwing mobs set fire to the National Archives and the university library. Crowds attacked Ceausescu’s home, forcing him and his wife Elena to flee the capital in a helicopter. Their pilot abandoned them on a country road where they were soon captured.

The military-led NSF seized control of the television stations and declared themselves the new government.

Military brass, a historical source of counterrevolution, were at odds with Ceausescu’s plan to integrate them into civilian work. “For years,” wrote rightwing academic Vladimir Tismaneanu in the New York Times, “troops have been forced to engage in such demeaning activities as raising crops and supplying manual labor for grandiose Ceausescu projects.”

Long held at bay by the socialist government, the terror of the bourgeoisie raised its head. On Dec. 25, 1989, a secret military tribunal charged Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu with fabricated crimes that included “genocide” and “destroying the country’s economic and spiritual values.” Moments later as he was led to his death, Nicolae Ceausescu sang the Internationale. He and his wife were executed by firing squad.

Chaos ensued in the following days. The entire leadership of the Communist Party was imprisoned. Communists were disappeared and even lynched in the streets. Some in the Securitate, whose origin came from the peasantry, put up an armed resistance to the military coup. They were hunted and executed.

Privatization and poverty, the American way

Within days the “socialist” NSF outlawed the Communist Party. Addendums to foreign treaties that called for states to guarantee full employment, housing and education were abolished.

The U.S. government was quick to intervene. As early as January 1990, Washington instructed its Bucharest envoy “to take preliminary actions to encourage the process [of privatization].” Special attention was given to the bourgeois media. The U.S. Embassy issued an urgent request for up-to-date video equipment for the television station. Prior anti-communist laws prevented the U.S. government from directly providing the equipment.

Embassy cables gloated over how the counterrevolution “has made it possible to pursue, in numerous heretofore unthinkable ways, our fundamental policy goals in Romania.”

One of those goals was the domination of Romanian polity by U.S. legal norms. The Embassy’s work plan included distributing 10,000 copies of the U.S. constitution in the Romanian language to all members of the new parliament after the elections. U.S. legal experts would “advise” Romania in the creation of the new constitution and legal codes. Newly-minted Romanian politicians would be exposed to representatives from U.S. political parties and private businesses.

Trade and economic meetings would convince Romanian officials that the economic benefits the U.S. can offer were contingent on the new government adhering to the American view of elections and the upholding of so-called individual rights to exploit the collective.

The U.S. military, which already had planned military-to-military contacts, would transform the Romanian armed forces into a “professional and non-political” corps based on a “commander – commanded” relationship.

Overnight, independent and sovereign Romania became a U.S. neocolony. A new law approved 100 percent foreign ownership of investments. State-owned enterprises, which had fueled the country’s generous social services, were sold to foreign capitalists.

Gone was the law banning foreign debt. Negotiations with the IMF began in 1993, with the requirement for the Romanian government to enter its currency into the world market, making Romania more susceptible to the tumult of global capitalism.

By 1994, half of the population lived on less than $160 a month. Price controls over food were removed. Inflation hit 300 percent. Unemployment, which previously did not exist, haunted millions. In desperation, 4 million people turned to a pyramid scheme called Caritas. The pyramid scheme was allowed to operate by the new government, and millions of families lost a collective $1 billion. The leu, Romania’s national currency, sank to 1,748 to one dollar.

Alleged discrimination of ethnic minorities was used to topple the socialist governments. But the new capitalist governments relied on the support of the racist right wing. Fascist violence against Roma, ethnic Hungarians and Jewish people erupted across the country. In a 1993 New York Times article, Henry Kamm detailed the quickly emerging racist attacks on the Roma. Using a slur for the Roma people, Kamm wrote: “The millions of Gypsies of Eastern Europe have emerged as great losers from the overthrow of Communism… Many of the economic and social protections that Gypsies enjoyed in Hungary, Romania and Czechoslovakia collapsed, permitting a revival of the open prejudice and persecution that have marked the history of the Roma, as Gypsies prefer to call themselves…”

Capitalism restored, social conditions deteriorate

The coup plotters’ aim, despite their claims of “democracy” and “freedom,” was never to improve the standard of living for Romanian workers.

As difficult as the years of rationing were, the quality of life for Romanians today is much worse.

More than 85 percent of all individual work contracts in Romania pay less than the minimum needed for survival, even as costs continue to climb. Many have left the country in search of an economic future. Since 1989 Romania experienced the highest levels of emigration of all European countries: 3.5 million people have fled, more than 5 times the number of deaths in World War II. Today, the diaspora represents one-fifth of the country’s own labor force.

Foreign corporations reap mega-profits from the artificially low wages of Romania. The restoration of capitalism promised wealth and freedom for the country, yet today Romania remains among the poorest countries in the European Union. Romania’s economy and natural resources have been completely opened to foreign capital for exploitation. Almost every industrial measure peaked in mid to late 1980s, and then bottomed out after the 1990s.

The Romanian government today is loyal to U.S. empire. There are now U.S. military bases in the countryside and in Romania’s principal ports. When the U.S. demanded that all NATO countries contribute 2 percent of their GDP, Romania was the first to raise military spending. By U.S. accounts, actions taken by the Romanian government in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks to support U.S. interests have been “almost too numerous to list”.

When the government was toppled in 1989, many Romanian people looked to the U.S. government as a source of hope. They were convinced that the years of austerity were finally over. Some believed that now, they too would have access to abundant consumer goods and an American lifestyle.

This false image of abundance was intentionally cultivated by the imperialists to weaken the Socialist Bloc. If the imperialists could convince workers in socialist states that the U.S. was the “land of opportunity,” they could seriously weaken the stability of socialism. Defeat of the socialists in the cultural war was an important factor in the overthrow of socialist governments.

Faced with the daunting task of industrializing agrarian societies, socialist governments in addition had to produce consumer goods for its population while under technological and economic embargo, and under constant threat of nuclear annihilation. Furthermore, they had to do this within the span of just decades. The bourgeoisie, on the other hand, had enriched themselves through centuries of capitalist exploitation, including the enslavement of millions of Africans and the Indigenous.

History did not cease in 1989. Capitalism’s restoration in Romania and the former Socialist Bloc has brought with it all its inherent contradictions. It is bound to reignite mass struggle. The words of the socialist Internationale, written 150 years ago and translated into nearly every language, continue to inspire the fight of the oppressed for emancipation: “The earth shall rise on new foundations; we have been naught, we shall be all.”

Select Bibliography

Marcy, Sam. “Reactionary Coup in Romania”. 4 Jan. 1990. Workers’ World. www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/marcy/1990/sm900104.html. Accessed 16 Dec 2019

Oțetea, Prof. Andrei. A Concise History of Romania. English edition edited by Andrew MacKenzie. London, Unified Printers and Publishers. 1985.

Rotaru, Constantin. Socialism și capitalism în teorie și practică fiscală. Editura Karta-Graphic. Ploiești, 2011.

Serban, Rodica. “A Grand, Historic Accomplishment of the People, for the People––New Modern Homes”. Scînteia. 7 Apr 1989. Quoted in JPRS Report: Eastern Europe. Foreign Broadcast Information Service.

How Did Capitalists Get So Rich?: On the Marriage Between Capitalism and Government

By James Leach

It is difficult to know what to say to the smug self-satisfaction of the business class who gaze upon the enormous wealth of their country, and then pat their back for the capitalist utopia they have built. In critical analyses of capitalism, considerable weight is put on examining the contradictions in the modes of exchange, the formation of crises, and the tension between labour and capital. But I want to address how capitalism developed, and how the considerable wealth of developed nations was produced, as well as how it became so acutely concentrated within a few pockets. As Marx asks in Wages, Prices and Profit, "how does this strange phenomenon arise, that we find on the market a set of buyers, possessed of land, machinery, raw material, and the means of subsistence… and on the other hand, a set of sellers who have nothing to sell except their labouring power, their working arms and brains?"

"Primitive Accumulation": Enclosures and Erasing the Commons

There is no concrete date which we can mark as the first day of capitalism, or the last day of feudalism, since its development was somewhat gradual. The results of the English Revolution in the seventeenth century, for example, saw movements away from feudal society and towards capitalist society, but it was not until two centuries later, during the Industrial Revolution, where capitalism truly flourished. However, a significant policy which marked a shift towards the dominance of private property is the agricultural enclosures. This involved the fencing of farmland into private property, mostly within the hands of large, propertied landowners. Before this, agricultural labourers either worked on common land within their village, or they were peasants working for a local lord. A portion of the labourer's produce would be seized by the lord as a tax and the labourers would then sell what was left in local markets. Enclosures saw the new dominance of wage labour, the separation of agricultural workers between themselves and their means of production, the formation of the first labour market, and of the first proletariat.

Before enclosures, common land was able to significantly rival wage labour. Jane Humphries essay Enclosures, Common Rights, and Women, published in the Journal of Economic History, explores the results of enclosures, as well as the significance of common land. Humphries finds that the family possession of a single cow on common land could "remain significant compared with landowner's wages" and on an annual basis "the comparison would probably be even more favourable to cowkeeping." Keeping cows communally also had other benefits. The by-product of rearing cows was goods such as skim-milk, which provided a 'gratifying addition to the monotonous diet of the adult farm workers', and was crucial to the healthy development of the labourer's children. However, after enclosures, due to high rents and resistance from farmers, common cowkeeping virtually vanished, and labourers could not often afford to buy milk.

Now that the efficiency of "communing" has been briefly established, to what extent did this communal lifestyle exist? Peter Linebaugh's exceptional text Stop, Thief! The Commons, Enclosures and Resistance is instrumental in answering these questions. Linebaugh documents the work of the seventeenth century statistician Gregory King, who estimated that were was "twenty million acres and pasture, meadow, forest, heath, moor, mountain, and barren land in a country of thirty-seven million acres', Linebaugh continues to say that 'even if common rights were exercised in only half of these, it means that in 1688 one quarter of the total area of England and Wales was common land.' Such an enormous measure of common land would have been extremely valuable to agricultural workers. Naturally, enclosures reversed this. 'Between 1725 and 1825 nearly four thousand enclosure acts appropriated more than six million areas of land… to the politically dominant land owners.' It does not take a genius to work out the effects on the newly formed working class. Reliance on Poor Relief went up, there was a poverty crisis in the eighteenth century, and as Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis simply puts: 'More than 70 percent of the peasants were thrown out of their houses and off their ancestral lands. It was devastating, brutal, cruel and… highly effective.' E.P Thompson called enclosures a plain case of class robbery.

It is difficult, however, to drill into the minds of a global population that they do not own much besides their labour power. The Indonesian novelist Promoedya Ananta Toer reported on the response from native Indonesians to enclosures in his memoirs: 'The native people had no word for "fence"- the concept was completely foreign to their culture. They didn't recognise such manmade limitations on land-use rights.' How could such a disaster for the global population not be overthrown immediately? Unfortunately, the rich and powerful have 'experts in legitimation', to use Antonio Gramsci's words. Garret Hardin's text The Tragedy of the Commons sought to justify enclosures. Hardin's thesis appears rational. He suggests that the commoners, in their simultaneous desire to profit as much as possible from the land, and the un-fettered access to land, would bring 'ruin to all.' Hardin's misanthropy is de-bunked with plain historical fact by Linebaugh: '… the commons is always governed… [an] officer elected by the commoners will impound that cow, or will fine that greedy shepherd who puts more than his share onto the commons.'

Imperialism

The consequences of imperialism are, and always have been, deeply lodged within the cognitive dissonance of the body politic. For example, it takes the most basic logic to recognise that capitalism developed alongside Transatlantic slavery, and it takes little extra effort to make the connection between them, yet this line of reasoning is often left un-pursued.

Pre- Civil War America is often seen as split between the free-market north and the plantation complex of the south. They were, however, inextricably linked. Forbes, a popular and prestigious business magazine, ran an interesting article on the subject, in relation to Sven Beckert's book Slavery's Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development. It turns out, in contrast to popular fantasy, that the capitalists of the American north were crucial in keeping slavery alive, and, of course, it was crucial to their development. The slave economy effected the north with 'plenty of merchants in New York City, Boston and elsewhere helping to organize the trade of slave-grown agricultural commodities…' The slave production of cotton 'offered a reason for entrepreneurs and investors to build manufactories… thereby connecting… Industrial Revolution to the advancing plantation frontier…' The latter point is particularly poignant. The Industrial Revolution ushered capitalism into a golden age where it could stand with two feet on a fertile ground of free trade accompanied with low tariffs (a subject which I will later address). The swollen shadow which shades the conscience of capitalism, of course, is the fact that it required the possession of human beings to help stimulate its progression. This can not be understated, since, for the first six decades of the 19th Century, raw cotton amounted to more than half of the nation's exports.

It would be tough to go through the entire history of modern imperialism to weigh its effects and thus measure the arms which propped up capitalist development, because there are simply too many cases. But it is worth addressing the very land that is now the 'United States of America'. It goes without saying that before European colonists arrived, there was a Native population who organised themselves locally and communally. It also goes without saying that this way of life has been mostly exterminated with state violence and the commodification of land. In 1845, California was part of Mexico. How did this change? Imperialism. Back in those days, the mainstream press could be more honest about the practices of the state. An article by the Washington Union said: 'Let the measure of annexation be accomplished… For who can arrest the torrent that will pour onward to the Wes? The road to California will be open to us.' In the 19th Century, the establishment did not have to wax lyrical with tales of 'democracy'. There is surely no questioning that such actions are inhuman; they create 'the wretched of the earth', to use Franz Fanon's turn of phrase. But what is the motive? It is rare for humans to be motivated by sheer violence. There must be a reward to legitimize violence. In the case of the United States' invasion of Mexico in 1847, the reward was the rich natural resources of California. Historian Howard Zinn, in his seminal text A People's History of the United States, quotes the Illinois State Register in 1846:

Shall this garden of beauty be suffered to lie dormant in its wild and useless luxuriance?... myriads of enterprising Americans would flock to its riches and inviting prairie's; the hum of Anglo-American industry would be heard in its valleys; cities would rise upon its plains and sea-coast, and the resources and wealth of the nation be increased in an incalculable degree.

This quote goes some way to explain how much the expansionist ethic of the American government meant to slave-owning economy of the south.

We need not go as far back as the 19th Century to look for examples of state force providing for the economy of a nation state. War has always been profitable. The neo-imperial oil wars of the 20 th and 21st Century have meant that the U.S and Britain have had cheap access to oil. Given that state force has brought this about, it has nothing to do with free trade.

Anything but Free Trade, In the Name of Capitalism

If we only pay attention to the dictates of Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek and other free-market enthusiasts, we can be easily fooled that (with a few nuances), the un-rivalled wealth of the modern superpowers is owed to its policies of free markets and trade. If we look at economic history plainly, however, we find remarkably different results. Ha- Joon- Chang's tour-de-force Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective , is a good place to start in studying what policies truly led to economic development.

Chang begins by invoking Friedrich List, the 19th Century German economist who fathered the 'infant industry promotion' theory, which proposed that budding industries require state protection from competitive markets which were dominated by experienced and long-standing manufacturing countries. List, in his albeit tediously named 'The National System of Political Economy' is important. He finds that Britain was 'the first country to perfect the art of infant industry promotion' because

[the monarchies of Britain] perceived that their newly established native manufactures could never hope to succeed in free competition with the old and long-established manufactures of foreigners… Hence, they sought, by a system of restrictions, privileges, and encouragements, to transplant to their native soil the wealth, the talents, and the spirit of enterprise of foreigners.

Chang then systematically goes through the historical development of almost every highly-developed nation, starting with Britain, 'the intellectual fountain of the modern laissez-faire doctrines…' The fourteenth century monarch Edward III is known for being the Brit to first actively start developing British wool production. His tactic was to ban imports of raw wool, centralise its trade and bring in Flemish weavers (he also only worse English cloth, to set an example). Naturally, through the most anti- free trade policies possible, Britain became the dominant exporter of wool. It was a hundred years after Henry VIII's import substitution policies of 1489 that Britain decided to be competitive in a market, which consequently drove the industries of the previously dominant Low Countries into the ground.

As already stated, the Industrial Revolution formed the blueprint for un-fettered capitalism. But how was this blueprint written? Britain had 'very high tariffs on manufacturing products as late as the 1820's, some two generations after the start of its Industrial Revolution, and when it was significantly ahead of its competitor nations in technological terms.' As well as tariff protection, Britain felt that for its businesses to develop, it needed to ban the imports of superior products from the colonies, in order for its own industries to remain economically viable. In 1700, for example, Britain banned the import of Indian cotton products, leading to the decline of the Indian cotton industry. It was then totally destroyed by the 'ending of the East India Company's monopoly in international trade in 1813.' Clearly, the economic supremacy of Britain in the 19th Century was not predicated on free trade. There was, however, developing pressure from the business community for free trade, once they had acquired enough wealth from protectionist policies to be competitive in global markets. By the 1850's, considerable steps (such as the eradication of tariffs) set in motion a liberalised capitalist economy. This did not last long. 'By the 1880's, some hard-pressed British manufacturers were asking for protection.' However, the true move away from free trade occurred in 1932, when the manufacturing advantage of Germany of the USA demanded protectionism from Britain.

Conclusion

What can be seen is that there have been gigantic impediments to true laissez-faire economics. These impediments have taken numerous forms: violence, colonialism, protectionism etc. Today, the impediments are slightly different. Enormous taxpayer subsidies to the corporate sector, for example, turn free-markets from fact into fantasy. The state ghosted every step capitalism took; their relationship is fascinating. Capitalism and the state are the main actors in a Sophoclean tragedy in which capitalism cannot function with or without the state. On the one hand, capitalism has considerably relied on the state for the conditions of its development, may that be enclosures, access to the captive markets of colonies, tariff protection, or plain violence to silence the rebelling masses. On the other hand, centralised government can be a leech on the efficiency of business. It has the cheek to demand

for taxes, and occasionally it represents 'we the people', and the interests of 'the people' are at odds with the interests of the capitalists. The government is often accused of being a threat to the freedom of the capitalist class, but history has shown that the latter needs the former to protect its interests. It is within this tragic comedy that we have lived since the origin of capitalism, and that we continue to live in today.

Stand Against Torture: Political Scientists Refuse to Legitimate Torture

By Paul A. Passavant and Jodi Dean

Since 2004, we have known that that the United States Government has been responsible for torture. We have known that the legal memoranda written by Berkeley law professor John Yoo during his tenure in the US Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel provided the legal arguments that enabled torture to become a matter of United States policy in the "global war on terror." (GWOT). Many have been shocked, outraged, or ashamed that the United States has banished itself from the most fundamental norm of the post-World War II international order and, some would argue, American constitutionalism and the rule of law itself. [1] Human rights organizations have struggled to discover how this system of torture has functioned, to remove victims from exposure to torture, and to hold key officials and private contractors (such as psychologists) responsible for their conduct. Despite support for these efforts, the success of organizations like Human Rights Watch (HRW), Amnesty International (AI), and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has only been limited. Both the Bush and Obama administrations frustrated and blocked their work. Others have moved on, out of cynicism, exhaustion, or preoccupation with other horrors. Nevertheless, the necessity of confronting and rejecting the US's institutionalized torture regime remains. We cannot and must not be a country that tortures.

Upon hearing that John Yoo was scheduled to appear at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association (APSA), held August 31 - September 3, 2017, a number of Political Scientists organized a response. The theme of the annual meeting was "The Quest for Legitimacy: Actors, Audiences and Aspirations." The goal of the organizers was to ensure that the APSA did not legitimate torture by providing institutional cover for Yoo. Our response included protests at the two panels on which Yoo was speaking, both organized by the Claremont Institute, an affiliated group that participates in the annual meeting. When Yoo got up to speak, we stood and turned our backs on him. We held signs, "Stand Up Against Torture." We remained silently standing until the end of the panels. Our response to Yoo's participation in our annual meeting also included getting measures passed at the APSA business meeting that would instruct and enable the ethics committee to bring the association's concern with abuses caused or experienced by political scientists together with its stated commitment to human rights.

In an article posted on the blog of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, Samantha Hill and Roger Berkowitz express "unease" about the APSA Yoo protests. Hill and Berkowitz seem to know that torture occurred. They recognize that Yoo's memos legally enabled the construction of a torture regime. They excerpt at length Corey Robin's summary of the public record. Yoo was not offering the idle speculations of an academic, Robin reminds us, he was issuing legal memoranda whose interpretations of law were binding on the executive branch unless overturned by the Attorney General himself. Yoo was bureaucratically central to the GWOT. According to Jane Mayer's sources, "it's incredible, but John Yoo and David Addington [legal counsel to Vice President Dick Cheney] were running the war on terror almost on their own." [2] Nevertheless, Hill and Berkowitz oppose those Political Scientists who stood in silent protest when Yoo rose to speak.

Hill and Berkowitz echo some of Yoo's supporters, arguing that he should be allowed to speak at APSA because he has not been convicted of the crime of torture. This objection goes to the heart of the problem of uncheckable executive power that Yoo enabled and the key point of the protest. No one can face criminal charges unless the executive branch prosecutes those who violate the law. Obviously, the Bush administration was committed to evading, rather than enforcing, US law criminalizing torture. Moreover, as Glenn Greenwald has reported , the Obama administration actively avoided prosecuting, or otherwise holding accountable, those responsible for the practice of torture. That the state failed to act, however, does not absolve its citizens for inaction. Citizens, too, can and must take action to prevent the normalization of torture. Hill and Berkowitz are disingenuous when they argue APSA should provide Yoo with a platform until he is convicted of war crimes. They can appear to oppose torture, without having to take a stand against torture, as they wait for Yoo's prosecution.

Hill and Berkowitz miss the point of the protest. Surely Hill and Berkowitz are familiar enough with the basics of law to know the difference between a profession's code of ethical conduct and the state's criminal law. The APSA protest was targeted less at Yoo than it was at APSA. Political scientists were insisting the ethical guidelines of our profession do not permit enabling torture. The American Psychological Association (APA) has amended its code of ethics to make this clear (if it wasn't before). The APSA protest announced that it is time for APSA to catch up to the APA. Hill and Berkowitz are playing a shell game by seeking to fool their readers insofar as they criticize the APSA protest because Yoo has not yet been found criminally liable.

Hill and Berkowitz may miss the point of protest period. They say that democracy requires the work of persuasion. Yet they appear not to grasp that protests are tools of persuasion. At APSA, the protests were accompanied by discussions at Council and business meetings about changing APSA policies. Throughout the meeting, not to mention on social media before and after the meeting, there were numerous discussions regarding the appropriateness of having an architect of the US torture regime speak at APSA. The protests were central to the debate over the professional ethics of political scientists.

Hill and Berkowitz are at their worst when they offer a comparison between Yoo and Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi bureaucrat who enabled horror at a mass scale. Any torture regime requires a bureaucracy. Eichmann and Yoo are the kind of bureaucrats who transform the worst of what is humanly imaginable into a mundane institutional practice. For Hill and Berkowitz, Eichmann is unlike Yoo and was rightly punished because he "set in motion the mass murder of innocents because of their religion." In contrast, Yoo "legally rationalized the torture of a small number of terrorists who may or may not have had information that might lead to the saving of thousands of American lives." Eichmann is evil because people were killed on account of their religion - because of their identity or imagined race. Yoo, they suggest, was rationalizing the torture of terrorists to discover information to save American lives. Hill and Berkowitz use religion, ethnicity, or an imagined race, to say nothing of nationalism, to rationalize torture.

Anyone familiar with Abu Ghraib - the key event in the discovery of the Bush torture regime - knows that 70-90 percent of those detained in that space dedicated to torture were ordinary civilians and not terrorists. [3] During the GWOT, 780 people were detained at the US military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Only three of those ever convicted by military commission are currently detained there, and there are plans to prosecute only fourteen of all those held at that detention camp. Here we see the double standard deployed by Hill and Berkowitz. We must listen to Yoo and treat him as part of the community - knowing his legal work enabled torture - because he has not been convicted for participating in a torture regime. Yet such generosity does not extend to the overwhelming majority of those Muslims and Arabs who have been victims of the torture regime. They are all (potential) terrorists and their torture is, apparently, permissible.

The Hill and Berkowitz comparison of Yoo to Eichmann is striking for its repetition of the torturers' lie: the terrorist might have information. While Hill and Berkowitz spare us the "ticking time bomb" in this scenario, the torturer can never be certain whether the victim does have "information" before inflicting torture. Afterwards, one does well to doubt that the anguished confessions provided anything reliable. [4]

Hill and Berkowitz mischaracterize Yoo's legal work as "opinion," although it was meant to be "binding" on other executive branch bureaucrats in the torture regime. They treat Yoo as rationalizing torture whereas Eichmann set it in motion. This is a lie. As Mayer makes clear, US torture policy came from the lawyers in the Justice Department. Hill and Berkowitz say, "Yoo is the kind of person we need to argue with head on." A debate over torture's merits violates the fundamental ethical and legal injunction against torture. It concedes that torture might sometimes be permissible. Hill and Berkowitz are thus open to the possibility that torture was acceptable in the GWOT. The political scientists protesting Yoo refuse this possibility.

Hill and Berkowitz inoculate Yoo from accountability. They even draft Hannah Arendt into the service of their sorry endeavor, situating Yoo in an Arendtian "space of appearance" where words and actions are recognized. This misappropriation ignores Arendt's own verdict on Eichmann: he should be banished from the world. The APSA protests did not call for Yoo's banishment or execution. They called on APSA to refuse to legitimate the author of US torture policy by providing him with institutional cover. They called on political scientists to stand against torture.

Originally published at Public Seminar .

Paul A. Passavant is Associate Professor of Political Science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, NY.

Jodi Dean is the Harter Chair of Humanities and Social Sciences at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, NY.

Notes

[1] Jeremy Waldron, "Torture and Positive Law: Jurisprudence for the White House," Columbia Law Review 105 (October, 2005).

[2] Corey Robin, "When Political Scientists Legitimate Torturers," August 25, 2017 (Online: coreyrobin.com, accessed September 5, 2017), citing Jane Mayer, The Dark Side (New York: Doubleday, 2008).

[3] Mark Danner, "Torture and Truth," in Mark Danner, Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror (New York: New York Review Books, 2004), 3.

[4] Darius Rejali, Torture and Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), chap. 21.