The FBI's War on the Left: A Short History of COINTELPRO

By Alex Zambito

Republished from Midwestern Marx.

Throughout its history the United States has billed itself as an open society upholding the free exchange of ideas. We are told that, unlike people in less-enlightened countries, Americans do not have to worry about being persecuted for their political beliefs. Of course, this has never been true. From its very inception, the US government has been restricting free-speech through legislation such as the Alien and Sedition Act of 1798- not to mention the restriction on expression for the enslaved. Americans usually consider this a thing of the past, but political repression continued throughout the 20th century to this day, but in more covert forms. In this essay, I will explore the historical development of the US government’s system of covert domestic political repression, its consolidation, and its culmination in the FBI’s COINTELPRO program.

The FBI has its origins in the General Intelligence Division which was created in 1919 by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer to collect information on radical organizations. J. Edgar Hoover, who would remain in power for the next several decades, was appointed as its head.[1] The GID was immediately used in the infamous Palmer Raids- a series of mass arrests and deportations targeting “alien” members of radical movements. The raids began on November 7, 1919 when GID agents raided offices of the United Russian Workers across the country arresting 650 people and deporting at least 43 without due process.  The crescendo of the raids came on January 2, 1920 when GID agents descended on radical groups in over 30 cities across the country, arresting at least 3,000 people.[2] Much of this repression was directed at the Communist Party USA, with Secretary of Labor William B. Wilson announcing on January 19th that membership in the CPUSA was enough to warrant deportation of immigrants.[3] The raids were finally ended by a court ruling in June 1920, but by then the damage had already been done. Left-wing organizations were effectively decimated with Communist Party membership dropping from over 27,000 in 1919 to just over 8,000 the next year.[4]

Along with the Palmer raids, the Bureau utilized numerous other methods to harass radical groups. In 1919, Hoover targeted Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association. The Bureau employed several infiltrators in the UNIA to uncover information which could be used in trumped up criminal charges against Garvey. After numerous charges of criminal activity failed to stick, the Bureau managed to obtain a conviction against Garvey on mail fraud in 1925. He was deported to Jamaica in 1927.[5]

By the mid-1920s, Hoover was able to renounce the FBI’s past political operations. Aside from participating in repression of major strikes, the Bureau would be true to its word for the next decade. But as the Communist Party began to regain relevance- reaching 66,000 members by 1939- Hoover gained approval from President Roosevelt to resume repression of “subversive activities”. Although Roosevelt later altered this directive as the Soviet Union became a key ally in the fight against Nazi Germany, it would not prevent Hoover from using it as justification for later counter-intelligence activities.[6]

After World War II ended and the Cold War began, Communism became enemy #1 with the CP becoming a natural target. In coordination with the CIA, the FBI began a program of intercepting and inspecting the international communications of US citizens. This was particularly focused on the mail and cables between the US and Soviet Union.[7] Additionally, the Bureau would frequently use other forms of information gathering such as “surreptitious entry” and “bugging” CP offices.[8] The FBI also cooperated with the IRS to gather information on targeted groups and single them out for harassment from the IRS.[9]

Additionally, the FBI would perfect the divide and conquer techniques it would later use to great effect in official COINTELPRO programs against the CP. The Bureau used infiltrators to exploit internal divisions within the party, such as over Khrushchev’s denunciations of Stalin.[10] The Bureau also used “anonymous mailings” in various ways to disrupt party activities. Agents would send letters to party members warning about the treacherous activities of others in the party, hoping to stir up factional disputes.[11] This was also a common ploy in the FBI’s “snitch jacketing” technique to portray loyal party members as informants. This was also frequently accomplished by informants within the party spreading rumors, forged informant reports, or “interviews” where agents would publicly speak with a target to create the impression the party member was an informant.[12]

Anonymous letters and interviews would also be used to impact the personal lives of party members or disrupt alliances the party would make with other groups. Agents would contact the employers or landlords of party members in efforts to get them fired or evicted. Additionally, if the CP were seeking to cooperate with other organizations, agents would send derogatory information to these organizations to prevent an alliance.[13]

These were the FBI’s covert methods in the battle against domestic communism, but it also played a direct role in the overt repression. The FBI played an active role in the rise of McCarthyism by cultivating “friendly media” outlets which would be used to disseminate derogatory information about the CP. Further, the Bureau aided anti-Communist private organizations such as the American Legion and anti-Communist congressmen, with FBI agents even writing their speeches.[14]

These activities would create a general context for the US government’s legal attacks against the CP leadership. FBI agents would use selective law enforcement to harass the party and its members. Party members were frequently arrested for minor or spurious causes. For example, a secretary of the Alabama branch of the CP was arrested and convicted of possessing “seditious literature” for carrying copies of The Nation and The New Republic. He was sentenced to 100 days hard labor and fined $100.[15] This culminated in the government’s use of the Smith Act to prosecute Communist Party members. The Smith Act was passed in 1940 and created criminal penalties for advocating the forcible overthrow of the US government and required all adult non-citizen residents to register with the federal government. It would be used to prosecute eleven top Communist Party members in 1949. All eleven were convicted with ten being sentenced to five to ten years and one- a World War II veteran- sentenced to three.[16] Similar cases would occur across the country, with frequent FBI interference in the judicial process.[17]

The official COINTELPRO program would not begin until 1956, although this was just a formalization of already existing FBI practices. Even though the Communist Party had already been decimated by the mid-1950s, the majority of COINTELPRO operations were carried out against the party. However, the most impactful COINTELPRO activities in this period were against other left-wing and civil rights movements. Some of the groups targeted were called “Black Extremist” groups. The Nation of Islam was an early target of this program, with the FBI maintaining massive files on just Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X. The FBI would go on to play a role in driving a wedge between the two.[18]

As would become a habit for the FBI, the parameters for which groups qualified as “Black Extremists” was expansive. Organizations that would eventually come under the COINTELPRO purview included the NAACP, SCLC, and SNCC.[19] The FBI infamously wiretapped Martin Luther King Jr. and sent him anonymous letters encouraging him to commit suicide.[20]
COINTELPRO would reach its zenith in the late 60ss and early 70s with the inauguration of COINTELPRO-Black Panther and COINTELPRO-New Left. As with its counterintelligence activities against the CP, the Bureau’s tactics ranged from the petty to the outright murderous. Bureau infiltrators of New Left student organizations were instructed to uncover evidence of members’ “depravity” to be publicized.[21] Agents would even contact targets’ parents to inform them of their child’s subversive activities. The FBI also sought to prevent these groups from exercising their first amendment rights by preventing speaking events and public demonstrations. Further, given that many of these groups were popular on college campuses, the Bureau targeted academics friendly to radical groups, seeking to get them disciplined or fired.[22]
The Bureau also attempted to instigate violence between target groups and violence-prone rival political organizations or criminal organizations. In 1968, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover sent a memorandum to FBI field offices instructing them to devise plans to exploit the conflict between the Black Panther Party and Ron Karenga’s Black Nationalist “US” organization.[23]

This was accomplished through infiltrators, anonymous mailings, and forged propaganda. For instance, the Los Angeles field office responded to Hoover’s call for proposals reporting:[24]

​“The Los Angeles Office is currently preparing an anonymous letter for Bureau approval which will be sent to the Los Angeles Black Panther Party supposedly from a member of the ‘US’ organization in which it will be stated the youth group of the ‘US’ organization is aware of the [Black Panther Party] ‘contract’ to kill RON KARENGA, leader of ‘US’, and they, ‘Us’ members, in retaliation have made plans to ambush leaders of the [Party] in Los Angeles. It is hoped this counterintelligence measure will result in an ‘US’ and [Black Panther Party] vendetta.”

Agents also distributed forged propaganda meant to increase tensions between the BPP and US, such as this cartoon attributed to US:[25]

This strategy would bear fruits as hostilities between the two groups spilled over into violent confrontations resulting in the deaths of four BPP members, including prominent members John Huggins and Bunchy Carter. Despite Bureau protestations that it never intended to encourage violence, the FBI continued to encourage hostility between the two groups even after these killings. This is illustrated by a 1970 report from the FBI’s Los Angeles office:[26]

​“Information received from local sources indicate that, in general, the membership of the Los Angeles BPP is physically afraid of US members and take premeditated precautions to avoid confrontations.

In view of their anxieties, it is not presently felt that the Los Angeles BPP can be prompted into what could result in an internecine struggle between the two organizations…

The Los Angeles Division is aware of the mutually hostile feelings harbored between the organizations and the first opportunity to capitalize on the situation will be maximized. It is intended that US Inc. will be appropriately and discreetly advised of the time and location of BPP activities in order that the two organizations might be brought together and thus grant nature the opportunity to take her due course.”

The Bureau used a similar technique with Operation Hoodwink, where the Bureau attempted to spark conflict between the Communist Party and the criminal organization La Cosa Nostra, as well as criminal elements within reaction unions such as the Teamsters. Fortunately, this attempt did not lead to any reported physical conflicts.[27] [28]

Additionally, the FBI liked to use a specific form of infiltrator known as “Agents Provocateurs” who would encourage members to commit violent or criminal acts. For example, a member of the Weather Underground arrested for a conspiracy to bomb Detroit police facilities was actually an FBI informant, Larry Grathwohl. Grathwohl reportedly instructed members on how to build bombs and participated in the group’s bombing of a Cincinnati public school.[29] One of the most famous provocateurs was “Tommy the Travler” Tongyai who traveled around college campuses in the northeast encouraging students to bomb military research facilities.[30]

As they did with the CP, the Bureau cooperated with local law enforcement to harass targeted groups and their members. Officials sought to stop targets frequently, hoping to arrest and convict them on minor charges. They would also attempt to frame targets for crimes they did not commit. This is exemplified by the case of Geronimo Pratt- a prominent member of the Los Angeles branch of the BPP. After numerous attempts to convict Pratt on trumped up charges failed, Pratt was accused of the 1968 “Tennis Court Murder”. On December 18, 1968, a white couple, Caroline and Kenneth Olsen, were robbed and shot by two black men on a tennis court in Santa Monica, California. Caroline Olsen would die a week later. In August 1969, an anonymous letter was delivered to the Los Angeles Police Department claiming Pratt had committed the murder and had been bragging about it. Pratt was also positively identified by Kenneth Olsen, leading to Pratt’s arrest and eventual conviction in 1972. Of course, the FBI was heavily involved in the trial. The anonymous letter turns out to have been written by Julius Butler, an FBI infiltrator, who would become a key prosecution witness. Additionally, the Bureau had at least one infiltrator in Pratt’s defense team keeping the Bureau informed on defense strategy. And the prosecution concealed the fact that Kenneth Olsen had initially identified another man, Ronald Perkins, as his wife’s killer and that police had purposefully influenced his identification. Pratt would remain in jail for a crime he did not commit until 1997 when his case was invalidated due to the prosecution’s suppression of evidence.[31]

But the worst of COINTELPRO was the Bureau’s use of violent raids and political assassinations. On April 6, 1968 a group of Panthers were confronted by police officers in west Oakland. Gunfire was exchanged and the police cordoned off the block. After an hour and a half, the Panthers attempted to surrender, but when unarmed ‘Lil Bobby Hutton emerged from a nearby basement, he was shot dead by police officers.[32] In a more overt case, Chicago police officers, with the assistance of the FBI, assassinated Fred Hampton in 1969. They were assisted by an FBI infiltrator, William O’Neal, who provided detailed floor plans of Hampton’s apartment.[33]

This is far from an exhaustive exploration of the FBI’s counterintelligence programs. The FBI targeted numerous groups such as the Socialist Workers’ Party, American Indian Movement, etc. that I was unable to cover here. While COINTELPRO was brought to light by the Church Committee in the 1970s and, subsequently, formally ended, the FBI has definitely continued its counterintelligence activities. In recent years, it has been revealed that the FBI maintains a list of “Black Identity Extremists”.[34] With this in mind, I think it is incredibly important for leftists to learn the history of COINTELPRO. With this knowledge we can more thoroughly safeguard our organizations against the inevitability of government subversion 

​Citations

[1]Churchill, W., & Vander Wall, J. (2001). COINTELPRO Papers. Retrieved 2020, from https://www.freedomarchives.org/Documents/Finder/Black%20Liberation%20Disk/Black%20Power!/SugahData/Government/COINTELPRO.S.pdf, 297

[2] Admin. (2020, July 24). AG Palmer Promises "War on Reds," Delivers Palmer Raids. Retrieved October 03, 2020, from https://todayinclh.com/?event=ag-palmer-promises-war-on-reds-delivers-palmer-raids 

[3]Churchill, W., & Vander Wall, J. (2001). COINTELPRO Papers, Retrieved 2020, from https://www.freedomarchives.org/Documents/Finder/Black%20Liberation%20Disk/Black%20Power!/SugahData/Government/COINTELPRO.S.pdf, 299

[4]“Communist Party Membership by Districts 1922-1950.” Accessed October 3, 2020. https://depts.washington.edu/moves/CP_map-members.shtml.

[5] Marcus Garvey.” FBI File on Marcus Garvey, Part4, document no. 190-1781-6, 10 Aug. 1922. The FBI: Federal Bureau of Investigation, US Department of Justice, https://vault.fbi.gov/marcus-garvey/marcus-garvey-part-04-of-12/view

[6] Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, United States Senate: Together with Additional, Supplemental, and Separate Views. Vol. II. Washington: U.S. Govt. https://www.transformation.dk/www.raven1.net/cointeldocs/churchfinalreportIIb.htm Accessed: 2020

[7] Ibid

[8] Ibid

[9] Ibid

[10] Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, United States Senate: Together with Additional, Supplemental, and Separate Views. Vol. III. Washington: U.S. Govt. http://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/church/reports/book3/pdf/ChurchB3_1_COINTELPRO.pdf Accessed:2020, 45

[11] Ibid, Pgs. 33-49.

[12] Ibid

[13] Ibid

[14] O'Reilly, Kenneth. "The FBI and the Origins of McCarthyism." The Historian 45, no. 3 (1983): 372-93. Accessed October 4, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24445173.

[15] Churchill, W., & Vander Wall, J. (2001). COINTELPRO Papers. P. 318, Retrieved 2020, from https://www.freedomarchives.org/Documents/Finder/Black%20Liberation%20Disk/Black%20Power!/SugahData/Government/COINTELPRO.S.pdf 

[16] McElroy, Wendy. “Smith Act Tyranny Against Communists.” The Future of Freedom Foundation, March 5, 2018. https://www.fff.org/explore-freedom/article/smith-act-tyranny-communists/.

[17] Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, United States Senate: Together with Additional, Supplemental, and Separate Views. Vol. III. Washington: U.S. Govt. http://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/church/reports/book3/pdf/ChurchB3_1_COINTELPRO.pdf Accessed:2020, 57

[18] Chicago. Bureau of Investigation. Chicago Letters. Chicago: Bureau of Investigation, 1969. http://docs.noi.org/fbi_january_22_1969.pdf

[19] Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, United States Senate: Together with Additional, Supplemental, and Separate Views. Vol. III. Washington: U.S. Govt. http://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/church/reports/book3/pdf/ChurchB3_1_COINTELPRO.pdf Accessed:2020, 5

[20] Gage, Beverly. “What an Uncensored Letter to M.L.K. Reveals.” The New York Times. The New York Times, November 11, 2014. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/16/magazine/what-an-uncensored-letter-to-mlk-reveals.html.

[21]  Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, United States Senate: Together with Additional, Supplemental, and Separate Views. Vol. III. Washington: U.S. Govt. http://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/church/reports/book3/pdf/ChurchB3_1_COINTELPRO.pdf Accessed:2020, 24 

[22] Ibid, Pg. 56

[23] “Federal Bureau of Investigation – Initial Memo on Fomenting Violence Against Black Panther Party.” Genius. Accessed October 4, 2020. https://genius.com/Federal-bureau-of-investigation-initial-memo-on-fomenting-violence-against-black-panther-party-annotated.

[24] Bloom, Joshua, and Waldo E. Martin. Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016, 218

[25] Los Angeles. Bureau of Investigation. Things to do Today. Los Angeles: Bureau of Investigations, 1969. http://collection-politicalgraphics.org/detail.php?type=browse&id=1&term=Black+Panther+Party&page=3&kv=54716&record=141&module=objects

[26] Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, United States Senate: Together with Additional, Supplemental, and Separate Views. Vol. III, Washington: U.S. Govt. https://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/church/reports/book3/pdf/ChurchB3_3_BlackPanthers.pdf Accessed: 2020, 24 

[27] “Hoodwink.” FBI Files for Operation Hoodwink, part 1, document no. 100-159407, 29 Nov. 1967. The FBI: Federal Bureau of Investigation, US Department of Justice, https://vault.fbi.gov/cointel-pro/hoodwink/cointel-pro-hoodwink-part-01-of-01/view

[28] “Hoodwink.” FBI Files for Operation Hoodwink, par1, document no. 100-49252, 25 Jan. 1968. The FBI: Federal Bureau of Investigation, US Department of Justice, https://vault.fbi.gov/cointel-pro/hoodwink/cointel-pro-hoodwink-part-01-of-01/view

[29] Newton, Michael. The FBI Encyclopedia. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2012, 133

[30] Churchill, Ward, and Jim VanderWall. Agents of Repression: the FBI's Secret Wars against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement. Cambridge, MA: South End Pr., 2008, 48.

[31] Ibid, 77-94

[32]  Bloom, Joshua, and Waldo E. Martin. Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016, 118-120.

[33] Churchill, Ward, and Jim VanderWall. Agents of Repression: the FBI's Secret Wars against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement. Cambridge, MA: South End Pr., 2008, 64-77.

[34] Speri, Alice. “The Strange Tale of the FBI's Fictional ‘Black Identity Extremism’ Movement.” The Intercept, March 23, 2019. https://theintercept.com/2019/03/23/black-identity-extremist-fbi-domestic-terrorism/.

Five Finger Death Punch: A Case Study in Performative Working Class Aesthetics

By Matt Nguyen-Ngo

A common sentiment on the left is that many American working-class whites, largely made up of reactionaries, undermine their own best interests by adopting right-wing politics. It’s not hard to determine why; through its influence over American culture and education over the course of history, the owner class has managed to redefine “capitalism as freedom” and “socialism as slavery.” Of course, determining the “how” is just as important as determining the “why.” This article seeks to uncover the methods by which the owner class manipulates culture and aesthetics to reinforce capitalist ideology in the American white working class, using the metal band Five Finger Death Punch as a case study.

What is Class?

With the language of class struggle becoming increasingly relevant in the political landscape of the United States, it becomes necessary to clarify the delineations between socioeconomic classes. The dominant concept of class in the US is the liberal one, which bases class distinctions largely on income level. This concept divides people into lower, middle, and upper income classes. If we are to define class in this way, then what are the cutoff points that differentiate these three classes from each other? At what amount of annual income would someone transition from “lower” to “middle” class in this framework? Any answer to this question is by definition arbitrary. On the other hand, in the context of class struggle described by Marx as the conflict between opposing economic interests of the bourgeoisie (owner class) and the proletariat (working class)[1], it makes infinitely more sense to construct class lines based not on one’s fluid income level, but instead on one’s concrete relationship to capital. This article rejects the liberal class framework in favor of the Marxian.

However, regardless of which economic measurements we base our class delineations upon, these lines won’t always match up with class identity as perceived by the general public. In any given culture, an individual’s class is perceived according to their aesthetic choices, such as clothing, speech, activities and affiliations. In the modern US, a “lower class” or “working class” person might wear camouflaged cargo pants and a sports jersey, or a tradesman’s uniform when on the job. A “middle class” or “upper class” person might wear slacks and a button-up shirt, or a business suit and watch instead. In late Victorian England, a politician might wear a frock coat and top hat to convey their sophistication to voters, or a tweed suit and cloth cap to break social conventions and show commonality with the average citizen.[2] Regardless of cultural context, class identification is a performance.

In the United States there is a recurring phenomenon where members of the owner class perform as members of the working class by adopting working-class aesthetics. This can take the form of politicians like Lindsey Graham wearing a cowboy hat to evoke the ranchers of the “Old West,” or New York real estate investor and US President Donald Trump using laypeople’s language to appeal to the rural white working class. It can take the form of wealthy capitalists electing to drive luxury pickup trucks that are never taken off a paved road, instead of a high-end sedan or exotic sports car. And, more salient to the subject of this article, it can take the form of a heavy metal band like Five Finger Death Punch – made up of reactionary capitalists – wearing the cultural markers of the American working class to relate to them as a fanbase. Like all aesthetic choices made by all people, these are all deliberate performances of group identity: in this case, a working-class identity that does not line up with material (economic) reality. By superficially identifying themselves with the working class, the “everyman,” these capitalists perform working-class aesthetics to create a false sense of solidarity with the proletariat, reinforcing the dominant ideology that grants them their power and influence.

Working-Class Performance

One of the most elucidating examples of this phenomenon, which I call “working-class performance,” is the work of celebrity Mike Rowe, made famous by his reality television show Dirty Jobs. As the host of Dirty Jobs, Rowe travels to different businesses around the United States putting himself in the shoes of their employees. He performs these unpleasant, menial jobs as a spectacle for more advantaged viewers to vicariously experience the struggles of the less fortunate. In one episode of Dirty Jobs, Rowe visits a pig farm in Las Vegas that turns food waste into slop to feed the pigs. Despite claiming to showcase the experiences of the “everyman,” the star of the show (other than Rowe himself) is the farm’s owner Robert Combs, who walks Rowe through the slop production process. Combs mentions an employee by name – a man named Jose – but no employees are ever shown on screen. This is a recurring theme in Dirty Jobs and other reality television shows like it. While they supposedly celebrate the working class as essential people who do the jobs “we” are unwilling to do, they actually “push the human beings whose labor they nominally valorize to the margins,” opting instead to tell the stories of capitalists through a “ventriloquized working class.”[3]

Despite his portrayal as an “everyman,” Mike Rowe has a net worth of $30 million largely made from television and being a company spokesman, appearing in high-profile advertisements for automobile and pharmaceutical companies.[4] In his advertisements for Ford’s F-150 pickup truck, Rowe (who has no real-life construction or automobile expertise) appears on a construction site amongst a backdrop of workers on the job, explaining why the F-150 is superior to other trucks and the working class viewer should buy it over the competition.[5] In other words, Rowe uses this working-class performance to sell you something.

So too does Five Finger Death Punch. Like Rowe, Five Finger Death Punch uses working-class performance to sell their audience something. This “something” can be music, concert tickets and merchandise of course, but I am referring to something more intangible. One of the most commercially successful American metal bands in the 21st Century, Five Finger Death Punch has carefully crafted their brand to appeal to millions of common Americans, predominantly conservative, white, working-class men. In this case study, I will deconstruct the band’s hyper-American “everyman” image to demonstrate how they sell the promise of the “American Dream,” ultimately serving the interests of capital. It is my hope that this will help illuminate the impact of working-class performance on American class relations and class consciousness.

Who is Five Finger Death Punch?

Five Finger Death Punch, or “5FDP,” is an American metal band based in Las Vegas, Nevada that hails from the groove metal, thrash, and arena rock traditions of bands like Pantera, Metallica, and W.A.S.P. With albums like 2009’s War is the Answer and 2011’s American Capitalist, 5FDP has deliberately created a provocative, hyper-American, hyper-capitalist image. In the words of their rhythm guitarist and marketing mastermind Zoltan Bathory:

“We [the band] like to press buttons. When everyone was on the streets with signs saying ‘war is not the answer,’ [in reference to the war in Iraq] we released War is the Answer. When Occupy Wall Street was going on and socialism was growing in America, we brought out American Capitalist. That’s all intentional.”[6]

Despite their exaggerated all-American image in the most stereotypical sense of the phrase, many of their members are immigrants – including Bathory. Bathory immigrated to the US from Hungary shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union, and loves to tell stories of how he arrived in the States with “a bag of clothes, a guitar, and a few bucks in my pocket,” with no English skills.[7] His is a familiar, tired story of dragging himself by his own bootstraps out of “grey communist squalor” to seize his own emancipation in “the freest and fairest political and economic system” of American free-market capitalism, enabling him to live a life of “unchecked excesses.”[8] It is a story that has been told time and time again by the families of exiled Cuban slaveowners and the like. It is a story that affirms the belief that the US is a golden place of unlimited opportunity for social mobility, and purports that those who do not get ahead are merely lazy and unworthy of success. After all, the story goes, if an immigrant like Bathory could do it, why can’t you? In addition to Bathory, the band’s longtime lead guitarist Jason Hook is Canadian, and Hook’s replacement Andy James hails from Norfolk, UK.

Of course, I do not deny that immigrants belong to their new countries just as much as the native born. However, why this exaggerated display of American uber-patriotism from a band that is 40% foreign-born? Speaking from personal experience as a member of the Vietnamese-American diaspora, I know that immigrants and/or minorities often perform exaggerated “Americanness” to fit in, to prove that one “belongs” in the country. Additionally, Bathory’s life story – no doubt curated for the metal news interviews – is the perfect origin story for a band that promotes “bootstraps” ideology and American jingoism so zealously.

Unsurprisingly, the band aggressively advocates for the US military and law enforcement. They believe these groups are exploited and underappreciated by an ungrateful public and unscrupulous government. This message is succinctly captured in the lyrics to “No One Gets Left Behind.”

Politicians banking in their greed

No idea on how to be all they can be

…

Play your war games with other people’s lives

It should be you on the front line

In another interview, Zoltan Bathory shows his disdain for how the public treats US soldiers, in his view.

“They’re [the soldiers] merely just doing their jobs… just like when the guys came back from Vietnam [after the end of the US-Vietnam War in 1975], they had to put up with all kinds of shit [from citizens].”[9]

Setting aside Bathory’s comments about public treatment of soldiers returning from Vietnam (which was hardly universal), and setting aside the American atrocities that would have provoked such animosity, 5FDP’s narrative that US soldiers are exploited is correct to a certain extent. US soldiers, often working-class men with limited economic options, are indeed sent to die by social elites who benefit from war. But 5FDP’s analysis is missing one critical element: the reason these elites are sending these soldiers to die. Politicians do not merely send soldiers to war for some nebulous, aimless greed. What are these politicians greedy for? Perhaps we can find our answer by asking the military arms and logistics companies that profit from American imperialism, and their political partners in Washington like Dick Cheney, former US Vice President and CEO of defense contractor Halliburton.[10] Indeed, despite seeming to rail against war profiteering in “No One Gets Left Behind,” 5FDP’s very next album is the aforementioned War is the Answer, which conveys the exact opposite message.

Despite their message that clearly advances the interests of capital, Five Finger Death Punch presents themselves as the quintessential American working-class band. Their image and music speak to the people who are often pejoratively labeled “rednecks”: the white, predominantly rural American working class.

Take, for example, their music video for “The Pride” off of American Capitalist, a list-form song that namedrops companies like Facebook and Coca Cola, in which vocalist Ivan Moody proclaims the band is “not selling out,” but “buying in.”[11] Moody is presumably “buying in” to capitalism itself, not just the specific companies he names in the song. The music video depicts the band playing in front of a wall of television screens, flashing an endless stream of advertisements that light up the stage. The band members all wear NASCAR-style jerseys proudly emblazoned with the logos of corporate sponsors. It is important to pay attention to the stylistic choices being made here, as well as the specific companies 5FDP chooses to advertise. NASCAR, or The National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing, is an auto sports organization that is commonly associated with American working-class whites. The companies flashing on the television screens include Monster Energy and Fox Racing, both brands with similar associations. This melding of working-class aesthetics with the valorization of capital jives will with the band’s political philosophy, which contends that its own commercial success is proof that capitalism provides freedom and prosperity. This image is crucial to the band’s success; if they were to simply sing songs praising capitalism and the military without adopting this “everyman” aesthetic, it’s doubtful their audience would relate to their music so powerfully.

Five Finger Death Punch’s Central Message

We can synthesize all that was previously discussed into one concise sentence: Five Finger Death Punch’s central narrative is that they – the band – started out just like you – the audience – so if they were able to achieve fame and fortune in the capitalist system, you can too. True American Capitalists, 5FDP is selling the “American Dream” itself.

This is nothing new in marketing. Take, for example, this 1990 advertisement for a perfume named Heaven Sent, depicting the fragrance user bathing in celebrity status, coddled by servers and paparazzi as she steps out of a limousine onto the red carpet.[12]

The woman is the winner of a sweepstakes in which the grand prize is a one-day celebrity experience. Instead of merely selling fragrance, the perfume company is quite literally selling upward mobility.[13] It is useful to note that this advertisement was published well after the “Great U-Turn” in the mid-1970’s which saw a dramatic increase in wealth inequality and decrease in social mobility that continues to this day.[14]

Like the Heaven Sent perfume advertisement, Five Finger Death Punch’s “The Pride” is selling the promise of upward mobility to their working-class audience in the only way that seems attainable in the modern age: celebrity status. By “buying in” to the American capitalist system, so the band promises, you too can live large like Five Finger Death Punch: the monster truck driving, Monster Energy chugging guys you can rock out with now, and have a beer with later.

This narrative is, of course, inaccurate. Like I previously discussed, the band’s beloved American capitalism does not provide the freedom and opportunity that they claim it does. If “social mobility” ever even existed at all for the vast majority of people, the “Great U-Turn” killed it a long time ago. This is to say nothing of the economic exploitation inherent to the owner-worker relationship that defines capitalism, as described in Marx’s Capital.[15] Additionally, while 5FDP is right to mistrust the US government, they do so for the wrong reasons. The US government sends soldiers to die in war on behalf of the capitalists that 5FDP spends so much time praising. Regardless of whether or not the band intends to do so, or is even aware that they’re doing it, 5FDP’s message ultimately serves the interests of capital and sows false consciousness among the working class.

Alternative Narratives

Since Five Finger Death Punch’s music appeals to so-called “rednecks,” it may be prudent to examine the origins of that word. The term “redneck” was coined to describe white coal miners during the West Virginia Mine War, who wore red bandanas around their necks to show their allegiance to the miners’ union.[16]

The West Virginia Mine War was an armed conflict that took place in the early 1920’s between striking miners and the mine “operators” (companies) that exploited their labor in the Appalachian coal mines, and controlled every aspect of their lives in the company towns. After the miners in the independent town of Matewan unionized, the coal companies retaliated by sending in the Baldwin-Felts, private mercenaries that violently cracked down on the strikers. The miners took up arms against these corporate mercenaries, culminating in the Battle of Blair Mountain. The miners called upon the US Federal Government for assistance, but were unpleasantly surprised when the federal troops took the companies’ side instead. It is an oft-forgotten, but crucial piece of American working class history that demonstrates how the state works on behalf of capital – not against it.[17]

So, the rural white working class indeed has a history of resisting oppression and authoritarianism. But it is not the nebulous, aimless authoritarianism that Five Finger Death Punch describes in their music video “Living the Dream,” which argues that mask mandates during the COVID-19 pandemic are a slippery slope to tyranny.[18] It is actually capitalist authoritarianism, and government oppression on behalf of capital. Five Finger Death Punch’s narrative is a distortion of history that was expertly crafted by the capitalists before them, making the working class complicit in its own subjugation.

Conclusion

If socialists are to create class consciousness among American working-class whites, it is necessary to understand why their false consciousness exists in the first place so that it may be counteracted. By understanding Five Finger Death Punch’s working-class performance, we can understand the forces at play that sow false consciousness among the American proletariat. By advancing narratives that, using white working-class history, contradict 5FDP’s capital-serving message, we can obstruct the flow of false consciousness and promote true class consciousness for all working people.

Notes

[1] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 1848.

[2] Marcus Morris, “Class, Performance and Socialist Politics: The Political Campaigns of Early Labour Leaders,” in Politics, Performance and Popular Culture, edited by Peter Yeandle, Katherine Newey and Jeffrey Richards, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016, pp. 259-275

[3] Gabriel Winant, “Dirty Jobs, Done Dirt Cheap: Working in Reality Television,” New Labor Forum 23, no. 3 (Fall 2014): pp. 66-71.

[4] Celebrity Net Worth, “Mike Rowe Net Worth.” https://www.celebritynetworth.com/richest-celebrities/actors/mike-rowe-net-worth/

[5] https://youtu.be/mDQpo23vfLw

[6] Zoltan Bathory, “When I Say That Nothing is Impossible, I Truly Believe It,” interview by Sam Law, Kerrang Magazine, March 30th, 2020.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Zoltan Bathory, “Interview: Five Finger Death Punch – Zoltan Bathory; Oslo, 2011,” interview by Guest, Musicalypse, January 10th, 2011.

[10] Jonathan Turley, “Big Money Behind War: The Military-Industrial Complex,” Al Jazeera, Jan 11th 2014. https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/1/11/big-money-behind-war-the-military-industrial-complex/

[11] Five Finger Death Punch, “The Pride.” https://youtu.be/zuQGx1H1Qh8

[12] Erika L. Paulson and Thomas C. O’Guinn, “Working-Class Cast: Images of the Working Class in Advertising,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 644 (Nov 2012): pp. 50-69.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Bennett Harrison and Barry Bluestone, The Great U-Turn: Corporate Restructuring and the Polarizing of America, New York, NY: Basic Books, 1988.

[15] Karl Marx, “Part Three: The Production of Absolute Surplus Value,” Capital: Volume 1, 1867.

[16] Wilma Lee Steele, “Do You Know Where the Word ‘Redneck’ Comes From? Mine Wars Museum Opens, Revives Lost Labor History,” interview by Roxy Todd, Inside Appalachia, West Virginia Public Broadcasting, May 18th, 2015.

[17] Brandon Nida, “Demystifying the Hidden Hand: Capital and the State at Blair Mountain,” Historical Archaeology 47, no. 3 (2013): pp. 52-68.

[18] Five Finger Death Punch, “Living the Dream.” https://youtu.be/eOkkWIOkWl8

As Usual, Most Of Us Miss The Point on Ice Cube and His "Platinum Plan"

By Ahjamu Umi

Republished from Hood Communist.

Rapper/actor/entertainer Ice Cube has worn many hats throughout his professional career.  He started as a so-called gangsta rapper with the impactful group NWA in the late 80s.  Then, he joined forces with Dr. Khalid Abdul Muhammad and the Nation of Islam to become a hardcore Black nationalist rapper in the early 90s.  That phase devolved into him making several high profile records with Mac 10 and WC as the “Westside Connection.”  Records that were part gangsta, part party animal.  Finally, he moved into mainstream motion pictures.

Most recently, he rotated back into the struggle for African self-determination with many public statements supporting protests against police terrorism.  And, in the last several days, its been exposed that he worked, at least on some level, with the administration of the current empire president to help create and/or support the regime’s so-called “Platinum Plan.”  The alleged purpose of this plan is to supposedly uplift the African community within the U.S. with more promises of capitalist advancement for the African masses. 

Most Africans are attacking Ice Cube for working with Trump’s people, but this is an understandable yet extremely subjective and superficial analysis of the real issues here.  What most Africans, and everyone else, will refuse to do is actually study this so-called Platinum Plan.  Most of us will instead rely on sound bites from the capitalist media and celebrity culture.  Most of us will never actually read and assess the plan itself. 

And, studying this plan, and any plan that is supposed to improve the conditions of the African masses, at the very least, requires us to study it in great detail so that’s exactly what we will do here because whether its Ice Cube or Mickey Mouse, our people have to develop increased political sophistication so that we can read through the lines and properly understand what’s being beamed at us.  This is particularly important when you are talking about the Democratic or Republican Parties, both of whom Malcolm X beautifully exposed for us over 50 years ago, although most of us will never study his analysis as well.

You all need to study this so-called plan.  The basis of it is promises to provide three million new jobs for African people.  To create 500,000 African owned businesses by increasing capital in African communities.  A promise of $500 billion in capital.  Higher policing standards (whatever that is supposed to mean).  A Second Step program which is supposed to address criminal justice system reform “while ensuring our communities and streets are safe.”  There are other statements about support for African churches, immigration policies that protect U.S. jobs, and healthcare.

Let’s break down each element here. 

Three million new jobs:  You have the last four years to provide ample evidence for how this regime, (and all the other ones to – we are neither Democrats, nor Republicans, nor Americans) manipulates employment data.  For them, millions of new jobs that pay minimum wage, offer no benefits, and have no job protections is a bragging right.  The truth is there is no where in this country where quality jobs defined as livable wages, affordable healthcare, and safe work conditions are increasing.  What is increasing are service jobs with low wages, no healthcare, and no stability.  These types of jobs serve the economic interests of the bourgeoisie like Trump and he and those in his class have a history of creating these types of low level jobs.  Anyone with even a cursory perspective on this question would understand clearly that the jobs these people are talking about creating will do nothing to improve the collective conditions of African people.

500,000 new African businesses and $500 billion in capital: Whenever a plausible suggestion for providing healthcare for people or rehabilitation efforts, eliminating houselessness, etc., there is immediately an outcry from reactionaries demanding to know “where the money will come from?”  Yet, some of you believe that this level of capital will be invested in African communities to permit us to independently develop.  A quick study of history will reveal to us that this concept, and all these bogus concepts in this so-called plan, are not new.  In the 1960s, in response to hundreds of urban rebellions, the Nixon administration with the support of McGeorge Bundy and the Chevron Foundation, wrote the script for Affirmative Action as a vehicle to create an African petti bourgeoisie that would have class interests that led it to protect the capitalist system.  This was accomplished.  And with that accomplishment its important to recognize that the goal of Nixon, Bundy, Rockefeller and all those folks 50+ years ago was never to uplift the African masses, although that’s the same rhetoric they used then.  It was to do exactly what they did, create an overseer class of Africans.  Today, even if you believe the numbers they are committing to, this is still their objective.  Whether we recognize it or not, the level of mass protests always rock the capitalist ruling classes to their knees.  They will always do whatever possible to control and mitigate that militancy.  Expanding the African petti bourgeoisie is again their answer.  The question you have to ask yourself is if after 50 years ago, there is no clear pathway for the masses of our people to advance through this model, why would you believe this go around will be any different?

Criminal Justice Reform, etc.:  By reform if you mean reducing the systemic inequities in this racist system (and if reform doesn’t mean that then what’s the point), you are living in a fantasy world if you actually believe this plan is going to make that happen.  This mass incarceration system is based on the same exploitative model that built capitalism.  Releasing a handful of people is great because they all need to be released, but as long as there is a capitalist system, there will be people incarcerated on a mass scale and the overwhelming majority of those people are going to be African and Indigenous.  Also, this talk about protecting and keeping jobs in the U.S. is laughable.  These people want you to believe that poor immigrants are the reason jobs are not available.  The truth is corporations have benefitted from the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and other trade tariff agreements to move their operations overseas because its more profitable for them to do that.  The capitalist assault against organized labor along with the refusal of unions to embrace actual political education, has weakened unions and made them revenue motivated entities.  This has done more to create conditions where jobs can leave this economy than anything else and the crafters of this so-called plan are 100% in favor of gutting unions which leaves no voice and protection for workers.

We can go on and on, but the point is this issue is so much bigger than Ice Cube.  This is a question of our lack of political sophistication and our weakness in accepting any random capitalist approved celebrity as our mouthpiece for advancing our people.  When we do this we continue to demonstrate how easily we are willing to be chumped by this system.  Some of us want these things to happen because we are really just concerned about our individual ability to get ahold of some of those dollars that could potentially be invested so that we can build upon our personal business, etc., desires.  These people should be viewed as parasites on our people no different than pimps, drug dealers, etc.  For those of us concerned about the masses of our people, we know that no capitalist plan is ever going to be the solution.  If that was true, it would have happened a long time ago.  Stop looking to celebrities and everyone else to be our voice.  That has simply never worked for us.  Until you see this as your responsibility to get involved and get serious about understanding these issues on deeper levels than the superficial basis we are talking about them now, we will continue to be political chump footballs for everybody who has access to the glitter and lights this system provides to them at your expense.

Bernie Sanders and the Left: What Happened?

By Mick Armstrong

Republished from Red Flag.

Bernie Sanders inspired hope among millions of working-class Americans appalled by the dire state of US politics. With his attacks on the billionaire class, his talk of socialism and his program of Medicare for all, a $15 minimum wage and free university tuition at last, there seemed to be an alternative to far-right Republicans like Trump and despised pro-big business Democrats like Hillary Clinton.

Sanders tapped into a mood for change in an increasingly polarised US society. On the one hand, there was the growth in support for Trump and various far-right conspiracy theorists and outright fascist groups. On the other hand, there was a sustained increase in the number of people favouring some sort of socialist alternative to capitalism. As early as 2011, a Pew Research Center poll showed that most young people had a more positive view of socialism than of capitalism.

Sanders’ two presidential campaigns built on and reinforced these sentiments. His support was particularly strong among young people, a majority of whom now reject capitalism. This was an important development in a country where there is no equivalent to the Australian or British labour parties and where socialist ideas of all stripes had long been marginalised by the Cold War anti-communist consensus. A further reflection of this trend was the growth of the Democratic Socialists of America, which now claims something like 70,000 members.

Socialists and Biden: an exchange

You don’t have to scratch too deeply beneath the surface to understand why this shift occurred. The 2007-08 global financial crisis resulted in millions of US workers losing their jobs and/or their homes. But the banks and the giant financial corporations that caused the crisis were bailed out to the tune of trillions of dollars by Democratic President Barack Obama. Workers’ taxes paid for those handouts. The US, like most of the Western world, has become an incredibly unequal society. The minimum wage is derisory. Today’s young people are set to be worse off than their parents’ generation. Compounding all that are endemic racism and militarism: the unrelenting police shootings of Blacks and the long decades of murderous wars from Iraq to Afghanistan, justified by rampant Islamophobia.

The bind was that there were limits to Sanders’ politics, which constrained and eventually reversed the radical potential of his campaign. By the standards of most other Western capitalist societies, Sanders was a moderate social democrat. He was, for example, nowhere near as left wing as Jeremy Corbyn in Britain. Sanders could seem much more radical than he actually was because of the abysmally right-wing nature of US politics. While his program put forward important individual reforms, it was not an anti-capitalist program and Sanders never called for getting rid of capitalism.

Sanders is not an opponent of US imperialism. He is a strong advocate of a hardline US stance against China, is pro-Israel and has longstanding connections with sections of the military industrial complex. From early in his political career in Burlington, Vermont, Sanders was a strong backer of the police. So, unsurprisingly, he has refused to support the Black Lives Matter demand to defund the police.

These serious limitations of Sanders’ politics were glossed over or apologised for by most of his supporters on the left. Such an approach meant that newly radicalising young people were not educated in clear-cut anti-imperialist politics—vital for socialists in the US, which remains the number one imperialist power in an increasingly conflict-ridden world.

Furthermore, while Sanders called for building a movement, it was a movement aiming to get him and other progressive Democrats, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, elected to office, not a movement of workers and youth to fight in the workplaces and on the streets for major reforms or to challenge capitalism.

Is this the most important election ever?

The bigger problem limiting the radical potential of the Sanders’ campaign was that it remained trapped within the framework of the Democratic Party—the number two party of US imperialism. Born as the party of the southern slaveholders, the Democrats have always served the interests of the rich and powerful and of US military might. From Wilson to Roosevelt to Truman to Kennedy to Johnson to Clinton to Obama, Democratic presidents have waged war after war of pillage and plunder.

Attempting to reform the Democrats is an utter dead-end for socialists. What is vitally needed in the US is a genuinely radical working-class political alternative to the Democrats. Sanders could have helped build such an alternative if, after his defeat in the 2016 primaries, he had run as a social democrat against both Clinton and Trump. But despite facing a brutal dirty tricks campaign by the Democrats’ corporate establishment, Sanders offered no alternative to his many supporters. He called on them to back the despicable Clinton.

Despite his supposed “independent” status, Sanders incorporated himself deeper and deeper into the Democratic mainstream after the 2016 elections. He tried to build, not a left-wing alternative to the Democrats, but a mildly progressive faction very much loyal to this party of big business.

To prove his loyalty in the 2018 midterm elections, Sanders campaigned for liberal, centrist and right-wing Democratic candidates. And from the outset of the presidential primaries, Sanders made it clear that he would back whoever won the Democratic nomination, even a hardline conservative like Joe Biden. Although he was again savagely done over by the Democratic establishment, Sanders remained true to his word. Indeed, Sanders and the likes of Ocasio-Cortez have gone out of their way to praise Biden.

In order to get on board left-wingers hostile to Biden, Sanders and other liberal Democrats have painted Biden as some sort of saviour of workers’ interests against Trump. This is despite Biden making it crystal clear that he will not back any of Sanders’ policies and focusing his campaign on making concessions to right-wing Republicans worried that Trump’s behaviour discredits US imperialism’s standing in the world.

So rather than working for a break from the Democrats, Sanders and the likes of Ocasio-Cortez have acted as a safety valve for US capitalism’s B team. They have tried to channel a growing radicalism, especially among young people, back into the discredited Democrats. Following this same trajectory, the Democratic Socialists of America have been increasingly incorporated as the progressive wing of the Democrats.

Sanders has joined a long line of past liberals, progressives and social democrats who have helped prop up the Democratic Party in the face of mass upsurges of disaffection by giving it a seemingly radical face. These various progressives have played and continue to play a vital role in maintaining the stability of US capitalism. Their role is one of the key factors in explaining why US workers don’t have their own party independent of the two mainstream capitalist parties, even a pathetically inadequate one like the British or Australian labour parties.

Socialists should not vote for Joe Biden

The other significant negative impact of the Sanders’ campaign has been on the politics of sections of the socialist left. Thrown off balance by the surge of support for Sanders, important sections of the socialist left threw themselves largely uncritically into his campaign. They embraced it as a get-rich-quick scheme for mass influence. Softening their socialist politics to fall in behind Sanders did nothing to advance working-class struggle or mass campaigns like Black Lives Matter or to build the revolutionary left. It strengthened the hand of the reformists and liberals who dominated and set the political terrain of Sanders’ campaign.

Numerous leftists abandoned the longstanding stance of the radical and revolutionary left in the US—from the syndicalists of the Industrial Workers of the World to Eugene Debs’ Socialist Party to the early US Communist Party to the Trotskyist movement—of not voting for candidates of either of the two dominant capitalist parties. Initially many on the left, including leaders of the Democratic Socialists of America, proclaimed that it was “Bernie or bust”—that they would campaign only for Sanders and not for a right-wing corporate Democrat like Biden.

But abandoning the socialist principle of not supporting candidates of openly capitalist parties in order to back Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez became a slippery slope. If you were prepared to vote for Sanders running as a Democrat on a mild social democratic program against Trump, it is no great further stretch to vote for the lesser evil Biden against the “fascist” Trump. Indeed, many of the former supporters of “Bernie or bust” have now caved in to the relentless campaign of the Democrats and the liberal establishment to back Biden.

But falling in behind Biden and the Democrats will do nothing to strengthen the hand of workers and the oppressed to resist the harsh attacks they will inevitably face, whoever sits in the White House after the presidential elections. Moreover, it will do nothing to counter the threat from the right, which has grown in the very soil of the harsh neoliberal capitalism championed by Democrats such as Biden.

What is vitally needed in the US is a fighting socialist movement to champion mass struggles like the Black Lives Matter movement and to build broader working-class resistance. Those struggles won’t be advanced by tailing the Democrats, no matter how seemingly progressive, but only by building a militant working-class political alternative.

What the Political Realignment Suggests About the Prospects for Fascism

By Ashton Rome

The multiple deep crises we currently face are producing huge fractures in the capitalist system's regular operation. In Wage Labor and Capital, Marx wrote that crises “carry the most frightful devastation in their train, and, like an earthquake, cause bourgeois society to shake at its very foundations.” The more fundamental the crisis, the more profound that everyday life and economic and political relationships are disrupted. Crises produce phenomena like we see today: the open calls for political violence, protests, and the growth of socialist and far-right groups; and the shifts in power within the global economic system. These phenomena play themselves out within political parties as the ruling classes and subordinate classes struggle to determine what direction the crisis will resolve itself. Within this process, the ruling class may attempt to reconfigure its hegemony through new political alliances and reformations, and new interplays between force and consent to bring social peace. This is what we see playing out as we see the realignment within the Democratic Party – or, more specifically, the shift of the traditional Republican establishment to Biden and the Democratic Party.

Organic Crisis

Gramsci used the term ‘organic crisis’ to describe periods where the capitalist system produces a crisis where the ruling class and its system can no longer function as it normally does. The crisis occurs at all levels of society – economic, social, political, and ideological. Because the ruling class cannot resolve the crisis, it poses challenges to the fundamental ideas, values, and organizations on which the previous order was maintained. A ‘crisis of representation’ also emerges where traditional parties are hollowed out because they lack legitimacy; and with them, the rules, norms, and legal constructions that they built. The depth of the crisis means that it is usually not enough to defend or conserve the “normal” but to construct a new settlement. The new settlement needs legitimation which simultaneously appeals to a new set of values and the “common sense” (ideology, beliefs, etc). They require cross-class alliances. Realignments typically occur in relation to crisis, as political parties attempt to respond to the new political, economic, and ideological conditions. They can occur as new parties emerge, or within traditional parties themselves.

The crises of the 1920s to the 1940s in the United States, for example, were resolved partially in the New Deal system - a coalition of unions, the black and white working class, white southern farmers, and intellectuals. To secure a U.S. global hegemony, the Brenton Woods system and security agreements like NATO were constructed. Once that system entered crisis, the ruling class used it as an opportunity to reshape relations which in the U.S. and Britain was settled firstly as Thatcherism and Reaganism and later on ‘Third Way’ and ‘New Labour’ as tech and financial service became dominant forces in the economy.

The Fascist Threat

There are debates today, like in 2016, about whether Trump is simply a right-wing populist, fascist, or traditional Republican. Furthermore, many have looked at whether he has a party apparatus or is an isolated leader. Many of those that are quick to call Trump a “fascist” reject the demands of the workers movement and especially their role in any anti-fascist struggle. For them, the key is securing the prevailing capitalist system through a vote for Biden. A discussion about the relationship of elites to parties is important for what it can reveal about the depth of the crisis, the balance of power between classes, and whether the ruling class sees the possibility of resolving it using existing institutions. The movement of part of the Republican establishment to Biden and the Democrats should not be looked at as temporary, but instead a representation of changing alliances in the face of multiple deep crises.

The danger lurking in a crisis period is that if the ruling class is not capable of maintaining power through its normal means, and the working class cannot take power, due to defeats, lack of organization and leadership, the emergence of ruling-class politics in the form of the far right becomes inevitable. The far-right in the form of authoritarian populism or outright fascism requires a crisis that radicalizes all subordinate classes, and a crisis of representation and authority, allowing its leader to speak in a sense "directly to the people" against a corrupt establishment. Trump proclaims to the middle and working class that the global elite and party establishment have embarked on policies of globalization which has offshored jobs and brought in cheap labor to drive down wages. According to the discourse of authoritarian populists like Trump, the existing institutions subvert the interests of the people and a leader, who reflects the will of the people, is needed to “make America great again”.

The movement from authoritarian populism to fascism as seen in Germany and Italy occurs when there is a socialist movement or more correctly the illusion of a strong socialist movement, which is threatening enough to mobilize an anti-socialist movement. It also requires a mass base to draw support from. As well it requires a ruling class convinced that it cannot rule through the existing democratic state apparatus. A September 22 poll from USA TODAY/Ipsos Poll that revealed that roughly 64% percent of respondents believe “protesters and counter-protesters are overwhelming American cities” should bring concern.

This is a laughable overestimation of the strength of the socialist movement today but one echoed by right wing media, Trump, the Department of Homeland Security, and Federal Bureau Investigations (FBI) in particular. Unfortunately, the left enters this crisis in a position of weakness, despite the 2008 and 2016 periods of radicalization that produced the 2018/19 strike wave, massive increases in membership of left groups, a near win for a self-professed "democratic socialist" presidential nominee, and the recent election of several left democrats throughout the country.

So far, compared to the tasks ahead, the left has not been able to translate those gains into the needed mass movements or independent working organizations like unions or a workers' Party, which could be used to shift the balance of power. The unfortunate thing is that we have yet to shift the balance of power leftward from a four decades-long slip rightward. If Trump and his brand of authoritarian populism has captured the Republican Party, during this period of crisis, it would mean that the far right has a powerful tool to beat back any counter-hegemonic movement.

The 2020 Realignment

When it was evident in 2016 that Trump was the nominee, some delegates and establishment figures like Erick Erickson conspired to block his nomination. Many were skeptical of Trump's lack of political experience. Many were concerned about the unrest that his racist scapegoating of immigrants and his history of sexual violence and sexism would cause. Others were and still are concerned by his flirtations with the alt-right and fascists, and especially of his outright criticism of the Post-9/11 national security state and neoliberal commonsense. Trump represents to them a wild card that can not be easily managed. For the ruling class that supported him, Trump's outsider status was suited for the task of maintaining the current order. Once his nomination was official, about 20% of Republican House members refused to endorse him, and a significant numbers of establishment Republicans like Richard Hanna of New York and Meg Whitman rallied around Clinton.

The Republican Party is now the Party of Trump. Since assuming the office Trump has confirmed part of the establishment's fears and relaxed them in other regards.  He has worked to build a cabinet of loyalists and effectively remade the Party into his own.  For the first two years he had to battle the party establishment like John McCain and Jeff Flake, but by 2019 Trump built a cabinet of loyalists and won the trust of many that opposed his initial run. This was exemplified by the fact that every Republican member of the House opposed his impeachment. Also, by 2019, congressional GOP had become more and more aligned with Trump, as opposition members retired and were replaced by more pro-Trump figures. As well the 2020 Republican Party is simply Trump’s platform from 2016. Trump in office was able to reassure the establishment by governing largely according to neoliberal orthodoxy as with his Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 and record stock market.

For the ruling class that supports Trump, he is useful. Trump's populism and discourse avoids naming and placing blame squarely on the capitalist system at the heart of the Great Recession and the austerity regime that gave rise to the anger that brought him into office. Trump, like other populists makes vague promises to various sections of society to win office and once in power, works to secure the position of the ruling elite and old power structure.  Trump's scapegoating divides the subordinate classes. His discourse whips up sections of the state and mostly middle class into action and violence against counter-movements like the left. This is crucial in a period of increasing polarization of wealth and more unequal distribution of wealth and goods.

The COVID19 pandemic, in accelerating crisis of legitimacy, and the dramatic decline of the Post World War 2 global system of governance has begged serious questions of Trump. The ruling class is concerned about the decline of the Post World War 2 institutions and alliances like North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), United Nations (U.N.), International Monetary Fund (IMF), and other multilateral cooperation that have sustained U.S. global hegemony. Though Trump has continued Obama's Pivot to Asia meant to challenge China's growing military and global influence, Trump has also undermined the alliances thought to be needed to accomplish it.

For years, Trump has allegedly spoken about withdrawing from NATO, and has questioned the U.S. commitment to allied states in the case of war. Trump unilaterally withdrew from the Iran nuclear agreement, Paris Agreement, took the U.S. out of the World Health Organization, and supported the commitment of right-wing populist figures in Europe to abandon the European project. 

At the same time, to some, Trump simply represents a hyper-realism about the possibility and sustainability of the post-World War 2 international order. Trump reflects a realization of the limits of American power and the domestic frustration of foreign conflicts brought by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The U.S. hegemony since WW2 is built on its monetary dominance, control of international institutions, expanding domestic consumer market, and through its full spectrum dominance (land, sea, air, space and cyber). The 2008/9 crisis exposed the limits of the U.S.'s ability to maintain that structure in the same way.

The ruling order is also concerned by the polarization and infights within and amongst governmental institutions like the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Department of Justice (DOJ), FBI and intelligence agencies like the Central Intelligence, Agency (CIA). Some are concerned by Trump’s alleged usurping of the independence of Homeland Security and DOJ as seen in a recent IG complaint which alleges that top political appointees in the DHS repeatedly instructed career officials to modify intelligence assessments on the George Floyd protests to suit Trump's agenda.

With COVID, Trump's decisions have reflected a breakdown of normal governance. Trump and his administration, along with Democratic leadership, were able to inject Wall Street and the rich with $135 billion in tax breaks, $2.2 trillion in the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES) in late March, $500 billion Federal Reserve program, and the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP). Trump, however, has strayed away from mainstream capitalist economists and refused to continue negotiations on a second round of stimulus whilst promoting conspiracy theories and misinformation around the virus.

The Ruling Class Case for Biden  

One of the main tasks of the ruling class is to figure out how best to place the cost of the crisis on the backs of ordinary people without arousing their anger. One section of the ruling class sees the Democratic Party and Biden as the last hope of preserving the neoliberal order, using traditional institutions of power, negotiation, and reform. Having survived a 'civil war' that first erupted after the failed 2016 presidential election, the Party has shown itself able to manage the crisis and bring legitimacy back to the system. With Biden as the nominee and the establishment still retaining their leadership, the Democratic Party has seemingly accomplished the impossible – a revival of centrism in the midst of its collapse.

The economic crisis and pandemic have exacerbated the ruling class fear of a resurgence of labor militancy like in the 1930s and 1960s. The last economic crisis brought waves of protests, new political formations, and levels of organization. In 2008, Obama was able to use rhetoric and symbolism, along with repression, to stop the emergence of large-scale mass movements. Similarly, Trump has used his outsider status and promises to a portion of the bottom 90%, scapegoating, and repression to avoid creating mass movements. This ‘peace’ was initially helped to be achieved by low unemployment. The crisis and the potential for an explosion of movements has brought urgent questions about whether the ruling class can govern in the old way or if something new is needed. They hope that Biden will be able to bring a political equilibrium using the concessionary and coercive powers of the state. In the same way, on the economic front, there is a hope that Biden will be more “rational” and listen to his advisers, appointed from the banking industry and Ivy League institutions.

Biden and the Democratic Party may have enough union and social movement support to conceivably tame any movements that threaten to go outside of its boundaries. This is mostly because the Democratic Party elites hopes to utilize ‘lesser evilism’ and ‘popular front’ type anti-fascism strategies to defend the state. It is also because the reformist character of the left wing of the party feels that it needs a left consensus in the halls of power to put forth its agenda. To keep their positions, they will need to play it safe with the establishment or risk being primaried or facing discipline from the Party. They also hope that the left of the Party and labor unions will translate concessions into “reforms”, which will placate the working masses. But as Gramsci once warned, “the crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

As such, Biden has received numerous establishment Republican, national security, and finance establishment support heading into the 2020 election. At this years' Democratic National Convention, more of the establishment than 2016 came out in support of Biden; these included: Cindy McCain, John Kasich, Susan Molinari, and Meg Whitman, former eBay and Hewlett-Packard CEO, and former Republican Secretary of State Colin Powell. On the final day of the convention, groups of over one hundred McCain 2008 and thirty Romney 2012 campaign staffers endorsed Biden, in addition to a group of nearly two dozen George W. Bush campaign and administration staffers.

In addition, Biden received the endorsement of seventy-three former U.S. national security officials in the Republican administrations, including former heads of the CIA and FBI and Trump administration officials. A group of a hundred prominent Republicans and independents, including Todd Whitman, former Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder, and former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld, launched ‘Republicans and Independents for Biden’ to campaign for Biden. With his support in the union and social movement, Biden is the only candidate that can seem like a political alternative to one element of their base, and a person capable of preserving the existing status quo to another. Although cross-party endorsements have been common in the last few conventions, the alliances have been temporary.

Trump and Authoritarian Populism’s Stable Base

Trump has been able to build a solid base amongst downwardly mobile white working and middle classes. It should be noted that working-class whites are not Trump’s only base or even main base. Though for example, neoliberalism was, as David Harvey argues a “political project to re-establish the conditions for capital accumulation and to restore the power of economic elites”, it required a new “common sense” and a cross-class alliance. Typically, periods of crisis lay bare the contradictions inherent in capitalist society and more specifically within uneasy coalitions such as Trump’s.

The middle class may feel dominated by banks and sections of big business, and workers may grow angry at the austerity that is a part of the ‘recovery’. One can see that the recovery packages were aimed at delivering for big business by giving bits to different sections of the base. When anger broke out that the 80 percent of the stimulus tax cuts went to millionaires and the Small Business Association’s Paycheck Protection Program largely went to powerful companies instead of providing relief to millions of American small businesses, Trump was able to divert the anger instead to the alleged intransigence of the Democratic Party and at governors who wouldn’t reopen the economy. It should be noted that the nativism Trump embodies was once relegated to a small faction of the Party (paleoconservatives such as Pat Buchanan), but has since been mainstreamed as neoliberalism has devastated their living standards. The nativism, as well as nationalism, acts in a way like W.E.B. Dubois’s “psychological wage”, used to maintain the middle class of the base that feels beaten down.

This nativism allowed Trump to secure so many union votes that Hillary Clinton lost Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Despite COVID and massive unemployment, Trump's approval rating has averaged around 40%. By comparison, a CBS News/New York Times poll showed President Bush’s final approval rating was twenty-two percent, due to views on the Iraq war and Great Recession. This shows that Trump and his authoritarian populism has a solid base, which could be mobilized. Conversely, an important caveat is there are indications from national polls and from swing states that working-class white voters aren’t as likely to vote for Trump as in 2016.

It should be noted as well that 2016 showed most of Trump’s supporters were largely affluent Republicans and come from the middle class. This is consistent with most authoritarian populists whose base is typically the middle class, who during times of crisis vacillate between the working class, which is engaging in struggle, and the capitalist class seeking to restore its order. Clearly, Trump, like other authoritarian populists, win support from sections of working class as well. This fact informs the prospect and strategy of building a socialist movement.

Right-wing populists use their platform to win the support of different classes to get into office. Once in office they accommodate to the old power structure and big business whose interests they try to protect, and whose financial support they require. Within the classical authoritarian populism of Italy, once in power, they supported the development of cartels and monopolies like FIAT and Montecatini.

There is nothing new about working-class whites supporting a Republican. The movement of working-class whites away from the Democratic Party occurred as the Civil Right's movement embraced the Democratic Party and its power was in decline. The Republicans starting in the 1950s were able to exploit the divisions that began to appear within the Democratic Party due to the Party's national leadership calling for de-segregation, while the Southern Party opposed it. The New Deal coalition undercut the Republican Party's traditional support in the industrial Northeast while maintaining the Democratic Party's base in the South. This left Republicans in the wilderness as exemplified by the fact that the Republicans only managed to win the White House in 1952 and 1956 (Pres. Dwight Eisenhower) and in 1968 and 1972 (Pres. Nixon) and controlled the Senate for only four years, 1947 to1949, and 1953 to 1955.

Trump was able to capitalize on the disappointment of Obama's failures to deliver on his progressive platform by partially playing on the racism latent in U.S. society. Obama's 2008 "Coalition" was unprecedented because it was built on a new consensus and a new set of alliances that brought in white working-class voters from the Midwest. With his 2008 victory, Obama included a big majority in the House and a post-neoliberal consensus that many thought would be the basis for a reversal of the 40 years of economic policy. Even though Obama lost the white working class vote by 18 points, this was a significant improvement over 2004 when they lost them by 23 points and he was able to win because of the turnout of voters of color and students. Obama’s election and subsequent base were buoyed by a movement to the left on war and health care issues and a discrediting of the neoliberal orthodoxy. If the New Deal Coalition was broken by “race” and white backlash to Civil Rights in the 1960s, Obama's victory seems to have meant a decrease in importance to “race” and the beginning of an economic populism.

Many people today forget the astronomical expectations of Obama when he got into office. Obama’s election occurred during the biggest recession since the Great Depression, which challenged the neoliberal “common sense” of the past four decades.  Obama’s popularity was nearly 80 percent on the eve of the election. His utterance that the “age of conservatism is through” seemed real. A USA Today/Gallup before the election showed that most Americans believe that Obama would be able to achieve every one of his ten major campaign promises, “from doubling the production of alternative energy to ensuring that all children have health insurance coverage.” However, because Obama and the Democratic Party weren’t willing to deliver a definitive break from neoliberalism, and the left wasn’t able to present a real political alternative, a year later, the Right were able to begin gain back seats and lay the basis for right populism.

Trump was able to win the backing of some white workers largely through playing on their disappointment and promises to reverse the past forty years of austerity and neoliberalism. Through theatrics and vague populist statements, Trump imbues the aura of fighting for working people instead of trimming around the edges like Obama.  A 2017 Harvard Business Review textual analysis of Trump’s campaign speeches showed that the word “workers” appeared more frequently than any other word other than “donors”, even going as far as promising to make the Republican Party a “Workers’ Party” .

The Republican establishment and the left backing Biden are on an impossible quest to defend institutions that no longer have legitimacy. Democrats like AOC are happy to frame the contest as one between ‘fascism’ on one hand and ‘democracy’ on the other. The left backing Biden tend to be reformist who see crises as cyclical but short term and don’t require radical change or the self activity (strikes, protests, etc) of working people. The capitalist economic and political systems are crisis prone, and will cause misery and pain in the service of finding a resolution. The huge unemployment rate, skyrocketing sovereign debt, global pandemic, and crisis of legitimacy, not to mention the ecological crisis, make it likely that this Recession will be deeper than even 2008.

As we have learned in other periods, things getting worse do not necessarily lead to increases in political struggle and victories for the left. The crisis of the 1970s brought a neoliberal settlement – a victory for the Right and capital.  The threat of fascism today can only be countered by a political strategy. Recognizing that the balance of power is by far stacked against the workers movement, the left must urgently provide the basis for a political alternative. The left must have an answer to unemployment, COVID, and the threat of war outside of simply defending capitalist institutions from the far right that seeks to remake them. It means taking away the fascist base.

One Hundred Years of Indian Communism

By Prabhat Patnaik

Republished from International Development Economic Associates.

A theoretical analysis of the prevailing situation, from which the proletariat’s relationship with different segments of the bourgeoisie and the peasantry is derived, and with it the Communist Party’s tactics towards other political forces, is central to the Party’s praxis. A study of this praxis over the last one hundred years of the existence of communism in India, though highly instructive, is beyond my scope here. I shall be concerned only with some phases of this long history.

While the Sixth Congress of the Communist International (1928) analysed the colonial question, advancing valuable propositions like “Colonial exploitation produces pauperization, not proletarianization, of the peasantry”, it put forward a line of action for Communist Parties that was sectarian in character; indeed the period following the Sixth Congress, often referred to as the Third Period, is associated with sectarianism. It was at the Seventh Congress in 1935, in the midst of the fight against fascism, which had claimed Ernst Thaelman, Antonio Gramsci and many others among its victims, that this sectarianism was rectified and the need to form united fronts was emphasized. The Seventh Congress tendency was translated into the Indian context by the Dutt-Bradley thesis calling for the formation of an Anti-Imperialist People’s United Front.

The economic programme suggested for such a front included the right to strike, banning reductions of wages and dismissals of workers, an adequate minimum wage and 8-hour day, a 50 per cent reduction in rents and banning the seizure of peasant land against debt by imperialists, native princes, zamindars and money lenders.

Communists being clandestine members of the Congress (the Indian case differed from South Africa in this respect where dual membership, of the SACP and ANC, was possible), and working in cooperation with the Congress Socialist party, were the outcome of this understanding.

This phase came to an end with the German attack on the Soviet Union. The Communist Party’s understanding that the nature of the war had changed because of this attack, though striking a sympathetic chord among many leading Congressmen, was officially rejected both by the CSP and the Congress, which actually launched the Quit India movement at this very time (in which many Communists who had been members of the Congress were also jailed for long periods).

With independence, the question of the nature of the new State and the relationship with the bourgeoisie came to the fore. It caused intense inner-Party debate and ultimately divided the Party. The CPI(M)’s theoretical position, enshrined in its programme, took off from Lenin’s position in pre-revolutionary debates within the RSDLP, a position that was to underlie, one way or another, all third world revolutionary programmes in the twentieth century. Lenin’s argument had been that in countries where the bourgeoisie came late on the historical scene, it lacked the capacity to carry through the anti-feudal democratic revolution, for fear that an attack on feudal property could well rebound into an attack on bourgeois property. It therefore could not fulfil the democratic aspirations of the peasantry. Only a revolution led by the working class in alliance with the peasantry, could carry the democratic revolution to completion, by breaking up feudal property, smashing feudal privileges, and redistributing land. This, far from holding back economic development, would in fact make it more broad-based by enlarging the size of the home market through land reforms, and also more rapid, by accelerating the growth of agriculture.

The post-independence Indian State’s eschewing of radical land redistribution, and its encouraging feudal landlords instead to turn capitalist on their khudkasht land, along with an upper stratum of the peasantry that acquired ownership rights on land from large absentee landlords, was reflective of the bourgeoisie’s entering into an alliance with landlords. Since it was a bourgeois-landlord State under the leadership of the big bourgeoisie, that was pursuing capitalist development, which in the countryside entailed a mixture of landlord and peasant capitalism, the task for the proletariat was to replace this State by an alternative State formed by building an alliance with the bulk of the peasantry, and to carry the democratic revolution forward, eventually to socialism. While the bourgeoisie had ambitions of pursuing a capitalist path that was relatively autonomous of imperialism, it was, the Party noted, collaborating increasingly with foreign finance capital.

Two aspects of this characterization deserve attention. First, it recognized that while capitalist development was being pursued, it was not under the aegis of imperialism. The bourgeoisie was by no means subservient to imperialism, a fact of which the use of the public sector against metropolitan capital, economic decolonization with the help of the Soviet Union, in the sense of recapturing control over the country’s natural resources from metropolitan capital, and the pursuit of non-alignment in foreign policy, were obvious manifestations. Developing capitalism at home in other words did not mean for the post-independence State joining the camp of world capitalism.

Second, the State, while it manifested its class character in defending bourgeois and landlord property and ushering in capitalism, including junker capitalism, did not act exclusively in the interests of the bourgeoisie and the landlords. It appeared to stand above all classes, intervening even in favour of workers and peasants from time to time. Thus while it presided over a process of primitive accumulation of capital, in the sense of the landlords evicting tenants to resume land for capitalist farming, it prevented primitive accumulation in the more usual sense, of the urban big bourgeoisie encroaching on peasant agriculture or artisan production. On the contrary, it not only reserved a quantum of cloth to be produced by the handloom sector, but also intervened in agricultural markets to purchase produce at remunerative prices, an intervention of which the agricultural capitalists, whether kulaks or landlords, were by no means the sole beneficiaries. Likewise, a whole array of measures for agriculture, such as protection from world market fluctuations, subsidised inputs, subsidized institutional credit, new practices and seed varieties being disseminated through State-run extension services, though they conferred the lion’s share of benefits on the emerging capitalist class in the countryside, also benefited large numbers of peasants.

The capitalist development that was pursued was thus sui generis. It was a capitalist development from within, not necessarily with the blessings of imperialism, and, notwithstanding increasing collaboration, often even at the expense of metropolitan capital. Because of this peculiar character, it did not cause an unbridgeable hiatus within society, i.e. within the ranks of the classes that had fought imperialism together during the anti-colonial struggle. Put differently, while the bourgeoisie betrayed many of the promises of the anti-colonial struggle, such as land to the tiller, it did not as long as the dirigiste regime lasted, betray the anti-colonial struggle altogether. This is also why the Party while putting itself in opposition to the regime, supported many of its measures, such as bank nationalization, the development of the public sector and its use for recapturing control over natural resources from metropolitan capital, FERA, and others.

This sui generis character of the capitalism that was being developed has misled many into thinking that it was an “intermediate regime” that presided over it and not a bourgeois-landlord State; but this mistake itself is testimony to its sui generis character. This development could not last for at least four reasons: first, the collapse of the Soviet Union that had made such a development trajectory at all possible; second, the fiscal crisis that the post-independence State increasingly got into inter alia because of massive tax evasion by the bourgeoisie and the landlords; third, the formation of huge blocks of finance capital in the banks of the advanced capitalist countries, especially after the “oil-shocks” of the seventies, which went global after the overthrow of the Bretton-Woods system (itself partly engineered by this finance capital), and which took advantage of the fiscal crisis to push loans to countries like India; and fourth, the fact that the dirigiste regime could not garner the support of the poor, notwithstanding its many pro-poor achievements compared to the colonial period.

The neo-liberal regime under the aegis of the now globalized finance capital represents the pursuit of capitalism of the most orthodox kind, as distinct from the sui generis capitalism of the dirigiste period. The State under neo-liberalism promotes much more exclusively the interests of the ruling classes, especially the corporate-financial oligarchy that gets closely integrated with globalized finance capital, and directly also of globalized finance capital itself (owing its fear that there may be a capital flight otherwise). An unbridgeable hiatus now develops within the country, with the big bourgeoisie aligning itself much more closely with metropolitan capital, having abandoned its ambition of relative autonomy vis-à-vis imperialism.

The neo-liberal regime withdraws to a large extent the support it extended to petty production and peasant agriculture, making it much more vulnerable. A process of primitive accumulation of capital is unleashed upon peasant agriculture not from within the rural economy (through landlords evicting tenants) but from agri-business and big capital from outside; likewise the neo-liberal State facilitates an unleashing of primitive accumulation upon the petty production sector, for instance through demonetization and the shift to a GST regime. Reservation of products for this sector is abandoned. The displaced peasants and petty producers move to towns in search of employment, but employment becomes increasingly scarce because of the abandonment of all constraints on technological-cum-structural change in the economy which the system of licensing had imposed earlier. The swelling reserve army of labour worsens the lot of the organized workers. The fate of the peasants, the agricultural labourers, the petty producers and organized workers get inextricably linked, and this fate worsens greatly, leading not only to a massive widening of economic inequality but also to an accentuation of poverty.

At the same time however neo-liberalism has entailed the shift of a range of activities, especially in the service sector (IT-related services) from the metropolis to the Indian economy which inter alia has increased the growth rate of GDP in the economy. This poses a fresh challenge before the Party because of the following argument.

Marx in his Preface to A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy had talked of a mode of production becoming historically obsolete when the relations of production characterizing it become a fetter on the development of productive forces. A conclusion is often drawn from this that as long as productive forces continue to develop, that mode of production continues to remain historically progressive. An obvious index of the development of productive forces is the rate of growth of the GDP, whence it follows that as long as this growth remains rapid, opposing a regime in the name of its inequity and exploitative character is historically unwarranted. The Communists on this argument should not oppose neo-liberal globalization, but should join other political forces in accepting it, albeit critically.

This argument however cannot stand scrutiny. Economic historians agree that Russia before the revolution was experiencing unprecedented rates of economic growth, especially industrial growth, and the advanced capitalist world as a whole had witnessed a prolonged boom; yet Lenin had no hesitation in calling capitalism of that time “moribund”. In short to take GDP growth as the marker of the historical state of a mode of production is a form of commodity fetishism; it seeks to locate in the world of “things” phenomena that belong to the world of “relations”.

While other political forces accepted neo-liberal globalization, the Party accordingly steadfastly opposed it. It, along with other Left political forces, stood by the workers and peasants who are victims of neo-liberal globalization instead accepting it as a sign of progress, as many Left formations in other countries have explicitly or implicitly done.

This has brought practical problems. Under the dirigiste regime one measure that separated Communists from others was land reforms. When a Communist government came to power, its task was clear, namely to carry out land reforms. But when land reforms have been completed to a significant extent, the next task is not clear. While industrialization is required, what form it should take and in what way it should be effected, are matters on which the state governments (where Communists are typically located) have very little say within a neo-liberal regime. Hence, Communist state governments within such a regime are often forced to mimic, to their cost, other state governments for effecting industrialization. This is an area where much more thinking and experimentation needs to be done.

Neo-liberal globalization itself however has reached a dead-end, a symptom of which is the mushrooming of authoritarian/fascist regimes in various parts of the world, for the preservation of moribund neo-liberal capitalism, through a combination of repression and of distraction of attention towards the “other” as the enemy. Overcoming this conjuncture is the new challenge before Indian Communism in its centenary year.

"It is Totally Naive to Want to Humanize Capitalism": An Interview with Frei Betto

[Photo: Frei Betto meets with Fidel Castro in the 1990s]

By Barbara Schijman

Originally published at Internationalist 360.

Carlos Alberto Libanio Christo, better known as Frei Betto, is a recognized Latin American progressive reference and one of the main figures of the Theology of Liberation. A writer, journalist and Dominican friar, he was imprisoned for four years during the military dictatorship in Brazil, which he opposed with body and soul. During his work as a friar he met, in the favelas of Sao Paulo, the former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, of whom he was an advisor, and in whose government he participated in the Zero Hunger program. He has written more than 60 books, including Fidel and Religion. Conversations with Frei Betto (1985); Mysticism and Spirituality (1997); The Artist’s Work. A Holistic Vision of the Universe (1999); and The Lost Gold of the Arienim (2016).

What thoughts does this pandemic world open up for you?

I believe that the pandemic is nature’s revenge, resulting from years of human domination and devastation. Absolutely everything that we have been doing for the last 200 years, the search for profit and the maximum exploitation of nature’s resources without any care for environmental preservation, results in a lack of control of the chain of nature, which is completely disrupted by human intervention. Many speak of the “anthropocene”, that is, the era of total human intervention in nature; but I prefer to call this situation “capitalocene”. In other words, the total hegemony of capital, of the search for profit, for gain; all of which causes a total imbalance in the natural environment.

This whole process of environmental devastation is the fruit of private capital gain. The problem is not the human being; the problem is neoliberal capitalism. And we must remember that nature can live without our uncomfortable presence; we cannot, we do need nature.

How do you analyze the situation in Brazil?

In my country, the situation is catastrophic because we have a neo-fascist government. I call President Jair Bolsonaro, the “Bagman”, I even gave him this nickname before the Economist Magazine did. Brazil is in a total fire, in the Amazon, and in other areas, and the president has no interest in improving the situation or changing the course of what we are experiencing. Everything that means death suits him. We are living under a genocidal and lying government.

He is so brazen that in his last speech at the UN he said that the culprits for the fires in the Amazon are the peasants, the small farmers of the area and the indigenous people. For this reason there is no doubt that here in Brazil we are living a catastrophic situation managed by a neo-fascist government, which is using more and more religious fundamentalism to legitimize itself. Health matters as little as education. Bolsonaro knows very well that an educated people is a people that has a minimum of critical consciousness. And so it is better for him that the people have no education at all so that they can continue as guides to an ignorant mass. Of course not because of the masses themselves, but because of the conditions of education that are not properly offered to the people. As if all this were not enough, we are now back on a map of hunger, with a tremendous number of people who do not have the minimum necessary of the nutrients provided by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). In short, we are in a tremendous situation. We’ll see what happens in the municipal elections in November.

What scenario do you envision?

I think the elections will be an interesting thermometer to evaluate how our people look at it. But the truth is that, in this, I am not very optimistic. The pandemic has helped a lot so that Bolsonaro has the hegemony of the narrative, because public demonstrations do not exist, they are prohibited, or they are not convenient, so only the voice of the government is heard.

By voting in favor of the political trial against former President Dilma Rousseff, Bolsonaro dedicated his vote to the memory of the Army torturer, Colonel Carlos Brilhante Ustra. His behavior should not be surprising. But what explains that he still maintains a considerable level of popular support?

I have two explanations for this situation. First, the right wing has mastered the electronic system of digital networks, which I prefer not to call “social” because they do not necessarily create sociability. I believe that many people on the left, progressive, have not yet mastered this mechanism. And also, since the owners of these platforms are favorable to sectors close to the government, many use algorithms and other devices to disseminate fake news and all kinds of lies. This has a lot of force because today people find out much more about the news and facts through the digital networks than through the traditional press. This is the first factor. The second factor is related to the mobilization of the poorest people by conservative evangelical churches. And then there are people who have abdicated their freedom to seek safety. That is the proposal of the global right: that each person should abdicate his freedom in exchange for his security.

In the face of the latter, and the hegemonic narrative it describes, what about the voices of the left?

On this we, these who feel part of the left, have a certain responsibility because we have abandoned the work of the base. We have abandoned work with the poorest people in this country. In the thirteen years that we have been in government we have not increased that base work, and this space has been occupied by those evangelical churches and some conservative fundamentalist Catholic sectors. These churches have made a lot of progress. And this also has to do with a project of the United States intelligence since the 1970s. In two conferences that took place in Mexico, the CIA and the State Department already said that the Liberation Theology was more dangerous than Marxism in Latin America and that a counteroffensive had to be made. This counteroffensive comes from the appearance of these electronic churches that were exported to Latin America, Africa, Asia, and other places.

Religion is the first system of meaning invented by the human being. There is no other sense more powerful and globalizing than religion. That is why so many people today are seeking to master this system. And we, who are progressives of the Theology of Liberation, have done here in Brazil an intense and very positive work at the base between the 70’s during the military dictatorship and also during the 90’s, but after that have come two very conservative pontificates, those of John Paul II and Benedict XVI. These were 34 years of demobilization of the basic church, of that church of the basic ecclesial communities; they were 34 years of prejudice against the Theology of Liberation. All of this opened space for this counteroffensive by the evangelical right.

Do you argue that “there is no future for humanity outside of socialism?” How do you build socialism at this juncture?

We must not wait for the end of capitalism to build socialism. We have to build socialism within the capitalist system, that is, to begin popular initiatives of economic solidarity, of sharing goods, of strengthening popular bases. That is where we are starting, there is no other way. We cannot return to the Leninist concept of an assault on the Winter Palace. We have to denounce the capitalist system but create effective alternatives to this system, as far as possible from the popular bases. In that way I believe that we can manage to break this system in the long term, but we have to have initiative and pressure and political forces. This is a long-term, essential task, and I don’t see any other way out at this juncture.

What examples of these initiatives do you claim?

There are many initiatives from popular sectors in different places. In Brazil, the Landless Movement has initiatives that are typically socialist. Recently, with the tremendous rise in the price of rice in Brazil, the MST, which is a big rice producer, has not raised its prices and had a terrible sale. Many people were able to discover the advantages of their family farming, where services and profits are shared among the families that are settled or camped. They are small initiatives that we have to strengthen, and look for spaces in the governments again, because it is very important and immense to work from the government, as we have done during the presidencies of Lula and Dilma.

Unfortunately, we have not taken advantage of all the possibilities, and above all, we have not done work, which for me is fundamental, that has to do with the political literacy of the people. We should have invested much more in that. If we have another opportunity to return to the government we will have to face that work, which is fundamental. If on the one hand the thirteen years of the Workers’ Party government promoted many social advances in Brazil – and they are the best in our republican history – but on the other hand, we have not worked on the political literacy of the people, the strengthening of the popular movements, and the democratization of the media.

There are those who argue that capitalism must be humanized. Is that possible?

It’s a totally contradictory idea. Humanizing capitalism is the same as taking the teeth out of the tiger, thinking that this will take away its aggressiveness; it is totally naive to want to humanize capitalism. There is no possibility of that; capitalism is intrinsically evil. Its own endogenous mechanism is a necrophiliac mechanism. It is a system that feeds on those who work, on those who consume, on the poor. It is a question of arithmetic: if there is not so much wealth there is not so much poverty; if there is not so much poverty there is not so much wealth. It is impossible to humanize capitalism; it is a very naive postulation and unfortunately there are still people who believe in this myth.

How do you generate democratic awareness? How do you work on the democratization of society in times like these?

By means of communication systems -digital, printed, audiovisual, etc.-, translating into popular language many of the concepts disseminated in the mass media. Simple people often do not understand concepts such as public debt, foreign investment, exchange rate fluctuations, and market mechanisms. This requires methodology – which Paulo Freire teaches – and popular education teams.

Can you imagine Lula being the president of Brazil again?

Maybe he will have the opportunity because they are reviewing his judgments and convictions, filled with so many prejudices. Hopefully, he will have the possibility to be a candidate again; it is our hope here.

Can you imagine a less conservative Catholic Church, attentive in fact to the proclamations it defends?

As I said, the Catholic Church has spent 34 years of conservative pontificates that have demobilized much of that popular work of the ecclesial base communities, the raw material of Liberation Theology. This does not come from the heads of theologians, it comes from the bases. All of this has been demobilized. It may be different times since the changes proposed by Pope Francis, but still the intermediate hierarchy between the bases and the people who have power in the church has not been totally changed. We still have a large number of bishops and priests who are very conservative and who do not want to get involved in the popular struggles, are afraid or in search of their comfort, their convenience, and do not want to put themselves at risk. There is a lot of work to be done, but there are sectors of the Catholic Church and of Latin America that are very committed to these struggles for the defense of the rights of the poorest, of human rights; this is very strong in many sectors.

How do you think about the immediate future?

I believe that in the immediate future there is going to be an exacerbation of individualism. The pandemic has required cutting off face-to-face relationships, so people are going to be increasingly isolated, with fewer opportunities to connect with each other and to come together in the streets, in the unions, in the social movements, at least until a vaccine comes to take us out of this situation. And here again the importance of knowing how to manage the digital networks appears. We, the progressive left, have to learn more and more to manage these networks and to change them, because we know that many of them are there only to favor consumption or even linked to services of espionage, intelligence, control of the people. There is a lot of struggle to be done around this because it is a factor that came to stay. Many people are informed through these digital networks. We have to create groups with the ability to dominate these networks, to disprove the fake news and disseminate the truth, the real facts. This is the only way we can do a virtual job of political education.

Is there a Liberation Theology today?

Yes, of course. Liberation Theology has opened its range to other topics that are not only social struggles, but also addresses the issue of ecology, questions of nanotechnology, astrophysics, cosmology, and bioethics. The problem is that we have rather lost the popular foundations, which were the basis of the Theory of Liberation. These foundations have been lost during these 34 years of conservative pontificates. Our main task is to return to the bases, to return to the slums, to return to the peripheries, to return to the poor people, to the oppressed, to the excluded, like black people, the indigenous, the LGBT. We all have to be in this struggle; that’s where we have to walk.

Are you optimistic?

I have a principle and that is we have to save pessimism for better days. We can’t play into the hands of a system that wants us to be quiet, depressed, discouraged; we have to keep fighting. History has many twists and turns. I have been through a lot of things, some very tremendous, others positive. The prison under the Vargas dictatorship, the strength of the popular movements, the election of Lula, the election of Dilma… I am optimistic, yes. We cannot consider any historical moment as definitive.

Translation by Resumen Latinoamericano, North America Bureau

The Austerity Election

[Photo: Morry Gash-Pool/Getty Images]

By Ezra Brain

Republished from Left Voice.

As the 2020 presidential election is approaching its climax, both Joe Biden and Donald Trump are continuing to try to sell this election. For Biden and his supporters, this election is about rescuing democracy from the creeping authoritarianism of Donald Trump. For Trump and his supporters, this election is about continuing the “great American comeback” and fighting back Biden’s supposed “radical socialism.” However, as we enter the final stage of the election, we should be very clear what this election is actually about for the capitalists: deciding which of the candidates will be better at demoralizing and attacking the working class through the implementation of austerity.

It’s The Economy, Stupid

James Carville’s famous 1992 saying that “it’s the economy, stupid” in regards to the Bill Clinton campaign rings more true today than ever. The full impact of the current economic crisis is still unknown. What is generally understood is that Trump’s promise of a “V-shaped recovery” — a recovery where the economy recovers as fast as it crashed — is not happening. In an October 3 article, the New York Times declared that while the “pandemic depression” is over, the “pandemic recession” is beginning. 

In that article, Neil Irwin points to the deep ongoing unemployment crisis, writing, “[the jobs numbers imply] that even as public health restrictions loosen and as vaccines get closer, the overall economy is not poised for a quick snapback to pre-pandemic levels. Rather, scarring is taking place across a much wider range of sectors than the simple narrative of shutdown versus reopening suggests.”

Even this statement could be overly optimistic. In a September 30 article for the Financial Post, David Rosenberg argues that “We are in a depression — not a recession, but a depression. The dynamics of a depression are different than they are in a recession because depressions invoke a secular change in behavior. Classic business cycle recessions are forgotten about within a year after they end. The scars from this one will take years to heal.”

The current crisis is the deepest in decades as successive waves of mass layoffs have left millions without work. Indeed, many of these layoffs were due to industry-wide shutterings such as in airlines, hospitality and the arts. It is unclear if some of these jobs will ever return, adding to the scars of the crisis In addition, an untold number of small businesses have closed due to this crisis as even major corporations filed for bankruptcy. For a period during the height of the first wave of the pandemic, the capitalists were in bad shape.

This crisis isn’t just limited to the United States. In recent weeks, the New Zealand economy has shrunk more than it has any time since the Great Depression, and the European recovery has become a “summer memory,” in the words of the New York Times. In Argentina, about half the country is in poverty as Latin America experiences their worst economic contraction ever. 

In short, the impacts of the crisis are deep and on-going. Add to this the very likely fact that another shutdown could be looming on the horizon, and it becomes clear that whoever occupies the White House next will be principally tasked with addressing the economic crisis before essentially anything else. The next president will be the “Pandemic Recession President.”

Austerity on the Horizon

Given that either Trump or Biden will be charged with addressing the current crisis, it is important to understand that — on economic matters — they are largely unified. Both men support bailouts for big business and austerity for the working class. Indeed, in the current moment, the bailouts for businesses are even larger than they were in 2008, there’s been essentially no oversight on how businesses use this money, and it’s all funded with taxpayer dollars. So, essentially, the government is fleecing the working class, who are deeply struggling, in order to funnel more money to the capitalists. They will then throw up their hands about the deficit and how we need to decrease spending, and rather than stop writing corporations blank checks, they will “balance the budget” through cutting programs for the most vulnerable. 

This is what austerity is:  the government slashes government spending (almost always on social services), ostensibly in order to get out of an economic crisis. However, austerity is really just an excuse for capitalists to find ways to grow their profits through increasing exploitation of the working class. Unsurprisingly, under austerity, it is the working class and the most vulnerable who disproportionately pay the price. 

Austerity was most famously in the news during the economic crisis of 2008. Europe specifically was devastated by austerity imposed by politicians of both the Left and the Right. As an example, the United Nations expert on extreme poverty wrote a report about the impact of austerity on the UK. The report says:

It thus seems patently unjust and contrary to British values that so many people are living in poverty. This is obvious to anyone who opens their eyes to see the immense growth in foodbanks and the queues waiting outside them, the people sleeping rough in the streets, the growth of homelessness, the sense of deep despair that leads even the Government to appoint a Minister for suicide prevention and civil society to report in depth on unheard of levels of loneliness and isolation. And local authorities, especially in England, which perform vital roles in providing a real social safety net have been gutted by a series of government policies.  Libraries have closed in record numbers, community and youth centers have been shrunk and underfunded, public spaces and buildings including parks and recreation centers have been sold off.  

That’s just a taste of the wreckage that austerity brings. It destroys the social safety net in the midst of an economic crisis that plunges millions into poverty. As more and more people are thrown into precarious situations, things like health, education, and retirement become underfunded and overburdened. The results are disaster and despair. 

Both the Democrats and the Republicans are unified behind austerity. We can see this in the fact that the bailouts passed so far have bipartisan support. Another example is how, in their recent city budget, the almost entirely Democratic New York City Council voted for a devastating austerity budget. Indeed, we too soon forget that the crippling austerity that was forced upon Puerto Rico was done under Obama. 

Both Trump and Biden will oversee deep cuts to the practically non-existent social safety net of the United States. Education will be gutted, and so-called “entitlements” programs may be privatized. Any bailout money that comes will continue to be funneled into the pockets of big capital.  

Biden is the Man for the Job? 

While the race for president is far from over — and if 2016 taught us nothing else, it taught us not to call the race before it’s over — the chance of Biden taking power is seeming increasingly likely. He’s ahead by an average of 10.8% nationally and is leading in most swing states. In addition, Biden has more support among billionaires and sectors of the capitalist class than Trump does and is raising significantly more money from Wall Street than Trump.

The answer to why Biden is drawing this support from capital is clear: they think that he will be the best at implementing austerity. The rich and big businesses want to ensure that there is a smooth implementation of austerity so that they are able to continue to enrich themselves off of our labor without pushback. Their hypothesis that Biden is the man to do that certainly has precedent.

In the UK, Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair was able to continue the devastating policy of Thatcherism and use his “left” trappings to solidify it. Indeed, Blair didn’t just continue Thatcher’s austerity; he added to it. Two months after promising during the election to not introduce university tuition fees, he did — marking the first time that British universities had tuition fees since 1962. While Blair faced some pushback for his austerity, because he was a member of a supposedly left-wing party, he didn’t face nearly the amount of public pushback that Thatcher did before him. 

In the United States, Bill Clinton was able to escalate Reaganism and deepen the neoliberal offensive but faced little public backlash because, as a Democrat, he had a shield against criticism. Thomas Frank put it best when he said: “Bill Clinton was not the lesser of two evils, he was the greater of them. The magic of him being a Democrat was that he did things that Republicans could have never accomplished. Welfare reform, the crime bill, NAFTA—things that injured members of his coalition. Clinton got done what Reagan couldn’t do and what Bush couldn’t do.”  

However, we don’t just need to look to past examples to see that Biden intends to be no friend to the working class in the current crisis. Biden’s website touts his experience running the “recovery” in 2009, but for working people, there never really was a recovery. Instead, an entire generation was forced into precarious labor and crippling student debt while millions lost their homes. That is the legacy of the Obama-Biden “recovery.”  And Biden is proud to have overseen it. Obama was an austerity president, and Biden will be the same. 

Frank’s words have a disturbing resonance in the current moment. As Biden is leading a coalition that includes most of the Black Lives Matters movement, much of the organized left, and all of the progressive wing of his party, what will he be able to do with them as a shield? Capital is supporting him for a reason. What will he be able to do that Trump can’t? 

We’ve been down this road before, and we cannot go down it again. We cannot — we must not — give our faith and support to a candidate who promises his capitalist donors that “nothing [will] fundamentally change.” We are in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, and both Biden and Trump are going to ensure that there is more money for big business and more austerity for the working class. 

However, it is important to note that the current moment is very different from the 1990s. The global capitalist crisis is deeper, and years of neoliberalism have begun to polarize people to the left. Additionally, Biden’s control over his coalition is much weaker than Clinton’s was. Indeed, while the prevalence of lesser evilism is helpful for whipping votes for Biden but it does lead to a large sector of Biden’s electoral base who disagree with policies. This could result in him being in a very weak position as president as his coalition is held together by opposition to Trump, not support for Biden. All in all, the task seems much harder for Biden than it did for Blair or Clinton.

In addition, if Trump is able to pull out a win, we should be very clear that he will also bring crippling austerity. His first term has already shown him to be a tireless ally of capital — especially given that many of his policies seem intended to specifically enrich himself and his family personally — and he is already withholding aid as part of a political tactic. However, Trump’s instability is leading him to be a more erratic ally to capitalists than Biden would be. Especially in the face of both the pandemic and the uprisings against police violence over the summer, Trump showed that he was not able to calm the situation, leading to frequent crashes in the market. While it is not set in stone yet, it does seem like a growing sector of capital is done with Trump and have decided to put their eggs into Biden’s steadier basket.

To resist the coming austerity, we must mobilize and organize to resist the coming onslaught of austerity. The only way to do this is through using the power of the working class to attack the capitalists and their politicians where it hurts: we need to withhold our labor through strikes and work stoppages. The capitalists are counting on the fact that Biden will be a more stable servant of capital who will receive less resistance as president when he implements austerity. We have to prove them wrong. Biden or Trump, we must be ready to fight back every single time the capitalists try to make us pay for their crisis.  

Socialism's Increasing Popularity Doesn't Bring Media Out of McCarthy Era

By Joshua Cho

Republished from FAIR.

Ever since the Great Recession in 2008, and accelerating with Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential run, there has been a resurgence of popularity and interest in socialism in the US, and an increasing skepticism of capitalism. A 2019 Pew poll (6/25/19) reported that 42% of respondents had a favorable view of socialism, with particular sympathy shown among people who are Black (65%), Latino (52%), have family incomes below $30,000 (50%) or are between the ages of 18-29 (50%). In a 2019 Gallup survey (12/18/19), 38% saw socialism positively—more than the 34% who identify as conservatives (Gallup, 7/27/20). Gallup (11/25/19) noted that Millennials were especially attracted to socialism, with slightly more viewing socialism positively than capitalism.

Democrats across the country view socialism more positively than capitalism, with a large majority willing to vote for a socialist as president. Despite questions of what the term “socialism” means to Americans, this growing interest has provoked articles decrying the “problem” that socialism doesn’t freak out Democratic voters the way it does other Americans (Slate, 2/24/20). The Columbia Journalism Review (5/8/18) noticed that while “the radical left in the U.S. has felt invigorated in recent years,” it still hasn’t “earned left-wing voices column inches in most mainstream outlets,” with coverage limited to being “about those voices, rather than by them.”

Looking at the representation of socialism among the hundreds of pundits in corporate media, one can be forgiven for almost thinking socialist pundits don’t exist.

The New York Times opinion writer Elizabeth Bruenig appears to be the only pundit employed by corporate media who both explicitly identifies as a “socialist” and makes arguments for some form of socialism in the U.S. (Washington Post, 3/6/18).

Laurence O’Donnell, host of MSNBC’s Last Word, identifies as a “practical European socialist,” and argues that “we’re all socialists now,” because even Bill O’Reilly is in favor of “socialist programs” like Social Security and Medicare. The MSNBC host claims to “embrace” the label in order to “counterbalance” the excessive influence of McCarthyism in the U.S. (LA Times, 3/16/13), but it’s difficult to discern a distinctly socialist perspective in his commentary.

Straightforward advocacy of socialism is something you very rarely see in corporate media (Washington Post, 3/6/18).

The Hill’s Krystal Ball (2/17/19), cohost of the show Rising, criticized Trump’s remarks claiming that “America will never be a socialist country” for presenting the false dichotomy of “smash-and-grab capitalism” or “what’s happening in Venezuela.” The class-conscious commentator described Sanders and other democratic socialists like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as “messengers for a compelling message with an actual vision.” Although she seems not to explicitly embrace the “socialist” label like Bruenig or O’Donnell, it may be fair to describe her as a democratic socialist pundit, because she often speaks favorably of the ideology, and provides a friendly platform to socialists on her show.

It appears corporate media give some degree of space for pundits to call for replacing capitalism with a new system, so long as they don’t identify themselves or that new system as “socialist.” Times columnist Michelle Alexander hasn’t explicitly identified as a socialist, but has argued (6/8/20) that “transforming our economic systems” is necessary to achieve “racial justice” and a “secure and thriving democracy,” while approvingly citing figures like W.E.B. Du Bois, Albert Einstein, Hellen Keller and Paul Robeson, all of whom argued that the U.S. “must move toward some form of socialism.” The Post’s Katrina Vanden Heuvel also hasn’t called herself a socialist, but has argued (12/10/19) that “capitalism is broken,” and that we need a “new system to better serve the common good,” without describing this new system as “socialism.”

Although CNN’s Van Jones was involved in the early 1990s with Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement (STORM), a defunct Maoist Bay Area group, since 2000 or so, he’s identified with the “green capitalist” movement instead (Green America, Fall/2007).

“Socialism” itself is a very contested term, and many self-described socialists may not consider some or all of these pundits to be genuine socialists. Conservatism is also a broad range of ideologies, not all of which are consistent with each other, which also has self-identified conservatives who denounce others as unworthy or inconsistent with the label (New York Times, 1/14/15; The Hill, 12/16/19). Conservative audiences are not expected to approve of all pundits who identify as conservatives, or who speak favorably of conservatism. Likewise, while some socialists may be unsatisfied with these figures, it is still significant that there are pundits who embrace being labeled a “socialist” and explicitly call for alternatives to capitalism within the US.

Venezuelan opposition figure Juan Guaidó has remarked that “socialist” figures like Ocasio-Cortez would be considered social democrats in his own country (New Yorker, 6/10/20). The Times’ Paul Krugman (2/13/20) is no socialist, but he has criticized Bernie Sanders for presenting himself as a “socialist,” rather than a “social democrat,” making himself “an easy target for right-wing smears.”

It’s more common to see criticism of capitalism (New York Times, 12/4/17)—but still not very common.

One can find criticisms of capitalism in corporate media, but that is ideologically consistent with liberals or progressives who call for government intervention to deal with market failures. Columnists like the New York Times’ Michelle Goldberg (12/4/17), who noted that “capitalism looks like the god that failed” to young people because of the “increasingly oligarchic nature of our economy,” and the Times’ Nicholas Kristof (5/23/20), who condemned “dog-eat-dog capitalism for struggling workers and socialism for the rich,” are critics of capitalism in corporate media who aren’t necessarily calling for socialism.

Other pundits have normalized socialism by claiming it already exists in a limited form, because they conflate all government spending on social programs with socialism—not advocating for socialism so much as claiming that it already exists in the US. Thus the Times’ Roger Cohen (3/8/19) and the Post’s Catherine Rampell (3/21/19) argue that “Europe” demonstrates how “socialism and the free market are compatible,” and dismiss the capitalist/socialist dichotomy as not being a “meaningful binary,” because “all modern countries have elements of capitalism and socialism.” These pundits make arguments similar to O’Donnell’s, defending a socialism that’s hard to distinguish from liberalism, though without identifying with the label as O’Donnell does.

A few other commentators have praised socialism and defended figures who identify as socialists. MSNBC’s Chris Hayes defended Bernie Sanders from McCarthyite criticisms, and praised the Democratic Socialists of America. MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle has made remarks on-air that appear to defend democratic socialism, in addition to explaining why it is a more desirable alternative to communism (NBC News, 2/27/20). The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson has written several columns urging Democrats to embrace the party’s more progressive base (7/2/18, 7/1/19), and described “democratic socialism” as something that is “perfectly appropriate” for Ocasio-Cortez’s district, in addition to endorsing (1/15/15) Martin Luther King, Jr.’s call for “economic equality”—which King suggested could be called “democratic socialism” (In These Times, 1/15/18).

Like Hayes and Ruhle, Times’ columnists like Jamelle Bouie and Farhad Manjoo have published numerous columns that appear to praise socialism or policies associated with socialists, but that appears to be the farthest they can go, as neither of them have ever embraced the label (New York Times, 2/6/19, 2/14/19, 10/22/19, 3/11/20).

“Open advocacy of socialism is now a normal part of our political discourse,” writes the Washington Post‘s E.J. Dionne (2/10/19)—but it’s still not a normal part of our media conversation.

When socialism or socialists are discussed favorably, or at least not adversely, it’s often in opposition to revolutionary socialist ideologies like Marxism-Leninism (the official ideology of around 20% of the world’s population, and of the US’s greatest geopolitical rival). Democratic socialism is often contrasted with socialist states of the Global South, whether Communist countries like China or Vietnam, or multi-party systems like Venezuela or Nicaragua, which are frequently presented by even the left-most pundits as justifiable targets of imperialism. Instead, wealthy, predominantly white Scandinavian countries like Denmark and Norway are often upheld as the preferable socialist ideal (New York Times, 4/27/19).

Although the Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne Jr. (2/10/19) argued that Trump and the Republican Party’s attempts to tar all Democrats as “socialist” and antithetical to “American values” will fail because “open advocacy of socialism is now a normal part of our political discourse,” it’s quite clear that McCarthyism is still constricting political discourse in the US. While socialism is being discussed more often, there’s a huge disparity between its acceptance among the U.S. population and the representation of socialists among pundits at the biggest news outlets in the country. There are almost no pundits employed in corporate media who feel comfortable openly identifying as a socialist and calling for socialism as an alternative to capitalism.

Perhaps it’s no surprise that corporate media outlets owned by oligarchs and the investor class are hostile to socialism, but when socialist pundits are virtually nonexistent at these agenda-setting outlets, despite 76% of Democrats being willing to vote for a socialist, it’s clear that these institutions are intended to propagandize the U.S. population into accepting the status quo. Even when politicians and policies often described as “socialist” are presented in a positive light, the fact that these journalists are uncomfortable embracing the label is evidence that McCarthyism still exercises a formidable restraint on the U.S. political imagination and discourse.

Why is the World Going to Hell? Netflix's 'The Social Dilemma' Tells Only Half the Story

By Jonathan Cooke

Republished from the author’s blog.

If you find yourself wondering what the hell is going on right now – the “Why is the world turning to shit?” thought – you may find Netflix’s new documentary The Social Dilemma a good starting point for clarifying your thinking. I say “starting point” because, as we shall see, the film suffers from two major limitations: one in its analysis and the other in its conclusion. Nonetheless, the film is good at exploring the contours of the major social crises we currently face – epitomised both by our addiction to the mobile phone and by its ability to rewire our consciousness and our personalities.

The film makes a convincing case that this is not simply an example of old wine in new bottles. This isn’t the Generation Z equivalent of parents telling their children to stop watching so much TV and play outside. Social media is not simply a more sophisticated platform for Edward Bernays-inspired advertising. It is a new kind of assault on who we are, not just what we think.

According to The Social Dilemma, we are fast reaching a kind of human “event horizon”, with our societies standing on the brink of collapse. We face what several interviewees term an “existential threat” from the way the internet, and particularly social media, are rapidly developing.

I don’t think they are being alarmist. Or rather I think they are right to be alarmist, even if their alarm is not entirely for the right reasons. We will get to the limitations in their thinking in a moment.

Like many documentaries of this kind, The Social Dilemma is deeply tied to the shared perspective of its many participants. In most cases, they are richly disillusioned, former executives and senior software engineers from Silicon Valley. They understand that their once-cherished creations – Google, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Instagram, Snapchat (WhatsApp seems strangely under-represented in the roll call) – have turned into a gallery of Frankenstein’s monsters.

That is typified in the plaintive story of the guy who helped invent the “Like” button for Facebook. He thought his creation would flood the world with the warm glow of brother and sisterhood, spreading love like a Coca Cola advert. In fact, it ended up inflaming our insecurities and need for social approval, and dramatically pushed up rates of suicide among teenage girls.

If the number of watches of the documentary is any measure, disillusion with social media is spreading far beyond its inventors.

Children as guinea pigs

Although not flagged as such, The Social Dilemma divides into three chapters.

The first, dealing with the argument we are already most familiar with, is that social media is a global experiment in altering our psychology and social interactions, and our children are the main guinea pigs. Millennials (those who came of age in the 2000s) are the first generation that spent their formative years with Facebook and MySpace as best friends. Their successors, Generation Z, barely know a world without social media at its forefront.

The film makes a relatively easy case forcefully: that our children are not only addicted to their shiny phones and what lies inside the packaging, but that their minds are being aggressively rewired to hold their attention and then make them pliable for corporations to sell things.

Each child is not just locked in a solitary battle to stay in control of his or her mind against the skills of hundreds of the world’s greatest software engineers. The fight to change their perspective and ours – the sense of who we are – is now in the hands of algorithms that are refined every second of every day by AI, artificial intelligence. As one interviewee observes, social media is not going to become less expert at manipulating our thinking and emotions, it’s going to keep getting much, much better at doing it.

Jaron Lanier, one of the computing pioneers of virtual reality, explains what Google and the rest of these digital corporations are really selling: “It’s the gradual, slight, imperceptible change in your own behaviour and perception – that is the product.” That is also how these corporations make their money, by “changing what you do, what you think, who you are.”

They make profits, big profits, from the predictions business – predicting what you will think and how you will behave so that you are more easily persuaded to buy what their advertisers want to sell you. To have great predictions, these corporations have had to amass vast quantities of data on each of us – what is sometimes called “surveillance capitalism”.

And, though the film does not quite spell it out, there is another implication. The best formula for tech giants to maximise their predictions is this: as well as processing lots of data on us, they must gradually grind down our distinctiveness, our individuality, our eccentricities so that we become a series of archetypes. Then, our emotions – our fears, insecurities, desires, cravings – can be more easily gauged, exploited and plundered by advertisers.

These new corporations trade in human futures, just as other corporations have long traded in oil futures and pork-belly futures, notes Shoshana Zuboff, professor emeritus at Harvard business school. Those markets “have made the internet companies the richest companies in the history of humanity”.

Flat Earthers and Pizzagate

The second chapter explains that, as we get herded into our echo chambers of self-reinforcing information, we lose more and more sense of the real world and of each other. With it, our ability to empathise and compromise is eroded. We live in different information universes, chosen for us by algorithms whose only criterion is how to maximise our attention for advertisers’ products to generate greater profits for the internet giants.

Anyone who has spent any time on social media, especially a combative platform like Twitter, will sense that there is a truth to this claim. Social cohesion, empathy, fair play, morality are not in the algorithm. Our separate information universes mean we are increasingly prone to misunderstanding and confrontation.

And there is a further problem, as one interviewee states: “The truth is boring.” Simple or fanciful ideas are easier to grasp and more fun. People prefer to share what’s exciting, what’s novel, what’s unexpected, what’s shocking. “It’s a disinformation-for-profit model,” as another interviewee observes, stating that research shows false information is six times more likely to spread on social media platforms than true information.

And as governments and politicians work more closely with these tech companies – a well-documented fact the film entirely fails to explore – our rulers are better positioned than ever to manipulate our thinking and control what we do. They can dictate the political discourse more quickly, more comprehensively, more cheaply than ever before.

This section of the film, however, is the least successful. True, our societies are riven by increasing polarisation and conflict, and feel more tribal. But the film implies that all forms of social tension – from the paranoid paedophile conspiracy theory of Pizzagate to the Black Lives Matter protests – are the result of social media’s harmful influence.

And though it is easy to know that Flat Earthers are spreading misinformation, it is far harder to be sure what is true and what is false in many others areas of life. Recent history suggests our yardsticks cannot be simply what governments say is true – or Mark Zuckerberg, or even “experts”. It may be a while since doctors were telling us that cigarettes were safe, but millions of Americans were told only a few years ago that opiates would help them – until an opiate addiction crisis erupted across the US.

This section falls into making a category error of the kind set out by one of the interviewees early in the film. Despite all the drawbacks, the internet and social media have an undoubted upside when used simply as a tool, argues Tristan Harris, Google’s former design ethicist and the soul of the film. He gives the example of being able to hail a cab almost instantly at the press of a phone button. That, of course, highlights something about the materialist priorities of most of Silicon Valley’s leading lights.

But the tool box nestled in our phones, full of apps, does not just satisfy our craving for material comfort and security. It has also fuelled a craving to understand the world and our place in it, and offered tools to help us do that.

Phones have made it possible for ordinary people to film and share scenes once witnessed by only a handful of disbelieved passers-by. We can all see for ourselves a white police officer dispassionately kneeling on the neck of a black man for nine minutes, while the victim cries out he cannot breathe, until he expires. And we can then judge the values and priorities of our leaders when they decide to do as little as possible to prevent such incidents occurring again.

The internet has created a platform from which not only disillusioned former Silicon Valley execs can blow the whistle on what the Mark Zuckerbergs are up to, but so can a US army private like Chelsea Manning, by exposing war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, and so can a national security tech insider like Edward Snowden, by revealing the way we are being secretly surveilled by our own governments.

Technological digital breakthroughs allowed someone like Julian Assange to set up a site, Wikileaks, that offered us a window on the real political world – a window through we could see our leaders behaving more like psychopaths than humanitarians. A window those same leaders are now fighting tooth and nail to close by putting him on trial.

A small window on reality

The Social Dilemma ignores all of this to focus on the dangers of so-called “fake news”. It dramatises a scene suggesting that only those sucked into information blackholes and conspiracy sites end up taking to the street to protest – and when they do, the film hints, it will not end well for them.

Apps allowing us to hail a taxi or navigate our way to a destination are undoubtedly useful tools. But being able to find out what our leaders are really doing – whether they are committing crimes against others or against us – is an even more useful tool. In fact, it is a vital one if we want to stop the kind of self-destructive behaviours The Social Dilemma is concerned about, not least our destruction of the planet’s life systems (an issue that, except for one interviewee’s final comment, the film leaves untouched).

Use of social media does not mean one necessarily loses touch with the real world. For a minority, social media has deepened their understanding of reality. For those tired of having the real world mediated for them by a bunch of billionaires and traditional media corporations, the chaotic social media platforms have provided an opportunity to gain insights into a reality that was obscured before.

The paradox, of course, is that these new social media corporations are no less billionaire-owned, no less power-hungry, no less manipulative than the old media corporations. The AI algorithms they are rapidly refining are being used – under the rubric of “fake news” – to drive out this new marketplace in whistleblowing, in citizen journalism, in dissident ideas.

Social media corporations are quickly getting better at distinguishing the baby from the bathwater, so they can throw out the baby. After all, like their forebears, the new media platforms are in the business of business, not of waking us up to the fact that they are embedded in a corporate world that has plundered the planet for profit.

Much of our current social polarisation and conflict is not, as The Social Dilemma suggests, between those influenced by social media’s “fake news” and those influenced by corporate media’s “real news”. It is between, on the one hand, those who have managed to find oases of critical thinking and transparency in the new media and, on the other, those trapped in the old media model or those who, unable to think critically after a lifetime of consuming corporate media, have been easily and profitably sucked into nihilistic, online conspiracies.

Our mental black boxes

The third chapter gets to the nub of the problem without indicating exactly what that nub is. That is because The Social Dilemma cannot properly draw from its already faulty premises the necessary conclusion to indict a system in which the Netflix corporation that funded the documentary and is televising it is so deeply embedded itself.

For all its heart-on-its-sleeve anxieties about the “existential threat” we face as a species, The Social Dilemma is strangely quiet about what needs to change – aside from limiting our kids’ exposure to Youtube and Facebook. It is a deflating ending to the rollercoaster ride that preceded it.

Here I want to backtrack a little. The film’s first chapter makes it sound as though social media’s rewiring of our brains to sell us advertising is something entirely new. The second chapter treats our society’s growing loss of empathy, and the rapid rise in an individualistic narcissism, as something entirely new. But very obviously neither proposition is true.

Advertisers have been playing with our brains in sophisticated ways for at least a century. And social atomisation – individualism, selfishness and consumerism – have been a feature of western life for at least as long. These aren’t new phenomena. It’s just that these long-term, negative aspects of western society are growing exponentially, at a seemingly unstoppable rate.

We’ve been heading towards dystopia for decades, as should be obvious to anyone who has been tracking the lack of political urgency to deal with climate change since the problem became obvious to scientists back in the 1970s.

The multiple ways in which we are damaging the planet – destroying forests and natural habitats, pushing species towards extinction, polluting the air and water, melting the ice-caps, generating a climate crisis – have been increasingly evident since our societies turned everything into a commodity that could be bought and sold in the marketplace. We began on the slippery slope towards the problems highlighted by The Social Dilemma the moment we collectively decided that nothing was sacred, that nothing was more sacrosanct than our desire to turn a quick buck.

It is true that social media is pushing us towards an event horizon. But then so is climate change, and so is our unsustainable global economy, premised on infinite growth on a finite planet. And, more importantly, these profound crises are all arising at the same time.

There is a conspiracy, but not of the Pizzagate variety. It is an ideological conspiracy, of at least two centuries’ duration, by a tiny and ever more fabulously wealth elite to further enrich themselves and to maintain their power, their dominance, at all costs.

There is a reason why, as Harvard business professor Shoshana Zuboff points out, social media corporations are the most fantastically wealthy in human history. And that reason is also why we are reaching the human “event horizon” these Silicon Valley luminaries all fear, one where our societies, our economies, the planet’s life-support systems are all on the brink of collapse together.

The cause of that full-spectrum, systemic crisis is not named, but it has a name. Its name is the ideology that has become a black box, a mental prison, in which we have become incapable of imagining any other way of organising our lives, any other future than the one we are destined for at the moment. That ideology’s name is capitalism.

Waking up from the matrix

Social media and the AI behind it are one of the multiple crises we can no longer ignore as capitalism reaches the end of a trajectory it has long been on. The seeds of neoliberalism’s current, all-too-obvious destructive nature were planted long ago, when the “civilised”, industrialised west decided its mission was to conquer and subdue the natural world, when it embraced an ideology that fetishised money and turned people into objects to be exploited.

A few of the participants in The Social Dilemma allude to this in the last moments of the final chapter. The difficulty they have in expressing the full significance of the conclusions they have drawn from two decades spent in the most predatory corporations the world has ever known could be because their minds are still black boxes, preventing them from standing outside the ideological system they, like us, were born into. Or it could be because coded language is the best one can manage if a corporate platform like Netflix is going to let a film like this one reach a mass audience.

Tristan Harris tries to articulate the difficulty by grasping for a movie allusion: “How do you wake up from the matrix when you don’t know you’re in the matrix?” Later, he observes: “What I see is a bunch of people who are trapped by a business model, an economic incentive, shareholder pressure that makes it almost impossible to do something else.”

Although still framed in Harris’s mind as a specific critique of social media corporations, this point is very obviously true of all corporations, and of the ideological system – capitalism – that empowers all these corporations.

Another interviewee notes: “I don’t think these guys [the tech giants] set out to be evil, it’s just the business model.”

He is right. But “evilness” – the psychopathic pursuit of profit above all other values – is the business model for all corporations, not just the digital ones.

The one interviewee who manages, or is allowed, to connect the dots is Justin Rosenstein, a former engineer for Twitter and Google. He eloquently observes:

We live in a world in which a tree is worth more, financially, dead than alive. A world in which a whale is worth more dead than alive. For so long as our economy works in that way, and corporations go unregulated, they’re going to continue to destroy trees, to kill whales, to mine the earth, and to continue to pull oil out of the ground, even though we know it is destroying the planet and we know it is going to leave a worse world for future generations.

This is short-term thinking based on this religion of profit at all costs. As if somehow, magically, each corporation acting in its selfish interest is going to produce the best result. … What’s frightening – and what hopefully is the last straw and will make us wake up as a civilisation as to how flawed this theory is in the first place – is to see that now we are the tree, we are the whale. Our attention can be mined. We are more profitable to a corporation if we’re spending time staring at a screen, staring at an ad, than if we’re spending our time living our life in a rich way.

Here is the problem condensed. That unnamed “flawed theory” is capitalism. The interviewees in the film arrived at their alarming conclusion – that we are on the brink of social collapse, facing an “existential threat” – because they have worked inside the bellies of the biggest corporate beasts on the planet, like Google and Facebook.

These experiences have provided most of these Silicon Valley experts with deep, but only partial, insight. While most of us view Facebook and Youtube as little more than places to exchange news with friends or share a video, these insiders understand much more. They have seen up close the most powerful, most predatory, most all-devouring corporations in human history.

Nonetheless, most of them have mistakenly assumed that their experiences of their own corporate sector apply only to their corporate sector. They understand the “existential threat” posed by Facebook and Google without extrapolating to the identical existential threats posed by Amazon, Exxon, Lockheed Martin, Halliburton, Goldman Sachs and thousands more giant, soulless corporations.

The Social Dilemma offers us an opportunity to sense the ugly, psychopathic face shielding behind the mask of social media’s affability. But for those watching carefully the film offers more: a chance to grasp the pathology of the system itself that pushed these destructive social media giants into our lives.