The Peru Protests and U.S. Infiltration of the Left

Pictured: Supporters of Pedro Castillo, the ousted president of Peru, protest in front of police in downtown Lima on Friday, Dec. 16, 2022. (Marco Garro/The New York Times)

By Kidus Desta

Peru has made international news in the past few months after thousands of citizens — many being indigenous and traveling from rural regions — began protesting in the capital city of Lima. Their main demand is the resignation of President Dina Boluarte, who stepped into power after former president Pedro Castillo was ousted from office and imprisoned. Castillo’s removal and imprisonment was the result of his attempt to dissolve the right-wing Congress.

Boluarte has said she will not step down until the next election. This sparked controversy since the next election is not until April 2024 and many see Boluarte as an unfit representative who betrayed Castillo, her party, and the Peruvian people. In addition to Boluarte’s resignation, many protesters are demanding Castillo’s release and changes to the nation’s constitution, which they say grants Congress too much power over the executive branch.

This concern is partly why Castillo ran on creating a new constitution as president. But fulfilling that campaign promise would require the formation of a constituent assembly, which Congress blocked. Some protesters therefore see the need to dissolve Congress so that the process of drafting a new foundational document can commence.

Peru’s current constitution was created under the far-right regime of Alberto Fujimori and is deeply informed by his capitalist politics. The constitution, for example, made it harder to tax gold and copper mines. Some hope that a constituent assembly will pave the way for a new constitutional framework that expands the state’s role in the economy and allows for more taxation on mining to fund social programs that indigenous and rural communities need. 

These communities have long felt disenfranchised. Despite comprising 26% of Peru’s population, indigenous Peruvians — the rural voices of the Andes — hold just 6.92% of federal congressional seats. Hailing from the Peruvian countryside, where he formerly worked as a schoolteacher, Castillo understood the grievances of rural and indigenous Peruvians and tried to address them as president. Boluarte and her government have gone in the opposite direction, ignoring calls to convene a constituent assembly by these marginalized groups who desire a constitution that works for them.

The Boluarte administration’s approach to governance has incited widespread outrage, with 71% of Peruvians disapproving of the president’s job performance. This sentiment — along with disapproval of Congress, which sits at 88% — lays at the heart of the current protest wave. In response, the Boluarte regime has used police repression as a means to retain power. This state violence has killed at least 53 people with the youngest being just 15 years old.

Despite the reprehensible actions of their government, the Peruvian people are firmly on the side of the protesters. According to the Institute of Peruvian Studies, 60% believe the protests are justified. An identical number agree with the central demand to free Castillo and a whopping 69% want a constituent assembly. Meanwhile, only 12% believe in keeping the constitution as is — down from 19% in June 2022. 

During the protests, conservative groups have come together to counter-protest. These counter-protests have been met with skepticism because of their initial backing by the national police, who promoted the “March For Peace” on social media and asked people to attend. Attendees included conservative politicians like far-right congressman Alejandro Muñante as well as retired military and police.

Due to the United States’ history of meddling in Latin America, many are questioning whether the superpower has a hand in the recent events in Peru. Peru — after all — has abundant natural resources including minerals like copper, lead, zinc, tin, silver, and gold. Copper has become an especially important resource in recent years due to its use in energy technology, with Goldman Sachs calling it the “new oil.”

Under Castillo’s presidency, the exploitative nature of neoliberalism was challenged by his demand that these resources benefit the people of Peru. Castillo believed that Peru’s resource endowment could help fund social programs that materially improve people’s lives. But efforts to undermine this vision may have been well underway even before Castillo left office. The day before he was ousted, Lisa Kenna — US ambassador to Peru and veteran of the CIA — met with Peru’s defense minister, “who then told the country’s powerful military to turn against Castillo.” On January 18th, Kenna held a meeting with mining and energy ministers from the Boluarte regime to discuss “investments” — a euphemism for expanding the extractive reach of Western multinationals.

In a stunning betrayal of values, Boluarte has gone from leading an anti-imperialist, anti-neoliberal party to overseeing a regime which serves imperialist and neoliberal interests. Such a betrayal has precedent in Latin America. In 2016, President Dilma Rousseff of Brazil was impeached and replaced by her vice president Michel Temer. Temer's vision of a pro-business economy contradicted Rouseff’s plans to bolster social programs.

During a conference at the Americas Society/Council of the Americas, in a speech addressed to “members of multinational corporations and the U.S. foreign policy establishment,” Temer admitted that this impeachment occurred so that he may be installed as president to cut social programs and privatize industry. This squares with Temer’s history as a US informant and aspiring challenger to Lula in Brazil’s 2006 presidential race.

As with Temer, Boluarte’s turn against her own party is primarily an act of opportunism. By siding with the far-right Congress and its imperialist allies, Boluarte has increased the odds of retaining her position of power. This unholy trinity shows how capitalist powers like the United States can undermine leftist movements in the Global South from within.

Kidus Desta is a Hampton Institute intern and undergraduate studying political science and economics at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Hegemonic Silence and the Nuclear Question

By Marcus Kahn

Imagine a NASA rocket loaded with astronauts reaches another galaxy. They find a planet inhabited by billions of advanced sentient beings and begin to observe them from above. The scientists learn that these beings, delineated into warring factions, have developed a technology capable of destroying their world hundreds of times over, and have set those weapons up in such a way that not only can they be launched at a moment’s notice and detonated within minutes, but are also prone to error and entail massive risk. But when the scientists tune in to the planet’s communications, conversational and broadcasted, they become deeply perplexed. The inhabitants barely speak of the suicidal threat they pose to themselves. They hardly seem to be thinking about it. This is the conundrum posed by nuclear weapons. 

How can such extreme potentialities lie largely unquestioned and undiscussed? 

The term socialization captures our gravitation to conformity, how we acquire norms through the pressures of our environment. That first day of school is scary and unfamiliar, but by the time you reach high school you are sitting and getting up according to a bell schedule without a second thought. Indoctrination adds in a directional quality; socialization that occurs along the contours of norms prescribed by dominant forces, to be internalized and replicated as unconscious obedience. By the time you graduate high school, you have received a social science education that has prepared you to support the status quo. Both terms ring true.  It may be human to err, but in an imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy it is human to normalize the unconscionable and transmute it into a commonsense assumption. The comprehensiveness of this process is most evident in our apparent equanimity to the prospect of complete annihilation, in our hegemonic silence. 

The boundaries of debate around nuclear weapons are closely gatekept by the state, ostensibly in the interests of security. Information on oscillations in the nuclear weapons threat is classified, reserved for state actors with adequate clearance who distribute updates to select media outlets, if not directly to the public. What the public receives is highly filtered. 

The Kennedy administration’s public narrative around the Cuban Missile Crisis crystallized into typical presidential hagiography in the intervening sixty years despite being thoroughly contradicted by subsequent academic research (pro tip: don’t record everything you say in the Oval Office if you want to deceive the American public in perpetuity).   The visual trope of a mushroom clouds in a cartoon is more familiar than the destruction and confusion on the ground in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Our imagination lacks essential context when it comes to conceptualizing the nuclear threat. 

However, even in a coherent and powerful doctrinal system, dissent and counter-narratives can slip through chinks in the institutional armor. Much like the scientific consensus around climate change, members of the scientific community have stepped outside the invisible boundaries of dominant system-supportive narratives. But these boundaries can be ideologically policed. In the 1980s, Carl Sagan published a study alongside a group of well-reputed scientists that argued even a limited nuclear war would lead to a catastrophic nuclear winter. Because their conclusions would have galvanized the peace movement and altered public perception of nuclear war planning, the scientists were subsequently marginalized and their work dismissed.  

These narrative trends skew public perception away towards deterrence strategies and away from a critical abolitionist stance. New York Times columnist David Brooks, during an uncharacteristic foray into epistemology, unknowingly identifies the scope of a doctrinal system in an article titled “How to Destroy Truth.” Brooks argues that “propositional knowledge” that “we acquire through reason, logical proof, and tight analysis” constitutes one of two reservoirs of collective knowledge. This body of knowledge is produced by “a network of institutions — universities, courts, publishers, professional societies, media outlets — that have set up an interlocking set of procedures to hunt for error, weigh evidence and determine which propositions pass muster.” To read between the lines, Brooks implicitly argues that powerful institutions determine the nature of truth in modern society. That which “passes muster” is legitimized, and if broadly accepted, eventually internalized within the canon of collective assumptions.

A Beginner's Guide to Bank Failures

By Ahjamu Umi

Republished from Hood Communist.

According to a February 2023 Federal Deposit and Insurance Corporation (FDIC) audit, 563 U.S. banks have failed and/or come under regulatory authority since 2021. Here in California, U.S., the latest casualty has been the Silicon Valley Bank (SVB). This latest rash of bank failures, especially within the software start up SVB, have alarmed apologists for capitalism all over the world. With this piece, we are hopeful we can bring some fundamental understanding of “bank failure” and what’s happening for everyday working people.

First, it should be explained that the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) is an institution of the U.S. federal government. It exists to provide some level of guarantees against bank failure. They do this by regulating banks, auditing them, and insuring bank deposits for up to $250,000 USD (aggregate deposits per institution). 

What Does This Mean?

Let’s say for example, you have $275,000 in liquid asset deposits in any U.S. bank. If that bank fails and/or comes under FDIC jurisdiction, your deposits for up to $250,000 are insured by the federal government, meaning the government should issue you a check for that amount. The remaining $25.000 in deposits that you had in the failed bank makes you now a creditor for that bank. This means they owe you that money, just as you owe your credit card companies, car finance institutions, etc.

Of course, like any creditor/borrower relationship, your ability to get repayment has no guarantee. The bank can come under bankruptcy protection, etc., which means you would lose all or most of that $25,000 in this hypothetical example. But that is a fundamental definition of the role of the FDIC. It’s worth noting that credit unions are governed by the National Credit Union Administration (NCUA), which serves the same general purpose for credit unions that the FDIC serves for banks, including insuring deposits for up to an aggregate $250,000 per customer/member per institution.

It’s important to also note that the FDIC was formed in 1933 as a result of the Banking Act legislation. This happened four years after the great stock market crash of 1929 which means the FDIC was created as a vehicle to encourage renewed trust in the U.S. banking system. It’s that question of trust that provides the basis for creating a simple way of analyzing and understanding what is happening with banks within the capitalist system and how to interpret these bank failures.

The Origins of the Banking System 

Contrary to popular opinion, the international banking system, and the concept of capital as the foundation of that system, did not start from the creative and intellectual genius of the fathers of the capitalist system. Instead, the start up capital for the international banking system came directly from proceeds produced from the enslavement of kidnapped Africans. The labor of their work was converted to revenues that were invested to initiate the banking system and the capital it would rely on to facilitate its existence. Every large international bank today from Chase to Barclays owes its origins to this nefarious beginning. If we understand and accept this irrefutable history, it should be easy to understand that the capitalist banking system, from its beginning, has been about exploitation and its that reality that paves the way for greater understanding of what’s happening today.

How Banks Work 

Banks operate by taking your deposits, no matter how large or small, and investing those deposits to generate capital. The more money you have to deposit, the greater incentives the banks provide you for doing so, for example: no fees, more services, slightly higher dividends (returns on your deposits), etc. Whether you have $250,000 deposited in a bank, or $25, the process works the same. Your money is used by the bank to invest in any number of financial projects designed to provide a positive return for the bank on your deposit. For the overwhelming majority of us, this is done with little to no return to you. 

Let’s say you have a job where your paycheck is directly deposited into your bank account every two weeks, say $2500 twice per month, and from each check you have $300 automatically transferred into your savings account. That means you are saving $600 USD per month. You will receive next to nothing for that money sitting and growing in that bank, but the bank will use your deposits and invest them in any number of profit generating projects— primarily exploitative projects around the world because those types of investments are the best suited to produce the highest return on the dollar. Think exploitative companies that steal resources from Africa for example. Companies like Dutch Royal Shell (Shell Oil) rob Nigeria’s Niger Delta blind drilling for oil. There is no oversight and the workers are paid peanuts. As a result, Shell’s profits continue to break records. Well, a bank will invest in Shell’s stocks and profit from Shell’s theft of resources from Nigeria. As Shell’s profits grow, the bank’s profits grow. And, by profits we mean capital i.e. money the bank earns that serves the sole and specific purpose of being reinvested for additional profits.

That’s why when the capitalist commentators talk about most U.S. banks being “well capitalized” they are actually telling the truth. These banks have millions of dollars – dollars they made investing your deposits – sitting around ready for them to invest to make even greater profits. Meanwhile, you get slim to nothing from them using your money and you will even be penalized if you come upon rough times and cannot maintain the minimum requirements they demand to keep your account(s) going. They have to make those demands of you because if your money isn’t available to them, they have nothing to invest and profit off of it. If you think about it, the banking model is basically the same as someone coming to you, taking your paycheck when you cash it, using your money to make additional money from it, and just returning to you what they took from you in the first place. And, if they are unable to get a return on your paycheck, they are usually supported by the government in their financial challenges while you are left to figure out how to proceed on your own with no help or support.

Silicon Valley Bank & Banks Playing With Your Money

That’s still not even the full story. Besides the example of investing in the exploitative practices of Shell and other criminal multi-national exploitative capitalist corporations, the banks invest heavily into shady and high risk ventures like securities from the secondary market. These types of investments are often bundled high risk mortgage loans, meaning loans provided to buyers who’s repayment potential is questionable, but who agreed to repayment terms at much higher, and profitable, interest rates. These types of unscrupulous business practices by banks have resulted in devastating consequences, such as the 2008 mortgage crash in the U.S. where everyday consumers were left houseless while the banks were bailed out by the 2009 multi-billion dollar gangster deal – compliments of the Obama Administration – one of the most lucrative welfare schemes in human history, recently eclipsed by the $2.2 trillion CARES Act of 2020. As it relates to banks like the Silicon Valley Bank in Santa Clara, California, U.S., the same principles apply. This bank was the home for software startup companies who invested incredible sums of money in highly questionable ventures for most of its 40 year existence. As has been alluded to, this has always been the program of capitalist banks, but in recent years we are seeing the limitations of this strategy much easier because the decline of capitalism has created conditions where the once assumed stability of capitalist banks is now more and more in question. 

Let the Banks Fall While We Rise  

This is a reality that will continue to create hardship for millions of people worldwide, but in the long run, this also has the potential to represent a new day for the masses of humanity where capital no longer controls the narrative everywhere on earth. There are a lot of variables to unpack in order to create that reality, but for now, the best thing all of us can do is engage every effort that we can to educate our communities about the role of banking institutions to profit from our continued exploitation and how the system is set up to support their existence, while making us the main source of accountability for ourselves and their greedy exploitative practices. This problem, like every other problem we face, cannot be resolved through any level of individual initiative. It cannot be resolved by any other approach to stabilizing the capitalist system. This problem is a reflection of the exploitative basis from which capitalism developed hundreds of years ago and it’s simply a manifestation that this profit over people model of operation is existing in its final days. This may be a scary thought to many, but at the end of the day, Kwame Ture was 100% correct when he said that “if we don’t struggle for revolution, we suffer so why don’t we organize and take the suffering as a pathway to our liberation and forward progress instead of just continuing to suffer with no end in sight?”  Capitalist banks are viewed as vehicles to provide us with houses, cars, loans, etc. What they are in reality is a criminal operation that is 100% supported by the U.S. government which is nothing more than a mouthpiece for international capitalism. The sooner we can do the necessary work to create broader consciousness around this, the sooner we can reclaim the resources that rightfully belong, not to a small and criminal elite, but  to the masses of people on earth. 

Ahjamu Umi is revolutionary organizer with the All African People's Revolutionary Party, adviser, and liberation literature author.

Corporate Personhood, Monopoly Capital, and the Precedent That Wasn't: The 1886 "Santa Clara" Case

By Curry Malott

Republished from Liberation School.

Editor’s note: Beginning with overturning Roe v. Wade, the ultra right-wing Supreme Court continues to attack hard-won and elementary democratic rights in the United States, from affirmative action to the Indian Child Welfare Act. The following article is the third in our series “Crimes of the Supreme Court,” which demonstrates the fundamentally reactionary and anti-democratic nature of the Supreme Court. By examining key decisions in the Court’s history, we explain their historical and political context, the legal concepts and frameworks used to justify their decisions, and lay out their implications for later cases. This entry focuses on an 1886 Supreme Court ruling that is often cited as the precedent guaranteeing corporations the same protections as “natural persons,” although it did no such thing. Nonetheless, this case and several preceding ones demonstrated how the struggle for corporate personhood—particularly under the “Equal Protection Clause” of the 14th Amendment—was intimately bound up in the transition to U.S. monopoly capitalism.

How do the actual people in charge of corporations manage to remain protected from the consequences of the countless crimes they commit year after year? How is it that when CEOs make clear and obvious decisions that habitually violate every existing worker-won regulation, from the Clean Air Act to the Civil Rights Act, with very few exceptions, they charge the corporation—the “artificial” or “unnatural” person—instead of the CEO—the actual, “natural person” who made those decisions?

The legal grounds that corporations have the same protections and rights as “natural persons” is commonly justified by the 1886 Supreme Court ruling in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company. As we’ll see, the Court’s decision in the case didn’t establish any precedent for corporate personhood, nor did the Court make any ruling on it. To the extent that the Supreme Court even debated “artificial,” “corporate,” and other kinds of personhood, they did so to facilitate the transition from “free competition” to monopoly capitalism in the country.

In this article, we explore the Santa Clara case before turning to debates within the institutions of power in the U.S. over the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. These debates can only be understood if situated within their historical, political, and economic context: the transition to monopoly capital in the U.S. To conclude, we explore the case’s destructive legacy, or the way it was illegitimately used to set precedent for the growth of monopoly capital.

The facts and outcome of the case

During the 1878-79 California Constitutional Convention, the state enacted a new tax code that, in part, prevented railroad corporations from factoring existing debts and mortgages into their total taxable value. The Southern Pacific Railroad Company, along with the Central Pacific Railroad Company, refused to follow the new code. They did not pay the additional tax, nor did they pay the back taxes they subsequently owed.

The first point of contention were back taxes—including the interest on them—that railroad companies refused to pay in California, specifically the taxes being levied on the fencing along the railroads’ right-of-way. Among the handful of complaints brought forth, lawyers representing the railroads argued that it was the county and not the state that should have assessed the value of the fencing. As Thom Hartmann points out, “the railroad was refusing to pay taxes of about $30,000,” which is “like having a $10,000 car and refusing to pay a $10 tax on it—and taking the case to the Supreme Court” [1].

Faced with the loss of revenue, a number of counties in California, including San Mateo County, filed suit against the railroad companies in an attempt to collect the taxes that the railroads refused to pay. According to Southern Pacific’s executives, they were being treated unfairly relative to “legal” or “natural” persons who could deduct debts and mortgages from their taxable income or value. The cases were consolidated before reaching the California Supreme Court, which ruled mostly in favor of the counties and against the railroad companies. The one exception concerned the fences constructed around the railroads. The Court affirmed that the fences “were improperly included by the State Board in its assessments” and, as a result, there was no legal basis for the counties to collect additional taxes [2].

The origins of corporate personhood?

Interestingly, however, the Santa Clara decision is rarely remembered for the issue of taxation and, more specifically, the role of railroad monopolies, and is instead mostly cited as the first instance of the Supreme Court upholding “corporate personhood.”

One of the railroad’s defenses at the Supreme Court hearing included arguing that the “Equal Protection Clause” of the 14th Amendment applied to corporations, so therefore the state couldn’t tax them differently from other citizens. Yet this was only a minor point among the six arguments presented by the railroads.

Moreover, it seems Chief Justice Morrison Waite quickly dismissed the argument in the case by stating that it is a general, agreed upon principle that the clause applies to corporations.  According to the ruling’s “headnote,” Waite stated the Court would not even consider “whether the provision in the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does” [3].

Did the Supreme Court, then, establish a legal precedent that corporations have the same legal protections as natural persons? Despite the Supreme Court citing it as precedent for a century, and despite that it was routinely taught to law students as precedent, the ruling did no such thing.

Waite’s comment above was not part of the official ruling. Instead, it was included in a headnote written by the Court’s Reporter of Decisions, journalist J.C. Bancroft Davis, former president of the Newburgh and New York Railway Company. Headnotes are introductory summaries of cases added to Court rulings to make it easier for legal professionals and others to sift through cases.

Headnotes, therefore, are not legally-binding and hold no legal authority. It wasn’t until the 1906 ruling in United States v. Detroit Lumber Co. that the Supreme Court officially ruled in its majority opinion that headnotes aren’t part of the Court’s rulings or findings. As then-Chief Justice David Brewer wrote, “the headnote is not the work of the court, nor does it state its decision… it is simply the work of the reporter, gives his understanding of the decision, and is prepared for the convenience of the profession in the examination of the reports” [4]. This, however, hasn’t prevented the U.S. courts in general, and the Supreme Court in particular, from citing the headnote as precedent.

The headnote is significant in a few ways. First, the report of Waite’s comments didn’t include any legal or constitutional justification; it was a mere assertion. As a result, since 1886 the status of corporations as “people” protected under the Constitution has been a source of controversy. Moreover, “the concept of the corporate person lacks a principled definition and, therefore, seems to expand, or contract, depending on the circumstances and on the personal predilections of the speaker” [5].

The headnote is especially significant because of Waite’s sweeping acceptance that corporations are protected by the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. This differs from a previous Court ruling in the 1873 Slaughterhouse Cases that made their way to the U.S. Supreme Court after an 1869 Louisiana legislature decision to issue a charter confining slaughterhouse operations in New Orleans to a single corporate entity, the Crescent City Live-Stock Landing and Slaughter-House Company.

Crescent City’s charter required the company to run its waste downstream, ordered other slaughterhouses, most of which were much smaller, to close, and forbid the establishment of any new slaughterhouses in the area for the next 25 years. In effect, the legislature produced a monopoly on slaughterhouses for the time period. This meant that all workers, including butchers, had to work for Crescent or find work elsewhere. As a result, hundreds of members of the Butchers’ Benevolent Association, which represented smaller or independent slaughterhouses, filed suit in the Louisiana Supreme Court on the basis that the monopoly violated the 13th and 14th Amendments by forcing butchers into “involuntary servitude” and taking away their property without compensation or due process.

When the U.S. Supreme Court took up the cases, the majority opinion explicitly stated that the Amendments did not apply in this instance. The dissenting opinion by Justice Stephen Field proposed a broad definition of the Amendments at stake, one that would become more expansive as the overthrow of Reconstruction solidified. The crucial issue, he stated, was “whether the recent amendments to the Federal Constitution protect the citizens of the United States against the deprivation of their common rights by State legislation.” Field closed the dissenting opinion by asserting that the 14th Amendment applies to corporations and monopolies. He wrote that the Amendment “does afford such protection, and was so intended by the Congress which framed and the States which adopted it” [6].

Between his time on California’s Ninth Circuit Court and the Supreme Court, “Field worked tirelessly to expand the 14th Amendment to include the rights of corporations.” He was driven by careerism and a desire to reach the country’s highest court and maybe even the presidency “with the support of railroad money” [7].

In his dissenting opinion in a related railroad case, Fields expressed his outrage that the Court was neglecting the crucial question, which was if “an unlawful and unjust discrimination was made . . . and to that extent depriving it of the equal protection of the laws” [8].

Whether or not the original drafters of the post-Civil War amendments explicitly considered if and how the 14th Amendment—or the 13th— could apply to corporations or any group other than Black people is unclear. Based on available records, some argue that Congress may indeed have considered or intended for corporations to be included in the 14th Amendment, as the original drafters “were inundated with petitions from insurance companies and railroads complaining about protectionist state measures” [9]. That the 14th Amendment makes a distinction between “persons” and “citizens” is also significant, as the former “are entitled to due process and equal protection” while the latter are only “guaranteed the privileges and immunities of national citizenship” [10].

What is certainly true, however, is that almost none of the 14th Amendment cases heard by the Supreme Court concerned the rights of Black people. The Supreme Court itself affirmed this in 1938. In his dissenting opinion on Connecticut Gen Life Ins C. v. Johnson, Justice Hugo Black cited Miller’s majority opinion in the 1873 Slaughterhouse cases, doubting that the 13th and 14th Amendments would include anyone except Black people. “Yet,” he continued, “of the cases in this Court in which the 14th Amendment was applied during the first fifty years after its adoption, less than one-half of 1 per cent. invoked it in protection of the negro race, and more than 50 per cent. asked that its benefits be extended to corporations” [11].

Further, recent history affirms that the U.S. ruling class considers and treats corporate entities much more humanely than they treat Black people.

Corporate personhood and a new phase of U.S. capitalism

The period leading up to the 1886 case was characterized by monumental shifts in the political, social, economic, and racial order of the U.S. This included the heroic Reconstruction era as well as its tragic defeat and the rapid growth of monopoly capital in the country.

In the decade leading up to Santa Clara case, railroad barons emerged as a new faction of the capitalist class that provided the model for monopoly capital. This is why, just before the 1878-79 California Convention, California allowed the Southern Pacific Railroad Company to absorb several other corporations. Prior to that, Congress granted 11 million acres of land to Southern Pacific, although for their expansion the company acquired additional debts through a mortgage on its construction, equipment, railcars, and so on. Southern Pacific was also granted the legal authority to construct a line connecting San Francisco to Texas.

The trend toward monopoly predated the Civil War and coincided with the ongoing conquest of the continent. Large corporations, with state funding, facilitated the expanding interstate commerce through railways and canals, which in turn led to a larger and more integrated national economy. Federal and state legislatures promoted this centralization of capital insofar as it took the economic burden off the state while still allowing the state to use the new networks for postal and military purposes.

The pressing question for the U.S. ruling class was whether or not the government-backed monopolists would ultimately represent a unique and temporary phenomenon or provide a model for capital as a whole.

There was a clear struggle between the ideologues of small enterprises that formerly dominated the economic landscape and operated similarly to the idealistic “free competition” phase of capitalism and those of monopoly capital, where the various enterprises dispersed throughout different entities were consolidated into large ones.

As Morton J. Horowitz details in his account of how legal structures raced to keep up with the latest changes in capital, in the 1880s there wasn’t any precedent about “natural” or “corporate” persons because these categories threatened individualism and free-market competition. By the turn of the century, however, the struggles over “political economy between small entrepreneurs and emergent big business over the legitimacy of large scale enterprise” erupted [12].

The debates taking place within the ruling class had to do with whether or not there was an inherent tendency for capital to centralize. At the time, most political economists didn’t give credence to the inevitability of monopolization, seeing the railroads as exceptional. It didn’t take long until politicians, bourgeois economists, and others rightly interpreted the railroad’s economic trajectory as a precursor to a coming phase of industrial monopolization.

There was a shift in power and influence within the capitalist class from the old “free enterprise” capitalists to the new monopolists:

“By the late nineteenth century in America, fundamental changes had already taken place in the legal treatment of the corporation. First, and by far the most important, was the erosion of the so-called ‘grant’ or ‘concession’ theory of the corporation, which treated the act of incorporation as a special privilege conferred by the state for the pursuit of public purposes. Under the grant theory, the business corporation was regarded as an ‘artificial being’ created by the state with powers strictly limited by its charter of incorporation. As we shall see, a number of more specific legal doctrines were also derived from the grant theory in order to enforce the state’s interest in limiting and confining corporate power” [13].

From this point of view, the rise of monopoly capitalism, or the centralization of larger and larger sectors of the means of production into fewer and fewer hands, is driven by the self-expansive and competitive nature of capitalist production. The Supreme Court provided the legal grounds for facilitating this transformation.

Legacy of the case

In the immediate aftermath of Santa Clara, “the Court did away with 230 state laws that had been passed to regulate corporations” [14]. It was clear evidence monopoly capital was in control of politics. Supreme Court decisions in the years between 1908 and 1914, often citing corporate personhood, struck down minimum-wage laws, workers’ compensation laws, utility regulation, and child labor laws—every kind of law that a people might institute to protect its citizenry from abuses” [15].

For over a century now, the state has continued to take power and rights away from working and oppressed people and transferred it to capital. They have even perverted the hard-won gains won by people’s movements into justifications for increasing corporate power, perhaps none more disgusting than the misuse of the 14th Amendment.

While even to this day there is no clear legal basis for corporate personhood, that hasn’t stopped the Supreme Court from waging class war against the people on behalf of corporations. Because the nine unelected judges determine the law, they can legally justify whatever tactics they deploy against us.

The misuse of Santa Clara’s headnote has not only severely inhibited the ability to regulate corporations, but it has created a space for CEOs and shareholders to operate with near impunity. For example, Joel Bakan notes that “corporate illegalities are rife throughout the economy…By design, the corporate form generally protects the human beings who run corporations from legal liability, leaving the corporation, a ‘person’…the main target of criminal prosecution” [16].

The Supreme Court was created to serve the interests of the capitalist class. Its very existence stands as a barrier to the working and oppressed peoples’ desire for a true democracy. As the Supreme Court unleashes its most current wave of attacks on our basic democratic rights, we will continue to fight for a new system.

References

[1] Thom Hartmann,Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became People–and How You can Fight Back(San Francisco: ‎ Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2010), 18.
[2] Santa Clara County. v. South Pacific Railroad, 118 U.S. 394 (1886), 411. Availablehere.
[3] Ibid., 396.
[4] United States v. Detroit Lumber Co., 200 U.S. 321 (1906). Availablehere.
[5] Malcolm J. Harkins III, “The Uneasy Relationship of Hobby Lobby, Conestoga Wood, the Affordable Care Act, and the Corporate Person: How a Historical Myth Continues to Bedevil the Legal System,”Saint Louis University Journal of Health Law & Policy7, no. 2 (2014): 204.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Nicholas S. Paliewicz, “How Trains Became People: Southern Pacific Railroad Co.’s Networked Rhetorical Culture and the Dawn of Corporate Personhood,”Journal of Communication Inquiry43, no. 2 (2019): 204-205.
[8] Cited in Ibid.
[9] Matthew J. Zinn and Steven Reed, “Equal Protection and State Taxation of Interstate Business,”The Tax Lawyer41, no. 1 (1987): 89-90.
[10] Ibid., 90.
[11] Connecticut General Life Ins. Co v. Johnson, 303 U.S. 77 (1938). Availablehere.
[12] Morton J. Horowitz, “Santa Clara Revisited: The Development of Corporate Theory,”West Virginia Law Review88, no. 2 (1986): 187.
[13] Ibid., 181.
[14] Howard Zinn,A People’s History of the United States(New York: Perennial Classics, 1980/1999), 261.
[15] Hartmann,Unequal Protection, 24.
[16] Joel Bakan,The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power(New York: The Free Press, 2004), 75-79.

Currency Crisis In The West (1965)

By Hsiang Chung

Republished from Black Agenda Report.

Editor’s Note from BAR: This 1965 essay appeared in Kwame Nkrumah’s journal, The Spark. If it were around today, The Spark would probably carry a warning in the US that it was “state-affiliated media.” Its editors probably wouldn’t care. The Spark was published by Kwame Nkrumah’s Bureau of African Affairs and its explicit mission was to build socialism in Ghana and to aid in fomenting working-class revolution throughout Africa.

The Spark’s content reflected this mission. The weekly paper ran essays articulating the theory of Nkrumaism and published detailed analysis of neocolonialism and imperialism, and of socialism and development. It considered the class struggle in Africa and examined anti-colonial struggles across the continent. In its pages appeared statements of solidarity with Cuba, Algeria, and Black America, and contributions from Amilcar Cabral, Fidel Castro, and Che Guevera. When W.E.B. Du Bois passed away in 1963, an issue appeared in his honor.

For the US State Department, The Spark represented a dangerous tendency within Nkrumah’s Ghana.  In January, 1964 the US Central Intelligence Agency issued a classified report titled “The Leftward Trend in Ghana .” The report noted that the US Embassy in Ghana had characterized a recent speech of Nkrumah’s “as perhaps his most extreme anticapitalist and revolutionary performance.” The speech, according to the CIA, “included [Nkrumah’s] first known specific use of such phrases as ‘class interests’ and ‘class politics,’” it criticized the US “as the citadel of reactionary opposition to progressive forces everywhere,” and it aligned Ghana with “the international ‘socialist’ fraternity.” “Subsequently,” the report continued, “[Nkrumah]  has increasingly tended to mouth the Communist-derived jargon appearing continually in The Spark.”

In their summary of the situation in Ghana, the CIA concluded that, “Barring a successful coup against his regime, it will probably be increasingly difficult for the West to maintain an effective presence in Ghana.”

Nkrumah was overthrown by a CIA-backed military on February 24, 1966.

Below we reprint an article from The Spark titled “Currency Crisis in the West.” Its author is Hsiang Chung, a Chinese economist of whom, we admit, we know little more than his name. Even so, the essay has a crystalline analysis of how monetary policy has been used as a tool of imperial and neocolonial rule. Moreover, in charting the historical reasons for the rise of the dollar’s global supremacy in the twentieth century, it establishes the historical conditions precipitating the dollar’s imminent twenty-first century fall. This is being republished for both historical perspective and relative analysis to the current state of the US dollar. It is important to note that much has changed since this was written in 1965, most notably the varying methods of imperialism/colonialism that have developed by the US and West, the fall of the USSR, and the abandoning the gold standard in 1971.

***

Hsiang Chung, “Currency Crisis in the West,” The Spark: A Socialist Weekly of the African Revolution, January 29, 1965.

The imperialist scramble for world domination is usually marked by a struggle for financial supremacy, for monetary policy is one of the heavy weapons of the imperialist countries in their drive, for expansion--a weapon they use to strangle their rivals and extend their spheres of influence.

In the struggle for monetary supremacy, an imperialist country invariably uses its political and economic power to establish a monetary bloc in which its own currency is made to take a leading position while the currencies of its colonies and dependencies as well as other states associated with it are reduced to a subordinate status.

It has to link to currencies of the monetary bloc members with its own, and at the same time to make them keep their gold and foreign exchange reserves in its central bank to be used by them for “unlimited buying and selling” on foreign exchange market at fixed rates. Consequently, its commodity in capital exports will not have to suffer from the fluctuation of the currency of the monetary bloc members and it will not have to pay more for raw material imports because of the devaluation of its own currency.

Moreover, since the gold and foreign exchange reserves of its monetary bloc members are deposited in its own central exploitation, and this leads to the formation of a financial centre within its own sphere of influence over which it is able to establish its financial supremacy. That is why currency warfare in capitalist international finance is an important means in the imperialist scramble for markets, outlets, for investment and sources for raw materials, as well as an indispensable factor in their constant redivision of the capital of this world.

The Monetary System Crisis Sharpened

The deepening of the general crisis of capitalism, especially the emergence of the crisis in the capitalist monetary system, has intensified the monetary warfare among the imperialist powers. As a result of the world economic crisis of 1929–33, normal financial relations among the capitalist countries were disrupted as never before; the gold standard completely collapsed, and the monetary system of the capitalist countries became chronically unstable.

From that time onwards, in their efforts to maintain currency stability, and to ward off the crisis in the monetary system, monopoly capitalist groups in the imperialist countries were compelled to resort to government intervention on a larger scale than before and adopt such measures in the field of international finance as  moratoria on foreign debts currency depreciation, foreign exchange  restrictions and control etc., in order to consolidate their position in the better struggle for markets and spheres of influence. However, all the steps, which were designed to shift the crisis onto others failed to extricate the imperialists from their plight, but instead made the struggle still sharper and more complicated.

Following the end of World War II, as a result of the formation of the socialist camp and the upsurge of the national liberation movement the areas dominated or exploited by the imperialist countries have become smaller and smaller. In this predicament, the inter-imperialist struggle for markets and spheres of influence has become more acute and currency has been used on a still larger scale as an instrument in defeating their adversaries. Not only have they subjected the currencies of their colonies and dependencies to their own as in the past; they have also exerted great efforts to make their own currency the dominant one within the shrinking imperialist camp. At the same time, the deepening of the general crisis of capitalism has been accomplished by an intensified crisis in the monetary system, and the imperialist countries have been forced to take further steps to intervene in various forms in the field of international finance. However, whenever they are taken by the strong to bully the weak or the weak to counteract an adversary’s pressure, the steps are bound to aggravate the imperialist monetary struggle, and make it more severe than was the case before World War II.

Domination vs Independence

The characteristic of postwar inter-imperialist relations is that US imperialism has increasingly endeavored to consolidate and extend its dominant position while the other imperialist powers refused to reconcile themselves to US control from which they have done all they can to free themselves. This rivalry between US imperialism and the other imperialist powers struggle between domination and independence— is also reflected in capitalist, world finance.

During World War II, US imperialism amassed enormous wealth and greatly expanded  its productive capacity and export trade. In the early post-war years, Washington took advantage of the temporary disappearances of three fascist countries, Germany, Italy, and Japan from the capitalist world arena of competition and of the heavy destruction suffered by the two old imperialist powers, Britain and France; it went all out for economic expansion abroad and consequently had a huge surplus in its balance of international payments and piled up vast gold reserves. In 1938 the US gold reserves amounted to $14,594 million or 56.1 per cent of the gold reserves of the capitalist world. In 1948, they jumped to $24,399 million, or 70.3 per cent of the capitalist world’s total. During this period, the other capitalist countries incurred huge deficits in their international accounts with the United States, resulting in a serious “dollar shortage” and massive gold outflows to the United States.

In the decade between 1938 and 1948, the gold reserves of Britain, the sterling area and the West European countries dropped from $9,511 million to $5,707 million, and their share of the capitalist world's gold reserves fell from 36.6 per cent to 16.4 per cent. At that time the disruption of domestic production, the heavy increases in budgetary deficits, and the impact of deficits in the payment of international payments brought about serious currency depreciation in most of the capitalist countries except the United States. Under the circumstances, the governments of these countries were constrained to their foreign exchange restrictions and controls to achieve, and to stabilize the value of their currencies by artificial means. The result was that they’re currencies became “soft”, i.e., could not be freely converted into other foreign currencies, they were in no position to compete with the dollar, a hard currency which was freely convertible.

Shift in Economic Power

This shift in economic power was much to the advantage of US imperialism in its greedy bid for world leadership. It has made every effort to form a big dollar bloc to dovetail plans to build an unprecedentedly big empire in the world. In addition to adopting political, military, economic and other measures, US imperialism, in order to fulfill this grandiose plan, must take the following steps in the monetary field. On the one hand, it needs to consolidate the external value of the dollar and maintain its “free convertibility” so that fixed exchange rate between the dollar and other currencies can be preserved, and the dollar can have the same status as gold in the capitalist world's current reserves.

This would provide favourable conditions for New York to become the capitalist world’s sole international financial centre.

On the other measures both at home, and in the currency blocs, they control in order to check economic penetration by their competitors. US imperialism therefore found it necessary to do the utmost to intervene in their international financial policies and foreign exchange systems, thus enabling it to maintain normal trade relations with them, and paying the way for its further economic expansion.

In effect, this US imperialist rapid plan is nothing but a refurnished version of the currency blocs established by Britain, France, and other old imperialist powers in their colonies and spheres of influence. But in order to ward off the strong opposition of other imperialists, the United States had to resort to more covert and slyer tactics in pushing forward this plan in the capitalist world.

Price of Gold Kept Down

In the first place, relying on its substantial gold reserves, US imperialism artificially kept down the price of gold in its dealings with other governments or their central banks. It is common knowledge that as early as 1934 the US government prescribed the external value of the dollar, i.e., the parity between the dollar and gold, at $35 an ounce. But since the latter part of the 1930s and particularly since World War II, the value of the dollar has been frequently devalued internally because of inflation. In 1948 the purchasing power of the dollar was only 57.8 per cent of what it was in 1939. In 1963 it further dropped to 44 per cent. In order to stabilize the external value of the dollar by artificial means, the U.S. government, irrespective of the frequent devaluation of the dollar internally, has always exchanged it for gold at the official rate of $35 percent ounce in its dealings with other countries. And so the external value of the dollar has long been out of tune with the extent of its internal devaluation while the price of gold has been greatly kept down.

Other capitalist countries were then suffering from a widespread “dollar shortage” and they virtually had very little or no dollars with which to buy US gold. Therefore, keeping the price of gold down actually meant compelling other capitalist countries to sell gold cheaply to the United States in order to make good their dollar deficits. This increased the surplus in the US balance of international payments, and gave it the opportunity to rake in gold at a low price made it difficult for the latter to relieve their “dollar shortage”. And this also became a pressure under which they had to accept the Marshall plan and other types of “aid,” and thus subject themselves to enslavement by US imperialism.

Another major aim of US imperialism in keeping down the price of gold is to irrigate the same role as gold to the dollar, whose external value was artificially stabilized, and serving as a world currency. Since the currencies of most other capitalist countries were unstable and their foreign exchange reserves, along with, and in preference to pound sterling. This facilitated US imperialism control of their currencies in one way or another, and it’s becoming the biggest International exploiter in capitalist world finance.

Washington’s Building Tactics

In the second place, in the early post-war years, Washington spread such false ideas as “the elimination of foreign exchange control,” “the stabilization of exchange rates,” and “avoidance of competitive currency depreciation.” These were designed to compel other countries to abandon their foreign exchange restrictions and controls, and relatively stabilize their exchange rates in a way advantageous to the United States. It pushed this policy in order to ensure that the proceeds of America commodity exports and the remittance to the United States of profits from overseas investment may be protected from other countries’ foreign exchange restrictions.

It is true that US imperialism, at least on the surface, has not imposed downright control over the currencies of its “allies.” In reality, however, it did all it could to achieve this purpose by bullying tactics and cajolement. As mentioned above, Washington compelled the recipients of its “aid“ to accept such terms as the introduction of free convertibility within a certain period of time and the scrapping of their foreign exchange controls and restrictions.

A notable example of this took place when Britain received a big US loan amounting to $3,750 million in 1945 and two years later was compelled to introduce free convertibility for the pound sterling, which lasted for only five weeks. Of great importance is the fact that the International Monetary Fund set up in the early postwar years— a major instrument of US imperialism in the international monetary field— dangled the bait of short term loans before member states in order to induce them to accept conditions involving the loss of national sovereignty. These included the abolition of foreign exchange, controls and restrictions, the definition of the foreign exchange value of a currency in terms of the dollar containing a specific weight of gold and the obligation to obtain the funds agreement to specific changes in foreign exchange rates.

Struggle Between Dollar and Pound

All these measures were naturally resented by other imperialist powers. However, West Germany and Japan were then dominated by Washington, and it was on the basis of formulas prepared by the US government that the exchange rates for the West German mark and the Japanese yen were established. Inflation of considerably serious proportions and a rapid deterioration in the balance of international payments overtook France and Italy; the franc and the lira were frequently devalued; it was difficult for them to compete with the dollar. Only the pound sterling could initiate limited counter- offensives against it. Although Britain’s power has declined since World War II, it still has the backing of the sterling area in international finance, the pound remains the reserve currency of sterling area countries and a number of other capitalist countries in the world network of overseas banks, which was set up by Britain in the last century, retains considerable influence. In these circumstances, the struggle between the dollar and the pound was naturally the most prominent one in the imperialist currency warfare.

The comprehensive system of foreign exchange restrictions and control set up by Britain in the sterling area was a powerful fulcrum strengthening British imperialist exploitation of the commonwealth countries and checking US economic penetration. And it was a serious handicap to US imperialist expansion in the capitalist world.

In the first few years since World War II, by means of loans, “aid” and pressure by different US controlled international organizations, Washington devised every possible means to compel Britain to open the door to the sterling area, and restore the free convertibility of the pound so as to pave the way for the control of the whole sterling area, including Britain itself. For a time British imperialism refused to take orders from Washington and adopted delaying tactics. But in 1949 a pound was devalued by 30.5 per cent against the dollar, followed by a corresponding currency to valuation by 35 other capitalist countries–to a large extent the result of pressure from Washington.

Nevertheless, Britain and other imperialist powers, wherever possible, dealt Washington’s high-handed policy, a rebuff. The sterling area and the currency blocs of other imperialist countries—such as the franc bloc—clung stubbornly to their spheres of influence. Moreover, on the question of the price of gold, because gold produced in the sterling area makes up more than 70 per cent of the total annual production of the capitalist world, Britain and South Africa have more than once battled for a rise in the gold price as a countermeasure to US control. They eventually succeeded in wrestling some concessions from Washington and were permitted to sell their gold for industrial purposes on the free market at a higher price than the official US price of $35 per ounce. The International Monetary Fund's demand for the abolition of foreign exchange controls, and for the institution of a fixed parity between the dollar and other currencies were ignored by many countries. France and Italy, for instance, did not institute fixed exchange rates until the mid-1950s. This shows that, despite Washington’s desperate efforts to put the capitalist world's monetary system under its control, other imperialist powers have been unwilling to accept permanent subordination, they have exerted every effort to free themselves from the claws of the dollar. With the shift in the balance of forces between the United States and other imperialist powers, both Washington’s efforts at domination in the monetary field, and the other imperialist’s resistance are growing more intense.

No More Dollar Dominance

With the advent of the 1950s and the aggravation of the uneven development of capitalism, new changes have taken place in the balance of forces among the imperialist countries. Propped up by the United States, West Germany, Italy, and Japan, have recovered from their position as defeated countries. The power of France has steadily increased, enabling it gradually to speak on equal terms with the United States. Although it keeps getting weaker, Britain too has no desire to be at the mercy of Washington. US dominance, which was attained during and immediately after World War II, has begun to falter.  

This shift in the balance of forces which is unfavorable to US imperialism is also reflected in international finance. After the war of aggression against Korea broke out in 1950, deficits began to appear in the US balance of payments and outflow of gold started, because its policies of war and aggression made it increasingly difficult for its trade surplus and proceeds from overseas investment to meet its huge military expenditures, foreign “aid” commitments and private capital export.

A similar situation recurred during US economic crisis of 1953–54. After 1956, taking advantage of the Anglo-French aggression against Egypt, the United States sold a large amount of oil and cotton to Western Europe, and this helped to bring about a turn for the better in the US balance of payments. However, from 1950 to 1957, the US gold flow to other countries amounted to $1,700 million. Added to this were mounting short term debts, and the annual rate of deficit in its balance of payments averaged about $1,200 million. During the same period the gold reserves of other capitalist countries increased by $3,700 million and their dollar reserves by $6,400 million. By the 1950s, the widespread “dollar shortage” of the early posts were years had virtually become a thing of the past.

A New State

After 1958, a new state was reached in the struggle between the United States and other imperialist powers to strengthen their respective positions in world finance. On the one hand, as a result of its intensified policies of war and aggression, US imperialism had to spend on an average more than $10,000 million a year for its overseas military expenditures, foreign “aid” and private capital export. This led to an increase in the serious dollar crisis, which was manifested in the form of balance of payment deficits, and of gold outflows. The dollar crisis and the recurrent economic crisis erupted either simultaneously or alternately.

Whatever methods it uses, it is impossible for US imperialism to prevent a continual deterioration in the position of the dollar. On the other hand, with the rapid growth in their political and economic power, the tremendous improvement in the balance of payment, and the big increase in their gold reserves, other major capitalist countries, and particularly several of the Common Market Six with France and West Germany as their nucleus, were able greatly to strengthen their currencies on the international finance market. From 1958 to 1962 the gold flowing from the United States to other countries totaled $6,800 million. These rises in the short term debts owed to other countries made for an average annual rate of deficits of about $3,000 million from 1950 to 1957. At the same time, the increase in the gold reserves of other capitalist countries amounted to $8,700 million. If increases in foreign exchange holdings are added to this the total increase in their gold and foreign exchange reserves during the period was $14,500 million. Most of these increases went to West European countries. France’s increases amounted to $3,400 million, Italy’s $2,200 million, and West Germany’s $1700 million. Next came Britain, the Netherlands and Belgium.

Dollar Crisis— Incurable Disease

By 1963, the incurable disease of the dollar crisis remained serious. The deficit in the US balance of payments in that year still stood at $3,000 million. At the end of December, its gold and foreign exchange reserves totaled $32,179 million, of which gold accounted for $19,790.million, or 47% of the capitalist world's total. Thus US gold reserves are far below their pre-war level while those of the West European countries are far above it.

A Fraternal Hand: The American Tradition of Socialist Democracy and Chinese Socialism

By Carlos Garrido

Republished from the Midwestern Marx Institute.

​There is a glaring paradox at the core of the American project. On the one hand, it proclaims its national self-determination with the values of life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, right to revolution, and to a government of, by, and for the people. On the other hand, the rights to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness have never been guaranteed for anyone but the white, male, capitalist class (which is slowly being racially and sexually diversified). The leading thinkers of the American project, from Jefferson to Martin Luther King Jr., have warned about the corrupting influence the interests of capital can play in preventing the concretization of these rights.

Thomas Jefferson, for instance, understood that the ‘enormous inequality’ in property relations was the cause of the ‘misery [of] the bulk of mankind,’ and that, as Herbert Aptheker notes, this concentration of capital was ‘the central threat to democratic rights.’[1] In noticing how the interest of capital can turn a government of, by, and for the people into a government of, by, and for big business, Jefferson would go on to draw a distinction between the democratic man and the aristocratic man. The former, he argued, trusts the people’s will, the latter distrusts it and turns towards big business elitism. Jefferson believed the aristocratic man, if he came to dominate the American government, would undermine the ideals of the 1776 anti-colonial revolution. The first generation of home-grown socialists, flowering in the 1820s and 1830s, saw Jefferson’s prediction actualize itself in the embryonic industrialization period of the US. In the face of growing inequalities and disparities, thinkers like Langdon Byllesby, Cornelius Blatchley, William Maclure, Thomas Skidmore and others, developed the ideals of the declaration of independence into socialism, what they considered to be its practical and logical conclusion.

Throughout the ages, generations of American socialists have appealed to the declaration of independence to argue for socialism in a way that connects with the American people’s common sense. Leading historians and theoreticians of the American socialist tradition, thinkers like Staughton Lynd, Herbert Aptheker, W.E.B. Dubois, Eugene Debs, William Z. Foster and others, have elaborated on the subject, noting that regardless of the limitations encountered in the founding of the American experiment, it was a historically progressive event, whose spirit should be carried forth today by socialists and communists.

As the US is increasing tensions against China, leading to what many consider a ‘new cold war,’ it is important to look back at the values the American people accept, to the thinkers the American people consider their own, and to consider how different China’s practices – which our ruling class and its media constantly estrange to the American public – are from the ideals which founded our country. What we will find, I believe, is the values prioritized by the leading thinkers of the American experiment, from Jefferson to Dewey to Martin Luther King Jr., are best embodied today in Chinese socialism. This truth, in my view, should be brought forth to the American people. No longer should their consent continue to be manufactured to fight against peoples whose practices align with our ideals more than those we encounter in our own country.

John Dewey (1859-1952), known as ‘America’s philosopher of democracy,’ wrote that we must stop thinking about democracy as something ‘institutional and external;’ instead, we should treat democracy as a ‘way of life,’ one governed by the ‘belief in the common man.’[2] For Dewey, genuine democracy is a consistent practice; it has less to do with showing up to a poll every two to four years and more to do with the ability of common people – what in Spanish we call el pueblo – to steadily exert their collective power over the affairs of everyday life. Dewey understood that this genuine form of democracy was largely inexistent in the US, where the democratic spirit is reduced to voting every four years in political elections which, as he argued, function more as a ‘shadow cast on society by big business.’[3]

In line with the long tradition of home-grown American socialists, Dewey would conclude that the ideals of the founders – especially the radical flank commonly known as the ‘dissenters’ – would be realized ‘only as control of the means of production and distribution is taken out of the hands of individuals who exercise powers created socially for narrow individual interests.’[4] In the context of the US, Dewey held that this required ‘a radical change in economic institutions and the political arrangements based on them.’ ‘These changes,’ said Dewey, ‘are necessary in order that social control of forces and agencies socially created may accrue to the liberation of all individuals associated together in the great undertaking of building a life that expresses and promotes human liberty.’[5] For Dewey, in short, only socialism could make actual the radical, and for its time, deeply democratic, spirit of the declaration of independence.

A similar sentiment can be found in Martin Luther King Jr., the only American to have his own holiday (every third Monday of January). In one of his last sermons, whilst reflecting on the rights upheld in the declaration of independence, King would note that ‘if a man doesn’t have a job or an income, he has neither life, nor liberty, nor the possibility for the pursuit of happiness. He merely exists.’ America, for King, had desperately failed to fulfill its promise, not just for the black souls it kept enchained for more than two centuries, but for all poor and working people who continued to ‘perish on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.’[6] This division was representative of what King called the ‘two Americas,’ the America of the poor working majority and the America of the few owners of big capital.[7]

Like Dives in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, King held that ‘if America does not use her vast resources of wealth to end poverty and make it possible for all of God’s children to have the basic necessities of life, she, too, will go to hell.’[8] The stranglehold monopoly capital has over the American state turned the American dream – that is, the individual’s quest for life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness in harmony with the human community – into the American nightmare. No number of victories in the sphere of civil rights could change, in King’s view, the fundamentally polarizing character of the system. As King would argue years after the victories of the civil rights movement: ‘I have found out that all that I have been doing in trying to correct this system in America has been in vain… I am trying to get at the roots of it to see just what ought to be done… The whole thing will have to be done away with.’[9] For all its claims of being a beacon of democracy, for King, as Cornel West argues, ‘America’s two main political parties, each beholden to big money, offer merely alternative visions of oligarchic rule.’[10] Like Dewey and many others within the tradition of American socialism, King considered the values of the declaration of independence to only be universally applicable if America is able to move beyond the capitalist mode of life.

The American ruling class ignores and/or sanitizes this tradition of home-grown socialism which permeates even through the most universally admired of American figures. It wishes to hide the working class’s and oppressed people’s history of struggle in our country, for only in doing so can it perpetuate the McCarthyite lie that socialism and the values the American people accept are wholly incompatible. The truth is that, on the contrary, it is on the basis of the values the American people already accept that American socialism has developed. By showing the American people the positive role socialism has played in their national past – and how these struggles have seen themselves as continuations of the revolutionary tradition of 1776 –  the similarities in Chinese socialist construction and this unique tradition of American socialism become apparent. 

Martin Luther King Jr., for instance, found it condemnable to sustain poverty amidst material abundance; the rights to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness require the abolition of poverty for their genuine fulfillment. In just 40 years, Chinese socialism has been able to lift more than 800 million people out of poverty, abolishing that horrendous condition the capitalist mode of life makes necessary for the vast majority of people. While building a poverty-free world with common prosperity, China has been able to realize a condition for its people which looks a lot more like what the leading American minds (like Dr. King) stood for than what can be found in America itself.

As we approach the 55th anniversary of King’s assassination (which the FBI helped orchestrate), we should ask: has America – which celebrates King once a year – heeded to King’s concern for poverty and the condition of the working class? The answer is a resolute No! In no state of the US, for instance, is the federal minimum wage ($7.25) enough to survive; even if it is raised to $15 – as the democratic socialists and other progressives have called for – the minimum wage would still not be enough for a working class family to survive anywhere in the country. With stagnant wages and inflation at a 40 year high, almost 60% of Americans are currently living paycheck to paycheck. Many of these people are on the brinks of joining the 600,000 homeless people wandering around in a country with more than 17 million empty homes. It is not surprising, in a country where there are 33 times more empty homes than homeless people, that 34 million people, including one in eight children, experience hunger while 30-40% of the U.S.’s food supply (40 million tons of food) is wasted every year. For all the tokenization of King we find in America’s political circus, we can say that after 55 years since his state-sanctioned death, America has still not listened, and much less realized, the demands of Dr. King. However, China has!

Likewise, Dewey, perhaps the most prominent philosopher America has produced, felt that to carry forth today the democratic creed of the declaration of independence, we must deepen our understanding and practice of democracy. A mode of life where the same small group of monopolists owns most of the property, controls most of the media, and decides who gets elected and what they do when elected, can hardly be called democratic. For Dewey, we are not living up to the democratic creed if ‘democracy’ only matters every two to four years when elections come about and working people are bombarded with reasons why they should vote for one puppet of the ruling class over another. Dewey would wholeheartedly agree with Xi Jinping in asserting that ‘democracy is not an ornament to be used for decoration; it is to be used to solve the problems that the people want to solve.’ As Xi has noted,​

If the people are awakened only at the time of voting and go into dormancy afterward; if the people only listen to smashing slogans during election campaigns but have no say afterward; if the people are only favored during canvassing but are left out after the election, such a democracy is not a true democracy.

​One could see words like these coming out of the mouths of a John Dewey or a Martin Luther King Jr. These ideas governing China’s socialist whole-process people’s democracy should seem anything but foreign to Americans – it is what our leading democratic theorists hoped the US system would develop into. If Americans are faithful to the democratic creed of the declaration of independence, and to the leading theorists of our country who’ve developed these into notions of socialist democracy with American characteristics, then we should be praising China for how incredibly comprehensive their socialist democracy (which is still humbly considered a work-in-progress) is. Far from thinking about democracy in the reductive, election-only sense, China’s system of socialist democracy is embedded in ‘seven integrated structures or institutional forms (体制tizhi): electoral democracy; consultative democracy; grassroots democracy; minority nationalities policy; rule of law; human rights; and leadership of the Communist Party.’ A comprehensive study of this whole-process people’s democracy would lead any unbiased researcher to the conclusion Roland Boer has (along with a plethora of Chinese scholars) arrived at: namely, that ‘China’s socialist democratic system is already quite mature and superior to any other democratic system.’
​
Not only does the US lack this seven-tiered democratic system, but even in the one realm it does have, namely, electoral democracy, the results it produces could hardly be called ‘democratic.’ For more than a decade studies from bourgeois institutions have themselves confirmed what Marxists have known since the middle of the 19th century, namely, that the essence of capitalist ‘democracy’ is ‘democracy for an insignificant minority –  democracy for the rich.’[11] The U.S., which spreads its blood soaked hands around the world plundering in the name of democracy, has been outed as a place where the dēmos (common people) do anything but rule (kratos). As a Princeton study headed by Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page shows,

In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule—at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagree with economic elites or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.[12]

​In societies divided by class antagonisms we can never talk about ‘pure democracy,’ or abstract democracy in general; we must always ask - as Lenin did - ‘democracy for which class’?[13] The ‘democracy’ and ‘democratic freedoms’ of capitalist to exploit and oppress will always be detrimental to working and oppressed peoples. Only an all-people’s democracy (a working and popular classes democratic-dictatorship) can be genuinely democratic, for it is the only time ‘power’ (kratos) is actually in the hands of ‘common people’ (demos).
​
To claim – as American capitalists, their puppet politicians, and their lapdog media does – that the US is a ‘beacon of democracy,’ and China an ‘authoritarian one-party system,’ is to hold on to a delusional topsy turvy view of reality. Only by holding explicitly the idea of democracy as democracy for the rich – an oxymoronic truth which they must continue to conceal from the American public – would any part of their assessment contain truth. If democracy is considered from the standpoint of the capitalist’s ability to arbitrarily exert their will on society at the expense of working people and the planet, then, of course, the US is a beacon of this form of so-called ‘democracy,’ and China an ‘authoritarian’ regime. If instead, democracy is considered from the standpoint of common people’s ability to exert their power successfully over everyday affairs, that is, if democracy is understood in the people-centered form it etymologically stands for, and in the way leading American thinkers like Jefferson, Dewey, and Dr. King understood it, then it would be indubitable that China is far more democratic than the US (and any other liberal-bourgeois ‘democracy’).

As the US increases its anti-China rhetoric and actions – a symptom of its empire’s moribund stage – it becomes an imperative for all sane people to counter the propaganda setting the stage for, at best, a new cold war, and at worst, a third world-war. As Julian Assange – whose treatment reminds us everyday of how much the West cherishes its so called ‘individual rights’ to speech and press – once eloquently stated: ‘if wars can be started by lies, peace can be started by truth.’

It is the duty of American communists, socialists, and progressives, to show the American people the truth; to show them that China is not the enemy of the American people, that the real enemy of the American people are those who would like us to see China as an enemy. It is not China who has our country surrounded by military bases. It is not China who is funding and inciting separatist movements in our autonomous regions. It is not China who is slandering us with baseless accusations of the most heinous crimes of genocide humanity can imagine. It is not China who is creating international military alliances a la global NATO to militarily threaten us. It is the US empire who is doing this to China. The only interests which China threatens are those of our finance capitalists, who have spent the last century impoverishing both our people at home and our brothers and sisters in the global south. China is a friend of the American working men and women; just like it is a friend of the African peoples, and the peoples in the Middle East and in Latin America, whose win-win, mutually beneficial relations in international trade with China have afforded them the ability to turn away from predatory neoliberal debt-trapping loans which have been systematically forced on them for half a century by the capitalist West.

In sum – to be faithful to the democratic creed of the declaration of independence and of the greatest minds our country has produced, we must realize today that China is not our enemy; instead, it is the place wherein the ideals which guide this democratic creed are best embodied. Instead of buying into the easily confuted lies of Western pundits, who hope we are foolish enough to accept them and dance to the drums of a war to sustain Western capitalist-imperialist hegemony, we must learn from China and work together to build a peaceful, cooperative, and ecological shared future for mankind.

References
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[1] Herbert Aptheker, The American Revolution: 1763-1783 (New York: International Publishers, 1960), 105.

[2] John Dewey, The Collected Works of John Dewey, 1882-1953, ed. by Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967-1990), LW 14:228.

[3] Dewey, LW 6:163.

[4] Dewey, LW 11:28.

[5] Dewey, LW 11:28.

[6] Martin Luther King Jr, The Radical King, ed. and introduced by Cornel West (Boston: Beacon Press, 2015), 246- 247. 248.

[7] King Jr, The Radical King, 236.

[8] King Jr, The Radical King, 248.

[9] King Jr, The Radical King, xi.

[10] King Jr, The Radical King, xiii.

[11] V. I. Lenin, Collected Works Vol. 26 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977) 465. 

[12] Gilens, M., & Page, B. (2014). Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens. Perspectives on Politics, 12(3), 564-581. doi:10.1017/S1537592714001595
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[13] V. I. Lenin, Collected Works Vol. 28 (Moscow: Progress Publishers,1974), 249.

Carlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American PhD student and instructor in philosophy at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale (with an M.A. in philosophy from the same institution). His research focuses include Marxism, Hegel, early 19th century American socialism, and socialism with Chinese characteristics. He is an editor in Midwestern Marx Institute for Marxist Theory and Political Analysis and in the Journal of American Socialist Studies. Carlos edited and introduced Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview: An Anthology of Classical Marxist Texts on Dialectical Materialism (Midwestern Marx Publishing Press, 2022). 

Our Freedoms Shrink as Our Military Expands

By Brad Wolf

Republished from Counterpunch.

The Merchants of Death even own our sidewalks. That’s what we were told when we arrived at Raytheon Technologies in Arlington, Virginia, on Valentine’s Day, February 14th, to issue a “Contempt Citation” for Raytheon’s failure to comply with a subpoena issued last November by the Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal, a People’s Tribunal scheduled for November of 2023.

Raytheon knew we were coming. The police were waiting and would not permit us to enter the enormous building even though other businesses and a public restaurant resided inside. “You’re not allowed in,” the police said. “The owner of the building said no to you.” Others were free to enter for lunch or to conduct business. The officers were polite. Respectful. “We are only doing our job,” they said, seeming more like a hired corporate police force than a public police force.

“And you cannot remain on the sidewalk,” the police said. We responded that it was a public sidewalk. “Not anymore,” the police said. “Raytheon bought the sidewalk. And the sidewalk across the street.” When asked how a private corporation can buy a public sidewalk, the officers shrugged not knowing the answer. “You can move down there,” they said, pointing to a corner across the busy street.

We asked to see a deed proving this bizarre acquisition of public property. Lo and behold, the police dutifully produced a deed stamped by the recorder of deeds office indicating Raytheon did in fact own the sidewalk all the way to the street.

Using US tax dollars, including the dollars of those of us who stood there, Raytheon bought up the very freedom they claim they’re building weapons to defend. Freedom of speech and assembly is drastically reduced when corporations as powerful as Raytheon control the halls of Congress, the Pentagon, the White House, and our corporate media.

In fact, in the belly of the beast of the Raytheon building was the corporate media itself, an ABC television affiliate which refused to talk to us last November. When we had approached an ABC spokesman outside, they refused to admit they worked for ABC despite wearing ABC attire. From corporate wars to corporate police to corporate media, all in one monstrous, taxpayer-funded building.

In 2023, approximately $858 billion will be taken from the paychecks of US citizens to help squelch our most fundamental Constitutional rights of privacy and assembly.

Across the street from Raytheon, we unfurled our banners and carried our signs. We held Raytheon in contempt for refusing to comply to a subpoena issued by the people of the world. We noted their shame of their own corporate behavior such that they purchased police and public sidewalks to keep public scrutiny away.

A young woman approached, noticing our signs. She was an Afghan refugee who had been there during the invasion. She and her family had suffered immensely from the US bombing. Her father barely made it out alive. She was crying as she spoke. Off to the side, a man in a suit carefully took pictures of each of us. We were photographed everywhere we went this Valentine’s Day.

To evidence Raytheon’s complicity in war crimes, we read the names of the 34 victims—26 of them schoolboys—killed in the horrific 2018 bombing of a school bus in Yemen. The bomb, a 500-pound Paveway laser-guided bomb was made by Lockheed Martin while Raytheon was responsible for the infrared system which targeted the bus.

Under the careful eye of our National Security State, we traveled to the Pentagon to deliver a subpoena compelling Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to testify before the Tribunal. Mr. Austin, before being Secretary of Defense was, of course, on the Board of Directors at Raytheon. This, after retiring from the military.

Mr. Austin had cashed in at Raytheon and was now in the catbird seat at the Pentagon sending billion-dollar contracts to his former employer. He is certain to cash in a second time when he leaves his current office. And so, we had a subpoena asking Secretary Austin to speak about these allegations epitomizing the “Revolving Door” between the military, defense contractors, and public office.

A dozen police waited. They counted the number in our group making hand signals between themselves. “You’ve just come from the Raytheon building,” they said to me. “And you plan on spending one hour here. And then you’re going to the Hyatt Hotel for a protest.” I asked how they knew that, especially the information about the Hyatt Hotel since that had not been made public, and the police officer smiled and said, “We have our ways.”

We were told we could protest in a small, fenced-in grassy area away from the metro stop, out of sight from most. We, the people, had been corralled behind a fence in a small grassy patch to peacefully exercise our freedom of speech as the billion-dollar behemoth of war and death, surveillance and repression, stood before us.

Similar actions of subpoena delivery had been carried out the same day in San Diego, California; Asheville, North Carolina; and New York City. Surveillance and corporate resistance had occurred at each location.

Valentine’s Day, this day meant for the opening of hearts, was one of recognizing the Orwellian state in which we live, funded by our own dollars. Our military not only consumes our money, but our freedoms as well.

We again read the names of the dead, sang, some prayed. As we were leaving, one of the police officers cheerfully said, “It’s 64° outside and a beautiful day. Why not enjoy it and go play golf.” A frightfully common thought in such perilous times.

Brad Wolf is a former prosecutor, professor, and college dean.  He is the Executive Director of Peace Action Network of Lancaster and writes for numerous publications.

Biden/Harris: Climate Hypocrites

By Juan Gonzalez Valdivieso

Republished in modified form from The Michigan Specter.

On Thursday, January 12th, Vice President Kamala Harris visited the University of Michigan’s Rackham Auditorium for a conversation on her administration’s “commitment to tackle our climate crisis.” The event specifics were largely concealed in the runup, with the university not confirming the exact time and location until the day before. Local news even hesitated to cover the proceedings until after their conclusion.

When coverage did break, however, its tune was unmistakably celebratory. The Michigan Daily, for example, highlighted the vice president’s nods to intersectionality while discussing environmental justice. This point and others apparently resonated, as MLive reported that the audience “embraced… Harris’[s] call for urgent climate action.”

But that call rings utterly hollow upon closer examination. When it comes to environmental issues, the Biden-Harris administration’s hypocrisy seemingly knows no bounds. They claim to care about climate change, yet fund and diplomatically support Israel — an apartheid regime infamous for, among other things, gross acts of environmental devastation.

Students Allied for Freedom and Equality (SAFE) — the University of Michigan’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter — highlighted this contradiction. The group organized a large demonstration outside of Rackham during Harris’s event. Speeches and chants recounted Israel’s horrid environmental record.

The country has a monstrous ecological footprint, making it one of the most unsustainable places on Earth. Israel’s nominally high levels of development — which are themselves built on colonialism — appear rather unimpressive when adjusted for ecological overshoot. It ranks well within the bottom quintile of the Sustainable Development Index. Even the United Kingdom looks green by comparison.

These statistics, though jarring, still do not fully capture the extent of Israel’s environmental destruction. Israeli authorities have “uprooted hundreds of thousands of trees to date, including olive, citrus, date, and banana.” They also regularly pollute Palestinian resources. This takes multiple forms. Not only does Israel knowingly use pesticides that contaminate the soil and harm various bird species, but the country is also notorious for poisoning freshwater reserves. Israeli settlements in particular are prominent sites of toxic dumping. As if that wasn’t enough, Israel consistently denies Palestinians access to sources of renewable energy, preventing the people they colonize from developing more sustainably.

Despite these undeniable facts, Israel goes to great lengths to cultivate an environmentalist image for itself. Against all available evidence, Israeli state officials frequently tout the country’s commitment to green ideals. This “greenwashing” is nothing more than a shoddy attempt to obscure Israeli crimes.

During their demonstration, SAFE called attention to this brutal reality. Above all, the group’s direct action made one thing crystal clear: true environmental consciousness necessitates absolute opposition to Israeli apartheid. Any project that aims to green the world while presupposing the validity of Zionism is not only incoherent but doomed. Until political leaders like Kamala Harris take heed, the discountenanced masses will continue to air their grievances and foment unrest.

Juan Gonzalez Valdivieso is a Colombian organizer, writer, editor, and undergraduate studying music and history. He serves as Editor-in-Chief of The Michigan Specter, the University of Michigan’s premier socialist publication.

In Brazil's Class War, Will Lula Fight Back?

[Photo credit: Pedro Vilela/Getty Images]

By Bernardo Jurema

It’s not an exaggeration to say that, with Lula da Silva's razor-thin victory over incumbent President Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil dodged a bullet. As it has in other countries like Hungary or India, another term of far-right rule would have meant a more reactionary police and military, accelerated environmental destruction, further evisceration of individual rights, and a serious blow to the prospects for restoring democracy. It’s also fair to say that the world dodged a bullet, given the Bolsonaro government's fervent support for mining and other extractive activities that threaten the Amazon rainforest, a crucial link in the global climate system. 

Although the final result was very close, with Lula at 50.9% and Bolsonaro at 49.1%, Lula won by a large margin among the poorest segments of the population. The former president carried 977 of the 1,003 least developed cities. And a poll right before the second round of voting showed Lula winning the lowest income bracket with 61% to Bolsonaro’s 33%.

Lula shied away from presenting a clear economic program during the campaign, explaining that “we don’t discuss economic policies before winning the elections.” He made vague promises to increase public spending, with a focus on infrastructure and social welfare. His main pledges were directed toward the segment of society that supported him most heavily. Lula called for removing Brazil from the Hunger Map, increasing the minimum wage, boosting employment, and improving access to healthcare. 

The challenges Lula now faces cannot be overestimated. He will take office on January 1st, 2023 under circumstances remarkably different from those of twenty years ago when he began his first term. With a global recession on the horizon, interest rates are on the rise worldwide and Brazil's largest trading partner, China, has seen its demand for commodities subside. On top of that, the outgoing Bolsonaro leaves in his wake "shaky public finances, with debt projected to reach almost 89 per cent of gross domestic product next year, and an economy forecast to slow sharply."

How will Lula address this poor state of affairs? A cursory look at his economic transition team raises some red flags. The team was led by Vice President-elect Geraldo Alckmin, a former rival of Lula’s Workers' Party, who is socially conservative, economically liberal, pro-police, and anti-labor. He was handpicked by Lula in a clear nod to Faria Lima (Brazil’s Wall Street), signaling to the market and conservative voters that "there would be no radical economic measures." As Glenn Greenwald noted in 2018, "For the powerful, it is impossible to dream of a better guardian of the status quo [than Alckmin].” 

Other members of the transition team included André Lara Resende, who headed Brazil's public investment bank under the center-right government of Fernando Henrique Cardoso. Resende infamously played a key role in repressing the 1995 oil workers' strike. He served on the transition team alongside Pérsio Árida, a longtime economic advisor to Alckmin who, in 2018, supported then-President Michel Temer’s radical neoliberal government. Árida has publicly opposed taxing large fortunes, instead backing privatization and neoliberal reform efforts. 

These neoliberals were counterbalanced in the transition team by members of a  "developmentalist" profile, who favor state planning and expanding public spending. Guilherme Mello, a professor at the University of Campinas Institute of Economics (known as the main intellectual hub of dissent against neoliberal orthodoxy), was one of them. Mello has since been appointed as the new Secretary of Economic Policy at the Ministry of Finance. Another developmentalist member of the transition team was Nelson Barbosa, who served as Minister of Finance from the end of 2015 into the first months of 2016 under the Rousseff government.

Most members of the transition team will not go on to become ministers or even occupy government posts. But the team nonetheless helped set the terms of political possibility, offering a choice between neoliberalism and developmentalism. While such a choice is hardly auspicious in the face of the climate crisis, Brazilians can at least be cautiously optimistic that developmentalists in the administration will pursue redistributive policies. 

Thanks to an historic commodities boom, redistribution efforts during Lula’s first two terms in office passed with relatively little friction. But what if the extractivist pie stops growing? These days, any redistributionist policies will almost certainly require some degree of confrontation. From the transition team, there is no clear vision of what must be done in terms of economic policy. As Roberto Andrés, an urban planner at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, has rightly pointed out:

“There will hardly be a favorable economic scenario for a new stage of inclusion without class struggle. It will be necessary to take from the richest to raise the level of the poorest. A tax reform that corrects the unfair Brazilian taxation may be the first step. To do so, the new government will have to face the dissatisfaction of the privileged classes, who will lose income. If it fails to do so, it runs the risk of not delivering the improvements it promises to the poorest."

On December 9th, Lula announced Fernando Haddad as his finance minister. Haddad previously served as Lula’s Minister of Education from 2005 to 2012. In that role, Haddad’s signature achievement was the PROUNI program, which expanded scholarship opportunities for poor students. This policy is a microcosm of Haddad’s conciliatory politics. While PROUNI helped disadvantaged pupils access higher education, the influx of government money was a major boon to private universities. 

For his second stint in a Lula administration, Haddad looks set to continue placating private interests. Recent comments suggest he’s open to privatizing airports and highways, saying that public-private partnerships “have to get on the agenda.” Despite this pro-business rhetoric, the markets reacted negatively to Haddad’s appointment. As one financial analyst explained, worries abound that Haddad will work to expand public spending and increase the national debt. In an attempt to quell these fears, Haddad recounted his time as Mayor of São Paulo, during which he reduced municipal debt and strengthened the bond market.

The new finance minister’s agenda appears syncretic, embracing the full spectrum of beliefs found in the transition team, from mild center-left Keynesianism to hardcore neoliberalism. Similarly mixed are the plans of Bernard Appy, the new special secretary for tax reform. While Appy seeks commonsense adjustments to Brazil’s notoriously anti-poor tax structure, his fixation on taxing consumption promises to preserve substantial regressivity.

There are also concerns to be had about Gabriel Galípolo, who will serve as the executive secretary of Lula’s economic ministry. Previously a professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Galípolo is close with corporate interests. In the past year, he has served as a mediator between the Workers’ Party and big business.

Galípolo won’t be alone in representing the financial sector within Lula’s economic ministry. O Globo, a Brazilian daily newspaper, reports that “at least one more member of Faria Lima” will receive an appointment. A countervailing influence, however, takes the form of Aloízio Mercadante. A close Lula ally and noted center-left Keynesian, Mercadante has been nominated to chair the National Bank for Economic and Social Development, a key instrument for long-term financial planning.

In addition to internal ideological disputes, the incoming Lula administration also faces external constraints. As journalist Diego Viana explains, the government will be “under siege by the Right, who are ready to pounce at the first sign of weakness.” This leaves little room for radical experimentation. It is mostly likely, Viana says, that the administration will “insert some distributive policies within an essentially traditional political economy.”

Seeking compromise has been a Lula trademark ever since his days as a union organizer in the 1970s. With Brazil now at a crossroads, it remains to be seen how much longer this balancing act can persist. Given the combination of the climate crisis, the rise of the far Right, and a looming global recession, only bold action is commensurate with the urgency of the moment. But that not only goes against Lula’s realpolitik penchant; it also would not be consonant with the balance of power, whereby the reactionary forces of agribusiness and finance are very strong, while working-class social movements find themselves demobilized, demoralized, and under constant attack.

Such a context calls for measured and realistic goal-setting. According to Viana, “What Lula needs to deliver, first and foremost, is to not be succeeded by another fascist like Bolsonaro. In addition, the coalition that elected Lula expects stability in employment, prices, and exchange rates. That can be achieved. But is it enough to obtain the most important outcome?”

Maybe not. But, to paraphrase Peggy Lee, that's all there is for today. 

Bernardo Jurema is a Brazilian political scientist based in Germany. He earned his PhD from the Free University of Berlin and has worked for international organizations and think tanks throughout Latin America and Europe.

Revisiting Eric Williams' 'Capitalism and Slavery' and Dismantling the Accepted Narratives of History

By John Burns

Republished from Monthly Review.

When British capitalism depended on the West Indies,” Eric Williams wrote in 1938,

they ignored slavery or defended it. When British capitalism found the West Indian monopoly a nuisance, they destroyed West Indian slavery.

Williams had no time for sentimental views on the abolition of slavery. The history he dealt in was more honest, more straightforward, and unafraid to confront the accepted narratives, wherever these might be found.

And confront he did. His 1945 work, Capitalism and Slavery, systematically destroyed the traditional, rose-tinted views of abolition in the UK, replacing the cozy and humanitarian with the cold and pragmatic, substituting empathy and egalitarianism with hard economic necessity. In Williams’s view, the United Kingdom reaped the immense benefits of slavery—for centuries, in fact—and dropped the practice only when it no longer served its lucrative purpose. To look at the facts in any other light is simply a pretense.

There are voices of humanitarianism within Williams’s work. There are voices of empathy, of egalitarianism. There are people whose consciences are clear, who’s hearts are true, people who fought against slavery and the British Empire’s grim association with it. There are all of these things because there were all of these things in real life. These voices existed in Georgian and Victorian Britain, and so they are present in Williams’s writing. It’s just that these voices, these notes of discord, were lost in a far larger choir. Those making all the noise—those who truly influenced governors and policymakers—were motivated by very different factors, such as economics, geopolitics, imperialism, and capitalism.

Williams received his early education in his native Trinidad and Tobago, then still part of the British Empire. As a student, he was awarded a scholarship to Oxford University, where he excelled as a student and refined many of ideas that would characterize his later work. In 1956, Williams formed the People’s National Movement (PNM), becoming the Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago that same year, and eventually led the country to independence in 1962. He continued to serve at the helm of the new nation right up until his death in 1981 at age 69, in the nation’s capital, Port of Spain.

His achievements as a freedom-minded politician and global head of state may have overshadowed his earlier work in academia, but these two aspects of his career cannot be separated. His clear-eyed and honest approach to history, and to his own people’s place within that history, shaped the path he would take in the following decades. By deconstructing UK attitudes to the slave trade, and its eventual abolition, Williams laid the foundations for dismantling British imperialism in the Caribbean. His contribution to our historical understanding, and to nationhood for Trinidad and Tobago, are inextricably linked.

Williams’s ideas are not new anymore. Capitalism and Slavery was written largely as a doctoral thesis in 1938, refined and published in 1945, and has been discussed for decades since. But Penguin’s relaunch of the book in 2022 is the first mass-market edition of the work to hit the shelves in the United Kingdom. It has, deservedly, become a bestseller.

But why does this matter now? Because we are still in danger of falling under the sway of accepted truths and fantastical narratives of history. The book is a timely reminder that history is a science that helps us better understand the culture and politics of our own age—it is not sculptor’s clay, ready to be molded into whatever shape or form best suits our own blinkered, and often prejudiced, aesthetic vision. History does not owe us anything. It is not ours to manipulate or distort.

In June 2020, the statue of enslaver Edward Colston was toppled by demonstrators in Bristol—a city that appears again and again in the pages of Capitalism and Slavery, thanks largely to the profits from the trade in sugar and enslaved people that flowed across its docks. This trade was so lucrative that Bristol became the Crown’s “second city” until 1775. It was men like Colston who helped achieve this status—hence the statue.

Colston had been, but his work as a merchant, slave trader, and subsequently, a Member of Parliament is etched into the stone upon which Bristol stands. He was almost three centuries dead by time his bronze likeness was lobbed into the Bristol Channel, and he likely had very little opinion on the matter.

Fortunately for Colston, there were plenty of people in 2020 who did have opinions on the matter. History—their history—they cried, was being erased. The “armies of wokeness” and “politically correct groupthink” were destabilizing the proud heritage of the United Kingdom, they claimed. Sure, Colston traded in slaves, but it was a different time, and Colston was a great man—a true hero of the city and its people—not to mention the criminal damage, public order offenses, or the rights of the sculptor himself.

This is an example of historical distortion and manipulation at work, pursuing ends that are nothing short of racist. History has provided us with a figure—Colston—whose great wealth led to the rise of one of the UK’s most important cities. History has provided us with the facts regarding the sources of that wealth—the slave trade; the theft of dignity from our fellow human beings. History does not provide us a way with which we can separate the two—we cannot have one without confronting the other. Erecting a statue to Colston—celebrating Colston for his efforts and his achievements—means erecting a statue to the slave trade, too.

Nor does history provide us with icons who are beyond reproach. By searching history for unimpeachable icons—symbols of a particular set of values or ethics—we are destined only for failure. If, in response to our disappointment at finding flawed human beings in lieu of the pristine icons we seek, we resort to mythologizing and hagiography, we play a very dangerous game, indeed. In another of the twentieth century’s great social texts, Women, Race and Class, Angela Y. Davis examines the relationship between feminist heroes Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and the “women first, negroes last” policies of Democratic politician Henry Blackwell.

Blackwell spoke in support of women’s suffrage in the South, asserting that “4,000,000 Southern women will counterbalance 4,000,000 negro men and women”, retaining the “political supremacy of the white race.” Davis writes about the “implicit assent” of Anthony and Stanton to Blackwell’s racist logic as she explores the troubling and complex nature of women’s suffrage during its gestation.

Like Williams and his deconstruction of accepted beliefs regarding abolition, Davis’s analysis of racist attitudes in the women’s suffrage movement leads to an awkward confrontation. Stanton and Anthony made incredible contributions to the rights of women in the United States, and this should never be forgotten—but to turn a blind eye to the gross inequality that formed the backdrop to the movement is to deny this injustice altogether, leaving us with a flawed and incomplete understanding of our own history.

This approach—this honesty, this meticulousness—is found within the pages of Capitalism and Slavery, too. This is not simply an attack on the white establishment of the United Kingdom and their forbears in the heyday of the empire; this is a methodical analysis of the key drivers behind the rise and fall of the British slave trade. Williams’s work is certainly not an attack on abolition—a critical moment in establishing of a better world for all human beings—but neither does it seek to perpetuate false ideas of who and what made the moment of abolition a reality.

Two centuries before the slave trade reached its peak, the very concept of slavery was decried by the uppermost echelons of power in the British Empire. Queen Elizabeth I herself said that enslavement would “call down the vengeance of heaven,” and yet, by the eighteenth century, all sorts of mental gymnastics were deployed to justify the trade. Church leaders, Williams said, proposed that slavery could bring “benighted beings to the chance of salvation,” while conservative thinker Edmund Burke—himself a rigorous supporter of religion’s place in society—expounded on the slaveholder’s right to maintain ownership of “their property”, that is, the human beings they had paid for. It seems ethics and morality are not absolutes, and can be manipulated to support economic prosperity.

When such leaps of logic and desperate justification can support the rise of the slave trade, why should these moral contortions suddenly cease? Why should the voices of humanity win the day, defeating the barbarism of trans-Atlantic slavery and achieving a resounding—if delayed—moral victory? The answer is simple: they didn’t. Williams foreshadows the eventual collapse of the trade by presenting the views of contemporary economists Josiah Tucker and Adam Smith, who declared the trade to be expensive and inefficient. In the end, it would be economics, not ethics, that would defeat the United Kingdom’s plantations and slave ships.

If the going was good, the slave trade would continue, no matter how many horrific acts were perpetrated on the shores of Africa and on the islands of the Caribbean. When the market stopped being profitable—when the fiscal engine driving slavery forwards started to cough and sputter—the trade would cease. The laws of business and enterprise, as cold and inhuman as they are, were far stronger than any moral outrage.

More than eight decades have gone by since Williams completed his doctoral thesis, and it is pleasant to think that we have moved on a great deal since those days. After all, Williams was then a subject of the British Empire. Now, the citizens of Trinidad and Tobago—along with the citizens of other former colonies—are free to determine their own path in the world. In 1965, the United Kingdom passed the Race Relations Act, outlawing discrimination on the “grounds of colour, race, or ethnic or national origins”—a positive step towards a better, more welcoming nation.

But we should not wrap ourselves too tightly in this comfortable blanket of pleasant thought. In 1968, three years after the Race Relations Act was passed, Enoch Powell made his rivers of blood speech in Birmingham. Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, division and discrimination led to violent flashpoints as riots ripped through urban centers. In 1993, the tragic murder of Stephen Lawrence exposed the systematic racism at the core of UK policing. In 2018, the so-called Windrush Scandal, overseen by then-Home Secretary Theresa May, saw immigrant UK citizens stripped of their rights and their dignity. The fight against discrimination and prejudice is far from over, and no amount of historical airbrushing can compensate for this.

This is why Williams’s work is so relevant today: It reminds us to question the comforting and convenient narratives of accepted history. Twisting historical narratives to fit our own agenda—to reflect our own view of what Britain represents—is deceitful at best, and dangerous at worst. A more critical, clear-eyed, analytical approach to the past is necessary if we are to truly understand the challenges of the present.

John Burns is a freelance writer and editor from Nottingham in the United Kingdom, now residing in Yunnan, southwest China.

Sources

• “Collections Online: British Museum,” Collections Online | British Museum. Accessed October 31, 2022.

• Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race & Class (New York: Vintage, 2020).

• Samuel Earle, “‘Rivers of Blood’: The Legacy of a Speech That Divided Britain,” Atlantic, April 20, 2018.

• “Edward Colston Statue: Four Cleared of Criminal Damage,” BBC News, January 5, 2022.

• “Eric Williams,” Encyclopedia Britannica. Accessed October 31, 2022.

• Chris Matthews, “Purge of Edward Colston’s Name in Bristol Continues,” Daily Mail Online, April 27, 2022.

• Matty Edwards, “‘A Monumental Moment in History’: Cable Readers React to the Colston 4 Being Cleared,” Bristol Cable, April 22, 2022.

• “Race Relations Act, 1965.” Legislation.gov.uk. Queen’s Printer of Acts of Parliament. Accessed October 31, 2022.

• Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (London: Penguin Books, 2022).