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

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

By Barbara Schijman

Originally published at Internationalist 360.

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

What thoughts does this pandemic world open up for you?

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

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

How do you analyze the situation in Brazil?

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

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

What scenario do you envision?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What examples of these initiatives do you claim?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can you imagine Lula being the president of Brazil again?

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

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

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

How do you think about the immediate future?

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

Is there a Liberation Theology today?

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

Are you optimistic?

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

Translation by Resumen Latinoamericano, North America Bureau

The Austerity Election

[Photo: Morry Gash-Pool/Getty Images]

By Ezra Brain

Republished from Left Voice.

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

It’s The Economy, Stupid

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

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

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

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

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

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

Austerity on the Horizon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Biden is the Man for the Job? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Joshua Cho

Republished from FAIR.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As the Global Hegemon Collapses, Can Private Property Be Far Behind?

[PHOTO: Al Drago/Getty]

By Steven Miller

Tuesday’s Presidential debate showed the world how the politics of collapse are determining the election of the next President of the US. It was reminiscent of the Roman Senate when the Goths sacked Rome in 410 AD. Senators gathered in the Forum, protected by the Praetorian Guards. Suddenly one Senator would leap up and cry, “I propose a law making sacking the city illegal.” Everyone voted and the resolution passed unanimously.

The world was watching Tuesday and was shocked at how low the politics have sunk in the US.

There are actually real issues these days — COVID, systemic economic collapse, institutional racism, rampant police murder. But instead we saw the leadership of the most powerful country in the world, the global hegemon for the last 70 years, collapsing in real time right there on television. The candidates could not have an intelligent discussion of the tremendous issues that face the country. No vision, no ideas, no dialogue, no programmatic solutions. The Democrats, of course, agree with Trump on 80% of the issues and therefore dare not make programmatic attacks. The debate proved nothing more than the old adage that when you lay down in the gutter, you do not wind up smelling like a rose.

Meanwhile the organs of the State are fighting themselves. This is characteristic of an objectively revolutionary situation. The FBI openly counters and reports to the American people to disprove the President. The President constantly usurps authority he does not legally have, including creating his own private police force aided and abetted by the most privatized elements of ICE and Homeland Security. The CDC, the Post Office and the Justice Department, every organ of the State, are politicized and coerced into being part of Trump’s election campaign.

The Senate and the House are in stalemate and cannot figure out how to help the American people now that 50 million are unemployed, have lost their healthcare, and are facing a looming Rent Apocalypse. Paralysis is another characteristic of an objectively revolutionary situation. The Republicans are risking losing the Senate as they try to jam through a new Supreme Court Justice before the election. People are beginning to see that these “honored institutions of democracy” are far from neutral.

Twenty-six million people hit the streets in righteous wrath over the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and so many others. Their demands crystalized around defunding or abolishing the police, which acts like an occupying army in a country that treats non-violent civilians with the tactics of the War of Terror, while white supremist vigilante gangs stalk them in the dark.

The institutions of the US State were forged in slavery and infused with structural racism. One of these, the Electoral College, was established to prevent the popular vote from determining the President. It will begin to tear itself apart after election day on November 3. No one knows whether or how the institutions of government will hold up in the coming months before a President is inaugurated on January 20… or after.

A major indicator of how things are going will be the actions of the corporate media industrial complex, perhaps the most sophisticated thought-control apparatus ever devised. These corporations have given Trump billions of dollars of free advertising, and give credence to his slightest whim. They now work in tandem with social media, which openly operates with malign intent to confuse the situation even more. It was therefore significant that one day before the debate, the New York Times, released information about Trump’s taxes that reveal he doesn’t pay any.

Property Depreciation as a Legal Invention

Now the political exposures are beginning to enter the sacred zone of private property, an issue the capitalist class prefers to keep in the dark. The very State, legal system and tax code that is coming under public scrutiny is designed to give uber privileges to private property. This is what the Trump crime family exploits, as does every corporation in America.

Tax laws allow tangible private property, used for business, to be depreciated. Personal property, like a home, cannot be depreciated, but a landlord can depreciate rental property because the theory is that tangible property is “used-up” over time, so the property owner can “depreciate” it.

But depreciation is simply a legal figment. How do we know? When an owner sells business property, the depreciation starts all over again from the top! And anyone who is forced to rent knows quite well that the value of property appreciates and gets more expensive over time. It doesn’t depreciate at all.

Then the property owner gets to deduct the cost of maintaining the property, so s/he gets a double dip. And since depreciation is a business expense, it is a deduction from business income. The law allows the owner to get cash generated in the current year without paying any tax on an amount of income equal to the amount of depreciation.

The legal scam then is elaborated. Trump (and every corporation) borrows money to purchase property, like a golf course, say for $100 million. They take the depreciation of course. Then they get an appraisal of the property that claims the property is actually worth $300 million. The appraisal, say, is three times what it should be, but the inflated appraisal can be used to provide collateral for additional loans.

In other words, the happy capitalist buys property with other peoples’ money, gets paid in tax breaks, ie public money, to depreciate it, and then falsely appreciates the value, to borrow more money to buy more property, etc etc. What a deal!

Inanimate private property in itself has these rights, not people. They are not the rights of the owner, because if the owner sells the property, they no longer get the privilege of depreciating it. So private property is a legal entity that has far more rights than human beings, just because the law says so. OMG – if ordinary citizens can challenge a system of legal institutions that are infused with systemic racism, how far can they go? That is part of the transformative power and the danger to the capitalists of this moment.

Alone in the world in its COVID response, the US put private property in control of the emergency. America is learning the hard way that there are issues that absolutely need a federal government to take control, propose a single strategy and coordinate resources. This is something that private property can never do.

Extractive Capitalism

Since the capitalist system collapsed in 2008, it has been sustained on life support by public money. US corporations, especially the financial sector, have received $25 trillion to $39 trillion in direct payments (David Sirota, Jacobin, “We've Always Had the Money for Medicare for All - We've Just Given It to Corporations Instead”, 18 June 2020). Capitalists got to onshore $23 trillion of profit two years ago. Add in direct subsidies through the military budget of $1+ trillion a year and massive billion-dollar subsidies to the petroleum and pharmaceutical industries.

Yet the economy collapsed after the advent of the virus in one week, the biggest collapse in history. Add in the actions of a criminal President and suddenly the wheels are coming off the bus. Or are they?

Is it really true that the most powerful capitalist class in history, with an unsurpassed military and three centuries of experience in maintaining its rule both legally and illegally, is so inept that they can do nothing about an unpredictable leader that destabilizes everything?

The government is clearly the last profit center left in capitalism. Just as with depreciation, the actions of government alone can create the legalities that create markets for private property. Hence the battles within the government and the State apparatus. The various capitalist gangs do not have real strategic differences, but they certainly differ tactically on whether to maintain bourgeois democracy to achieve their goals.

Corporations merged with the government long ago; now they are rapidly merging with the State, as the provision of police services are increasingly under the control corporations. Since 2003, the Department of Homeland Security has been spending billions a year to affect this change. Private property is unified in the vision of disaster capitalism: take advantage of the situation to re-organize society to augment private profits. They are not moving slowly. They are re-creating the economy as an extractive industry.

Trump’s Secretary of the Treasury, Steve Mnuchin, for example, was instrumental in creating the “rentership society”. After 2008, financiers understood that there could never be broad home ownership again in the United States. So they evicted millions from their homes, while graciously letting some stay as long as they paid rent, a sum that was dramatically higher than what they paid before. These policies drove millions out of the communities they had lived in for decades even as large amounts of new housing was built. But that housing was built to be empty, to be speculative property that supported hedge funds and not people. That is an extractive industry that sucks wealth out of communities, just as petroleum corporations extract wealth out of the ground.

US capitalism has big plans to transform other branches of the economy into an extractive machine. Constant privatization of every aspect of life is the method. Serious observers of England’s Brexit insanity recognize that when the dust settles, US-style privatized health care intends to invade and try to take over. Trump’s new Supreme Court nominee will likely vote to end Obamacare, and eliminate health care for another 25 million people or so. What can possibly arise to fill the void? What can allow US corporations to further invade public European health care systems?

Maybe it’s the new Apple watch?

Apple released the latest device during all this turmoil, and proudly stated that it was after long discussions with their “partners” in the insurance industry. Why? Could it be because the insurance industry is the main organizer of health care in the US? What is the connection here?

Haim Israel is a strategic director of Bank of America and head of the report, “The World After Covid Primer.” (www.bofaml.com/.../the_world_after_covid.pdf)

The report notes that 1/3 of the world’s data resides in the healthcare industry. It notes that value of data to the economy will increase from 30l billion euros in 2018 to 829 billion euros in 2025.

“We found that while the data generated is rising exponentially, just 1% of it is analysed or monetised effectively. The post Covid era could benefit technology companies who can analyse and monetise such data, but adoption is likely to vary by region owing to privacy concerns and regulations.”

And..  

“Big Government: a new social contract -- Growing surveillance, inequality and the current inadequacy of some healthcare systems versus others highlighted by the current crisis will act as a catalyst for change in politics, furthering populism trends and increasing the risk of social unrest. Covid-19 has handed governments a new social mandate to protect their citizens. Governments will exert greater influence on businesses with shareholder supremacy potentially eroding in favour of stakeholders. Further, this crisis has made the technology industry useful – if not vital – for implementing government power. We think this is unlikely to reverse…”

How far can this go? Vandanta Shiva reports in her article, “The Pandemic Is a Consequence of the War Against Life” (September 21, 2020):

On March 26, 2020, at a peak of the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic and in the midst of the lock­down, Microsoft was grant­ed a patent by the World Intel­lec­tu­al Prop­er­ty Orga­ni­za­tion (WIPO). Patent WO 060606 declares that ​“Human Body Activ­i­ty asso­ci­at­ed with a task pro­vid­ed to a user may be used in a min­ing process of a cryp­tocur­ren­cy system….”

The ​“body activ­i­ty” that Microsoft wants to mine includes radi­a­tion emit­ted from the human body, brain activ­i­ties, body flu­id flow, blood flow, organ activ­i­ty, body move­ment such as eye move­ment, facial move­ment, and mus­cle move­ment, as well as any oth­er activ­i­ties that can be sensed and rep­re­sent­ed by images, waves, sig­nals, texts, num­bers, degrees, or any oth­er infor­ma­tion or data.

Intellectual property rights, which is what a patent is, are just as much a creation of government as depreciation. It is another form of privilege for private property.

This step turns health care based on bio-data, especially privatized health care, into an extractive industry. We see this approach as well as corporations racing to develop vaccines. Corporations have long developed vaccines for pets and farm animals, but have resisted developing human vaccines, since they do not produce much profit as compared to “treatments” that you pay for across your lifetime.

One reason that government becomes the market of last resort is because economic production is increasingly done by computer systems and robots. As machines replace human labor, that labor cannot be exploited, which is the source of capitalist private profit. But maybe monetized data and data devices allow humans to be exploited for their information, not dissimilar to the exploitation of animals.

So — given these very real developments, with future potential for private profit, is it really likely that the financial industry, which is the major shot-caller in capitalist planning, going to put up with an incompetent, narcissistic, erratic fool for a US President? These boys have run the world since the advent of the Marshall Plan that re-built Europe after World War II. Are they going to give up now? Without even hardly trying?

Unlikely.

The battles we are living through today are a prelude to the battles that will ensue, regardless of who wins the election. The capitalist agenda will remain on the table. They fully intend to culminate their strategy of total privatization. But the story is not over, and the man behind the curtain is private property. The US hegemon is truly fumbling. The rising global popular movement to hold government accountable for public safety and the basic necessities of life in a time of collapse may be diverted for a bit, but it cannot be stopped.

All it requires is class consciousness and abandoning the notions that the status quo will maintain, that incrementalism and piecemeal solutions work and that we can reform our way into a world that puts healing at the top of the agenda.

The Left, the Election Crisis, and the 'Elephant in the Room'

By Larry Holmes

Republished from Workers World.

The head of the U.S. Postal Service is sabotaging delivery of ballots through the mail. Trump is acting like he won’t step down even if he’s defeated in the elections. And it appears that right-wing and neo-fascist forces, who have guns, are getting ready to go into the streets after the elections to support an attempted coup. Every group and activist ready to fight fascism in the streets should be making preparations right now to intervene in the event of any fascist developments in November.

The political crisis in the ruling class that is playing itself out in the presidential election is not really about Trump, any more than it’s about saving democracy, decency and all the other stuff that Democratic Party leaders are shouting about.

This crisis is about the capitalist system starting to break down and fall apart, and what must be done to rescue capitalism and U.S. imperialism from demise.

This crisis has been building for a long time.  The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the course of the crisis; it’s like pouring gasoline on a burning police station.

What will the working class do?

The working class is the elephant in the room. In the past, when communist and socialist political parties were strong, especially in developed imperialist countries with large working classes, when a political crisis developed in the ruling class, the response by a militant communist would be: “What is the working class going to do about this?”  Communist leaders like Rosa Luxemburg, Antonio Gramsci, or Harry Haywood would ask their comrades: “How can the working class intervene in this crisis to defend its own class interests?”

During the times when these noted revolutionaries were active in Germany, Italy, and the U.S., it was understood by all the cadre and militants in the working class that the working class was ultimately the only class that could change the big equation — and finally, end capitalism. Moreover, it was understood that if the working class did not intervene during a political crisis, something very bad might happen, like the faction within the capitalist class prevailing that was considering the desperate option of turning to fascism.

On the other hand, there was the prospect that if the working class intervened in the political crisis in a correct and strong way, the political crisis could be turned into a revolutionary crisis, meaning that the working class would exploit the differences within the capitalist class, as well as its instability and weakness, to  make a socialist revolution.

The expression “the elephant in the room” means that people are talking around the real issue because they don’t know what to do about that issue. Very few revolutionaries are asking what the working class will do about the current election crisis because the question seems irrelevant.

Notwithstanding the amazing work stoppages that many pandemic frontline workers have engaged in to protect their safety, and the many other signs that militants in the working class are pushing back and carrying out more strikes, the working-class movement as a whole in the U.S. is weak organizationally and politically.

Thus, the expectation is that the working class is not going to intervene in defense of its class interests beyond voting for the Democrats, with some even voting for Trump. Militants should be neither angry nor frustrated with workers for voting for Biden. The way that they see it, they don’t have any other choice.

For revolutionaries, the main political battle regarding support for the Democratic Party is with other forces on the left who say that they are socialists and are opposed to capitalism, but will find some rationale, mostly fear, for supporting the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party’s abandonment of the working class to globalization, austerity and pauperization, paved the way for Trumpism. The Democrats will not change, cannot change, and exist these days mostly to co-opt movements and then kill them.

The only way that the working class is going to find a way out of being held hostage to the Democrats is to begin learning how to organize as a class and act like a class that is independent of the capitalist political parties. This is true, not only in relation to the electoral struggle, but even more importantly, to the full rebirth of the class struggle against capitalism. This rebirth is already underway. However, it will not advance to the next level without the intervention of revolutionary class-conscious militants.

There’s no end to the questions surrounding the election crisis. What’s going to happen before the elections? What’s going to happen during and after the elections? How can progressives and revolutionaries respond to any development? From the perspective of a Marxist-Leninist, the biggest question is still: What can be done to insure that the U.S. working class begins to do all that is necessary to intervene in a crisis? Not now when it’s too weak, but soon, and the sooner the better.

Even in countries where the labor movement is close to one of the capitalist political parties, or there is a social democratic party that mostly supports what the capitalists want it to support, if an attempted coup or a fascist attack occurs the labor movement calls a general strike.

The election crisis should serve as a wake-up call. Yes, the working-class movement is weak. But revolutionaries can no longer afford to use that as an excuse to remove the working class from the discussion. Once we do that, we have surrendered.  Whatever ideas or demands revolutionaries put forward, they are of only symbolic and educational value if there is no army capable of fighting and defeating the enemy. That army is the working class, and the battlefield is the class struggle.

It should come as no surprise that many people, especially women, are saddened by the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and are worried about who Trump will choose to replace her. When the working class is not organized as a class to defend its own class interests, who else can the people turn to in order to defend themselves but politicians and important individuals?

How did this happen to the working class?

Over a long period that began after the U.S. established itself as the dominant imperialist power in the world, generally speaking, the leaders of the labor movement – who were once relatively militant, and some even anti-capitalist — underwent a transformation that rendered them in many cases little more than appendages to the capitalist system.

Explaining how this happened over the course of the past three-quarters of a century is too much to go over here. But make a note:  How this happened should be studied and discussed. It’s important for every militant to know what happened.

Also important to know is that appearing to become an appendage to the system and the status quo is neither a natural nor a permanent state for the organized labor movement. It is an aberration that must — and will – be reversed. The conditions that led to the conservatism of the labor movement no longer exist, and as such, their conservatism is going to be replaced with revolutionary class struggle.

It should be noted that by and large, most of the left, including organizations that consider themselves Marxist and even revolutionary, have tended to base themselves on movements and struggles that were incorrectly seen as separate from the working class and the labor unions. The reason for this is that the labor movement seemed dormant.

Organizing and activity that seemed friendly to anti-capitalist views and organizational recruitment existed in the antiwar movement — and to some extent in the anti-racist movement and the women’s and LGBTQ2S+ movements. In truth, all of these movements are different fronts of the working-class movement, although that is not how they are viewed in most cases.

This unfortunate view is a product of the political weakness of the existing working-class movement. It’s time for such narrow and exclusionary views to give way to more inclusive and revolutionary views of who and what make up the working class today.

To some extent, the origins of these narrow and false ideas about what the working class is and who is in the labor movement are products of a tacit (and sometimes not so tacit) agreement that union officials and leftists made after the anti-communist witch hunt – which forced many communists and socialists out of the unions – began to lift somewhat in the early 1960s.

The agreement was this: Radicals must stay out of the labor unions and refrain from trying to influence the working class with their radical ideas.  In exchange for agreeing to stay away from the working class, progressives and radicals could organize against the war in Vietnam and around other issues, but apart from obtaining some labor endorsements and having a few labor speakers at a rally, antiwar organizers were to stay away from the workers.

Opening of struggle over need for strikes

The examples of professional athletes protesting racism by refusing to play, and health care workers, Whole Foods and Amazon workers, and other workers walking off the job to protest being forced to work in unsafe conditions, has ignited a new struggle within and outside the organized labor movement over the need to carry out more and bigger work stoppages, and bring back the general strike.

Around Labor Day, a group of about 40 regional labor unions representing millions of workers issued a statement calling for conducting mass, nationwide work stoppages in solidarity with Black Lives Matter. While no concrete plans or dates for these actions has been announced, this development is a clear challenge to the conservative top leadership of the AFL-CIO and the unions that formed Change To Win.

This is good news, and it’s about time. These developments in the labor movement must be supported, joined, and pushed strongly by everyone who considers themselves progressive. It is nothing less than scandalous — and unacceptable — that the AFL-CIO’s top leadership has done little more than release a statement or two in response to the worldwide uprising sparked by the police murder of George Floyd in May, and the murders of others like Breonna Taylor and Elijah McClain.

How is it possible that millions of people could be marching in the streets day after day on every continent, and yet the leaders of the U.S. labor movement cannot bring themselves to organize a one-hour nationwide work stoppage in support of this uprising?

A strategy to fuse all movements into a new working-class movement

 The scope of the election crisis is too big.  The scope of the COVID-19 pandemic is too big.  The scope of the capitalist crisis is too big.  And the scope of the racist attacks, whether by the police, FBI, or fascists, is too big to be addressed without a serious strategy towards the development of a revitalized working-class movement.  The attacks on the working class that are already underway — with much more to come — are too big for anti-capitalist radicals not to have such a strategy.

No matter how long it takes, or how many obstacles there may be, it is imperative that a fusion of the mass movement in the streets develop against racism and fascism, and that it include all sectors of the working class that are either not organized or are under-organized: migrant workers, incarcerated workers, gig workers, street vendors, sex workers, the unemployed, people with disabilities, the homeless, the most oppressed people — and the organized labor movement.

It should be understood that the global uprising against racism this past spring and summer was, at its root, a working-class uprising.  The participants may not have  been conscious of this — and the uprising was not called in the name of the working class. But that does not change the fact that it was the multinational working class protesting in the streets. Going forward, future uprisings will be more class-conscious, with more of the many sectors of the working class in motion.

This fusion must come from below, and must not be led by the Democratic Party, or any other organization that is tied to the status quo and is an obstacle to real struggle. It is not necessary, and, in fact, it would be a mistake for the movement in the streets, or any other section of the working class that is not in the organized labor movement, to subordinate itself to conservative labor leaders.

The goal of fusion is to expand the working-class movement, to tear down the boundaries and antiquated conceptions that limit and divide the working class, and to push the entire working class in a revolutionary direction.

The formation of Workers Assemblies and a Workers Assembly movement may prove very helpful in this process

Whatever happens on or after Nov. 3, organizing the working class is the prize we must work for and stay focused on. We should be confident about our victory.

Larry Holmes is First Secretary of Workers World Party.

Seven Theses on "Re-opening the Economy": Further Notes on Viral Dialectics

By Bryant William Sculos

1.  The economy is not—and never was—closed or shutdown.

At the peak of the global economic shutdown, it is likely that less than 50% of the economy actually shutdown. And for most of the initial “lockdown” period, much much less than 50% of the economy was inactive. Unskilled workers, sometimes having their hours cut, sometimes increased without overtime pay, magically became “essential workers.” While there is national and regional global variance, this is nearly universally true. Of course, many millions—if not billions—have lost their jobs around the world. Some of these are entertainment or hospitality/comfort service workers, but many are truly essential care and educational workers. The real backbone of the capitalist economic system has been endangered, hyper-exploited, or otherwise cast off. The stock market thrives all the while. Maybe, just maybe, we should actually shutdown this foundationally unjust world order.

2.  The cure is worse than the disease.

The shutdown—and this weird post-shutdown partial shutdown period—has caused enormous harm to countless people. Actually, we could count them, but the people who make those decisions about what to count (and what counts) don’t care enough. It is because of the literal insanity of our system that people are literally being driven insane, into the depths of emergent and exacerbated mental illness. People are killing themselves because of the responses to COVID-19. But that isn’t because we shut down, but rather it is because of how we shutdown, without coming close to addressing long-preexisting social inequities that were barely below the surface—if below the surface at all. This is no cure at all. The most vulnerable are either dead or more vulnerable; the safe and secure are, for the most part, at least as safe and secure as they were before.

3. The disease is worse than the cure.

An economy isn’t a thing that is capable of caring. In the midst of a mass pandemic where likely well-over a million people have already died, we should care about something that has never cared about us? How could it? Economies are systems that reflect the distributions of power and then the character of the values and priorities of that society. The responses to COVID-19 are perfectly in-line with the systemic values of capitalism. As the infamous graffiti reminds us, capitalism is the virus. A COVID-19 vaccine won’t change that. There is a vaccine for capitalism, and it is up to all of us to find it (really, to create it, in practice) together.

4. Yes, the economy is more important than your grandma.

And it always has been. It is more important than you too! It shouldn’t be though. It doesn’t have to be, but if we look at the absolutely wretched state of elder care in the US and around the world, we shouldn’t be surprised to hear actual alive human beings—elected officials and policymakers no less—suggest that grandparents should be willing to sacrifice their lives on the altar of capitalism. Think about that. These people have been made completely fucking psychotic. Then again, before COVID-19 too many of us accepted this basic logic on a daily basis.

5. We really should compare this to the flu.

Not that COVID-19 is as serious as the seasonal flu—a mistaken thought I had and quickly abandoned in early March 2020. And yet, seasonal flu is an enduring civilizational challenge that we too easily accept as intractable, beyond what we’ve achieved thus far with the existing vaccination protocols. We have, occasionally more than 50% effective, vaccines that people need to take every year. Still, we have hundreds of thousands of people dying annually from the flu. Perhaps millions are saved, yes. But how many billions of dollars are made by the health care companies that make and distribute these vaccines? Vaccines that—while better than nothing—are still wildly inadequate. There are political-economic lessons we must learn from how the flu is treated, and we must refuse to allow the same things to happen with COVID-19, a much more serious problem.

6. Don’t let them bring evictions back.

We should be paying more attention to the fact that right now, in many places (but, perhaps, most notably in the US), evictions are effectively non-existent. As banks, landlords, and local sheriffs still try to find a way to evict people, we should fight to get the prohibition against eviction accepted as a new political norm—even if the result of such a struggle is a compromise that simply makes it harder for people to be evicted.

7.  Physical distancing is new. Social distancing has been going on for a while. Since the late 1700s probably.

With the urbanization associated with the industrial revolution people have, over the past several centuries, lived increasingly close to one another. Physical proximity has increased along with the development and spread of global capitalism. During that same period, humanity has become increasingly socially-isolated. Family ties are less. Friendship bonds, while they may be maintained in more mediated form through social media, are perhaps stronger and more significant than ever before. Still, these bonds are not as powerful or enduring at this stage of historical social development as family bonds were prior to the advent of global capitalism—however oppressive and violent they indeed were. COVID-19 has merely exacerbated a problematic sociological pattern that was already with us. One wonders whether social ties will experience a jump in strength once COVID-19 is under better control, epidemiologically and medically speaking (likely only possible once mass vaccination is achieved).

Bryant William Sculos, Ph.D. is the founding curator and editor of LeftHooked, a monthly aggregator and review of socialist writing, published by the Hampton Institute, where he is also a contributing editor. He is a visiting assistant professor of global politics and theory at Worcester State University. Bryant is also the politics of culture section editor for Class, Race and Corporate Power and co-editor (with Prof. Mary Caputi) of Teaching Marx & Critical Theory in the 21st Century (originally published with Brill and now available in paperback with Haymarket Books).

What's Good for Tech Stocks is Bad for the Economy

By Contention News

Tech stocks deepened their recent skid this week, and the fear among market watchers right now is the bubble may have already burst. Investments that could do no wrong just last month now look somewhat suspicious.

What these observers don’t know is that things are actually much worse than they think. There is a deep and important connection between these high-flying tech investments and the crappy economy their shareholders hope to escape.

Drawing this out requires a big picture outlook, and connecting some dots in ways that Wall Street can’t.  

How society works

Let’s start as big as we can: all human societies have to constantly reproduce themselves to survive. Our society reproduces itself through a system of market exchanges. Each completed purchase validates the good or service exchanged as necessary for the reproduction of our society.

Investors use their capital to command some portion of society’s existing resources to produce something new they think society also demands. If they’re right, then the product will sell and they’ll get a return on their investment. If the new product isn’t socially necessary — i.e. valuable — it won’t sell, and they lose their investment.

Where investors gain value, and where they don’t

These investors don’t gain any additional value from the inputs they buy for their products. Buying these inputs just validates their necessity. To create new value the investors need to combine the inputs together to create new, value-added products, and this requires human input — labor.

Labor power is an exceptional input because the workers selling it can’t realize its value without the machinery, facilities, and other inputs owned by private businesses. This means those businesses get to buy labor power at a discount, and investors pocket the difference. 

This has an important implication: each enterprise is some combination of produced inputs and labor power. If the enterprise sinks a larger share of its investment dollars into inputs rather than labor, then over time they should return less investment. This is why labor-intensive “emerging markets” can have such extraordinary rates of growth as compared to capital-intensive advanced economies.

Why investors love “operating leverage”

This is the level where this impact emerges — in the aggregate, over time. At the level where equity markets operate — individual firms and sectors over short terms — a different perspective emerges.

There, “valuation” has everything to do with expected future cash flows. Operating income — the money left over after paying out all the costs of production and overhead costs of the business — is the name of the game. The more operating income a company expects, the more valuable its stock should be.

Every company delivers this cash flow differently. Companies with low variable costs (the labor and input costs of each unit produced) and high fixed costs (the administrative expenses necessary to keep the lights on) are said to have a high degree of “operating leverage.” These businesses are efficient at turning their revenue into operating income.

Why tech stocks look so hot

Tech companies tend to have high operating leverage. Each additional unit sold adds very little to their variable costs — Facebook can sell thousands of ads before they have to add any hardware or staff, for example — which means that for every percentage point of revenue growth, they get more than a point of cash flow growth.

So when the economy is growing — the norm for capitalist economies — rising sales mean growing revenue, which means even faster cash flow growth and equity value. Investment gets disproportionately drawn into high fixed-cost, low variable-cost firms.

But produced inputs don’t add value, remember, and yet these high fixed costs — attractive to investors — include only those inputs. Labor power does add value, but that’s covered in the variable costs they seek to minimize.

Bottom line: investments at the firm level favor a capital allocation that produces less value throughout the economy overall.

Where the zombies come from

And it gets worse: when sales drop, these companies’ high overhead costs put them at increased risk of default. Since they are also the ones with disproportionate levels of investment, leaders seek to bail them out, mainly in the form of interest rate suppression by central banks. The companies can borrow and issue bonds more easily, but this debt only adds to their fixed costs.

Soon you have an economy full of companies that make just enough to cover their debt service — so-called “zombie” firms.

So now we can connect the dots: high levels of operating leverage made tech stocks sexy investments for years, but this contributed to a capital-intensive economy with lower aggregate returns on investment. When downturns came, central bank rescues only created more long-term deadweight, hence the slow, sleepy growth of the last “recovery.”

Now that the recent speculative boom has paused, we’re left with a terrifying question: what do we do with an economy founded on a basis that can’t perform for the future, especially in light of all the debt — i.e. future earnings — that we’ve accumulated to build it?

One thing is certain: the leaders that can’t deliver a relief package everybody wants definitely can’t figure this one out either. Watch out for your own bottom line while they try nonetheless. 

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On the Anti-Racist Economy

By Joshua Briond

In the aftermath of the state-sanctioned executions of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, we have witnessed arguably the largest and most sustained mobilization of protests and political demonstrations across the country in the movement for Black lives. In the midst of an era of drastically increased performative and opportunistic "activism," where "spreading awareness" is prioritized over human lives and dignity—which was helped ushered in by the Shaun King’s of the world—where capital(ism) does what it has done to everything: commodify, celebritize, and corporatize any and everything, by any means necessary. Such has been done for “social justice" rhetoric and activism. We have seen, in real time, Black Lives Matter be co-opted, commodified, watered down, and flat-out defanged in the face of capital, as the simple passivity of the hashtag and movement demands—if you can call it such—has become socially acceptable in the mainstream arena, specifically so in the post-Kaepernick era.

With increasing pressure for bourgeois public figures to “speak out” and “spread awareness” from fans, the sociopolitical moment has forced historically apolitical figures and brands alike to momentarily step outside their bubble of privilege, power, and wealth to release uninspired and bland political statements vaguely condemning violence and pledging their rhetorical support for the Black lives matter movement. Such acts are met with comment sections filled with bleak and dystopian undue and unjust adulation for bare minimum performances of intellectually insulting public political theater—that is yet typical for the celebrity worship present here in the US. As the limits of neoliberal political imagination have once again depicted, in this crucial sociopolitical climate, the best the professional liberal class could offer as a solution to the prevalence of racialized state violence—was not the political interrogation of the white power structure we live under and its constant terror and antagonization to non-white life—but to vote for uninspired Democratic candidates, donate to NGOs and non-profits with zero ties to communities most largely affected by said violence, and read “ally” self-help books, written largely but not exclusively by and for white people.

One of the books in question is Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility. Published the summer of 2018, it went viral during the rise of the protests (stated to have sold at least a million copies in the matter of a few months). Others have grappled with the glaring contradictions and violence inherent to the act of a white person raking in millions under the guise of “anti-racism” and “anti-bias training”—that has been largely proven ineffective; while also charging anywhere from $30,000 to $45,000 on public speaking gigs for corporate conglomerates like Bill Gates and Amazon. So I’m not here to speak on that. Yet, DiAngelo’s public persona and prominence is arguably the perfect depiction of the co-optation of the politics of “anti-racism” into its own industry for corporate diversity initiatives without addressing structural root causes. The issue with books, panels, infographics, and the discourse surrounding race that centers and targets “allies” is that so many of them still fundamentally misunderstand rac[e/ism], whiteness, and anti-Blackness as just a matter of individual feelings, ignorance, and morality—instead of what it is: a structural organizing tool that the US political economy—built on and inseparable from slavery and genocide—necessitates.

“We who were not black before we got here, who were defined as black by the slave trade—have paid for the crisis of leadership in the white community for a long time & have resoundingly, even when we face the worst about our­selves, survived & triumphed over it."

—James Baldwin

How can one be an anti-racist if the historical precedence of race and racialization as a colonial society organizing device and regime isn’t widely understood amongst those who proclaimed to identify or align with anti-racist values? And when the vast majority of this country’s population—including self-proclaimed anti-racists’ understanding of race is wrongly and harmfully understood as that of a biological marking, rather than a sociopolitical tool meticulously and conveniently constructed and manipulated through legislation? As W.E.B. Du Bois, amongst other historians and critical race thinkers have noted: Whiteness, as stated since its historicized legislation, marks power and dominance. Blackness marks the powerless, slave, and dispossessed.

The United States of America, as we know of it, cannot function or exist without the racial regime: whiteness and anti-blackness. The entire economy, politically and otherwise—going all the way back to the cotton industry; which introduced the world to the US as a global imperial-capitalist project—is predicated & sustained through racial violence. The subjugation of imperialized nations and peoples, the dispossessed, and the enslaved, is how America and therefore the American knows that they are free. The coloniality of American freedom and the subjugation of those racialized and colonized nations and peoples cannot be divorced from one another. The entire concept of freedom and democracy—as espoused as principle by the American project—is predicated on the denial of such, of the Other(s).

“Africanism is the vehicle by which the American self knows itself as not enslaved, but free; not repulsive, but desirable; not helpless, but licensed & powerful; not history-less, but historical; not damned, but innocent; not a blind accident of evolution, but a progressive fulfillment of destiny.”

—Toni Morrison

I want to say that when I speak of the “America(n),” I am referring to that of the white. America(n) means white. I would like to also infer that the American, and white identity, ideology, and structure, is founded upon not just the systemic exploitation of the Other, namely the Black or otherwise the slave, the native, the dispossessed, and the colonized—and the moral and political justification of it—but also defined entirely by said positionality of the subjugated. As Toni Morrison has written, “Black slavery enriched the country’s [creative] possibilities. for in that construction of blackness and enslavement could be found not only the not-free but also, with the dramatic polarity created by skin color, the projection of the not—me. The result was a playground for the imagination. What rose up out of collective needs to allay internal fears and to rationalize extemal exploitation was an American Africanism—a fabricated brew of darkness, otherness, alarm, and desire that is uniquely American."

The liberal anti-racist economy is fundamentally unwilling and ill-equipped to grapple with this and racial[ized] contradictions of capital(ism)—the likes of which Black radicals of the Black radical tradition have theorized and highlighted on for decades now. Racism is not just a matter of individual ignorance or feelings that can be changed or eradicated via “understanding,” “diversity and anti-bias training,” “tough conversations,” or a quick fix in morality and finally seeing subjects of its violence as human; as so many prominent “anti-racists” would like to have us believe. The ‘antiracist’ economy, lucrative as may be, is incapable of birthing white ‘anti-racists’ because it refuses to grapple with the inherent racism of the project, or rather regime of race, racialization, capital(ism), and whiteness-as-power, in and of itself. You cannot manufacture solidarity—which a radical anti-racist movement necessitates—on the simple passivity of moral posturing. Solidarity must be built on, not just through shared struggle or basic figurations of empathy, but also on recognizing the humanity of those in which it has been historically denied to and ultimately coming to an understanding and agreement that we are worth fighting for.

“As long as you think you are white, there is no hope for you.” —James Baldwin

To teach white people to be ‘antiracist’ is to teach white people to betray everything that they have ever known about their very existence, the world order, and life itself; it is to quite literally antagonize everything that they are and sense empowerment from. Therefore, you cannot ‘teach’ white people to be ‘antiracist’ through moral and virtue signaling—especially when whiteness itself, as politically constructed, is, has always been, and will always be, immoral. It is why becoming an anti-racist is, or at least should be, a choice one makes through rigorous study of the history of race, racialization, whiteness, and liberation movements, etc. White people cannot be guilted into antiracism—this is why the “spreading awareness” tactic—deployed by Shaun King and his ilk—that bombards people with pornographic visualizations of black terror and death have been largely ineffective but on the contrary quite in fact, historically libidinal—a source of entertainment and collective joy. The politics of moralism has proven futile. You cannot moralize oppression—especially when the source and basis of said oppression is that of capital and whiteness—both of which are categorically immoral.

In a sociopolitical moment where we have seen Donald Trump’s violence exceptionalized; making it out to be unlike anything we have ever seen before—despite his political crimes largely (and simply) being an extension of the order and requirements of the US presidency—by the liberal media apparatus; terroristic political legacies resuscitated, war criminals, regime changers, and COINTELPRO state agents become faces of resistance. All of which depict a moment in which the standard for “good doers,” “morality,” and human rights and social justice advocate is deeper in the gutter than ever before. I’m afraid that the anti-racist economy, the ally industrial complex—as a result of commodification of social justice has ushered in an “anti-racism” and a human right advocacy that is inseparable from the social, political, and economic capital that it often leads to.

I’m afraid the anti-racist economy has, ironically enough, failed to create any substantial “allies” or “anti-racists.” But instead created a culture of unadulterated and uncontested political performativity, groomed more benevolent self-aggrandizing white people—who are smarter, more clever than their forebears at disguising such racism; to avoid backlash, consequences, or even the mildest forms of confrontation; just enough to navigate situations with and around subjects of racial oppression without exposing the psychopathy and immorality of structural and ideological whiteness—but not enough to materially and substantially dedicate themselves to and sacrifice their own power and capital towards an anti-capitalist, anti-racist, and anti-imperialist struggle.

I’m afraid that there has been little to no progress, remorse or lessons learned—on the part of individual whites or the white power structure at-large as evidenced by the continuation of the legacy of colonialism, slavery and historicized violence—as the tactics and acts wielded against the initial racially marked and subjugated would serve as a template of what would occur in the centuries to follow—being exported to other racialized and colonized people domestically and across the globe; while still being enacted on the initially marked, i.e., African, Black, and Indigenous subjects.

I’m afraid with the consequences of slavery, which is that of whiteness-as-power, the racial regime and racism that is inherent to it depict white remorselessness on the part of the perpetuators and continued beneficiaries of the historicized economic industry; to paraphrase one of my favorite James Baldwin quotes from 1970: the very sight of black people in white chains and cages—both proverbial or otherwise—houseless, neglected, and structurally subjugated, and terrorized; would struck such anger, such intolerable rage, in the eyes, minds, and bodies of the American people, that they would themselves spontaneously rise up and strike off the manacles. But instead, as we know of it all too well, the existence of said chains, cages, and racial subjugation, is how the American measures their own safety and sense of comfort. It is how they know they are free.

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

By Chris Wright

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

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

Aside from its direct legislative importance, the Workers’ Bill is of interest in that it shows just how left-wing vast swathes of the U.S. population were in the 1930s and can become when a political force emerges to articulate their grievances. This bill, which was far more radical than provisions in the Soviet Union for social insurance, was endorsed by over 3,500 local unions (and the regular conventions of several International unions and state bodies of the American Federation of Labor), practically every unemployed organization in the country, fraternal lodges, governmental bodies in over seventy cities and counties, and groups representing veterans, farmers, Blacks, women, the youth, and churches. In the West, the South, the Midwest, and the East, millions of citizens signed petitions and postcards in support of it. And this was all despite the active hostility of every sector of society with substantial resources.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Despite its failure, the Workers’ Unemployment Insurance Bill was a significant episode in the 1930s that certainly hasn’t deserved to be written out of history. Both substantively and in its popularity, a case can be made that it was more significant than the Social Security Act and the Townsend Plan, its two main competitors.

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Triple Crisis in the Anthropocene Ocean

By Ian Angus

Republished from Climate & Capitalism, via Monthly Review.

It is impossible to overstate the importance of the ocean to life on Earth. Covering 71% of the planet’s surface, it contains 97% of the world’s surface water and is central to the great biogeochemical cycles that define the biosphere and make life possible. Marine plants generate half of the world’s breathable oxygen.

Millions of species of animals live in the ocean. Seafood is a primary source of protein for three billion people, and hundreds of millions work in the fishing industry.

The ocean’s metabolism–the constant flows and exchanges of energy and matter that have continued for hundreds of millions of years–is a vital part of the Earth System. As famed oceanographer Sylvia Earle writes, our fate and the ocean’s are inextricably intertwined.

Our lives depend on the living ocean–not just the rocks and water, but stable, resilient, diverse living systems that hold the world on a steady course favorable to humankind.(1)

The living ocean drives planetary chemistry, governs climate and weather, and otherwise provides the cornerstone of the life-support system for all creatures on our planet, from deep-sea starfish to desert sagebrush.… If the sea is sick, we’ll feel it. If it dies, we die. Our future and the state of the oceans are one.(2)

The living ocean is now being disrupted on a massive scale. It has changed before, but never, since an asteroid killed the dinosaurs, as rapidly as today. The changes are major elements of the planetary transition out of the conditions that have prevailed since the last ice age ended, towards a profoundly different biosphere–from the Holocene to the Anthropocene.

We are entering an unknown territory of marine ecosystem change… the implications for the ocean, and thus for all humans, are huge.(3)

Most popular accounts of the relationship between the ocean and climate change focus on melting ice and rising sea levels, and indeed those are critical issues. Greenland alone loses over 280 billion metric tons of ice a year, enough to cause measurable changes in the strength of the island’s gravity. At present rates, by 2100 the combination of global glacial melting and thermal water expansion will flood coastal areas where over 630 million people live today. Well over a billion people live in areas that will be hit by storm surges made bigger and more destructive by warmer seawater. Rapid action to slash greenhouse gas emissions would be fully justified even if rising seas were the only expected result of global warming.

Devastating as sea level rise will be, however, more serious long-term damage to the Earth System is being driven by what biogeochemist Nicolas Gruber calls a “triple whammy” of stresses on the oceans, caused by the growing rift in Earth’s carbon metabolism.

“In the coming decades and centuries, the ocean’s biogeochemical cycles and ecosystems will become increasingly stressed by at least three independent factors. Rising temperatures, ocean acidification and ocean deoxygenation will cause substantial changes in the physical, chemical and biological environment, which will then affect the ocean’s biogeochemical cycles and ecosystems in ways that we are only beginning to fathom.…

Ocean warming, acidification and deoxygenation are virtually irreversible on the human time scale. This is because the primary driver for all three stressors, i.e. the emission of CO2 into the atmosphere, will cause global changes that will be with us for many hundreds, if not thousands, of years.(4)

Other marine ecologists have described ocean warming, acidification and oxygen loss as a “deadly trio,” because when they have occurred together in the past, mass extinctions of animal and plant life have followed.(5)

We will consider the elements of the deadly trio separately, but it is important to bear in mind that they are closely related, have the same causes, and frequently reinforce each other.

Part One: CORROSIVE SEAS

“Ocean acidification … is a slow but accelerating impact that will overshadow all the oil spills that have ever occurred put together.” —Sylvia Earle(6)

Ocean acidification has been called global warming’s equally evil twin. Both are caused by the radical increase in atmospheric CO2, and both are undermining Earth’s life support systems.

There is always a constant interchange of gas molecules across the air-sea interface, between atmosphere and ocean. CO2 from the air dissolves in the water; CO2 from the water bubbles into the air. Until recently, the two flows were roughly balanced: the amount of carbon dioxide in each element has not changed much for hundreds of thousands of years. But now, when atmospheric CO2 has risen 50%, the flow is out of balance. More carbon dioxide is entering the sea than leaving it.

That’s been good news for the climate. The ocean has absorbed about 25% of anthropogenic CO2 emissions and over 90% of the additional solar heat, half of that since 1997. If it hadn’t done so, global warming would already have reached catastrophic levels. As Rachel Carson wrote years ago, “for the globe as a whole, the ocean is the great regulator, the great stabilizer of temperatures…. Without the ocean, our world would be visited by unthinkably harsh extremes of temperature.”(7)

But there is a price to be paid for that service. Adding CO2 is changing the ocean’s chemistry. The formula is very simple:

H2O + CO2 → H2CO3Water plus carbon dioxide makes carbonic acid.

Adding CO2 makes seawater more acidic.

Over the past century, the ocean’s pH level has fallen from 8.2 to 8.1. That doesn’t sound like much, but the pH scale is logarithmic, so a drop of 0.1 means that the oceans are now about 30% more acidic than they used to be.(8) That’s a global average–the top 250 meters or so are generally more acidic than the deeps, and acidification is more severe in high latitudes, because CO2 dissolves more easily in colder water.

The present rate of acidification is a hundred times faster than any natural change in at least 55 million years. If it continues, ocean acidity will reach three times the pre-industrial level by the end of this century.

Impact

Surprisingly, given that scientific concern about CO2 emissions started in the 1950s, little attention was paid to ocean acidification until recently. It was first named and described in a brief article in Nature in September 2003, and first discussed in detail in a 2005 Royal Society report that concluded acidification would soon go “beyond the range of current natural variability and probably to a level not experienced for at least hundreds of thousands of years and possibly much longer.”(9)

Those wake-up calls triggered the launch of hundreds of research projects seeking to quantify acidification more precisely, and to determine its effects. While there are still big gaps in scientific knowledge, there is now no doubt that ocean acidification is a major threat to the stability of the Earth System, one that is pushing towards a sixth mass extinction of life on our planet.(10)

Though formally correct, the word “acidification” is misleading, since the oceans are actually slightly alkaline, and the shift now underway only makes them a little less so. Even in the most extreme scenario, a thousand liters of seawater would still contain less carbonic acid than a small glass of cola.

However, just as raising the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide to 0.041 percent is causing global climate change, so a small increase in the amount of CO2 in seawater poses major threats to the organisms that live in that water. Reduced pH has already significantly changed the habitats that marine plants and animals depend on: a further reduction could be deadly for many of them.

The most-studied casualties of ocean acidification are calcifiers, the many organisms that take carbonate from the surrounding water to build their shells and skeletons. In seawater, carbonic acid quickly combines with available carbonate, making it unavailable for shell and skeleton building. Water with less than a certain concentration of carbonate becomes corrosive, and existing shells and skeletons start to dissolve.

As marine conservation biologist Callum Roberts writes, lower pH is already weakening coral reefs, and the problem will get much worse if CO2 emissions aren’t radically reduced soon.

The skeletons of corals on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef have weakened measurably in the last twenty-five years and now contain 14 percent less carbonate by volume than they did before…. Ocean acidification has been dubbed ‘osteoporosis for reefs’ because of this skeletal weakening.…

If carbon dioxide in the atmosphere doubles from its current level, all of the world’s coral reefs will shift from a state of construction to erosion. They will literally begin to crumble and dissolve, as erosion and dissolution of carbonates outpaces deposition. What is most worrying is that this level of carbon dioxide will be reached by 2100 under a low-emission scenario of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.(11)

About 25% of all fish depend on coral reefs for food and shelter from predators, so the shift that Roberts describes would be disastrous for marine biodiversity.

Other calcifiers weakened by ocean acidification include oysters, mussels, crabs, and starfish. Of particular concern are tiny shelled animals near the bottom of the food chain: if their numbers decline, many fish and marine mammals will starve. In particular:

• Single-celled Foraminifera are abundant in all parts of the ocean, and are directly or indirectly consumed by a wide variety of animals. A recent study compared present day foraminifera with samples collected 150 years ago in the Pacific by the famous Challenger expedition. The researchers found that “without exception, all modern foraminifera specimens had measurably thinner shells than their historical counterparts.” In some types of foraminifera, shell thickness is now 76% less than in the 1800s.(12)

• Pea-sized Pteropods, sometimes called sea butterflies, live mainly in cold water. An article in the journal Nature Geoscience reports “severe levels of shell dissolution” in live pteropods captured in the ocean near Antarctica, resulting in “increased vulnerability to predation and infection.”(13) Since pteropods are food for just about every larger marine animal from krill to whales, “their loss would have tremendous consequences for polar marine ecosystems.”(14)

Interference with shell and skeleton formation may not be the most deadly effect of ocean acidification. The metabolic systems of all organisms function best when the pH level of their internal fluids stays within a narrow range. This is particularly problematic for marine animals, including fish, whose blood pH tends to match the surrounding water. For some species, even a small reduction in blood pH can cause severe health and reproduction problems, even death.(15) A growing body of research suggests that ocean acidification alone will decimate some species of fish in this century, causing the collapse of major fisheries.(16)

Only long-term studies can determine exactly how acidification will affect global fish populations, but waiting for certainty is dangerous, because once acidification occurs, we are stuck with it. A recent study confirmed that “once the ocean is severely affected by high CO2, it is virtually impossible to undo these alterations on a human-generation timescale.” Even if some unknown (and probably impossible) geoengineering system rapidly returns atmospheric CO2 to the pre-industrial level, “a substantial legacy of anthropogenic CO2 emissions would persist in the oceans far into the future.”(17)

Warnings ignored

In 2008, 155 scientists from 26 countries signed a declaration “based on irrefutable scientific findings” about “recent, rapid changes in ocean chemistry and their potential, within decades, to severely affect marine organisms, food webs, biodiversity, and fisheries.”

To avoid severe and widespread damages, all of which are ultimately driven by increasing concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2), we call for policymakers to act quickly to incorporate these concerns into plans to stabilize atmospheric CO2 at a safe level to avoid not only dangerous climate change but also dangerous ocean acidification.…

Policymakers need to realize that ocean acidification is not a peripheral issue. It is the other CO2 problem that must be grappled with alongside climate change. Reining in this double threat, caused by our dependence on fossil fuels, is the challenge of the century.…(18)

In 2009, twenty-nine leading Earth System scientists identified the level of ocean acidification as one of nine Planetary Boundaries–“non-negotiable planetary preconditions that humanity needs to respect in order to avoid the risk of deleterious or even catastrophic environmental change at continental to global scales.”(19)

In 2013, the always-cautious Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) expressed high confidence that absorption of carbon dioxide is “fundamentally changing ocean carbonate chemistry in all ocean sub-regions, particularly at high latitudes.”

“Warming temperatures, and declining pH and carbonate ion concentrations, represent risks to the productivity of fisheries and aquaculture, and the security of regional livelihoods given the direct and indirect effects of these variables on physiological processes (e.g., skeleton formation, gas exchange, reproduction, growth, and neural function) and ecosystem processes (e.g., primary productivity, reef building and erosion).”(20)

The IPCC’s Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere, published in 2019, concludes that “the ocean is continuing to acidify in response to ongoing ocean carbon uptake,” that “it is very likely that over 95% of the near surface open ocean has already been affected,” and that “the survival of some keystone ecosystems (e.g., coral reefs) are at risk.”(21)

Despite overwhelming scientific evidence that acidification is a major threat to the world’s largest ecosystem, the governments of the world’s richest countries remain silent. The word oceans only appeared once in their Paris Agreement and acidification wasn’t mentioned at all. It remains to be seen whether the next UN Climate Change Conference, which has been postponed to December 2021, will respond appropriately–if it responds at all.

Part Two of “Triple Crisis in the Anthropocene Ocean,” will be published in mid-September.

This article continues my series on metabolic rifts. As always, I welcome your comments, corrections and constructive criticism.—IA

Notes:

1. Sylvia A. Earle, The World Is Blue: How Our Fate and the Oceans Are One (Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2010), 20.

2. Sylvia A. Earle, Sea Change: A Message of the Oceans (New York: Ballantine Books, 1995), xii.

3. Jelle Bijma et al., “Summary of ‘Climate Change and the Oceans.’”

4. Nicolas Gruber, “Warming Up, Turning Sour, Losing Breath: Ocean Biogeochemistry Under Global Change,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, May 2011, 1980, 1992.

5. Jelle D. Bijma et al., “Climate Change and the Oceans–What Does the Future Hold?” Marine Pollution Bulletin Sept., 2013.

6. Interviewed in John Collins Rudolf, “Q. and A.: For Oceans, Another Big Headache.” New York Times, May 5, 2010.

7. Rachel L. Carson, The Sea Around Us (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018 [1950]), 163-4.

8. More precisely, there are 30% more hydrogen (H+) ions.

9. Ken Caldeira and Michael E. Wickett, “Anthropogenic Carbon and Ocean pH,” Nature, Sept. 25, 2003, 365; Royal Society, Ocean Acidification Due to Increasing Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide (London: Royal Society, 2005), 39.

10. Some argue that a mass extinction has already begun.

11. Callum Roberts, The Ocean of Life: The Fate of Man and the Sea (New York: Penguin, 2013), 108,110.

12. Lyndsey Fox et al., “Quantifying the Effect of Anthropogenic Climate Change on Calcifying Plankton,” Scientific Reports, January 31, 2020.

13. N. Bednaršek et al., “Extensive Dissolution of Live Pteropods in the Southern Ocean,” Nature Geoscience, (December 2012) 881, 883.

14. Matthias Hofmann and Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, “Ocean Acidification: A Millennial Challenge,” Energy & Environmental Science (September 2010), 1888-89

15. This is also true of humans. Our normal blood pH is 7.4: a drop of 0.2 can be fatal.

16. See, for example, Martin C. Hänsel et al., “Ocean Warming and Acidification May Drag down the Commercial Arctic Cod Fishery by 2100,” PLOS ONE, April 22, 2020. For a summary of research on biological and other effects of ocean acidification, see An Updated Synthesis of the Impacts of Ocean Acidification on Marine Biodiversity, published by the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity.

17. Sabine Mathesius et al., “Long-term Response of Oceans to CO2 Removal from the Atmosphere,” Nature Climate Change, December 03, 2015, 1107-14.

18. “Monaco Declaration,” proceedings of Second International Symposium on the Ocean in a High-CO2 World (Unesco, 2008).

19. Johan Rockström et al., “Planetary Boundaries: Exploring the Safe Operating Space for Humanity,” Ecology and Society 14, no. 2 (2009)

20. Ove Hoegh-Guldberg et al., “The Ocean,” in Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability. (Cambridge University Press, 2014), 1658.

21. IPCC, Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate (2019), 59, 66.