Socialism and the Global Information War

By Heiko Khoo

China.org.cn, April 14, 2013

The battle of ideas is central to the struggle for world socialism. Leaflets, newspapers, books, theatre troupes, radio, film and television have all played an important role in ideological warfare over the last 100 years. Recently the Internet has facilitated the rapid mobilization of rebellions in North Africa and the Middle East, which shattered apparently stable regimes.

However, what Marx wrote in 1845 remains true:

“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.”

The world hegemony of capitalism remains a fact. It is backed by powerful instruments of propaganda, which constantly seek to anchor the outlook of the ruling class within wider society. This continues despite a profound transformation in the balance of power that has accompanied the world economic crisis.

Analysts working for the People’s Liberation Army have long understood the need to study and develop methods of “people’s warfare in the information age.” As early as 1996, the Liberation Army Daily carried an excellent article by Wei Jincheng, where he explained that: “A people’s war in the context of information warfare is carried out by hundreds of millions of people using open-type modern information systems.” The era that he prophesied is now reality. But the tools available are inadequately used to transform global consciousness. Today’s world of network-centric information war, where public perceptions and attitudes are shaped by interaction with the Internet and the global mass media, necessitates a constant struggle to explain reality, and to win hearts and minds to the socialist cause.

Capitalist governments are waging war against their own people in the name of everyone “tightening their belts” meanwhile the super-rich have stashed away US$32tn in offshore tax havens. The justification for the system of wealth distribution is undermined by ruthless cuts targeting the working classes and poor. Nevertheless a barrage of absurd and persistent propaganda seeks to blame the poor for being poor. It accuses public sector workers of being selfish and lazy and promotes the concept of national-patriotic unity to confuse people during times of crisis.

Democratic elections do not change the fact that these governments represent the business and banking elite, who pull the strings behind the democratic facade. They buy political and ideological power and manipulate the minds of the people to believe that they live in freedom. In Europe, where welfare capitalism provided decades of relative stability, tens of millions are waking up to the real character of the crisis and are gradually forming views antithetical to capitalism itself.

Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz, the influential former chief economist and senior vice president of the World Bank, wrote a damning condemnation of the system in his book, "The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future". He shatters the myth that making a tiny minority rich helps society and shows that increasing inequality hinders economic and social progress. Beijing University Professor Justin Yifu Lin recently held the same World Bank post as Joseph Stiglitz had. He believes that China’s economy must upgrade its infrastructure and organize its productive activity to exploit its comparative advantages in the world economy. However, his ideas avoid any consideration of the comparative advantages of socialist economics and philosophy. In the world battle to win hearts and minds, what social and economic policies can offer an alternative to ever increasing inequality? Surely it is because of the advantages of publicly owned banks and industries that China avoided the worst of the global crisis.

The need to impact world opinion of the majority is rooted in the internationalist vision of Marxism. Before 2008 Western business advisors lectured China about the need to adopt the capitalist model. It continues to be the case that business lobbies get more attention in China than links to the workers of the world. But if Europe’s workers knew that China is building 36 million low-cost apartments for the workers; that wages are rising rapidly; and that welfare provision is expanding, this could play a big role in shifting consciousness about the so-called necessity of austerity in their own countries. If they knew the colossal scale of China’s public sector investment in railways, transport and green technology, European workers would more easily be able to envisage and demand alternative economic plans.

Inside China, real and dramatic progress, when poorly expressed in the form of propaganda, often evokes scorn, skepticism and mockery. This is multiplied in the Internet age at a speed and scale that no one can contain. So there is an urgent need to focus attention on defending core public sector advances and improving all aspects of democratic control over public property. Improvements for the masses should find expression from the people themselves and the media should act to facilitate this.

Yu Jianrong, the director of the Social Issues Research Center at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences Rural Development Institute, hit the nail on the head in a recent article where he explained that the present system of rigid and static stability – aimed at the preservation of order – should give way to a dynamic, resilient and creative stability. In this way, the dialectics of social unrest can become a source of energy and vitality. This can help to sweep away corruption and the abuse of power, defend public property and invigorate the communist cause. Social unrest can become a productive force that helps to reduce inequality and foster a more participatory and harmonious society.

The author is a columnist with China.org.cn. For more information please visit:

http://china.org.cn/opinion/heikokhoo.htm

Opinion articles reflect the views of their authors, not necessarily those of China.org.cn.

By Keith Joseph

The Kasama Project

Monthly Review published an essay by Michael Heinrich critiquing Marx’s work on the falling rate of profit called:Crisis Theory and the Falling Rate of Profit.  I haven’t seen any response yet.  Here’s mine.

Heirnrich puts forth three basic theses: 1. Marx, at the end of the day, does not present a coherent and final crisis theory.  2. Marx had two more or less distinct economic projects.  The first begins with the Grundrisse (although this text appears to the public last) and includes the three volumes of Das Kapital and the Theories of Surplus Value. This was the project as Marx originally conceived it and announced it in the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (the six book plan). The second, lesser known, project begins after 1865 and see Marx re-working his earlier formulations in light of new evidence and even scaling down his ambitions.  He now believes he will only be able to complete part of his work and others will have to finish it.  3. The math on the falling rate of profit doesn’t add up.

The essay is very interesting and I am certainly eager to investigate Marx’s “second” project more thoroughly.  Heinrich does a fine job of explaining how Marx conceived the critique of political economy  at various moments and his emphasis on Marx’s willingness to continually question and re-think his findings is important and worthy of emulation.

I found Heinrich’s refutation of the falling rate of profit’s math unconvincing because it is not clear that Heinrich understands the falling rate of profit at the conceptual level.  Setting the rate of profit and the rate of surplus value into mathematical formula  is an important step in the proof of the theory and the formalization of theory can bring clarity but the way that Heinrich proceeds obfuscates more than it reveals.  

Simply put, rising productivity of labor manifests itself in a falling profitability of capital.  It is not clear in Heinrich’s critique that he understands this basic point at the conceptual level.

Rising labor productivity means less labor embedded per unit of output so the commodity bears increasingly less value. Additionally, rising labor productivity destroys existing values since value is determined by socially necessary labor times and rising labor productivity shortens socially necessary labor times. So, existing values must compete in the market with values created under the new conditions of production.  Any labor time above the new socially necessary standard is disappeared in the market as a result of competition.  A falling rate of profit can co-exist, for a time, with a rising mass of profit if the capital relation is reaching new places and markets are expanding.  Heinrich ignores all this.  Now he does mention the importance of the credit system (which is the most developed form of money under capitalism) and its importance to understanding modern crisis.  The credit system is no doubt crucial.

Heinrich’s error, I think, is revealed in the following. Heinrich quotes a famous passage from the Grundrisse and then he argues that it is mistaken. 

“In the so-called “Fragment on Machines,” one finds an outline of a theory of capitalist collapse. With the increasing application of science and technology in the capitalist production process, “the immediate labour performed by man himself” is no longer important, but rather “the appropriation of his own general productive power,” which leads Marx to a sweeping conclusion: “As soon as labour in its immediate form has ceased to be the great source of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and therefore exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of use value. The surplus labour of the masses has ceased to be the condition for the development of general wealth, just as the non-labour of the few has ceased to be the condition for the development of the general powers of the human head. As a result, production based upon exchange value collapses.”

Heinrich’s then says:

These lines have often been quoted, but without regard for how insufficiently secure the categorical foundations of the Grundrisse are. The distinction between concrete and abstract labor, which Marx refers to in Capital as “crucial to an understanding of political economy,” is not at all present in the Grundrisse.6 And in Capital, “labor in the immediate form” is also not the source of wealth. The sources of material wealth are concrete, useful labor and nature. The social substance of wealth or value in capitalism is abstract labor, whereby it does not matter whether this abstract labor can be traced back to labor-power expended in the process of production, or to the transfer of value of used means of production. If abstract labor remains the substance of value, then it is not clear why labor time can no longer be its intrinsic measure, and it’s not clear why “production based on exchange value” should necessarily collapse. When, for example, Hardt and Negri argue that labor is no longer the measure of value, they do not really refer to the value theory of Capital but to the unclear statements of the Grundrisse.7”

Hardt and Negri’s arguments, regardless of what they may assert, are not consistent with the Grundrisse and that they appeal to the authority of the Grundrisse is not a mark against that text.  But that is a minor point.  Heinrich points out that value embedded in a machine (that is the labor time embedded in the machine) is transferred from the machine to the product.  This is correct. 

But when Heinrich says:

“If abstract labor remains the substance of value, then it is not clear why labor time can no longer be its intrinsic measure, and it’s not clear why “production based on exchange value” should necessarily collapse.”

Production based on exchange-value would collapse at this point because no new value production is possible.  Yes the products of human labor would exist, including means of production but there would be no source for surplus value, the capital relation is a process and the process would end without labor to exploit.  Heinrich’s comment above reveals that he doesn’t really understand the point of the falling rate of profit.  Profit is the form that capital accumulation must take under capitalist social relations.  Capital accumulation is the form that the development of the productive powers of human labor must take at a certain level of development.  Once the productive powers of human labor are developed to the point that human labor is no longer necessary the profit form is no longer necessary but more importantly the value form is no longer necessary.  Value is “abstract socially necessary labor time.” If socially necessary labor time is zero exchange value is no longer an adequate form, capitalism is over.

The crisis of 2008 is best understood in this light.  Moore’s Law, for example, the idea that digital technology develops in an exponential progression, is an expression of stunning rate of technological change that has taken place over the last 30 years.  Rapid (and in some instances exponential) technological change and rising labor productivity are the central feature of the current economic crisis.

This crisis is rooted in the neoliberal solution to the stagflation crisis of the 1970′s.  Neoliberalism in practice crushed the labor unions, deregulated the economy, dumped the gold standard and moved to floating exchange rates, and globalized the production process thereby unleashing the merciless whip of competition radically spurring the pursuit of relative surplus value and resulting in mind boggling technological change. Rapid technological change and rising labor productivity puts downward pressure on the rate of profit and that is the essence of the problem for the system. 

Rising labor productivity, pursued relentlessly by capital seeking advantage over the competition, gives temporary advantage to the innovating capital but, paradoxically, undermines the overall rate of surplus value production putting downward pressure on the rate of profit.

Rising labor productivity means less labor embedded per unit of output so the commodity bears increasingly less value. Additionally, rising labor productivity destroys existing values since value is determined by socially necessary labor times and rising labor productivity shortens socially necessary labor times. So, existing values must compete in the market with values created under the new conditions of production.  Any labor time above the new socially necessary standard is disappeared in the market as a result of competition.  A falling rate of profit can co-exist, for a time, with a rising mass of profit if the capital relation is reaching new places and markets are expanding. 

Debt financing, another way to offset a falling rate of profit, allows the realization of existing values before they are destroyed by the fall in socially necessary labor times.  The financial crisis ensued when expanding markets and debt financing could no longer keep pace with rising productivity/falling rate of profit.  Although it is expressed as a financial crisis its origin is in the production process. 

Marx explained, famously, in the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, that a mode of production is overthrown when the forces of production can no longer develop within the matrix of existing social relationships. 

The "productive forces" is another way of thinking about technology. Technology increases the productive power of human labor. The productive forces are then people and their technology/tools.

Under capitalism, the productive power of human labor takes the alienated form of capital and appears, to labor, as an alien power outside itself when capital is in fact the mystified form of labor’s power.  Disturbances in the development of human productive power appear as crisis of capital accumulation.

In the current crisis the further accumulation of alienated human power (capital) is fettered by the debt relation.  The debt relation started as a spur to further development allowing consumption to outstrip revenue. Debt and credit sped the turnover of capital making further accumulation possible.  But as interest rates rose debtors became unable to continue borrowing and repaying. The crisis ensued and the debt relation became a fetter on further accumulation – the movement of a social relation from spur to fetter is a familiar pattern explained in Marx’s Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.

The tendency towards a falling rate of profit is an expression of the contradiction between the continued development of the productive forces and the social relationships in which those forces have hitherto developed (the contradiction is also detailed in the Preface).

At this time debt is the specific social relation fettering continued economic development. Transforming the debt relation will solve this crisis.  There isn’t any other solution. If the hegemony of financial capital continues we will remain in recession tittering on depression for at least a decade while the impossible task of attempting to pay back debt is undertaken. The debt relation is enforced by the hegemony of financial capital.  This is why financial capital is our main enemy right now, and it is also why we should be able to rally the whole of society (all other social classes) against this “one percent.”  As an aside, “financial capital’s” hegemony is not some unanticipated outcome due to a new stage of “monopoly capitalism.”  The hegemony of financial capital is rooted in the separation of ownership and production which is what the stock market is all about.  This is a part of the expected maturation of capital.

Historical Materialism demonstrates that increasing labor productivity drives historical change. Rapid technological development is the historical mission of capitalism. Marx showed us that capitalism’s social relationships began as a spur to rapid technological development but they would eventually become brakes on further development and at that point there would be social and economic crisis and a transformation of our economic relationships would become necessary if catastrophe is to be averted.

Heinrich’s work shows that there is still much theoretical work to do, the role of the credit system and its relation to the falling rate of profit is still a critical area of further research and the current crisis is an perfect example of this relationship.

Tags: crisis of 2008, crisis theory, falling rate of profit, Marxism, value theory

A group of volunteers wave green handkerchiefs as they ride their bicycles in Beijing on November 21, 2012 for the launch of a world-tour to promote low-carbon lifestyles. The activity, which will see volunteers set off on a global tour from Libo County in Guizhou Province, was launched under the themes of bringing back the handkerchief, using less tissue paper, travelling by environmentally friendly means, and living a low-carbon lifestyle. / Xinhua (Photo by Zhao Jing)

Creating an Ecological Civilization

By Jiang Chunyun

From: English Edition of Qiushi Journal. a publication of the CCP  Central Committee

Vol.5 No.1 January 1, 2013

As the old Chinese proverb goes, “To return a kindness with gratitude is a good deed, the act of an upright man; to treat a kindness with ingratitude is a bad deed, the act of a petty man.” These words, “good” and “bad,” “gratitude” and “ingratitude,” have long been the most fundamental criteria for judging the morality and action of an individual. Do children treat their parents with respect out of gratitude for the loving care their parents have given them? Do countrymen serve their motherland wholeheartedly out of gratitude for everything their motherland has afforded them? And do human beings have awe for and cherish their green home out of gratitude for the life that nature has granted them? Everybody on earth, individuals and groups alike, must find rational answers to these questions, regardless of their nationality, race, gender, class, and occupation, and must require both themselves and others to act in accordance with a just code of speaking out for good and doing good instead of evil.

Life on earth began as early as several hundred million years ago, while the story of human evolution started only several million years ago. This means that humans are latecomers. At every step of human evolution—from our transformation from Australopithecus to Homo erectus, and again from archaic Homo sapiens to Homo sapiens—we have been cared for by nature, which, like a great and holy mother, has allowed humankind to grow from a species with few members to one with several billion members. In comparison with family and country, the care that nature has bestowed on us is more fundamental, more worthy of our gratitude. Yet how have we treated nature? This may be a difficult question to answer, but it is one that we must answer as a matter of conscience.

Frankly speaking, there are many people who are able to show appreciation towards nature. These people have made active contributions to ecological protection and the improvement of the environment. But at the same time, there are also people who have no sense of gratitude towards nature. These people are indifferent towards the changes that are affecting nature and the environment. Moreover, there are even people who are so ungrateful towards nature that they would wantonly damage the environment. These people are by no means few in number, and their violations against nature are on the increase. This is the root cause of the ecological degradation and environmental deterioration that has plunged the human race into a survival crisis.

Ecological and environmental issues began to emerge with the advent of agricultural society, although at that time the impact of human activities on the environment was gradual and relatively minor. However, with the arrival of the Industrial Revolution and the rapid development of science and technology, human beings began to deal serious damage to the environment as they created great material wealth and cultural achievements. This damage has become increasingly serious in modern times. Air pollution, water pollution, soil pollution, desertification, global warming, the melting of the glaciers, the depletion of the ozone, the spread of acid rain, the sharp drop in biodiversity, and the frequent occurrence of fatal diseases and natural disasters—these startling facts are a warning that the earth’s biosphere, which mankind relies on for its survival, is damaged. They tell us that the major ecological systems supporting the earth’s biosphere, such as forests, grasslands, wetlands, rivers, lakes, farmlands, mountains, the atmosphere, and oceans, are bruised all over, weakened, and that untold dangers lurk amongst them. The biosphere is like a cracked fish tank which is losing its water. As the water seeps out of the tank at an increasing rate, the survival of the fish inside is coming under threat. Therefore, if we are unable to repair the biosphere quickly, the damage will only become worse and worse. This will continue until the biosphere eventually ceases to function, being no longer able to operate, and when that happens humankind will descend into a desperate struggle for its survival. This is not alarmist talk, but a real depiction of a hidden crisis that will threaten the survival of the human race.

In an effort to address the human crisis that has been triggered by environmental deterioration, the international community and the countries of the world have frequently convened meetings, signed conventions and accords, issued declarations, made commitments, and taken action. While in some cases these efforts have led to positive results, in overall terms our efforts to restore ecosystems and rectify environments have yielded few results. At most we can say that there has been partial improvement. The trend of environmental deterioration on a global scale is yet to be reversed, and there are even signs that it is becoming more serious. James Speth, the Dean of the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale University and former Administrator of the United Nations Development Program, says that the trend of environmental decline, which has made the international community uneasy, is yet to be fundamentally mitigated. Ill omens still exist, and these problems are becoming more ingrained, bringing about immediate danger. Speth believes that problems such as global warming, environmental pollution, resource depletion, ecological degradation, and the loss of biodiversity are much worse than we are able to understand, willing to admit, or tend to estimate.

The reasons for global environmental deterioration are deep-seated. Though we cannot rule out the influence of reverse ecological succession, the fact remains that the most fundamental cause of global environmental deterioration is humankind’s failure to treat nature correctly. Human beings have made irreparable mistakes due to their biased understanding of the relationship between humans and nature. The predatory exploitation of resources and irrational modes of production and lifestyles that came with the Industrial Revolution have had a devastating impact on ecosystems and the environment. Traditional industrial civilization was undoubtedly a revolutionary step forward from agricultural civilization, creating much higher productivity, huge material wealth, as well as technological and cultural achievements. However, the shortcomings of industrial civilization are not difficult to see: it is extremely profit-driven, greedy, predatory, aggressive, and even crazy in nature, its values and approach to development being the rapid accumulation of wealth and capital at any cost. In recent centuries, under the influence of these ideas, developed industrial countries in the West engaged in an unprecedented campaign to conquer, plunder, and destroy nature. With this came a long succession of colonial wars which not only saw millions die and hundreds of millions become slaves, but also caused the world’s ecological environments to suffer on an unprecedented scale. Many of those who plundered the world’s natural resources were proponents of anthropocentrism, the view that human beings are the masters of nature and that all other things in the natural world are mankind’s possessions, consumables, and servants. Guided by these notions, they robbed, seized and destroyed without restraint, and led extravagant, luxurious, and extremely wasteful lifestyles. In more than 200 years of industrial history, developed countries in the West have consumed around half of the world’s non-renewable resources, which took billions of years to form.

Fact has repeatedly warned us that we cannot rely on traditional industrial civilization to correct its own mistakes when it comes to the environment. Traditional industrial civilization has therefore come to a dead end. Despite this, however, certain developing countries have failed to break away from the developmental mode of traditional industrial civilization as they have sought to industrialize. As a result, within the space of just decades, they have encountered the kind of environmental pollution and ecological degradation that took one or two hundred years to emerge in the West. These countries must now meet the challenge of maintaining a balance between economic development and environmental protection.

Since the latter half of the last century, we have come to the profound realization that industrial civilization is unsustainable. Drawing from the lessons of the past, we have proposed the creation of an ecological civilization, which is characterized by sustainable development and harmony between mankind and nature. Ecological civilization provides us with broader prospects for resolving the environmental crisis and maintaining balance between development and the environment. It represents a substantive step forward from industrial civilization, because it not only embodies the strengths of industrial civilization, but is also able to address its weaknesses and failings by applying brand new ideas. The basic features of ecological civilization can be summarized as follows.

First, human beings are a part of nature. The relationship between human beings and other creatures should be one of equality, friendship, and mutual reliance, as opposed to a relationship in which humans are supreme.

Second, since it is nature that has given us life, we should feel gratitude towards nature, repay nature, and treat nature well. We should not forget the debt that we owe to nature, or treat nature and other creatures violently.

Third, humans are entitled to exploit natural resources, but we must take the tolerance of ecosystems and the environment into account when doing so in order to avoid overexploitation.

Fourth, human beings must follow the moral principles of ensuring equity between people, between countries and between generations in resource exploitation. We should refrain from violating the rights and interests of other people, other countries, and future generations.

Fifth, we should advocate conservation, efficiency, and recycling in the utilization of resources so as to maximize efficiency whilst keeping consumption and the impact on nature to a minimum.

Sixth, we should view sustainable development as our highest goal, rejecting the overexploitation of resources and short-sighted acts aimed at gaining quick results.

Seventh, the fruits of development must be enjoyed by all members of society and not monopolized by a small minority.

It is essential that we correct the way we treat nature and assume our rightful position in nature. As the wisest of all creatures, we should give full play to our intelligence and capacity for thought by shouldering the responsibility of caring for, protecting, guiding, and strengthening nature, and ensuring that all of nature’s creatures are able to live in harmony and develop in a balanced, orderly, and continuous fashion.

It must be noted that while China has made remarkable achievements in socialist modernization during more than 30 years of reform and opening up, it has also encountered serious environmental problems that are undermining its sustainable development. Fact has demonstrated and will continue to demonstrate that we must take Marxism-Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought, and the theories of socialism with Chinese characteristics as our guide, commit to the path of socialism with Chinese characteristics, implement the Scientific Outlook on Development, which puts people first and seeks to promote comprehensive, balanced, and sustainable development, and build a resource-conserving and environmentally friendly society. These are not only the essence for promoting ecological progress and realizing the transformation of human civilization, but also a prerequisite and solid foundation for ensuring the sound and rapid development of economy and society, the balancing of economic development and environmental protection, the establishment of a harmonious society, and the improvement of people’s wellbeing.

There are two old Chinese sayings which, through their dialectical materialism, reveal to us the key to success in any undertaking. The first is: to go undefeated in a hundred battles, you must know both the enemy and yourself. The second is: success belongs to those who are prepared, and failure to those who are not. If we are to reverse the trend of environmental degradation and save the biosphere, we must correctly assess the state of our living environment, face up to environmental problems instead of trying to conceal them, use scientific means to anticipate dangers that lurk ahead, and sincerely reflect on our maltreatment of nature. Once we have acknowledged our errors we must take action to correct them. To do this, we must enhance our sense of mission, danger, and responsibility, and take the necessary measures to turn a precarious situation into a favorable one, so as to realize a sound balance between development and the environment.

It is about time that we changed our way of thinking and discarded our concept of a traditional industrial civilization in favor of a modern ecological one. It is about time that we put an end to our irrational modes of development and consumption, and made efforts to save the earth’s biosphere.

The struggle to save the biosphere and transform our civilization from a traditional industrial civilization to a modern ecological civilization will be an endeavor more magnificent than any seen before in human history, and a complex social undertaking of huge proportions. It will require that we humans carefully consider, correctly understand, and answer a series of questions, some of which are as follows: What is the relationship between human beings and nature? Is it one of the conqueror and the conquered, the dominator and the dominated, and the ruler and the ruled? Or is it one of equality, friendship, harmony, coexistence, and mutual flourishing? Why is earth the only cradle of life among the vast number of celestial bodies in universe? What is the earth’s biosphere, and how will ordinal or reversed ecological succession affect the survival and development of human beings? Which biological systems support and maintain the earth’s biosphere? Is it inevitable that the survival and development of the human race will come at the expense of ecosystems and the environment? How should we understand the relationship between promoting an ecological civilization and transforming our modes of development and consumption? How should we deal with the contradiction between limited natural resources and limitless human desire? Should we make up for the huge damage caused to nature by long-term overexploitation? If so, how do we repay this debt? Should we let nature rest and regain its strength like humans do when they become old or ill? What is the role of science and technology in saving the biosphere? What is the relationship between population growth and resources, environment and sustainable development? What do the constant wars of human beings mean to nature? How do we give full play to the role of law and ethics as effective means of guaranteeing environmental protection and the salvation of the biosphere? Why must we improve our methods and standards for evaluating economic and social development? How should the countries of the world cooperate and coordinate with one another in saving the earth’s biosphere and developing ecological civilization?

Drawing lessons from both our successes and failures in interacting with nature, we must see the global environmental crisis for what it is, and work out the relevant theories, ways of thinking, and countermeasures as we commit ourselves to the path of promoting ecological civilization.

Author: Former Vice Chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress of China

Note: This article is a slightly abridged version of the preface of the book Saving the Earth’s Biosphere—Concerning the Transformation of Human Civilization, which was edited by the author and published by Xinhua Press in September 2012.

A system that accelerates social disparity must be reformed before problems with resource allocation and social justice can be addressed

By Liu Shangxi

Caixin.com March 29, 2013

In theory, public ownership, including ownership by all the people and collective ownership, is conducive to narrowing the gap between the rich and the poor. In reality it’s not.

In the planned economy under public ownership, China appeared to have achieved social equity, but this was accompanied by low efficiency and slow development. After reform and opening up started in the late 1970s, China implemented a market economy, though one that was still dominated by public ownership. Economic efficiency improved, but the income distribution gap has exceeded that of many other market economies dominated by the private ownership system. Why has the public ownership system failed to close the gap between rich and poor and instead widened it?

In fact, whether a public ownership system can enhance social equity depends on whether there is a sound property rights system in place.

Under a planned economy, the system of ownership and the system of property rights are made one. Property rights, operating rights, usage rights and the right to financial gain are all of the same entity.

Under a market economy, however, the system of ownership and the property rights system are separated, and operating rights and usage rights fall under different entities. For instance, farmers have the right to use farmland but no ownership. Their financial gain is shared between farmers and the rural collective. All the land, mineral resources, forests, water, and other factors of production of the country are also split off into operating rights and use rights, forming independent property rights entities that share revenue rights with the ultimate owner – the state. In this way, public resources can be better allocated under the push of the market, and each property rights entity can obtain corresponding revenue. Then, revenue obtained from collective and state ownership can be shared by its members. In theory it looks good.

In fact there was no thorough study on how to deal with property rights under public ownership, and we just borrowed the theory of property rights based on private ownership. The mismatch created problems.

Much of the land, mineral resources and other public resources that are factors of production have not seen property rights reform. In reality, administrative approval, agreements and competitive auctions led by various levels of governments are used to transfer usage rights. Most of property rights revenues have not been shared with the public, with much of it lining the pockets of a few, becoming part of the original capital accumulation of some people with access to power. Coupled with the market mechanism that is spreading in China, social wealth quickly accumulates and concentrates, hence the rapidly widening gap between rich and poor.

Revenue from public property includes revenue from the transfer of public resources for development, such as the transfer of usage rights for land, mineral resources, scenic areas, waters and lakes. It also includes gains from the property of government institutions, such as from auctions and rentals. Moreover, there are dividends from state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and state-owned stock holdings, as well as profits from capital, income from various types of licensing, including public spaces, public channels and public media, as well as charges for public facilities.

By Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Monthly Review

We were like Custer. We were surrounded.

—Sgt. James J. Riley explaining why he ordered surrender in an engagement in Nasiriyah, Iraq on March 23, 2003. 1

At the onset of the U.S. military invasion of Iraq, Senator Robert Byrd emotionally queried: “What is happening to this country? When did we become a nation which ignores and berates our friends? When did we decide to risk undermining international order by adopting a radical and doctrinaire approach to using our awesome military might? How can we abandon diplomacy when the turmoil in the world cries out for diplomacy?”

As a historian, I would have to respond to Senator Byrd that 1776 or thereabouts was when. Many admirable U.S. anti-imperialists have been making the same point as Senator Byrd. An erasure of history is at the heart of some of the most anti-imperialist critiques of the Bush administration’s foreign policy. Continuity is hidden, and a small departure is exaggerated. From Gore Vidal to Manning Marable to Michael Moore “lost democracy” is a refrain. Edward Said writes: “The doctrine of military pre-emption was never voted on by the American people or their representatives… It seems so monumentally criminal that important words like democracy and freedom have been hijacked, used as a mask for pillage, taking over territory and settling scores.” Said ends his essay by, correctly, stating: “Bush looks like a cowboy.”2

That observation is also common to critics of the war around the world. Although it is meant to be understood as a bad thing, in fact, the cowboy is not a negative metaphor for many U.S. citizens, particularly those who are descendants of the old settler class, as are the majority of the ruling class and officers of the military. How many generations of children now have grown up gleefully playing cowboys and Indians?

Perhaps the fact that I grew up as a child of a cowboy father and Indian mother narrows my view of this metaphor, making it loom too large and out of perspective. Then again, maybe that experience brings with it some insider knowledge.

The Rise of White Supremacy and Imperialism/Capitalism

To allow no dissent from the truth was exactly the reason they had come to America.3

Are your garments spotless?Are they white as snow?

Are they washed in the blood of the lamb?

As this traditional evangelical Christian hymn suggests, whiteness as an ideology is far more complex than mere skin color, although skin color has been and continues to be a key component of racism within the United States. The origins of white supremacy as it is now experienced and institutionalized—and denied—in the United States (and, due to colonialism and imperialism, throughout the world) can be traced to the prior colonizing ventures of Christian Crusades into Muslim-controlled territories, and to the Calvinist Protestant colonization of Ireland. These were the models for the colonization of the Western Hemisphere, and are the two strands that merge in the genetic makeup of U.S. society.

The Christian Crusades against Islam/Africa gave birth to the law of limpieza de sangre, cleanliness of blood, which the Spanish Inquisition was mandated to investigate and determine. The Christian Crusades, particularly the Castilian conquest of the Iberian Peninsula and expulsion of Jews and Muslims, created the seed ideology and institutions for modern colonialism with its necessary tools—racist ideology and justification for genocide. The law of limpieza de sangre was perhaps the most important cargo on the 1492 voyage of Christopher Columbus, sailing under the flag of Spain.

Great Britain emerged as an overseas colonial power a century later than Spain, and absorbed aspects of the Spanish caste system into its colonialist rationalizations, particularly regarding African slavery, within the context of chosen people/New Jerusalem Calvinism and Puritanism.

In the pre-formation of the United States, Puritanism and Calvinist Protestantism uniquely refined white supremacy as a political/religious ideology (a covenant with God) requiring the shedding of white blood for purification. The Ulster-Scots Calvinists were the settler/colonizers of Northern Ireland and constituted a majority of settlers in the western lands over the Appalachian/Allegheny spine of English North America. Their origin story became the origin story of the United States. It tells of pilgrim/settlers doing God’s will and forging into the promised land, being surrounded by savages, and killing the heathen (first the Irish in Ulster, then the Native Americans in North America). Thereby, the sacrifice and blood shed is perceived as proof of the sanctity and purity of the nation itself. All the descendants of those who made such sacrifices are the true inheritors of the land.

The Crusades and Purity of Blood

In the eighth century, Muslims came to power in all but the northern fringe of the Iberian Peninsula and ruled for centuries. However, by the end of the fifteenth century, the last Muslim state held only a foothold in Granada, an enclave on the southeastern coast surrounded by the expansionist Christian monarchies of Castile and Aragon. During those intervening seven hundred years, various Christian kingdoms based in the north of the peninsula attacked Moorish territory, seizing their lands and properties. The Christian crusaders named this process La Reconquista, the reconquest. This military/religious project created the institutions and practices later established in Spanish America, especially the encomienda (conquered land granted to the conquistador along with the people on it, with the conquistador earning the noble title of hidalgo).

The Reconquest meant the slow and systematic extension of Christian power over all those lands that had been Muslim since the eighth century, and so involved the clash of Christian and Muslim armies and societies. What the Reconquest destroyed, however, was the racial and religious coexistence, which despite incessant armed conflict had distinguished the society of mediaeval Spain. It was claimed by a contemporary that when the Christians went to war against the Moors, it was ‘neither because of the law (of Mahommed) nor because of the sect that they hold to’, but because of the lands they occupied and for this reason alone.4

Before Christian aggression and eventual expulsion of the Moors from the Iberian Peninsula, Christians, Jews, and Muslims had enjoyed a mutual tolerance so the question of racial or religious conflict had not existed.

The Vatican created the original institution of the Inquisition in 1179 for routing out Christian heretics, the original mandate being free of racialization. However, the 1400s in Spain saw increasing Inquisition investigations of conversos, that is, Christian converted Jews, and of moriscos, Christian converted Muslims. Jews and Muslims who refused to convert were finally deported en masse from the Iberian Peninsula at the end of the fifteenth century. (It is said that Columbus watched the people being loaded on to ships for deportation as he set sail in 1492).

Before this time the concept of biological race based on “blood” is not known to have existed as law or taboo in Christian Europe or anywhere else in the world.5 As scapegoating and suspicion of conversos and moriscos intensified in Christian Spain, the doctrine of limpieza de sangre, “purity of blood,” was popularized and had the effect of granting psychological, and increasingly legal, privileges to “Old Christians” thereby obscuring the class differences between the poor and the rich, i.e. between the landed aristocracy and the land-poor peasants and shepherds. In Cervantes’ Don Quixote the impoverished Sancho Panza says, “I am an Old Christian, and to become an earl that is sufficient,” to which Don Quixote replies, “And more than sufficient.” And Cervantes’ contemporary, Lope de Vega, wrote in his PeribE1F1ez: “soy un hombre, /aunque de villana casta, /limpio de sangre y jam /de hebrea o mora manchada” (I am a man, although of lowly status, yet clean of blood and with no mixture of Jewish or Moorish blood.)

What we witness in late fifteenth and early sixteenth century Spain is the first instance of class leveling based on imagined biological racial differences, indeed the origin of white supremacy, the necessary ideology of colonial projects in America and Africa. We see here the beginnings of the “thousand year Reich” of settler capitalism/colonialism, and its characteristic tug of war over the hearts and minds of the majority of the settlers—the yeomanry, and later the “white” working classes. Historian David Stannard, in his American Holocaust, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992) adds to Elie Wiesel’s famous observation, that the road to Auschwitz was paved in the earliest days of Christendom, the caveat that on the way to Auschwitz the road led straight through the heart of America. The ideology of white supremacy was paramount in neutralizing the class antagonisms of the landless against the landed, and in the distribution of the confiscated lands and properties of Moors, Jews, and of Irish, Native Americans and Africans. Kamen describes the process in fifteenth and sixteenth century Spain:

a situation in which the highest and lowest classes could maintain social mobility without great fear of social distinction…as with the genuine aristocracy, the concepts of honour, pride and hidalguEDa become the very foundations of action…In so far as this concept of honour was identified with the virtues of the Old Christian nobility, deference to honour became deference to the nobility…the Castilian nobility continued to regard their functions as essentially the same that they had always been. Their task was to fight and not to labour. HidalguEDa would not permit a nobleman, even the lowest rank of nobleman, to labour or to trade…6

The “Old Christian” Spanish, whatever their economic situation, were allowed to identify with the worldview of the nobility. As one Spanish historian puts it, “the common people looked upwards, wishing and hoping to climb, and let themselves be seduced by chivalric ideals: honour, dignity, glory, and the noble life.”7

We can also locate the origin of genocide and its linkage to colonialism in the late 1400s in Spain. Two punishments were devised to root out uncertain Christians deemed to have unclean blood: the extermination of many burned at the stake and the social isolation and persecution of the rest.

Ireland and the English Inquisition

During the early 1600s the English conquered Northern Ireland, and declared a half-million acres of land open to settlement; the settlers who contracted with the devil of early colonialism came mostly from western Scotland. England had previously conquered Wales and southern and eastern Ireland, but had never previously attempted on such a scale to remove the indigenous population and “plant” settlers. The English policy of exterminating Indians in North America was foreshadowed by this English colonization of Northern Ireland. The ancient Irish social system was systematically attacked, traditional songs and music forbidden, whole clans exterminated and the remainder brutalized. A “wild Irish” reservation was even attempted.8 The planted settlers were Calvinist Protestants, assured by their divines that they had been chosen by God for salvation (and title to the lands of Ulster). The native (and Papist) Irish were definitely not destined for salvation, but rather the reverse, both in the present and hereafter.

The “plantation” of Ulster followed centuries of intermittent warfare in Ireland, and was as much the culmination of a process as a departure. In the sixteenth century, the official in charge of the Irish province of Munster, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, ordered that:

The heddes of all those (of what sort soever thei were) which were killed in the daie, should be cutte off from their bodies and brought to the place where he incamped at night, and should there bee laied on the ground by eche side of the waie ledying into his owne tente so that none could come into his tente for any cause but commonly he muste passe through a lane of heddes which he used ad terrorem…[It brought] greate terrour to the people when thei sawe the heddes of their dedde fathers, brothers, children, kindsfolke, and freinds…9

Bounties were paid for the Irish heads brought in and later only the scalp or ears were required. A century later, in North America, Indian heads and scalps were brought in for bounty in the same manner. Native Americans picked up the practice from the colonizers. The first English colonial settlement in North America had been planted in Newfoundland in the summer of 1583, by Sir Humphrey Gilbert.

During the mid-nineteenth century, influenced by Social Darwinism, some English scientists peddled the theory that the Irish (and of course all people of color) had descended from apes, while the English were descendants of man who had been created by God in His image. Thus the English were “angels” and the Irish (and other colonized peoples) were a lower species, what today U.S. white supremacists call “mud people,” products of the process of evolution.10 It is the seventeenth century Ulster Calvinist ideology in late nineteenth century modern guise.

White Supremacy, the U.S. Origin Myth, and U.S. Imperialism

Two paragraphs, rarely cited, from the Declaration of Independence raise thorny questions about Anglo-American imperialist roots in forming the breakaway United States of America. This was not simply the founding of a republic for propertied, mostly slave-owning, white males, but more importantly a settler-colonialist and imperialist-aggressor state.

He [King George] has endeavored to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose, obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners, refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither, and raising the conditions of new appropriations of lands. [The treaty ending the French and Indian War made British settlement over the Allegheny/Appalachian line into Indian country illegal and ordered the return of those tens of thousand settlers who had already squatted there, demanding land rights.]

He [King George] has excited domestic insurrections amongst us and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions.

Not only did founding father Thomas Jefferson pen those words, he was also the real architect of the genocide and confiscation of the land of settled indigenous peoples later termed the Jacksonian policy of Indian removal.

Reconciling empire and liberty was a historic obsession of U.S. political thinkers and historians, in the twenty-first century openly being debated once again. Thomas Jefferson had hailed the United States as an “empire for liberty.” Andrew Jackson coined the phrase, “extending the area of freedom” to describe the process in which slavery had been introduced into Texas in violation of governing Mexican laws, to be quickly followed by a slaveholder’s rebellion and U.S. annexation. The term “freedom” became a euphemism for the continental and worldwide expansion of the world’s leading slave power. The contradictions, particularly since the initial rationalization for U.S. independence was anti-empire, are multiple.

It is easy to date U.S. imperialism to Andrew Jackson, but he only carried out the original plan, initially as an army general who led three genocidal wars against the Muskogee in Georgia/Florida, then as the most popular president ever, and the organizer of the expulsion of all native peoples east of the Mississippi to the Oklahoma Territory.

Although white supremacy was the working rationalization and ideology of English theft of Native American lands, and especially the justification for African slavery, the independence bid by what became the United States of America is more problematic, in that democracy/equality and supremacy/dominance/empire do not make an easy fit. It was during the 1820s, the era of Jacksonian Democracy, that the unique U.S. origin myth was created, James Fenimore Cooper the initial scribe. James Fenimore Cooper’s re-invention of America in The Last of the Mohicans has become the official U.S. origin story. Herman Melville called Cooper “our national novelist,” and, of course, he was the great hero of Walt Whitman who sang the song of manhood and the American super-race through empire. As an enthusiastic supporter of the U.S. war against Mexico, 1846–1848, Whitman proposed the stationing of sixty thousand U.S. troops in Mexico in order to establish a regime change there, stating, “whose efficiency and permanency shall be guaranteed by the United States. This will bring out enterprise, open the way for manufacturers and commerce, into which the immense dead capital of the country will find its way.”11

Whitman’s sentiment (and he was the most beloved writer of his time, and still beloved by contemporary U.S. poets, particularly the Beats) followed the already established U.S. origin myth that had the frontier settlers replacing the native peoples, similar to the parallel Afrikaner origin myth in South Africa.

To the extent that African Americans, Native Americans, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, and non-European immigrants are allowed (and are willing) to embrace and embody U.S. patriotism, they may be accepted as conversos, as the Spanish Inquisition termed those who professed Christianity despite their “unclean” blood. Yet in the end, only the Old Settlers are true Americans.

This white supremacist ideology formed the core of U.S. foreign policy as well, from its origins to the present. As Samir Amin pointed out: “During this entire phase [the Cold War] the East-West conflict was presented as a struggle between socialism and capitalism, although it was never anything other than the conflict between the periphery and the center, manifested in its most radical form.”12

Why Do We Date U.S. Imperialism Only to 1898, and as an Aberration?

“American” supremacy and populist imperialism are inseparable from the content of the U.S. origin story and the definition of patriotism in the United States today. And it began at the beginning, even before the founding of the United States, not as an accident or aberration in the progression of democracy. The founding of the United States marked a split in the British Empire, not an anticolonial liberation movement.

The very term, “frontier,” used to define the border between independent Native American nations and the United States, implies a foreign country on the other side of a demarcation line—a country to be invaded, its inhabitants controlled and then expelled, while settlers move in protected by the army. Everything accounted for in the first hundred years plus as “movement of the frontier” was plain and simple imperialism, fitting all the definitions thereof.

During this new phase of U.S. imperialism following 9/11, accelerating with the invasion, occupation, and administration of Iraq, commentators and historians—left and right—but mostly liberal Democrats, observe that the United States is not very good at imperialism, with vague references to the Spanish-American War. Actually, the United States has not become the most powerful military machine and dominant power on earth and in history by accident or by staying home and minding the cows and banks like the Swiss, who are capitalist and rich, but not imperialists.

“Well, so what?” many of my antiwar and social-justice friends ask me, asserting that the truth would alienate “ordinary people,” whoever they are. Who would know since it has never been tried? Besides, I have my doubts that most of my leftist friends are themselves prepared to accept that the very origin of the United States is fundamentally imperialist, rather than imperialism being a divergence from a well-intentioned path. The public acceptance of media propaganda justifying U.S. government aggression falls into the pattern of a belief system based on the origin story that is uninterrupted and uninterrogated by us, the left.

Of course, there are many leftist and social democratic thinkers and scholars who challenge the 1898 age of imperialism myth. Most notably, Monthly Review has never strayed from understanding the long history of U.S. imperialism, particularly in Latin America. Also, William Appleman Williams and a whole generation of radical U.S. historians acknowledge “empire as a way of life” the title of Williams’ 1980 book of essays (New York: Oxford University Press) that includes an exhaustive list of overseas interventions dating back to day one, giving substance to the U.S. Marine theme, “the shores of Tripoli.” And with the Iraq intervention, many antiwar critics have compiled such lists.

The expansion of the United States from sea to shining sea is coming under reexamination, even from bourgeois historians, with the sudden unabashed assertion of U.S. imperialism. Warren Zimmermann, in his recent book on the frankly imperial aims of the Teddy Roosevelt administration, First Great Triumph (New York: Farrar Straus and Geroux, 2002), introduces his material with words rarely found in mainstream literature:

Americans like to pretend that they have no imperial past. Yet they have shown expansionist tendencies since colonial days…Overland expansion, often at the expense of Mexicans and Indians, was a marked feature of American history right through the period of the Civil War, by which time the United States had reached its continental proportions.The War for American Independence, which created most of the founding myths of the Republic, was itself a war for expansion…Thomas Jefferson nursed even grander plans for empire.13

Warren Zimmermann himself knows something of the practical side of imperialism. He was the last U.S. ambassador to pre-civil war Yugoslavia. Surely it is past time for leftists to abandon the Whitmanesque celebratory myths of a democratic American manifest destiny.

Conclusion

As a graduate student in Latin American History at UCLA in the mid-1960s, I first learned about imperialism, and it was my good fortune to have access to Marxist analysis. However, it was not until the early 1970s when I became involved as an expert witness in Native American court cases regarding U.S.-Indian treaties, that I came to grasp the true nature and development of U.S. imperialism. At that same time, a now deceased mentor, Canadian Native leader and Marxist historian, Howard Adams, gave me a book that had a great influence on me.14 That book was Pierre Jalée’s Imperialism in the Seventies (New York: The Third Press, 1973) which contained a brilliant introduction by Harry Magdoff. Harry’s cautionary words three decades ago resonate even more loudly today:

The major obstacle to such enlightenment is the pervasiveness of the ideological rationalization for imperialism. The extent of this pervasiveness is not easy to perceive because such rationalization is deep-seated. Its roots are intertwined with the accepted, conventional modes of thought and the consciousness of a people. Thus, they are located in the false patriotism and racism that sink deeply and imperceptibly into the individual’s sub-conscious; in the traditions, values, and even aesthetics of the cultural environment—an environment evolved over centuries during which self-designated “superior” cultures assumed the right to penetrate and dominate “inferior” cultures. These roots are also buried in the sophisticated theorems of both liberal and conservative economics, sociology, political science, anthropology, and history. For these reasons, citizens of an imperialist country who wish to understand imperialism must first emancipate themselves from the seemingly endless web of threads that bind them emotionally and intellectually to the imperialist condition.15

This, I believe, is the most important task for the antiwar and social justice movements in the United States today—to assume the responsibility of being citizens of an empire that must be dismantled.

Notes

1. Peter Baker, “Wrong Turn in Nasiriyah Led to Soldiers’ Capture Maintenance Company Drove Into Waiting Ambush,” Washington Post, April 13, 2003.
2. Edward Said, “Give Us Back Our Democracy: Americans Have Been Cheated and Lied To,” (www. CounterPunch.org, 4/21/03).
3. Perry Miller, Errand in the Wilderness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956), 114.
4. Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition (New York: New American Library, 1965), 2.
5. Norman Roth, Conversos, Inquisition, and the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 229.
6. Kamen, Inquisition, 117–118.
7. Claudio Sánchez Albornoz, España, un enimgma histórico (2 vols.)(Buenos Aires, 1962), I, 677.
8. Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 42.
9. Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), 168.
10. L. Perry Curtis, Jr., ed., Apes and Angels (Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1971).
11. Walter A. McDougall, Promised Land, Crusader State (New York: Houghton Mifflin Co, 1997), 95.
12. Samir Amin, Empire of Chaos (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1992), 9.
13. Zimmermann, First Great Triumph (New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2002), 17.
14. Howard Adams, Prison of Grass (Toronto: Free Press, 1974).
15. Pierre Jalée, Imperialism in the Seventies (New York: Third Press, 1973), xvii–xviii.’

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz is a longtime activist, university professor, and writer. In addition to numerous scholarly books and articles she has published two historical memoirs, Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie (Verso, 1997), and Outlaw Woman: A Memoir of the War Years, 1960–1975 (City Lights, 2002), and is working on a third, Norther: Re-Covering Nicaragua, about the 1980s contra war against the Sandinistas.

‘Bombard Those in Power with Strategically Well-selected, Precise, Finite Demands…’

By Slavoj Žižek

London Review of Books

One of the clearest lessons of the last few decades is that capitalism is indestructible. Marx compared it to a vampire, and one of the salient points of comparison now appears to be that vampires always rise up again after being stabbed to death. Even Mao’s attempt, in the Cultural Revolution, to wipe out the traces of capitalism, ended up in its triumphant return.

Today’s Left reacts in a wide variety of ways to the hegemony of global capitalism and its political supplement, liberal democracy. It might, for example, accept the hegemony, but continue to fight for reform within its rules (this is Third Way social democracy).

Or, it accepts that the hegemony is here to stay, but should nonetheless be resisted from its ‘interstices’.

Or, it accepts the futility of all struggle, since the hegemony is so all-encompassing that nothing can really be done except wait for an outburst of ‘divine violence’ – a revolutionary version of Heidegger’s ‘only God can save us.’

Or, it recognises the temporary futility of the struggle. In today’s triumph of global capitalism, the argument goes, true resistance is not possible, so all we can do till the revolutionary spirit of the global working class is renewed is defend what remains of the welfare state, confronting those in power with demands we know they cannot fulfil, and otherwise withdraw into cultural studies, where one can quietly pursue the work of criticism.

Or, it emphasises the fact that the problem is a more fundamental one, that global capitalism is ultimately an effect of the underlying principles of technology or ‘instrumental reason’.

Or, it posits that one can undermine global capitalism and state power, not by directly attacking them, but by refocusing the field of struggle on everyday practices, where one can ‘build a new world’; in this way, the foundations of the power of capital and the state will be gradually undermined, and, at some point, the state will collapse (the exemplar of this approach is the Zapatista movement).

Or, it takes the ‘postmodern’ route, shifting the accent from anti-capitalist struggle to the multiple forms of politico-ideological struggle for hegemony, emphasising the importance of discursive re-articulation.

Or, it wagers that one can repeat at the postmodern level the classical Marxist gesture of enacting the ‘determinate negation’ of capitalism: with today’s rise of ‘cognitive work’, the contradiction between social production and capitalist relations has become starker than ever, rendering possible for the first time ‘absolute democracy’ (this would be Hardt and Negri’s position).

These positions are not presented as a way of avoiding some ‘true’ radical Left politics – what they are trying to get around is, indeed, the lack of such a position. This defeat of the Left is not the whole story of the last thirty years, however. There is another, no less surprising, lesson to be learned from the Chinese Communists’ presiding over arguably the most explosive development of capitalism in history, and from the growth of West European Third Way social democracy. It is, in short: we can do it better. In the UK, the Thatcher revolution was, at the time, chaotic and impulsive, marked by unpredictable contingencies. It was Tony Blair who was able to institutionalise it, or, in Hegel’s terms, to raise (what first appeared as) a contingency, a historical accident, into a necessity. Thatcher wasn’t a Thatcherite, she was merely herself; it was Blair (more than Major) who truly gave form to Thatcherism.

The response of some critics on the postmodern Left to this predicament is to call for a new politics of resistance. Those who still insist on fighting state power, let alone seizing it, are accused of remaining stuck within the ‘old paradigm’: the task today, their critics say, is to resist state power by withdrawing from its terrain and creating new spaces outside its control. This is, of course, the obverse of accepting the triumph of capitalism. The politics of resistance is nothing but the moralising supplement to a Third Way Left.

Simon Critchley’s recent book, Infinitely Demanding, is an almost perfect embodiment of this position.[*] For Critchley, the liberal-democratic state is here to stay. Attempts to abolish the state failed miserably; consequently, the new politics has to be located at a distance from it: anti-war movements, ecological organisations, groups protesting against racist or sexist abuses, and other forms of local self-organisation. It must be a politics of resistance to the state, of bombarding the state with impossible demands, of denouncing the limitations of state mechanisms. The main argument for conducting the politics of resistance at a distance from the state hinges on the ethical dimension of the ‘infinitely demanding’ call for justice: no state can heed this call, since its ultimate goal is the ‘real-political’ one of ensuring its own reproduction (its economic growth, public safety, etc). ‘Of course,’ Critchley writes,

history is habitually written by the people with the guns and sticks and one cannot expect to defeat them with mocking satire and feather dusters. Yet, as the history of ultra-leftist active nihilism eloquently shows, one is lost the moment one picks up the guns and sticks. Anarchic political resistance should not seek to mimic and mirror the archic violent sovereignty it opposes.

So what should, say, the US Democrats do? Stop competing for state power and withdraw to the interstices of the state, leaving state power to the Republicans and start a campaign of anarchic resistance to it? And what would Critchley do if he were facing an adversary like Hitler? Surely in such a case one should ‘mimic and mirror the archic violent sovereignty’ one opposes? Shouldn’t the Left draw a distinction between the circumstances in which one would resort to violence in confronting the state, and those in which all one can and should do is use ‘mocking satire and feather dusters’? The ambiguity of Critchley’s position resides in a strange non sequitur: if the state is here to stay, if it is impossible to abolish it (or capitalism), why retreat from it? Why not act with(in) the state? Why not accept the basic premise of the Third Way? Why limit oneself to a politics which, as Critchley puts it, ‘calls the state into question and calls the established order to account, not in order to do away with the state, desirable though that might well be in some utopian sense, but in order to better it or attenuate its malicious effect’?

These words simply demonstrate that today’s liberal-democratic state and the dream of an ‘infinitely demanding’ anarchic politics exist in a relationship of mutual parasitism: anarchic agents do the ethical thinking, and the state does the work of running and regulating society. Critchley’s anarchic ethico-political agent acts like a superego, comfortably bombarding the state with demands; and the more the state tries to satisfy these demands, the more guilty it is seen to be. In compliance with this logic, the anarchic agents focus their protest not on open dictatorships, but on the hypocrisy of liberal democracies, who are accused of betraying their own professed principles.

The big demonstrations in London and Washington against the US attack on Iraq a few years ago offer an exemplary case of this strange symbiotic relationship between power and resistance. Their paradoxical outcome was that both sides were satisfied. The protesters saved their beautiful souls: they made it clear that they don’t agree with the government’s policy on Iraq. Those in power calmly accepted it, even profited from it: not only did the protests in no way prevent the already-made decision to attack Iraq; they also served to legitimise it. Thus George Bush’s reaction to mass demonstrations protesting his visit to London, in effect: ‘You see, this is what we are fighting for, so that what people are doing here – protesting against their government policy – will be possible also in Iraq!’

It is striking that the course on which Hugo Chávez has embarked since 2006 is the exact opposite of the one chosen by the postmodern Left: far from resisting state power, he grabbed it (first by an attempted coup, then democratically), ruthlessly using the Venezuelan state apparatuses to promote his goals. Furthermore, he is militarising the barrios, and organising the training of armed units there. And, the ultimate scare: now that he is feeling the economic effects of capital’s ‘resistance’ to his rule (temporary shortages of some goods in the state-subsidised supermarkets), he has announced plans to consolidate the 24 parties that support him into a single party. Even some of his allies are sceptical about this move: will it come at the expense of the popular movements that have given the Venezuelan revolution its élan? However, this choice, though risky, should be fully endorsed: the task is to make the new party function not as a typical state socialist (or Peronist) party, but as a vehicle for the mobilisation of new forms of politics (like the grass roots slum committees). What should we say to someone like Chávez? ‘No, do not grab state power, just withdraw, leave the state and the current situation in place’? Chávez is often dismissed as a clown – but wouldn’t such a withdrawal just reduce him to a version of Subcomandante Marcos, whom many Mexican leftists now refer to as ‘Subcomediante Marcos’? Today, it is the great capitalists – Bill Gates, corporate polluters, fox hunters – who ‘resist’ the state.

The lesson here is that the truly subversive thing is not to insist on ‘infinite’ demands we know those in power cannot fulfil. Since they know that we know it, such an ‘infinitely demanding’ attitude presents no problem for those in power: ‘So wonderful that, with your critical demands, you remind us what kind of world we would all like to live in. Unfortunately, we live in the real world, where we have to make do with what is possible.’ The thing to do is, on the contrary, to bombard those in power with strategically well-selected, precise, finite demands, which can’t be met with the same excuse.

Legacies of the Musical Cultural Front:

Robeson, Guthrie, and Seeger [1]

By Harry Targ
Purdue University

This paper was a presentation at “Woody at 100: Woody Guthrie’s Legacy to Working Men and Women”, a conferences at Penn State University, September 8-9, 2012 [2]

Introduction

Several key concepts in the Marxian tradition influenced the consciousness and political practice of Paul Robeson, Woody Guthrie, and Pete Seeger. First, all three were historical and dialectical materialists. They conceived of the socio-economic condition of people’s lives as fundamental to the shaping of their activities and consciousness. They were historical materialists in that they understood that the material conditions of people’s lives changed as the economic system in which they lived changed. And they were dialectical in that they were sensitive to the contradictory character of human existence.

Second, class as the fundamental conceptual tool for examining a society shaped their thinking. Increasingly they realized that class struggle was a fundamental force for social change. Given the American historical context they saw that class and race were inextricably interconnected.

Third, all three addressed a theory of imperialism which they regarded as critical to understanding international relations. Living in an age of colonialism and neo-colonialism all three performer/activists, but particularly Paul Robeson, saw imperialism as a central structural feature  of relations between nations, peoples and classes. They were inspired by those resisting the yoke of foreign domination.

Fourth, Robeson, Guthrie, and Seeger saw that community, harmony, and socialism would represent the next stage of societal development. They believed that the vision of socialism had the potential for improving the quality of life of humankind. Robeson’s experiences in the Soviet Union led him to a greater degree to regard the experience of existing socialist states as free of the kind of racism endemic to the United States.

Fifth, Robeson, Guthrie, and Seeger emphasized the connection between theory and practice. Each artist in his own way articulated what Robeson proclaimed in 1937 in the context of supporting the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War that every artist must take a stand. The artist (i.e., the intellectual) must act in the context of a world of exploitation. One was either on the side of the ongoing oppressive order or on the side of change.

Armed with these insights, the three folk artist/activists discussed below committed themselves to action; action grounded in the struggles of their day. In Gramsci’s terms, they were organic intellectuals. They joined anti-racist, anti-colonial, labor and peace struggles. They walked picket lines, entertained Spanish Civil War loyalists, striking workers and other protesters, and sought to lend support to international socialist solidarity. Being an organic intellectual in the 1930s and 40s, and in the case of Pete Seeger the 1940s and beyond, meant participating in what Michael Denning called “the cultural front.” The ambience of the CIO, the Communist movement, civil rights and anti-war struggles, and building the New Deal provided the social forces out of which Robeson, Guthrie, and Seeger could thrive and grow.  The three,–Robeson, Guthrie, and Seeger–artists and activists, were both agents and products of Marxist ideas engaged in practical political work as organic intellectuals participating in a broad cultural front.

Each artist/activist projected an image of human oneness. They saw the connections between the defense of democracy in Spain and the U.S. South and the necessity of building a peaceful and democratic post-World War II order to achieve justice for the working classes of all lands.  Robeson’s consciousness was shaped by the vision of a common pentagonal chord structure in the world’s folk music; a metaphor that privileges difference and unity. The musical visions of Guthrie and Seeger celebrated what was common in the human experience as well.

In sum, the remarks below address the implicit Marxist lens that shaped the consciousness and behavior of three giants-Paul Robeson, Woody Guthrie, and Pete Seeger. It addresses how their artistic and political work was shaped by and shaped the social movements of the period from the 1930s to the present. It draws upon cultural theory, particularly Michael Denning’s idea of a multilayered “cultural front.” And it links the theory, practice and context to the political strategy of the “popular front.”

Finally, the paper suggests that the theory and practice of Robeson, Guthrie, and Seeger represent a model for building contemporary mass movements in the face of economic and political crises. Over the past two years the world has seen mass mobilizations against dictatorship in Middle Eastern regimes; emerging new socialist forces in France, the Netherlands, and Denmark; mass movements against wars on workers, women, and minorities in the United States; and the emergence of grassroots mobilizations, particularly the Occupy Movement, all across the North American continent. The framework of struggle-the 99 percent versus the one percent-while not expressly Marxist, can have the same animating effect on workers, youth, minorities, and women, that the songs of Robeson, Guthrie, and Seeger did from the 1930s to the present time.

Marxist Ideas: Historical and Dialectical Materialism

Marxist analysis begins with the presupposition that humans create the conditions for the production and reproduction of life. These involve the satisfaction of basic needs. To do so requires the organization of production: of human labor, technology, science, and society. “This connection is ever taking on new forms, and thus presents a ‘history’ independently of the existence of any political or religious nonsense which in addition may hold men together.” [3]

“Labor in the Marxist schema is the ultimate human activity as it is the basis from which life is sustained. The kinds of productive activities humans engage in determine their existence and who they are. “What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce. The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their production.” [4]

With this as a beginning, Marx described the historic transformation from one ‘mode of production’ to another. Capitalism and socialism were the prevailing modes of production in Robeson’s time. Capitalism is a mode of production in which one class owns and/or controls the means of production (factories, technologies, scientific expertise) and the other class, the workers, exchange their ability to do work for a wage which will be used to reproduce life. In the capitalist mode of production, the ruling class appropriates the value of goods and services produced by workers, which translates into profit, in exchange for which workers receive enough money to survive.

The capitalist mode of production is dynamic. The root of its existence is exploitation, the ability of capitalists to expropriate the value of goods and services produced by workers, and expansion, continued capital accumulation. As to the latter, capitalist units, banks and corporations, need to expand in the face of competition with adversaries. The watchwords of the system are “grow or die.” It is this expansion that takes capitalists all across the face of the globe with slavery, colonialism and neocolonialism as the result. And, since expanding capitalist enterprises and wealthier ruling classes increasingly dominate the political lives of their governments, capitalism was a system that bred competition and war between states.

Marx’s historical materialist method was not linear, it was not mechanistic. The rise of capitalism out of feudalism and the growth of monopoly capitalism out of its industrial capitalist precursor occurred in a world of conflict and turmoil; in a world of contradictory social, political, and societal forces, history was shaped. Dialectical materialism assumes that material reality is contradictory. All processes, all things, all objects, are and are not what they appear to be. Within each social process are embedded contradictory tendencies. The dialectical method rejects thinking in terms of fixed conceptual categories and notions of mutual exclusivity (a thing is either this or that). History was complex; complex to understand and complex to judge.

Class and Class Struggle

Exploitation in the Marxist tradition is the system by which the surplus produced by the worker is appropriated by the capitalist. When capitalists hire workers to labor for a given period of time, much of the value of the products that are produced are appropriated by them and become the basis for profit. Since capitalists own or control the means of production and wish to hire workers at the lowest possible wages, under the least favorable conditions, to be as productive as possible, and workers have interests in appropriating more of the value of what they produce, class struggle is embedded at the point of production in the capitalist system.

During periods of intense struggle between capitalists and workers, capitalists utilize various strategies and governmental tools to weaken the resolve and organization of workers. Capitalism needs an industrial reserve army of un- and underemployed workers available to work for less and to drive down the price of work. In addition, capitalists use strategies such as production speedups and lengthening the work day to get more value out of their work forces. Historically, capitalists have used the importation of pools of workers from other countries to challenge the leverage of those already in the work force. And, significantly, capitalism has historically used racism, ethnic discrimination, and traditional patterns of male domination as tools to divide the workforce. Ultimately, Marx and Engels argued, capitalism was a historical system driven by class struggle and any efforts to divide the working class by race, gender, (and in our own day sexual preference), and nationality, must be opposed.

Imperialism

Lenin drew upon Marxist theory to development an outlook on twentieth century imperialism that shaped progressive thinking throughout the years of Robeson’s activism. The Marxist-Leninist view of imperialism was that it was synonymous with capitalism during its monopoly stage.

As capitalism evolved from competition among numerous economic actors to concentration and centralization, and as state power became more concentrated, small numbers of corporations and banks acquired enormous amounts of wealth and power. To sustain the monopolistic nature of capitalism as it evolved in Europe and North America, the need for vital raw materials, cheap sources of labor, markets, and more investment opportunities became critical. Capitalism was a global system from its emergence out of feudalism in the sixteenth century but the breadth of its reach had increased ever since. And expansion to non-western regions of the globe and ultimately the establishment of a worldwide system of colonies controlled by Europe and North America became vital to the survival of capitalism as a global system. Capitalism needed slave, then cheap labor, agricultural commodities, and raw materials. Also customers for the goods produced in the capitalist centers that workers could not afford to purchase made non-western markets critical as well.

In addition to these reasons for the globalization of capitalism, Lenin argued that manufacturing and banking capital had become increasingly integrated and that the ever expanding accumulation of money capital required the growth of investment opportunities beyond national boundaries. Consequently, he warned, countries and territories of the global south were becoming absorbed into the capitalist world system by way of investments in joint stock companies, loans, investments for overseas sale of goods, and the construction of production facilities. Imperialism as domination and control of the economic life of oppressed peoples, became an intrinsic part of the process of capital accumulation and hence capitalism itself. In the modern world, capitalism and imperialism had become one and the same system.

Socialism

For Marx and later Lenin a socialist state represented the interests of the working class. The socialist state is a transitional stage of society which will someday be transformed to communism. Under socialism classes still survive; under communism they would disappear.

The socialist vision that animated mass movements since the rise of capitalism has been based on the proposition that the interests of the working class will be served in a socialist state in a way that they are not under capitalism. Thus, under socialism human needs will be fulfilled for all as best the society can afford, equality will be a value maximized along with freedom, and the state will engage in sustained efforts to eliminate historic patterns of discrimination based on race, gender, and ethnicity. In other words, under socialism, the state serves the interests of the entire working class instead of the capitalist class. Under socialism, Robeson believed, it was possible to envision the elimination of racism and sexism.
Robeson’s Marxism

Robeson’s commentaries on contemporary affairs from the mid-1930s reflect a growing theoretical sophistication and a consciousness informed by the concepts described above. In speeches, newspaper articles, and interviews, Robeson relied on history, on a sense of the materiality of peoples’ lives, and on the growing resistance to oppression as the driving force of history. By the 1940s, his texts refer more frequently to Marxian categories about the capitalist system. While he was a person of action and an artist, not a political theorist, his commentaries were increasingly historical, materialist, and dialectical.

Speaking to an enthusiastic audience of workers at the 1948 convention of the International Fur and Leather Workers Union for example, Robeson articulated the view that the vast majority of humankind had a history of struggle against the expropriation of the wealth they produced by tiny minorities. He remembered that his father ran away from slavery and that his cousins in North Carolina, sharecroppers and tenant farmers, struggled to make a living. He referred to miners in West Virginia and Latino workers “living practically under the ground in holes” in Colorado, and to workers in the Midwest as well as field hands in California “living at the edge of subsistence.” [5]

Robeson told the assembled trade unionists that he had witnessed and heard reports of police violence against striking workers in the Mesabi Range in Minnesota, and in Iowa, and in South Carolina. To him, the arms of the state were used by and for the minority ruling class to crush the drive for change. The power of the state, he claimed, was designed to keep working people in a kind of industrial servitude.

Robeson then made the historical point that “these things, unfortunately, are not new in the struggle of mankind.” Further, “…the people, the great majority of the people, struggling as we have for generation after generation forward to some better life, how can it happen that everywhere in history a few seem to take the power in their hands, confuse the people themselves and there they remain?”   [6] And, he pointed out, the development of the United States (and presumably of the world) was built upon the labor of these same masses of people from the British Isles, Africa, Eastern Europe, Asia, and Latin America.

Robeson linked worldwide development and exploitation to that of the Black experience in the United States. He said that “the ‘Negro people’ …must have knowledge  that the very primary wealth  of America is cotton, built on the backs of our fathers; that cotton taken to the textile mills of New England;  and that we don’t have to ask for crumbs to be dropped  from the few up top, but we have the right and the responsibility to demand  in a militant way  a better life  for ourselves and for the rest of  those Americans and the peoples of the world who still suffer and are oppressed.”  [7]

Addressing the modern world, Robeson condemned United States support for the perpetuation of the British Empire which imposed “serfdom” in Asia and Africa and the apartheid regime in South Africa. He also argued that the United States thinks”… more of the profits of a few people of Standard Oil of this very state, than of the lives of one of the great peoples of the world.”  [8] Robeson said the directors of Standard Oil care nothing about working people; their sole motivation is profit. In summing up, Robeson claimed, millions of people throughout history have aspired and struggled so that the many can secure “some kind of real share of their labor,  that the few shall not keep on controlling our land, that there must be an extension of this democracy to those who do not have it.” [9]

In a 1949 interview, Robeson linked the struggles of African Americans to all workers and spoke, in colloquial language, of the ruling class that exploited everyone. This ruling class uses race and ethnicity to divide these workers so that the masses are divided into …”warring factions that produces nothing for them but discord and misery  while a scant, privileged few take all the wealth, hold the power and dictate the terms. This concentration of power in the hands of less than a hundred men is so strong that it can decide who shall eat and who shall not, who shall have decent homes and who shall be doomed to crowded tenements that are firetraps and rat-infested holes where children must be reared and the occupants live and die in despair.”  [10] Robeson related imperialism, class exploitation, and racism when he declared in London that: “…the fight  of my Negro people in America and the fight of the oppressed workers everywhere was the same struggle.” [11]

In an illuminating preface to a book by Luis Taruc, Born of the People, [12]  Robeson reflects on the historic resistance of the people of the Philippines to Spanish and U. S. colonialism. Recalling the apocryphal decision of U.S. President William McKinley to invade the Philippines to replace Spanish occupation, Robeson draws parallels with the history of colonialism practiced by the British and other imperial powers.  Most importantly, Robeson likens the history of imperialism to the then contemporary U.S. policies in Korea, in West Germany, and in the construction of a capitalist Japan.

And while the history of the world, Robeson seems to be suggesting, is a history of domination and exploitation, the imperial system creates resistance and ultimately the forces that will overthrow it. Ever the “dialectician,” Robeson refers to the Philippine struggle for freedom as an object lesson. “Here in Taruc’s searching and moving story, the whole struggle is laid bare–the terrible suffering and oppression, the slow torturous seeking for the ‘basic reasons’ and for the ‘right methods of action,’ the tremendous wisdom and perseverance in carrying through, the endless courage, understanding, determination of the people, of all sections of the people, for national liberation and dignity.”  [13] He concluded with reference to other struggles that in his mind represented the dialectical opposite of imperial domination; in the Soviet Union, in China, and in the Eastern European regimes (“Peoples Democracies”). Resistance will in the end yield a new kind of humanity, he claimed.
When Robeson first became a visible artistic presence and was called upon to answer questions about the world of politics, he demurred from involving himself in political discourse. He spoke more of the special qualities of the African American people and those of their African ancestors, particularly in comparison with Europeans and Americans. He drew upon simplistic anthropological comparisons of cultures which privileged analytical thinking, such as the European, and those, to the contrary, which were more emotive, such as the African. However, by the 1930s, Robeson’s thinking was transformed by exposure to the class struggles of the Welsh miners, his visits to the Soviet Union, his tour of the front in the Spanish civil war and his growing familiarity with the works of Marxists.

In an interview for a British film magazine, The Cine-Technician, [14] in 1938,  Robeson recalls how he years earlier had become aware that “the most genuine and enthusiastic applause always came from the gallery.”   [15] He realized that it was the working people who most responded to his work and that his own background and artistic sensibilities connected to that segment of the population.

By the time of the interview, Robeson was identifying world history with exploitation of peoples, articulating the just cause of the militant organizing drives of industrial unionism in the United States and Great Britain, and was connecting the struggles of people of color to the class struggles of workers. Also he was insisting that workers’ struggles must include those of minorities. Opposition to lynchings in the U.S. South and the poll tax to limit Black voting were working class issues relevant to the entire class, he said. The connections he was making in the late 1930s would continue to deepen in the subsequent twenty years of his political activism.

In a 1948 speech before a caucus meeting of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union  ILWU (and on behalf of third party presidential candidate Henry Wallace), Robeson identified the broader struggle for workers’ rights. “…the struggle for economic rights, the struggle for higher wages, the struggle for bread, the struggle for housing, has become a part of a wider political struggle. They have moved in to high places in government, and today the enemies of labor control the working apparatus of the state. They have to be removed. There has to be a basic change.”  [16]

And in an article referred to above, Robeson clearly identifies what constitutes the working class in his thinking: “To be completely free from the chains that bind him, the Negro must be part of the progressive forces which are fighting the overall battle of the little guy-the share cropper, the drugstore clerk, the auto mechanic, the porter and the maid, the owner of the corner diner, the truck driver, the garment, mill and steel workers. The progressive section sees no color line and views the whole problem of race and color prejudices and discrimination as a divisional tactic of those pitting class against class, dividing the masses into tint, warring factions that produces nothing for them but discord and misery…”  [17]

Robeson’s awareness of the global character of the struggle for liberation was sharpened by his interactions with and participation in the rising anti-colonial movements of the 1930s and 1940s. As his focus on Africa grew he articulated the connections between African misery and the extraction of vital natural resources by colonial and neo-colonial powers. During a speech delivered before the National Labor Conference for Negro Rights in 1950, Robeson referred to the important connections between the exploitation of Africa and the United States. The latter benefited from uranium mined in the Belgian Congo, and several African countries provided gold, chrome, cobalt, manganese, tin, palm oil, and other basic resources for industrial societies. [18]

Further, he argued that U.S. workers’ tax dollars, through the Marshall Plan, and the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, were being used to prop up European colonial powers to exploit Black Africa. In addition President Truman’s Point Four program was designed to finance opening the door for U.S. “banker-imperialists” to invest in natural resources and cheap labor in Africa. To maintain stability for foreign investors, Robeson claimed, the United States was building military bases on the African continent.

And in the context of the Cold War, Robeson’s world vision was clearly framed by a theory of imperialism. ” With the Soviet Union out of their grasp-one sixth of the earth’s surface-and Eastern Europe established on a new basis of independence, American big business sought desperately to extend their holdings in the rest of the world. For they need the sources of cheap labor, the easy markets and the fields of investments in which to multiply the idle profits they have already wrung out of the toil-broken bodies of American workers, black and white.” [19]

In this speech and many others after World War II, Robeson referred to the socialist alternatives existing at that time. He mentioned the Russian revolution and the efforts of European, U.S., and Japanese armies to overthrow the new Bolshevik regime. He acknowledged the recently concluded Chinese revolution. And he referred positively to the new socialist regimes under construction in Eastern Europe. His attachment to socialism as an alternative to western capitalism was kindled by early trips to the Soviet Union, where he noticed the paucity of racism in Russian life. Coming from a society fundamentally shaped by racism, in social interaction, culture, and distribution of wealth and power, the Soviet Union Robeson saw was radically different.

Robeson was interviewed by the Sunday Worker in 1936 about a recent visit to the Soviet Union. He was quoted as saying: “While in the Soviet Union I made it a point to visit some of the workers’ homes-that is some that were not so famous as Eisenstein. And I saw for myself. They all live in healthful surroundings, apartments, with nurseries containing the most modern equipment for their children. Besides they were still building. I certainly wish the workers in this country-and especially the Negroes in Harlem and the South-had such places to stay in.”  [20] A year later he spoke with praise about verbal commitments to racial and national equality in the new Soviet constitution. He referred to the constitution as a manifestation of a new “Soviet humanism.” [21]

Twelve years later, in the darkening days of the Cold War, Robeson continued his praise of the Soviet Union at an address at a banquet sponsored by the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship. After criticizing unemployment and low wages of black Americans, the specter of lynchings, and the perpetuation of the Jim Crow system of segregation in the South, he offered the Soviet model as an alternative. For him “the Soviet Union’s very existence, its example before the world of abolishing all discrimination based on color or nationality, its fight in every arena of world conflict for genuine democracy and for peace, this has given us Negroes the chance of achieving our complete liberation within our own time, within this generation.” [22] Beyond what he saw as the socialist “humanism” of the Soviet system, Robeson pointed to the deterrent power of the Soviet Union against “world imperialism.” For him, the struggle for racial justice in the United States would be less of a public issue than it is if the United States were not in global competition with the Soviet Union.

Embedded in the corpus of Robeson’s public statements and activism was a vision of a society of social and economic justice and workers’ political empowerment. This was why he was driven to fight Fascism and to adamantly defend democracy for all people. To him the state should reflect and serve the interests of the working class. And when a worker’s state is established, he was suggesting, the drive for conquest and control of other peoples would end. He was positing a common humankind that was fragmented and brutalized by imperialism. For Robeson, the existing socialist states of his day represented the possibility of global change. Central to the socialist outcome would be an end to racism and exploitation.

Guthrie’s Marxism

Woody Guthrie came to his understanding of capitalism, the connections between the land, labor, the ownership and control of the means of production through a process of experiencing family wealth and impoverishment in Okemah, Oklahoma. He saw people around him being driven from economic security by the devastation of land by corporate agriculture, technology, and natural disaster. His travels led to experiencing migrant labor in California, militant labor struggles across the North American continent, and left political activism in his later life.

In a 1947 essay reflecting on his political awakening Guthrie wrote that: “I never did know that the human race was this big before. I never did really know that the fight had been going on so long and so bad. I never had been able to look out over and across the slum section nor a sharecropper farm and connect it up with the owner and the landlord and the guards and the police and the dicks and the bulls and the vigilante men with their black sedans and sawed off shot guns.” [23]

Virtually all of Guthrie’s writings, musical and essays, emphasize the role of work, the expropriation of the value of what workers produce by capitalists, and the enforcement of a capitalist system based on unequal distribution of wealth and power enforced by the state. His language was vivid, polemical, and insightful (“inciteful” also):  “The Rich War Lords believe in Killing, Hating, and Taking. They hire people to do it for them. They hire your brother to grab up a badge and a gun and mow you down in front of a shop, or a mine, or a mill, or a factory. They even spend wagon loads of money on picture shows, magazines, newspapers, radios, and for phonograph records, and everything in the world, even preachers, to make you think they are Right, and us poor folks are Wrong.” [24]

A myriad of statements like these over the course of Guthrie’s career suggest his belief that the economic system in which farmers and factory workers lived was driven by the Marxian idea of exploitation. His song lyrics spelled out over and over again how the capitalists expropriated what by all rights belonged to laborers and how history was driven by on-again off-again struggle between capital and labor. By instinct, observation, and study Guthrie realized that the viability of the capitalist economic system was built on force and fraud.

The former, force, is represented by police, scabs, and armies. Fraud refers to the print media, radio, the music industry, and religion. In memoir after memoir Guthrie mentioned the entertainment industry, with particular disdain for former comrades who sold out to “the big money boys” and created a commercially viable and sanitized popular music. It is interesting to note in similar ways that through experience Robeson came to reject the original lyrics to his classic rendition of “Old Man River” in the musical “Showboat” because of its demeaning portrait of the docile African American worker along the Mississippi River. And later Pete Seeger wrote about his discomfort with the commercial success of the folk group, The Weavers, whose somewhat modified folk songs for a time became commercially viable and, at the same time, less militant. (However, the Weavers did introduce into popular culture people’s songs at a time when anti-communism was destroying any residue of the cultural front).

Even the artist, Guthrie wrote, was inextricably connected to the capitalist order. “No, you are never actually bought nor bribed til they have decided that they can use you in one way or another to rob, to deceive, to blind, confuse, to misrepresent, or just to harass, worry, bedevil, and becloud the path of the militant worker on his long hard fight from slavery to freedom….And it is the highest form of your owner’s joy when he buys you out from the union side.”

However, Guthrie pointed out that despite artistic complicity with owners, from time to time those artists radical pasts will be used to immobilize their progressive activities. And generally capitalism created a system of spies who identify dangerous radicals including artists who had become supporters of the system and Congressional committees to investigate past or current activists. This creates a capitalist “dog eat dog” system. “It is all of this spying on each other that causes the newspapers to be full of killings, murders, rapes, robbings, divorces, shootings, stabbings, and every known kind of disease, decay, rot and degeneracy.”

Guthrie linked capitalist exploitation to social control and efforts to divide the working class. “This is the system which the owners would like to prolong, to keep alive, to prolong as long as they possibly can, because in the wild blindness of it all, they get all of us to fighting against one another, and rob us coming in the fields of production, and going, in the realms of distribution.” Guthrie’s project, he said, was “to expose by every conceivable way that I could think of with songs and with ballads, and even with poems, stories, newspaper articles, even by humor, by fun, by nonsense, ridicule and by any other way that I could lay hold on.”  [25]

The power of Guthrie’s songs came from the combination of his explication of the trials and tribulations of farmers, factory workers, and the unemployed; the dramatization of their continual struggles against exploitation and oppression, and his vision of a better socialist world. The distillation of Marxist theory is best reflected in the iconic three verses in “This Land is Your Land”

On private property:

Was a big high wall there that tried to stop me:
A sign was painted said “Private Property”
But on the other side it didn’t say nothing–
This land was made for you and me.

On the consequences of exploitation:

One bright sunny morning in the shadow of the steeple,
By the relief office I saw my people–
As they stood there hungry,
I stood there wondering if
This land was made for you and me. [26]

And on struggle:

Nobody living can every stop me,
As I go walking my freedom highway.
Nobody living can make me turn back.
This land was made for you and me. [27]

Seeger’s Marxism

Pete Seeger is incorporated in this discourse on Marxism, culture, and politics for a variety of reasons. First, as a bridge between the theory and practice of Robeson, Guthrie and the years subsequent to the height of the Cold War, Seeger, in a fundamental sense was the translator of progressive political culture to newer generations of political activists. Second, inspired by (and inspiring at least Woody Guthrie), Seeger translated the Marxist outlook and practice to a variety of issues that were not addressed as centrally during the Great Depression, World War II, and the early Cold War. Third, Seeger presented a model of engaged artistry in an era when the connection between art and politics was actively discouraged and punished.

Finally, the body of Seeger’s art and activism actually enriched Marxist theory by conceptualizing the connections between all peoples, people and nature, and firmly embedded the inextricable bonds between an understanding of class, race, and gender (and sexual preference and the environment). It is not that these connections were not suggested by Marx in the nineteenth century, nor in the work of Robeson and Guthrie, but with the exigencies of the Cold War and post-Cold War period, these were more underscored by history.

First, Seeger’s performances, songs, and celebrations of the artistry of others clearly has foregrounded history, materialism, and dialectics. His collection Carry It On! A History in Song and Pictures of the Working Men and Women of America, (with Bob Reiser, Simon and Schuster, 1985) organized songs about the working class chronologically and topically, including “Oh Freedom, 1770-1865;” “Eight Hours, 1865-1900;” “Solidarity Forever, 1900-1918;” “Talkin’ Union, 1918-1945;” “The Banks of Marble, 1945-1963;”and “More Than a Paycheck, 1963-Now.”

A newer Seeger anthology of songs, Where Have All the Flowers Gone, A Singer’s Stories, Songs, Seeds, and Robberies, (A Sing Out Publication, 1993) reflected the growing complexity of issues that progressive movements of the sixties and beyond took. Chapter titles included: “All Mixed Up;” “Politics 1939-49;” “Kids;” “Some Love Songs, Some Music Without Words,” “New Tunes to Others’ Words;” “”New Words to Others’ Tunes,” “The Vietnam War;” “From the Great Old Book;” “Think Globally, Sing Locally;” and “Time, Home, Family, Friends.” In addition, along with his many other publications and recordings, Seeger published an “afterword” to a recently reissued version of the Guthrie/Seeger collection  from the 1940s and 1950s called Hard Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People (University of Nebraska Press, 2012).

Most of Seeger’s often performed songs have illustrated the centrality of history, work, and the systems of exploitation that working people have experienced. Seeger sang of the brutality of the mine owners in Wales who “plunder willy nilly.” “They have fangs, they have teeth,” so much so that “even God is uneasy.” [28] Seeger and the Weavers regularly sang about the banks there “were made of marble, With a guard at very door, And the vaults are stuffed with silver That the seamen sweated for.” [29]

The exploitation of the miners and seamen were part of historical struggles that were even reflected in the Old and New Testaments. In “Turn, Turn, Turn” Seeger pointed out that…. “to everything there is a season.” The song suggested that the ebbs and flows of history were not bound by calendars, dates, times, and heroes and villains. A “season” was defined by its historic projects. And these historic projects, the words suggested, included “a time to reap,” “a time to build,” “a time to break down,” “a time to cast away stones,” and “a time to gather stones together.” Projects entailed defeats and victories, tears and laughter but the seasons go on and encompassed “a time to love” and “a time to hate.” And in the end the song declared that “it’s not too late.”

Over the years, Seeger’s performances emphasized class struggle, “Which Side Are You On.”  “Union Maids,” “We Shall Not Be Moved,” “L’Internationale” and countless others. They also highlighted the struggle against imperialism from “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” “Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream,” to “Waste Deep in the Big Muddy” including solidarity with the Vietnamese people (“Teacher Uncle Ho”) and the Cubans (“Guantanamera”).

And, in terms of Seeger’s vision, peace, harmony with nature, equality, an end to racism and sexism, played most prominently. The lens on the world assimilated from the labor and anti-fascist struggles of the 1940s were adopted by Seeger’s performances and writings to the reemerging campaigns for racial justice and later the liberation of women. And, in dialectical fashion, Seeger learned from those engaged in struggles-in the freedom movement of the South, growing challenges to patriarchy, and the environmental movement. His founding of the Clearwater movement to clean up the Hudson River brought all of these concerns together.

Theory and Practice

In practice man must prove the truth, that is, the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking which is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question. [30]

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it. [31]

Marx saw a necessary connection between the development of ideas about the world and engagement in that world to change it. Contrary to bourgeois systems of thought that evolve in abstract and intellectual contestation with competing ideas, in the Marxist perspective, ideas are tested in action. All three political actors discussed above were performers, not philosophers. However, they did engage in research about social systems and cultures and saw the need to relate their understanding and ideas about culture to concrete realities. They resolved to connect their intellectual and artistic powers to action, to social change.

Perhaps Robeson’s most prominent “political” speech was given before the National Joint Committee for Spanish Relief at Royal Albert Hall on June 24, 1937. In it he proclaimed the necessity of the artist to take a stand.” … I have longed to see my talent contributing in an unmistakably clear manner to the cause of humanity. Every artist, every scientist, must decide NOW where he stands. He has no alternative.” [32]

And then he connected the necessity of action in the struggle to save Spain from fascism with the longer struggle of Blacks for liberation. He reiterated that the artist must take sides. “He must elect to fight for freedom or slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative. The history of the capitalist era is characterized by the degradation of my people: despoiled of their lands, their culture destroyed, they are in every country save one, denied equal protection of the law, and deprived of their place in the respect of their fellows.”  [33] He ended his speech with a clarion call for artists to defend culture from assault; that the legacy of humankind is threatened by the rise of fascism. From this dramatic moment to the end of his active political life in the early 1960s, Robeson connected his art with his understanding of colonialism, racism, fascism, and imperialism. His political and artistic choices were carefully crafted to link theory with practice.

Time after time, Woody Guthrie made it clear about how he saw the connection between his singing and the struggles of workers for a better life. He said he hated songs that made people feel that they were no good. “I am out to fight those kinds of songs to my very last breath of air and my last drop of blood.” He wrote that he sang songs about the exploiters and the downtrodden, “…the outlaws that the people loved and the ones that the people hated.”  “The folks all around the world have been fighting now for a hundred centuries to all be union and to all be free and I sing the songs that tell you about that.”

Guthrie made it clear who he was speaking and singing for. “I speak for the union people that see a union world and that fight for a one big union all around the world…a singer for the AFL of L, CIO, Brotherhoods and Sisterhoods….” “….and fight against the white hood of the Ku Klux Klan because I hate them….” “I speak for the human beings of this human race and when anybody quits being a human and goes to fighting against the union right then I jump on them with all of my teeth and toenails….And I hang on and I keep on singing and yelling and singing and yelling and singing and yelling and reading and writing and hollering and fighting and everything else.” [34]

And Pete Seeger has always connected his stage presence, soliciting musical participation, and activism for social change. In addition, he has argued that there are intimate connections between music-popular culture-and building social movements.

Will there be a human race here in another 200 years? Yes, it’s a possibility. If so, it
will be partly because songwriters of many kinds used whatever talents they were
born with or developed.

And used them to help their fellow humans get together. Their closer neighbors. Their
distant cousins in the wider world. These pages show some of the mistakes made and
some of the small successes of one songwriter and his friends in the 20th century.

Here’s hoping that readers will find a few ideas worth stealing.  [35]

The Organic Intellectual

The mode of being of the new intellectual can no longer consist in eloquence, which is an exterior and momentary mover of feelings and passions, but in active participation in practical life, as constructor, organizer, ‘permanent persuader,’ and not just a simple orator…     [36]

The Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci wrote about the “organic intellectual,” that is the intellectual who was connected to various social groups or movements and acted in concert with and stimulated the activities of such groups. The organic intellectual in class society was linked to the project for historical change of the working class.

As the consciousnesses of Robeson, Guthrie, and Seeger were changed by exposure to Marxism, the socialist vision, anti-colonial struggles, and the working class, their conception of art as well as their conception of their connections to their audiences changed significantly. As indicated above, the artists realized that their strongest connections as artist were with the working class, or as Robeson put it, the people “in the gallery.” They came to see their art as a project of and for poor and oppressed peoples. The fight against Fascism and war and for democracy remained intimately connected to human liberation.

In an illuminating interview in 1939, Robeson discussed the historic meaning of the folk songs he was singing and the ways in which his performances concretized the historic struggles of common people. His performances linked the historical context in which the songs of freedom originated and the contemporary struggles against racism and fascism. For example, the cry to “let my people go” had meaning for those fighting fascism in the 1930s as well as those chanting against slavery and feeling “like a motherless child” describes the pain and suffering of emigration in the face of fascist military expansion.

In response to a question about what folk music meant to Robeson, he described the roots of the genre and the ways in which he as performer used his talent to give meaning to the traditions. In this way, he was the interpreter, the organizer, the intellectual guide to the masses of working people who created the culture that was basic to their humanity.

First, Robeson defined folk music. “I mean the songs of people, of farmers, workers, miners, road-diggers, chain-gang laborers, that come from direct contact with their work, whatever it is. This folk music is as much a creation of a mass of people as language.”  [37] Woody Guthrie once wrote that “I saw the hundreds of thousands of stranded, broke, hungry, idle, miserable people that lined the highways all out through the leaves and underbrush. I heard these people sing in their jungle camps and in their Federal Work Camps and sang songs I made up for them over the air waves.” [38]

Second, Robeson discussed the sociology of the music and most importantly his connection, organically, with the creators of the culture.  Both folk music and language “…are derived from social groups which had to communicate with each other and within each other. One person throws in a phrase. Then another-and when, as a singer, I walk from among the people, onto the platform, to sing back to the people the songs they themselves have created, I can feel a great unity, not only as a person, but as an artist who is at one with his audience.” [39]

In this interview, Robeson grounded his own changing consciousness in the process of connecting with the “folk” who created the music he sang. “This keeping close to the feelings and desires of my audiences has a lot to do with shaping my attitude toward the struggle of the people of the world. It has made me an anti-fascist, whether the struggle is in Spain, Germany or here.” [40]

His career, Robeson said, had led him to see through the “pseudo-scientific racial barriers” which shaped his consciousness growing up in a racist society. The rejection of that society and the commitment to struggle against it came from “…my travels, from world events which show that all oppressed people cry out against their oppressors-these have made my loneliness vanish, have made me come home to sing my songs so that we will see that our democracy does not vanish. If I can contribute to this as an artist, I shall be happy” [41] Guthrie and Seeger, in language much paralleling Robeson’s, would share the vision of the folk musician as an organic intellectual.

The Cultural Front

The heart of this cultural front was a new generation of plebeian artists and intellectuals who had grown up in the immigrant and black working-class neighborhoods of the modernist metropolis… a radical social-democratic movement forged around anti-fascism, anti-lynching and the unionism of the CIO. [42]

Michael Denning portrays the “cultural front” of the 1930s as a broad network of organizational connections constituting a mass movement. The Communist Party of the United States was a significant element of this network, expanding well beyond the orbit of the party to encompass performance artists, labor activists, civil rights workers, and varying anti-fascists forces in the United States. The cultural front was a mass movement, it was a cultural moment, it was an ambience or atmosphere that attracted millions of people. For Denning its most visible manifestation was the massive mobilization of workers to demand the right to form unions. The Congress of Industrial Organizations or CIO was its organizing vehicle and below that, it must be added, the dogged Communist Party organizers who worked for years building support for industrial unions.

Paul Robeson developed his worldwide reputation as an artist and as a political activist at the height of the cultural front. He, along with many other performers, writers, and painters inspired the mass political mobilizations of the cultural front and at the same time were stimulated in their work to develop further in conformance with its vision. A symbiotic relationship developed between performer and movement.

Among Robeson’s organizational connections were a variety of unions affiliated with the Congress of Industrial Organizations. He worked closely with African-American organizations committed to racial justice. As suggested above, he gave his energies to the anti-fascist struggle in Spain. And he involved himself in the burgeoning anti-colonial movements, particularly in support of Pan-Africanism. From World War II until the end of his political activism, he identified with the Socialist states and as the Cold War deepened became an activist in the world peace movement.

Guthrie and Seeger emerging as performers and political activists about five years later committed themselves to union organizing and anti-fascist struggles. Traveling the country singing in union halls and labor camps, they offered their services to give voice and inspiration to working class struggles. Upon return to New York City, Seeger and Guthrie sought to build a working class song movement that would resonate from the cultural center to the nation at large. Creating the Almanac Singers, networking with folk musicologists such as Alan Lomax and singers engaged in ongoing class struggles such as Aunt Molly Jackson and Florence Reece from Harlan County, Kentucky, Seeger and Guthrie nationalized a folk genre that reflected the Marxist lens discussed above. And after World War II, Robeson, Seeger, and Guthrie joined forces in an effort to keep the Cultural Front and its Popular Front politics alive by working vigorously for the presidential campaign of Henry Wallace in 1948. In addition, they appeared together in defiance of racist and anti-communist violence at the iconic folk concert at Peekskill, New York in 1949.

As Denning suggested Robeson’s career and political activism paralleled the rise to influence of progressive forces in the United States and around the world. Artists like Robeson, Guthrie, and Seeger, stimulated, nourished, and inspired these forces and at the same time were stimulated and nourished by them. Each depended on the other for definition and ultimately survival. The growing challenge to Robeson’s and Seeger’s politics in 1950s America was significantly impacted by the decline of the Left. Repression occurred as progressive sectors of labor and the civil rights movement were subjected to anti-communism.  While Robeson, Guthrie, and Seeger remained important political figures around the world, as socialism grew and anti-colonial movements gained victory, the restrictions on Robeson’s travel and the anti-communist assaults on Seeger attempted to cut off connections with a global cultural front.

In sum, reflecting on the Marxian commitment to the transformation of theory into practice, the Gramscian model of the committed “organic intellectual,” and Denning’s idea of a time and place, the 1930s and 1940s, when a working class, anti-lynching, anti-fascist “cultural front” framed art and politics, we can better understand Paul Robeson, Woody Guthrie, and Pete Seeger, the activists, and Marxists.

The Relevance of the Marxism of Robeson, Guthrie, and Seeger Today

Today, at a time of growing violence and war, racism, super-exploitation of workers, all on a global basis, the Robeson/Guthrie/Seeger model of an engaged artist/intellectual/activist seems as necessary as ever. In reviewing their lives and work, several critical elements of thought and action emerge that can serve as an examples for artist/intellectuals and social movements today.

First, Robeson, Guthrie, and Seeger developed a theoretical framework that helped them to understand domestic and international relations; politics, economics, and culture; and the vital links between class, race, and gender (although ideas about gender were less developed). They embraced the Marxist approach which was historical, materialist, and dialectical.

Second, Robeson realized by the mid-1930s, and Guthrie and Seeger a few years later, that their theoretical understanding of the world needed to be matched by practical engagement in that world. Robeson, early in his career believed that as an artist he should not to be politically engaged. But again, the events of the 1930s changed his mind: that to be an artist meant to be engaged. He realized that he had no choice but to join the struggle for the survival of humankind. Throughout his remaining years, he referred to himself as a fighter against fascism. Similar but less dramatic “conversions” could be teased from the biographies of Guthrie and Seeger.

Third, Robeson’s commitment to the struggle for human liberation and against fascism was to be manifested in his political activities and in his artistic endeavors. He would sing for the movement. He would fashion an art that was of the movement. His commitment to the performance of the “Negro spiritual” was designed to celebrate the pain and suffering and the very soul of his people. Over the years, his passion for performing the songs of people from many lands constituted an expression of his political ideology and international class solidarity. And as was sampled above the same frame was as passionately articulated by Guthrie and Seeger.

Fourth, Robeson realized that his art was an expression of and concretized the vision of the broad masses of peoples for whom he performed. His realization that he resonated most to the people “in the balcony’ reflected the connection between him as the “organic intellectual” and the working class he spoke for. And, in the milieu of the 1930s, he represented the vision and the hope of workers, Black and white, colonial peoples, and the broad front of anti-fascist freedom fighters the world over. His performance represented them and their existence made his art possible. He was perhaps an early example of a global artist speaking for and shaped by a global cultural front. [43] Again, Guthrie and Seeger sang in support of industrial workers, participating in their organizing drives; mobilized in the campaign against Fascism in Europe and Asia, after the war participated with peace and justice activists, and particularly in the case of Pete Seeger, supported and helped bring visibility of the Southern Freedom movement to the country at large. All three performers came together to support Progressive Party presidential candidate Henry Wallace in 1948 and joined in resistance against racism and anti-communism in a concert, then riot, in Peekskill, New York in 1949.

Finally, Robeson’s Marxism, manifested in theory and practice, in performance and politics, shaped his thinking about his music. His understanding of the music he sang was shaped by historical and dialectical materialism and class solidarity. In an appendix to his autobiography, Here I Stand, he writes about the commonality of chord structures he found in music from Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America:

Continued study and research into the origins of the folk music of various peoples in many parts of the world revealed that there is a world body-a universal body-of folk music based upon a universal pentatonic (five-tone) scale. Interested as I am in the universality of mankind-in the fundamental relationship of all peoples to one another-this idea of a universal body of music intrigued me, and I pursued it along many fascinating paths. [44]

Robeson saw a beautifully diverse world of peoples and cultures sharing a common humanity. To him human solidarity was possible because of it. Robeson’s articulated vision of human solidarity in his art and politics was perhaps his most profound contribution. This as well was the greatest contribution of the cultural front from which he came. No more important idea is needed today to guide our social movements, and a blossoming global cultural front, than that of the “universal body of music” and the “universality of (hu)man kind” which he proclaimed.

Guthrie was more pugnacious when he wrote:

I hate a song that makes you think that you are not any good. I hate a song that makes you think that you are just born to lose. Bound to lose. No good to nobody. No good for nothing. Because you are too old or too young or too fat or too slim. Too ugly or too this or too that. Songs that run you down or poke fun at you on account of your bad luck or hard traveling. I am out to fight those songs to my very last breath of air and my last drop of blood….[45]
Pete Seeger once quoted his Weavers comrade Lee Hayes who wrote:

    Good singing won’t do;
    Good praying won’t do;
    Good preaching won’t do;
    But if you get them all together
    With a little organizing behind it,
    You get a way of life
    And a way to do it.” [46]

In sum, Robeson, Guthrie, and Seeger articulated through art and action a set of accessible Marxist concepts for understanding the world and general ideas about how to change it; a vision of a “Popular Front” that must bring the vast majority of humankind (the 99 percent?) to common action; and a call to action combining intellectual rigor, militancy and tolerance.

Endnotes

1.  Penn State Conference theme
2.  Parts of this paper were presented at a conference “Paul Robeson: His History and Development as an Intellectual” at Lafayette College, Easton, Pennsylvania, April 8, 2005. This latest version was improved as a result of substantive suggestions for a revision by Jay Schaffner, labor educator and musician’s union organizer, now retired.
3. Karl Marx and  Frederick Engels, The German Ideology, International Publishers, New York, 1976, 50.
4.  Ibid. 42.
5.  Paul Robeson, “Speech at International Fur and Leather Workers Union Convention,” May 20, 1948, Proceedings, in Philip S. Foner ed., Paul Robeson Speaks: Writings, Speeches, Interviews, 1918-1974, Citadel Press, Secaucus, N.J. 1978, 184.
6. Ibid. 185.
7.  Ibid. 185.
8.  Ibid. 186.
9.  Ibid. 186.
10.  Paul Robeson, “My Answer,” as told to Dan Bailey in New York Age, August 6, 13, 20, September 3, 17, 1949, in Foner, ed.,229.
11.  Paul Robeson, “I, Too, Am American,” Reynolds News, London, February 27, 1949 in Foner, ed., 191.
12.  Paul Robeson, “Foreword ,”  Born of the People by Luis Taruc, ” New York, 1953, in Foner, ed., 370-372.
13.  Ibid. 371.
14.  Paul Robeson, “Paul Robeson Tells Us Why,” An interview by Sidney Cole in The Cine-Technician, London, September-October, 1938, in Foner, ed., 121-123.
15.  Ibid. 122.
16.  Paul Robeson, “remarks at Longshore,  Shipclerks, Walking Bosses and Gatemen and Watchmen’s Caucus,” August 21,1948 Proceedings, Foner.,ed. 188-189.
17.  Paul Robeson, “My America,” in Foner, ed. 229.
18.  Paul Robeson, “Forge Negro-Labor Unity for Peace and Jobs,” speech at National Labor Conference for Negro Rights, Chicago June 10, 1950, in Foner, ed. 246.
19  Paul Robeson, “Speech to Youth,” address delivered at First National Convention of Labor Youth League, November 24. 1950, in Foner, ed. 255.
20.  Paul Robeson, “U.S.S.R. The Land for Me,” Sunday Worker, May 10, 1936, in Foner, ed., 106.
21.  Paul Robeson, “When I Sing,” Sunday Worker, February 7, 1937, in Foner, ed., 116.
22.  Paul Robeson, “The Negro People and the Soviet Union,”  address at the National Council of Soviet  American Friendship New York, November 10, 1949,  pamphlet, New York, 1950 in Foner, ed., 240.
23.  Woody Guthrie, Pastures of Plenty, a Self-Portrait, (edited by Dave Marsh and Harold Leventhal), Harper Collins, 1990, 9.
24.  Woody Guthrie (with Alan Lomax and Pete Seeger), Hard Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People, University of Nebraska Press, 2012, 281.
25.  Woody Guthrie, Pastures of Plenty, 200-201.
26.  David R. Shumway, “Your Land, The Lost Legacy of Woody Guthrie,” in Robert Santelli and Emily Davison editors, Hard Travelin:’The Life and Legacy of Woody Guthrie, Wesleyan University Press, hanover, 1999, 133-134.
27.  Pete Seeger, Where Have All the Flowers Gone: A Singer’s Stories, Songs, Seeds, and Robberies, Sing Out Publications, 1993, 142.
28.  Pete Seeger, Where Have All the Flowers Gone, 99.
29.  Pete Seeger and Bob Reiser, Carry It On! A History in Song and Picture of the Working Men and Women of America, Simon and Schuster, 1985, 179.
30.  Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, “Theses on Feurbach,” in Lewis S. Feuer, ed. Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy, Anchor Books, 1959, 243.
31.  Ibid. 245.
32.  Paul Robeson, “The Artist Must Take Sides,” Daily Worker, June 24, 1937, November 4, 1937, Foner, ed. 118.
33.  Ibid. 119.
34.  Woody Guthrie, “WNEW,” Born to Win, Colliers, 1965, 220-226.
35.  Pete Seeger, Where Have All the Flowers Gone, 261.
36.  Antonio Gramsci,  Selections From the Prison Notebooks, International Publishers, New York, 1971, 10.
37.  Paul Robeson, “Paul Robeson Told Me,” interview by Julia Dorn, TAC, July-August, 1939, in Foner, ed. 131.
38.  Woody Guthrie, Pastures of Plenty, 7.
39.  Paul Robeson, “Paul Robeson Told Me,” 131.
40.  Ibid.
41.  Ibid, 132.
42.  Michael Denning, The Cultural Front, Verso, London, 1996, xv,xviii.
43.  Robeson inspired many artists to take the politically engaged path including  Ossie Davis , Ruby Dee, Harry Belafonte, Nina Simone, Pete Seeger, and Danny Glover.
44.  Paul Robeson, Here I Stand, Beacon, Boston, 1988, 115.
45.  Woody Guthrie, Born to Win,  223.
46.  Pete Seeger and Bob Reiser, Carry It On!, 10.

Harry Targ is a national committee member of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism.

China 2013

By Samir Amin
Monthly Review

Samir Amin is director of the Third World Forum in Dakar, Senegal. His books include The Liberal Virus, The World We Wish to See, and The Law of Worldwide Value (all published by Monthly Review Press). This article was translated from the French by James Membrez.

The debates concerning the present and future of China—an “emerging” power—always leave me unconvinced. Some argue that China has chosen, once and for all, the “capitalist road” and intends even to accelerate its integration into contemporary capitalist globalization. They are quite pleased with this and hope only that this “return to normality” (capitalism being the “end of history”) is accompanied by development towards Western-style democracy (multiple parties, elections, human rights). They believe—or need to believe—in the possibility that China shall by this means “catch up” in terms of per capita income to the opulent societies of the West, even if gradually, which I do not believe is possible. The Chinese right shares this point of view. Others deplore this in the name of the values of a “betrayed socialism.” Some associate themselves with the dominant expressions of the practice of China bashing1 in the West. Still others—those in power in Beijing—describe the chosen path as “Chinese-style socialism,” without being more precise. However, one can discern its characteristics by reading official texts closely, particularly the Five-Year Plans, which are precise and taken quite seriously.

In fact the question, “Is China capitalist or socialist?” is badly posed, too general and abstract for any response to make sense in terms of this absolute alternative. In fact, China has actually been following an original path since 1950, and perhaps even since the Taiping Revolution in the nineteenth century. I shall attempt here to clarify the nature of this original path at each of the stages of its development from 1950 to today—2013.

The Agrarian Question

Mao described the nature of the revolution carried out in China by its Communist Party as an anti-imperialist/anti-feudal revolution looking toward socialism. Mao never assumed that, after having dealt with imperialism and feudalism, the Chinese people had “constructed” a socialist society. He always characterized this construction as the first phase of the long path to socialism.

I must emphasize the quite specific nature of the response given to the agrarian question by the Chinese Revolution. The distributed (agricultural) land was not privatized; it remained the property of the nation represented by village communes and only the use was given to rural families. That had not been the case in Russia where Lenin, faced with the fait accompli of the peasant insurrection in 1917, recognized the private property of the beneficiaries of land distribution.

Why was the implementation of the principle that agricultural land is not a commodity possible in China (and Vietnam)? It is constantly repeated that peasants around the world long for property and that alone. If such had been the case in China, the decision to nationalize the land would have led to an endless peasant war, as was the case when Stalin began forced collectivization in the Soviet Union.

The attitude of the peasants of China and Vietnam (and nowhere else) cannot be explained by a supposed “tradition” in which they are unaware of property. It is the product of an intelligent and exceptional political line implemented by the Communist Parties of these two countries.

The Second International took for granted the inevitable aspiration of peasants for property, real enough in nineteenth-century Europe. Over the long European transition from feudalism to capitalism (1500–1800), the earlier institutionalized feudal forms of access to the land through rights shared among king, lords, and peasant serfs had gradually been dissolved and replaced by modern bourgeois private property, which treats the land as a commodity—a good that the owner can freely dispose of (buy and sell). The socialists of the Second International accepted this fait accompli of the “bourgeois revolution,” even if they deplored it.

They also thought that small peasant property had no future, which belonged to large mechanized agricultural enterprise modeled on industry. They thought that capitalist development by itself would lead to such a concentration of property and to the most effective forms of its exploitation (see Kautsky’s writings on this subject). History proved them wrong. Peasant agriculture gave way to capitalist family agriculture in a double sense; one that produces for the market (farm consumption having become insignificant) and one that makes use of modern equipment, industrial inputs, and bank credit. What is more, this capitalist family agriculture has turned out to be quite efficient in comparison with large farms, in terms of volume of production per hectare per worker/year. This observation does not exclude the fact that the modern capitalist farmer is exploited by generalized monopoly capital, which controls the upstream supply of inputs and credit and the downstream marketing of the products. These farmers have been transformed into subcontractors for dominant capital.

Thus (wrongly) persuaded that large enterprise is always more efficient than small in every area—industry, services, and agriculture—the radical socialists of the Second International assumed that the abolition of landed property (nationalization of the land) would allow the creation of large socialist farms (analogous to the future Soviet sovkhozes and kolkhozes). However, they were unable to put such measures to the test since revolution was not on the agenda in their countries (the imperialist centers).

The Bolsheviks accepted these theses until 1917. They contemplated the nationalization of the large estates of the Russian aristocracy, while leaving property in communal lands to the peasants. However, they were subsequently caught unawares by the peasant insurrection, which seized the large estates.

Mao drew the lessons from this history and developed a completely different line of political action. Beginning in the 1930s in southern China, during the long civil war of liberation, Mao based the increasing presence of the Communist Party on a solid alliance with the poor and landless peasants (the majority), maintained friendly relations with the middle peasants, and isolated the rich peasants at all stages of the war, without necessarily antagonizing them. The success of this line prepared the large majority of rural inhabitants to consider and accept a solution to their problems that did not require private property in plots of land acquired through distribution. I think that Mao’s ideas, and their successful implementation, have their historical roots in the nineteenth-century Taiping Revolution. Mao thus succeeded where the Bolshevik Party had failed: in establishing a solid alliance with the large rural majority. In Russia, the fait accompli of summer 1917 eliminated later opportunities for an alliance with the poor and middle peasants against the rich ones (the kulaks) because the former were anxious to defend their acquired private property and, consequently, preferred to follow the kulaks rather than the Bolsheviks.

This “Chinese specificity”—whose consequences are of major importance—absolutely prevents us from characterizing contemporary China (even in 2013) as “capitalist” because the capitalist road is based on the transformation of land into a commodity.

Present and Future of Petty Production

However, once this principle is accepted, the forms of using this common good (the land of the village communities) can be quite diverse. In order to understand this, we must be able to distinguish petty production from small property.

Petty production—peasant and artisanal—dominated production in all past societies. It has retained an important place in modern capitalism, now linked with small property—in agriculture, services, and even certain segments of industry. Certainly in the dominant triad of the contemporary world (the United States, Europe, and Japan) it is receding. An example of that is the disappearance of small businesses and their replacement by large commercial operations. Yet this is not to say that this change is “progress,” even in terms of efficiency, and all the more so if the social, cultural, and civilizational dimensions are taken into account. In fact, this is an example of the distortion produced by the domination of rent-seeking generalized monopolies. Hence, perhaps in a future socialism the place of petty production will be called upon to resume its importance.

In contemporary China, in any case, petty production—which is not necessarily linked with small property—retains an important place in national production, not only in agriculture but also in large segments of urban life.

China has experienced quite diverse and even contrasting forms of the use of land as a common good. We need to discuss, on the one hand, efficiency (volume of production from a hectare per worker/year) and, on the other, the dynamics of the transformations set in motion. These forms can strengthen tendencies towards capitalist development, which would end up calling into question the non-commodity status of the land, or can be part of development in a socialist direction. These questions can be answered only through a concrete examination of the forms at issue, as they were implemented in successive moments of Chinese development from 1950 to the present.

At the beginning, in the 1950s, the form adopted was petty family production combined with simpler forms of cooperation for managing irrigation, work requiring coordination, and the use of certain kinds of equipment. This was associated with the insertion of such petty family production into a state economy that maintained a monopoly over purchases of produce destined for the market and the supply of credit and inputs, all on the basis of planned prices (decided by the center).

The experience of the communes that followed the establishment of production cooperatives in the 1970s is full of lessons. It was not necessarily a question of passing from small production to large farms, even if the idea of the superiority of the latter inspired some of its supporters. The essentials of this initiative originated in the aspiration for decentralized socialist construction. The Communes not only had responsibility for managing the agricultural production of a large village or a collective of villages and hamlets (this organization itself was a mixture of forms of small family production and more ambitious specialized production), they also provided a larger framework: (1) attaching industrial activities that employed peasants available in certain seasons; (2) articulating productive economic activities together with the management of social services (education, health, housing); and (3) commencing the decentralization of the political administration of the society. Just as the Paris Commune had intended, the socialist state was to become, at least partially, a federation of socialist Communes.

Undoubtedly, in many respects, the Communes were in advance of their time and the dialectic between the decentralization of decision-making powers and the centralization assumed by the omnipresence of the Communist Party did not always operate smoothly. Yet the recorded results are far from having been disastrous, as the right would have us believe. A Commune in the Beijing region, which resisted the order to dissolve the system, continues to record excellent economic results linked with the persistence of high-quality political debates, which disappeared elsewhere. Current projects of “rural reconstruction,” implemented by rural communities in several regions of China, appear to be inspired by the experience of the Communes.

The decision to dissolve the Communes made by Deng Xiaoping in 1980 strengthened small family production, which remained the dominant form during the three decades following this decision. However, the range of users’ rights (for village Communes and family units) has expanded considerably. It has become possible for the holders of these land use rights to “rent” that land out (but never “sell” it), either to other small producers—thus facilitating emigration to the cities, particularly of educated young people who do not want to remain rural residents—or to firms organizing a much larger, modernized farm (never a latifundia, which does not exist in China, but nevertheless considerably larger than family farms). This form is the means used to encourage specialized production (such as good wine, for which China has called on the assistance of experts from Burgundy) or test new scientific methods (GMOs and others).

To “approve” or “reject” the diversity of these systems a priori makes no sense, in my opinion. Once again, the concrete analysis of each of them, both in design and the reality of its implementation, is imperative. The fact remains that the inventive diversity of forms of using commonly held land has led to phenomenal results. First of all, in terms of economic efficiency, although urban population has grown from 20 to 50 percent of total population, China has succeeded in increasing agricultural production to keep pace with the gigantic needs of urbanization. This is a remarkable and exceptional result, unparalleled in the countries of the “capitalist” South. It has preserved and strengthened its food sovereignty, even though it suffers from a major handicap: its agriculture feeds 22 percent of the world’s population reasonably well while it has only 6 percent of the world’s arable land. In addition, in terms of the way (and level) of life of rural populations, Chinese villages no longer have anything in common with what is still dominant elsewhere in the capitalist third world. Comfortable and well-equipped permanent structures form a striking contrast, not only with the former China of hunger and extreme poverty, but also with the extreme forms of poverty that still dominate the countryside of India or Africa.

The principles and policies implemented (land held in common, support for petty production without small property) are responsible for these unequalled results. They have made possible a relatively controlled rural-to-urban migration. Compare that with the capitalist road, in Brazil, for example. Private property in agricultural land has emptied the countryside of Brazil—today only 11 percent of the country’s population. But at least 50 percent of urban residents live in slums (the favelas) and survive only thanks to the “informal economy” (including organized crime). There is nothing similar in China, where the urban population is, as a whole, adequately employed and housed, even in comparison with many “developed countries,” without even mentioning those where the GDP per capita is at the Chinese level!

The population transfer from the extremely densely populated Chinese countryside (only Vietnam, Bangladesh, and Egypt are similar) was essential. It improved conditions for rural petty production, making more land available. This transfer, although relatively controlled (once again, nothing is perfect in the history of humanity, neither in China nor elsewhere), is perhaps threatening to become too rapid. This is being discussed in China.

Chinese State Capitalism

The first label that comes to mind to describe Chinese reality is state capitalism. Very well, but this label remains vague and superficial so long as the specific content is not analyzed.

It is indeed capitalism in the sense that the relation to which the workers are subjected by the authorities who organize production is similar to the one that characterizes capitalism: submissive and alienated labor, extraction of surplus labor. Brutal forms of extreme exploitation of workers exist in China, e.g., in the coal mines or in the furious pace of the workshops that employ women. This is scandalous for a country that claims to want to move forward on the road to socialism. Nevertheless, the establishment of a state capitalist regime is unavoidable, and will remain so everywhere. The developed capitalist countries themselves will not be able to enter a socialist path (which is not on the visible agenda today) without passing through this first stage. It is the preliminary phase in the potential commitment of any society to liberating itself from historical capitalism on the long route to socialism/communism. Socialization and reorganization of the economic system at all levels, from the firm (the elementary unit) to the nation and the world, require a lengthy struggle during an historical time period that cannot be foreshortened.

Beyond this preliminary reflection, we must concretely describe the state capitalism in question by bringing out the nature and the project of the state concerned, because there is not just one type of state capitalism, but many different ones. The state capitalism of France of the Fifth Republic from 1958 to 1975 was designed to serve and strengthen private French monopolies, not to commit the country to a socialist path.

Chinese state capitalism was built to achieve three objectives: (i) construct an integrated and sovereign modern industrial system; (ii) manage the relation of this system with rural petty production; and (iii) control China’s integration into the world system, dominated by the generalized monopolies of the imperialist triad (United States, Europe, Japan). The pursuit of these three priority objectives is unavoidable. As a result it permits a possible advance on the long route to socialism, but at the same time it strengthens tendencies to abandon that possibility in favor of pursuing capitalist development pure and simple. It must be accepted that this conflict is both inevitable and always present. The question then is this: Do China’s concrete choices favor one of the two paths?

Chinese state capitalism required, in its first phase (1954–1980), the nationalization of all companies (combined with the nationalization of agricultural lands), both large and small alike. Then followed an opening to private enterprise, national and/or foreign, and liberalized rural and urban petty production (small companies, trade, services). However, large basic industries and the credit system established during the Maoist period were not denationalized, even if the organizational forms of their integration into a “market” economy were modified. This choice went hand in hand with the establishment of means of control over private initiative and potential partnership with foreign capital. It remains to be seen to what extent these means fulfill their assigned functions or, on the contrary, if they have not become empty shells, collusion with private capital (through “corruption” of management) having gained the upper hand.

Still, what Chinese state capitalism has achieved between 1950 and 2012 is quite simply amazing. It has, in fact, succeeded in building a sovereign and integrated modern productive system to the scale of this gigantic country, which can only be compared with that of the United States. It has succeeded in leaving behind the tight technological dependence of its origins (importation of Soviet, then Western models) through the development of its own capacity to produce technological inventions. However, it has not (yet?) begun the reorganization of labor from the perspective of socialization of economic management. The Plan—and not the “opening”—has remained the central means for implementing this systematic construction.

In the Maoist phase of this development planning, the Plan remained imperative in all details: nature and location of new establishments, production objectives, and prices. At that stage, no reasonable alternative was possible. I will mention here, without pursuing it further, the interesting debate about the nature of the law of value that underpinned planning in this period. The very success—and not the failure—of this first phase required an alteration of the means for pursuing an accelerated development project. The “opening” to private initiative—beginning in 1980, but above all from 1990—was necessary in order to avoid the stagnation that was fatal to the USSR. Despite the fact that this opening coincided with the globalized triumph of neo-liberalism—with all the negative effects of this coincidence, to which I shall return—the choice of a “socialism of the market,” or better yet, a “socialism with the market,” as fundamental for this second phase of accelerated development is largely justified, in my opinion.

The results of this choice are, once again, simply amazing. In a few decades, China has built a productive, industrial urbanization that brings together 600 million human beings, two-thirds of whom were urbanized over the last two decades (almost equal to Europe’s population!). This is due to the Plan and not to the market. China now has a truly sovereign productive system. No other country in the South (except for Korea and Taiwan) has succeeded in doing this. In India and Brazil there are only a few disparate elements of a sovereign project of the same kind, nothing more.

The methods for designing and implementing the Plan have been transformed in these new conditions. The Plan remains imperative for the huge infrastructure investments required by the project: to house 400 million new urban inhabitants in adequate conditions, and to build an unparalleled network of highways, roads, railways, dams, and electric power plants; to open up all or almost all of the Chinese countryside; and to transfer the center of gravity of development from the coastal regions to the continental west. The Plan also remains imperative—at least in part—for the objectives and financial resources of publicly owned enterprises (state, provinces, municipalities). As for the rest, it points to possible and probable objectives for the expansion of small urban commodity production as well as industrial and other private activities. These objectives are taken seriously and the political-economic resources required for their realization are specified. On the whole, the results are not too different from the “planned” predictions.

Chinese state capitalism has integrated into its development project visible social (I am not saying “socialist”) dimensions. These objectives were already present in the Maoist era: eradication of illiteracy, basic health care for everyone, etc. In the first part of the post-Maoist phase (the 1990s), the tendency was undoubtedly to neglect the pursuit of these efforts. However, it should be noted that the social dimension of the project has since won back its place and, in response to active and powerful social movements, is expected to make more headway. The new urbanization has no parallel in any other country of the South. There are certainly “chic” quarters and others that are not at all opulent; but there are no slums, which have continued to expand everywhere else in the cities of the third world.

The Integration of China into Capitalist Globalization

We cannot pursue the analysis of Chinese state capitalism (called “market socialism” by the government) without taking into consideration its integration into globalization.

The Soviet world had envisioned a delinking from the world capitalist system, complementing that delinking by building an integrated socialist system encompassing the USSR and Eastern Europe. The USSR achieved this delinking to a great extent, imposed moreover by the West’s hostility; even blaming the blockade for its isolation. However, the project of integrating Eastern Europe never advanced very far, despite the initiatives of Comecom. The nations of Eastern Europe remained in uncertain and vulnerable positions, partially delinked—but on a strictly national basis—and partially open to Western Europe beginning in 1970. There was never a question of a USSR–China integration, not only because Chinese nationalism would not have accepted it, but even more because China’s priority tasks did not require it. Maoist China practiced delinking in its own way. Should we say that, by reintegrating itself into globalization beginning in the 1990s, it has fully and permanently renounced delinking?

China entered globalization in the 1990s by the path of the accelerated development of manufactured exports possible for its productive system, giving first priority to exports whose rates of growth then surpassed those of the growth in GDP. The triumph of neoliberalism favored the success of this choice for fifteen years (from 1990 to 2005). The pursuit of this choice is questionable not only because of its political and social effects, but also because it is threatened by the implosion of neoliberal globalized capitalism, which began in 2007. The Chinese government appears to be aware of this and very early began to attempt a correction by giving greater importance to the internal market and to development of western China.

To say, as one hears ad nauseam, that China’s success should be attributed to the abandonment of Maoism (whose “failure” was obvious), the opening to the outside, and the entry of foreign capital is quite simply idiotic. The Maoist construction put in place the foundations without which the opening would not have achieved its well-known success. A comparison with India, which has not made a comparable revolution, demonstrates this. To say that China’s success is mainly (even “completely”) attributable to the initiatives of foreign capital is no less idiotic. It is not multinational capital that built the Chinese industrial system and achieved the objectives of urbanization and the construction of infrastructure. The success is 90 percent attributable to the sovereign Chinese project. Certainly, the opening to foreign capital has fulfilled useful functions: it has increased the import of modern technologies. However, because of its partnership methods, China absorbed these technologies and has now mastered their development. There is nothing similar elsewhere, even in India or Brazil, a fortiori in Thailand, Malaysia, South Africa, and other places.

China’s integration into globalization has remained, moreover, partial and controlled (or at least controllable, if one wants to put it that way). China has remained outside of financial globalization. Its banking system is completely national and focused on the country’s internal credit market. Management of the yuan is still a matter for China’s sovereign decision making. The yuan is not subject to the vagaries of the flexible exchanges that financial globalization imposes. Beijing can say to Washington, “the yuan is our money and your problem,” just like Washington said to the Europeans in 1971, “the dollar is our money and your problem.” Moreover, China retains a large reserve for deployment in its public credit system. The public debt is negligible compared with the rates of indebtedness (considered intolerable) in the United States, Europe, Japan, and many of the countries in the South. China can thus increase the expansion of its public expenditures without serious danger of inflation.

The attraction of foreign capital to China, from which it has benefitted, is not behind the success of its project. On the contrary, it is the success of the project that has made investment in China attractive for Western transnationals. The countries of the South that opened their doors much wider than China and unconditionally accepted their submission to financial globalization have not become attractive to the same degree. Transnational capital is not attracted to China to pillage the natural resources of the country, nor, without any transfer of technology, to outsource and benefit from low wages for labor; nor to seize the benefits from training and integration of offshored units unrelated to nonexistent national productive systems, as in Morocco and Tunisia; nor even to carry out a financial raid and allow the imperialist banks to dispossess the national savings, as was the case in Mexico, Argentina, and Southeast Asia. In China, by contrast, foreign investments can certainly benefit from low wages and make good profits, on the condition that their plans fit into China’s and allow technology transfer. In sum, these are “normal” profits, but more can be made if collusion with Chinese authorities permits!

China, Emerging Power

No one doubts that China is an emerging power. One current idea is that China is only attempting to recover the place it had occupied for centuries and lost only in the nineteenth century. However, this idea—certainly correct, and flattering, moreover—does not help us much in understanding the nature of this emergence and its real prospects in the contemporary world. Incidentally, those who propagate this general and vague idea have no interest in considering whether China will emerge by rallying to the general principles of capitalism (which they think is probably necessary) or whether it will take seriously its project of “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” For my part, I argue that if China is indeed an emerging power, this is precisely because it has not chosen the capitalist path of development pure and simple; and that, as a consequence, if it decided to follow that capitalist path, the project of emergence itself would be in serious danger of failing.

The thesis that I support implies rejecting the idea that peoples cannot leap over the necessary sequence of stages and that China must go through a capitalist development before the question of its possible socialist future is considered. The debate on this question between the different currents of historical Marxism was never concluded. Marx remained hesitant on this question. We know that right after the first European attacks (the Opium Wars), he wrote: the next time that you send your armies to China they will be welcomed by a banner, “Attention, you are at the frontiers of the bourgeois Republic of China.” This is a magnificent intuition and shows confidence in the capacity of the Chinese people to respond to the challenge, but at the same time an error because in fact the banner read: “You are at the frontiers of the People’s Republic of China.” Yet we know that, concerning Russia, Marx did not reject the idea of skipping the capitalist stage (see his correspondence with Vera Zasulich). Today, one might believe that the first Marx was right and that China is indeed on the route to capitalist development.

But Mao understood—better than Lenin—that the capitalist path would lead to nothing and that the resurrection of China could only be the work of communists. The Qing Emperors at the end of the nineteenth century, followed by Sun Yat Sen and the Guomindang, had already planned a Chinese resurrection in response to the challenge from the West. However, they imagined no other way than that of capitalism and did not have the intellectual wherewithal to understand what capitalism really is and why this path was closed to China, and to all the peripheries of the world capitalist system for that matter. Mao, an independent Marxist spirit, understood this. More than that, Mao understood that this battle was not won in advance—by the 1949 victory—and that the conflict between commitment to the long route to socialism, the condition for China’s renaissance, and return to the capitalist fold would occupy the entire visible future.

Personally, I have always shared Mao’s analysis and I shall return to this subject in some of my thoughts concerning the role of the Taiping Revolution (which I consider to be the distant origin of Maoism), the 1911 revolution in China, and other revolutions in the South at the beginning of the twentieth century, the debates at the beginning of the Bandung period and the analysis of the impasses in which the so-called emergent countries of the South committed to the capitalist path are stuck. All these considerations are corollaries of my central thesis concerning the polarization (i.e., construction of the center/periphery contrast) immanent to the world development of historical capitalism. This polarization eliminates the possibility for a country from the periphery to “catch up” within the context of capitalism. We must draw the conclusion: if “catching up” with the opulent countries is impossible, something else must be done—it is called following the socialist path.

China has not followed a particular path just since 1980, but since 1950, although this path has passed through phases that are different in many respects. China has developed a coherent, sovereign project that is appropriate for its own needs. This is certainly not capitalism, whose logic requires that agricultural land be treated as a commodity. This project remains sovereign insofar as China remains outside of contemporary financial globalization.

The fact that the Chinese project is not capitalist does not mean that it “is” socialist, only that it makes it possible to advance on the long road to socialism. Nevertheless, it is also still threatened with a drift that moves it off that road and ends up with a return, pure and simple, to capitalism.

China’s successful emergence is completely the result of this sovereign project. In this sense, China is the only authentically emergent country (along with Korea and Taiwan, about which we will say more later). None of the many other countries to which the World Bank has awarded a certificate of emergence is really emergent because none of these countries is persistently pursuing a coherent sovereign project. All subscribe to the fundamental principles of capitalism pure and simple, even in potential sectors of their state capitalism. All have accepted submission to contemporary globalization in all its dimensions, including financial. Russia and India are partial exceptions to this last point, but not Brazil, South Africa, and others. Sometimes there are pieces of a “national industry policy,” but nothing comparable with the systematic Chinese project of constructing a complete, integrated, and sovereign industrial system (notably in the area of technological expertise).

For these reasons all these other countries, too quickly characterized as emergent, remain vulnerable in varying degrees, but always much more than China. For all these reasons, the appearances of emergence—respectable rates of growth, capacities to export manufactured products—are always linked with the processes of pauperization that impact the majority of their populations (particularly the peasantry), which is not the case with China. Certainly the growth of inequality is obvious everywhere, including China; but this observation remains superficial and deceptive. Inequality in the distribution of benefits from a model of growth that nevertheless excludes no one (and is even accompanied with a reduction in pockets of poverty—this is the case in China) is one thing; the inequality connected with a growth that benefits only a minority (from 5 percent to 30 percent of the population, depending on the case) while the fate of the others remains desperate is another thing. The practitioners of China bashing are unaware—or pretend to be unaware—of this decisive difference. The inequality that is apparent from the existence of quarters with luxurious villas, on the one hand, and quarters with comfortable housing for the middle and working classes, on the other, is not the same as the inequality apparent from the juxtaposition of wealthy quarters, middle-class housing, and slums for the majority. The Gini coefficients are valuable for measuring the changes from one year to another in a system with a fixed structure. However, in international comparisons between systems with different structures, they lose their meaning, like all other measures of macroeconomic magnitudes in national accounts. The emergent countries (other than China) are indeed “emergent markets,” open to penetration by the monopolies of the imperialist triad. These markets allow the latter to extract, to their benefit, a considerable part of the surplus value produced in the country in question. China is different: it is an emergent nation in which the system makes possible the retention of the majority of the surplus value produced there.

Korea and Taiwan are the only two successful examples of an authentic emergence in and through capitalism. These two countries owe this success to the geostrategic reasons that led the United States to allow them to achieve what Washington prohibited others from doing. The contrast between the support of the United States to the state capitalism of these two countries and the extremely violent opposition to state capitalism in Nasser’s Egypt or Boumedienne’s Algeria is, on this account, quite illuminating.

I will not discuss here potential projects of emergence, which appear quite possible in Vietnam and Cuba, or the conditions of a possible resumption of progress in this direction in Russia. Nor will I discuss the strategic objectives of the struggle by progressive forces elsewhere in the capitalist South, in India, Southeast Asia, Latin America, the Arab World, and Africa, which could facilitate moving beyond current impasses and encourage the emergence of sovereign projects that initiate a true rupture with the logic of dominant capitalism.

Great Successes, New Challenges

China has not just arrived at the crossroads; it has been there every day since 1950. Social and political forces from the right and left, active in society and the party, have constantly clashed.

Where does the Chinese right come from? Certainly, the former comprador and bureaucratic bourgeoisies of the Guomindang were excluded from power. However, over the course of the war of liberation, entire segments of the middle classes, professionals, functionaries, and industrialists, disappointed by the ineffectiveness of the Guomindang in the face of Japanese aggression, drew closer to the Communist Party, even joining it. Many of them—but certainly not all—remained nationalists, and nothing more. Subsequently, beginning in 1990 with the opening to private initiative, a new, more powerful, right made its appearance. It should not be reduced simply to “businessmen” who have succeeded and made (sometimes colossal) fortunes, strengthened by their clientele—including state and party officials, who mix control with collusion, and even corruption.

This success, as always, encourages support for rightist ideas in the expanding educated middle classes. It is in this sense that the growing inequality—even if it has nothing in common with inequality characteristic of other countries in the South—is a major political danger, the vehicle for the spread of rightist ideas, depoliticization, and naive illusions.

Here I shall make an additional observation that I believe is important: petty production, particularly peasant, is not motivated by rightist ideas, like Lenin thought (that was accurate in Russian conditions). China’s situation contrasts here with that of the ex-USSR. The Chinese peasantry, as a whole, is not reactionary because it is not defending the principle of private property, in contrast with the Soviet peasantry, whom the communists never succeeded in turning away from supporting the kulaks in defense of private property. On the contrary, the Chinese peasantry of petty producers (without being small property owners) is today a class that does not offer rightist solutions, but is part of the camp of forces agitating for the adoption of the most courageous social and ecological policies. The powerful movement of “renovating rural society” testifies to this. The Chinese peasantry largely stands in the leftist camp, with the working class. The left has its organic intellectuals and it exercises some influence on the state and party apparatuses.

The perpetual conflict between the right and left in China has always been reflected in the successive political lines implemented by the state and party leadership. In the Maoist era, the leftist line did not prevail without a fight. Assessing the progress of rightist ideas within the party and its leadership, a bit like the Soviet model, Mao unleashed the Cultural Revolution to fight it. “Bombard the Headquarters,” that is, the Party leadership, where the “new bourgeoisie” was forming. However, while the Cultural Revolution met Mao’s expectations during the first two years of its existence, it subsequently deviated into anarchy, linked to the loss of control by Mao and the left in the party over the sequence of events. This deviation led to the state and party taking things in hand again, which gave the right its opportunity. Since then, the right has remained a strong part of all leadership bodies. Yet the left is present on the ground, restricting the supreme leadership to compromises of the “center”—but is that center right or center left?

To understand the nature of challenges facing China today, it is essential to understand that the conflict between China’s sovereign project, such as it is, and North American imperialism and its subaltern European and Japanese allies will increase in intensity to the extent that China continues its success. There are several areas of conflict: China’s command of modern technologies, access to the planet’s resources, the strengthening of China’s military capacities, and pursuit of the objective of reconstructing international politics on the basis of the sovereign rights of peoples to choose their own political and economic system. Each of these objectives enters into direct conflict with the objectives pursued by the imperialist triad.

The objective of U.S. political strategy is military control of the planet, the only way that Washington can retain the advantages that give it hegemony. This objective is being pursued by means of the preventive wars in the Middle East, and in this sense these wars are the preliminary to the preventive (nuclear) war against China, cold-bloodedly envisaged by the North American establishment as possibly necessary “before it is too late.” Fomenting hostility to China is inseparable from this global strategy, which is manifest in the support shown for the slaveowners of Tibet and Sinkiang, the reinforcement of the U.S. naval presence in the China Sea, and the unstinting encouragement to Japan to build its military forces. The practitioners of China bashing contribute to keeping this hostility alive.

Simultaneously, Washington is devoted to manipulating the situation by appeasing the possible ambitions of China and the other so-called emergent countries through the creation of the G20, which is intended to give these countries the illusion that their adherence to liberal globalization would serve their interests. The G2 (United States/China) is—in this vein—a trap that, in making China the accomplice of the imperialist adventures of the United States, could cause Beijing’s peaceful foreign policy to lose all its credibility.

The only possible effective response to this strategy must proceed on two levels: (i) strengthen China’s military forces and equip them with the potential for a deterrent response, and (ii) tenaciously pursue the objective of reconstructing a polycentric international political system, respectful of all national sovereignties, and, to this effect, act to rehabilitate the United Nations, now marginalized by NATO. I emphasize the decisive importance of the latter objective, which entails the priority of reconstructing a “front of the South” (Bandung 2?) capable of supporting the independent initiatives of the peoples and states of the South. It implies, in turn, that China becomes aware that it does not have the means for the absurd possibility of aligning with the predatory practices of imperialism (pillaging the natural resources of the planet), since it lacks a military power similar to that of the United States, which in the last resort is the guarantee of success for imperialist projects. China, in contrast, has much to gain by developing its offer of support for the industrialization of the countries of the South, which the club of imperialist “donors” is trying to make impossible.

The language used by Chinese authorities concerning international questions, restrained in the extreme (which is understandable), makes it difficult to know to what extent the leaders of the country are aware of the challenges analyzed above. More seriously, this choice of words reinforces naive illusions and depoliticization in public opinion.

The other part of the challenge concerns the question of democratizing the political and social management of the country.

Mao formulated and implemented a general principle for the political management of the new China that he summarized in these terms: rally the left, neutralize (I add: and not eliminate) the right, govern from the center left. In my opinion, this is the best way to conceive of an effective manner for moving through successive advances, understood and supported by the great majority. In this way, Mao gave a positive content to the concept of democratization of society combined with social progress on the long road to socialism. He formulated the method for implementing this: “the mass line” (go down into the masses, learn their struggles, go back to the summits of power). Lin Chun has analyzed with precision the method and the results that it makes possible.

The question of democratization connected with social progress—in contrast with a “democracy” disconnected from social progress (and even frequently connected with social regression)—does not concern China alone, but all the world’s peoples. The methods that should be implemented for success cannot be summarized in a single formula, valid in all times and places. In any case, the formula offered by Western media propaganda—multiple parties and elections—should quite simply be rejected. Moreover, this sort of “democracy” turns into farce, even in the West, more so elsewhere. The “mass line” was the means for producing consensus on successive, constantly progressing, strategic objectives. This is in contrast with the “consensus” obtained in Western countries through media manipulation and the electoral farce, which is nothing more than alignment with the requirements of capital.

Yet today, how should China begin to reconstruct the equivalent of a new mass line in new social conditions? It will not be easy because the power of the leadership, which has moved mostly to the right in the Communist Party, bases the stability of its management on depoliticization and the naive illusions that go along with that. The very success of the development policies strengthens the spontaneous tendency to move in this direction. It is widely believed in China, in the middle classes, that the royal road to catching up with the way of life in the opulent countries is now open, free of obstacles; it is believed that the states of the triad (United States, Europe, Japan) do not oppose that; U.S. methods are even uncritically admired; etc. This is particularly true for the urban middle classes, which are rapidly expanding and whose conditions of life are incredibly improved. The brainwashing to which Chinese students are subject in the United States, particularly in the social sciences, combined with a rejection of the official unimaginative and tedious teaching of Marxism, have contributed to narrowing the spaces for radical critical debates.

The government in China is not insensitive to the social question, not only because of the tradition of a discourse founded on Marxism, but also because the Chinese people, who learned how to fight and continue to do so, force the government’s hand. If, in the 1990s, this social dimension had declined before the immediate priorities of speeding up growth, today the tendency is reversed. At the very moment when the social-democratic conquests of social security are being eroded in the opulent West, poor China is implementing the expansion of social security in three dimensions—health, housing, and pensions. China’s popular housing policy, vilified by the China bashing of the European right and left, would be envied, not only in India or Brazil, but equally in the distressed areas of Paris, London, or Chicago!

Social security and the pension system already cover 50 percent of the urban population (which has increased, recall, from 200 to 600 million inhabitants!) and the Plan (still carried out in China) anticipates increasing the covered population to 85 percent in the coming years. Let the journalists of China bashing give us comparable examples in the “countries embarked on the democratic path,” which they continually praise. Nevertheless, the debate remains open on the methods for implementing the system. The left advocates the French system of distribution based on the principle of solidarity between these workers and different generations—which prepares for the socialism to come—while the right, obviously, prefers the odious U.S. system of pension funds, which divides workers and transfers the risk from capital to labor.

However, the acquisition of social benefits is insufficient if it is not combined with democratization of the political management of society, with its re-politicization by methods that strengthen the creative invention of forms for the socialist/communist future.

Following the principles of a multi-party electoral system as advocated ad nauseam by Western media and the practitioners of China bashing, and defended by “dissidents” presented as authentic “democrats,” does not meet the challenge. On the contrary, the implementation of these principles could only produce in China, as all the experiences of the contemporary world demonstrate (in Russia, Eastern Europe, the Arab world), the self-destruction of the project of emergence and social renaissance, which is in fact the actual objective of advocating these principles, masked by an empty rhetoric (“there is no other solution than multi-party elections”!). Yet it is not sufficient to counter this bad solution with a fallback to the rigid position of defending the privilege of the “party,” itself sclerotic and transformed into an institution devoted to recruitment of officials for state administration. Something new must be invented.

The objectives of re-politicization and creation of conditions favorable to the invention of new responses cannot be obtained through “propaganda” campaigns. They can only be promoted through social, political, and ideological struggles. That implies the preliminary recognition of the legitimacy of these struggles and legislation based on the collective rights of organization, expression, and proposing legislative initiatives. That implies, in turn, that the party itself is involved in these struggles; in other words, reinvents the Maoist formula of the mass line. Re-politicization makes no sense if it is not combined with procedures that encourage the gradual conquest of responsibility by workers in the management of their society at all levels—company, local, and national. A program of this sort does not exclude recognition of the rights of the individual person. On the contrary, it supposes their institutionalization. Its implementation would make it possible to reinvent new ways of using elections to choose leaders.

Acknowledgements

This paper owes much to the debates organized in China (November–December 2012) by Lau Kin Chi (Linjang University, Hong Kong), in association with the South West University of Chongqing (Wen Tiejun), Renmin and Xinhua Universities of Beijing (Dai Jinhua, Wang Hui), the CASS (Huang Ping) and to meetings with groups of activists from the rural movement in the provinces of Shanxi, Shaanxi, Hubei, Hunan and Chongqing. I extend to all of them my thanks and hope that this paper will be useful for their ongoing discussions. It also owes much to my reading of the writings of Wen Tiejun and Wang Hui.

Notes

China bashing refers to the favored sport of Western media of all tendencies—including the left, unfortunately—that consists of systematically denigrating, even criminalizing, everything done in China. China exports cheap junk to the poor markets of the third world (this is true), a horrible crime. However, it also produces high-speed trains, airplanes, satellites, whose marvelous technological quality is praised in the West, but to which China should have no right! They seem to think that the mass construction of housing for the working class is nothing but the abandonment of workers to slums and liken “inequality” in China (working class houses are not opulent villas) to that in India (opulent villas side-by-side with slums), etc. China bashing panders to the infantile opinion found in some currents of the powerless Western “left”: if it is not the communism of the twenty-third century, it is a betrayal! China bashing participates in the systematic campaign of maintaining hostility towards China, in view of a possible military attack. This is nothing less than a question of destroying the opportunities for an authentic emergence of a great people from the South.

Sources

The Chinese Path and the Agrarian Question

Karl Kautsky, On the Agrarian Question, 2 vols. (London: Zwan Publications, 1988). Originally published 1899.

Samir Amin, “The Paris Commune and the Taiping Revolution,” International Critical Thought, forthcoming in 2013.

Samir Amin, “The 1911 Revolution in a World Historical Perspective: A Comparison with the Meiji Restoration and the Revolutions in Mexico, Turkey and Egypt,” published in Chinese in 1990.

Samir Amin, Ending the Crisis of Capitalism or Ending Capitalism? (Oxford: Pambazuka Press, 2011), chapter 5, “The Agrarian Question.”

Contemporary Globalization, the Imperialist Challenge

Samir Amin, A Life Looking Forward: Memoirs of An Independent Marxist (London: Zed Books, 2006), chapter 7, “Deployment and Erosion of the Bandung Project.”

Samir Amin, The Law of Worldwide Value (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010), “Initiatives from the South,” 121ff, section 4.

Samir Amin, The Implosion of Contemporary Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review Press, forthcoming in 2013), chapter 2, “The South: Emergence and Lumpendevelopment.”

Samir Amin, Beyond US Hegemony (London: Zed Books, 2006). “The Project of the American Ruling Class,” “China, Market Socialism?,” “Russia, Out of the Tunnel?,” “India, A Great Power?,” and “Multipolarity in the 20th Century.”

Samir Amin, Obsolescent Capitalism (London: Zed Books, 2003), chapter 5, “The Militarization of the New Collective Imperialism.”

André Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

Yash Tandon, Ending Aid Dependence (Oxford: Fahamu, 2008).

The Democratic Challenge

Samir Amin, “The Democratic Fraud and the Universalist Alternative,” Monthly Review 63, no. 5 (October 2011): 29–45.

Lin Chun, The Transformation of Chinese Socialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996).

Historian Mark Solomon looks at the prospects for a new socialist left

By Mark Solomon

Published by Portside March 6, 2013

On February 4, 2010 The Gallop Poll released its latest data on the public’s political attitudes. The headline read: “Socialism Viewed Positively by 36% of Americans.” While the poll did not attempt the daunting task of exploring what a diverse public understood socialism to mean, it nevertheless revealed an unmistakably sympathetic image of a system that had been pilloried for generations by all of capitalism’s dominant instruments of learning and information as well as by its power to suppress and slander socialist ideas and organization.

In sheer numbers, that means a population at the teen- age level and above of tens of millions with a favorable view of socialism.

Why then is the organized socialist movement in the United States so small and so clearly wanting in light of the potential for building its numbers and influence?

That is a crucial question. At every major juncture in the history of the country, radical individuals and organizations in advance of the mainstream have played essential roles in influencing, guiding and consolidating broad currents for social change. In the revolution that birthed this country, radical activists articulated demands from the grass roots for an uncompromising and transforming revolution to crush colonial oppression. Black and white abolitionists fought to make the erasure of slavery the core objective of the Civil War while also linking that struggle to women’s suffrage and trade unionism. A mass Socialist Party in the early 20th century fought for state intervention to combat the ravages of an increasingly exploitative economic system while advancing the vision of a socialist commonwealth. In the Great Depression, the Communist Party and its allies fought the devastations of the crisis – helping to build popular movements to expand democracy, grow industrial unions and defend protections for labor embodied in the historic New Deal.

Small left and socialist organizations in the sixties supported a range of progressive struggles from peace to civil rights to women’s liberation to gay rights and beyond. The limited resources of those groups were effective in galvanizing massive peace demonstrations and in campaigns against racist and sexist oppression. But the Cold War and McCarthyism had eviscerated any hope for a major influential socialist current. Consequently, no large and impacting force existed to extend to the peace movement a coherent anti-imperial analysis that might have contributed to its continuity and readiness to confront the wars of the nineties and the new century. Nor was there a strong socialist organization to contribute to the civil rights struggle by advocating for reform joined to a commitment to deeper social transformation. Had such a current existed, it might have contributed to building a broad protective barrier against the devastating FBI and local police violence against sectors of the movement like the Black Panthers.

There should be little debate today on the left over the need for a strong socialist voice and movement in light of festering economic stagnation, war on the working class, looming environmental catastrophe, a widening chasm between the super-rich and the rest of us, massive joblessness and incarceration savaging African Americans and other oppressed nationalities, crises in health care, housing and education. Such a strong socialist presence could offer a searching analysis of the present situation, help stimulate a broad public debate on short term solutions and formulate a vision of a socialist future that could begin to reach the minds and hearts of the 36 percent who claim to be sympathetic to that vision.

Back to the question: why is there no large respected socialist organization today? The answer is complex and not readily subject to a consensus. The failures of the first socialist wave in the 20th century, the unrelenting demonization of socialism by the dominant political apparatus, internal sectarian cultures and narrow social composition that inhibit outreach to youth and oppressed nationalities – have all contributed to a weak socialist presence.

Doubtless, some if not all, existing socialist organizations would insist that they are growing, respected and effective. That can be argued, but it is valid to acknowledge that existing socialist groups, to one degree or another, have made and continue to make important contributions to the struggle for a just present and better future. This is especially true of the work of individual socialists in various unions and mass organizations.

However, the small size and inadequate resources or socialist organization nearly fatally inhibit their impact and influence. No matter how hard working and principled, small socialist groups are drowned out by the power and pervasiveness of the dominant tools of information and education. The Internet has opened a window to reaching mass audiences. But socialist websites (if one is successful in locating them) cannot substitute for the indispensable task of organizational outreach, of human beings making direct contact with other human beings, of physical debate and discussion, of well-orchestrated, highly visible mass actions.

The time has come to work for the convergence of socialist organizations committed to non-sectarian democratic struggle, engagement with mass movements, and open debate in search of effective responses to present crises and to projecting a socialist future.

There are socialist organizations already airing divergent views within their ranks – reflecting positions that overlap with other socialist organizations committed to democratic struggle and socialist education. The Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, the Communist Party USA, Democratic Socialists of America and the Freedom Road Socialist Organization have been meeting to explore areas for cooperation in advancing the fight to defend the needs and interests of all working people. With involvement of their members, and with all who honestly wish a unity project to succeed, those organizations could constitute a starting point for other left and socialist groups and individuals to join as equal participants in building an imaginative, revitalized socialist presence.

A conversation with a veteran socialist historian about merger brought a nearly apoplectic response: that will never happen; too much history of mutual antagonism; too much institutional self-aggrandizement; too much belief within each organization of their ideological and strategic “certainties,” etc.

His bleak assessment may well be valid. One could list even more problems: the comfort of organizational silos, the complexity of sorting out and merging the physical resources of each organization, selecting a conjoined leadership, lingering political and ideological differences.

It can also be argued that a merger of organizations with a combined membership of a few thousand would still not be large or vibrant enough to make an impact on a country of over 300 million; nor would its combined membership include a sufficient component of youth, African Americans, Latinos, Asians, etc., commensurate with the country’s changing demographics.

That perhaps misses a crucial point. While growth and dynamism are not guaranteed, the open-minded and comradely spirit embodied in a merger could excite and inspire thousands of former members of those organizations to join a new, collaborative entity. Many others impressed by a revitalized commitment by socialists to put aside narrow interests and seek common ground could also be moved to join. The simple declaration of unity and amalgamation by old ideological foes will stir an energized, hopeful response on the left.

Among socialist organizations there is a long tradition of opposition to racism, sexism and homophobia; a concrete record of unwavering struggle for racial and gender justice as indispensable to all working class aspirations. With that experience and consciousness a renewed socialist organization with augmented resources would have the potential to speak directly to young people of color, to the jailed and formerly jailed, to a new generation of students, to teen aged youth, to the large numbers who joined the Occupy movement, the unaffiliated leftists and socialists who have joined the rapidly growing Jacobin journal, Labor Notes, the large Left Forums, the Left Labor Project, etc. Whatever its initial form, an alliance of socialists offers the promise of a continuous, enduring framework for democratic struggle, for discussion, for debate, for learning, for growing – all within a stable, political and organizational environment.

With a visible presence for outreach to emerging but undefined left forces, a merged socialist movement could presumably generate the financial resources to hire and train young organizers. With stronger organization derived from convergence, it could tap latent left and socialist sentiment in “red states,” especially the South and Midwest that would reawaken the truly national presence of socialism that characterized the Socialist Party in the early 20th century.

Those augmented resources could open up space for expanded socialist education through debate and discussion, through a combination of new publications and continuing publications of the merged organizations, through classes, think tanks and through utilization of the Internet.  The present Online University of the Left is an excellent example of the potential for utilization on a large scale of new technology for socialist education.

Despite the enormous challenges inherent in convergence, there are a number of reasons to anticipate readiness for unified socialist organizing:

1.  First and foremost, the present crisis of world capitalism is systemic. While there will continue to be economic peaks and valleys, the overall prognosis is for enervation and stagnation that will increasingly demonstrate capitalism’s declining ability to provide decent lives for present and future generations.

2.  There is likely agreement among various organizations on the need for a long-range socialist transformation. There is a likely consensus on the validity of Marx’s basic critique of the contradictions inherent in capitalism: increasingly socialized production colliding with private appropriation of the fruits of that production – constituting the key source of the system’s inherent instability. Historically, the relations of production (manifested in social classes) become fetters upon the productive forces (human beings and machinery) – thus requiring the overturning of the old system – socializing the relations of production in order to bring them into harmony with highly socialized productive forces. With globalization of capital that contradiction between social production and private appropriation has itself become global – resulting in the accumulation of unimaginable wealth by a small minority while masses languish in deepening poverty and social misery.

3.  There is likely agreement that both the path to socialism and its essential character are subjects for study, debate and experimentation. There is much to study: the “solidarity economy” posits 21st century socialism with workers’ control of all essential institutions, a market function and imperative ecological concern.  There are a growing number of experiments in cooperatives, workers’ self-management, and local public ownership of energy. Other approaches stress confrontation with corporate power through mass struggle for control of state policy – aiming to expand the public sphere while reducing and eventually eliminating corporate control of the economy and society. In sum, a new socialist organization will open avenues to fresh, challenging exploration of social transformation.

4.  There is a likely consensus among socialists that “vanguard” organizations and sectarian “cadre” groups have been negated by the existence of a broadly heterogeneous multiracial working class of women and men. The present-day working class and its allies are too diverse to be led by a single, narrowly conceived political current. A renewed socialist organization must reflect that heterogeneity as well as the determination of members to be full, controlling participants in present struggles and in charting a socialist future. The new organization’s structure would likely be neither fully “vertical” nor fully “horizontal.” In the past the former has often undermined democratic participation and the latter (illustrated by the experience of the Occupy movement) has often led to organizational incoherence and stasis. 5.  There is likely agreement that there should be no preexisting, standard for socialist organizing that mandates a “take it or leave it” rigidity. The door should be open to experimentation in exploring both organizational and theoretical issues. There is also likely agreement for the short-and-medium-term at least that a converged organization should not be formed as party or electoral organization. The electoral issue, a major point of contention on the left, could be a major topic of exploration and debate. There should be no obstacles for those who sincerely wish to join the struggle against the ravages of the system and who seek a socialist alternative. In that regard it is important to note the variety of left and socialist movements around the world worthy of study. Clearly, there is no single “correct” path to 21st century socialism. Greece, in the midst of existential crisis, has given rise to Syriza, merging a remarkable range of organizations despite sharply different ideological and historical roots into a unified party whose platform rejects austerity, demands the cancellation of Greece’s debt and reform of the European Central Bank. Syriza emerged in 2001 from a group called “Space for Dialogue for the Unity and Common Action of the Left.” In June 2012, Syriza received almost27% of the vote in parliamentary elections, making it the main opposition party and positioning it as the potential future governing party.

In France, a coalition of left and socialist parties has formed a Left-Front coalition that ran a unified campaign in the last national elections. Germany has “Die Linke,” the Left Party formed from a coalition of the successors to the old ruling party in the German Democratic Republic and a militant West German labor organization. An all-European Left Party is a continental formation of an impressive array of left and socialist parties and organizations. Latin America is perhaps the region with the greatest left and socialist experimentation that generally stresses democratic and participatory engagement at the grass roots in building alternatives to capitalism. The Latin American left in particular has advanced some of the most compelling interpretations of Marx’s thinking concerning the crucial issues of ecological preservation and survival. It has also engendered, country-by-country a variety of social experiments based upon distinct national conditions involving various degrees of mixed, transitional economies on the road to socialism.

Speaking only for myself, I would like to see the creation of an entirely new organization. However, a total merger of organizations at this time can justly be viewed as utopian at best and naïve at worst. One must acknowledge the need for a patient process – for ongoing consultation, for gradual building of mutual comfort and mutual confidence, for a possible stage of confederation or alliance. Crucially, joint activities to defeat austerity and the right wing offensive constitute a sound basis at this juncture on the road to convergence. In the long term, the next generation and generations beyond will determine the form and content of the struggle for social transformation based on changed circumstances that cannot now be fully envisioned.

That does not negate the need for “all deliberate speed” in building an advanced, effective political instrument to help forge the linkages between the economic crisis, the environmental crisis and the crisis of militarism and war. That instrument is needed to help provide political depth and interconnectedness to burgeoning movements on the environment, immigration, gun control, women’s rights, the prison- industrial complex, voting rights, student debt, protection of Social Security and Medicare, jobs and union rights, and the struggle against interventionism and the national security state. Above all, the urgency of the deepening crisis of capitalism demands the political will of socialist organizations to take those bold and resolute steps to forming a strong new alliance capable of having a powerful and lasting impact on the struggle for justice, peace and a socialist future.

Mark Solomon is past national co-chair of the United States Peace Council and the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. He is author of The Cry Was Unity: Communists and African Americans, 1917-1936 and is currently working on a memoir/narrative at the Du Bois Institute at Harvard University on the freedom and peace movements in the 1940s and 1950s.

Posted by Portside on March 6, 2013

By Noam Chomsky
Alternet.org, March 5, 2013

There is “capitalism” and then there is “really existing capitalism.”

The term “capitalism” is commonly used to refer to the U.S. economic system, with substantial state intervention ranging from subsidies for creative innovation to the “too-big-to-fail” government insurance policy for banks.

The system is highly monopolized, further limiting reliance on the market, and increasingly so: In the past 20 years the share of profits of the 200 largest enterprises has risen sharply, reports scholar Robert W. McChesney in his new book “Digital Disconnect.”

“Capitalism” is a term now commonly used to describe systems in which there are no capitalists: for example, the worker-owned Mondragon conglomerate in the Basque region of Spain, or the worker-owned enterprises expanding in northern Ohio, often with conservative support – both are discussed in important work by the scholar Gar Alperovitz.

Some might even use the term “capitalism” to refer to the industrial democracy advocated by John Dewey, America’s leading social philosopher, in the late 19th century and early 20th century.

Dewey called for workers to be “masters of their own industrial fate” and for all institutions to be brought under public control, including the means of production, exchange, publicity, transportation and communication. Short of this, Dewey argued, politics will remain “the shadow cast on society by big business.”

The truncated democracy that Dewey condemned has been left in tatters in recent years. Now control of government is narrowly concentrated at the peak of the income scale, while the large majority “down below” has been virtually disenfranchised. The current political-economic system is a form of plutocracy, diverging sharply from democracy, if by that concept we mean political arrangements in which policy is significantly influenced by the public will.

There have been serious debates over the years about whether capitalism is compatible with democracy. If we keep to really existing capitalist democracy – RECD for short – the question is effectively answered: They are radically incompatible.

It seems to me unlikely that civilization can survive RECD and the sharply attenuated democracy that goes along with it. But could functioning democracy make a difference?

Let’s keep to the most critical immediate problem that civilization faces: environmental catastrophe. Policies and public attitudes diverge sharply, as is often the case under RECD. The nature of the gap is examined in several articles in the current issue of Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Researcher Kelly Sims Gallagher finds that “One hundred and nine countries have enacted some form of policy regarding renewable power, and 118 countries have set targets for renewable energy. In contrast, the United States has not adopted any consistent and stable set of policies at the national level to foster the use of renewable energy.”

It is not public opinion that drives American policy off the international spectrum. Quite the opposite. Opinion is much closer to the global norm than the U.S. government’s policies reflect, and much more supportive of actions needed to confront the likely environmental disaster predicted by an overwhelming scientific consensus – and one that’s not too far off; affecting the lives of our grandchildren, very likely.

As Jon A. Krosnick and Bo MacInnis report in Daedalus: “Huge majorities have favored steps by the federal government to reduce the amount of greenhouse gas emissions generated when utilities produce electricity. In 2006, 86 percent of respondents favored requiring utilities, or encouraging them with tax breaks, to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases they emit. Also in that year, 87 percent favored tax breaks for utilities that produce more electricity from water, wind or sunlight [ These majorities were maintained between 2006 and 2010 and shrank somewhat after that.

The fact that the public is influenced by science is deeply troubling to those who dominate the economy and state policy.

One current illustration of their concern is the “Environmental Literacy Improvement Act” proposed to state legislatures by ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, a corporate-funded lobby that designs legislation to serve the needs of the corporate sector and extreme wealth.

The ALEC Act mandates “balanced teaching” of climate science in K-12 classrooms. “Balanced teaching” is a code phrase that refers to teaching climate-change denial, to “balance” mainstream climate science. It is analogous to the “balanced teaching” advocated by creationists to enable the teaching of “creation science” in public schools. Legislation based on ALEC models has already been introduced in several states.

Of course, all of this is dressed up in rhetoric about teaching critical thinking – a fine idea, no doubt, but it’s easy to think up far better examples than an issue that threatens our survival and has been selected because of its importance in terms of corporate profits.

Media reports commonly present a controversy between two sides on climate change.

One side consists of the overwhelming majority of scientists, the world’s major national academies of science, the professional science journals and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

They agree that global warming is taking place, that there is a substantial human component, that the situation is serious and perhaps dire, and that very soon, maybe within decades, the world might reach a tipping point where the process will escalate sharply and will be irreversible, with severe social and economic effects. It is rare to find such consensus on complex scientific issues.

The other side consists of skeptics, including a few respected scientists who caution that much is unknown – which means that things might not be as bad as thought, or they might be worse.

Omitted from the contrived debate is a much larger group of skeptics: highly regarded climate scientists who see the IPCC’s regular reports as much too conservative. And these scientists have repeatedly been proven correct, unfortunately.

The propaganda campaign has apparently had some effect on U.S. public opinion, which is more skeptical than the global norm. But the effect is not significant enough to satisfy the masters. That is presumably why sectors of the corporate world are launching their attack on the educational system, in an effort to counter the public’s dangerous tendency to pay attention to the conclusions of scientific research.

At the Republican National Committee’s Winter Meeting a few weeks ago, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal warned the leadership that “We must stop being the stupid party ... We must stop insulting the intelligence of voters.”

Within the RECD system it is of extreme importance that we become the stupid nation, not misled by science and rationality, in the interests of the short-term gains of the masters of the economy and political system, and damn the consequences.

These commitments are deeply rooted in the fundamentalist market doctrines that are preached within RECD, though observed in a highly selective manner, so as to sustain a powerful state that serves wealth and power.

The official doctrines suffer from a number of familiar “market inefficiencies,” among them the failure to take into account the effects on others in market transactions. The consequences of these “externalities” can be substantial. The current financial crisis is an illustration. It is partly traceable to the major banks and investment firms’ ignoring “systemic risk” – the possibility that the whole system would collapse – when they undertook risky transactions.

Environmental catastrophe is far more serious: The externality that is being ignored is the fate of the species. And there is nowhere to run, cap in hand, for a bailout.

In future, historians (if there are any) will look back on this curious spectacle taking shape in the early 21st century. For the first time in human history, humans are facing the significant prospect of severe calamity as a result of their actions – actions that are battering our prospects of decent survival.

Those historians will observe that the richest and most powerful country in history, which enjoys incomparable advantages, is leading the effort to intensify the likely disaster. Leading the effort to preserve conditions in which our immediate descendants might have a decent life are the so-called “primitive” societies: First Nations, tribal, indigenous, aboriginal.

The countries with large and influential indigenous populations are well in the lead in seeking to preserve the planet. The countries that have driven indigenous populations to extinction or extreme marginalization are racing toward destruction.

Thus Ecuador, with its large indigenous population, is seeking aid from the rich countries to allow it to keep its substantial oil reserves underground, where they should be.

Meanwhile the U.S. and Canada are seeking to burn fossil fuels, including the extremely dangerous Canadian tar sands, and to do so as quickly and fully as possible, while they hail the wonders of a century of (largely meaningless) energy independence without a side glance at what the world might look like after this extravagant commitment to self-destruction.

This observation generalizes: Throughout the world, indigenous societies are struggling to protect what they sometimes call “the rights of nature,” while the civilized and sophisticated scoff at this silliness.

This is all exactly the opposite of what rationality would predict – unless it is the skewed form of reason that passes through the filter of RECD.

(Noam Chomsky's new book is ``Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire. Conversations with David Barsamian.'' Chomsky is emeritus professor of linguistics and philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass.)

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