Inescapable Contradictions
– from Greg Godels is available at:
http://zzs-blg.blogspot.com/
Marxists favor the term “contradiction.”
A discussion of “contradiction” as a Marxist technical term can become quite tangled and obscure, particularly when the discussion proceeds to Hegelian philosophy. But some clear and simple things can be said about contradictions without delving deeply:
Marxists use the term to indicate a conflict between elements, social forms, forces, processes, or ideas that expresses a fundamental opposition rather than a conflict that arises by accident or happenstance.
Contradictions are not resolvable without an equally fundamental or qualitative change in the antagonists or their relations (Mao Zedong, in his writings, chooses to allow for conflicts [“contradictions”] that are non-antagonistic as well).
Thus, the conflict between dominating and dominated social classes (the capitalists and the working class, for example) represents a contradiction since opposition is fundamental to the nature of the classes and cannot be resolved without a radical and qualitative change in their relations. The dominated class must become dominant or it must eliminate the relationship of domination.
In Marxist revolutionary theory, the class contradiction is the most important contradiction, the contradiction that informs social analysis and socialist strategy.
But other contradictions exist in capitalist society, in politics, in economics, in culture, in foreign policy, and in virtually every aspect of life under capitalism. When class contradictions become particularly acute, they manifest in the sharpening of contradictions in every other aspect of the dominant social form. When the contradictions, the underlying conflicts, result in dysfunctionality, Marxists recognize a systemic crisis.
Contradictions Abound!
Today, in the US, in the wake of the greatest economic downturn since the Crash of 1929, contradictions are found in every aspect of public life. The increasingly apparent class contradiction is exemplified by growing inequality, poverty, and social chaos. The explosive opioid epidemic (recognized only because it has crossed the racial and class “railroad tracks”) generates initiatives from all factions of bourgeois politics. Pundits cry out for punitive action or enhanced social service support, sometimes both. But they fail to locate the causes of the epidemic, causes that are located under the surface of bourgeois society. They fail to recognize that desperate acts accompany desperate circumstances. Wherever poverty and social alienation increase, anti-social, harmful behavior rises as well.
The contradiction between a brutal, uncaring, social regimen and the most fragile, the most marginalized people is as old as class society and the thirst for wealth. The economic ravage of the small towns and cities scattered across the Midwest attest to this contradiction. Capitalists exploited the workers for their labor until they could wring no further profit; then they tossed them aside and left them with no good jobs and no hope. Crime and other destructive behaviors will only increase, unless the contradiction is resolved with a departure from the profit-based system, an alternative profoundly alien to the two major political parties.
They, too, are fraught with contradictions. Both the Democratic and Republican Parties score low in poll approval (see, for example, CNN Poll: Views of DemocraticParty hit lowest mark in 25 years); since 2008, both have failed to advance their programs even when enjoying complete legislative and executive dominance (2009-2010, 2017-); and both parties are afflicted with dissension and division.
The fundamental contradiction in US politics arises from the fact that the two dominant political organizations, the Democratic and Republican Parties, are capitalist parties, yet they pretend to represent the interests of the 70-80% of the US population that have nothing in common with the capitalist class and its loyal servants. While the two parties have skillfully posed as popular while unerringly serving elites, the economic crisis, endless wars, and growing inequality have unmasked their duplicity.
Consequently, factions have broken out in both parties. The Republicans have sought to contain the nativists and racists, the religious zealots, and the isolationists and nationalists within the party while maintaining a corporate agenda. The Democrats have similarly attempted to hold the social liberals, the neo-New Dealers, the social democrats, the environmentalists, and the minorities in a party fundamentally wedded to promoting capitalism and market solutions. Neither strategy can escape the contradictions inherent in a system of two capitalist parties.
The Tea Party movement, Trump, and the Bannonites threaten to shatter the Republican Party. The slick corporate Republicans have lost their magic, unloading vitriol on the vulgar, crass Trump, who deviates from the corporate consensus. The Republican infighting exposes the damage in the party.
The Democrats are exposed as well by the fissure between the Sanders followers and those who are so fearful of working people and wholly beholden to Wall Street and corporate money that they can’t even co-exist with Sanders’ mild reformism. The schism is so great that fundraising has nearly collapsed. And the revelations of DNC collusion with Clinton’s campaign confirmed by Donna Brazile, a long-time ranking insider, demonstrate the rigid, undemocratic nature of the organization. The fact that Brazile also improperly fed debate questions to Clinton only serves to highlight the corruption of the Party and its leaders.
While both Parties are expert at diversion and deflection, the depth of the political crisis, the sharpness of the contradictions, have generated levels of hypocrisy and hysteria unseen since the height of the Cold War. After the debacle of the Clinton Presidential campaign, the Democrats, in collusion with many elements of the security services and most of the monopoly media, mounted a shrill anti-Russia campaign. Crudely, they have relied on the emotional remnants of anti-Sovietism to lodge a host of unsubstantiated charges and a campaign of guilt-by-association. To anyone awake over the last half century or so, the charge of “meddling in the US election” is laughable for its hypocrisy. Have we forgotten Radio Free Europe or Radio Marti? Or a host of other examples?
The high flyers of the stock market– the social media giants– added ridiculous claims of Russian sneakiness to appease the powerful investigative committees and deflect from their own profitable, but vile and socially harmful content.
Reminiscent of the worst days of the so-called McCarthy era, the targeted party– in this case the Republicans– recoiled from the struggle for truth and tried to out-slander the Democrats. Today, they are ranting about an obscure, meaningless uranium deal swung by the Democrats with the wicked Russians.
The first fruits of the farcical Mueller Russian fishing expedition– the Manafort indictment– say nothing about Russia and everything about the corruption infecting US political practices. At best, we will discover that Ukrainian and Russian capitalists are just as corrupt as our own.
Other cracks in capitalist institutions signal intractable contradictions. Both the widespread charges of sexual impropriety in the entertainment industry and the tensions between the players and owners in professional football are symptoms of weaknesses in two of capitalism’s most effective instruments of consensus. Both sports and entertainment are critical mechanisms of distraction that dilute political engagement.
The ever-expanding charges of sexual abuse within the giant entertainment monopolies are spreading to other workplaces, like the government and the news media. While the media are aggressively pursuing the prominent actors, directors, producers, government officials, and other high profile suspects, they wittingly ignore the contradiction that underlies these offenses. In most cases, the malignant behavior grows out of the power asymmetry of employer to employee. Invariably, in these instances, the employee’s reluctance to resist, to come forward, to fight back springs from the fear of retaliation, loss of employment, blacklisting, etc. In other words, it is not akin to other sexual abuses that come from misuse of physical power. Instead, these crimes are possible because of economic power, the power afforded by capitalist economic relations. Indeed, these crimes and similar exercises of employer power exist in many more workplaces and far beyond the world of celebrities. Of course, the corporate media are unwilling to explore the general question of employer abuse that extends beyond celebrities to millions of powerless victims.
Similarly, the conflict over standing for the national anthem is a battle between employees– admittedly among the highest paid in the world– and their employers, the owners of the professional football teams. When Houston Texans owner Robert C. McNair called the players “inmates” it was a not too subtle, vulgar reminder to the players that they are subservient to the owners. What emerged as a legitimate protest against the blacklisting of quarterback Colin Kaepernick has been reshaped by management into a battle over workplace rights and the terms and conditions of employment, a fundamental class contradiction.
Who Rules the World?
As long as capitalism has existed in its mature, monopoly form, it has demonstrated an inherent, relentless global predatory tendency, a form of exploitation that Lenin dubbed “imperialism.” For most of the twentieth century, imperialist governments were obsessed with smashing the leading anti-imperialist force, the socialist countries, while, at the same time, maintaining– often with force– colonial and neo-colonial relations with other nations and nation-states. Thus, the leading contradiction of that era was the opposition between the socialist community, along with its allies in the national liberation movements, and its capitalist adversaries (most often led by the US) and their military blocs (NATO, SEATO, etc.). In mid-century, the capitalist offensive took the virulent form of fascism.
With the demise of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of the socialist community, the US and its most powerful allies declared global victory. Far too much of the unanchored left accepted this declaration, failing to see the various and varied resistance to US and capitalist hegemony springing up throughout the world as fundamentally and objectively anti-imperialist. Far too many disillusioned leftists retreated to vague, moralistic, and decidedly class-blind notions of human rights or humanitarianism, a “leftism” that squared all too neatly and conveniently with the decidedly self-serving concept of “humanitarian interventionism” concocted by the ideologues of imperialism.
But what many foresaw as an “American 21st Century” proved to be an illusion. The basic contradiction between the US and anti-imperialist forces of resistance and independence and the historic contradiction between US imperialism and its imperialist rivals operate as profoundly as they have at any time in the history of imperialism. The dream of “Pax Americana” dissolved before endless wars and aggressions and the emergence of renewed, new, and undaunted oppositional centers of power.
The long-standing Israeli-US strategy of goading and supporting anti-secular, anti-socialist, and anti-democratic movements in emerging nations, especially in predominantly Islamic nations, has failed, even backfired. Though recruited to stifle anti-capitalist movements, these politically backward forces have turned on their masters to stand against occupation and aggression.
The imperialist reaction to these developments has left failed states, environmental disaster, economic chaos, and disastrous conflict in its wake.
In addition, US and NATO destruction has generated a refugee crisis of monumental proportions, flooding the European Union with immigrants and fueling both a surge of anti-immigrant sentiment and the ensuing growth of nationalist politics. Anti-EU and anti-US sentiment grow accordingly.
While the US has not lost its ability to wreak havoc and destruction, it has clearly failed to secure the stability that it had long sought in order to cement the global capitalist order.
Indeed, there are significant sectors of the ruling class that now benefit from the chaos. The military-industrial sector is undergoing a dramatic revival of production and arms sales thanks to the fear and chaos stoked since the end of the Cold War, particularly with newly invented fears of Russian design and aggression along with constantly rising tensions.
The US energy sector, revitalized by new technologies, is now looking to wrestle markets from their traditional suppliers. Many of the sanctions against Russia and the isolation of Qatar and Iran are about capturing natural gas markets in Europe. In this regard, US capitalism benefits from instability and hostility in the Middle East and Africa, where volatility in energy production can only redound to the more stable US suppliers, protected by US military might. The conflict in Nigeria, continued chaos in Libya, the tension between former Iraqi and Kurdish allies, the confounding and disruptive moves by the traditionally staid Saudis, the destabilizing of Venezuela, and, of course, the sanction war with Russia all advantage US energy production.
This contradiction between the post-Cold War avuncular role of the US in guaranteeing the pathways toward global corporate profits and the contrary role of accepting a multi-polar world and forging US policy solely to advantage US capitalism is intensifying. It is a product of the failure of the US to impose what Kautsky (1914) called “ultra-imperialism,” the illusion of collaborative imperialism.
By employing the Marxist conceptual tool of “contradiction,” we are afforded a coherent picture of the crisis facing the capitalist order, particularly in the US. The picture is revealed to be one impervious to the theoretical programs (or anti-programs) favored by the social democrats or anarchists who dominate the US left (and much of the European left). Without a revolutionary left, the forthcoming debates will only be between defending the idealized “peaceful” global order of a stable, regulated capitalism or those salvaging an inward-looking, vulgar nationalism; it will only be between those dreaming of a mythical kingdom of class harmony with a generous net to capture the most disadvantaged and those leaving fate to market forces. All are roads that have long proved to be dead ends.
The intensifying contradictions of capitalism call for another option: a revolutionary movement for socialism.
Greg Godels
zzsblogml@gmail.com
Inescapable Contradictions
Inescapable Contradictions
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Inescapable Contradictions
The Collapse of the Center, Where is the Left?
by worker
The Collapse of the Center, Where is the Left?
- from Greg Godels is available at:
http://zzs-blg.blogspot.com/
With both the Italian elections and the German effort at a so-called “Grand Coalition” in the recent news, much attention has turned to political developments in Europe. For those of us in the US, interest comes not only from the impact of European politics on our own affairs, but also from the fact that US and European trends have often traveled parallel tracks.
For example, in much of the post-war period, governance in Europe has revolved around two centrist political poles that can be roughly characterized as Christian democracy and social democracy. Insofar as both poles defend capitalism and oppose Communism, support capitalist institutions, and are content to peacefully alternate rule, they mirror the US two-party system without the stricter institutional backstops that preserve the electoral system for the Republican and Democratic Party in the US.
Certainly, the Western European political systems were nominally multi-party after the war, but the dynamics of those systems steered political developments toward the center. The far right was appropriately neutered by the discrediting of Nazism and fascism as a consequence of World War II. The revolutionary left-- the Communists-- were overtly and covertly thwarted by the Cold War, the NATO consensus. Where the Communists enjoyed formal legality, the centrist parties, the US, and the NATO allies worked hand-in-glove to deny participation in government.
While both European Christian democracy and social democracy were firmly committed to the capitalist course, social democracy wittingly served as a buffer against the attraction of a workers’ state by advocating a kind of faux-socialism, a socio-economic safety net. As an insurance policy against the ascendency of European Communist Parties, Christian democracy tempered the right’s conventional economic liberalism of minimalist government, unfettered markets, and austere budgets, grudgingly accepting social spending and a more “humane” social contract.
Frustrated with the de facto barrier against Communist parliamentary success, many European Communist Parties began a process of concessions, of shedding revolutionary principles and prospects, creating a left-social democracy dubbed “Euro Communism.” A few Parties resisted this opportunistic path.
The demise of the Soviet Union and the European socialist states proved to be a watershed for European politics and, particularly, the left. The Euro Communist left, stripped of its untenable raison d'être-- Communism without Communism-- collapsed, leaving a void to the left of social democracy. Social Democracy, in turn, cast off faux-socialism for public-private partnership under the direction of monopoly capitalism: markets, and not social policies, were to provide for the masses. And, without the threat of Communism, the right returned to its fundamental character, aggressively pressing unrestrained class politics: anti-unionism, fiscal austerity, deregulation, privatization, and chauvinism.
Without the fear of Communism, capitalism found no need for an accommodation with the working class.
In the 1990s, Continental Europe followed the path blazed in the UK and US over a decade earlier by the Thatcher/Reagan axis. Faced with shifting alignments and the 1970s failure of Old Labour/New Deal policies (specifically, the Keynesian economic framework underlying both approaches), a new consensus began to emerge in both countries.
From the mid-1980s into the next decade, the new consensus spread to nearly all major political parties and around the globe. In its essence, it was a return to Whiggism, the political, social, and economic ideology of the bourgeoisie: parliamentarism, negative rights, and the economic liberalism of minimal regulation, preference for private over public initiative, and markets as decisive of all matters and in the last instance.
Pundits are fond of labeling this development “neo-liberalism,” a statement of the obvious. But the superficiality of that term obscures the fact that the turn is more than a mere policy. In fact, it is a response to the failings of the previous consensus and it constitutes the capitalist norm when the specter of Communism does not loom large over the future.
Social democrats in the US and Europe promoted the notion of a “third way” to mask their capitulation to classical capitalism and its totalizing influence over all aspects of society, over every global nook and cranny. In fact, after the demise of the Soviet Union and its socialist neighbors, there was the one way in the US and EU.
With capitalism marching triumphantly into the twenty-first century, most of the US and European left conceded that capitalism was resilient and here to stay. An inflated memory of a kinder, gentler capitalism might be the best that could be imagined.
But the triumphant project ran aground, crashing on the rocks of economic crises. The capitalist accumulation process imploded in 2000 and, again, even more severely, in 2007-2008. “Recovery” re-established accumulation, but left millions of broken, desperate people in its wake. Inequality, unemployment, underemployment, poverty, insecurity, and alienation afflicted millions in the US and the EU (and, of course, the rest of the world). Capitalism recovered, but the people did not. For the people, the entrenched ideological options of conservatism and social democracy offered only the thin gruel of austerity.
Mesmerized by rising equity values and restored profitability, and impressed with the growing wealth and well-being of the bourgeoisie and the visible and vocal petty bourgeoisie, ruling elites labor under the illusion that all is going well. In Europe and the US, the never-changing meal of celebrity-worship, sports, anti-social social media, and other distractions nourish a false sense of security and satisfaction.
But in towns and villages, neighborhoods and suburbs, people are suffering. Alcoholism, drug abuse, and other addictions are taking a demographic toll, unseen by high-income, physically segregated elites. As insecurities and dysfunctionality grow, millions feel a growing difference-- an often poorly expressed class difference-- between the beneficiaries of the capitalist economy and themselves, the losers.
Anger seethes.
Without the compass of a revolutionary ideology, without the vision of socialism, this anger remains unfocused, directed vaguely at government, the media, existing political parties, and, too often, convenient scapegoats.
As the anger emerges politically, it is met with elite derision, contempt, or condescension. It is seen by their “betters” as a product of the uneducated, the backward, the uncultured. As Hillary Clinton so famously put it: “the deplorables.”
The insularity of US and European elites-- divided from the masses by culture, social practices, power, status, and wealth-- leads directly to the political crisis that spawned Brexit, Trump’s election, the rise of “populist” or alternative political parties, and most decidedly, the discrediting of historically centrist parties. This last week’s desperate attempt to preserve a coalition of the center in Germany and the collapse of the center left and the shocking success of the Five Star Movement and extreme right in Italy only underscore the distance between the masses and the political parties carefully crafted by the bourgeoisie to contain the aspirations of those masses.
Behind these political developments lies a stagnant, sputtering global economy. It is apparent that segments of the ruling classes are uneasy with or reject the globalist ideology of open markets and are moving towards economic nationalism. The failure of growth to return has led many in the capitalist class to call for a change in direction: protectionism. The emergence of support for nationalism and protectionism has energized the Euro-skeptics, the extreme right, and Trump.
Of course, the other side of this political coin is the failure of the left, especially the left that is yet untainted by the stain of ineffectual social democracy. For the most part, the non-establishment left has failed to deliver a militant, persuasive message to the working people in Europe and the US. And where there is a still a credible militant Communist left, the waters have been muddied by false prophets-- for example, SYRIZA in Greece.
In many countries, the retreat from Marxism became a rout after the fall of the Soviet Union. In its place, ideologies like anarchism, utopian socialism, and cooperativism-- ideologies that had long been discredited by Marx himself-- are revived. The peculiarly North American mania for procedural democracy-- the view that justice will flow spontaneously like a natural spring when we unleash a radical version of Robert’s Rules of Order-- has returned to prominence as shown by to the now collapsed Occupy movement. And of course, left-lite liberals immerse themselves in the battles for self-identity and against “micro-aggressions” while minority identities are actually ravaged by the macro-aggressions of class war and capitalist exploitation.
In light of recent poor electoral showings, some have sought to explain the sorry state of the US and European left as a result of structural changes in capitalism. They see a new working class, the “precariat,” as superseding the traditional proletariat (even The Wall Street Journal has fancied the term). The “precariat” notion derives from the realities of a changing workplace of part-time, contract, temporary, and dispersed employment, an optimal realization of the classical liberal economic dream. This trend in employment has made organizing workers difficult, certainly more challenging than with the world of the traditional worker engaged in one lifetime or semi-lifetime job under a factory roof.
Of course, the structural changes cited are, to a great extent, the result of the failure of trade unions and political parties to defend the interests of workers against predatory capitalists. Moreover, the difficulties that these changes bring forth are obstacles to union organizing, less so to political parties. And history teaches that establishing militant political parties precedes organizing militant trade unionism. No task before the union movement today presents greater impediments than was the task of building industrial unions in the US in the 1930s. The challenge of establishing the CIO was only met, was only possible, because of the leadership and effort of Communist and socialist workers.
Needed is the return in influence of historically informed workers’ parties that draw upon the social theory of Marx and the organizational insights of Lenin (that is to say, parties that reject the backward Cold War dogma of Anything but Communism), Without the strong option of Communist or Workers’ Parties, the European and US working class will continue to face the repellent choice between decadent, rotting centrist parties and a host of new charlatan parties offering fool’s gold policies, magic elixirs, and vulnerable scapegoats.
Only an independent, working class-oriented movement informed by Marxism-Leninism can provide a “third way” apart from the disaster of free-market globalism or the trap of economic nationalism.
The old saw that workers deserve their own party is more true today than ever-- an authentic anti-capitalist party that returns to the revolutionary legacy surrendered to opportunism and parliamentary illusions.
by worker
The Collapse of the Center, Where is the Left?
- from Greg Godels is available at:
http://zzs-blg.blogspot.com/
With both the Italian elections and the German effort at a so-called “Grand Coalition” in the recent news, much attention has turned to political developments in Europe. For those of us in the US, interest comes not only from the impact of European politics on our own affairs, but also from the fact that US and European trends have often traveled parallel tracks.
For example, in much of the post-war period, governance in Europe has revolved around two centrist political poles that can be roughly characterized as Christian democracy and social democracy. Insofar as both poles defend capitalism and oppose Communism, support capitalist institutions, and are content to peacefully alternate rule, they mirror the US two-party system without the stricter institutional backstops that preserve the electoral system for the Republican and Democratic Party in the US.
Certainly, the Western European political systems were nominally multi-party after the war, but the dynamics of those systems steered political developments toward the center. The far right was appropriately neutered by the discrediting of Nazism and fascism as a consequence of World War II. The revolutionary left-- the Communists-- were overtly and covertly thwarted by the Cold War, the NATO consensus. Where the Communists enjoyed formal legality, the centrist parties, the US, and the NATO allies worked hand-in-glove to deny participation in government.
While both European Christian democracy and social democracy were firmly committed to the capitalist course, social democracy wittingly served as a buffer against the attraction of a workers’ state by advocating a kind of faux-socialism, a socio-economic safety net. As an insurance policy against the ascendency of European Communist Parties, Christian democracy tempered the right’s conventional economic liberalism of minimalist government, unfettered markets, and austere budgets, grudgingly accepting social spending and a more “humane” social contract.
Frustrated with the de facto barrier against Communist parliamentary success, many European Communist Parties began a process of concessions, of shedding revolutionary principles and prospects, creating a left-social democracy dubbed “Euro Communism.” A few Parties resisted this opportunistic path.
The demise of the Soviet Union and the European socialist states proved to be a watershed for European politics and, particularly, the left. The Euro Communist left, stripped of its untenable raison d'être-- Communism without Communism-- collapsed, leaving a void to the left of social democracy. Social Democracy, in turn, cast off faux-socialism for public-private partnership under the direction of monopoly capitalism: markets, and not social policies, were to provide for the masses. And, without the threat of Communism, the right returned to its fundamental character, aggressively pressing unrestrained class politics: anti-unionism, fiscal austerity, deregulation, privatization, and chauvinism.
Without the fear of Communism, capitalism found no need for an accommodation with the working class.
In the 1990s, Continental Europe followed the path blazed in the UK and US over a decade earlier by the Thatcher/Reagan axis. Faced with shifting alignments and the 1970s failure of Old Labour/New Deal policies (specifically, the Keynesian economic framework underlying both approaches), a new consensus began to emerge in both countries.
From the mid-1980s into the next decade, the new consensus spread to nearly all major political parties and around the globe. In its essence, it was a return to Whiggism, the political, social, and economic ideology of the bourgeoisie: parliamentarism, negative rights, and the economic liberalism of minimal regulation, preference for private over public initiative, and markets as decisive of all matters and in the last instance.
Pundits are fond of labeling this development “neo-liberalism,” a statement of the obvious. But the superficiality of that term obscures the fact that the turn is more than a mere policy. In fact, it is a response to the failings of the previous consensus and it constitutes the capitalist norm when the specter of Communism does not loom large over the future.
Social democrats in the US and Europe promoted the notion of a “third way” to mask their capitulation to classical capitalism and its totalizing influence over all aspects of society, over every global nook and cranny. In fact, after the demise of the Soviet Union and its socialist neighbors, there was the one way in the US and EU.
With capitalism marching triumphantly into the twenty-first century, most of the US and European left conceded that capitalism was resilient and here to stay. An inflated memory of a kinder, gentler capitalism might be the best that could be imagined.
But the triumphant project ran aground, crashing on the rocks of economic crises. The capitalist accumulation process imploded in 2000 and, again, even more severely, in 2007-2008. “Recovery” re-established accumulation, but left millions of broken, desperate people in its wake. Inequality, unemployment, underemployment, poverty, insecurity, and alienation afflicted millions in the US and the EU (and, of course, the rest of the world). Capitalism recovered, but the people did not. For the people, the entrenched ideological options of conservatism and social democracy offered only the thin gruel of austerity.
Mesmerized by rising equity values and restored profitability, and impressed with the growing wealth and well-being of the bourgeoisie and the visible and vocal petty bourgeoisie, ruling elites labor under the illusion that all is going well. In Europe and the US, the never-changing meal of celebrity-worship, sports, anti-social social media, and other distractions nourish a false sense of security and satisfaction.
But in towns and villages, neighborhoods and suburbs, people are suffering. Alcoholism, drug abuse, and other addictions are taking a demographic toll, unseen by high-income, physically segregated elites. As insecurities and dysfunctionality grow, millions feel a growing difference-- an often poorly expressed class difference-- between the beneficiaries of the capitalist economy and themselves, the losers.
Anger seethes.
Without the compass of a revolutionary ideology, without the vision of socialism, this anger remains unfocused, directed vaguely at government, the media, existing political parties, and, too often, convenient scapegoats.
As the anger emerges politically, it is met with elite derision, contempt, or condescension. It is seen by their “betters” as a product of the uneducated, the backward, the uncultured. As Hillary Clinton so famously put it: “the deplorables.”
The insularity of US and European elites-- divided from the masses by culture, social practices, power, status, and wealth-- leads directly to the political crisis that spawned Brexit, Trump’s election, the rise of “populist” or alternative political parties, and most decidedly, the discrediting of historically centrist parties. This last week’s desperate attempt to preserve a coalition of the center in Germany and the collapse of the center left and the shocking success of the Five Star Movement and extreme right in Italy only underscore the distance between the masses and the political parties carefully crafted by the bourgeoisie to contain the aspirations of those masses.
Behind these political developments lies a stagnant, sputtering global economy. It is apparent that segments of the ruling classes are uneasy with or reject the globalist ideology of open markets and are moving towards economic nationalism. The failure of growth to return has led many in the capitalist class to call for a change in direction: protectionism. The emergence of support for nationalism and protectionism has energized the Euro-skeptics, the extreme right, and Trump.
Of course, the other side of this political coin is the failure of the left, especially the left that is yet untainted by the stain of ineffectual social democracy. For the most part, the non-establishment left has failed to deliver a militant, persuasive message to the working people in Europe and the US. And where there is a still a credible militant Communist left, the waters have been muddied by false prophets-- for example, SYRIZA in Greece.
In many countries, the retreat from Marxism became a rout after the fall of the Soviet Union. In its place, ideologies like anarchism, utopian socialism, and cooperativism-- ideologies that had long been discredited by Marx himself-- are revived. The peculiarly North American mania for procedural democracy-- the view that justice will flow spontaneously like a natural spring when we unleash a radical version of Robert’s Rules of Order-- has returned to prominence as shown by to the now collapsed Occupy movement. And of course, left-lite liberals immerse themselves in the battles for self-identity and against “micro-aggressions” while minority identities are actually ravaged by the macro-aggressions of class war and capitalist exploitation.
In light of recent poor electoral showings, some have sought to explain the sorry state of the US and European left as a result of structural changes in capitalism. They see a new working class, the “precariat,” as superseding the traditional proletariat (even The Wall Street Journal has fancied the term). The “precariat” notion derives from the realities of a changing workplace of part-time, contract, temporary, and dispersed employment, an optimal realization of the classical liberal economic dream. This trend in employment has made organizing workers difficult, certainly more challenging than with the world of the traditional worker engaged in one lifetime or semi-lifetime job under a factory roof.
Of course, the structural changes cited are, to a great extent, the result of the failure of trade unions and political parties to defend the interests of workers against predatory capitalists. Moreover, the difficulties that these changes bring forth are obstacles to union organizing, less so to political parties. And history teaches that establishing militant political parties precedes organizing militant trade unionism. No task before the union movement today presents greater impediments than was the task of building industrial unions in the US in the 1930s. The challenge of establishing the CIO was only met, was only possible, because of the leadership and effort of Communist and socialist workers.
Needed is the return in influence of historically informed workers’ parties that draw upon the social theory of Marx and the organizational insights of Lenin (that is to say, parties that reject the backward Cold War dogma of Anything but Communism), Without the strong option of Communist or Workers’ Parties, the European and US working class will continue to face the repellent choice between decadent, rotting centrist parties and a host of new charlatan parties offering fool’s gold policies, magic elixirs, and vulnerable scapegoats.
Only an independent, working class-oriented movement informed by Marxism-Leninism can provide a “third way” apart from the disaster of free-market globalism or the trap of economic nationalism.
The old saw that workers deserve their own party is more true today than ever-- an authentic anti-capitalist party that returns to the revolutionary legacy surrendered to opportunism and parliamentary illusions.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Inescapable Contradictions
Bernie Sanders: “Don’t Be Rude to White Nationalists, Do What Alexandria Did”
“People Have a Right to Go Into a Restaurant and Have Dinner”
Bernie Huckabee-Sanders said he did not support being rude to “people” when he was asked about incidents in which Trump administration officials were publicly harassed because of their vicious policy of kidnapping migrant children at the southern U.S. border.
"I'm not a great fan of shouting down people or being rude to people," Sanders told MSNBC host Kristen Welker two weeks ago. "I think,” Sanders lectured, “we have a situation and a Congress that's way out of touch with where the American people are. People have a right to be angry when Congress gives tax breaks to billionaires and wants to cut nutrition programs for low income pregnant women. You have to a right to be angry. Take that out in a constructive way."
"I think people have a right to go into a restaurant and have dinner," Sanders elaborated. "That's where we got to place our energy. I do know that people are angry. They are angry about these terribly inhumane immigration policies. They're angry about the fact they can't afford prescription drugs. They are angry about tax breaks that go to billionaires. The way to deal with that is exactly what Alexandria did."
Sanders was referring to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a progressive Democrat who won a Democratic Party primary election against 10-term incumbent New York Rep. Joe Crowley.
“Bernie doesn’t understand that these particular ‘people’ stand out from the common lot of humanity as agents of racist evil.”
"Organize at the grass roots level. Win elections and get involved in the political process," Sanders said.
I’m not a big fan of venting at terrible public officials in public venues myself. (Anything less than arresting them and dragging off to revolutionary peoples’ tribunals looks weak and boring to me.). Still, I found Sanders’ comments disturbing. It is depressing and revealing that he folded in-power and proto-fascistic white nationalist Trump administration operatives into the broad and overall category of “people” --- you know, just everyday folks, no different than anyone else trying to have a dinner out.
If Bernie doesn’t understand that these particular “people” stand out from the common lot of humanity as agents of racist evil, then it’s kind of hard to take his call for “civility” very seriously.
It blows me away that it would enter Sanders’ mind to say that “people have a right to go into a restaurant and have dinner” when we are talking about children and families detained, caged, separated, and terrorized by U.S. border authorities. So, “people” – highly class- and race-privileged Trump officials, that is – “have a right” to go out for dinner, do they, Bernie? Well, Senator, thousands of people who happen to be brown-skinned migrants fleeing U.S-backed terror and stuck in racist U.S. holding pens don’t have the right to leave the oppressive facilities in which they are detained. Many of them have had their children stolen from them and sent to distant locations somewhere in the U.S.
told Bernie that racist and nativist white nationalists are “people,” anyway? I am reminded of the great Soviet sniper Lyudmila Pavlichenko, who killed 309 German Nazis invading her country. When Eleanor Roosevelt observed that Pavlichenko had killed hundreds of “men,” the sniper corrected, pointing out that she shot “fascists,” not “men.”)
Keeping People off the Streets, Herding Them to the Ballot Box
Bernie Sanders uses the “civility” issue to pose a false dichotomy: either (1) be destructively uncivil by “shouting down” and “being rude” to “people” (to vicious racist policymakers, that is) or (2) be “constructive” by “organiz[ing] at the grassroots level,” understood as getting involved in U.S. major party electoral politics and “win[ning] elections” – doing “exactly what Alexandria did.”
What, you haven’t won a major party congressional primary election yet this year? You better get to work, my fellow American!
That is the not-so “independent” Senator from Vermont continuing to play his longstanding role of trying to sustain progressives’ deadly and dysfunctional attachment to the nation’s narrow and strictly time-staggered election- and candidate-centered politics. That is Bernie feeding what the great radical American historian Howard Zinn called “the election madness” that “engulf[s] the entire society, including the left” once every two years “because we have all been brought up to believe that voting is crucial in determining our destiny, that the most important act a citizen can engage in is to go to the polls.”
“The really critical thing,” Zinn once sagely wrote, “isn't who's sitting in the White House, but who is sitting in —in the streets, in the cafeterias, in the halls of government, in the factories. Who is protesting, who is occupying offices and demonstrating—those are the things that determine what happens.”
“The only thing that’s going to ever bring about any meaningful change,” Noam Chomsky (a Sanders backer to some degree) told Abby Martin in early 2016, “is ongoing, dedicated, popular movements that don’t pay attention to the election cycle.”
Bernie was and remains all about the masters’ election cycle, which is dedicated to the delusional and empirically false notion that U.S. citizens get meaningful input into policy by spending three minutes in a voting booth once every 2 or 4 years choosing from among a handful of candidates selected in advance for us by the nation’s unelected and interrelated dictatorship of money and empire. It’s about keeping the people off the streets, where they belong on a regular basis if they are serious about progressive change in this time of viciously racist, classist, sexist and eco-cidal reaction. It’s about selling citizens false hope in politicians – the snake-oil promise that all or most of our energies should be poured into herdingpeople to the polls to take a painfully brief and coldly time-staggered moment (three minutes once every two or four years) to mark a ballot for the right masters to nominally rule over us (the real rulers are in corporate and financial suites, not elected offices). That’s the basic “sheep-dog” message.
No Cartwheels
Is Democratic Socialists of America member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez different from the general run of corporate major party politicos, including “people” like Crowley? Sure. If I lived in the New York 14th Congressional district and was registered there (I wouldn’t be) as a Democrat (New York does not have open primaries), I would likely have taken three minutes to vote for Ocasio-Cortez in the primary. I would have done so (a) to help bring down the corrupt, high-ranking corporate-imperial Democrat Crowley and his local Democratic machine backers and (b) to show some support for Ocasio-Cortez’s progressive, social-democratic domestic policy agenda, including Medicare for All, free college tuition, and the abolition of racist-nativist Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency. I would have been motivated also by Ocasio-Cortez’s professed “socialism” and concern with class inequality and by her history as someone with recent experience in a real working-class job (waiting tables) and in social and protest movements (e.g. Standing Rock).
Still, I am doing no cartwheels over her victory. I cannot follow Sanders in pointing to “Alexandria” as the holy grail national and “grassroots” alternative to “being rude to people.” This is for five reasons. First, Ocasio-Cortez won with incredibly low turnout (13%), something that falls quite short of a leftist landslide and reflects local peculiarities in the operation of the New York City Democratic machine.
Second, as the veteran Left urban political strategist, activist, and commentator Bruce Dixon recently noted on Black Agenda Report, “Joe Crowley pretty much gave up the seat: After 10 terms in Congress and with lots of corporate friends, Joe Crowley knows he can start at seven figures, at least six to twelve times his congressional salary plus bonuses as a lobbyist. That had to be a powerful motivation not to campaign too damn hard, and another circumstance unique to this particular contest.”
“I would have been motivated by Ocasio-Cortez’s professed ‘socialism’ and concern with class inequality.”
Third, Ocasio-Cortez’s victory partly reflects a combined demographic (racial and ethno-cultural) and party anomaly: the over-long presence of a white Democratic machine politician atop a recently redistricted and now nearly majority Latinx and majority non-white district where the Democratic Party had failed to cultivate a neoliberal candidate of color – the kind of safe Latino or Black politico the nation’s second corporate and imperial party has developed across the nation’s urban minority-majority congressional districts. As Danny Haiphong recently observed in the American Herald Tribune, “New York District 14 is one of the few [urban minority Congressional districts] left where neoliberal Black and Brown politicians do not dominate the political landscape. It will be difficult to replicate Ocasio-Cortez’s victory across the country because neoliberal, Black politicians in other districts are protected by the politics of representation.”
Fourth, as Dixon notes, “while there are no institutions under US law and custom that can hold leftist candidates and officeholders accountable to left constituencies or organizations…there are a galaxy of institutional levers and pressures operating inside the Democratic party aimed at flipping progressive elected officials rightward.” Ocasio-Cortez will face enormous power disparity between local grassroots pressure from below and the nationally mobilized monopoly, empire, and party pressure exercised on her from the top down.
Fifth, Haiphong is right to note that the dismal Democrats are dead and buried as a means of progressive transformation:
“The Democratic Party is incapable of reform and serves not as a vehicle for change but rather as a graveyard of social movements. It will be the graveyard of Ocasio-Cortez’s principles too if we don’t build independent institutions and organizations capable of moving popular excitement over her campaign away from the Democratic Party’s corporate grave diggers…We need to build a political alternative to the Democrats because when it comes to the Democratic Party, there is nothing left to hold it to account. Left-leaning youth and workers must break free from the ball and chain that keeps them shackled to the Democratic Party. Social movements are the only vehiclethat can convince struggling people in this country that the Democratic Party is accountable to Wall Street and Wall Street only.”
(Well – accountable also to related and overlapping wealth and power structures in Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and the military-industrial complex.)
It’s nothing new. I’ve been listening to nonsense about supposed chances for the progressive takeover and reform of the Democratic Party since I was a grade-schooler in the original Mayor Daley’s Chicago. When will this childish dream finally die? (The best primer on the Democrats’ longstanding corporate captivity is Lance Selfa’s The Democrats: A Critical History[Haymarket Press, 2012]).
Sorry, No Shortcuts
The Democrats are running a large crop of former intelligence operatives and ex-military candidates this November. This is the broad imperialist slate that Bernie Sanders is asking citizens to mark ballotsen massefor in the fall, playing his well-established role as a leading Democratic voter-turnout “sheepdog” for the nation’s not-so “leftmost” major war party – and for the “election madness” Zinn tried to warn us against. Ocasio-Cortez, with her progressive “peace economy” platform (which disappeared “mysteriously” from her Website right after her primary victory over Crowley), will be highly atypical among the Democrats who enter Congress next year.
It’s good that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took down the lazy white corporate good-old boy machine Democrat Joe Crowley. But it’s not all that big a deal. The young Puerto Rican “democratic socialist’s” victory is not going to be replicated across the U.S. It is a highly localized and largely anomalous occurrence. It is certainly no compelling argument for progressives to center their activism around an election-frenzied run to that great “coffin of class consciousness” (historian Alan Dawley) that is the American ballot box. There are no short-cuts, electoral or otherwise, to the more serious and urgent politics and difficult work of building an actual American Left – something that would steer clear of the seductive siren songs of major party electoral extravaganzas.
https://blackagendareport.com/bernie-sa ... andria-did
“People Have a Right to Go Into a Restaurant and Have Dinner”
Bernie Huckabee-Sanders said he did not support being rude to “people” when he was asked about incidents in which Trump administration officials were publicly harassed because of their vicious policy of kidnapping migrant children at the southern U.S. border.
"I'm not a great fan of shouting down people or being rude to people," Sanders told MSNBC host Kristen Welker two weeks ago. "I think,” Sanders lectured, “we have a situation and a Congress that's way out of touch with where the American people are. People have a right to be angry when Congress gives tax breaks to billionaires and wants to cut nutrition programs for low income pregnant women. You have to a right to be angry. Take that out in a constructive way."
"I think people have a right to go into a restaurant and have dinner," Sanders elaborated. "That's where we got to place our energy. I do know that people are angry. They are angry about these terribly inhumane immigration policies. They're angry about the fact they can't afford prescription drugs. They are angry about tax breaks that go to billionaires. The way to deal with that is exactly what Alexandria did."
Sanders was referring to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a progressive Democrat who won a Democratic Party primary election against 10-term incumbent New York Rep. Joe Crowley.
“Bernie doesn’t understand that these particular ‘people’ stand out from the common lot of humanity as agents of racist evil.”
"Organize at the grass roots level. Win elections and get involved in the political process," Sanders said.
I’m not a big fan of venting at terrible public officials in public venues myself. (Anything less than arresting them and dragging off to revolutionary peoples’ tribunals looks weak and boring to me.). Still, I found Sanders’ comments disturbing. It is depressing and revealing that he folded in-power and proto-fascistic white nationalist Trump administration operatives into the broad and overall category of “people” --- you know, just everyday folks, no different than anyone else trying to have a dinner out.
If Bernie doesn’t understand that these particular “people” stand out from the common lot of humanity as agents of racist evil, then it’s kind of hard to take his call for “civility” very seriously.
It blows me away that it would enter Sanders’ mind to say that “people have a right to go into a restaurant and have dinner” when we are talking about children and families detained, caged, separated, and terrorized by U.S. border authorities. So, “people” – highly class- and race-privileged Trump officials, that is – “have a right” to go out for dinner, do they, Bernie? Well, Senator, thousands of people who happen to be brown-skinned migrants fleeing U.S-backed terror and stuck in racist U.S. holding pens don’t have the right to leave the oppressive facilities in which they are detained. Many of them have had their children stolen from them and sent to distant locations somewhere in the U.S.
told Bernie that racist and nativist white nationalists are “people,” anyway? I am reminded of the great Soviet sniper Lyudmila Pavlichenko, who killed 309 German Nazis invading her country. When Eleanor Roosevelt observed that Pavlichenko had killed hundreds of “men,” the sniper corrected, pointing out that she shot “fascists,” not “men.”)
Keeping People off the Streets, Herding Them to the Ballot Box
Bernie Sanders uses the “civility” issue to pose a false dichotomy: either (1) be destructively uncivil by “shouting down” and “being rude” to “people” (to vicious racist policymakers, that is) or (2) be “constructive” by “organiz[ing] at the grassroots level,” understood as getting involved in U.S. major party electoral politics and “win[ning] elections” – doing “exactly what Alexandria did.”
What, you haven’t won a major party congressional primary election yet this year? You better get to work, my fellow American!
That is the not-so “independent” Senator from Vermont continuing to play his longstanding role of trying to sustain progressives’ deadly and dysfunctional attachment to the nation’s narrow and strictly time-staggered election- and candidate-centered politics. That is Bernie feeding what the great radical American historian Howard Zinn called “the election madness” that “engulf[s] the entire society, including the left” once every two years “because we have all been brought up to believe that voting is crucial in determining our destiny, that the most important act a citizen can engage in is to go to the polls.”
“The really critical thing,” Zinn once sagely wrote, “isn't who's sitting in the White House, but who is sitting in —in the streets, in the cafeterias, in the halls of government, in the factories. Who is protesting, who is occupying offices and demonstrating—those are the things that determine what happens.”
“The only thing that’s going to ever bring about any meaningful change,” Noam Chomsky (a Sanders backer to some degree) told Abby Martin in early 2016, “is ongoing, dedicated, popular movements that don’t pay attention to the election cycle.”
Bernie was and remains all about the masters’ election cycle, which is dedicated to the delusional and empirically false notion that U.S. citizens get meaningful input into policy by spending three minutes in a voting booth once every 2 or 4 years choosing from among a handful of candidates selected in advance for us by the nation’s unelected and interrelated dictatorship of money and empire. It’s about keeping the people off the streets, where they belong on a regular basis if they are serious about progressive change in this time of viciously racist, classist, sexist and eco-cidal reaction. It’s about selling citizens false hope in politicians – the snake-oil promise that all or most of our energies should be poured into herdingpeople to the polls to take a painfully brief and coldly time-staggered moment (three minutes once every two or four years) to mark a ballot for the right masters to nominally rule over us (the real rulers are in corporate and financial suites, not elected offices). That’s the basic “sheep-dog” message.
No Cartwheels
Is Democratic Socialists of America member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez different from the general run of corporate major party politicos, including “people” like Crowley? Sure. If I lived in the New York 14th Congressional district and was registered there (I wouldn’t be) as a Democrat (New York does not have open primaries), I would likely have taken three minutes to vote for Ocasio-Cortez in the primary. I would have done so (a) to help bring down the corrupt, high-ranking corporate-imperial Democrat Crowley and his local Democratic machine backers and (b) to show some support for Ocasio-Cortez’s progressive, social-democratic domestic policy agenda, including Medicare for All, free college tuition, and the abolition of racist-nativist Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency. I would have been motivated also by Ocasio-Cortez’s professed “socialism” and concern with class inequality and by her history as someone with recent experience in a real working-class job (waiting tables) and in social and protest movements (e.g. Standing Rock).
Still, I am doing no cartwheels over her victory. I cannot follow Sanders in pointing to “Alexandria” as the holy grail national and “grassroots” alternative to “being rude to people.” This is for five reasons. First, Ocasio-Cortez won with incredibly low turnout (13%), something that falls quite short of a leftist landslide and reflects local peculiarities in the operation of the New York City Democratic machine.
Second, as the veteran Left urban political strategist, activist, and commentator Bruce Dixon recently noted on Black Agenda Report, “Joe Crowley pretty much gave up the seat: After 10 terms in Congress and with lots of corporate friends, Joe Crowley knows he can start at seven figures, at least six to twelve times his congressional salary plus bonuses as a lobbyist. That had to be a powerful motivation not to campaign too damn hard, and another circumstance unique to this particular contest.”
“I would have been motivated by Ocasio-Cortez’s professed ‘socialism’ and concern with class inequality.”
Third, Ocasio-Cortez’s victory partly reflects a combined demographic (racial and ethno-cultural) and party anomaly: the over-long presence of a white Democratic machine politician atop a recently redistricted and now nearly majority Latinx and majority non-white district where the Democratic Party had failed to cultivate a neoliberal candidate of color – the kind of safe Latino or Black politico the nation’s second corporate and imperial party has developed across the nation’s urban minority-majority congressional districts. As Danny Haiphong recently observed in the American Herald Tribune, “New York District 14 is one of the few [urban minority Congressional districts] left where neoliberal Black and Brown politicians do not dominate the political landscape. It will be difficult to replicate Ocasio-Cortez’s victory across the country because neoliberal, Black politicians in other districts are protected by the politics of representation.”
Fourth, as Dixon notes, “while there are no institutions under US law and custom that can hold leftist candidates and officeholders accountable to left constituencies or organizations…there are a galaxy of institutional levers and pressures operating inside the Democratic party aimed at flipping progressive elected officials rightward.” Ocasio-Cortez will face enormous power disparity between local grassroots pressure from below and the nationally mobilized monopoly, empire, and party pressure exercised on her from the top down.
Fifth, Haiphong is right to note that the dismal Democrats are dead and buried as a means of progressive transformation:
“The Democratic Party is incapable of reform and serves not as a vehicle for change but rather as a graveyard of social movements. It will be the graveyard of Ocasio-Cortez’s principles too if we don’t build independent institutions and organizations capable of moving popular excitement over her campaign away from the Democratic Party’s corporate grave diggers…We need to build a political alternative to the Democrats because when it comes to the Democratic Party, there is nothing left to hold it to account. Left-leaning youth and workers must break free from the ball and chain that keeps them shackled to the Democratic Party. Social movements are the only vehiclethat can convince struggling people in this country that the Democratic Party is accountable to Wall Street and Wall Street only.”
(Well – accountable also to related and overlapping wealth and power structures in Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and the military-industrial complex.)
It’s nothing new. I’ve been listening to nonsense about supposed chances for the progressive takeover and reform of the Democratic Party since I was a grade-schooler in the original Mayor Daley’s Chicago. When will this childish dream finally die? (The best primer on the Democrats’ longstanding corporate captivity is Lance Selfa’s The Democrats: A Critical History[Haymarket Press, 2012]).
Sorry, No Shortcuts
The Democrats are running a large crop of former intelligence operatives and ex-military candidates this November. This is the broad imperialist slate that Bernie Sanders is asking citizens to mark ballotsen massefor in the fall, playing his well-established role as a leading Democratic voter-turnout “sheepdog” for the nation’s not-so “leftmost” major war party – and for the “election madness” Zinn tried to warn us against. Ocasio-Cortez, with her progressive “peace economy” platform (which disappeared “mysteriously” from her Website right after her primary victory over Crowley), will be highly atypical among the Democrats who enter Congress next year.
It’s good that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took down the lazy white corporate good-old boy machine Democrat Joe Crowley. But it’s not all that big a deal. The young Puerto Rican “democratic socialist’s” victory is not going to be replicated across the U.S. It is a highly localized and largely anomalous occurrence. It is certainly no compelling argument for progressives to center their activism around an election-frenzied run to that great “coffin of class consciousness” (historian Alan Dawley) that is the American ballot box. There are no short-cuts, electoral or otherwise, to the more serious and urgent politics and difficult work of building an actual American Left – something that would steer clear of the seductive siren songs of major party electoral extravaganzas.
https://blackagendareport.com/bernie-sa ... andria-did
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."