Happy, Happy Birthday Karl Marx, On The 200th Anniversary Of His Birth-Some Thoughts
A link to NPR’s Christopher Lydon’s Open Source 2018 program on the meaning of Karl Marx in the 21st century on the 200th anniversary of his birth:
http://radioopensource.org/marx-at-200/
By Seth Garth
Normally Frank Jackman would be the natural person to do his take on the name, the role, the legacy of one German revolutionary exiled to London after the revolutions of 1848 faded away, Karl Marx, on the 200th anniversary of his birth in 1818. And Frank at first fought me a little, said he had grabbed a bunch of Marx’s books and pamphlets like the Communist Manifesto and the abridged Das Capital abetted by his friend and colleague Engels’ The Peasant Wars In Germany and Scientific Socialism. No question heavy lifting, heavy reading which our respective youths would have been read until early in the morning page turners but now would seemingly act as a sedative, a sleep aid, at least for me since Frank said it had made him more alert although agreeing that the works were not “read until early in the morning page turners.” Frank’s argument to me at least for his grabbing the assignment was that he had of the two of us been more influenced by Marx’s works and programs and had actually been a supporter of the old time Trotskyist organization the Socialist Workers Party for a while back in the early 1970s after he got out of the Vietnam blood bath American army and was ready to “storm heaven” (his words) to right the wrongs of this wicked old world (my words grabbed via Sam Lowell take) and as well had been doing leftwing commentary since Hector was a pup (somebody unknown’s expression).
Frank then went chapter and verse at me with what he remembered (both from long ago and the recent re-readings) about how he had all his life, all his early life looking for something, some movement to move him, to move us who grew up with him poor as church mice, maybe poorer to a more just world. Had made me laugh, since on some of the stuff I have been right alongside him, when he mentioned the old Student Union for World Goals which a bunch of us had put together in high school. A grouping with a program that was inundated with all the anti-communist, red scare, Cold War platitudes we could find. We basically were a little to the left of Ike, Grandpa Ike, Dwight D. Eisenhower who was President of the United States (POTUS in twitter-speak) in our youth filled with bauble about the virtues of capitalism, although I think we would have been hard pressed to make that word connection and probably said something like prosperity which we had garnered very little of in the now remembered golden age of the 1950s.
Then as the thaw came, or as people, young people mostly broke the spell of the red scare Cold War night, after we have sown our oats out in the Summer of Love, 1967 and saw some writing on the wall that we were ‘raw meat” for the draft come college graduation day getting hopped up about Robert Kennedy’s ill-fated, ill-starred bid for the Democratic Party Presidential nomination in 1968. I already mentioned the Army experiences which did both of us in for a while but which frankly drove Frank outside bourgeois politics (he had expected that he would tie his wagon to Robert Kennedy and when that idea fell apart with Kennedy’s assassination offering Hubert H. Humphrey his services against the main villain of the ear Richard M. Nixon in the expectation that he would ride that train out of the draft and/or begin the road to a nice sinecure via Democratic Party politics). I am not sure if he began serious reading on Marx in the Army or not but when he got out in 1971 he certainly was doing the “read until the early morning” routine. I grabbed some of his tidbits, associated with some of the radical circles in Cambridge he started to frequent, went down the line with him in Washington on May Day, 1971 where we both got busted but soon after withdrew a bit from both him and serious leftwing politics. I was crazy, still am, for films, for seeking some kind of career as a film critic and so spent more of my time in the Brattle Theater in Harvard Square than protesting on Boston Common. He can address sometime his own withdrawal from left-wing organizational politics and moving on to journalism, political commentary on his own dime.
That is enough of the political justification for Frank’s fighting me on this assignment. Frank, however, took the unusual step, for him anyway, of mentioning his being pissed off about losing the Marx assignment and mentioned it to site manager Greg Green. The guy who gives out the assignment and who has had more than one person, me included, scratching their heads both in the assignments they have gotten of late or like Frank not have gotten. Whatever Frank laid out for Greg he had both of us come in to his office to discuss the issue. You know as much as you need to about Franks’ “cred.”
My frame of reference and what amounted to the winning argument was that I had been Peter Paul Markin’s closest friend in high school. Markin, forever known as Scribe for the obvious reason that he always carried a notebook and pen or pencil in his shirt pocket AND always, always had two thousand facts ready to throw at anybody who would listen, mainly girls, which drove more that one of our corner boy crowd to threaten grievous bodily is the real primary source for whatever we knew about Karl Marx before we went crazy later and started to seriously read the stuff. So I knew the details of how Frank, Frankie Riley, Jimmy Jenkins, Si Lannon and maybe a couple of others first heard about the name and ideas of one Karl Marx and who would later act on them a little. This is where I was a little ahead of Frank knowing that Greg, after taking over as site manager when Allan Jackson was purged from that position, was interested much more in “”human interest” stories than the “tiresome” (his words) esoteric left-wing jargon that he knew Frank would meandering into, no, would get in knee deep.
(For the record some of the other guys who hung around with Scribe and the rest of us like Ricky Rizzo and Dave Whiting, both who would lay their heads down in hellhole Vietnam and wound up on the town monument and Washington black granite, Red Riley and even Frank Jackman when he was hopped up on that Student Union thing almost lynched him when he started talking favorably about Karl Marx and the idea of red revolution in those dead ass red scare Cold War nights. All they wanted to hear about was whatever intelligence Scribe had on some girl they were interested in of which he somehow almost incongruously had been plenty of information about or what his next plan was for the “midnight creep” which I assume needs no further explanation except he planned the capers but no way would Frankie Riley or the rest of us let him lead the expeditions-hell we would still be in jail.)
Others, including Frank Jackman, have now seemingly endlessly gone over the effect Scribe had on them a little later when the turbulent 1960s we all got caught up in, blew a gasket, in the Summer of Love, 1967 as the culmination of what he also had been talking about for years on those lonely forlorn weekend nights when we hung around good guy Tonio’s Pizza Parlor “up the Downs” in the growing up Acre section of North Adamsville. What most of the guys did not know, or did not want to know, was that a little of what Scribe was thinking at the time, was that maybe Karl Marx might be proven to be right, might have been onto something when he spoke about the working classes, us, getting a big jump ahead in the world once things turned upside down. He held those views pretty closely then, especially when he was practically red-baited into silence by those guys who were even more hung up, as was Scribe in many ways, on the new normal American negative propaganda about Russia, Communism, and Karl Marx. Nobody, this from later Scribe once he flamed red, was born a radical, a revolutionary, and certainly not a Marxist but certain conditions, among them being as poor as church mice, gave a clue to where some people might go. The intellectuals, although Scribe did not call them that, would come to their Marxism more through books and rational thought than as prime victims of the usually one-sided class struggle of the rich against the poor. That was about as far as Scribe would go, wanted to go, because in many ways, although maybe a little less fulsomely, he wanted to go the same bourgeois politics path as Frank in politics.
Like I say Scribe described to some of us a glimmer, a faux Marxist primer, then in high school, not at all thought out like it would be by him or us later in the late 1960s and early 1970s when we got back respectively from our tours to the “real” world from ‘Nam and knew we had been fucked over by our government. That the “reds” in Vietnam were poor folk, peasants, with whom we had no quarrel. But that was later.
Here is a better example of the glimmer Scribe shined on us back in the day. I remember one night, it had to be one high school night given the teacher and class he was descripting, Scribe had told me that he had had to stay after school one day for Mr. Donovan, the World History teacher and football coach which tells you what he was about, when Scribe had given a surly answer about some question Mr. Donovan had asked. That surliness coming from two sources, one Donovan having members of the class endlessly reading aloud the freaking book boring everybody within a mile of the room and that he really believed he already knew more about history than Donovan and so was personally bored as well. The question had not been about Marxism but something else and during that afternoon detention Donovan had asked him if he was a “Bolshevik.” Scribe recoiled in horror he said knowing that to say yes would get him in some trouble (probably more after school time at least) and for the simple fact that he could not say truthfully whatever teen angst and alienation he was feeling was driven by that kind of understanding of the world-then.
What this history teacher confrontation did do was get Scribe looking again, and this tells as much about him as any other anecdote, at his dog-eared copy of Karl Marx’s (and his co-thinker and financial “angel” Friedrich Engels) classic statement of his views The Communist Manifesto to confirm whether he was a “Marxist,” “Communist,” whatever and he came away from that re-reading knowing that he was not one of those guys, a red. That was the kind of guy Scribe was when he was confronted with something he didn’t understand. The rest of us would have said “fuck it” and let it go at that or have challenged old Donovan with a spurious “yeah, what about it.” Maybe some silly remark like “better red than dead” or “my mommy is a commie,” expressions making the rounds in that dead air time.
So this little sketch really is a “human interest” story and not all that much about Marx in any political sense and that is also why I think that Greg bought my argument over Frank’s. Whatever Marx, Marxism, hell, just general radical non-parliamentary socialism held for the 19th devotees (and bloodthirsty enemies too) extending into the greater part of the 20th century fell down, went to ground, with the demise of the Soviet Union back in 1991-92, and whatever intellectual curiosity Marx and Marxism held fell down too so other than as an exotic utopian scheme today there is no reason to go chapter and verse on the details of what Marx was programmatically projecting.
To finish up on this sketch though I should like to mention the way Scribe, which again will tell something about the mad monk when he was in his flower, got his copy of the Manifesto back when he was fourteen or fifteen. He had heard for some source, maybe some “beat” over in Harvard Square when he used to go there after a particularly bad day in the mother wars, it was a cool document or something, who knows with Scribe was kind of strange. He couldn’t find the book in either the school or town libraries for the simple fact that neither had the document nor did when he inquired they want to have it in circulation. Yeah it was that kind of time. A friendly young librarian suggested that he try the Government Printing Office which might have a copy if somebody in Congress (like the red-baiter par excellence Senator Joseph McCarthy) or some governmental agency had ordered it printed for whatever reason as part of an investigation or just to put it in the record for some reason. He got the address in Washington and the GPO sent back a brochure with their publications for sale. And there it was. He ordered a copy and a few weeks alter it came in the mail. Here’s the funnier part, funnier that the government providing copies on the cheap (or maybe free I forget what he said on that point) of such a notorious document the document had been placed on the publication list because it was part of the record for the raucous House Un-American Activities Committee meeting in San Francisco in 1960 when they were practically run out of town by protestors as the Cold War began to thaw in certain places. Of course that was a recollection by Scribe later when we were deep into the Summer of Love out in that very town and he had asked some older people what that protest was all about.
Yeah, Scribe was a piece of work and he would eventually drag some of us along with him in his good days like the Summer of Love and later after Vietnam time running around with radical students in Cambridge when checking out Mark and Marxism was all the rage. Like I said old Marx has had his up and downs, has taken his beatings but some things Scribe said he said and which we later read about like the poor getting a better shake because they provided the value provided by their cheap labor were spot on. Worse, in a way when I looked, re-read, for this assignment some of the stuff reads like it could have been written today. How about that.
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Click on the headline to link to the Socialist Alternative (CWI) website.
Women Bearing the Burden of Austerity
Jul 17, 2012
By Frantz Serge
In this global economic crisis, there is again an opportunity for political representatives of capital to radically reconfigure class relations. To manage this systemic global economic downturn, which includes a crisis for labor (long periods of unemployment), crisis of accumulation (loss of profits), governments had to find a way to deal with the massive amount of commercial and financial debt in the system.
At the same time that governments began socializing banking and corporate debt (through bailouts and quantitative easing), unemployment rose and government revenue crisis (sovereign debt crisis) began. An effect of the global economic crisis has been that much more people have been left in precarious situations and need to depend on social services, putting additional strain on government budgets. Economic and political leaders have attempted to ‘renew prosperity through austerity’. Instead of prosperity, the cuts to social services, wages, and public sector and social programs have put additional burden on women as families step in to fill the gap.
This attack on the public sector and social services is not new, but has emerged as an economic ideology emerging from the 1970’s global economic downturn. As the global economic stagnation of the early 1970s hit, neo-liberalism, which aimed particularly at what was left of the ‘welfare state’ and public services, attacked the public sector by either completely dismantling; privatizing, or de-funding public services. Because child and elderly care are no longer ‘socialized’ it has meant that it has once again shifted back to millions of women in the home. While at the height of the growth of social democratic and labor governments in the Post-World War II period, political parties along with militant work forces were able to expand the public sector and provide equitable employment opportunities for women and racial minorities; and social welfare programs like subsidized family maintenance care.
Impact on Women
Today, cuts to social services such as social security and health services affect women to the extent that they have to assume the role of head of the family. Women are forced to cover the services cut and somehow expected to carry out their professional lives. Even in two-parent homes where payments for care services can be split between the two parents have to depend on tax benefits and subsidies to be able to fund private day care or have one parent reduce their work hours to care for the child. This situation is perhaps, most obvious in the United Kingdom where families spend on average a third of their net incomes on child care.
Women’s ‘double burden’ has been solidified as well in recent private and public sector pension ‘reforms’ in the United States and nearly all countries in Europe. These ‘reforms’ make the monetary amount of monthly pension payments upon retirement on the salary and years of service while an active employee and becoming privatized with Savings schemes privately managed system using individual savings accounts. With women more likely to have interrupted careers, and more likely to have part-time work and wages lower than male workers , the cycle of women’s oppression and exploitation has become more obvious in the age of neoliberal reforms.
Looking at neo-liberalism as a whole, its economic philosophy and policies specifically target three public sector groups: service users, public sector workers, and unions, but with a deeper analysis, a story emerges that shows the wider impact of austerity. Women, especially women of color, in fact make up the majority of public sector program users, workers, and union members, an effect of a gender division of labor that still assigns most “care work” to women. Care work in fact still remains contained in many public sector jobs.
US and UK
The affects of the attacks on the public sector and its affects of female workers were clearly shown in the United States when comparing the disproportionate job losses starting from 2007, pre-recession, to 2011. Overall women comprise 59.5 percent of employees in state and local government. As the financial crisis hit, and state became further over burden with debt, state governments and federal government agencies began cutting their work forces.
Because women and African Americans constitute a disproportionately large share of the state and local public-sector workforce, the result has been higher jobless rates for women and women and men of color. The Economic Policy Institute’s 2 May 2012 Briefing Paper reported that from 2007 to 2011, 765,000 jobs were cut from state and local governments, with women comprising 70.5% of those jobs cuts. Looking from 2009 to March 2012, Matt Sledge of the HuffingtonPost writes that women in total lost some 396,000 jobs in the public sector. In the United Kingdom, the government’s budget monitor reported the public sector job losses will reach 710,000 by 2017. Women in Britain comprise two-thirds of all public sector employees.
In the UK, the David Cameron and the Tories’ austerity programs are having a similar disproportionate affect on women. The national governments’ £3.5 billion in funding cuts for local governments have forced local governments to cut programs that were previously offered like prenatal checkups, breast-feeding support and day care.
Treasury data complied by the House of Commons Library researchers show that David Cameron and George Osborne's austerity policies targeting tax credits, child benefits and public sector pensions have resulted in £11.1 billion of the £14.9 billion raised from five spending reviews beginning in 2010 coming from women. This is despite the fact that women in the UK earn less than men on average. All of this means a great reversal from the huge women’s rights gains won by women’s groups and social justice activists over the last century in Britain.
In the United States the attack on social services and programs that women depend on been the most ferocious and far reaching in California, where Gov. Jerry Brown’s revised 2012-13 budget calls for cuts of subsidized child care to low-income by approximately 20% from the 2011. As Gov. Brown’s proposed budget demands goes state welfare and health care programs for the poor will be cut by $2 billion. Single mother’s employment rate 69.2 percent in 2007 to 58.8 percent in 2010, and child poverty stands at 22% . The series of cuts to California Work Opportunity and Responsibility to Kids (CalWORKs), a state program that gives money to counties for job training and work related services, has already been significantly underfunded in the last few years, but the proposed 2012-13 budget calls for the more than $1 billion in cuts.
Following suit, in June Mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg released his executive budget which demands cuts for child and after school programs for the fifth straight year, which would leave 90,000 children total without these programs come September. In Massachusetts, Gov. Deval Patrick is seeking to fill the $1.3 billion budget gap through cuts to child care subsidies, through cuts of about $8 million.
These cuts in the United States and elsewhere mean that more and more women will force back into the homes. Austerity’s ‘retraditionalizing’ effect is especially seen in Greece and elsewhere. In Greece, some experts predict that joblessness figures could reach up to 30% by the end of the year; coupled with slashed wages and receding public services by the Troika, there has been a co-emerging increase in Greek women’s unpaid work load. As hundreds of thousands of Greeks reach the maximum period for receiving state benefits for unemployment in the coming months, Greek women’s double burden of being both care taker and worker, women’s household and work life will likely get more stressful.
World Capitalism
In Spain, unemployment is exceeding 25%, and 1.5 million households are left without a single wage-earner, taking a dramatic effect on families and women. In an NPR story airing on 11 Jul titled “Spanish Families Share Expenses and Tradition”, Lauren Frayer tells the story of the Fernandez family, a family of five children who make ends meet on the father’s unemployment benefits, government benefits for a disabled child and the grandfather’s factory paycheck. The story ends with the father "At least I have time for my kids….I can spend the whole day entertaining them! Many families in Spain live in multi-generational household because of unemployment and high expenses- the highest in Europe. Though there haven’t been cuts to health care, benefits for the elderly and disabled, as the Eurozone crisis continues there is no doubt that there will be cuts. By not talking about how austerity is linked to women’s oppression, it shows media and spokespersons naturalize austerity.
Under capitalism, especially in times of austerity, the family is seen by economic and political leaders as a means to transfer costs. In Greece for example, women’s rights activists in Greece have also reported that domestic violence is on the rise, making many women’s activists feel that austerity a way of hiding the devastation caused austerity behind doors of the home. Politicians and spokespersons for capital attempt to rationalize cuts to programs like health clinic and nurseries arguing that they are women’s work, and non-statuary ‘gold plated’ extras. Marxists have argued on the other hand that so called ‘woman’s work’ are a crucial part of the means in which society use to reproduces its families, citizens and workers.
The struggle for women’s liberation within the age of neo-liberalism would need to stand not for equality of cuts or “shared burden” but for the radical restructuring and transformation of gender and class relations along socialist lines. An economic system based on profit maximization will constantly seek to undermine and challenge victories that benefit all working people, especially women. To assert demands for women’s liberation into the wider struggle, the broad-based anti-austerity and anti-cuts campaigns need to build connections with local community ‘fight-backs’ against the closures and cuts to programs women effect depend on. Karl Marx’s words ring as true today as it did in 1868: “Everyone who knows anything of history also knows that great social revolutions are impossible without the feminine ferment."
