The New War Congress: An Obama-Republican War Alliance?
Submitted by davidswanson on Sun, 2010-11-21 22:04 AfghanistanCongressIraq
By David Swanson
Swanson has just published War Is A Lie. This article originally appeared on TomDispatch.
To understand just how bad the 112th Congress, elected on November 2nd and taking office on January 3rd, is likely to be for peace on Earth, one has to understand how incredibly awful the 110th and 111th Congresses have been during the past four years and then measure the ways in which things are likely to become even worse.
Oddly enough, doing so brings some surprising silver linings into view.
The House and Senate have had Democratic majorities for the past four years. In January, the House will be run by Republicans, while the Democratic majority in the Senate will shrink. We still tend to call the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan "Bush's wars." Republicans are often the most outspoken supporters of these wars, while many Democrats label themselves "critics" and "opponents."
Such wars, however, can't happen without funding, and the past four years of funding alone amount to a longer period of war-making than U.S. participation in either of the world wars. We tend to think of those past four years as a winding down of "Bush's wars," even though in that period Congress actually appropriated funding to escalate the war in Iraq and then the war in Afghanistan, before the U.S. troop presence in Iraq was reduced.
But here’s the curious thing: while the Democrats suffered a net loss of more than 60 seats in the House in the midterm elections just past, only three of the defeated Democrats had voted against funding an escalation in Afghanistan this past July 27th. Three other anti-war Democrats (by which I mean those who have actually voted against war funding) retired this year, as did two anti-war Republicans. Another anti-war Democrat, Carolyn Kilpatrick of Michigan, lost in a primary to Congressman-elect Hansen Clarke, who is also likely to vote against war funding. And one more anti-war Democrat, Dan Maffei from western New York, is in a race that still hasn't been decided. But among the 102 Democrats and 12 Republicans who voted "no" to funding the Afghan War escalation in July, at least 104 will be back in the 112th Congress.
That July vote proved a high point in several years of efforts by the peace movement, efforts not always on the media's radar, to persuade members of Congress to stop funding our wars. Still a long way off from the 218-vote majority needed to succeed, there's no reason to believe that anti-war congress members won't see their numbers continue to climb above 114 -- especially with popular support for the Afghan War sinking fast -- if a bill to fund primarily war is brought to a vote in 2011.
Which President Will Obama Be in 2012?
The July funding vote also marked a transition to the coming Republican House in that more Republicans (160) voted "yes" than Democrats (148). That gap is likely to widen. The Democrats will have fewer than 100 House Members in January who haven't already turned against America’s most recent wars. The Republicans will have about 225. Assuming a libertarian influence does not sweep through the Republican caucus, and assuming the Democrats don't regress in their path toward peace-making, we are likely to see wars that will be considered by Americans in the years to come as Republican-Obama (or Obama-Republican) in nature.
The notion of a war alliance between the Republicans and the president they love to hate may sound outlandish, but commentators like Jeff Cohen who have paid attention to the paths charted by Bill Clinton's presidency have been raising this possibility since Barack Obama entered the Oval Office. That doesn't mean it won't be awkward. The new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), for example, is aimed at reducing the deployment and potential for proliferation of nuclear weapons. Obama supports it. Last week, we watched the spectacle of Republican senators who previously expressed support for the treaty turning against it, apparently placing opposition to the president ahead of their own views on national security.
That does not, however, mean that they are likely to place opposition to the President ahead of their support for wars that ultimately weaken national security. In fact, it’s quite possible that, in 2011, they will try to separate themselves from the president by proposing even more war funding than he asks for and daring him not to sign the bills, or by packaging into war bills measures Obama opposes but not enough to issue a veto.
For Obama's part, while he has always striven to work with the Republicans, a sharp break with the Democrats will not appeal to him. If the polls were to show that liberals had begun identifying him as the leader of Republican wars, the pressure on him to scale back war-making, especially in Afghanistan, might rise.
If the economy, as expected, does not improve significantly, and if people begin to associate the lack of money for jobs programs with the staggering sums put into the wars, the president might find himself with serious fears about his reelection -- or even about getting the Democratic Party’s nomination a second time. His fate is now regularly being compared to that of Bill Clinton, who was indeed reelected in 1996 following a Republican midterm trouncing. (In his successful campaign to return to the Oval Office, Clinton got an assist from Ross Perot, a third-party candidate who drew off Republican votes and whose role might be repeated in 2012 by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.)
History, however, has its own surprises; sometimes it’s the chapters from the past you’re not thinking about that get repeated. Here, for instance, are three presidents who are not Bill Clinton and whose experiences might prove relevant: Lyndon Johnson's war-making in Vietnam led to his decision not to run for reelection in 1968; opposition to abuses of war powers was likely a factor in similar decisions by Harry Truman in 1952 in the midst of an unpopular war in Korea and James Polk in 1848 after a controversial war against Mexico.
The Unkindest Cut
Bills that fund wars along with the rest of the military and what we have, for the past 62 years, so misleadingly called the "Defense" Department, are harder to persuade Congress members to vote against than bills primarily funding wars. "Defense" bills and the overall size of the military have been steadily growing every year, including 2010. Oddly enough, even with a Republican Congress filled with warhawks, the possibility still exists that that trend could be reversed.
After all, right-wing forces in (and out of) Washington, D.C., have managed to turn the federal budget deficit into a Saddam-Hussein-style bogeyman. While the goal of many of those promoting this vision of deficit terror may have been intent on getting Wall Street's fingers into our Social Security savings or defunding public schools, military waste could become collateral damage in the process.
The bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, known on television as "the deficit commission" and on progressive blogs as "the catfood commission" (in honor of what it could leave our senior citizens dining on), has not yet released its proposals for reducing the deficit, but the two chairmen, Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, have published their own set of preliminary proposals that include reducing the military budget by $100 billion. The proposal is, in part, vague but -- in a new twist for Washington's elite -- even includes a suggested reduction by one-third in spending on the vast empire of bases the U.S. controls globally.
Commission member and Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) has proposed cutting only slightly more -- $110.7 billion -- from the military budget as part of a package of reforms that, unlike the chairmen's proposals, taxes the rich, invests in jobs, and strengthens Social Security. Even if a similar proposal finally makes it out of the full commission, the new Republican House is unlikely to pass anything of the sort unless there is a genuine swell of public pressure.
Far more than $110.7 billion could, in fact, be cut out of the Pentagon budget to the benefit of national security, and even greater savings could, of course, be had by actually ending the Afghan and Iraq wars, a possibility not considered in these proposals. If military cuts are packaged with major cuts to Social Security or just about anything else, progressives will be as likely as Republicans to oppose the package.
While the new Republican House will fund the wars at least as often and as fulsomely as the outgoing Democratic House, namely 100% of the time, the votes will undoubtedly look different. The Democratic leadership has tended to allow progressive Democrats the opportunity to vote for antiwar measures as amendments to war-funding bills. These measures have ranged from bans on all war funding to requests for non-binding exit strategies. They have not passed, but have generated news coverage. They may also, however, have made it easier for some Democrats to establish their antiwar credentials by voting “yes” on these amendments -- before turning around and voting for the war funding. If the funding is the only war vote they are allowed, some of them may be more likely to vote "no."
On March 10, 2010, Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) used a parliamentary maneuver (that will still be available to him as a member of the minority) to force a lengthy floor debate on a resolution to end the war in Afghanistan. Kucinich has said that he will introduce a similar resolution in January 2011 that would require the war to end by December 31, 2012. That will provide an initial opportunity for Congress watchers to assess the lay of the land in the 112th Congress. It will likely also be the first time that war is powerfully labeled as the property of the president and the Republicans.
The other place public discussion of the wars will occur is in committee hearings, and all of the House committees will now have Republican chairs, including Buck McKeon (R-CA) in Armed Services, and Darrell Issa (R-CA) in Oversight and Government Reform. In recent decades, the oversight committee has only been vigorously used when the chairman has not belonged to the president's party. This was the case in 2007-2008 when Congressman Henry Waxman (D-CA) investigated the Bush administration, even though he did allow high officials and government departments to simply refuse compliance with subpoenas the committee issued. It will be interesting to see how Republican committee chairs respond to a similar defiance of subpoenas during the next two years.
A Hotbed of Military Expansionism
The Armed Services Committee is likely to be a hotbed of military expansionism. Incoming Chairman McKeon wants Afghan War commander General David Petraeus to testify in December (even before he becomes chairman) on the Obama administration's upcoming review of Afghan war policy, while the Pentagon reportedly does not want him to because there is no good news to report. While Chairman McKeon may insist on such newsworthy witnesses next year, his goal will be war expansion, pure and simple.
In fact, McKeon is eager to update the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) to grant the president the ongoing authority to make war on nations never involved in the 9/11 attacks. This will continue to strip Congress of its war-making powers. It will similarly continue to strip Americans of rights like the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches and seizures that President Obama has tended to justify more on the basis of the original AUMF than on the alleged inherent powers of the presidency that Bush’s lawyers leaned on so heavily.
The president has been making it ever clearer in these post election weeks that he's in no hurry to end the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan. The scheduled end date for the occupation of Iraq, December 31, 2011, will now arrive while Republicans control a Congress that might conceivably, under Democrats, have been shamed into insisting on its right to finally end that war. Republicans and their friends at the Washington Post are now arguing avidly for the continuation of existing wars in the way their side always argues, by pushing the envelope and demanding so much more -- such as a war on Iran -- that the existing level of madness comes to seem positively sane.
The most silvery of possible silver linings here may lie in the possibility of a reborn peace movement. George W. Bush's new memoir actually reveals the surprising strength the peace movement had achieved by 2006. In that year, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who was publicly denouncing any opposition to war, privately urged Bush to bring troops out of Iraq before the congressional elections. But that was the last year in which the interests of the peace movement were aligned with those of groups and funders that take their lead from the Democratic Party.
In November 2008, the last of the major funders of the peace movement took their checkbooks and departed. Were they at long last to take this moment to build the opposite of Fox News and the Tea Party, a machine independent of political parties pushing an agenda of peace and justice, anything would be possible.
David Swanson is the author of the just published book War Is A Lie and Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union. He blogs at Let’s Try Democracy and War Is a Crime.
Copyright 2010 David Swanson
Monday, November 22, 2010
*From The International Socialists Orgaization-What do socialists say about democracy?
ISR Issue 74, November–December 2010
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
What do socialists say about democracy?
By PAUL Le BLANC
“DEMOCRACY DOES not come from the top, it comes from the bottom,” Howard Zinn tells us at the beginning of his wonderful film The People Speak. “The mutinous soldiers, the angry women, the rebellious Native Americans, the working people, the agitators, the antiwar protestors, the socialists and anarchists and dissenters of all kinds—the troublemakers, yes, the people who have given us what liberty and democracy we have.”1 This insight from Zinn provides a key to our topic—the relation between democracy and socialism, especially the socialism associated with the outlook of Karl Marx.
The great democratic ideal of our country, historically, has been that we live in a land in which there is government of the people, by the people, and for the people, with liberty and justice for all. It is worth raising a question about how much democracy—how much rule by the people—actually exists in this American republic of ours. The definition of “republic” is rule (or government) by elected representatives—not quite the same thing as government by the people. We’ll need to come back to that shortly. But certainly even an imperfect democracy is better than rule over the people by a government that decides it knows what is best for them. Many right-wingers today claim this is the goal of socialism.
That is a lie. Yet one of the tragedies of the twentieth century is that so many self-proclaimed partisans of socialism plugged themselves into that lie, leaving “rule by the people” out of the socialist equation. They defined socialism as government ownership and control of the economy, and government planning for the benefit of the people, who some day (but not yet!) would be permitted to have a decisive say in the decisions affecting their lives. This so-called socialism from above was central to the ideology of certain elitist reformers associated with the so-called moderate wing of the socialist movement, and it was also central to the Stalin dictatorship in Russia. Even down to the present day, some well-meaning folks use this logic to describe despotic regimes (such as that in North Korea) as “socialist.” Such thinking has disoriented millions of people over the years. But as the Afro-Caribbean revolutionary internationalist C. L. R. James insisted (using the word “proletarian” where many of us would say “working class”),
the struggle for socialism is the struggle for proletarian democracy. Proletarian democracy is not the crown of socialism. Socialism is the result of proletarian democracy. To the degree that the proletariat mobilizes itself and the great masses of the people, the socialist revolution is advanced. The proletariat mobilizes itself as a self-acting force through its own committees, unions, parties, and other organizations.2
Similar things were said in earlier years by the Italian Communist leader Antonio Gramsci, the Chinese dissident Communist Chen Duxiu, and the Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui, to name three of many.
“Socialists should not argue with the American worker when he says he wants democracy and doesn’t want to be ruled by a dictatorship,” said James P. Cannon—a founder of both the U.S. Communist Party and U.S. Trotskyism—in the wake of the 1956 Hungarian workers’ and students’ uprising against Stalinist bureaucratic tyranny. “Rather, we should recognize [the worker’s] demand for human rights and democratic guarantees, now and in the future, is in itself progressive. The socialist task is to not to deny democracy, but to expand it and make it more complete.” Cannon stood in the revolutionary Marxist tradition of not only opposing capitalism, but also opposing oppressive bureaucracies in the labor movement throughout the world, asserting that “in the United States, the struggle for workers’ democracy is preeminently a struggle of the rank and file to gain democratic control of their own organizations.” He added that—both in Communist countries and capitalist countries—“the fight for workers’ democracy is inseparable from the fight for socialism, and is the condition for its victory.” We can find the same kinds of points being made by Eugene Victor Debs and others during an earlier heyday of American socialism in the first two decades of the twentieth century and by revolutionaries in Europe—Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, and many others.3
The failure to recognize that genuine democracy and genuine socialism are absolutely inseparable is only one source of confusion. Another source of confusion has to do with the relationship between capitalism and democracy. Most of what I have to share here will actually focus on that question. A useful case study for us will be the American Revolution and its aftermath. Then we will need to touch on what some have called “the democratic breakthrough” for which Karl Marx and the labor movement with which he was associated are largely responsible. We should then consider descriptions of so-called democracy in the United States over the years by people in a position to know. We will conclude with some key insights from Lenin and Trotsky on combining the struggles for democracy and socialism.
First we should acknowledge an element of confusion that flows from a particular understanding—or misunderstanding—of Marxism. Marxist theory outlines different stages in human history based on different economic systems, first a primitive tribal communism that lasted for thousands of years, then a succession of class societies—in Europe including: ancient slave civilizations, feudalism, and then capitalism, with its immense productivity and economic surpluses that have paved the way for the possibility of a socialist society.
The misunderstanding flows from the fact that according to Marxists, the transition from feudalism to capitalism is facilitated and largely completed by something that has been termed “bourgeois democratic revolutions.” Bourgeois, of course, refers to capitalism, and the term bourgeois-democratic revolution refers to those revolutionary upheavals, involving masses of people in the so-called lower classes, that have swept aside rule by kings and domination of the economy by hereditary nobles or aristocrats, creating the basis for both the full development of capitalist economies and more or less democratic republics.4 Some Marxists, and many capitalist ideologists, have projected an intimate interrelationship between the rise of capitalism and the rise of democracy. Just as “love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage” in the old song, so capitalism and democracy naturally go together. But, as a number of sharp-minded historians and social scientists have argued, this notion is quite misleading. In order to clarify that, we should take a look at an aspect of our own bourgeois-democratic revolution, the American Revolution of 1775 to 1783.
The American Revolution and democracy
The big businessmen, the capitalists, the ruling elites of the thirteen North American colonies were the great merchants of the North and the great plantation owners of the South, and they did not want to be bossed around and constrained by the far-off government of an incredibly arrogant monarchy and aristocracy, combined with privileged merchants in England, who dominated the British Empire. To be able to pose an effective challenge, however, they needed to persuade a much larger percentage of their fellow colonists—small farmers, shopkeepers, artisans and craftsmen, laborers and more—to make common cause with them. It became clear that these plebian masses were particularly responsive to the kinds of revolutionary-democratic conceptions that radicals like Tom Paine put forward in incendiary bestsellers such as Common Sense. Such notions were consequently incorporated into magnificent rhetoric that Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence in 1776. It was used to rally enough support throughout the colonies—now transforming themselves into independent, united states of America—to stand up to the greatest economic and military power in the world. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” it declared, “that all men are created equal, and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, and among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The document went on that governments are not legitimate if they do not enjoy the consent of the governed, and that the people who are governed have a right to challenge, overturn, and replace governments not to their liking.5
Yet certain revolutionary leaders who wished to conserve the power of the wealthy minority of merchants and plantation owners were uncomfortable with the implications of such potent stuff. Early on, one such conservative, Gouvernor Morris, commented:
The mob began to think and to reason. Poor reptiles! It is with them a vernal morning; they are struggling to cast off their winter’s slough, they bask in the sunshine, and ere noon they will bite, depend upon it. The gentry begin to fear this. . . . I see, and I see it with fear and trembling, that if the disputes with Great Britain continue, we shall be under the worst of all possible dominions; we shall be under the domination of a riotous mob.
John Adams fretted that, “our struggle has loosened the bands of government everywhere. That children and apprentices were disobedient—that schools and colleges were grown turbulent—that Indians slighted their guardians and Negroes grew insolent to their masters.” Adams was dismayed by pressures to give propertyless men the right to vote (and by pressure from his own wife even to extend this right to women). He brooded: “It tends to confound and destroy all distinctions and prostrate all ranks to one common level.” He warned: “Men in general in every society, who are wholly destitute of property, are also too little acquainted with public affairs to form a right judgment, and too dependent upon other men to have a will of their own.” Alexander Hamilton, a visionary enthusiast of an industrial capitalist future, was perhaps clearest of all. “All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and well-born, the other the mass of the people.” Since the “turbulent and changing” masses “seldom judge or determine right,” the wealthy elite must be given “a distinct permanent share in the government.” Or as he put it earlier, “that power which holds the purse-strings absolutely must rule.”6
Three years after the revolution was officially won, and in the wake of Shays’s Rebellion of small farmers and poor laborers in Massachusetts, General Henry Knox wrote to George Washington: “Their creed is that the property of the United States has been protected from the confiscation of Britain by the joint exertions of all, and therefore ought to be the common property of all.” Knox’s exaggeration expressed the anxiety of the well off in the early republic. “This dreadful situation has alarmed every man of principle and property in New England,” Knox continued. “Our Government must be braced, changed, or altered to secure our lives and property.” By the late 1780s, a majority of the states had given the right to vote to a minority—white male property owners. Of course, some of the property owners might be small farmers, artisans, and some shopkeepers with ties to what Hamilton called “the mass of the people.” Most of the state governments had a more representative lower house for such folk—but it was held in check by a more powerful upper house that was controlled by the rich. In addition, many powerful state and local offices were appointed from above rather than elected.7
It is likely that a great majority of the Founding Fathers who gathered to discuss and compose a new Constitution of the United States in the late 1780s saw things in the manner explained by Aristotle many centuries earlier: “The real difference between democracy and oligarchy is poverty and wealth. Wherever men rule by reason of their wealth…, that is an oligarchy, and where the poor rule, that is democracy.” The fact remained, as Ellen Meiksins Wood has commented, that “the colonial and revolutionary experience had already made it impossible to reject democracy outright, as ruling and propertied classes had been doing unashamedly for centuries and as they would continue to do for some time elsewhere.” We will look at what happened “elsewhere”—at least in Europe—in a few moments. But what happened in the early American republic at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 was an attempt to fuse democracy (government by the many) with oligarchy (government by the few) in a way that would conserve the power of the wealthy. The key was the notion of representative democracy in which the laboring multitude is represented by figures from the wealthy elite. Or as Alexander Hamilton put it in No. 35 of the Federalist Papers, “an actual representation of all classes of the people by persons of each class is altogether visionary,” and, instead, workers in the skilled and manufacturing trades, thanks to “the influence and weight and superior acquirements” of the wealthy merchants, will generally “consider merchants as the natural representatives of all these classes of the community.” Ellen Wood’s paraphrase is nicely put: “Here shoemakers and blacksmiths are represented by their social superiors.” She adds, “these assumptions must be placed in the context of the Federalist view that representation is not a way of implementing but of avoiding or at least partially circumventing democracy.”8
Even the more liberal-minded Founding Father, a close associate of Thomas Jefferson’s, James Madison—in No. 10 of the Federalist Papers—observing that “the most common and durable source of factions [in society] has been the various and unequal division of property,” emphasizes: “Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society.” Here again we see the laboring majority and the wealthy minority. Insisting that “a pure democracy” will enable “a majority… to sacrifice to its ruling passion or interest both the public good and the rights of other citizens,” Madison hailed the Constitution’s conceptualization of a republic because it “opens a different prospect and promises the cure for what we are seeking.” Madison returned to this concern in No. 51 of the Federalist Papers, and praised the Constitution for creating structures and dynamics that will fragment the majority. Among other things, the checks and balances the Constitution established are able (as he puts it) “to divide the legislature into separate branches, and to render them by different modes of election and different principles of action, as little connected with each other as the nature of their common dependence on society will admit.”
There is another element in Madison’s calculations. He reminds us: “If the majority be united by a common interest, the rights of the minority will be insecure.” The solution is to ensure that, “whilst all authority [in the government] will be derived and dependent on the society, the society itself will be broken into so many parts, interests and classes of citizens, that the rights of individuals, or of the minority, will be in little danger from interested combinations of the majority.” A geographically extensive republic, fragmented into states, with a “great variety of interests, parties and sects which it embraces,” will block a majority coalition that could endanger the wealthy minority.9
Even setting aside its original embrace of slavery, the design of the U.S. Constitution became a bulwark of privilege even as more and more men, and finally women as well, were able to conquer the right to vote. Three modern-day social scientists—Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Evelyne Huber Stephens, and John D. Stephens—have produced an important study entitled Capitalist Development and Democracy. They suggest it was a “constitutional or liberal oligarchy” (we could also call it an undemocratic republic) that was set up in the 1780s. They go on to trace important gains that were made in the 1820s and 1830s, in the 1860s, in 1920, and in the 1960s, to expand the right to vote and to make the government more responsive to the desires and needs of the majority.10
The expansion of voting rights was not a gift from on high, but was achieved through tenacious, protracted, and sometimes violent social struggles, spearheaded by the kinds of “troublemakers” that Howard Zinn has so lovingly described. And yet even with all this, genuine rule by the people cannot be said to have been established in our country—a reality we will explore shortly. But first we should turn our attention to what Rueschemeyer and his colleagues document as the democratic breakthrough in Europe.
The democratic breakthrough
Following, revising, and elaborating on studies of earlier social scientists such as Göran Therborn, they comment that “the bourgeoisie, which appears as the natural carrier of democracy in the accounts of orthodox Marxists, liberal social scientists and [others], hardly lived up to this role.” Throughout Europe, the men of wealth and property were generally as reluctant as their U.S. capitalist cousins to go in the direction of rule by the people, preferring some form of liberal or constitutional oligarchy, or sometimes even to cut deals with kings, aristocrats, and generals. They tell us that “it was the growth of the working class and its capacity for self-organization that was most critical for the breakthrough of democracy. The rapid industrialization experienced by western Europe in the five decades before World War I increased the size and, with varying time lags, the degree of organization [of the working class] and this changed the balance of class power in civil society to the advantage of democratic forces.” Their studies confirm “that the working class, represented by socialist parties and trade unions, was the single most important force in the majority of countries in the final push for universal male suffrage and responsible government.” (It took additional feminist ferment, generally supported by socialists, to include women into the equation.)11
Here too, genuine rule by the people cannot be said to have been established in these countries. But it is undeniable that these gains, the right to vote and to organize politically, made it easier for the laboring masses to pressure the wealthy minority. This definitely brought about meaningful improvements for millions of people.
There is one additional very key point for us here. Another social scientist, August Nimtz, embracing the work of Rueschemeyer and his colleagues, finished connecting the dots, in his very fine study Marx and Engels: Their Contribution to the Democratic Breakthrough. Essential elements in the thrust of working-class democracy, Nimtz documents, were the intellectual and practical-political labors of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels in the Communist League, in the 1848 revolutionary upsurge, during the quiescent interlude that followed, and then in the years of the International Workingmen’s Association, First International, and Paris Commune. Nimtz is especially good at conveying a sense of the crucial importance of the First International in the larger political developments of the 1860s and 1870s, and particularly in the development of the labor movements of Europe and North America. He supplies extensive documentation for what he calls his “most sweeping claim”—that “Karl Marx and Frederick Engels were the leading protagonists in the democratic movement in the nineteenth century, the decisive breakthrough period in humanity’s age-old struggle for democracy.”12
And yet Marx and Engels themselves were highly critical of the so-called democracies that were coming into being in various capitalist countries, not least of all in the United States. It was not because the two men were antidemocratic, but precisely because they were fierce advocates of genuine democracy, that they were so critical. For Marx, communism (or socialism, which for him meant the same thing) was what he once called “true democracy,” which he passionately favored. He and Engels explained in The Communist Manifesto that under capitalism “the bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of modern industry and of the world market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative state, exclusive political sway,” and that “the executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” Against this, they argued that workers must increasingly unite in the struggle for a better life, waged in their workplaces and communities, which would need to amount, finally, to what they called “the organization of the proletarians into a class, and consequently into a political party” that would be capable of bringing about “the forcible overthrow of the bourgeoisie,” laying “the foundation for the political sway of the proletariat.” This meant that communists and all the other working-class parties must seek “the formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat.” The “first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy,” and then increasingly to take control of the economy in order to bring about the socialist reconstruction of society.13
Without this, genuine democracy would be impossible. In describing the first workers’ government in history—the short-lived Paris Commune of 1871, which pro-capitalist military forces soon drowned in blood—Marx commented that “instead of deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in parliament, universal suffrage was to serve the people, constituted in communes.” Twenty-two years later, Engels commented to a comrade living in the United States, “The Americans for a long time have been providing the European world with the proof that the bourgeois republic is the republic of capitalist businessmen in which politics is a business like any other.”14
The limits of bourgeois democracy
A brilliant description of “practical politics” has been offered by one of the outstanding working-class revolutionaries of the United States, Albert Parsons, one of the Haymarket martyrs who described himself as a socialist, a communist, and an anarchist. A tireless activist and organizer, he was also editor of The Alarm, the English-language paper of the International Working People’s Association—which was a powerful force in Chicago during the 1880s.
Parsons put these comments on page one of The Alarm during the election season of 1884:
There is not one sound spot in our whole social system, industrial, political, or religious. It is rotten to the core. The whole scheme as we now have was originated by pirates, founded upon fraud, and perpetrated by force. The United States of America possesses in all its glory that sum total of all humbugs—the ballot. This country is now in the midst of its periodical craze—a presidential election. The voters are enthused by the politicians, parading with torches, bands of music and shouting for this or that nominee or party. A man can no more run for office without money than he can engage in business without capital.
The article argued that even if a poor man is nominated because of his popularity, his campaign is financed by wealthy friends in the party who expect him to “vote the right way” on particular issues; if he doesn’t do this, he is replaced by someone who will.
He takes his seat and votes to kill all legislation which would invade the “sacred rights” of the propertied class, and guards like a watch-dog the “vested rights” of those who enjoy special privileges. This is “practical politics.” The poor vote as they work, as their necessities dictate. If the workingmen organize their own party, they are counted out; besides, those who own the workshop control, as a general thing, the votes in it. It is all a question of poverty; the man without property has practically no vote. “Practical politics” means the control of the propertied class.15
Related to one of the points that Parsons makes here—regarding the workplaces where a majority of us spend our working lives (and so much of our waking lives)—it is worth taking time to reflect on the fact that, even if we don’t let our employers intimidate us into voting one way or another, as soon as we walk through the doors of the workplace, we have entered a realm of economic dictatorship—sometimes a relatively benevolent dictatorship, sometimes a totalitarian nightmare, often something somewhere in-between. But there is no democracy—no majority rule, limited freedom of expression, often—especially if there’s no union—no bill of rights. A wealthy minority rules over us in the workplaces and in the entire economy on which all of us are dependent.
There are additional realities that flow from this, and you don’t have to be a genius like Albert Einstein to figure out what they are. The fact remains, however, that Einstein did discuss the question in 1949 and expressed himself rather well, so let’s see what he had to say:
Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of smaller ones. The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights.16
More recently, Sheldon Wolin, Professor Emeritus of Political Theory at Princeton University, updated some of Einstein’s points. To understand what he says, you need to understand Greek—so I will now give you a Greek language lesson. We got the word “democracy” from the ancient Greeks—demokratia, derived from demos (the people) and kratia (rule). Sheldon Wolin says: “It is obvious that today—in the age of communication conglomerates, media pundits, television, public opinion surveys, and political consultants—the exercise of popular will, the expression of its voice, and the framing of its needs have been emptied of all promise of autonomy.” No kidding! Noting that “American politicians and publicists claim that theirs is the world’s greatest democracy,” Wolin tells us, instead (and remember, “demos” means “the people”): “The reality is a democracy without the demos as actor. The voice is that of a ventriloquist democracy.”17 That is, “we the people” seem to be expressing ourselves politically, but really what is being expressed comes from the wealthy elites and their minions who control the economy, the larger culture, the sources of information, the shaping of opinion, and the political process as a whole.
Many anarchists, quite understandably, denounce the very concept of democracy as a swindle that should be ?rejected by all honest revolutionaries. Marxists argue, however, that the swindle must be rejected—but democracy should be fought for. It does seem, however, that given the many ways in which the electoral process in the United States is stacked in favor of capitalism and capitalists, a case can be made, at least in the present time, for our efforts to be concentrated outside the electoral arena. Just as politics involves much, much more than elections and electoral parties, so the struggle for democracy—as the comments of Howard Zinn suggest—can often be pursued far more effectively in workplaces, in communities, in schools, in the streets, in the larger culture through non-electoral struggles, and creative work of various kinds. The key for us is to draw more and more people into pathways of thinking and pathways of action that go in the direction of questioning established authority and giving people a meaningful say about the realities and decisions affecting their lives. That is the opposite of how so-called democracy—focused on elections—actually works in our country. This comes through brilliantly in the description of the wonderful anarchist educator Paul Goodman regarding the U.S. political system in the early 1960s:
Concretely, our system of government at present comprises the military-industrial complex, the secret paramilitary agencies, the scientific war corporations, the blimps, the horses’ asses, the police, the administrative bureaucracy, the career diplomats, the lobbies, the corporations that contribute Party funds, the underwriters and real-estate promoters that batten on urban renewal, the official press and the official opposition press, the sounding-off and jockeying for the next election, the National Unity, etc., etc. All this machine is grinding along by the momentum of the power and profit motives and style long since built into it; it cannot make decisions of a kind radically different than it does. Even if an excellent man happens to be elected to office, he will find that it is no longer a possible instrument for social change on any major issues of war and peace and the way of life of the Americans.18
Elections can sometimes be used effectively by revolutionaries to reach out to masses of people with ideas, ?information, analyses, and proposals that challenge the established order. If elected, they may also find that—aside from proposing and voting for positive, if relatively modest, social reforms—they will also be able to use elected office to help inform, mobilize, and support their constituents in non-electoral mass struggles. But the insertion of revolutionaries into the existing capitalist state will not be sufficient to bring about the “true democracy” that Marx spoke of, because they would find themselves within political structures designed to maintain the existing power relations. They would not have the power to end capitalist oppression or to transform the capitalist state into a structure permitting actual “rule by the people.” Marx and Engels themselves came to the conclusion that it would not be possible for the working class simply to use the existing state—designed by our exploiters and oppressors—to create a new society. The workers would need to smash the oppressive apparatus in order to allow for a genuinely democratic rule, through their own movements and organizations, and through new and more democratic governmental structures.
It is possible that some revolutionaries might be elected before such revolutionary change restructures the state. But they can be effective in what they actually want to do only by working in tandem with broader social movements and with non-electoral struggles. These movements and struggles must be working to empower masses of people in our economy and society, and to put increasing pressure on all politicians and government figures, and also on capitalist owners and managers, to respond to the needs and the will of the workers, of the oppressed, and of the majority of the people. Remember C. L. R. James’s comment: “To the degree that the [working class] mobilizes itself and the great masses of the people, the socialist revolution is advanced. The [working class] mobilizes itself as a self-acting force through its own committees, unions, parties, and other organizations.” These are, potentially, the seeds of the workers’ democracy—germinating in the present—that will take root and grow, challenging and displacing the undemocratic and corrupted structures associated with the so-called bourgeois democracies.
Democracy and “communism”
Before we conclude, we need to look more closely, even if briefly, at a contradiction that seems to have arisen between the notion of democracy and the realities of what came to be known as Communism. Within the tradition of twentieth-century Communism, many (in sharp contrast to Marx) came to counterpose revolution and communism to democracy as such. This can’t be justified, but it needs to be explained. Lenin, Trotsky, and the Bolsheviks led a super-democratic upsurge of the laboring masses, resulting in the initial triumph of the Russian Revolution of 1917. Immediately afterward, Russia was overwhelmed by foreign military invasions, economic blockades, and a very bloody civil war nurtured by hostile foreign capitalist powers. In that horrific situation, a brutal one-party dictatorship was established to hold things together. The Bolsheviks (even comrades Lenin and Trotsky) came up with highly dubious theoretical justifications for the dictatorship, which caused Rosa Luxemburg—correctly—to sharply criticize them, even as she supported the Russian Revolution. The justifications they put forward were soon used as an ideological cover for the crystallization of a vicious bureaucratic tyranny propagated, in the name of “Communism,” by Joseph Stalin and others, ultimately miseducating millions of people throughout the world.19
Both Lenin and Trotsky, and also many others who were true to the revolutionary-democratic essence of the Bolshevik tradition, sought to push back this horrendous corruption of the Communist cause. But it was too late, and after the late 1920s such words as Communism, Marxism, and socialism became wrongly identified throughout the world with that horrendous, totalitarian, murderous corruption represented by the Stalin regime. The ideology and practices of Stalinism are close to being the opposite of classical Marxism.
And it was the classical Marxist outlook that animated Lenin for most of his life—an outlook insisting that genuine socialism and genuine democracy are inseparable. In fact, this was at the heart of the strategic orientation that led to the victory of the 1917 Revolution. It is an orientation that still makes sense for us today. Let’s see how Lenin maps that out in a 1915 polemic:
The proletariat cannot be victorious except through democracy, i.e., by giving full effect to democracy and by linking with each step of its struggle democratic demands formulated in the most resolute terms. . . . We must combine the revolutionary struggle against capitalism with a revolutionary program and tactics on all democratic demands: a republic, a militia, the popular election of officials, equal rights for women, the self-determination of nations, etc. While capitalism exists, these demands—all of them—can only be accomplished as an exception, and even then in an incomplete and distorted form. Basing ourselves on the democracy already achieved, and exposing its incompleteness under capitalism, we demand the overthrow of capitalism, the expropriation of the bourgeoisie, as a necessary basis both for the abolition of the poverty of the masses and for the complete and all-round institution of all democratic reforms. Some of these reforms will be started before the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, others in the course of that overthrow, and still others after it. The social revolution is not a single battle, but a period covering a series of battles over all sorts of problems of economic and democratic reform, which are consummated only by the expropriation of the bourgeoisie. It is for the sake of this final aim that we must formulate every one of our democratic demands in a consistently revolutionary way. It is quite conceivable that the workers of some particular country will overthrow the bourgeoisie before even a single fundamental democratic reform has been fully achieved. It is, however, quite inconceivable that the proletariat, as a historical class, will be able to defeat the bourgeoisie, unless it is prepared for that by being educated in the spirit of the most consistent and resolutely revolutionary democracy.20
This uncompromising struggle for the most thoroughgoing and genuine democracy is one of the glories of the genuine Leninist tradition. It is something that can resonate with the needs, the aspirations, and the present-day consciousness of millions of people—and at the same time it leads in a revolutionary socialist direction.
In a similar manner, Leon Trotsky pushed hard against ultraleft sectarianism in the early 1930s when he insisted on the struggle both to defend “bourgeois democracy” and to push beyond it to workers’ democracy in the face of the rising tide of Hitler’s Nazism. In this he stressed the need to defend the revolutionary-democratic subculture of the workers’ movement. “Within the framework of bourgeois democracy and parallel to the incessant struggle against it,” Trotsky recounted, “the elements of proletarian democracy have formed themselves in the course of many decades: political parties, labor press, trade unions, factory committees, clubs, cooperatives, sports societies, etc. The mission of fascism is not so much to complete the destruction of bourgeois democracy as to crush the first outlines of proletarian democracy.” In opposing the fascist onslaught on democracy, the goal of revolutionaries is to defend “those elements of proletarian democracy, already created,” which will eventually be “at the foundation of the soviet system of the workers’ state.” Eventually, it will be necessary—Trotsky says—“to break the husk of bourgeois democracy and free from it the kernel of workers’ democracy.” In the face of the immediate fascist threat, “so long as we do not yet have the strength to establish the soviet system, we place ourselves on the terrain of bourgeois democracy. But at the same time we do not entertain any illusions.”21
The situation we face today is as different from that which Lenin faced in 1915 and Trotsky faced in 1933 as their situations were different from what Marx and Engels faced in 1848 and 1871. But they are not totally different. Their insights and approaches may be helpful to us in our own situation as we struggle for rule by the people, genuine democracy, as the basis for a future society of the free and the equal.
This article is based on a presentation given at Socialism 2010, held in Chicago on June 18–20, 2010. Paul Le Blanc is professor of history at La Roche College in Pittsburgh, and is author of numerous books, including Lenin and the Revolutionary Party (Humanities Press, 1993) and the editor of Lenin:revolution, democracy, socialism (Pluto Press, 2008).
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 See Anthony Arnove, Chris Moore, and Howard Zinn, directors, The People Speak, 2009, and Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York: HarperCollins, 2004).
2 C. L. R. James (with Raya Dunayevskaya and Grace Lee Boggs), “The Invading Socialist Society,” in Noel Ignatiev, ed., A New Notion: Two Works by C. L. R. James (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2010), 28. Also see David Forgacs, ed., An Antonio Gramsci Reader (New York: Schocken Books, 1988), Gregor Benton, ed., Chen Duxiu’s Last Articles and Letters, 1937–1942 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1998), and Michael Pearlman, ed., The Heroic and Creative Meaning of Socialism: Selected Essays of José Carlos Mariátegui (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1996).
3 James P. Cannon, “Socialism and Democracy,” in Speeches for Socialism (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1971), 356, 361. Also see Jean Tussey, ed., Eugene V. Debs Speaks (New York: Pathfinder Press, 197) and Paul Le Blanc, From Marx to Gramsci: A Reader in Revolutionary Marxist Politics (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1996).
4 The controversial conception of “bourgeois revolution” is discussed and defended intelligently in Colin Mooers, The Making of Bourgeois Europe (London: Verso, 1991) and Henry Heller, The Bourgeois Revolution in France, 1789–1815 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006).
5 See Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (New York: Vintage Books, 1998).
6 I had to check on some of Morris’s words. Vernal means springtime, and casting off one’s winter slough is what snakes and other reptiles do—shedding their dead skin. For the quotes, see Gary B. Nash, The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America (New York: Penguin Books, 2005), 100, 203, 206, 278–79, 367; Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy, Jefferson to Lincoln (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), 32.
7 Knox quoted in Diego Rivera and Bertram D. Wolfe, Portrait of America (New York: Covici Friede, 1934), 104; Wilentz, 27–28. Also see Edward Countryman, The American Revolution, revised edition (New York: Hill and Wang, 2003).
8 M. I. Finley, Democracy Ancient and Modern, revised edition (Rutgers, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1985), 13; Ellen Meiksins Wood, “Demos Versus ‘We the People’: Freedom and Democracy Ancient and Modern,” in Josiah Ober and Charles Hedrick, eds., Demokratia: A Conversation on Democracies, Ancient and Modern (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 132, 122–23; Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay, The Federalist Papers, edited by Clinton Rossiter (New York: New American Library, 1961), 214–15.
9 Federalist Papers, 79, 81, 322–25.
10 Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Evelyne Huber Stephens, and John D. Stephens, Capitalist Development and Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 40, 44, 122–32.
11 Ibid., 141, 140. Also see Göran Thernborn, “The Rule of Capital and the Rise of Democracy,” New Left Review 103 (May–June 1977): 3–41, and Geoff Eley, Forging Democracy, The History of the Left in Europe, 1850–2000 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).
12 August H. Nimtz, Jr., Marx and Engels: Their Contribution to the Democratic Breakthrough (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000), vii; also see my review, “Marx and Engels: Democratic Revolutionaries,” International Viewpoint, September 2002, http://www.internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article381.
13 Phil Gasper, ed., The Communist Manifesto: A Road Map to History’s Most Important Document (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2005), 4243, 53, 56, 59, 69. On “true democracy” being the same as communism, see Richard N. Hunt, The Political Ideas of Marx and Engels, Vol. I, (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1974), 74–75, and Michael Löwy, The Theory of Revolution in the Young Marx (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2005), 41–43.
14 Karl Marx, “The Civil War in France,” in David Fernbach, ed., The First International and After: Political Writings, Vol. 3, (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1974), 210; S. Ryzanskaya, ed., Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence revised edition, (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1965), 452.
15 “Practical Politics,” The Alarm, October 11, 1884, 1 (microfilm).
16 Albert Einstein, “Why Socialism?” Monthly Review, May 1949, http://www.monthlyreview.org/598einstein.php.
17 Sheldon Wolin, “Transgression, Equality, and Voice,” in Ober and Hedrick, eds., Dmokratia, 87.
18 Paul Goodman, “Getting Into Power,” in Paul Goodman, ed., Seeds of Liberation (New York: George Braziller, 1964), 433.
19 On the profoundly democratic nature of the 1917 Revolution, and on the horrors of its aftermath see: Rex A. Wade, The Russian Revolution 1917 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), and William Henry Chamberlin, The Russian Revolution, 1917–1921 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987). On the faulty theoretical justifications, see Hal Draper, The “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” from Marx to Lenin (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1987). On the Stalinist dictatorship, see Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1937), and Roy Medvedev, Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989).
20 V. I. Lenin, “The Revolutionary Proletariat and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination,” in Paul Le Blanc, ed., Revolution, Democracy, Socialism, Selected Writings (London: Pluto Press, 2006), 233–34.
21 Leon Trotsky, “The United Front for Defense: Letter to a Social Democratic Worker,” in George Breitman and Merry Meisel, eds., The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1971), 367–68.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
What do socialists say about democracy?
By PAUL Le BLANC
“DEMOCRACY DOES not come from the top, it comes from the bottom,” Howard Zinn tells us at the beginning of his wonderful film The People Speak. “The mutinous soldiers, the angry women, the rebellious Native Americans, the working people, the agitators, the antiwar protestors, the socialists and anarchists and dissenters of all kinds—the troublemakers, yes, the people who have given us what liberty and democracy we have.”1 This insight from Zinn provides a key to our topic—the relation between democracy and socialism, especially the socialism associated with the outlook of Karl Marx.
The great democratic ideal of our country, historically, has been that we live in a land in which there is government of the people, by the people, and for the people, with liberty and justice for all. It is worth raising a question about how much democracy—how much rule by the people—actually exists in this American republic of ours. The definition of “republic” is rule (or government) by elected representatives—not quite the same thing as government by the people. We’ll need to come back to that shortly. But certainly even an imperfect democracy is better than rule over the people by a government that decides it knows what is best for them. Many right-wingers today claim this is the goal of socialism.
That is a lie. Yet one of the tragedies of the twentieth century is that so many self-proclaimed partisans of socialism plugged themselves into that lie, leaving “rule by the people” out of the socialist equation. They defined socialism as government ownership and control of the economy, and government planning for the benefit of the people, who some day (but not yet!) would be permitted to have a decisive say in the decisions affecting their lives. This so-called socialism from above was central to the ideology of certain elitist reformers associated with the so-called moderate wing of the socialist movement, and it was also central to the Stalin dictatorship in Russia. Even down to the present day, some well-meaning folks use this logic to describe despotic regimes (such as that in North Korea) as “socialist.” Such thinking has disoriented millions of people over the years. But as the Afro-Caribbean revolutionary internationalist C. L. R. James insisted (using the word “proletarian” where many of us would say “working class”),
the struggle for socialism is the struggle for proletarian democracy. Proletarian democracy is not the crown of socialism. Socialism is the result of proletarian democracy. To the degree that the proletariat mobilizes itself and the great masses of the people, the socialist revolution is advanced. The proletariat mobilizes itself as a self-acting force through its own committees, unions, parties, and other organizations.2
Similar things were said in earlier years by the Italian Communist leader Antonio Gramsci, the Chinese dissident Communist Chen Duxiu, and the Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui, to name three of many.
“Socialists should not argue with the American worker when he says he wants democracy and doesn’t want to be ruled by a dictatorship,” said James P. Cannon—a founder of both the U.S. Communist Party and U.S. Trotskyism—in the wake of the 1956 Hungarian workers’ and students’ uprising against Stalinist bureaucratic tyranny. “Rather, we should recognize [the worker’s] demand for human rights and democratic guarantees, now and in the future, is in itself progressive. The socialist task is to not to deny democracy, but to expand it and make it more complete.” Cannon stood in the revolutionary Marxist tradition of not only opposing capitalism, but also opposing oppressive bureaucracies in the labor movement throughout the world, asserting that “in the United States, the struggle for workers’ democracy is preeminently a struggle of the rank and file to gain democratic control of their own organizations.” He added that—both in Communist countries and capitalist countries—“the fight for workers’ democracy is inseparable from the fight for socialism, and is the condition for its victory.” We can find the same kinds of points being made by Eugene Victor Debs and others during an earlier heyday of American socialism in the first two decades of the twentieth century and by revolutionaries in Europe—Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, and many others.3
The failure to recognize that genuine democracy and genuine socialism are absolutely inseparable is only one source of confusion. Another source of confusion has to do with the relationship between capitalism and democracy. Most of what I have to share here will actually focus on that question. A useful case study for us will be the American Revolution and its aftermath. Then we will need to touch on what some have called “the democratic breakthrough” for which Karl Marx and the labor movement with which he was associated are largely responsible. We should then consider descriptions of so-called democracy in the United States over the years by people in a position to know. We will conclude with some key insights from Lenin and Trotsky on combining the struggles for democracy and socialism.
First we should acknowledge an element of confusion that flows from a particular understanding—or misunderstanding—of Marxism. Marxist theory outlines different stages in human history based on different economic systems, first a primitive tribal communism that lasted for thousands of years, then a succession of class societies—in Europe including: ancient slave civilizations, feudalism, and then capitalism, with its immense productivity and economic surpluses that have paved the way for the possibility of a socialist society.
The misunderstanding flows from the fact that according to Marxists, the transition from feudalism to capitalism is facilitated and largely completed by something that has been termed “bourgeois democratic revolutions.” Bourgeois, of course, refers to capitalism, and the term bourgeois-democratic revolution refers to those revolutionary upheavals, involving masses of people in the so-called lower classes, that have swept aside rule by kings and domination of the economy by hereditary nobles or aristocrats, creating the basis for both the full development of capitalist economies and more or less democratic republics.4 Some Marxists, and many capitalist ideologists, have projected an intimate interrelationship between the rise of capitalism and the rise of democracy. Just as “love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage” in the old song, so capitalism and democracy naturally go together. But, as a number of sharp-minded historians and social scientists have argued, this notion is quite misleading. In order to clarify that, we should take a look at an aspect of our own bourgeois-democratic revolution, the American Revolution of 1775 to 1783.
The American Revolution and democracy
The big businessmen, the capitalists, the ruling elites of the thirteen North American colonies were the great merchants of the North and the great plantation owners of the South, and they did not want to be bossed around and constrained by the far-off government of an incredibly arrogant monarchy and aristocracy, combined with privileged merchants in England, who dominated the British Empire. To be able to pose an effective challenge, however, they needed to persuade a much larger percentage of their fellow colonists—small farmers, shopkeepers, artisans and craftsmen, laborers and more—to make common cause with them. It became clear that these plebian masses were particularly responsive to the kinds of revolutionary-democratic conceptions that radicals like Tom Paine put forward in incendiary bestsellers such as Common Sense. Such notions were consequently incorporated into magnificent rhetoric that Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence in 1776. It was used to rally enough support throughout the colonies—now transforming themselves into independent, united states of America—to stand up to the greatest economic and military power in the world. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” it declared, “that all men are created equal, and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, and among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The document went on that governments are not legitimate if they do not enjoy the consent of the governed, and that the people who are governed have a right to challenge, overturn, and replace governments not to their liking.5
Yet certain revolutionary leaders who wished to conserve the power of the wealthy minority of merchants and plantation owners were uncomfortable with the implications of such potent stuff. Early on, one such conservative, Gouvernor Morris, commented:
The mob began to think and to reason. Poor reptiles! It is with them a vernal morning; they are struggling to cast off their winter’s slough, they bask in the sunshine, and ere noon they will bite, depend upon it. The gentry begin to fear this. . . . I see, and I see it with fear and trembling, that if the disputes with Great Britain continue, we shall be under the worst of all possible dominions; we shall be under the domination of a riotous mob.
John Adams fretted that, “our struggle has loosened the bands of government everywhere. That children and apprentices were disobedient—that schools and colleges were grown turbulent—that Indians slighted their guardians and Negroes grew insolent to their masters.” Adams was dismayed by pressures to give propertyless men the right to vote (and by pressure from his own wife even to extend this right to women). He brooded: “It tends to confound and destroy all distinctions and prostrate all ranks to one common level.” He warned: “Men in general in every society, who are wholly destitute of property, are also too little acquainted with public affairs to form a right judgment, and too dependent upon other men to have a will of their own.” Alexander Hamilton, a visionary enthusiast of an industrial capitalist future, was perhaps clearest of all. “All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and well-born, the other the mass of the people.” Since the “turbulent and changing” masses “seldom judge or determine right,” the wealthy elite must be given “a distinct permanent share in the government.” Or as he put it earlier, “that power which holds the purse-strings absolutely must rule.”6
Three years after the revolution was officially won, and in the wake of Shays’s Rebellion of small farmers and poor laborers in Massachusetts, General Henry Knox wrote to George Washington: “Their creed is that the property of the United States has been protected from the confiscation of Britain by the joint exertions of all, and therefore ought to be the common property of all.” Knox’s exaggeration expressed the anxiety of the well off in the early republic. “This dreadful situation has alarmed every man of principle and property in New England,” Knox continued. “Our Government must be braced, changed, or altered to secure our lives and property.” By the late 1780s, a majority of the states had given the right to vote to a minority—white male property owners. Of course, some of the property owners might be small farmers, artisans, and some shopkeepers with ties to what Hamilton called “the mass of the people.” Most of the state governments had a more representative lower house for such folk—but it was held in check by a more powerful upper house that was controlled by the rich. In addition, many powerful state and local offices were appointed from above rather than elected.7
It is likely that a great majority of the Founding Fathers who gathered to discuss and compose a new Constitution of the United States in the late 1780s saw things in the manner explained by Aristotle many centuries earlier: “The real difference between democracy and oligarchy is poverty and wealth. Wherever men rule by reason of their wealth…, that is an oligarchy, and where the poor rule, that is democracy.” The fact remained, as Ellen Meiksins Wood has commented, that “the colonial and revolutionary experience had already made it impossible to reject democracy outright, as ruling and propertied classes had been doing unashamedly for centuries and as they would continue to do for some time elsewhere.” We will look at what happened “elsewhere”—at least in Europe—in a few moments. But what happened in the early American republic at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 was an attempt to fuse democracy (government by the many) with oligarchy (government by the few) in a way that would conserve the power of the wealthy. The key was the notion of representative democracy in which the laboring multitude is represented by figures from the wealthy elite. Or as Alexander Hamilton put it in No. 35 of the Federalist Papers, “an actual representation of all classes of the people by persons of each class is altogether visionary,” and, instead, workers in the skilled and manufacturing trades, thanks to “the influence and weight and superior acquirements” of the wealthy merchants, will generally “consider merchants as the natural representatives of all these classes of the community.” Ellen Wood’s paraphrase is nicely put: “Here shoemakers and blacksmiths are represented by their social superiors.” She adds, “these assumptions must be placed in the context of the Federalist view that representation is not a way of implementing but of avoiding or at least partially circumventing democracy.”8
Even the more liberal-minded Founding Father, a close associate of Thomas Jefferson’s, James Madison—in No. 10 of the Federalist Papers—observing that “the most common and durable source of factions [in society] has been the various and unequal division of property,” emphasizes: “Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society.” Here again we see the laboring majority and the wealthy minority. Insisting that “a pure democracy” will enable “a majority… to sacrifice to its ruling passion or interest both the public good and the rights of other citizens,” Madison hailed the Constitution’s conceptualization of a republic because it “opens a different prospect and promises the cure for what we are seeking.” Madison returned to this concern in No. 51 of the Federalist Papers, and praised the Constitution for creating structures and dynamics that will fragment the majority. Among other things, the checks and balances the Constitution established are able (as he puts it) “to divide the legislature into separate branches, and to render them by different modes of election and different principles of action, as little connected with each other as the nature of their common dependence on society will admit.”
There is another element in Madison’s calculations. He reminds us: “If the majority be united by a common interest, the rights of the minority will be insecure.” The solution is to ensure that, “whilst all authority [in the government] will be derived and dependent on the society, the society itself will be broken into so many parts, interests and classes of citizens, that the rights of individuals, or of the minority, will be in little danger from interested combinations of the majority.” A geographically extensive republic, fragmented into states, with a “great variety of interests, parties and sects which it embraces,” will block a majority coalition that could endanger the wealthy minority.9
Even setting aside its original embrace of slavery, the design of the U.S. Constitution became a bulwark of privilege even as more and more men, and finally women as well, were able to conquer the right to vote. Three modern-day social scientists—Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Evelyne Huber Stephens, and John D. Stephens—have produced an important study entitled Capitalist Development and Democracy. They suggest it was a “constitutional or liberal oligarchy” (we could also call it an undemocratic republic) that was set up in the 1780s. They go on to trace important gains that were made in the 1820s and 1830s, in the 1860s, in 1920, and in the 1960s, to expand the right to vote and to make the government more responsive to the desires and needs of the majority.10
The expansion of voting rights was not a gift from on high, but was achieved through tenacious, protracted, and sometimes violent social struggles, spearheaded by the kinds of “troublemakers” that Howard Zinn has so lovingly described. And yet even with all this, genuine rule by the people cannot be said to have been established in our country—a reality we will explore shortly. But first we should turn our attention to what Rueschemeyer and his colleagues document as the democratic breakthrough in Europe.
The democratic breakthrough
Following, revising, and elaborating on studies of earlier social scientists such as Göran Therborn, they comment that “the bourgeoisie, which appears as the natural carrier of democracy in the accounts of orthodox Marxists, liberal social scientists and [others], hardly lived up to this role.” Throughout Europe, the men of wealth and property were generally as reluctant as their U.S. capitalist cousins to go in the direction of rule by the people, preferring some form of liberal or constitutional oligarchy, or sometimes even to cut deals with kings, aristocrats, and generals. They tell us that “it was the growth of the working class and its capacity for self-organization that was most critical for the breakthrough of democracy. The rapid industrialization experienced by western Europe in the five decades before World War I increased the size and, with varying time lags, the degree of organization [of the working class] and this changed the balance of class power in civil society to the advantage of democratic forces.” Their studies confirm “that the working class, represented by socialist parties and trade unions, was the single most important force in the majority of countries in the final push for universal male suffrage and responsible government.” (It took additional feminist ferment, generally supported by socialists, to include women into the equation.)11
Here too, genuine rule by the people cannot be said to have been established in these countries. But it is undeniable that these gains, the right to vote and to organize politically, made it easier for the laboring masses to pressure the wealthy minority. This definitely brought about meaningful improvements for millions of people.
There is one additional very key point for us here. Another social scientist, August Nimtz, embracing the work of Rueschemeyer and his colleagues, finished connecting the dots, in his very fine study Marx and Engels: Their Contribution to the Democratic Breakthrough. Essential elements in the thrust of working-class democracy, Nimtz documents, were the intellectual and practical-political labors of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels in the Communist League, in the 1848 revolutionary upsurge, during the quiescent interlude that followed, and then in the years of the International Workingmen’s Association, First International, and Paris Commune. Nimtz is especially good at conveying a sense of the crucial importance of the First International in the larger political developments of the 1860s and 1870s, and particularly in the development of the labor movements of Europe and North America. He supplies extensive documentation for what he calls his “most sweeping claim”—that “Karl Marx and Frederick Engels were the leading protagonists in the democratic movement in the nineteenth century, the decisive breakthrough period in humanity’s age-old struggle for democracy.”12
And yet Marx and Engels themselves were highly critical of the so-called democracies that were coming into being in various capitalist countries, not least of all in the United States. It was not because the two men were antidemocratic, but precisely because they were fierce advocates of genuine democracy, that they were so critical. For Marx, communism (or socialism, which for him meant the same thing) was what he once called “true democracy,” which he passionately favored. He and Engels explained in The Communist Manifesto that under capitalism “the bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of modern industry and of the world market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative state, exclusive political sway,” and that “the executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” Against this, they argued that workers must increasingly unite in the struggle for a better life, waged in their workplaces and communities, which would need to amount, finally, to what they called “the organization of the proletarians into a class, and consequently into a political party” that would be capable of bringing about “the forcible overthrow of the bourgeoisie,” laying “the foundation for the political sway of the proletariat.” This meant that communists and all the other working-class parties must seek “the formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat.” The “first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy,” and then increasingly to take control of the economy in order to bring about the socialist reconstruction of society.13
Without this, genuine democracy would be impossible. In describing the first workers’ government in history—the short-lived Paris Commune of 1871, which pro-capitalist military forces soon drowned in blood—Marx commented that “instead of deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in parliament, universal suffrage was to serve the people, constituted in communes.” Twenty-two years later, Engels commented to a comrade living in the United States, “The Americans for a long time have been providing the European world with the proof that the bourgeois republic is the republic of capitalist businessmen in which politics is a business like any other.”14
The limits of bourgeois democracy
A brilliant description of “practical politics” has been offered by one of the outstanding working-class revolutionaries of the United States, Albert Parsons, one of the Haymarket martyrs who described himself as a socialist, a communist, and an anarchist. A tireless activist and organizer, he was also editor of The Alarm, the English-language paper of the International Working People’s Association—which was a powerful force in Chicago during the 1880s.
Parsons put these comments on page one of The Alarm during the election season of 1884:
There is not one sound spot in our whole social system, industrial, political, or religious. It is rotten to the core. The whole scheme as we now have was originated by pirates, founded upon fraud, and perpetrated by force. The United States of America possesses in all its glory that sum total of all humbugs—the ballot. This country is now in the midst of its periodical craze—a presidential election. The voters are enthused by the politicians, parading with torches, bands of music and shouting for this or that nominee or party. A man can no more run for office without money than he can engage in business without capital.
The article argued that even if a poor man is nominated because of his popularity, his campaign is financed by wealthy friends in the party who expect him to “vote the right way” on particular issues; if he doesn’t do this, he is replaced by someone who will.
He takes his seat and votes to kill all legislation which would invade the “sacred rights” of the propertied class, and guards like a watch-dog the “vested rights” of those who enjoy special privileges. This is “practical politics.” The poor vote as they work, as their necessities dictate. If the workingmen organize their own party, they are counted out; besides, those who own the workshop control, as a general thing, the votes in it. It is all a question of poverty; the man without property has practically no vote. “Practical politics” means the control of the propertied class.15
Related to one of the points that Parsons makes here—regarding the workplaces where a majority of us spend our working lives (and so much of our waking lives)—it is worth taking time to reflect on the fact that, even if we don’t let our employers intimidate us into voting one way or another, as soon as we walk through the doors of the workplace, we have entered a realm of economic dictatorship—sometimes a relatively benevolent dictatorship, sometimes a totalitarian nightmare, often something somewhere in-between. But there is no democracy—no majority rule, limited freedom of expression, often—especially if there’s no union—no bill of rights. A wealthy minority rules over us in the workplaces and in the entire economy on which all of us are dependent.
There are additional realities that flow from this, and you don’t have to be a genius like Albert Einstein to figure out what they are. The fact remains, however, that Einstein did discuss the question in 1949 and expressed himself rather well, so let’s see what he had to say:
Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of smaller ones. The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights.16
More recently, Sheldon Wolin, Professor Emeritus of Political Theory at Princeton University, updated some of Einstein’s points. To understand what he says, you need to understand Greek—so I will now give you a Greek language lesson. We got the word “democracy” from the ancient Greeks—demokratia, derived from demos (the people) and kratia (rule). Sheldon Wolin says: “It is obvious that today—in the age of communication conglomerates, media pundits, television, public opinion surveys, and political consultants—the exercise of popular will, the expression of its voice, and the framing of its needs have been emptied of all promise of autonomy.” No kidding! Noting that “American politicians and publicists claim that theirs is the world’s greatest democracy,” Wolin tells us, instead (and remember, “demos” means “the people”): “The reality is a democracy without the demos as actor. The voice is that of a ventriloquist democracy.”17 That is, “we the people” seem to be expressing ourselves politically, but really what is being expressed comes from the wealthy elites and their minions who control the economy, the larger culture, the sources of information, the shaping of opinion, and the political process as a whole.
Many anarchists, quite understandably, denounce the very concept of democracy as a swindle that should be ?rejected by all honest revolutionaries. Marxists argue, however, that the swindle must be rejected—but democracy should be fought for. It does seem, however, that given the many ways in which the electoral process in the United States is stacked in favor of capitalism and capitalists, a case can be made, at least in the present time, for our efforts to be concentrated outside the electoral arena. Just as politics involves much, much more than elections and electoral parties, so the struggle for democracy—as the comments of Howard Zinn suggest—can often be pursued far more effectively in workplaces, in communities, in schools, in the streets, in the larger culture through non-electoral struggles, and creative work of various kinds. The key for us is to draw more and more people into pathways of thinking and pathways of action that go in the direction of questioning established authority and giving people a meaningful say about the realities and decisions affecting their lives. That is the opposite of how so-called democracy—focused on elections—actually works in our country. This comes through brilliantly in the description of the wonderful anarchist educator Paul Goodman regarding the U.S. political system in the early 1960s:
Concretely, our system of government at present comprises the military-industrial complex, the secret paramilitary agencies, the scientific war corporations, the blimps, the horses’ asses, the police, the administrative bureaucracy, the career diplomats, the lobbies, the corporations that contribute Party funds, the underwriters and real-estate promoters that batten on urban renewal, the official press and the official opposition press, the sounding-off and jockeying for the next election, the National Unity, etc., etc. All this machine is grinding along by the momentum of the power and profit motives and style long since built into it; it cannot make decisions of a kind radically different than it does. Even if an excellent man happens to be elected to office, he will find that it is no longer a possible instrument for social change on any major issues of war and peace and the way of life of the Americans.18
Elections can sometimes be used effectively by revolutionaries to reach out to masses of people with ideas, ?information, analyses, and proposals that challenge the established order. If elected, they may also find that—aside from proposing and voting for positive, if relatively modest, social reforms—they will also be able to use elected office to help inform, mobilize, and support their constituents in non-electoral mass struggles. But the insertion of revolutionaries into the existing capitalist state will not be sufficient to bring about the “true democracy” that Marx spoke of, because they would find themselves within political structures designed to maintain the existing power relations. They would not have the power to end capitalist oppression or to transform the capitalist state into a structure permitting actual “rule by the people.” Marx and Engels themselves came to the conclusion that it would not be possible for the working class simply to use the existing state—designed by our exploiters and oppressors—to create a new society. The workers would need to smash the oppressive apparatus in order to allow for a genuinely democratic rule, through their own movements and organizations, and through new and more democratic governmental structures.
It is possible that some revolutionaries might be elected before such revolutionary change restructures the state. But they can be effective in what they actually want to do only by working in tandem with broader social movements and with non-electoral struggles. These movements and struggles must be working to empower masses of people in our economy and society, and to put increasing pressure on all politicians and government figures, and also on capitalist owners and managers, to respond to the needs and the will of the workers, of the oppressed, and of the majority of the people. Remember C. L. R. James’s comment: “To the degree that the [working class] mobilizes itself and the great masses of the people, the socialist revolution is advanced. The [working class] mobilizes itself as a self-acting force through its own committees, unions, parties, and other organizations.” These are, potentially, the seeds of the workers’ democracy—germinating in the present—that will take root and grow, challenging and displacing the undemocratic and corrupted structures associated with the so-called bourgeois democracies.
Democracy and “communism”
Before we conclude, we need to look more closely, even if briefly, at a contradiction that seems to have arisen between the notion of democracy and the realities of what came to be known as Communism. Within the tradition of twentieth-century Communism, many (in sharp contrast to Marx) came to counterpose revolution and communism to democracy as such. This can’t be justified, but it needs to be explained. Lenin, Trotsky, and the Bolsheviks led a super-democratic upsurge of the laboring masses, resulting in the initial triumph of the Russian Revolution of 1917. Immediately afterward, Russia was overwhelmed by foreign military invasions, economic blockades, and a very bloody civil war nurtured by hostile foreign capitalist powers. In that horrific situation, a brutal one-party dictatorship was established to hold things together. The Bolsheviks (even comrades Lenin and Trotsky) came up with highly dubious theoretical justifications for the dictatorship, which caused Rosa Luxemburg—correctly—to sharply criticize them, even as she supported the Russian Revolution. The justifications they put forward were soon used as an ideological cover for the crystallization of a vicious bureaucratic tyranny propagated, in the name of “Communism,” by Joseph Stalin and others, ultimately miseducating millions of people throughout the world.19
Both Lenin and Trotsky, and also many others who were true to the revolutionary-democratic essence of the Bolshevik tradition, sought to push back this horrendous corruption of the Communist cause. But it was too late, and after the late 1920s such words as Communism, Marxism, and socialism became wrongly identified throughout the world with that horrendous, totalitarian, murderous corruption represented by the Stalin regime. The ideology and practices of Stalinism are close to being the opposite of classical Marxism.
And it was the classical Marxist outlook that animated Lenin for most of his life—an outlook insisting that genuine socialism and genuine democracy are inseparable. In fact, this was at the heart of the strategic orientation that led to the victory of the 1917 Revolution. It is an orientation that still makes sense for us today. Let’s see how Lenin maps that out in a 1915 polemic:
The proletariat cannot be victorious except through democracy, i.e., by giving full effect to democracy and by linking with each step of its struggle democratic demands formulated in the most resolute terms. . . . We must combine the revolutionary struggle against capitalism with a revolutionary program and tactics on all democratic demands: a republic, a militia, the popular election of officials, equal rights for women, the self-determination of nations, etc. While capitalism exists, these demands—all of them—can only be accomplished as an exception, and even then in an incomplete and distorted form. Basing ourselves on the democracy already achieved, and exposing its incompleteness under capitalism, we demand the overthrow of capitalism, the expropriation of the bourgeoisie, as a necessary basis both for the abolition of the poverty of the masses and for the complete and all-round institution of all democratic reforms. Some of these reforms will be started before the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, others in the course of that overthrow, and still others after it. The social revolution is not a single battle, but a period covering a series of battles over all sorts of problems of economic and democratic reform, which are consummated only by the expropriation of the bourgeoisie. It is for the sake of this final aim that we must formulate every one of our democratic demands in a consistently revolutionary way. It is quite conceivable that the workers of some particular country will overthrow the bourgeoisie before even a single fundamental democratic reform has been fully achieved. It is, however, quite inconceivable that the proletariat, as a historical class, will be able to defeat the bourgeoisie, unless it is prepared for that by being educated in the spirit of the most consistent and resolutely revolutionary democracy.20
This uncompromising struggle for the most thoroughgoing and genuine democracy is one of the glories of the genuine Leninist tradition. It is something that can resonate with the needs, the aspirations, and the present-day consciousness of millions of people—and at the same time it leads in a revolutionary socialist direction.
In a similar manner, Leon Trotsky pushed hard against ultraleft sectarianism in the early 1930s when he insisted on the struggle both to defend “bourgeois democracy” and to push beyond it to workers’ democracy in the face of the rising tide of Hitler’s Nazism. In this he stressed the need to defend the revolutionary-democratic subculture of the workers’ movement. “Within the framework of bourgeois democracy and parallel to the incessant struggle against it,” Trotsky recounted, “the elements of proletarian democracy have formed themselves in the course of many decades: political parties, labor press, trade unions, factory committees, clubs, cooperatives, sports societies, etc. The mission of fascism is not so much to complete the destruction of bourgeois democracy as to crush the first outlines of proletarian democracy.” In opposing the fascist onslaught on democracy, the goal of revolutionaries is to defend “those elements of proletarian democracy, already created,” which will eventually be “at the foundation of the soviet system of the workers’ state.” Eventually, it will be necessary—Trotsky says—“to break the husk of bourgeois democracy and free from it the kernel of workers’ democracy.” In the face of the immediate fascist threat, “so long as we do not yet have the strength to establish the soviet system, we place ourselves on the terrain of bourgeois democracy. But at the same time we do not entertain any illusions.”21
The situation we face today is as different from that which Lenin faced in 1915 and Trotsky faced in 1933 as their situations were different from what Marx and Engels faced in 1848 and 1871. But they are not totally different. Their insights and approaches may be helpful to us in our own situation as we struggle for rule by the people, genuine democracy, as the basis for a future society of the free and the equal.
This article is based on a presentation given at Socialism 2010, held in Chicago on June 18–20, 2010. Paul Le Blanc is professor of history at La Roche College in Pittsburgh, and is author of numerous books, including Lenin and the Revolutionary Party (Humanities Press, 1993) and the editor of Lenin:revolution, democracy, socialism (Pluto Press, 2008).
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 See Anthony Arnove, Chris Moore, and Howard Zinn, directors, The People Speak, 2009, and Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York: HarperCollins, 2004).
2 C. L. R. James (with Raya Dunayevskaya and Grace Lee Boggs), “The Invading Socialist Society,” in Noel Ignatiev, ed., A New Notion: Two Works by C. L. R. James (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2010), 28. Also see David Forgacs, ed., An Antonio Gramsci Reader (New York: Schocken Books, 1988), Gregor Benton, ed., Chen Duxiu’s Last Articles and Letters, 1937–1942 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1998), and Michael Pearlman, ed., The Heroic and Creative Meaning of Socialism: Selected Essays of José Carlos Mariátegui (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1996).
3 James P. Cannon, “Socialism and Democracy,” in Speeches for Socialism (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1971), 356, 361. Also see Jean Tussey, ed., Eugene V. Debs Speaks (New York: Pathfinder Press, 197) and Paul Le Blanc, From Marx to Gramsci: A Reader in Revolutionary Marxist Politics (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1996).
4 The controversial conception of “bourgeois revolution” is discussed and defended intelligently in Colin Mooers, The Making of Bourgeois Europe (London: Verso, 1991) and Henry Heller, The Bourgeois Revolution in France, 1789–1815 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006).
5 See Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (New York: Vintage Books, 1998).
6 I had to check on some of Morris’s words. Vernal means springtime, and casting off one’s winter slough is what snakes and other reptiles do—shedding their dead skin. For the quotes, see Gary B. Nash, The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America (New York: Penguin Books, 2005), 100, 203, 206, 278–79, 367; Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy, Jefferson to Lincoln (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), 32.
7 Knox quoted in Diego Rivera and Bertram D. Wolfe, Portrait of America (New York: Covici Friede, 1934), 104; Wilentz, 27–28. Also see Edward Countryman, The American Revolution, revised edition (New York: Hill and Wang, 2003).
8 M. I. Finley, Democracy Ancient and Modern, revised edition (Rutgers, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1985), 13; Ellen Meiksins Wood, “Demos Versus ‘We the People’: Freedom and Democracy Ancient and Modern,” in Josiah Ober and Charles Hedrick, eds., Demokratia: A Conversation on Democracies, Ancient and Modern (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 132, 122–23; Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay, The Federalist Papers, edited by Clinton Rossiter (New York: New American Library, 1961), 214–15.
9 Federalist Papers, 79, 81, 322–25.
10 Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Evelyne Huber Stephens, and John D. Stephens, Capitalist Development and Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 40, 44, 122–32.
11 Ibid., 141, 140. Also see Göran Thernborn, “The Rule of Capital and the Rise of Democracy,” New Left Review 103 (May–June 1977): 3–41, and Geoff Eley, Forging Democracy, The History of the Left in Europe, 1850–2000 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).
12 August H. Nimtz, Jr., Marx and Engels: Their Contribution to the Democratic Breakthrough (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000), vii; also see my review, “Marx and Engels: Democratic Revolutionaries,” International Viewpoint, September 2002, http://www.internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article381.
13 Phil Gasper, ed., The Communist Manifesto: A Road Map to History’s Most Important Document (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2005), 4243, 53, 56, 59, 69. On “true democracy” being the same as communism, see Richard N. Hunt, The Political Ideas of Marx and Engels, Vol. I, (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1974), 74–75, and Michael Löwy, The Theory of Revolution in the Young Marx (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2005), 41–43.
14 Karl Marx, “The Civil War in France,” in David Fernbach, ed., The First International and After: Political Writings, Vol. 3, (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1974), 210; S. Ryzanskaya, ed., Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence revised edition, (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1965), 452.
15 “Practical Politics,” The Alarm, October 11, 1884, 1 (microfilm).
16 Albert Einstein, “Why Socialism?” Monthly Review, May 1949, http://www.monthlyreview.org/598einstein.php.
17 Sheldon Wolin, “Transgression, Equality, and Voice,” in Ober and Hedrick, eds., Dmokratia, 87.
18 Paul Goodman, “Getting Into Power,” in Paul Goodman, ed., Seeds of Liberation (New York: George Braziller, 1964), 433.
19 On the profoundly democratic nature of the 1917 Revolution, and on the horrors of its aftermath see: Rex A. Wade, The Russian Revolution 1917 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), and William Henry Chamberlin, The Russian Revolution, 1917–1921 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987). On the faulty theoretical justifications, see Hal Draper, The “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” from Marx to Lenin (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1987). On the Stalinist dictatorship, see Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1937), and Roy Medvedev, Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989).
20 V. I. Lenin, “The Revolutionary Proletariat and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination,” in Paul Le Blanc, ed., Revolution, Democracy, Socialism, Selected Writings (London: Pluto Press, 2006), 233–34.
21 Leon Trotsky, “The United Front for Defense: Letter to a Social Democratic Worker,” in George Breitman and Merry Meisel, eds., The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1971), 367–68.
Sunday, November 21, 2010
*From The Fort Benning School Of The Americas Protest- Thousands Converge at the gates of Fort Benning for 20th Anniversary of November Vigil to Close the SOA
Thousands Converge at the gates of Fort Benning for 20th Anniversary of November Vigil to Close the SOA
26 PEOPLE ARRESTED AND HELD IN THE COUNTY JAIL ON MULTIPLE CHARGES
From: hvoss@soaw.org
Nonviolent Civil Disobedience Action Followed by Indiscriminate Arrests and Targeting of Journalists. Among those arrested by Columbus Police were three Journalists, including TV News Crew from RT America and Unrelated Bystanders.
Thousands of human rights activists, torture survivors, veterans, faith-based communities, union workers, students, musicians and others from across the Americas are gathered today at the gates of the U.S. military base Fort Benning to call for the closure of the School of the Americas (renamed Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation).
Following the SOA Watch rally, human rights activists brought their nonviolent witness to close the SOA into the street leading onto the military base. The activists briefly shut down the road with a large sign that said, "Stop: This is the End of the Road for the SOA." Their action is part of a longstanding tradition of creative civil disobedience to call attention to the atrocities committed by graduates of the School of the Americas. 10-12 people were arrested, and others charged, including the 90-year old Jesuit priest Bill Brennan, and ordained Catholic priest Janice Sevre-Duszynska.
Two human rights activists crossed onto Fort Benning through the highway entrance. They have been charged with federal trespass and face up to six months in federal prison and a fine up to $5,000.
When the rally participants tried to leave the vigil area, the police blocked off all exit points. After a few minutes, the police allowed people to leave on the sidewalk, only to follow them, indiscriminately arresting people who had neither committed any crimes nor engaged in civil disobedience. Among those arrested was the RT America TV crew, who was filming the police misconduct and bystanders. All arrestees are currently being held in the Muscogee County Jail for up to a $5,500 bond.
SOA Watch is a nonviolent grassroots organization that works for the closing the
School of the Americas and a change in U.S. foreign policy - www.SOAW.org
26 PEOPLE ARRESTED AND HELD IN THE COUNTY JAIL ON MULTIPLE CHARGES
From: hvoss@soaw.org
Nonviolent Civil Disobedience Action Followed by Indiscriminate Arrests and Targeting of Journalists. Among those arrested by Columbus Police were three Journalists, including TV News Crew from RT America and Unrelated Bystanders.
Thousands of human rights activists, torture survivors, veterans, faith-based communities, union workers, students, musicians and others from across the Americas are gathered today at the gates of the U.S. military base Fort Benning to call for the closure of the School of the Americas (renamed Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation).
Following the SOA Watch rally, human rights activists brought their nonviolent witness to close the SOA into the street leading onto the military base. The activists briefly shut down the road with a large sign that said, "Stop: This is the End of the Road for the SOA." Their action is part of a longstanding tradition of creative civil disobedience to call attention to the atrocities committed by graduates of the School of the Americas. 10-12 people were arrested, and others charged, including the 90-year old Jesuit priest Bill Brennan, and ordained Catholic priest Janice Sevre-Duszynska.
Two human rights activists crossed onto Fort Benning through the highway entrance. They have been charged with federal trespass and face up to six months in federal prison and a fine up to $5,000.
When the rally participants tried to leave the vigil area, the police blocked off all exit points. After a few minutes, the police allowed people to leave on the sidewalk, only to follow them, indiscriminately arresting people who had neither committed any crimes nor engaged in civil disobedience. Among those arrested was the RT America TV crew, who was filming the police misconduct and bystanders. All arrestees are currently being held in the Muscogee County Jail for up to a $5,500 bond.
SOA Watch is a nonviolent grassroots organization that works for the closing the
School of the Americas and a change in U.S. foreign policy - www.SOAW.org
The Latest From The Internationalist Group- The Struggle In France
As Striking Sanitation Workers and Students Hold Firm
Paris Workers’ Assemblies Declare “We’re Continuing to Fight,” Call for General Strike
Hundreds of students marched from the Jussieu campus of University of Paris to garbage incinerator inIvry-sur-Seine to meet striking sanitation workers, November 2. Banner says: “Students, Workers of
Paris On Strike Against the Smashing of Our Pensions.” (Internationalist photo)
PARIS, November 3 – After the big marches which brought out 2 million opponents of the French government’s anti-worker pension “reform” law last Thursday, October 28, the bourgeois media declared it was time for a wrap-up. The protests had “run out of steam” said the right-wing business paper Les Echos; “the conflict takes time off” was the verdict in Libération. Far from it. The last two days have seen an ebb and flow of the battle, but there has been plenty of action. Around France, blockades of several universities have held firm in the strongholds while retreating under right-wing attack where they have been weaker. Police continue to break up blockades of fuel depots as new ones break out. And while refinery workers and Marseille port workers voted under pressure from the union bureaucracy to go back to work, Paris sanitation workers are still going strong after two weeks on strike. Yesterday hundreds of students marched to their picket with a banner proclaiming “On Strike Until Withdrawal” of the pension law.
On Saturday, October 30 the first regional coordinating meeting for the Île de France capital region was held with nearly 100 delegates from “interprofessional assemblies” (made up of trade unionists and other activists in the struggle against the pension law) in a number of Paris arrondissements (districts) and surrounding départements. Also attending were delegations and representatives of assemblies of rail workers at several Paris train stations, hospital workers, municipal workers, show business workers, teachers, university students and high school students. The assembly issued an appeal titled, “They Voted the Law, We’re Continuing to Fight.” The statement declared its conviction that the government could be defeated over its attack on pensions by bringing together all employed, temporary and unemployed workers in order to “extend the movement and block the economy.” In an implied rebuke of the trade-union tops who on Friday called off the refinery and port strikes, the appeal declared:
“We support the strike pickets and blockades and we particularly call for solidarity against the repression against youth and workers in struggle. Contrary to certain trade-union leaders, we do not want to ‘go on to other things’ nor ‘change change the mode of action.’ We remain firm in the objective of a general strike until withdrawal of the law is achieved.”
A national meeting of representatives of “Interpro” assemblies which have sprung up in various towns around France has been called for this coming weekend in Tours.
Student Strike Solid in Saint-Denis
Entrance to the University of Paris VII campus in Saint-Denis, November 2. No one was about to take
down this barricade. (Internationalist photo)
Sunday and Monday were pretty quiet. Then yesterday, Tuesday, November 2 in Nantes 800 students voted to continue their strike for another week, in what leaders of the local student union called “the most important general assembly since the start of the pension struggle.” In Mans, nearly 400 students voted by a three-to-one majority in favor of blocking the campus. In Grenoble, a general assembly of 500 students voted to continue the strike and extend the blockades to all university buildings. (However, today the blockade was dissolved.) In Pau, Saint-Etienne and Toulouse, assemblies voted in favor of blockades. Here in the capital, an attempt was made to blockade the elite Sorbonne campus of the University of Paris I for the first time, with partial success in the morning. At the Tolbiac campus of Paris I, an assembly voted to end to blockade after right-wingers unblocked the doors. At the Paris X campus in Nanterre, where last week right-wing students physically attacked a barricade the day after a jammed general assembly of over 600 students voted two-to-one to continue the blockade, this time a smaller assembly voted to end the blockade but continue the strike (which we’re told means that there may be some classes, but attendance isn’t required).
However, at the Paris VIII campus in Saint-Denis, to the north of the capital, the blockade continues without weakening. On October 28, the last national “day of action,” a joint assembly of students and workers brought 400 people into the auditorium. Saint-Denis is a historically “red” city, with a Communist Party (PCF) mayor. The University campus is bounded by Avenue Lenine and Avenue de Stalingrad, and a street has been named after Mumia Abu-Jamal, the renowned black radical journalist on death row in Pennsylvania (which caused the U.S. Congress to pass a resolution condemning Saint-Denis). In this municipality with large numbers of residents of African and Maghreban (North African) origin, a referendum in 2006 voted to allow immigrants to vote in local elections (this was overruled by an administrative court). The Saint-Denis campus has been on strike for the last two weeks. When The Internationalist visited it on Tuesday morning it was solidly barricaded, with piles of tables and chairs at every entrance and several dozen students handing out leaflets, making signs and preparing for a general assembly. As a student striker said in an interview, “They’re hardly going to try to take down this barricade.”
A bulletin from the Mobilization Committee of Paris VIII gave an update on the political situation. However, the bulletin implicitly supported the sellout of the refinery and port workers’ strikes, arguing: “The strike was running out of steam since last week, let’s not forget that some of the workers have been on open-ended strike for almost a month, and they still have to pay the rent and eat. The decline in the number of strikers doesn’t in any way mean acceptance of the law, only a need to work in order to survive.” This is apparently the position of the New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA), which has only said that ending the strikes “marks a pause in the mobilization.” And it’s certainly the line of the PCF and CGT union leaders. But it is not what happened, and it’s not what we (and others) heard from refinery strikers at the Paris march on Thursday, when they were full of determination, while saying they were coming under pressure to go back. Certainly being on strike pretty much alone for a month takes its toll, but the CGT and CFDT leadership pushed the members to return to work. Even then between a quarter and a third of refinery workers voted to stay out. The vote at the Grandpuits refinery outside Paris was 58 to 27, according to Le Parisien, while at Donges near Nantes it was 286 to 68, according to L’Humanité.
Paris Sanitation Workers Hang Tough
Strike camp in front of garbage incinerator at Ivry-sur-Seine just outside Paris, November 2. Striking
sanitation workers hung tough and were backed up by effective solidarity action, winning settlement
for early retirement at higher pay. (Internationalist photo)
On Tuesday afternoon there was a march by striking students from Jussieu (University of Paris VII) to the garbage incinerator just over the city limits in Ivry, to the south of Paris. This is the largest garbage processing plant in Europe, handling more than 1,500 tons of garbage a day. The 5,000 sanitation workers of Paris have been on strike against the pension law “reform” since October 19., with dozens of strikers camped out at the incinerator day and night. In addition to demanding that the retirement law be withdrawn, they are calling for “bonuses” that they have received instead of wage increases to be rolled into their basic pay, so that they would count in calculating their pensions. The Internationalist interviewed Régis Viceli, the general secretary of the CGT Sanitation union. “If this law passes, it will be bad for working people in France and everywhere in Europe,” he said, adding that the CGT had proposed other means of financing pensions. “If we go over to a system of pensions by capitalization [individual retirement accounts], as you know very well [in the United States], it will be very hard.” To defeat the attack “the workers have to unite,” because there is a push to smash the present retirement system “in the interests of capitalism.”
While garbage workers in Marseille went back to work last week on orders of the Force Ouvrière union federation after being requisitioned by the Socialist mayor, due to what union bureaucrats and the city administration called a sanitation emergency, strikers in Ivry told the press they could “hold out until Christmas” (Libération, 30 October). In our interview, Viceli complained that the Socialist Party mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanöe contracted private companies to pick up garbage and undercut the strike, while refusing to even discuss their demands about converting bonuses. “This mayor, who says he is of the left, calls himself a ‘liberal socialist,’ and we know what that means.” Since the beginning of his second term, Delanöe has been privatizing and laying off (he wanted to get rid of 113 garbagemen, and even after a fight, 58 sanitation workers’ jobs were lost).
On the other hand, there has been an outpouring of support for the strike. “From the very first day, the solidarity has been tremendous. We have received 10,000 euros in contributions.” The previous Sunday, hundreds of Parisian workers, students and supporters came out to Ivry for a barbecue at the garbage incinerator! A great time was reportedly had by all, but alas, no Claude Monet was there to paint this modern-day Dejeuner sur le pavé (picnic on the pavement).
After a while, the student demonstrators arrived, some 400 or more, chanting “Tous ensemble, tous ensemble, grève générale!” (All out together, general strike). As the column approached, the sanitation workers and marchers applauded this demonstration of student-worker solidarity. Viceli addressed the students thanking them for their support. “There is no pause,” he said, only “preparatory actions. They’re trying in the shops to rally some more people to go out, because the only support we can get is when people go on strike.” The student demonstrators read a communiqué noting that that blockages were important, but it was necessary to stop production in order to strike at capital.1
In the evening, back at Paris VIII for a meeting of the Saint-Denis Interpro general assembly, the discussion was about how to keep up the momentum. One thing that was striking was that in this meeting in a municipality many of whose residents are of black African or North African origin, as well as in other assemblies, we have seen no representatives of these workers and youth. Yet it is precisely the youth of immigrant origin in the working-class housing projects, the cités, who have been singled out for repression and denounced as casseurs (smashers) by the authorities. Some student activists use this loaded term themselves, even as the government is now labeling student strikers bloqueurs (blockers). In an interview with a student activist after the meeting, we asked about ties to youth in the projects and about mobilizing to defend the several hundred facing trial and possible imprisonment, as a way to appeal for common action. In fact, students are distributing a leaflet of the “Anti-Repression Committee of Saint-Denis,” although it doesn’t mention the clear ethnic character of the repression.
A statement the Saint Denis Interpro assembly issued Wednesday morning took a harder line on the union tops than the student Mobilization Committee bulletin the day before:
“If the number of strikes has in fact gone down, it’s because the strategy of the Intersyndicale [the coordinating committee of eight union federations, including the CGT, CFDT, SUD, UNSA, CGC and others] of calling for one-day strikes and demonstrations spread out over time leads to the isolation and wearing down of those who were on open-ended strikes (refinery workers, railroad workers)….
“A very large majority of the population supports the movement, and the striking workers who went back say that they’re ready to go out again if other sectors enter the fray….
“In the face of part of the Intersyndicale that has started to talk of ending the movement … we reaffirm our struggle for the withdrawal of the law without negotiation, which can only be achieved by a general strike.”
Yet the ending of the strikes is not only due to the policies of “a part of the Intersyndicale” but to the pro-capitalist labor bureaucracy as a whole. While the Solidaires and Force Ouvrière federations sometimes make noises about a general strike, they have not seriously fought to prepare for one. They look to maneuvers at the top rather than calling for elected strike committees. What’s needed is to build a revolutionary opposition in all the unions, one that fights to oust the bureaucracy – the labor lieutenants of capital – and to forge a workers party like the Bolsheviks under the leadership Lenin and Trotsky, capable of waging the class struggle through to the end, to workers revolution.
“We Want Some Envelopes, Too”
CGT demonstration outside Medef (bosses association) headquarters, November 3. Women workers have played leading role in strikes and protests against pension “reform.” (Internationalist photo)Today, Wednesday, November 3 there were two demonstrations. The first, in Neuilly-sur-Seine, went to the estate of Liliane Bettencourt, the second richest person in France, whose tax evasion and payoffs to government politicians and parties set off a national scandal last summer, particularly since one of her financial advisors was the wife of labor minister Eric Woerth, the treasurer of president Nicolas Sarkozy’s party, who presented the pension “reform” to parliament. Responding to reports that Woerth had received an envelope stuffed with €150,000 in cash from Bettencourt, the humorous demand of the demonstrators was, “We want some envelopes, too.” When two guards came out to remove stickers and signs from the front gate, the crowd chanted “Flunkeys, join us!”
At noon, the CGT and FSU, the main education union, held a rally outside the offices of the employers’ association, Medef, in the posh 7th arrondissement. Medef president Laurence Parisot bragged of being the force behind the pension “reform” law. The elegant avenue was completely blocked off by a metal barrier and buses of the CRS riot police. Only about 300 unionists showed up, however, and it had a routine flavor. At least in Le Havre on Saturday (October 30), where the port oil terminal workers had been on strike since October 12, the unions walled in the local Medef headquarters with concrete blocks, while the windows of the building still showed traces of the eggs that had landed there during earlier demonstrations.
The CGT leaflet calling for today’s action noted that the deficit in the national pension fund (CNAV) was 10 million euros last year. The employers are demanding that workers give up two (or more) years of their lives supposedly to fill this deficit when France’s top corporations, the CAC40 (equivalent of the Dow Jones Industrials in the U.S.), made €43 billion last year, in the depths of the capitalist economic crisis, and in January 2009 the government funneled €360 billion into the coffers of French banks. Just putting one million of France’s jobless workers back to work would wipe out the deficit. But while exposing the bosses’ numbers racket, the CGT still does not call for withdrawal of the law, only to negotiate about refinancing. And it only says it will keep up struggle until the law is promulgated in a couple weeks.
The struggle is indeed continuing. Tomorrow, Thursday November 4 starting at 10 a.m. the five unions of Air France have called on airline workers to make Thursday “a great day of mobilization and strikes in the French airports” in order to “maintain and accentuate the pressure on the president and the government” over the “unjust and ineffective pension reform.” At the same hour, there will be a mobilization to blockade the incinerator in Saint-Ouen where the scab garbage trucks have been going. In the afternoon, high school students, back from their two week vacation, will mark their return with a march and demonstration/mass leafleting at the Austerlitz railway station. Interestingly, even trade-union spokesmen are saying the lycéens will be key to continuing the strike movement. But for bureaucrats, of course, that is a way of ducking their own responsibility. ■
1 On November 8, after more than three weeks on strike, Paris sanitation workers agreed to return to work in return for a settlement on their key local demand, to fold bonuses into their basic wages. Under the deal, 400 workers nearing retirement age would have their basic pay used in calculating pensions increased by €1,100 a year. And despite the defeat of the struggle against raising the retirement age nationally, in view of their difficult working conditions (pénibilité), they will still be able to retire at age 55 (Le Parisien, 9 November). Holding out a week longer than sanitation workers in the rest of France, the Paris strikers were backed up with effective solidarity action. The city administration agreed to negotiate when after several attempts strike supporters managed to blockade the second incinerator at Saint-Ouen on November 2, and to keep it shut for the duration of the strike. With garbage piling up on the streets, the “Socialist” city administration finally saw the light. Even with this initial victory, the sanitation workers said that they would keep up the pressure by striking 55 minutes every day for the rest of their demands.
The Latest From The Massachusetts Citizens Against the Death Penalty
Massachusetts Citizens Against the Death Penalty
Founded in 1928, MCADP is the oldest active anti-death penalty organization in the United States.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Detail of Bartolomeo Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco from the cartoon of a mural by Ben Shahn © Estate of Ben Shahn /Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Home
About MCADP
Articles of Interest
Links
Local Chapters
Request Info/Join Us
PO Box 51920
Boston, MA 02205
Telephone:
617-523-3951
email:
mcadp@earthlink.net
Contact your legislators to make your opinion known!
MCADP, MA Citizens Against the Death Penalty
for comments about this site contact WEBMASTER
last update 11/6/10
Massachusetts Citizens Against the Death Penalty
Presents the 2009
The HERBERT AND SARA EHRMANN AWARD
Honoring
The Dead Man Walking School Theatre Project
Presented by Special Guest and former Ehrmann Award Recipient,
Sister Helen Prejean
&
The HUGO ADAM BEDAU AWARD
Recognizing
Professor Professor Michael Meltsner
Matthews Distinguished Professor of Law, Northeastern
Saturday, December 4, 2010
Ehrmann Awards Presentation 4:30PM *
Reception following
Harvard University Science Center, Hall B
One Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA 02138
Admission - Free
Space is limited, so please RSVP
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Please note:
MCADP is pleased to present this year’s awards in conjunction with a program presented by the
Dead Man Walking School Theatre Project at the Harvard University Science Center.
The complete program will begin at
2PM with a presentation of an excerpt of the play, followed at
3PM, by a panel discussion moderated by Sr. Helen Prejean with a number of
distinguished participants, and the program will culminate at
4:30 with the presentation of the MCADP Ehrmann/Bedau Awards.
You may join the audience at any point during the afternoon, space permitting.
Directions to Harvard Science Center
The Harvard Science Center is a large, multi-tiered building just north of Harvard Yard near the juncture of Massachusetts Avenue and Cambridge Street, a short walk from the Harvard T stop.
Copyright © 2002 Massachusetts Citizens Against the Death Penalty, Inc.\
Founded in 1928, MCADP is the oldest active anti-death penalty organization in the United States.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Detail of Bartolomeo Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco from the cartoon of a mural by Ben Shahn © Estate of Ben Shahn /Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Home
About MCADP
Articles of Interest
Links
Local Chapters
Request Info/Join Us
PO Box 51920
Boston, MA 02205
Telephone:
617-523-3951
email:
mcadp@earthlink.net
Contact your legislators to make your opinion known!
MCADP, MA Citizens Against the Death Penalty
for comments about this site contact WEBMASTER
last update 11/6/10
Massachusetts Citizens Against the Death Penalty
Presents the 2009
The HERBERT AND SARA EHRMANN AWARD
Honoring
The Dead Man Walking School Theatre Project
Presented by Special Guest and former Ehrmann Award Recipient,
Sister Helen Prejean
&
The HUGO ADAM BEDAU AWARD
Recognizing
Professor Professor Michael Meltsner
Matthews Distinguished Professor of Law, Northeastern
Saturday, December 4, 2010
Ehrmann Awards Presentation 4:30PM *
Reception following
Harvard University Science Center, Hall B
One Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA 02138
Admission - Free
Space is limited, so please RSVP
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Please note:
MCADP is pleased to present this year’s awards in conjunction with a program presented by the
Dead Man Walking School Theatre Project at the Harvard University Science Center.
The complete program will begin at
2PM with a presentation of an excerpt of the play, followed at
3PM, by a panel discussion moderated by Sr. Helen Prejean with a number of
distinguished participants, and the program will culminate at
4:30 with the presentation of the MCADP Ehrmann/Bedau Awards.
You may join the audience at any point during the afternoon, space permitting.
Directions to Harvard Science Center
The Harvard Science Center is a large, multi-tiered building just north of Harvard Yard near the juncture of Massachusetts Avenue and Cambridge Street, a short walk from the Harvard T stop.
Copyright © 2002 Massachusetts Citizens Against the Death Penalty, Inc.\
From The "Left In East Dakota" Blog -On Capitalism And Election Blahs
LEFT IN EAST DAKOTA
I WOKE UP DURING MY AMERICAN DREAM
Wednesday, November 03, 2010
The only democratic body of the United States government is now controlled by a backwards political party based in fear and superstition. This is the result of the "lesser of the two evils" mindset. Inevitably, the greater evil will return. Until we break with this dogmatic viewpoint and build a class independent alternative to the the two-party dictatorship of capital, this shit-show will continue...
JOIN THE CAMPAIGN FOR A MASS PARTY OF LABOR!!
posted by Graeme at 4:11 PM Comments
Friday, October 29, 2010
Change
hunting and gathering to herding and settling
Things haven't always been this way and things won't always remain this way. Much like our underlying knowledge we will someday be no longer, we all understand this but don't particularly care to dwell on it. While we can physically see many of the more tangible things change- like our jobs, friends, homes, physical appearances- we sometimes don't see, or maybe even refuse to see, our institutions, our political realities, our "world," so to speak, change.
For much of the 200,000 years us homosapiens have been around, we've been communists. Now, as far as words in the English language with baggage attached to it go, communism must be close to the top of the list. Let me explain. Of course I'm not talking about the "Communism" we all learned about in school with its gulags, its Stalin, its dreary sunless and Godless skies; I'm talking about hunter-gatherer societies where every able bodied person went to find food and share it with the rest of the group. It took several of us slow, clawless, dull-teethed humans working together with our big brains to catch anything substantial to eat. Everything that was collected was consumed and the few tools and other items crafted were held in common. This went on for a mind-boggling amount of our existence. In fact, modern humans lived this way until the Neolithic Revolution, which is dated around 8000 to 12000 years ago. (So we were communists, albeit primitive ones, for at least 185,000 years!) The Neolithic Revolution ushered in agriculture, which made it possible for us to stop chasing food. Soon (at least historically speaking) the taming of animals provided another much more reliable source of food. From hunters and gatherers, we became herders and settlers.
whose surplus?
Eventually we got pretty good at growing food and raising livestock. We became so good that we produced more than we needed. A surplus started piling up. It didn't take long before someone figured out that if they controlled that surplus, they ruled the roost. This was the beginning of class society. The men who could talk to God argued it was God's will they control it; the warriors demanded they control it or they'll cut your head off; the Royalty argued it was God's will and they'll cut your head off; and so on. Inevitably, power sharing deals were made. Different modes of production brought different ruling classes, with their power still resting on their control of the surplus that was created. This was the case even during times of famine, whether natural or created, when there was no surplus. Once that power was taken, society was built around those relations as if things had always been that way, surplus or not.
But who created the surplus? For much of history, this was a fairly straight forward question. In a slave society, for example, clearly it's the slave who is creating the surplus for the slave owner. During Feudalism, it's the serf who works the land for the nobleman, who in turn is loyal to his King. In both these cases the exploitation, and brutal dehumanization, is clear. But there is also a growing of the productive forces. Both the slave owner and the nobleman were interested in increasing their own wealth and this created rivalries, wars, old Gods dying, new Gods being born, etc. But it also created an ability to produce more of a surplus, that is as mentioned, a growth in the productive forces.
don't tread on me
Eventually a ceiling is hit. There tends to be a lot more slaves than slave owners and sooner or later they often decide they are sick of being worked to death against their will. (Who would have thought?) And as the folks below the Mason-Dixon Line in the United States found out, there is a distinct limit of technological advancement that can be achieved under a slave economy. Technological innovation requires an educated work force and the last thing a slave owner who is attempting to breed tranquility wants is a tech savvy slave. Not to mention the fact that the slave would have exactly zero motivation to use the machines in a way that would be of use for the slave owner. The ruling class also used socially constructed racism, a huge issue still a problem today, as a way to divide the surplus creators and many slave owners no doubt believed their own rhetoric and thought their slaves weren't capable of learning anyway.
We saw a ceiling get hit in economies dominated by Feudal relations as well. A straw, as is said, broke the camel's back. A period of heightened class struggle seemingly erupted out of nowhere, but really was there all along buried under layers of contradictions. Even then the world was getting smaller. Kings from there were consolidating land by marrying queens from here. Skilled craftsman were making much better quality goods and new inventions were making production easier. Along with more goods came more selling of goods, and with that the rising of people who sold them. The merchants that did this found themselves in a historically important role. They also found themselves gaining more and more power. But they still were operating under the economic laws of Feudalism. From village to village within the same kingdom there were different currencies and taxes, creating an obvious nightmare for someone trying to sell goods. The land was tied to the nobility and passed on through birth as opposed to being up for sale. There was no urban work force to speak of as most worked the land as peasants or were craftsmen who specialized in one craft. Things needed to change in order for society to move forward.
capitalism
Obviously, I'm being brief, but the general direction of where I'm heading leads us to where we are now, with the merchants owning industry through a system of market exchange and private ownership of the means of production. This is called Capitalism. Our idea of what a country is was also developed in this period. Capitalists needed uniform currencies and laws in certain areas to govern trade, buying and selling, etc. That isn't to say, however, we made a clean break with times past. History certainly doesn't flow uninterrupted in a straight line. In France, the idealistic fervor of the rising bourgeoisie led to the French Revolution trying to go much further than was historically possible. This ushered in Napoleon, who was the right person at the right place and time (at least from a certain power structure's point of view). In the United States, on the other hand, the pragmatic ideals of many of the leaders allowed a backwards slave society to exist well into the middle of the 19th century, until the Civil War (which would be more accurately called the finale of the U.S. Revolution) finally secured a victory for Capitalism.
Capitalism is tricky. It takes something that is relatively simple- production and consumption of goods- and confuses it to the point of creating complex financial instruments, such as derivatives, that no one seems to really understand. Those very few individuals who own industry are constantly looking for new ways to turn money into more money, and again, as those of us in the U.S. are keen to, this means a shift away from manufacturing actual goods.
Despite the lack of transparency, we can gather that Capitalism isn't any different than other modes of production in the sense that a surplus created. But it is different regarding how it's created. Capitalism needs free laborers, that is people who are free to sell their labor power on the open market. When we go look for a job we are advertising ourselves as someone who can make our employer money. We often give this little thought as it has been our reality our entire existence. But what are the greater implications of the profit motive? And where does profit come from?
Because we distribute goods on the basis of creating profit for private individuals, some things are inevitable. There are those with great amounts of wealth and those with little to none. This is certain so long as we operate under the profit motive. There is no getting around it. It is an endless source of misery and death for millions upon millions of people. We are told much of this comes down to how hard people work. And to some extent, there is truth in this. Certainly Capitalism allows a degree of social mobility. It would be too obvious, like the slave and Feudal systems of old, if it didn't. Within certain contexts people can gain more wealth by putting forth more effort, knowing how to position themselves favorably within certain structures, and so on. This is the same in many organizations- from organized crime, to a multinational corporation, to a totalitarian government. But even a tacit grasp of reality quickly dilutes the significance of this argument. Surely know one can disagree that if I was born a female in the slums of Kinshasa I wouldn't be sitting in an air conditioned room right now with a fridge full of food, car in the drive way, and HD satellite TV in the living room. This is not because of my "work ethic," but because of the environment I was born into. That obviously is an extreme example, but the "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" argument conveniently fails to account for the even this, let alone the more subtle environmental differences within our own personal communities.
So what about profit? Capitalism demands profit in order to stay in business. But who creates the profit? We are told profit is created by a company selling a commodity for more money than it cost them to acquire or produce it. In other words, profit is made during exchange. Profit is solely dependent on the price of a commodity. This effectively shuts production out of the equation. Production is a mystery, not to be talked about during our economics classes. There is a distinct reason for this. In reality, profit is based off of a commodity's value. Not only its exchange value, but also its use value. (For example, a hammer's exchange value is how much it costs at the Home Depot. Its use value is its ability to pound a nail into the wall.) When we look up the Wall Street Journal's dress, we see that value is actually created during production. Labor, from research and development to the actual transformation of raw materials into a exchangeable commodity, adds value to a substance. A pile of cotton has a certain amount of value. It isn't until labor transforms it into a comfortable yet fashionable t-shirt that its value increases. The price reflects that value. Of course the price is also affected by stuff like supply and demand, marketing driven fads, etc. But in the final analysis, despite how distorted the relationship between price and use value can sometimes be, there's a definite amount of value created by definite amount of socially necessary labor time. (Socially necessary means exactly that. Even if it takes you a day to do something that takes someone else an hour, tough luck, the socially necessary labor time to produce that good is an hour.)
the secret that shook the world
The implications of this are astounding. If labor is what adds value to a good, how come labor isn't reimbursed fully for this? Why is it capital treats labor as just another expense, like a machine or a building? This is the primary contradiction Marx exposed in his famous works entitled "Capital." Because the Capitalists have ownership over industry, they are able to take the surplus value created home for themselves. This allows them to accumulate vast amounts of wealth, wealth that they didn't create. This is how workers are exploited under Capitalism. They are exploited, not only in the moralistic sense, but also in a very scientific sense. Even those who are paid relatively well have to be paid less than the value they create or else there would be no profit for the Capitalist to usurp.
This secret was enough to alter the very foundations of economics. The labor theory of value was scrapped. You won't hear any mainstream economist talk about it today, even though Adam Smith, the father of Capitalism, firmly understood it as a basis of his theories. This is not surprising. During other modes of production there were also loads and loads of charlatans who made quite comfortable livings convincing people things today are how they have always been and how they'll always be. Any sort of real change is to be "unrealistic" or "radical." Today, ours write for the NY Times and talk on CNN.
TINA
There is no alternative. After the collapse of the totalitarian distortion of "socialism" that existed in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, this was the answer we got if we dared question the omnipotent wisdom of the market. I always thought this was a bit strange given it was coming from the same message machine that also told us we can "be anything we want." The words "anything" and "no alternative" seem to clash a bit. In fact, it's pretty much the exact opposite. We can't be anything we want, a sentiment I believe most children can grasp, and there is an alternative. There always is.
And the alternative isn't the failed example of the Soviet Union, as so commonly is said. There are many reason why Russia turned out the way it did. When the Bolsheviks took power, they intended to be the flicker that started the flame of a world revolution. Just like the Capitalists had done away with Feudalism, they expected the Socialists to do away with Capitalism. But when the spreading of the revolution failed, primarily because of the working class leadership in the developed countries, we saw it degenerate. Similar to the French Revolution allowing a situation in which Napoleon was able to take power, the objective situation following the Russian Revolution allowed Stalin to rise. Without the spreading of the Revolution into the more advanced countries, it would die. The original Bolsheviks knew this, which is why Stalin and his rising bureaucracy had them all executed.
The Stalinist bureaucracy's power was, however, based on a certain economic structure. This was something that went largely unpredicted by Karl Marx and Frederich Engels, the founders of scientific socialism. While the state was in effect a workers' state, meaning the commanding heights of the economy had been nationalized and were potentially able to be controlled by the people who actually did the work, political power rested with a bureaucratic elite. Much like Napoleon charging through Europe abolishing serfdom and replacing it with the economic structure that benefited his rule, the Stalinists shored up as much influence as they could post WWII. There were the more subservient bureaucracies throughout the Eastern Bloc, but there also were some who became independently powerful while adopting a very similar structure. China's peasant revolution, for example, took Russia's ready made degenerated state and basically started where they left off. But this hardly meant the Chinese were pawns of the Soviets, nor were the Vietnamese Stalinists pawns of the Chinese. If they largely owed their liberation to themselves (Tito's Partisans in Yugoslavia are another example) they earned a degree of independence. This was something the Capitalist west failed to understand, and it showed, particularly in Vietnam, put also in various Latin American countries. Given Stalinism, carefully portraying itself as "Socialism" or "Communism," was the only major alternative to the imperial domination of the colonialist countries, most of the anti-colonial struggles ended up adopting some form of this distorted ideology. This confused, and continues to confuse, many of the left in the developed countries.
You suck, but so do you
During the Cold War the Soviet Union and the United States were engaged in a war of propaganda, among other things. What's so interesting about this war of ideas is the glaring fact that both sides really didn't have to make that much stuff up. It's true, the United States was, and is, an extremely financially polarized society that despite being the richest in history fails to provide even basic living standards for many of its citizens. It's also true that the United States is perpetually at war in an attempt to maintain its post-WWII worldwide dominance. This has cost millions of people their lives. In contrast, it's true the Soviet Union was a ruled by a totalitarian bureaucracy that regularly murdered and jailed citizens that dared question the privilege of the ruling stratum. It's not surprising those who benefited from this arrangement had no desire to highlight the fact that U.S. Capitalism at one time, and even more so in western Europe, gave enough concessions to allow a fairly stable standard of living to a sizable chunk of its population. (This period, however, is now over. These are the "good old days" we see the "Tea Party" movement today yearn for in a sad, historically ignorant way.) Nor is it surprising U.S. imperialism had no desire to highlight the enormous gains of the planned economy. Russia went from a backwards peasant country to producing the first satellite to orbit the earth, all within 40 years. That's simply incredible. That would be like Pakistan today placing the first human on Mars a couple generations from now. It's almost unthinkable. But such is the power of humanity harnessed with a rational plan of production.
real change
The Soviet Union failed because they lacked democracy. It's one thing to plan national space program bureaucratically from the top, but it's quite another to produce people's favorite pair of jeans or the toothpaste most would prefer to use. But just as Capitalism shows us the enormous productive power we hold, the "Communist" countries showed us how we could potentially harness that power to make sure every single human has the basic necessities to shape his or her life in the way they see fit. Democracy provides a check and balance to planning. It's needed at every level.
This is the primary concern of those with power. Democracy threatens power. This is why they demonize government, even though our current government governs a state that's primary purpose is to keep current property relations intact. The idea of "big government" is translated to the average person as a long wait at the post office. In reality, the ruling class isn't real concerned with mix-ups at the DMV. They are, however, very much concerned with the theoretical possibility of government being used to take away their privileges.
This is why we must engage in the political process, no matter how corrupt and ridiculous it may be. Right now in the United States we have no political party, but this will have to change. The working class will be forced to enter into politics as Capitalism no longer has the room to offer as many concessions as it did before. (I'm involved in a campaign that calls for a mass party of labor which I urge you to check out.) Apathy is not atrophy, and American workers will move. And when they do, the world will shake.
It's extremely simple, but also unforgivingly complex. For me, and perhaps this isn't so flattering, reshaping society isn't about "the common good" so much as it's about individual freedom. I want a world where much of my life consists of me doing what I want, not what I'm financially compelled to do. If we allocate the world's resources based on need as opposite to profit, we are actually providing the only possible way to have true individual freedom. It simply can't be done so long as the economy is controlled by a few people; be it kings and queens, state bureaucrats, or domineering capitalists. We have got to take power. This is our historical task.
I WOKE UP DURING MY AMERICAN DREAM
Wednesday, November 03, 2010
The only democratic body of the United States government is now controlled by a backwards political party based in fear and superstition. This is the result of the "lesser of the two evils" mindset. Inevitably, the greater evil will return. Until we break with this dogmatic viewpoint and build a class independent alternative to the the two-party dictatorship of capital, this shit-show will continue...
JOIN THE CAMPAIGN FOR A MASS PARTY OF LABOR!!
posted by Graeme at 4:11 PM Comments
Friday, October 29, 2010
Change
hunting and gathering to herding and settling
Things haven't always been this way and things won't always remain this way. Much like our underlying knowledge we will someday be no longer, we all understand this but don't particularly care to dwell on it. While we can physically see many of the more tangible things change- like our jobs, friends, homes, physical appearances- we sometimes don't see, or maybe even refuse to see, our institutions, our political realities, our "world," so to speak, change.
For much of the 200,000 years us homosapiens have been around, we've been communists. Now, as far as words in the English language with baggage attached to it go, communism must be close to the top of the list. Let me explain. Of course I'm not talking about the "Communism" we all learned about in school with its gulags, its Stalin, its dreary sunless and Godless skies; I'm talking about hunter-gatherer societies where every able bodied person went to find food and share it with the rest of the group. It took several of us slow, clawless, dull-teethed humans working together with our big brains to catch anything substantial to eat. Everything that was collected was consumed and the few tools and other items crafted were held in common. This went on for a mind-boggling amount of our existence. In fact, modern humans lived this way until the Neolithic Revolution, which is dated around 8000 to 12000 years ago. (So we were communists, albeit primitive ones, for at least 185,000 years!) The Neolithic Revolution ushered in agriculture, which made it possible for us to stop chasing food. Soon (at least historically speaking) the taming of animals provided another much more reliable source of food. From hunters and gatherers, we became herders and settlers.
whose surplus?
Eventually we got pretty good at growing food and raising livestock. We became so good that we produced more than we needed. A surplus started piling up. It didn't take long before someone figured out that if they controlled that surplus, they ruled the roost. This was the beginning of class society. The men who could talk to God argued it was God's will they control it; the warriors demanded they control it or they'll cut your head off; the Royalty argued it was God's will and they'll cut your head off; and so on. Inevitably, power sharing deals were made. Different modes of production brought different ruling classes, with their power still resting on their control of the surplus that was created. This was the case even during times of famine, whether natural or created, when there was no surplus. Once that power was taken, society was built around those relations as if things had always been that way, surplus or not.
But who created the surplus? For much of history, this was a fairly straight forward question. In a slave society, for example, clearly it's the slave who is creating the surplus for the slave owner. During Feudalism, it's the serf who works the land for the nobleman, who in turn is loyal to his King. In both these cases the exploitation, and brutal dehumanization, is clear. But there is also a growing of the productive forces. Both the slave owner and the nobleman were interested in increasing their own wealth and this created rivalries, wars, old Gods dying, new Gods being born, etc. But it also created an ability to produce more of a surplus, that is as mentioned, a growth in the productive forces.
don't tread on me
Eventually a ceiling is hit. There tends to be a lot more slaves than slave owners and sooner or later they often decide they are sick of being worked to death against their will. (Who would have thought?) And as the folks below the Mason-Dixon Line in the United States found out, there is a distinct limit of technological advancement that can be achieved under a slave economy. Technological innovation requires an educated work force and the last thing a slave owner who is attempting to breed tranquility wants is a tech savvy slave. Not to mention the fact that the slave would have exactly zero motivation to use the machines in a way that would be of use for the slave owner. The ruling class also used socially constructed racism, a huge issue still a problem today, as a way to divide the surplus creators and many slave owners no doubt believed their own rhetoric and thought their slaves weren't capable of learning anyway.
We saw a ceiling get hit in economies dominated by Feudal relations as well. A straw, as is said, broke the camel's back. A period of heightened class struggle seemingly erupted out of nowhere, but really was there all along buried under layers of contradictions. Even then the world was getting smaller. Kings from there were consolidating land by marrying queens from here. Skilled craftsman were making much better quality goods and new inventions were making production easier. Along with more goods came more selling of goods, and with that the rising of people who sold them. The merchants that did this found themselves in a historically important role. They also found themselves gaining more and more power. But they still were operating under the economic laws of Feudalism. From village to village within the same kingdom there were different currencies and taxes, creating an obvious nightmare for someone trying to sell goods. The land was tied to the nobility and passed on through birth as opposed to being up for sale. There was no urban work force to speak of as most worked the land as peasants or were craftsmen who specialized in one craft. Things needed to change in order for society to move forward.
capitalism
Obviously, I'm being brief, but the general direction of where I'm heading leads us to where we are now, with the merchants owning industry through a system of market exchange and private ownership of the means of production. This is called Capitalism. Our idea of what a country is was also developed in this period. Capitalists needed uniform currencies and laws in certain areas to govern trade, buying and selling, etc. That isn't to say, however, we made a clean break with times past. History certainly doesn't flow uninterrupted in a straight line. In France, the idealistic fervor of the rising bourgeoisie led to the French Revolution trying to go much further than was historically possible. This ushered in Napoleon, who was the right person at the right place and time (at least from a certain power structure's point of view). In the United States, on the other hand, the pragmatic ideals of many of the leaders allowed a backwards slave society to exist well into the middle of the 19th century, until the Civil War (which would be more accurately called the finale of the U.S. Revolution) finally secured a victory for Capitalism.
Capitalism is tricky. It takes something that is relatively simple- production and consumption of goods- and confuses it to the point of creating complex financial instruments, such as derivatives, that no one seems to really understand. Those very few individuals who own industry are constantly looking for new ways to turn money into more money, and again, as those of us in the U.S. are keen to, this means a shift away from manufacturing actual goods.
Despite the lack of transparency, we can gather that Capitalism isn't any different than other modes of production in the sense that a surplus created. But it is different regarding how it's created. Capitalism needs free laborers, that is people who are free to sell their labor power on the open market. When we go look for a job we are advertising ourselves as someone who can make our employer money. We often give this little thought as it has been our reality our entire existence. But what are the greater implications of the profit motive? And where does profit come from?
Because we distribute goods on the basis of creating profit for private individuals, some things are inevitable. There are those with great amounts of wealth and those with little to none. This is certain so long as we operate under the profit motive. There is no getting around it. It is an endless source of misery and death for millions upon millions of people. We are told much of this comes down to how hard people work. And to some extent, there is truth in this. Certainly Capitalism allows a degree of social mobility. It would be too obvious, like the slave and Feudal systems of old, if it didn't. Within certain contexts people can gain more wealth by putting forth more effort, knowing how to position themselves favorably within certain structures, and so on. This is the same in many organizations- from organized crime, to a multinational corporation, to a totalitarian government. But even a tacit grasp of reality quickly dilutes the significance of this argument. Surely know one can disagree that if I was born a female in the slums of Kinshasa I wouldn't be sitting in an air conditioned room right now with a fridge full of food, car in the drive way, and HD satellite TV in the living room. This is not because of my "work ethic," but because of the environment I was born into. That obviously is an extreme example, but the "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" argument conveniently fails to account for the even this, let alone the more subtle environmental differences within our own personal communities.
So what about profit? Capitalism demands profit in order to stay in business. But who creates the profit? We are told profit is created by a company selling a commodity for more money than it cost them to acquire or produce it. In other words, profit is made during exchange. Profit is solely dependent on the price of a commodity. This effectively shuts production out of the equation. Production is a mystery, not to be talked about during our economics classes. There is a distinct reason for this. In reality, profit is based off of a commodity's value. Not only its exchange value, but also its use value. (For example, a hammer's exchange value is how much it costs at the Home Depot. Its use value is its ability to pound a nail into the wall.) When we look up the Wall Street Journal's dress, we see that value is actually created during production. Labor, from research and development to the actual transformation of raw materials into a exchangeable commodity, adds value to a substance. A pile of cotton has a certain amount of value. It isn't until labor transforms it into a comfortable yet fashionable t-shirt that its value increases. The price reflects that value. Of course the price is also affected by stuff like supply and demand, marketing driven fads, etc. But in the final analysis, despite how distorted the relationship between price and use value can sometimes be, there's a definite amount of value created by definite amount of socially necessary labor time. (Socially necessary means exactly that. Even if it takes you a day to do something that takes someone else an hour, tough luck, the socially necessary labor time to produce that good is an hour.)
the secret that shook the world
The implications of this are astounding. If labor is what adds value to a good, how come labor isn't reimbursed fully for this? Why is it capital treats labor as just another expense, like a machine or a building? This is the primary contradiction Marx exposed in his famous works entitled "Capital." Because the Capitalists have ownership over industry, they are able to take the surplus value created home for themselves. This allows them to accumulate vast amounts of wealth, wealth that they didn't create. This is how workers are exploited under Capitalism. They are exploited, not only in the moralistic sense, but also in a very scientific sense. Even those who are paid relatively well have to be paid less than the value they create or else there would be no profit for the Capitalist to usurp.
This secret was enough to alter the very foundations of economics. The labor theory of value was scrapped. You won't hear any mainstream economist talk about it today, even though Adam Smith, the father of Capitalism, firmly understood it as a basis of his theories. This is not surprising. During other modes of production there were also loads and loads of charlatans who made quite comfortable livings convincing people things today are how they have always been and how they'll always be. Any sort of real change is to be "unrealistic" or "radical." Today, ours write for the NY Times and talk on CNN.
TINA
There is no alternative. After the collapse of the totalitarian distortion of "socialism" that existed in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, this was the answer we got if we dared question the omnipotent wisdom of the market. I always thought this was a bit strange given it was coming from the same message machine that also told us we can "be anything we want." The words "anything" and "no alternative" seem to clash a bit. In fact, it's pretty much the exact opposite. We can't be anything we want, a sentiment I believe most children can grasp, and there is an alternative. There always is.
And the alternative isn't the failed example of the Soviet Union, as so commonly is said. There are many reason why Russia turned out the way it did. When the Bolsheviks took power, they intended to be the flicker that started the flame of a world revolution. Just like the Capitalists had done away with Feudalism, they expected the Socialists to do away with Capitalism. But when the spreading of the revolution failed, primarily because of the working class leadership in the developed countries, we saw it degenerate. Similar to the French Revolution allowing a situation in which Napoleon was able to take power, the objective situation following the Russian Revolution allowed Stalin to rise. Without the spreading of the Revolution into the more advanced countries, it would die. The original Bolsheviks knew this, which is why Stalin and his rising bureaucracy had them all executed.
The Stalinist bureaucracy's power was, however, based on a certain economic structure. This was something that went largely unpredicted by Karl Marx and Frederich Engels, the founders of scientific socialism. While the state was in effect a workers' state, meaning the commanding heights of the economy had been nationalized and were potentially able to be controlled by the people who actually did the work, political power rested with a bureaucratic elite. Much like Napoleon charging through Europe abolishing serfdom and replacing it with the economic structure that benefited his rule, the Stalinists shored up as much influence as they could post WWII. There were the more subservient bureaucracies throughout the Eastern Bloc, but there also were some who became independently powerful while adopting a very similar structure. China's peasant revolution, for example, took Russia's ready made degenerated state and basically started where they left off. But this hardly meant the Chinese were pawns of the Soviets, nor were the Vietnamese Stalinists pawns of the Chinese. If they largely owed their liberation to themselves (Tito's Partisans in Yugoslavia are another example) they earned a degree of independence. This was something the Capitalist west failed to understand, and it showed, particularly in Vietnam, put also in various Latin American countries. Given Stalinism, carefully portraying itself as "Socialism" or "Communism," was the only major alternative to the imperial domination of the colonialist countries, most of the anti-colonial struggles ended up adopting some form of this distorted ideology. This confused, and continues to confuse, many of the left in the developed countries.
You suck, but so do you
During the Cold War the Soviet Union and the United States were engaged in a war of propaganda, among other things. What's so interesting about this war of ideas is the glaring fact that both sides really didn't have to make that much stuff up. It's true, the United States was, and is, an extremely financially polarized society that despite being the richest in history fails to provide even basic living standards for many of its citizens. It's also true that the United States is perpetually at war in an attempt to maintain its post-WWII worldwide dominance. This has cost millions of people their lives. In contrast, it's true the Soviet Union was a ruled by a totalitarian bureaucracy that regularly murdered and jailed citizens that dared question the privilege of the ruling stratum. It's not surprising those who benefited from this arrangement had no desire to highlight the fact that U.S. Capitalism at one time, and even more so in western Europe, gave enough concessions to allow a fairly stable standard of living to a sizable chunk of its population. (This period, however, is now over. These are the "good old days" we see the "Tea Party" movement today yearn for in a sad, historically ignorant way.) Nor is it surprising U.S. imperialism had no desire to highlight the enormous gains of the planned economy. Russia went from a backwards peasant country to producing the first satellite to orbit the earth, all within 40 years. That's simply incredible. That would be like Pakistan today placing the first human on Mars a couple generations from now. It's almost unthinkable. But such is the power of humanity harnessed with a rational plan of production.
real change
The Soviet Union failed because they lacked democracy. It's one thing to plan national space program bureaucratically from the top, but it's quite another to produce people's favorite pair of jeans or the toothpaste most would prefer to use. But just as Capitalism shows us the enormous productive power we hold, the "Communist" countries showed us how we could potentially harness that power to make sure every single human has the basic necessities to shape his or her life in the way they see fit. Democracy provides a check and balance to planning. It's needed at every level.
This is the primary concern of those with power. Democracy threatens power. This is why they demonize government, even though our current government governs a state that's primary purpose is to keep current property relations intact. The idea of "big government" is translated to the average person as a long wait at the post office. In reality, the ruling class isn't real concerned with mix-ups at the DMV. They are, however, very much concerned with the theoretical possibility of government being used to take away their privileges.
This is why we must engage in the political process, no matter how corrupt and ridiculous it may be. Right now in the United States we have no political party, but this will have to change. The working class will be forced to enter into politics as Capitalism no longer has the room to offer as many concessions as it did before. (I'm involved in a campaign that calls for a mass party of labor which I urge you to check out.) Apathy is not atrophy, and American workers will move. And when they do, the world will shake.
It's extremely simple, but also unforgivingly complex. For me, and perhaps this isn't so flattering, reshaping society isn't about "the common good" so much as it's about individual freedom. I want a world where much of my life consists of me doing what I want, not what I'm financially compelled to do. If we allocate the world's resources based on need as opposite to profit, we are actually providing the only possible way to have true individual freedom. It simply can't be done so long as the economy is controlled by a few people; be it kings and queens, state bureaucrats, or domineering capitalists. We have got to take power. This is our historical task.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)