With growing disillusionment in capitalist “democracy,” more and more people are looking towards alternatives to provide the answers they need. As Marxists, our role is to guide others out of the darkness of liberalism and toward the liberating path of Socialism. With that in mind, one of the first steps is to clear up the confusion, which mainly stems from propaganda and anti-communist movements, about a concept at the very core of our ideology: the dictatorship of the proletariat. I aim to be brief, clear, and accessible to all readers as I do my best to make understood the meaning of dictatorship and how it is not about oppression, but liberation of all people currently being oppressed.

The dictatorship of the proletariat is one of the more controversial topics within Socialist and Communist politics. The word ‘dictatorship’ strikes fear in the hearts of many, and can stoke the flame of a million skeptics with a single blow. Discussions of the dictatorship of the proletariat tend to fixate on the word ‘dictatorship’ while ignoring the class content—’of the proletariat.’ This superficial reaction, shaped by decades of propaganda, demands correction.

Marx, from the very first mention of the dictatorship of the proletariat, repeatedly clarified what exactly this meant, repeatedly fought against opportunism (that is to say so-called representatives of the working-class collaborating with the very forces that dominate us)–a term he knew would invite distortion. Yet, the opportunist still persists. Our struggle continues to fight against this, to guide people onto the path of proletarian dictatorship, to clear up all confusion and purposeful slandering of the truly freeing vision behind the term. In order to fight against those who weaponize this idea, one must first understand its conception, i.e., the material and historical womb from which it was born.

The Origins of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat

…the proletariat rallies more and more around revolutionary socialism, around communism, for which the bourgeoisie has itself invented the name of Blanqui. This socialism is the declaration of the permanence of the revolution, the class dictatorship of the proletariat as the necessary transit point to the abolition of class distinctions generally, to the abolition of all the relations of production on which they rest, to the abolition of all the social relations that correspond to these relations of production, to the revolutionizing of all the ideas that result from these social relations.

— Karl Marx, The Class Struggles in France, 1848-1850, 1850, Marxists.org

Louis Auguste Blanqui, from whom Blanquism derives, was a revolutionary that was imprisoned for over thirty years. His ideology was heavily focused on the revolution itself, and not so much as to what society would look like after the revolution. Blanquists believe that a very small group should lead the revolution and establish a temporary dictatorship in order to redistribute wealth in a just manner. This marks a clear break from the class-conscious foundation of Marxist ideology, which sees revolution not as the task of a small elite, but of the organized working-class.

The first mention of proletarian dictatorship by Marx traces all the way back to 1850, to the early stages of his and Engels’ work. From its earliest days, Marxism has emphasized the necessity of proletarian dictatorship. The quote above from Marx’s The Class Struggles in France, 1848-1850, is the earliest mention by Marx of proletarian dictatorship, and what is even more outstanding than its age in relation to Marxism is how fleshed out this necessary idea already is: “…the class dictatorship of the proletariat as the necessary transit point to the abolition of class distinctions generally…”, from the first mention of it, Marx makes it very clear that proletarian dictatorship is necessary in abolishing all class distinctions and antagonisms entirely from society, i.e., in realizing Communism.

There is no revolution without a revolutionary change in who controls the state. From the minority using state apparatuses to oppress the majority to the majority building new state machinery as the mechanism for suppressing counter-revolutionism. This, in essence, is the dictatorship of the proletariat — power wielded by the hand of the majority for the first time in all the history of class society.

Proletarian vs Bourgeois Dictatorship

In order to inspire a change in society toward proletarian dictatorship we must first educate the masses, help them see that we already live under a dictatorship, dominated by the very rich who hold immense political power, on top of their inhumane amounts of wealth, and have control over every aspect of political, social, and economic life. Democracy is not a form of governance, but a measure of what class of people benefit from the government in charge. The control over the majority by a tiny minority is the essence of capitalism, i.e., bourgeois dictatorship, or, if you like, liberal democracy, the form of control and oppression that we’ve lived under and been subjected to for far too long.

The first step is to clearly expose the countless injustices perpetuated daily by the bourgeois dictatorship—those who claim to represent you and me while serving their own class interests. Let no travesty wither away in silence, let no misstep go unchecked, let no politicians consider themselves invincible. We must take on the role of the microscope in examining the current government and that of the megaphone in relaying their constant mistakes and wrongdoings to the people.

A workers’ government is one in which no official, no parliamentarian, no representative, officer, leader, etc. makes more than the average worker’s wage. The natural remuneration weeds out those who seek those positions for their wealth, privilege, influence, etc. This government brings to the forefront leaders who are dedicated in their service to the people with whom they share a class background, who know the struggles of the people and are better fit to deal with them than any politician born in the bourgeois cradle. This is the manifestation of proletarian dictatorship, which very clearly shows the striking differences between it and the dictatorship of the bourgeois class.

What we need is a government that is created by the working-class, for the working-class, and constituted of those who belong to the working-class. This government has the interests of the majority rather than current governments that exist to serve corporations and a handful of billionaires. A government made up of the people it governs is true representation.

A government of and for the people, that is proletarian dictatorship; a government not of the people, but for profiting off the suffering of the people, that is bourgeois dictatorship, that is capitalist government, that is your government, and that is my government.

The dictatorship of the proletariat is not about oppression, but liberation—the transfer of power from the few to the many, the unlocking of the chains that hold us down. It is a necessary phase in building a world free of class domination.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Andrew Lehrer.

Image by Nick Fewings.

West Berlin—the capitalist side of Berlin during the Cold War, was a city of radical ferment, especially in the 1960s into the 1980s. Groups calling themselves communist mixed with counterculture radicals, anarchists and varying combinations of any and all of the above. One of the best known of these groups called themselves the 2 Juni Bewegung—the 2^nd of June Movement. Many of its members had previously been part of a loosely-knit band of provocateurs calling themselves Hasch Rebels. Of course, the Hasch referred to hashish, which was the most common form of cannabis available in Europe at the time. Like the Yippies in the United States, these folks were anti-authoritarian and leftlist, with most of them being from the German working class. Their targets included the police, the court system (which included many former Nazis), the mainstream press and US/West German imperialism, especially as it revealed itself in postwar Germany.

On June 2, 1967, many if not all of the individuals who would became the 2 Juni Bewegung took part in a protest against the Shah of Iran, who was visiting the city of Berlin. The Shah, who was the largest benefactor of US aid in the region we call the Middle East at the time, was gaining world renown for the repressive police state he was building in Iran. The protest turned violent when police working with Iran’s secret police the SAVAK, began to attack the crowd. A young man named Benne Ohnesborg was shot and killed. Hence, the name, 2 Juni Bewegung.

Although it certainly had its detractors, there was a relatively strong current in the western new left that supported and engaged in armed struggle. The reasons for this ranged from the political to the personal; from an impatience with the protest movements to a genuine attempt to create a revolutionary situation. Perhaps the best known of these groups engaged in armed struggle were Italy’s Red Brigades (BR), West Germany’s Red Army Fraktion (RAF) and the Weather Underground Organization (WUO) in the United States. This list does not not include groups from the Black liberation and other third world liberation movements in large part because of their very different relationship to US imperialism. The 2 Juni Bewegung should also be included in this list. The recent publication of From Hash Rebels to Urban Guerrillas: A Documentary History of 2 Juni Bewegung makes this quite clear.

Of the four groups mentioned above, it’s reasonable to state that each of them had their own approach. In other words, each group developed their praxis according to their understanding of what would be most effective for the role they hoped to play. Of course, that understanding was based on the makeup of their membership, their experiences in the greater society, who they were trying to engage and what their short and medium term goals were. For example, the Red Army Fraktion saw itself as part of the worldwide struggle against US imperialism—in league with the aremd fighters in the Vietnamese National Liberation Front and the Palestinian Liberation Organization. On the other hand, Italy’s Red Brigades considered their role to be one of organizing the working class of Italy into a revolutionary force. The Weather Underground, although originating from a desire to organize the white working class youth in the United States into a fighting force behind the Black revolutionary vanguard, ultimately spent most of its most active years acting more in the vein of the RAF, serving as something of a fifth column in support of the Vietnamese and other anti-imperialist/colonial struggles.

The 2 Juni Bewegung formed with the intention of fomenting revolution inside the metropole—the heart of western imperialism. Unlike the RAF and the WUO, it operated both underground and aboveground. This provided it with a consequent level of support among proletarian youth working and otherwise. This dynamic manifested itself in instances such as the distribution of leaflets in West Berlin after the group kidnapped conservative mayoral candidate Peter Lorenz and demanded the release of political prisoners in Germany. After 2 Juni Bewegung members and supporters provided the leaflets to various allies in the Berlin counterculture community, the leaflets were spread throughout the city. When all was said and done, between ten and twenty thousand were passed out, all while the city was locked down while the authorities searched for Lorenz, who was released unharmed after the prisoners had safely arrived in the then socialist country of South Yemen.

The basis of the group’s theory is simple and was one shared by many leftist groups in Europe, North America and elsewhere around the world. Its essence is expressed in this excerpt from a pamphlet written by the left feminist group Rote Zora in 1987: “capitalist accumulation turns all human activities, expressions and material conditions for survival into commodities.” The group’s analysis presciently displays a potential relevance to today, an example of which can be found in the closing statement of member Klaus Viehmann at his trial in 1981 (and reprinted with edits in the magazine Radikal later that year.) After discussing the state of the Left and anarchist movements, the counterculture and the Greens, the place of violence and the expanding police state from the street to the prisons, Viehmann turns his attention to the role of computer technology; “the collection of data,” he writes. “is one side of this dirty coin, and the access to it is the other.”(262) He continues in this vein, predicting the advent of a form of technofascism—where those with the computers can take over the world without leaving their secure facility. .

From Hash Rebels to Urban Guerrillas is a well-curated collection of many of the group’s leaflets, theoretical writings, transcripts of interviews and debates. Like they did with their earlier publication of the Red Army Fraktion’s documentary history, PM Press and Canada’s Kersplebedeb have produced a vibrant and informative text that is simultaneously history, prediction and even a potential source for contemporary organizing. The impeccable translation brings the lively, often impassioned and even humorous content of the originals to the English-speaking reader with all of it intact.

The post The Rebellion of the Hippie Lumpen in Capitalist Berlin appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ron Jacobs.

Image by Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona.

Conditions for working people continue to get worse. The right to strike, or to join a union, is denied by increasing numbers of the world’s governments. The 2023 Global Rights Index report issued by the International Trade Union Confederation makes for grim reading, as has consistently been the case for the decade that the ITUC has issued its yearly reports.

Once again, there is no country on Earth that fully protects workers’ rights, the Global Rights Index report informs us. Nothing new here, as this was the case in the 2022 report, and all the reports before that. Neoliberalism does not have a human face.

More

The post It’s a Capitalist World appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Pete Dolack.

The latest campaign against “anti-socialist behavior” is yet another example of Pyongyang enforcing its vaguely written Rejection of Reactionary Thought and Culture Act, which it passed in 2020 with the intent of eliminating activities deemed to be South Korean, foreign or capitalist cultural practices. 

While violators of the law are often citizens caught watching and distributing South Korean and Western media, it has also been used to crack down on window tinting, speaking and texting using South Korean slang or word spellings, teaching youth how to dance, or changing their hair color and wearing unapproved clothing styles.

Severe punishments for what would never be considered a crime outside of North Korea have included long prison sentences and even execution.

Though the law technically applies to both men and women, the current crackdown only targets women who wear shorts.

The move to stop women from showing off too much skin below the knee is meant to preserve the tradition of socialist etiquette and lifestyle, a resident of the northwestern province of North Pyongan told RFA’s Korean Service Tuesday on condition of anonymity to speak freely.  

“As more and more women wear shorts in the cities, including here in Sinuiju, the authorities are writing them up for violations of dress etiquette,” she said. “Yesterday, a police patrol arrested 10 women in the marketplace for wearing shorts. They had to write a statement of self-criticism and sign a document saying they would face legal consequences if they were caught wearing shorts again.

Women’s burden

Most families in North Korea depend on women as the breadwinner. Men must report to their government-assigned jobs, where their salaries are nowhere near enough to live on, so families get by on the income of side businesses, which fall to the women to run.

Given the huge responsibility that falls on them, citizens are angry that the government won’t let them wear what they want in hot weather, the resident said.

“The residents complain about authorities, who confine and terrorize these women who are responsible for their families’ livelihood, making them spend all day in the police station just because they wore shorts.”

A resident of South Pyongan province, north of the capital Pyongyang, told RFA on condition of anonymity for safety reasons that more women are wearing shorts in public this summer due to a heat wave. 

“In response, the authorities are stopping women who wear shorts on the streets, saying that it is not in line with socialist tradition and lifestyle,” she said.

It was not the first time that police arrested women for their fashion choices, the South Pyongan resident said.

“A few years ago, they were cracking down on wide-legged skirt pants, saying they were Japanese fashion,” she said. “Many women are complaining, asking why men can wear shorts and women can’t. They are saying that the authorities are discriminating against us.”

The shorts ban for women is not the first time North Korea has applied the rules differently across genders.

Last month, RFA reported that North Korea enacted a public smoking ban for all citizens, but authorities only punished female smokers. Residents in that report pointed out the double standard, noting that the country’s leader Kim Jong Un is often pictured in state media with a lit cigarette.

Translated by Leejin J. Chung. Edited by Eugene Whong.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Son Hyemin for RFA Korean.

Kurt Nahar (Suriname), Untitled 2369, 2008.

On 20 July, the United Nations (UN) released a document called A New Agenda for Peace. In the opening section of the report, UN Secretary-General António Guterres made some remarks that bear close reflection:

We are now at an inflection point. The post-Cold War period is over. A transition is under way to a new global order. While its contours remain to be defined, leaders around the world have referred to multipolarity as one of its defining traits. In this moment of transition, power dynamics have become increasingly fragmented as new poles of influence emerge, new economic blocs form and axes of contestation are redefined. There is greater competition among major powers and a loss of trust between the Global North and South. A number of States increasingly seek to enhance their strategic independence, while trying to manoeuvre across existing dividing lines. The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic and the war in Ukraine have hastened this process.

We are, he says, in a moment of transition. The world is moving away from the post-Cold War era, in which the United States and its close allies, Europe and Japan, (collectively known as the Triad) exerted their unipolar power over the rest of the world, to a new period that some refer to as ‘multipolarity’. The COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine accelerated developments that were already in motion before 2020. The gradual attrition of the Western bloc has led to contestation between the Triad and newly emerging powers. This contestation is most fierce in the Global South, where trust of the Global North is the weakest it has been in a generation. The poorer nations, in the current moment, are not looking to yoke themselves to either the fragile West or the emergent new powers but are seeking ‘strategic independence’. This assessment is largely correct, and the report is of great interest, but it is also weakened by its lack of specificity.

Gladwyn K. Bush or Miss Lassie (Cayman Islands), The History of the Cayman Islands, n.d.

Not once in the report does the UN refer to any specific country, nor does it seek to properly identify the emergent powers. Since it does not provide a specific assessment of the current situation, the UN ends up providing the kind of vague solutions that have become commonplace and are meaningless (such as increasing trust and building solidarity). There is one specific proposal of great meaning, dealing with the arms trade, to which I shall return at the end of this newsletter. But apart from showing concern over the ballooning weapons industry, the UN report attempts to erect a kind of moral scaffolding over the hard realities that it cannot directly confront.

What then are the specific reasons for the monumental global shifts identified by the United Nations? Firstly, there has been a serious deterioration of the relative power of the United States and its closest allies. The capitalist class in the West has been on a long-term tax strike, unwilling to pay either its individual or corporate taxes (in 2019, nearly 40 percent of multinational profits were moved to tax havens). Their search for quick profits and evasion of tax authorities has led to a long-term decrease in investment in the West, which has hollowed out its infrastructure and its productive base. The transformation of Western social democrats, from champions of social welfare to neoliberal champions of austerity, has opened the door for the growth of despair and desolation, the emotional palate of the hard right. The Triad’s inability to smoothly govern the global neo-colonial system has led to a ‘loss of trust’ in the Global South towards the United States and its allies.

S. Sudjojono (Indonesia), Di Dalam Kampung (‘In the Village’), 1950.

Secondly, it was astounding to countries such as China, India, and Indonesia to be asked by the G20 to provide liquidity to the Global North’s desiccated banking system in 2007–08. The confidence of these developing countries in the West decreased, while their own sense of themselves increased. It was this change in circumstances that led to the formation of the BRICS bloc in 2009 by Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa – the ‘locomotives of the South’, as was theorised by the South Commission in the 1980s and later deepened in their little-read 1991 report. China’s growth by itself was astounding, but, as the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) noted in 2022, what was fundamental was that China was able to achieve structural transformation (namely, to move from low-productivity to high-productivity economic activities). This structural transformation could provide lessons for the rest of the Global South, lessons far more practical than those offered by the debt-austerity programme of the International Monetary Fund.

Neither the BRICS project nor China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) are military threats; both are essentially South-South commercial developments (along the grain of the agenda of the UN Office for South-South Cooperation). However, the West is unable to economically compete with either of these initiatives, and so it has adopted a fierce political and military response. In 2018, the United States declared an end to the War on Terror and clearly articulated in its National Defence Strategy that its main problems were the rise of China and Russia. Then-US Defence Secretary Jim Mattis spoke about the need to prevent the rise of ‘near-peer rivals’, explicitly pointing to China and Russia, and suggested that the entire panoply of US power be used to bring them to their knees. Not only does the United States have a vast network of roughly 800 overseas military bases – hundreds of which encircle Eurasia – it also has military allies from Germany to Japan that provide the US with forward positions against both Russia and China. For many years, the naval fleets of the US and its allies have conducted aggressive ‘freedom of navigation’ exercises which encroach upon the territorial integrity of both Russia (in the Arctic, mainly) and China (in the South China Sea). In addition, provocative manoeuvres such as the 2014 US intervention in Ukraine and massive 2015 US arms deal with Taiwan, further threatened Russia and China. In 2018, the United States unilaterally withdrew from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty (which followed the 2002 abandonment of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty), a move which upset the apple cart of nuclear arms control and meant that the US contemplated the use of ‘tactical nuclear weapons’ against both Russia and China.

Enrico Baj (Italy), Al fuoco, al fuoco (‘Fire! Fire!’), 1964.

The United Nations is correct in its assessment that the unipolar moment is now over, and that the world is moving towards a new, more complex reality. While the neo-colonial structure of the world system remains largely intact, there are emerging shifts in the balance of forces with the rise of the BRICS and China, and these forces are attempting to create international institutions that challenge the established order. The danger to the world arises not from the possibility of global power becoming more fragmented and widely dispersed, but because the West refuses to come to terms with these major changes. The UN report notes that ‘military expenditures globally set a new record in 2022, reaching $2.24 trillion’, although the UN does not acknowledge that three-quarters of this money is spent by the member states of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). Countries that want to exert their ‘strategic independence’ – the UN’s phrase – are confronted with the following choice: either join in the West’s militarisation of the world or face annihilation by its superior arsenal.

A New Agenda for Peace is designed as part of a process that will culminate at a UN Summit for the Future to be held in September 2024. As part of this process, the UN is gathering proposals from civil society, such as this one from Aotearoa Lawyers for Peace, Basel Peace Office, Move the Nuclear Weapons Money campaign, UNFOLD ZERO, Western States Legal Foundation, and the World Future Council, who call on the summit to adopt a declaration that:

Reaffirms the obligation under Article 26 of the UN Charter to establish a plan for arms control and disarmament with the least diversion of resources for economic and social development;

Calls on the UN Security Council, UN General Assembly and other relevant UN bodies to take action with respect to Article 26; and

Calls on all States to implement this obligation through ratification of bilateral and multilateral arms control agreements, coupled with progressive and systematic reductions of military budgets and commensurate increases in financing for the sustainable development goals, climate protection and other national contributions to the UN and its specialised agencies.

This newsletter is dedicated to the memory of our comrade Subhash Munda (age 34), a leader of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), who was shot dead in Daladli Chowk (Ranchi, Jharkhand) on 26 July. Subhash, a fourth generation communist, was a leader of the Adivasi (indigenous-tribal) community and was killed for his fight against the land mafia. There are not enough resources in the world to satisfy the greed of the land mafias and the capitalists. But there are enough resources to fulfil human needs, as Subhash Munda knew and for which he fought.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Vijay Prashad.

The Quest for Mainstream Acceptance: Magical Individual to Societal Healing

Today, in the effort to win mainstream acceptance of psychedelics, there are a number of voices in the room. Among them, the loudest are the ones who individualize illness through the medical lens while seeking legitimacy through access to powerful medical institutions, civil society, and the corporation in a proclaimed quest to “heal” those suffering in our society. We see anything from features in Forbes about 20-something tech billionaires microdosing to increase productivity, to 60 Minutes interviews with U.S. Iraq war veterans who report being cured from PTSD, to miracle stories of ketamine working with the poor and formerly incarcerated. Ironically, as this piece is being published, a number of these voices will be discussing and debating the path of the psychedelic renaissance at Psychedelic Science conference, taking place June 19–23 and being marketed as the largest conference on psychedelics in history.

Organizationally, some of the best-known names in the psychedelic space are the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), the for-profit System Fail 23 mental health company Compass Pathways, and the nonprofit Usona Institute. Many inside these organizations often promote a course of thought claiming psychedelics in and of themselves can “heal” anything from PTSD to societal conflict. It’s as if there is a search for a balm, a real-life soma, to dissociate from the horrors of race and class. For many, psychedelics are the answer to this search.

Of those who believe psychedelics could find their way to addressing greater structural issues plaguing society, the reasoning often goes that “once the individual heals, then we can work on healing society — or even the world.” In one TED talk for example, MAPS founder Rick Doblin — one of the most prominent names in the psychedelic space — claims that psychedelic experiences have “the potential to help be an antidote to tribalism, to fundamentalism, to genocide and environmental destruction.” During the 2021 Fantastic Fungi Global Summit — an annual summit of mushroom enthusiasts — speaker after speaker discussed how important it is to expand the availability of psychedelics to “help heal the world.” We can expect much of the same rhetoric from various presenters at the Psychedelic Science conference.

The result of this theory of individualized mental health supposes that people and their mental lives exist in a vacuum. Trauma happens to an individual, so use psychedelics to heal the individual. But depression, stress, anxiety, etc., are not a result of personal failures but oppressive, exploitative, and alienating conditions of life under capitalism. Doblin and others will have us believe that we can “heal people” without dealing with the conditions of their lives, but by simply using psychedelics to change how they see those conditions. Far from healing the world, this approach reinforces the conditions that lead to the suffering itself.

There is a naivete born of goodwill, good acid, and a lack of structural analysis that could be amusing if the current state of the world were not so dire. It’s a kind of “magical societal healing” mantra that is echoing through the most progressive sectors of the so-called renaissance, i.e., “we simply gain acceptance to powerful institutions, give these drugs to people, getting them into existing systems of oppression and the change will come” or even more then change, “a more just society” will come. But, as we will discuss, in this process the psychedelic community ultimately seeks to incorporate itself into powerful, controlling institutions, which will not only prevent these substances from helping heal the world but also enlist them in maintaining the systems harming us all.

Gramscian Hegemony and Psychedelic Medicine

Proponents of psychedelics seek to gain acceptance for these substances by medicalizing them. Article after article is published on how psychedelics can help treat various forms of psychological suffering. But medicalization could play a role in further entrenching ruling-class control of psychedelics. To further examine this process, it is important to revisit the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony.

Gramsci terms the control wielded by the ruling-class “hegemony.” Gramsci believed that if the ruling class was unable to maintain control over the masses, the masses may seek to change circumstances around their ongoing exploitation. For Gramsci, the ruling class does not always need to use domination or coercion to maintain its authority — and actually using these forms of control can sometimes be more destabilizing or fragile for the ruling classes. Instead, they can use “cultural, moral and ideological” leadership to gain a high level of consent among the general population. The ruling class manipulates language, culture, even morality itself to subtly convince the masses that the status quo is normal, natural, and the best course for everyone in society. This helps maintain power in capitalist society and make sure the interests of the capitalist state are represented in the minds of the ranks of the masses.

As Bruce Cohen notes in Psychiatric Hegemony: A Marxist Theory of Mental Illness, an institution continually used to impose ruling-class ideology today is the institution of medicine. Control through institutions such as medicine have proved quite effective for the ruling class because they provide a guise of perceived objectivity. Cohen notes,

These civic institutions are much more effective than direct, repressive organs of the state in manipulating the masses due to their perceived detachment from elite control. Hegemonic power is conducted under the guise of objective and neutral institutional practice, though it is in reality nothing of the sort. Instead, intellectuals and professionals are responsible for the legitimation of ruling-class ideas within the public sphere, articulating such values as seemingly natural and taken-for-granted knowledge about the world.

As we discussed in our previous piece, the medical system helps uphold the status quo by finding ways to reduce natural reactions to damaging systems to specific quantified diagnoses, which can be documented and billed for. This allows for the commodification of natural physical and psychological reactions to oppressive systems. Medical professionals can help in “depoliticizing inherently political problems” in the words of physician and activist Vicente Navarro, leading people to believe that individual action or improvement is the answer instead of collective action for societal change. In this way, the institution of medicine helps impose ruling-class ideology by misdirecting condemnation away from violent systems, which benefit the ruling class, and instead onto individuals.

The medicalization of psychedelics is so useful because it gives the guise of neutral exploration of the science for individual therapeutic purposes while at the same time funneling them into a more subtle form of control, which benefits the ruling class. By being presented as scientifically objective, medical professionals can be effective in the task of instituting ruling-class hegemony because as physician and activist Howard Waitzkin argues, “doctors may be more effective in enforcing societal norms than other social control agents; doctors are less accountable to the public and therefore freer to inject class and professional biases into their relationships with clients.”

But it goes further than shifting from system-based analysis to individual-based analysis. The process of medicalization also leads to material control of these substances by institutions that serve the ruling class. The medicalization of psychedelics means substances that can profoundly affect consciousness and one’s perception of society as a whole will be more likely to be “available” strictly through medical gatekeeping. This will lead to more control over how psychedelics are used, what the outcome of their usage is, all while ensuring a profitable market is created within the medical system that poses no threat to the status quo. Psychedelics in the hands of capitalist doctors, therapists, companies, will be used to reinforce capitalist ideology, individualized psychiatry, and a continued obfuscation of the social and structural factors affecting health and well-being.

Why Incorporate Psychedelics as Medicine?

This brings us to questions around why medical control of psychedelics would be useful. We can propose a number of ideas. One compelling theory is suggested by Caitlin Johnstone in her piece “‘Psychedelic Renaissance’ Entirely about Corporate Greed.” The author notes “the abusive nature of capitalism is causing a widespread mental health crisis that our rulers have a vested interest in preventing so the slaves will keep turning the gears of the machine.” The proposals range anywhere from treating alienation and depression resulting from workplace exploitation with psilocybin to giving MDMA to soldiers to make it easier for them to advance imperialist policy through killing and military violence. Could this latter example be why we see military personnel gathering to conferences like Psychedelic Science like moths to a flame?

Psychedelics themselves do not have an inherent right or left ideology built into them. They have the power to either break down or reinforce traditionally held beliefs around people’s relation to themselves, their loved ones, society, and even reality itself. They can threaten hegemonic ideologies, or they can reinforce and deepen the acceptance of ruling-class ideologies. For some, when combined with critical political analysis, psychedelics can reconnect the user to greater inner purpose, reconnect to community, reestablish the interconnectivity of all living things. With this reconnection could come the potential of a realization of the truly destructive nature of oppressive systems. This opens the possibility for one to see the destructive systems outside of him or herself as the true causes of suffering and develop resolve to fight to destroy those systems. When combined with revolutionary political analysis, this can give these substances revolutionary potential in some cases.

We saw at least some of this process play out in the “first psychedelic wave” in the ’60s as there were often direct connections made between psychedelic use and anti-establishment related political practice. It comes as no surprise, then, that now proponents of the medicalization of psychedelics fear a repeat of the hit the movement took at that time. It’s partially why there is a strong focus on not letting anything “go off the rails” and a condemnation of the connection between political practice and psychedelic use.

The political potential of psychedelic use is what makes it even more important for the ruling class to gain hegemonic control over how these substances are used and made available to the public. It makes it that much more important for medical professionals, for example, to help push bourgeois ideology by helping perpetuate individualization and internalization of psychological suffering, for example, ultimately misdirecting the gaze away from a critical, system-based analysis.

When Gramsci discussed hegemony, he saw the process of the ruling class maintaining ideological control as a constant battle in which ruling-class “norms” are constantly destabilized or questioned. This process of questioning ruling-class hegemony becomes heightened in times of crisis. Today, capitalism creates more and more crises around the globe. The Covid-19 pandemic exposed the limits to the biomedical model of maintaining health and well-being. Now, postpandemic peaks, overdose deaths are increasing, and suicides are once again on the rise. We see increasing military conflicts around the globe and the current geopolitical landscape compounding things with rising inflation making it harder for people to make ends meet. These co-occurring crises can cause people to question whether ruling-class institutions such as medicine can actually help treat or alleviate the suffering of the masses. In this context, it is no wonder that medicine would naturally incorporate psychedelics as therapeutic modalities as it becomes even more crucial for capitalist class to restrengthen the legitimacy of ruling-class institutions at this time.

The Need for a Revolutionary Perspective in the Renaissance

By incorporating these substances into medicine and other mainstream institutions, proponents can claim that we are moving toward making these substances more available to help a greater number of people. At the same time, the trend will help keep psychedelics from playing any role in pushing the toiling masses to upend the entire system. As we argue above, hegemonic institutions such as medicine can help monitor and control the conclusions reached by those using these substances. And this obviously extends beyond the strict limits of medicine. For example, those acting as guides or doing integration work are going to be some of the most influential people in influencing the conclusions individuals come to from using psychedelics. This makes their political praxis that much more crucial toward influencing outcomes.

We can already see some of the outcomes of the quest for acceptance into hegemonic institutions in real time today — the venture capitalist, the investor bros, fresh from their journey with “my shaman,” having seen the creation and destruction of the universe, now emerge as new beings. And yet the capitalist capture is so complete, their only recourse is to commodify. They have created companies now traded on the NASDAQ — with all the typical bells and whistles of “fair trade,” “sustainability,” and “equity.” But, contrary to what some may hope, the power and money will not shift post-ayahuasca enlightenment. We should know that these drugs have been available to the rich and powerful for 70 years, many whom were the architects of neoliberalism.

We want to be clear, any possibility of psychedelics helping mitigate suffering under capitalism can be positive. But as these substances are incorporated into hegemonic institutions such as medicine, we should ask ourselves, What is our goal? Is our goal to simply blunt suffering, or is our goal to actually reduce and eliminate suffering? If we want to strive for both, we must question the structures these substances are being incorporated into and how they function to further entrench ruling-class control. We must understand how ruling-class hegemony functions through class institutions.

Overall, our hope is that psychedelics can meet their revolutionary potential and have a role in not only mitigating suffering caused by violent systems, but also help us eliminate those systems altogether. But if system-based analysis is absent from the growing renaissance, and if revolutionary politics are not central to our analysis, then the potential to actually fight systems which create suffering does not exist.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Mike Pappas and Dimitri Mugianis.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/06/21/capitalist-hegemony-in-psychedelic-medicine/feed/ 0 405661 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/06/20/replacing-the-capitalist-dream-of-ai-driven-profits/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/06/20/replacing-the-capitalist-dream-of-ai-driven-profits/#respond Tue, 20 Jun 2023 05:59:10 +0000 https://www.counterpunch.org/?p=286580

Photo by Alec Favale

Artificial intelligence (AI) and how it’s going to change the world is a popular topic of conversation these days. There is concern that it will generate ever-more deceptive imagery that can upend people’s lives or create propaganda that can fuel mass fear. There’s the ultimate fear of human extinction from the increasingly sophisticated evolution of AI. These are valid worries.

Then there’s the seemingly more mundane threat that AI poses to employment. It is expressed in the form of countless stories that have some iteration of the headline: which jobs are at most risk of being lost to AI?

Most analysts predict that AI will replace graphic designers, copywriters, customer service agents, and telemarketers. Some of the most dystopian of these listicles focus on teachers and psychologists being replaced by AI.

The stories are written with the intention of predicting the coming storm so that people can prepare themselves for the future. But the headlines are also intentionally designed as clickbait, likely fueling fear-based consumption of the stories by readers eager to find out if their own jobs are likely to be replaced by AI in the coming years. Indeed, I found several stories, like this one, where my own vocation of journalism was in the crosshairs of AI.

The framing of “Will AI replace your job?” obscures the bigger problem that has been at work for centuries: and that is how our jobs, and therefore our educations, careers, and livelihoods, are at the whims of a capitalist system intent on minimizing costs and maximizing profits.

Indeed, Mathias Doepfner, the CEO of the German media group that owns Politico, who warned that AI could replace journalism jobs, used Darwinian logic in saying, “Artificial intelligence has the potential to make independent journalism better than it ever was—or simply replace it,” and therefore, “Only those [publishing houses] who create the best original content will survive.”

And while critics of AI counter that it could never replace humans because of our innate creativity and curiosity, the point that often gets missed is that humans are the ones engaging in the great AI replacement of jobs—a small handful of humans. They hail from the rarified group of elites who sit in corporate board rooms and deliver presentations to shareholders about how they plan to maximize dividends by replacing humans with AI.

The question we should be asking isn’t whether AI can replace humans. It should be: why are some humans so intent on replacing the jobs that the rest of us hold, with AI? Even further, why do we live in a world where we lack so much control over our destinies in the first place?

AI, like other innovations that have automated jobs, is simply a tool that can make life easier. I can use a machine to wash my clothes and another one to wash my dishes instead of wasting my time with handwashing. Graphic designers already use software to digitally paint images instead of painting them by hand. If AI is a tool that can make certain jobs easier and free up our time for relaxation and leisure while we reap the same or greater compensation then so be it. But it ought not to be inevitable that corporate employers will cut our salaries or entirely replace our jobs with AI. That is a choice being made in a system that relies on profit motives rather than human well-being.

What we consider a vocation, big business treats as a cog in a giant wheel called “the labor market.” Dire predictions of AI “disruptions” to this market cast the entire trend as almost a natural phenomenon, whose trajectory is simply out of human hands.

But the reason that AI is booming is because it translates into a giant windfall for corporations. One economic prediction concludes that “the market for artificial intelligence (AI) is expected to show strong growth in the coming decade. Its value of nearly [$100 billion] is expected to grow twentyfold by 2030, up to nearly [$2 trillion].”

AI is big business, perhaps the biggest of them all. The dystopia it promises is a natural endpoint—of unregulated capitalism. If the “man behind the curtain” is eager to replace us, why can we not rip the curtain down and replace him?

So, I asked ChatGPT, the popular AI chatbot that is basically a smarter Google, the following question: “Does a capitalist economic model center human [well-being]?” The first sentence of a lengthy response was, “The capitalist economic model, in its purest form, does not explicitly center human well-being as its primary objective.”

ChatGPT proceeded to tell me that “Capitalism emphasizes individual economic freedom and the pursuit of self-interest, with the belief that this leads to overall economic growth and prosperity.”

“Belief” is the operative word here. It is a matter of faith that capitalism leads to prosperity for all. There is a religious fervor that was once popularly called “trickle-down economics,” underpinning a system where reality is at odds with the fantasy of capitalist wealth sharing.

When examining broad trends, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) found that wealth inequality in the U.S. grew significantly between 1979 and 2019. The CBO report, which is based on a nonpartisan analysis, concluded that “Increases in market income at the top of the distribution drove much of the rise in income inequality over that time.” In other words, the rich got richer because they hoarded more wealth.

It also found that “transfers increasingly lessened income inequality when transfer rates grew among households in the lowest quintile.” This technical language simply means that when people accessed government benefits their incomes increased. It’s like saying, “People benefitted when given benefits.”

There is no need for belief or faith in a system where the government is designed to directly help the people it represents. Belief and faith are required only to prop up the great lie that a capitalist economy helps everyone prosper. If we want people to prosper, we can make it so. There are many forms this can take: renewing the child tax credit, replacing private health care with a tax-funded Medicare for All system, increasing Social Security benefits, paying reparations to Black people, and even guaranteeing a basic income. None of them rely on faith. They help people because they are designed to help people.

I asked ChatGPT, “What sort of economic system can replace capitalism and ensure the [well-being] and prosperity of the vast majority of humans?” The machine spat out five different options ranging from socialism to a “resource-based” economy “where the allocation of resources is based on careful assessment and sustainable management of Earth’s resources.”

Even AI knows that there are alternatives to the current system that rules our lives. If capitalism can replace us, surely, we can replace capitalism?

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Sonali Kolhatkar.

Noam Chomsky Interviewed by Richard McDaniel

May 26, 2023. The Sentinel.

Usually as a high school journalist, one expects to write their fair share of articles regarding anything from local events to national political issues, which may interest a decent number of students within the school. Rarely does a high school journalist like myself have an opportunity to interview a figure who has shaped both their own thinking and the worldwide academic landscape for generations.

Noam Chomsky is a man who needs no introduction. An activist, philosopher, professor, linguist, and one of the most cited authors in the humanities, Chomsky is an intellectual hero of mine. Although I disagree with him on certain issues – COVID-19 and many domestic political issues – it is impossible to describe his influence on my intellectual development in words. His vociferous critiques of American foreign policy and his unrelenting defense of free speech have been an inspiration and constant reminder to always be on the watch for acts of state violence.

It is on these grounds of reverence that I am pleased to post a recent interview I had with Chomsky. While this interview is short, it nevertheless retains key wisdom from Chomsky. Enjoy!

McDaniel: In recent years, attacks on public school curriculum are becoming more prevalent, especially in Florida, with Ron DeSantis railing against AP African American Studies and any form of Critical Theory. How do you think the future of public education in the United States looks?

Chomsky: The answer is up to people like you. DeSantis is at the forefront of a broad effort to refashion education on a Stalinist model. Whether they succeed or not depends on whether an engaged public will resist and try to preserve, and enhance, the system of mass public education that was one of America’s great contributions to democracy, now under severe threat.

McDaniel: You have been a famous critic of capitalism for most of your life. Do you believe Marx’s idea that capitalism will eventually kill itself by its own contradictions has any truth or relevance today?

Chomsky: Something of the sort is happening, though not exactly as Marx predicted. Marx was an enthusiastic admirer of capitalism for having overthrown the feudal economy, which produced wealth for the few but not capital that would be used for production of goods and services. During the past 40+ years the economy has been regressing to something like a feudal structure, where wealth is being produced for a few by financial manipulations that contribute virtually nothing to a productive economy.

McDaniel: Many students at my school have been immensely influenced by both your political and linguistic work. As you reflect back on your life and how you have influenced generations of thought, how does that make you feel?

Chomsky: I hope that the influence stimulates independent thought and inquiry. How well that’s achieved is for others to determine.

McDaniel: In “Manufacturing Consent,” you and Edward S. Herman famously proposed the concept of the propaganda model to explain the role of the mass media. While this outlook on the media may seem quite negative, do you have any advice for high schoolers who possess an interest in journalism as a career?

Chomsky: It’s not often noticed, but a large part of that book was [a] defense of the courage and integrity of journalists against deceitful and slanderous attacks by Freedom House. Journalism can be, and sometimes is, a noble calling.

McDaniel: Since many students in my school district engage or want to engage in some sort of political activism, what political texts would you recommend to a high schooler?

Chomsky: Lots of choices. Some of the most inspiring [are] the volumes “Voices of a People’s History,” Zinn-Arnove-Pessin, recently updated.

Thank you so much, Noam Chomsky, for taking the time to share some insights.

This content originally appeared on chomsky.info: The Noam Chomsky Website and was authored by anthony.

Photograph Source: Balogic – CC BY-SA 4.0

The Capitalist Democrats…

The Democratic Party is a militantly capitalist entity and always has been – and not just in the neoliberal era. The much beloved New Deal Democratic president Franklin Roosevelt, himself a wealthy member of the capitalist establishment, boasted that he had saved the US American profits system by overseeing reforms that helped deradicalize the populace in the wake of the great capitalist failure known as the Great Depression.

The leading post- New Deal neoliberal Democratic politicians and policymakers of my adolescence and adulthood, from Jimmy Carter through Joe Biden have all sworn and demonstrated their fealty to the capitalist order in numerous ways that I (along with many others) have written about and documented at great length.

Nancy Pelosi meant it when she was asked by a young Bernie Sanders fan to comment on the high popularity of the word “socialism” among US youth: “we’re capitalist and that’s just the way it is.”

With a net worth well over $100 million thanks largely to the parasitic accumulations of her investor husband, Pelosi had some selfish reasons to cancel discussion of alternatives to the system that has given the top tenth of the nation’s upper One Percent as much wealth as its bottom 90 percent.

“We’re capitalist and that’s just the way it is” has been the shared consensus opinion of all but a tiny share of the Democratic Party’s candidates, operatives, officeholders, policy wonks, ideologists and, of course, funders for all of my six decades-plus on this continent.

…Considered “Socialist,” “Radical Left,” and Even “Marxist” by Republicans

All of the above is meant to introduce a question that has been rolling around in my mind since the “Tea Party” rebellion against the supposed “Marxist-Leninist Black nationalist” US President Barack Trans-Pacific Partnership Obama, who was in fact a “deeply conservative” servant of the wealthy Few and their vast corporate and financial holdings:  Why this recurrent wild-eyed Republican/FOX News denunciation of the dismal, dollar-drenched neoliberal capitalist-imperialist Democrats as “radical Left,” “Marxist,” “socialist,” “communist,” and the like? Why do Republicans rail on and on about the “socialist” and even “Marxist” menace supposedly represented by a party that bends over backwards to demonstrate its fealty to the Lords of Capital – this in a country where Marxist and socialist forces are (dangerously and depressingly) marginalized?

The charge has gone ballistic in the Trump era, of course, with the false neo-McCarthyite, paranoid-style accusation of supposed socialist radicalism now routinely hurled at the bourgeois and (since the mid-1970s) neoliberal Democratic Party. Many readers here have probably heard or read about numerous Republicans from Donald Trump on down absurdly calling the recent indictment of Trump a politically vindictive “weaponization of the legal system” by “the radical socialist left,” as if the Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and the 24 grand jurors who recently voted to charge Trump are members of a communist organization.

“A Marxism State of Mind”

Five weeks ago, Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors” Trump took things to a new level of paranoid anti-Marxism at the annual convention of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). There he claimed that “Marxist thugs, radicals” have turned “our once beautiful USA” into a  “crime-ridden, filthy, communist nightmare….I used to say that we will never be a socialist country,” Trump said.  Now, however, since his eviction from the White House and the rise of Joe Biden’s supposedly stolen presidency, Trump said, “that train has passed the station long ago of socialism. It never even came close to stopping, frankly…We’re now in a Marxism state of mind, a communism state of mind, which is far worse. We’re a nation in decline.”

Yes, Donald Trump proclaimed the end of Barack Obama and Joe Biden’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution!

Apparently believing that the United States has progressed from the mere dictatorship of the proletariat to full communism beyond class, Trump promised counter-revolution: “we’ll kick the communists out.”

(Trump, who was mentored by Joe McCarthy’s legal counsel Roy Cohn, has got the present  “Marxist thug” writer right at least:  I transitioned from revisionist socialism to MSOM [“Marxism state of mind”] and CSOM [“communism state of mind”] years [well, decades] ago and wish more folks on “the left” would do the same.)

Fascist Ideology Requires It

Forget for a moment, if you can – I can’t – that this country and the world are in dire existential need of socialist revolutions to replace a capitalist-imperialist order that is quite literally destroying life on Earth.  That critical matter aside, what’s behind this preposterous but pervasive Republican charge that the plutocratic, deeply conservative Dems are Marxists, socialists, and communists?

No small part of the answer, I suspect, is that the Republican Party over the last fifteen years and with particular intensity since the rise of Trump has gone fascist and that anti-Marxism and anti-socialism are critical ingredients of the political and ideological virus that is fascism.  The very logic of the fascist world view requires a big menacing socialist enemy even when no such enemy objectively exists.

This, I think, is one of two absent or at least underdeveloped pieces in the Yale philosopher Jason Stanley’s brilliant ten-point analysis of fascist politics.  The first thing missing (if implicit) in his widely read book How Fascism Works is fascism’s explicit rejection of parliamentary bourgeois democracy and its violent determination to introduce a new authoritarian political superstructure. The second thing missing (though this is also implicit and hinted at in Stanley’s book) is obsessive anti-socialism and anti-Marxism.

Why Look for Evidence and Reality in Anything the Republi-fascists Say?

Then there’s the many-sided falsity and madness of most of what the Republi-fascists say. It’s a mistake to look for rationality and empirical evidence behind most of what the nation’s rightmost major party and its adherents believe or purport to believe.  Three of Stanley’s ten fascism-defining points are critical here: constant political propagandization, anti-intellectualism, and “unreality,” seen in the Republi-fascists’ attachment to wild conspiracy theories.  Look, folks (to steal a line from Biden), this is a party that:

preposterously clings to the massively false claim that Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election.

ridiculously claims that the January 6 Capitol Riot was a minor and mostly friendly affair – a curious description of a bloody physical assault on the US legislative branch meant to provoke a crisis cancelling Joe Biden’s election.

lethally denies decades of scientific research on the deepening climate catastrophe. It purveys thoroughly mythical narratives of voter fraud.

passes state laws criminalizing the accurate teaching of any history that does not match its white nationalist myths about of when “America was great.”

is full of anti-vaxxers and book banners and people who ludicrously believe that American grade school children are being taught graduate and law school-level critical race theory (CRT) by “socialist” elementary teachers and that CRT is “Marxist.”

thinks there’s a giant “radical Left” organization called Antifa exercising vast power in connection with “deep state” forces who want to collapse America’s fossil fuel industry in service to supposedly communist China.

contains and elevates people who think that the Democrats are party of a child-eating globalist conspiracy funded by George Soros.

believes that small fetal cell clusters are living human beings with as much claim to civil and legal rights life as fully grown women.

is loaded with fundamentalist Christians who take the endless wild, often bloody, and vindictive stories in The Holy Bible as revealed truth and who believe that Armageddon is at hand. (Many of the more unhinged Bible-thumpers in the party believe or claim to believe that the slithering sociopath Trump is God’s Chosen One sent to Earth to lead the select to heaven.)

I could go on listing the ludicrous and even psychotic things Republi-fascists believe. Seen against the backdrop of their overall madness, the Republi-fascists’ idea that the Democrats are “Marxists” and “socialists”, and that the nation is haunted by “the radical Left” seems par for the course and relatively mild.

Hints of Plausibility

At the same time, there are perhaps just enough tiny hints of the seeming truth of the at once neofascist and neo-McCarthyite narrative to give Republi-fascist anti-socialism/-Marxism a slight scent of plausibility.  Democratic voters and Democratic-affiliated organizations do stand to the comparatively social-democratic, environmentalist, anti-racist and feminist left of the ever more right-wing Republicans (this is not very hard to do, of course).  This reflects the Democrats’ base in highly unequal, poverty-plagued, and racially and culturally heterogenous metropolitan areas with a good number of highly educated professionals and a decent smattering of liberal and leftish intellectuals and colleges and universities – polyglot cities that are viewed with classically fascist fear and loathing (see this book’s ninth chapter) by “red” (try brown) state Republicans.

There is a small handful of national Democratic Congresspersons who occasionally claim to be “democratic socialists,” including a telegenic Latina Congressperson (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) who once said that capitalism is “irredeemable” and a senior US Senator (Bernie Sanders) who has made two serious runs of the Democratic presidential nomination in the last two election cycles.

The nation’s rampant identity politics and ideological confusion has helped identify “the left” and even socialism with racial minority and female and gay representation, not proletarian revolution. The “woke imperialist” Democrats are deeply invested in splashing a fake-progressive multi-cultural and cross-gender veneer on their capitalist and imperialist politics by putting Black, Latino, female, and gay faces in high places.

The Republi-fascists are not about to see or acknowledge the capitalism-imperialism behind the identity screen.  Their white nationalist form of anti-socialism makes it a no-brainer for them to merge neoliberal identitarianism (what Nancy Fraser has oxymoronically called “progressive neoliberalism”) with Marxism and “a communism state of mind.”

There was in fact a leftish Occupy Movement/moment directed against class inequality and plutocracy that spread across the nation’s cities and town like wildfire in the fall of 2011. That felt kinda radical and socialist even if it was really a mixture of populism and anarchism.  And there have been major and often remarkably cross-racial rebellions against racist police brutality in major, medium-sized and even some small US cities and towns since the murder of Trayvon Martin in February of 2012.  The George Floyd Rebellion was the biggest protest wave in American history. It sparked no small white-Amerikaner neofascist reaction, from Trump on down.

Alt-Fact Fascist Media

Meanwhile, the right possesses a vast communications “alt-fact” network that permits it to circulate and reinforce its malicious and fantastic narratives free of empirical challenge and reasoned debate. From FOX News and its further right competitors One America Network and Newsmax to the vast right-wing talk radio network to the dark web chat rooms where fascists plot armed attacks on “the radical Left” and “the deep state,” the ever more mainstreamed far right creates its own alternative un-reality, where Donald Rumsfeld’s Orwellian statement holds “true”: “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” False and malevolent things said and posted repeatedly across the bias-confirming and self-reinforcing right-wing echo chamber become facts in the minds of millions.

The Third Reich’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels would have appreciated this neofascist communications system. It’s not for nothing that he ordered the mass production and distribution of the Volksempfänger, the single-channel “people’s radio,” to broadcast Adolph Hitler’s vicious racist and expansionist, evidence-free propaganda directly into everyday Germans’ homes, hearts, and minds. “By 1941,” historian Allison Marsh notes, “nearly two-thirds of German households owned a Volksempfänger, and Goebbels had succeeded in giving Hitler a direct conduit into people’s homes via the airwaves.”

Our modern-day Goebbels, Tucker Carlson, has used Fatherland/FOX to poison millions of Amerikaner minds with false election theft and January 6 narratives he does not privately believe – and with a constant drumbeat of propaganda  meant to convince masses that the neoliberal capitalist-imperialist Democrats are “radical Left Marxists,”  and that the nation is in danger of socialist takeover.

Of course, nothing would be better for this country, continent, hemisphere, and world than an actual socialist revolution in the United States of America – the last thing the Democrats ever want to see, even if Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did once properly call capitalism an “irredeemable” system.

A Telling Irony

Even as the Republi-fascist party gets away with routinely, absurdly, and inaccurately excoriating the Democrats as “socialists” and even as “Marxists” (supposedly terrible things to be), the Democrats, with very few occasional exceptions, can barely if ever bring themselves to honestly, publicly, and accurately call the Republican Party of “Retribution” fascist.  Adding to the irony, the Republikaners’ constant absurd demonization of the Dems as supposed socialists and Marxists is a significant part of what helps us identify the current Republican Party today as a fascist organization.

More on why the F-word fits the Republicans[1] – and how this is messing with the American System – later this week.

+ This is a slightly longer and updated version of an essay that appeared on The Paul Street Report two weeks ago.

Note

1. A partial preview: ‘let’s acknowledge something unpleasant about why the Republi-fascists steadfastly oppose even elementary gun control measures even as the nation experience one mass shooting after another. Let’s say what we know or ought to know out loud: the nation’s rightmost major party is now a socially, racially, and politically eliminationist and neofascist formation that embraces the rule of men over the rule of law. It channels and contains definite white-supremacist genocidal tendencies and sensibilities. As such, it leaders are happy about the fact that its adherents possess a wildly disproportionate share of the insane number of firearms and especially of the military style weaponry that is out and about in the US-American Armed Madhouse. It is pleased with the private arms status quo as it applauds demented politicos including a putschist ex-president who fascistically and absurdly call their corporate Democratic opponents “radical Left animals” and who speak in open terms about bloody “retribution,” “vengeance,” and “Civil War.”’

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Paul Street.

North Koreans are secretly watching and listening to so many South Korean movies and songs smuggled into the country that they are becoming increasingly worried that they might let a banned word slip – and face prison time or even death for using “capitalist” lingo, sources in the country tell Radio Free Asia.

“Residents who are already accustomed to the South Korean way of speaking now feel like they have to practice the Pyongyang dialect,” said a resident in the northwestern province of North Pyongan, referring to the capital. 

“They are worried that South Korean words will unintentionally or unknowingly come out of their mouths and that they will be punished,” he said.

For example, North Korean women dare not call their husbands or boyfriends  “jagiya” (which correlates to honey) or “oppa” (another term of endearment which literally means older brother). Instead, they must stick with “dongji,” (comrade), the source said.

People are also having to avoid using South Korean loan words from English such as ‘paesyeon’ (fashion), ‘heeoseutail’ (hairstyle) and ‘waipeu’ (wife).

“Even openly saying ‘I love you’ is evidence that they have seen South Korean movies and such language has become normalized,” the source said.  

North Korean authorities are aware of the spreading use of South Korean terms and are intent on “wiping out the rotten language of capitalism,” said a second source based in the same province. 

RFA previously reported instances of people being punished for speaking like South Koreans, and also  shocking cases where people were executed for trying to sell contraband videos and music on thumb drives.

But the recently passed Pyongyang Cultural Language Protection Act goes even further. 

Under this law, those found to have even taught or influenced others toward adopting this kind of speech could get the death penalty.

But for some people, speaking like an upper class Seoulite just comes naturally after decades of exposure.

So that’s prompted an odd situation where people are having to relearn how to speak like a proper North Korean through practice, sources say.

Divided by a common language

Though North and South Koreans speak a mutually intelligible language, the peninsula can be divided into several major regional dialects. 

Since the end of the Korean war, the respective governments of the North and South enacted differing standardization policies that have led to differences in spelling, the use of loan words from other languages, and most importantly, pronunciation.

In the North, the dialect of the capital Pyongyang is considered standard, whereas in the South, the standard language is modeled after how people talk in Seoul. 

Additionally, the seven decades of separation since the end of the Korean War have resulted in each side of the border adopting different slang, idioms and even terms of endearment.

Under North Korean policy, loan words originating in English or other Western languages have been effectively scrubbed from the standard language – unlike in the South, where such loan words are readily absorbed into everyday use.

But advances in technology over the years made South Korean media more accessible to North Koreans despite government efforts to stop them from watching it.

First it was clumsily distributed in the 1980s in bulky VHS cassettes, but by the late 90’s the medium of choice became video CDs. By the early 2000s, people were sharing the latest hit series on easily concealable USB flash drives, and now they are passed around on tiny microSD cards.

Among young people especially, it has become more than a trend to speak like a South Korean by emulating illegal media. It could be said in many cases that it is how they naturally speak, and they are simply emulating each other. 

Alternate reality

These movies and TV shows have done more than introduce North Koreans to new slang and vocabulary. They have unveiled a world of freedom and prosperity they have come to envy, and as such South Korean-style speech has come to represent those dreams, the first source said.

“The South Korean lifestyles shown in South Korean movies is a fantasy world to North Koreans,” the first source said. “No matter how much the North Korean authorities emphasize our national identity and characteristics, it will not be easy to eradicate the [Seoul] dialect.

Those most in danger of being caught speaking like South Koreans are families of judicial officials, because their power enables them to watch more illegal media without punishment, the first source said.

Ironically, these are the same people whose job it is to crack down on illegal videos, the source said. 

These officials “are supposed to keep and protect the system,” he said. “But they are the ones immersed in South Korean movies and dramas … to the point that they are the ones spreading around South Korean words.” 

Translated by Claire Shinyoung Oh Lee. Written in English by Eugene Whong. Edited by Malcolm Foster

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Jieun Kim for RFA Korean.

Permitting such imprudent risk-taking flows directly from the Trump-GOP Congressional weakening of regulations in 2018, which was supported by dozens of Democrats, led by bank toady Senator Mark Warner (D-VA). That bipartisan deregulation provided a filibuster-proof passage by the Senate.

The other culprit is the Federal Reserve. Its very fast interest rate hikes reduced the asset value of those two banks’ holdings in long-term Treasury bonds, which reduced their capital reserves. With the “what, me worry” snooze of the California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation, S.V.B had little supervision from state regulatory examiners and compliance enforcers.

Actually, big depositors sniffed the shakiness of these two banks and acted ahead of the regulatory cops with mass withdrawals that sealed the fate of S.V.B. Imagine, S.V.B was giving out bonuses hours before its collapse. For this cluelessness, the bank’s CEO, Gregory Becker, took home about eleven million dollars in pay last year.

All this was predicted by Senator Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Katie Porter. Warren, in particular, specifically opposed the 2018 Congressional lifting of stronger liquidity and capital requirements along with regular stress tests for banks with assets over $50 billion. Trump’s law allowed the absence of these safeguards to cover banks with assets up to $250 billion. Such de-regulation covered S.V.B and Signature.

Signature Bank had former House Banking Committee Chair Barney Frank on its board of directors. His name is on the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which was passed following the 2008 Wall Street collapse. Even Mr. Frank was clueless about what Signature’s CEO Joseph DePaolo was mismanaging. (DePaulo was paid $8.6 million last year.)

Of course, the underfunded FDIC doesn’t have enough money to make good all the large depositors in these two banks. So, it is increasing the fees charged to all banks for such government insurance. The banks will find ways to pass these surchargers on to their customers.

Other midsized banks may be shaky as more major depositors pull out and put their money into mega-giant banks like JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup, which are universally viewed as “too big to fail.” The smaller businesses harmed by these closed banks are now on their own. No corporate socialism is as yet saving them.

One of the provisions of the Dodd-Frank law was to require federal agencies to rein in bank executives’ pay that incentivizes recklessness and even fraud, as Public Citizen noted. Yet after 13 years, PC declared: “a hodgepodge of federal agencies – the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, the Federal Reserve, the National Credit Union Administration, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and the Securities and Exchange Commission – that is supposed to finalize the rule has so far failed to do so.”

Defying mandates of Congress, often riddled with waivers from Capitol Hill, is routine for federal agencies. They know that when it comes to law and order for profiteering corporations, Congress is spineless. Have you heard of any resignations or firings from these sleepy regulatory agencies? Of course not. They continue to raise the ante for corporate socialist rescue even beyond their legal authority. For example, where does the FDIC get the authority to guarantee all the deposits in the failed banks when the Congressional limit is strictly $250,000 per account?

Some people will remember Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson telling the Washington Post that there were “no authorities” for massive bank bailouts – think Citigroup in 2008 during a private weekend meeting in Washington, DC – but, he said, “someone had to do it.”

Meanwhile, the American people remain fearful but silent over the safety of their bank deposits. They heard Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen tell Congress that the banking system “remains sound.” Some remember that’s what her predecessor said in the spring of 2008 about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac – the safest investments after Treasury bonds. By the fall, both of these giants had collapsed taking millions of trusting shareholders down with them.

Finally, all those brilliant economists at the Federal Reserve surely must know that when midsize banks lose almost 20% on the value of their 10-year Treasuries, due to the very fast interest rate hikes by Jerome Powell’s Fed, trouble is on the horizon. Why didn’t they anticipate this outcome and do some foreseeing and forestalling? Nah, why worry, didn’t you know that the Fed prints money?

Or maybe the Federal Reserve (its budget comes from bank fees, not the Congress), couldn’t see beyond fighting inflation, something it did not take seriously in time over a year and a half ago. More than a few outside economists repeatedly gave the Fed fair warning. But then the Fed, hardly ever criticized by the mainstream press, was listening to its brilliant economists.

Stay tuned. This rollercoaster ride is not over yet.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Ralph Nader.

Once again, government socialism—ultimately backed by taxpayers—is saving reckless midsized banks and their depositors. Silicon Valley Bank (S.V.B) and Signature Bank in New York greedily mismanaged their risk levels and had to be closed down. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), in return, to avoid a bank panic and a run on other midsized banks went over its $250,000 insurance cap per account and guaranteed all deposits—no matter how large, which are owned by the rich and corporations—in those banks.

Permitting such imprudent risk-taking flows directly from the Trump-GOP Congressional weakening of regulations in 2018, which was supported by dozens of Democrats, led by bank toady Senator Mark Warner (D-Va.). That bipartisan deregulation provided a filibuster-proof passage by the Senate.

The other culprit is the Federal Reserve. Its very fast interest rate hikes reduced the asset value of those two banks’ holdings in long-term Treasury bonds, which reduced their capital reserves. With the "What, me worry?" snooze of the California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation, SVB had little supervision from state regulatory examiners and compliance enforcers.

Actually, big depositors sniffed the shakiness of these two banks and acted ahead of the regulatory cops with mass withdrawals that sealed the fate of SVB. Imagine, SVB was giving out bonuses hours before its collapse. For this cluelessness, the bank's CEO, Gregory Becker, took home about eleven million dollars in pay last year.

All this was predicted by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.). Warren, in particular, specifically opposed the 2018 Congressional lifting of stronger liquidity and capital requirements along with regular stress tests for banks with assets over $50 billion. Trump's law allowed the absence of these safeguards to cover banks with assets up to $250 billion. Such de-regulation covered SVB and Signature.

Signature Bank had former House Banking Committee Chair Barney Frank on its board of directors. His name is on the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which was passed following the 2008 Wall Street collapse. Even Mr. Frank was clueless about what Signature's CEO Joseph DePaolo was mismanaging. (DePaulo was paid $8.6 million last year.)

Of course, the underfunded FDIC doesn't have enough money to make good all the large depositors in these two banks. So, it is increasing the fees charged to all banks for such government insurance. The banks will find ways to pass these surchargers on to their customers.

Other midsized banks may be shaky as more major depositors pull out and put their money into mega-giant banks like JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Citigroup, which are universally viewed as "too big to fail." The smaller businesses harmed by these closed banks are now on their own. No corporate socialism is as yet saving them.

One of the provisions of the Dodd-Frank law was to require federal agencies to rein in bank executives' pay that incentivizes recklessness and even fraud, as Public Citizen noted. Yet after 13 years, PC declared: "a hodgepodge of federal agencies—the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, the Federal Reserve, the National Credit Union Administration, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and the Securities and Exchange Commission—that is supposed to finalize the rule has so far failed to do so."

Defying mandates of Congress, often riddled with waivers from Capitol Hill, is routine for federal agencies. They know that when it comes to law and order for profiteering corporations, Congress is spineless. Have you heard of any resignations or firings from these sleepy regulatory agencies? Of course not. They continue to raise the ante for corporate socialist rescue even beyond their legal authority. For example, where does the FDIC get the authority to guarantee all the deposits in the failed banks when the Congressional limit is strictly $250,000 per account?

Some people will remember Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson telling the Washington Post that there were "no authorities" for massive bank bailouts—think Citigroup in 2008 during a private weekend meeting in Washington, DC— but, he said, "someone had to do it."

Meanwhile, the American people remain fearful but silent over the safety of their bank deposits. They heard Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen tell Congress that the banking system "remains sound." Some remember that's what her predecessor said in the spring of 2008 about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—the safest investments after Treasury bonds. By the fall, both of these giants had collapsed taking millions of trusting shareholders down with them.

Finally, all those brilliant economists at the Federal Reserve surely must know that when midsize banks lose almost 20% on the value of their 10-year Treasuries, due to the very fast interest rate hikes by Jerome Powell's Fed, trouble is on the horizon. Why didn't they anticipate this outcome and do some foreseeing and forestalling? Nah, why worry, didn't you know that the Fed prints money?

Or maybe the Federal Reserve (its budget comes from bank fees, not the Congress), couldn't see beyond fighting inflation, something it did not take seriously in time over a year and a half ago. More than a few outside economists repeatedly gave the Fed fair warning. But then the Fed, hardly ever criticized by the mainstream press, was listening to its brilliant economists.

Stay tuned. This rollercoaster ride is not over yet.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Ralph Nader.

The post Reckless Capitalist Banks Rescued by Government Socialism – Again! appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ralph Nader.

Every systemic banking crisis has a trigger that sets it off. In the case of SVB, the reason for its bankruptcy is twofold.

Responding to worried questions raised by many about the ongoing banking crisis that started in the US with the bankruptcy of the Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), and is now affecting Japan and other countries, I can offer the following brief analysis.

The trigger

Every systemic banking crisis has a trigger that sets it off. In the case of SVB, the reason for its bankruptcy is twofold.

1. The fall in prices in the secondary market for bonds – basically, US government bonds (treasuries) – which was caused by the Fed rate hike which, in turn, was “imposed” on all central banks by inflation.
2. The plummeting in the share prices of Big Tech and of the entire digital ecosystem of small tech start-ups around Big Tech – a decline caused by the Fed’s termination (due to inflation) of money printing.

In more detail, SVB took two hits at the same time.

1. The first hit its funds, which were mainly invested in US treasuries. This happened as the rise in interest rates reduced the resale price of these bonds (Why buy “second hand” an older bond that yields 0.5% when you can buy a “new” one that yields 3%?). In itself, this development was not sufficient to bankrupt SVB. As long as SVB was not obliged to sell at a reduced price the older bonds it held, there was no problem. However, because of the second hit, SVB was forced to sell at a large discount. And that’s where the problem started.
2. When inflation forced the Fed to stop printing new money (i.e. no more quantitative easing), the flow of funds that were keeping the shares of Big Tech companies in the stratosphere also stopped. Thus, Big Tech shares deflated. As these companies (Google, Amazon, Meta, Twitter, Netflix, Airbnb, Uber, etc.) based their funding on loans taken out by putting up their overvalued stock prices as collateral (e.g., that’s how Elon Musk bought Twitter), Big Tech suddenly ran out of cash. That’s why they started pulling their deposits from banks like SVB.

In short, at the same time as SVB’s capital base was being reduced, depositors were asking for their deposits back. As soon as the news got out that SVB was late in returning depositors’ funds, a classic bank run began.

The cause

The underlying reason why the failure of a medium-sized bank in California created so much angst worldwide is that international capitalism has never been able to get back on its feet after 2008.

In more detail: Central banks (the FED, the ECB, etc.) have one basic tool – the interest rate. When they want to put a brake on economic activity to keep inflation in check, they raise the interest rate, and vice-versa. But, in addition to price stability, central banks have two other goals: the stability of the banking system, and the balancing of liquidity with investment. The interest rate chosen by the central bank is one. That same number (e.g. 3%) must achieve three objectives simultaneously: price stability, banking system stability, and balancing between liquidity and investment.

What could be done as an alternative? The exact opposite: austerity for the banks, with nationalisation of those who cannot survive.

And herein lies the reason why I argue that, after 2008, capitalism cannot recover: There is no longer one interest rate that can achieve all three of these objectives simultaneously. This is the tragedy of central bankers: If they want to tame inflation (at a high enough interest rate), they trigger a banking crisis and, as a result, they are forced to bail out the oligarchs who, despite being bailed out, drive investments below liquidity. If, on the other hand, they impose a lower interest rate to avoid triggering a banking crisis, then inflation gets out of control – with the result that businesses expect interest rates to rise, which discourages them from investing. And so on and so forth.

Back to 2008, then?

No, for two reasons. First, the problem for US banks today is not that their assets are junk (e.g. structured derivatives based on red loans) as they were in 2008, but that they own government bonds which they are simply forced to sell at a discount. Second, the Fed bailout announced yesterday is different from the one in 2008 – today it is the banks and depositors who are being bailed out, but not the bank owners-shareholders. These two reasons explain why bank stocks are falling but there is no total collapse of stock markets.

The fact that there is no total collapse of the stock markets does not, of course, mean that the crisis of capitalism – which has been developing continuously since 2008 – is not deepening. It simply does not have the characteristics of an instantaneous, heavy-handed fall.

What does this development mean for Europe?

In 2008, Berlin and Paris were rejoicing that the banking crash was American and did not concern them – or so they thought. Until they realised that Franco-German banks were loaded with the toxic US derivatives that bankrupted Lehman.

Today, Franco-German banks don’t seem to have the same problem – rather, they are being spared due to the antiquated structure of the European economy. What do I mean? Franco-German banks have not lent large amounts to European Big Tech for the simple reason that European Big Tech doesn’t exist – they still lend to car manufacturers and extraction companies. So, I don’t see a European SVB on the horizon.

That doesn’t mean, of course, that European banks are safe. Their own funds are also invested in bonds whose prices have fallen. A large deposit flight will create the same problems here as we are seeing in the US. Such a flight could come from parts of the financial system that one cannot imagine – for example, from the insurance sector (as in Britain last autumn) or from a collapse of the weak Credit Suisse, which has long been suffering.

What should have been done?

Since 2008, governments and central banks have been trying to prop up the banks through a combination of socialism for the banks, and austerity for everyone else. The result is what we see today: The metastasis of the crisis from one “organ” of capitalism to another, with the magnitude of the crisis increasing with each such metastasis.

What could be done as an alternative? The exact opposite: austerity for the banks, with nationalisation of those who cannot survive. And socialism for workers – a basic income for all, a return to collective bargaining and, further out, new forms of participatory ownership of high- and low-tech companies. In other words, nothing short of a political revolution.

To those who fear the idea of a political revolution, my message is simple: Prepare to pay the price of the escalating crisis of a capitalism determined to take us all to its grave.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Yanis Varoufakis.

The post Capitalist Higher Education Didn’t Break the American Dream, Capitalism Did appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Paul Street.

My colleague Rachel Yehuda studied rates of PTSD in adult New Yorkers who had been assaulted or rapes. Those whose mothers were Holocaust survivors with PTSD had a significantly higher rate of developing serious psychological problems after these traumatic experiences. The most reasonable explanation is that their upbringing had left them with a vulnerable physiology, making it difficult for them to regain their equilibrium after being violated. Yehuda found a similar vulnerability in the children of pregnant women who were in the World Trade Center that fatal day in 2001. Similarly, the reactions of children to painful events are largely determined by how calm or stressed their parents are.
― Bessel A. van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

Oh, I know I sometimes blithely say, “Violence is in the DNA of Americans.” Or, I say, “Americans are colonized, in constant fear, flight, freeze mode because of their intergenerational trauma put upon so many millions here and tens of millions outside the border of U$A.” Or, yep, “Collective Stockholm syndrome brought upon the masses through Disneyfication, McDonaldization and Infantalization.” I am serious, though, about epigenetic trauma, and if a child witnessing pain, hate, parents shooting up, violently attack each other, poverty, drug use, all of that “stuff,” well, the DNA is in fact changed for the babe, the juvenile, as all those stress hormones — there are dozens and hundreds in concert with all sorts of other bodily functions tied to the gut and brain and cortisol interplay — they morph child into hyper-vigilant and hyper-reactive and possibly hyper-mentally disjointed teens … And then what happens to them in adulthood?

You have to wonder what is in the water, meat, air, soil, Cheetos when we see this in Greece but nothing of the sort in Palestine, Ohio. I am looking at how collectively traumatized Americans are, in so many ways, from education, TV, militaristic leaders, lynchings, the entire reservation and internment and hateful Gilded media Class shitting on us. Two trains, two countries, two derailments, two different collective responses.

Police said 12,000 people had gathered by the large esplanade in front of the parliament to demand accountability for Tuesday’s head-on collision near the central city of Larissa that has sparked widespread outrage.

At least 57 people were killed and dozens were injured when a passenger train with more than 350 people on board collided with a freight train on the same track in central Greece.

Yikes. This says a thousand things and draws upon a hundred topics in one photo: Freemont, OH protesters?

Vinyl chloride train cars were derailed and then the company just burned the tankers, instead of paying for a slow pumping out and transfer, releasing PCBs, dioxins, you know, the stuff of Agent Orange. Into the air, all over the place. And so, if this isn’t vitally important to everyday life, to the crimes of Nuland-Kagan Family-Blinken-Garland-Yellen-Albright-Sherman and what occurred in their parents’ and grandparents’ lives, and then passing on those morphed genetic traits to THEM, and now we pay the price for their trauma and misanthropy, well, we are a completely blank society if we can’t get into the streets daily and fight for our rights to NOT look deeply into this, and connect the dots — and there are so many dots, as in why so much hatred of Russia is coming from those Neocons, those people whose family lines were in the Holocaust — we are missing a great opportunity to see what motivates these elitists.

A person’s experience as a child or teenager can have a profound impact on their future children’s lives, new work is showing. Rachel Yehuda, a researcher in the growing field of epigenetics and the intergenerational effects of trauma, and her colleagues have long studied mass trauma survivors and their offspring. Their latest results reveal that descendants of people who survived the Holocaust have different stress hormone profiles than their peers, perhaps predisposing them to anxiety disorders. Yehuda’s team at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and the James J. Peters Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Bronx, N.Y., and others had previously established that survivors of the Holocaust have altered levels of circulating stress hormones compared with other Jewish adults of the same age. Survivors have lower levels of cortisol, a hormone that helps the body return to normal after trauma; those who suffered post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) have even lower levels.

PARENT’S STRUGGLE, CHILD’S RISK

A variety of studies, many using long-term medical records from large populations, have found that certain experiences affect future descendants’ health risks. 
— Victoria Stern

Look, these are highly complex studies, if we just use biologic-genetics-endocrine studies. We do not ALWAYS have to rely on DNA material and long-term studies with petri dishes and billions of points of data to UNDERSTAND what happens in a household where parents are criminals, neglectful, mean, violent, unattentive, poor and struggling, never there, always in turmoil. The Nazi Holocaust? The wiring of the brain man is going to be the hardest to pin down, whereas diabetes is the easiest to connect to parents passing on those traits. But truly, the brain — that gut-serotonin-reuptake connection “thing” does determine brain functioning, cognition, disposition, outlook and personality as well as the deeper psycho-biological formulations of what it is to be a human under a thousand points of stress, both in the womb and under a kitchen table shivering from fear. What sort of Complex PTSD will ever be held to account for those children and parents and all the people bombed by Ukraine in Donbass? In Syria? All those witnesses to / survivors of war, and those who wage war, wage crimes against humanity? Alley of Angels in Donbass, erected for those victims of the Nuland-Obama-Kagan war on Russians, i.e. Maidan Coup onwards:

So what happens, then, with American Society, whereupon the media and politicians deny history, context, stories, points of view, and necessary peaks into other people’s struggles and lives? What collective amnesia, confusion, memory hole worshipping occur in a society hit with both sides of the invented liberal-conservative line, one that never existed until The Man, The Corporations, found it necessary to make the Asian, Latino, African-American as enemy, as the drain on the Majority’s lives, their concept of peace and neighborhood, their belief in myths. The Majority being The White Man/Woman! How much early childhood and juvenile and peer trauma can we attribute to a Biden or a Trump or Pelosi or any of these elites who go to elite finishing schools, prep schools, colleges, entering the dungeons of law schools, MBA programs, International Scam institutes? Does an Albright, with her own odd biography tied to her family, get a pass, get some sort of human compensatory feeling for her belief system?

Do we see the pain and the struggle and the conflicting views and her own ego lined up in those wrinkles of life?

“It’s one thing to find out you’re Jewish… but another to find out that relatives had died in concentration camps. That was a stunning shock.” Madeleine Albright first learned of her Jewish identity when she was 59, two weeks before being sworn in as the first female Secretary of State in U.S. history. “It was a complicated family story,” she said in an interview. Investigations by the Washington Post revealed that, although Albright was raised Catholic, her parents were born Jewish. She also discovered that 26 of her family members, including three grandparents, had been murdered in the Holocaust. Madeleine Albright was born Marie Jana Korbelova in Prague on May 15, 1937, the oldest of three children of Josef and Anna (Speeglova) Korbel. In 1937, Josef Korbel was serving as a press-attaché at the Czechoslovak Embassy in Belgrade. He worked for Czechoslovakia’s first democratic president, Tomas Masaryk, who retired in 1935, and his successor, Edvard Benes.

What sort of triple epigenetic trauma lurked in her brain? Ed Bradley interviewed America’s first female secretary of state in 1997. Albright died at 84.

I could go deeply into epigenetics, and this Adverse Childhood Events, a tracking system (unfortunately, on the digital data dashboard tied to performance) that does in fact take into consideration the huge uphill battle many youth have growing up in stressful and dysfunctional and non-attentive and violent and poor homes:

Of course, most of my life as teacher, mentor, journalist, social worker, activist has been entwined with the people I teach-mentor-serve-report on-advocate for and where they came from. What about my homeless female veterans? What got them to join the armed services? What caused them to use drugs and end up homeless and end up in my office talking about supports and other avenues of healing and getting a better footing I might have? All my female clients both civilian and military were sexually assaulted, abused and raped. That trauma is complex because it is never just one blow to the head, one violent forced rape. So many things tied to the context of how and where and who it happened with, and then, the failure of our society to deal with this trauma, the failure of courts, cops and politicians. Unfortunately, the elite, those Albright kind of folk, except younger and into tech-data-tracking-social impact investing, they are using ACEs for PROFITEERING:

A red flag for me in Gavin Newsom’s “child-friendly” proposed budget was the $45 million he allocated to screen children and adults in Medi-Cal for ACEs. I’m writing this post to express serious reservations I have about the process of developing ACE (Adverse Early Childhood Experiences) scores for people. ACEs are getting tremendous media exposure of late. While I believe this to be a crucial pubic health concern, my fear is that ACE prevention and mitigation interventions will become vehicles for “innovative” finance and will expand profiling of vulnerable populations.

I want to make it clear from the outset that I acknowledge childhood trauma does result in long-term negative health consequences for individuals. I’ve seen it in my own family. I also recognize that systems of structural racism have inflicted stress and violence on communities of color and indigenous peoples for generations, resulting in high rates of chronic illness that make them attractive targets for “social impact” schemes. People have a basic human right to treatment and care, which should not be conditioned on surveillance and having data harvested to line the pockets of social impact investors.

What concerns me about ACEs is the “scoring.” Why should a standardized rubric developed under the auspices of one of the largest managed healthcare systems, Kaiser Permanente, label clients and structure the way a doctor, therapist, social worker, or educator can care for them? How did this tool come to have such a far reach, and whose interests will it ultimately serve? Is a reliance on “scores” an intentionally-constructed framework that allows providers to limit their scope to “fixing” individuals and families rather than advancing a more radical approach whereby systemic causes of community trauma, trauma rooted in our country’s deep racist history, can be acknowledged, holistically assessed, and begin to be ameliorated? And finally, will this “scoring” system be used to transform the treatment of childhood trauma into a machine for “pay for success” data speculation? I believe it will. (“ACE (Adverse Childhood Experience) Scores: Part of the “Pay for Success” Plan? Feb. 5, 2019, Wrench in the Gears, Alison McDowell)

So, this level of exploitation for profit has flooded the American landscape generation after generation, until we are here, in that GAD moment for many — generalized anxiety disorder. Chaos, inertia, cancel society, trigger warnings, up is down, racism is okay sort of thinking. Until someone like me who has been witness to other people’s direct trauma and who has been a trauma navigator and of course been a teacher too, within gang programs, tied to low income communities, prisons, elsewhere considered “on the other side of the railroad tracks” writes about it as a way of making sense of what I have seen and heard, and some of it has been horrific, beyond belief, and in one sense, some of it can’t be repeated even in a Dissident Voice newsletter. I’ll finish this very superficial treatment of collective trauma and epigenetics with my own flipping through Showtime’s offerings, or what have you. I was attempting with open mind and heart to get into the documentary on Chelsea Manning, XY Chelsea.

Look, I am a friend to many communities within the LGBTQA+ grouping, and know the story of Chelsea Elizabeth Manning, born Bradley Edward Manning; December 17, 1987. A whistleblower. This documentary, however, was so self-indulgent, so steeped in a sort of dumbed-down look at a person in constant struggle that it was filled with affectations and was difficult for me to get any traction on it. I have read good accounts about Bradley-Chelsea. I know Chelsea also got on the Podcast Circuit in March 2022 and said the most idiotic things about Putin, Russia, the SMO, Ukraine. Very very sad case of misinformed person. I won’t link one of those shows here. So, to get through the midnight hour of insomnia, I found a gem:

Here, the YouTube blurb: Raw and unflinching examination of the courageous and remarkable life of basketball star and social justice activist Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf. Born Chris Jackson, he overcame tremendous adversity to reach the NBA and found his true calling when he converted to Islam. His decision not to stand for the national anthem, however, turned him from prodigy to pariah. Told candidly by Abdul-Rauf himself more than 20 years later it’s the remarkable story of one man who kept the faith and paved the way for a social justice movement.

Look, I just came back from coaching the Special Olympics basketball team, and we have one more practice before a March 18 out-of-town state tournament. I work with these amazing young adults, and I was not about to tolerate at the end of my night this Manning self-indulgence.

ACEs — Manning had boozer parents, in Oklahoma, violent, and of course, poor. Abused and neglected, Bradley was a lost soul, and decided to join the military to get some meaning in his life. Chelsea states in the flick that there are many transgender folk in the armed services. Many reasons. Definitely worth looking into.

Then, well, I knew some of Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf’s story, Chris Jackson growing up in Stars and Bars, KKK, Mississippi, dirt poor, no father, and a mother who never told him who is father was. His older brother shot squirrels and doves with a pellet gun for food, not fun. They were always hungry. You have to watch this film, man.

It will uplift you, and it will deeply solidify in you, I hope, why this country is so traumatized, deeply spiritual lobotomized, inertia bound in terms of real history, and so so disassociative around who the real enemies are. So many incapable elite human failures pounding the war drums, so many in high and middle office stealing from us, and yet no boiling tar and pokey features and sharpened pitchforks. Abdul-Rauf, a true hero. The best basketball athlete Shaq ever saw:

He shared how his turning point came one day when he visited his mother’s home. He opened the refrigerator and it was empty. He went to the restroom to wash his hands. When he leaned on the sink, it collapsed on the floor. That was it. After playing for two years at LSU, he told his LSU coach he wanted to play in the NBA. “My mother is everything (to me)…I got to take care of her,” Abdul-Rauf emotionally said. His coach’s response surprised him. He told him it was the best decision he could make. He knew if he went pro, he would be able to take care of his mother. So he did. In 1990, Abdul-Rauf was the third overall pick of the Denver Nuggets during the NBA draft.

It is a tough one, since I will not be standing for the national anthem this coming March 18, which I have always shown as my own deeply enmeshed protest of the stars and stripes, my own military trauma, and of course, like Mahmoud, my education through Fred Hampton, the Black Panthers, Malcolm X and ten thousand others.

His views about America changed, and he found that his beliefs no longer aligned with what he observed. People he looked up to changed, he noticed. To protest oppression, he refused to stand for the American national anthem. It stirred controversy, and some say his stance was the blueprint for what would come 20 years later when 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick took a knee during the anthem to protest racial injustice. Kaepernick kneeled at a preseason game against the Chargers for the first time on Sep. 1, 2016. “It sounds cliche, but when I say I was so comfortable with my information, I was so comfortable with my faith and my position. I was so comfortable with my belief in God and how things are going,” Abdul-Rauf said. His faith was bigger than the game, he said. This was not the first time he had chosen not to stand for the anthem, but it was the first time someone had noticed. It cost him his home, which the Ku Klux Klan burned down, and his NBA career.

Shit-dog, the deeply ingrained trauma of growing up, and in both Manning’s and Johnson’s cases, an absent father in variations on a theme. Chelsea struggled with identity in Oklahoma, and Mahmoud struggled with a neurological condition, a mind draining and body pounding condition that in fact made him into a god-like basketball player.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.

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The post Understanding Haiti as a Case Study of Capitalist Modernity appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Daniel Falcone.

The agenda was set with the Lewis Powell Memorandum in 1971. Written at the request of the United States Chamber of Commerce, probably the most influential structure of capitalist rule at the time, the concern for the Chamber was the need to find a more coherent counter-offensive to the attacks against the system over the previous years. At the center of the anti-system attacks during the 1960s was, of course, the Black Liberation Movement and the Anti-War movement.

Powell made the argument that the capitalist class had to recognize that their very survival was at stake and that meant capitalists had to understand that as a class their interests transcended their individual enterprises.

And while the tone of Powell’s memo was “professional” and lacked rhetorical excesses, the need for a more intentional and strategic class war was the call that leaped out from the Powell memo.

The day is long past when the chief executive officer of a major corporation discharges his responsibility by maintaining a satisfactory growth of profits, with due regard to the corporation’s public and social responsibilities. If our system is to survive, top management must be equally concerned with protecting and preserving the system itself.

The policy implications were obvious. The U.S. ruling class concluded that it could no longer afford the “excesses” of the liberal welfare state and reform liberalism that as far as it was concerned had produced a failed war strategy, cultural decadence, rampant inflation, urban riots and demands for rights from groups representing every sector of U.S. society.

This was the beginning of the right-wing neoliberal turn. A societal-wide counterrevolutionary policy that also required a domestic counterinsurgency strategy that would have a military, but more importantly, an ideological/cultural component. Domestically the main target of the counterinsurgency would be the revolutionary nationalist and socialist forces of the Black liberation movement and “new communist” formations.

Internationally, the turn to neoliberalism translated into a brutal intensification of colonial/capitalist (imperialist) value extraction from nations in the global South buttressed by weak, corrupt, repressive neocolonial states politically and militarily propped-up by the U.S.

The neoliberal counterrevolution produced irreconcilable contradictions that we are living through today. The gap between rich and poor nations and between workers and capitalists had never been more pronounced and immiseration so cruel.

For the Black working class, the neoliberal turn was a catastrophe. The off-shoring of the U.S. industrial base with its relatively high paying jobs along with the reorganization of the economy to a service economy and the privatization wave that devastated social services and public employment where black workers were disproportionately located created structural precarity that only needed one incident to push tens of thousands into desperation. In the 2000s there were two. Hurricane Katrina and the economic collapse of 2008 that saw the greatest loss of Black wealth and income since the end of the reconstruction period between 1877 and 1896.

Compounding this devastation, the crimes against humanity represented by the 2020 covid pandemic in which literally tens of thousands of Black people, mainly poor, unnecessarily died because the state failed to protect their fundamental human rights to health and social security.

While Katrina exposed the fragility of Black life in the Gulf Coast, the economic crisis of 2008 just a few years later plugged millions of African workers into a desperate, depression era scramble for survival in conditions where Black labor was superfluous, and the very existence of Black life was seen as a social problem. The mass slaughter of the covid pandemic closed out the first two decades of a century that was supposed to exemplify “American” greatness with a demoralized and confused electorate turning to a washed-up hack politician named Joe Biden.

Midterm Elections: If Stopping Fascism is on the Ballot, what was it the Africans Experienced all These Years?

Neoliberalism was a rightist capitalist reform project. Today it informs the context for the midterms elections for African/Black workers. The objective material needs of Black workers and our desire for self-determination, independent development and peace were not on the ballot.

And while the duopoly represents the primary political contradiction obscuring the reality of the dictatorship of capital, the most aggressive neoliberal actors now operate in and through the democratic party. Consequently, the unspoken character of the competition between the two parties is that elections have now shaped up since 2016 as a contest between the far-right elements represented today by Trump forces and the neoliberal right represented by corporate democrats tied to finance capital and transnational corporations.

This is the undemocratic choice. The republicans represent the disaffected white nationalist petit-bourgeoisie settlers who think they are indigenous to this land. The ruling corporate capitalist elements of that party are for the most part nationalist oriented, dependent for their profits on the domestic economy. Some elements produce for the global markets, but they are in constant struggle with big capital as the capitalist economy “naturally” concentrates into its monopoly stage.

Democrats who historically had been associated with labor and the common man even during the period when it was the party of racist segregation under the apartheid system in the South, is today the party controlled by U.S. based monopoly capital. For workers, this form of bourgeois democracy has no space or structure representing the interests of workers, the poor and structurally oppressed. The working class and poor are slowly beginning to understand that.

That is why early evidence suggests that African/Black workers did not participate in numbers that were necessary for the democrats to have prevailed in some of those key races. The democrats have nothing to offer, no policies, no hope, and no vision.

Some of the cowardice phony “progressives” in that party suggest that the national democrats did not push an economic message even though it was clear that the economic crisis was their most pressing concern.

But what economic message? The democrats long ago abandoned their base and they continue to desperately find ways to dilute the influence of their most loyal base – African Americans – by seeking out that elusive white, primarily women, suburban vote.

What the midterms reaffirmed is that the class war that Powell advocated for in the 70s as a primary strategic objective of the ruling class continues and is intensifying, even as the ruling class is in crisis and cannot rule in the same way. This means that the people must disabuse themselves of all illusions and sentimental ideas around common national interests with this reckless and increasingly irrational bourgeoisie.

We cannot allow ourselves to fall prey to the slick propaganda that diverts attention away from the failures of the capitalist system. January 6th and Trump, evil Putin, the calculating Chinese, the exaggerated crime issue, and immigration issue, are all meant to divert us away from the fact that our lives are empty, that we have no time for friends and family, mindless soul crushing work characterizes our existence, if we have it, and the fear and anxiety that comes from a precarious existence saps our spirits and turns our confusion and anger inward.

Ideological clarity that stems from a liberated consciousness directs us to the conclusion that it is the system that is the enemy. Not our neighbor, or the undocumented gardener or food delivery person, not the peoples of Nicaragua, Haiti, Venezuela and Cuba who just want to live in their own way and in peace.

The democrat party is a morally bankrupt shell, hollowed out by years of lies and corruption. Many do not want to accept the bitter reality that we (Africans and colonized peoples) must objectively acknowledge that nothing will substantially change by this election or any other bourgeois election. We can and must contest in those spaces but we are clear –  as long as power is retained by the Pan European colonial/capitalist dictatorship Black people will continue to suffer and collective humanity will face an existential threat.

• First published at Black Agenda Report

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Ajamu Baraka.

Janine Jackson interviewed Center for Popular Democracy’s Julio López Varona about Puerto Rico colonialism for the  September 30, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Janine Jackson: Puerto Rico is in dire need of fuel for generators as they deal with the devastation of Hurricane Fiona. But a ship carrying fuel has been idling offshore, unable to enter a port, because it’s Puerto Rico, where the Jones Act—requiring that all goods be brought in on a US-built ship, owned and crewed by US citizens, and flying the US flag—makes critical goods more expensive, or in this case, out of reach. (The White House has just announced it will temporarily waive the Jones Act.)

Bloomberg (9/28/22)

Investment firms in mainland states can’t act as advisors to the government in the issue of bonds while at the same time marketing those bonds to investors—but they can in Puerto Rico.

In Puerto Rico, you can get tax breaks, including zero income tax on capital gains—unless, that is, you were born on the island. Only non–Puerto Ricans qualify.

Puerto Ricans themselves are ineligible for Supplemental Security Income, even though they pay payroll taxes.

All of which is to suggest that the story of Puerto Rico’s ability to prepare for, withstand and recover from natural disasters starts long before the storm.

We’re joined now by Julio López Varona, co-chief of campaigns at the Center for Popular Democracy. He joins us by phone from San Juan. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Julio López Varona.

Julio López Varona: Thank you for having me.

JJ: There are a number of ways you could illustrate the tangle of predatory policy and political disempowerment and just exploitation that are the ongoing crisis for Puerto Rico, before and after any natural disasters.

Center for Popular Democracy (8/22)

But I know that you worked recently looking at how that all plays out in one very important sector: pharmaceuticals. What did that research show about how things work in Puerto Rico?

JLV: We have been interested in looking at how the colonial economy of Puerto Rico plays out in different sectors for a while.

We’ve been specifically interested in thinking about how pharmaceutical companies are, in many ways, doing what they said they would do with the billions of dollars that we give them every year through tax exemptions.

This is part of a decades-old practice to give billions of dollars of tax exemptions to pharma, which have phased out, in many cases, because of changes in our economy, but still remain.

And we were interested in thinking through how these tax exemptions were actually helping communities have a good life, how they were allowing people to actually have a dignified salary, and all those things.

And when we dug in, we started talking to workers in the security and cleaning space, and in those cases, we found thousands of workers that, in many cases, were subcontracted by pharmaceutical companies, and were getting paid minimum wage, had the baseline of benefits that Puerto Ricans get.

And it was really interesting for us, because the pharmaceutical company for a long time had been sold as, what I say parallels to the “American dream,” the “Puerto Rican dream”: This is how you get out of poverty. This is how you have a family. But we find these thousands of workers that are actually not doing that.

And it brings about the question what is the economy? And why are we providing these tax exemptions when they are not benefiting Puerto Ricans? And, more importantly, who are they benefiting?

Emisférica (2018)

Why are we continuing to do this, and why are we not being able to take advantage of the billions of dollars that could be put for our economy, and more in moments like this, one where we have hurricanes happening, and where we have people struggling with issues with relocation, issues with droughts and flooding.

In the case of Hurricane Fiona specifically, we have workers that we’ve been talking to that lost their homes while working [for] these pharma companies, that say that they’ve been the first ones to step up after other hurricanes.

So we have a really interesting moment, where pharma says it’s ready, but we have thousands of thousands of workers that are struggling in a moment of crisis.

JJ: In some ways, it sounds very familiar to the kind of promises that companies make here on the mainland as well, that, you know, “Give us these tax breaks and we’ll create all these good jobs that will lift people out of poverty.”

And there’s often very little follow-up to see whether they’re actually creating that many jobs to begin with, before you even get to whether their wages are actually really lifting people out of poverty.

Politico (9/19/22)

JLV: Yeah. We often say that Puerto Rico has become a microcosm for the worst kind of experiment on capitalist ideas. We’ve seen those ideas be translated into extreme privatization, like what’s happening right now with the electrical grid, which still is not able to provide electricity to all Puerto Rican families, like 12 or 13 days after Hurricane Fiona.

We’ve seen the impact of what you were referring a little bit earlier around tax exemptions for the rich, and this idea of trickle-down economics—like the rich come, and everybody’s better.

And then we’ve seen what’s happening with all of these corporations. Pharma is a great example, but we also know that Puerto Rico has the highest density of Walmarts and Walgreens, and those companies are also displacing Puerto Rican local companies.

So all of the things that neoliberalism has preached for a long time, that are the way in which you make capitalism flourish, are happening in Puerto Rico, and in many ways the agenda is one that has been accomplished successfully.

It’s really good if you have money. It’s really, really bad if you’re a person that doesn’t have money, and isn’t able to take advantage of all the programs that benefit the wealthy.

CNN (9/24/22)

JJ: And isn’t able to jet away to your second home when a hurricane comes.

Part of the “Misery, Yet Again, for Puerto Ricans,” which was part of a CNN headline, part of that narrative is Puerto Ricans are in such a perennial hole because they can’t pay off their debt.

Now, we can’t do the long version of this, necessarily, but I just don’t know that you could get into an elite media conversation by explaining that, in reality, Puerto Rico has paid any debt that it rightfully owed long ago, yeah?

JLV: I would even say, if we simplified very much, there is a historical reason why Puerto Rico was in its debt crisis, and it is at the center of it because of colonialism.

Puerto Ricans, like Puerto Rico’s economy, have been controlled by the US since the US came to Puerto Rico.

If you look at the change in the way in which we went from our own currency to US currency, that’s benefited people from the US. When we see the changes that happen when it came to the crops that were used in the ’20s. And then when we looked at pharma and the companies that came, or the military invasion, there are many examples of how the Puerto Rican economy has been driven by the interests of the US.

So even if we argue that the final result of this was that there was a debt crisis that was made in Puerto Rico, that would not tell the whole story.

New York (4/17/19)

And even if you told that story, you should also account for the fact that this debt, in many cases, was illegal.

This debt that, in many cases, as you said, was already paid. And that the people that are currently negotiating that debt are the same people that, in some cases, make money out of it.

So it’s a very, very complex situation that at the end has to do with colonialism, economic control of Puerto Ricans’ future, and greed. Greed in the worst way possible. Greed when it comes to hedge funds that decided to come to Puerto Rico, knowing that Puerto Rico would default, and extract as much wealth as they could. And greed when it came to the people that were running Puerto Rico, and decided that they wanted to move forward with an agenda that, at the end of the day, was extremely good for those that had money—which is kind of a theme in this conversation—and really, really dire for people that live here, and in some cases have been driven out of Puerto Rico because of those economic conditions.

JJ: Finally, when we’ve spoken before, it seems we always come around to talking about dignity, to talking about leading with the dignity of human beings in the policies that we make.

And I just wanted to add, there is, when you learn about what’s happening in Puerto Rico, you see that there is, beyond pushback to each new indignity, there is long-term organizing and growing happening that provides a way to at least look forward. Isn’t that true?

Julio López Varona: “What Puerto Ricans want and deserve is respect. They deserve a voice in the decisions that are made about their economy and their future.”

JLV: Yeah. Five years ago, when Hurricane Maria happened, everybody talked about Puerto Rico se levanta, “Puerto Rico rises up.” This time, after Hurricane Fiona, people are talking about solo el pueblo salva al pueblo. So “only the people save the people.”

People understand that what’s happening in Puerto Rico is wrong. People understand that we cannot trust the government anymore, and that we need to organize and support each other.

We’ve also gotten to the point where “resiliency” is not a good word. “Resiliency” is actually a bad word. What Puerto Ricans want and deserve is respect. They deserve a voice in the decisions that are made about their economy and their future.

And they deserve, in many cases, reparations. They deserve that the people that have put us in this position step up and actually allow us to have the resources we need so that we can rebuild ourself, without the oversight of anybody, but with the power of the people at the center of the conversation and the actions taken.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Julio López Varona, co-chief of campaigns at the Center for Popular Democracy. They’re online at PopularDemocracy.org. Julio López Varona, thank you so much for joining us today on CounterSpin.

JLV: Thank you for having me.

The post ‘Puerto Rico Has Become a Microcosm for the Worst Kind of Capitalist Ideas’ appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

Author Jeff Brown wrote that China is “history’s most successful socialist and communist country.”

This conflation of communism and socialism is common but inaccurate. It fudges that, according to Marxist thought, socialism is an earlier stage in the process of reaching the end goal of communism.

That writer Ron Leighton asserts in his piece that “China is Capitalist” is rather simplistic. Laissez faire capitalism, neoliberalism, and exploitation of other nations are antithetical to Chinese political-economic practice.

Dictionary Definitions

Socialism: “a theory or system of social organization that advocates the ownership and control of the means of production and distribution, capital, land, etc., by the community as a whole, usually through a centralized government.”

Communism: “a theory or system of social organization based on the holding of all property in common, actual ownership being ascribed to the community as a whole or to the state.”

Capitalism: “an economic system in which investment in and ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange of wealth is made and maintained chiefly by private individuals or corporations, especially as contrasted to cooperatively or state-owned means of wealth.”

Is there an extant purely capitalist society? What do hospitals, schools, the fire department, the police, military, etc represent? The fact is that capitalism, because of its proclivity to concentrate wealth in a few hands, could not survive in a society without wealth redistribution.

The Communist Party of China prioritized pulling all its citizens out of absolute poverty and achieved this in late 2021. What “capitalist” country has achieved this? The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea — despite a scorched earth bombardment by the US, climatological disasters suffered, and continuous sanctions against it — has achieved tuition-free education for all, kindergarten through university; free preschool; universal healthcare; full employment; and universal housing. What capitalist countries have achieved this? In fact, my North Korean guide proudly opined that the DPRK was more socialist than China.

China now strives toward becoming a xiaokang society, a moderately prosperous society — basically a society where almost everyone has attained a middle class level. This is hardly what one would expect to be prioritized under capitalism’s law of the jungle.

Unhindered, a system of socialism should function without need for capitalism.

Nonetheless, arguing about whether China is communist or capitalist is futile. China is neither.

If one wants to know what political-economic system China adheres to then check in with China’s chairman Xi Jinping. He states clearly in his book On the Governance of China that China follows and applies Marxist-Leninism to the Chinese context and that China is currently in the early stage of socialism, what Chinese call Socialism with Chinese Characteristics. The “Communist” in the Communist Party of China indicates the end goal, as Xi also makes clear in his book.

China emphasizes peace, the freedom for each nation to choose a system which best suits it, win-win commerce, and an improved life for people of all nations. It does not seek to impose a political-economic system on others, and it does not emphasize profit over people.

Sounds quite distant from capitalism.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kim Petersen.

The Greanville Post recently republished China watcher Jeff Brown’s 2015 piece, “The Myth of Chinese Capitalism“. Brown calls the supposed myth, “One of the greatest fabrications of Western media, among academics and on Wall Street…” He asserts that the West promotes a “self-assuring message…that China is fully in the fold of Western capitalism, except…Beijing plays dirty, using its own set of rules” (emphasis in the original). Further, he disputes the “superficial image” of China as “just a copycat, eastern version of crass Americana.” He is correct that these messages and images are simplistic. In their place, however, rather than a more complex, and importantly, more accurate variation, he offers his own superficial image.

Despite appearances, Brown really only offers four gaunt pieces of evidence for his claim that China is “communist-socialist”, instead of capitalist, two of which are highlighted in the subtitle. “Every last inch of China’s land is collectively owned. And so are the ‘commanding heights of the economy’” (arguing the latter, he includes more general claims about state-ownership of industry). The remaining pieces of evidence concern China’s constitution and its welfare state. I will look at them in the order they are presented.

Before explaining his proofs, Brown engages in some general applause for the Chinese system—though the causes for his cheerleading are basically beside the point regarding whether China is communist-socialist or capitalist. He states that “China has become, in one generation, the world’s largest economy in purchasing power parity (PPP)”—a measure economists question anyway when used in reference to production, as Brown does.

Economist Patrick Honohan argues:

China’s GDP at PPP recently passed that of the United States. But such calculations neglect the fact that PPPs take account of the systematic tendency of poorer countries to have lower prices….

If cross-country comparisons are to be robust, they need to take account of factors such as environmental degradation and the globalization of production. In at least 10 countries, the required resource depletion adjustment for environmental degradation amounts to more than 15 percent of GDP. The far-fetched 25 percent GDP growth rate in Ireland in 2015 reflects the role of multinational corporations.

In any event, PPP stats hardly establish the nature of the system in the terms given.

Further, and no proof either, he cites China’s once “very egalitarian 0.16” Gini coefficient, noting that currently (2015) it is 0.37, between Sweden’s (0.25) and that of the United States (0.41). Having said this, it is true that, as Brown implies, (1) not all modernization (in the sense of productivity and reduction of poverty) occurred after 1978, when liberalization generally is considered to have begun, and (2), not all post-1978 reform and transformation has been neoliberal, save for the qualification of reputed Chinese cheating. Yet, these also fail to demonstrate that China is “communist-socialist” rather than capitalist.

As Brown’s first proof of China’s “communist-socialist” system he offers an extended quote from China’s constitution, specifically its 1982 version. But the passage, unsurprisingly, is not much more than the CCP’s self-reported hagiographic nonsense. Yes, a decrease in poverty has been achieved, both under Mao and during the post-1978 period. Dispute as to the exact number and measures used remains, but the achievement is not insignificant. On the other hand, the assertion that “The exploiting classes as such have been eliminated” is fanciful today even if it was arguable in the Maoist period.

The constitution is quick to assert the government is a “people’s democratic republic led by the working class and based on the alliance of workers and peasants”. In this regard, it might be of interest to know that the actual membership of the Chinese Communist Party has changed over time. If it was ever a meaningful worker/peasant organization (and arguably in the pre-civil war days it was), it isn’t now. As Chuangcn notes, in June 2022, “the Organization Department of [the] CCP published the latest statistics about members composition”. Chuangcn observes that while “workers and peasants are in a constant trend of decrease”, “managers, specialists and retirees have one of increase.” This being the case, it is no stretch to say this latter group is roughly similar to the professional-managerial class (PMC) in the United States.

In John and Barbara Ehrenreich’s 1977 essay, “The Professional-Managerial Class”, they write:

To generations of radicals, the working class has been the bearer of socialism, the agent of both progressive social reform and revolution. But in the United States in the last two decades, the left has been concentrated most heavily among people who feel themselves to be ‘middle class,’ while the working class has appeared relatively quiescent. This ‘middle class’ left, unlike its equivalent in early twentieth-century Europe or in the Third World movement; it is, to a very large extent, the left itself. It has its own history of mass struggle, not as an ally or appendage of the industrical class, but as a mass constituency in and of itself. At the same time, most of the U.S. left continues to believe (correctly, we think) that without a mass working-class left, only the most marginal social reforms is possible.¹

Has a similar class arisen in China, where one party perhaps can even tighten elite political control over “the most marginal social reforms”? Are we to suppose, even if we take seriously the notion that the dictatorship of the workers and peasants can be something other than just a dictatorship, that the current make-up of the Party can deliver anything but, in this case, party-state-capitalist control and, for the rest, a demand for docility?

What about social programs as a proof? The implication that social welfare programs makes China “communist-socialist” is transparently ridiculous, and it echoes right-wing views about such programs. Plainly, I think, social welfare programs demonstrate at most that China is social democratic. While social democracies certainly do provide real assistance to populations, they have never approached the core of capitalist social relations in any real sense. That neoliberalism butts heads with social democracy remains a debate within capitalism.

Next on Brown’s short list of supposed evidence is China’s supposedly collectivized land.

Brown writes that “China is still very much communist, because every square meter of this country is owned collectively by the Chinese people, via the state.” In the next paragraph, he gives the punchline. “Anybody on Planet Earth can invest in China’s real estate, but if you wish to keep it longer than 70 years [70 years!], you will have to renew your lease contract and pay its going market value, to do so.” I defy you to find a capitalist who is significantly unnerved by such an arrangement.

We might have guessed, of course, that collective land ownership could be as meaningful or meaningless as democracy, freedom, or popular sovereignty. In fact, in China, “swindling locals and forcing them off their land” so that it might be converted “to state-ownership” and then “placed on the market” is “all too common in China since the capitalist transition spread to the sphere of land ownership and became more centered on real estate over the past two decades”.

Further:

“Socialist Modernization” has, in reality, only led to the further entrenchment of the private property system. The party has overseen the destruction of essentially all remaining communal or semi-communal conventions in land and enterprise management, alongside all remaining forms of socialist welfare, systematically replacing them with conventions of private ownership modelled on the legal systems of the leading capitalist nations. This cultivation of commodification, combined with the repression of all potential for communist organizing to emerge among the population at large, seems to pose this Chinese ‘socialism’ against all prospects for proletarian emancipation. Placed in global context, it is not an exaggeration to say that socialism, as it actually exists today, is largely anti-communist.

The next piece of evidence is that of state-owned enterprise.

A recent report published by The Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE), finds that:

China’s private sector has grown not only in absolute terms but also as a proportion of the country’s largest companies, measured by revenue or (for listed ones) by market value, from a very low level when President Xi was confirmed as the next top leader in 2010 to a significant share today. SOEs still dominate by revenue among the largest companies, but their preeminence is eroding. To be sure, the Communist Party has attempted to develop its presence in the corporate world, including in the private sector, through various means. But equity ownership structures matter. China’s private-sector companies are focused on profit maximization and value creation in ways SOEs are not.

The authors note that everyone from the Rockefeller-founded Asia Society to The Wall Street Journal, and, incidentally, state propagandists in China, take seriously Xi Jinping’s supposed “pivot to the state”.  They also remind us that claims of a “pivot back to state-sector dominance have been made multiple times before, with reference to policy shifts in 1989-1990, 2003, the mid-2000s, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2012, 2017, 2019, and early 2020. Meanwhile, China’s private sector has kept advancing. There is no compelling indication that this time is different.”

(Regarding the subtitled pieces of evidence (that land and the most important industries are state owned), it is probably not a coincidence that, as a left-wing Chinese writer claims, these “form the basis of the [Chinese] regime’s claim to be ‘socialist’”. Brown, a resident of Beijing (at least as of 2015), has probably heard them before on TV.)

Chuangcn recently offered an array of answers to the broader questions: “What Do Chinese Workers Think about the CCP?”,’Is China a capitalist country?’, ‘Is China a socialist country?’, and ‘Wasn’t China a Communist Country under Mao?’. Chuangcn members, both in China and internationally, supplied answers. These replies can be summed up as ‘not much’, ‘yes’, ‘no’, and ‘no’.

Still, a few quotes are helpful.

Regarding workers’ opinions about the CCP, one respondent, Ruirui, said that though he or she originally took the Party to be genuine and even “sacred”, he or she nevertheless “came to realize that the CCP truly had nothing to do with communism, so my interest in it completely disappeared.” Another, Kaixuan, said that “There is nothing socialist or communist or even mildly progressive about the CCP.” Cheng Yeng said that since he or she became an actual communist, they had no interest in the Party whatsoever. There are many more similar replies.

As for the questions whether China is capitalist or socialist, Chuangcn gives the following rejoinders. “China is capitalist. It is capitalist both because it is fully integrated in the global capitalist system and because capitalist imperatives have penetrated all the way down to everyday life.”. As for socialism, Chuangcn says that if China is socialist it is only because the word has “lost any relationship to the destruction of capitalist society”.

Chuangcn substantially says regarding communism under Mao that, no, China was not communist. Additionally, they claim that Maoist China really matched more the description “developmental regime”, a system of building up the capacities and wealth of the country while modernizing it. The developmental regime more or less described every Third World and Non-Aligned country. They attempted to develop either via Western methods or Soviet methods (or some variation thereof).

However, and just as important as the facts of the matter, there is more generally the subject of judgment. The term religiosity as a criticism of Brown’s interpretation refers to secular, political simplified, good-vs.-evil belief system. It applies well to nationalism. As the British political scientist, Frank Wright, put it, “Nationalisms are not merely ‘like’ religions – they are religions.” Brown, who “grew up in Oklahoma, USA, in the 50s-60s” and like many Cold War babies, perhaps, tended to perceive the world in very stark dualistic terms, probably clung then to a United States-focused nationalism. In an apparent case of transferred-nationalism ² , though, has he traded one simplified view for another, this time one echoing tenets set forth in Beijing?

*****

There is a further sense in which Brown’s view may be seen as religious-like and relevant to my argument. The sociologist Daniel DellaPosta considers the problem of simplified, good-vs.-evil worldviews specifically in regard to “an increase of mass polarization” arising from “belief consolidation, entailing the collapse of previously cross-cutting alignments, thus creating increasingly broad and encompassing clusters organized around cohesive packages of beliefs”. This means a person is likely to have a set of views governed first by their perceived occurrence on a political spectrum instead of independently-judged beliefs that may, secondarily, seem more-or-less scattered or clustered across a political spectrum.

Naturally, when one is raised with a simplified view (like nationalism), at least parts of which are found to be significantly distorted or unfair, adopting a transferred- or negative nationalism might seem like a reasonable reaction, and doing so may lead to some insight. It’s also a readily-useful position to fall back on, particularly when faced with limited information. Invariably, though, a flexible, complex view fully expecting the unexpected, the inconsistent, and the ambivalent, is the only worthy replacement for a simplified view like nationalism or transferred-nationalism. 

1. Barbara and John Ehrenreich, “The Professional Managerial Class”, Radical America, (March 1977), p. 7.
2. In the sense of reflexive and total support for another nation-state rather than the one in which one was born or resides. No support or criticism, certainly, can be applauded or dismissed merely on the basis of one’s birthplace or location. But the over-simplicity and Manichean nature of a worldview sets it out as religious-like. Of course, Orwell can be dismissed for having the wrong politics, but the points he makes refer to faulty thinking and cannot be so easily dismissed.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Ron Leighton.

Image by Catgirlmutant.

The Greanville Post recently republished China watcher Jeff Brown’s 2015 piece, ‘The Myth of Chinese Capitalism’. Brown calls the supposed myth, “One of the greatest fabrications of Western media, among academics and on Wall Street…” He asserts that the West promotes a “self-assuring message…that China is fully in the fold of Western capitalism, except…Beijing plays dirty, using its own set of rules” (emphasis in the original). Further, he disputes the “superficial image” of China as “just a copycat, eastern version of crass Americana.” He is correct that these messages and images are simplistic. In their place however, rather than a more complex, and importantly, more accurate variation, he offers his own superficial image.

Despite appearances, Brown really only offers four gaunt pieces of evidence for his claim that China is “communist-socialist”, instead of capitalist, two of which are highlighted in the subtitle. “Every last inch of China’s land is collectively owned. And so are the ‘commanding heights of the economy’” (arguing the latter, he includes more general claims about state-ownership of industry). The remaining pieces of evidence concern China’s constitution and its welfare state. I will look at them in the order they are presented.

Before explaining his proofs, Brown engages in some general applause for the Chinese system—though the causes for his cheer-leading are basically beside the point regarding whether China is communist-socialist or capitalist. He states that “China has become, in one generation, the world’s largest economy in purchasing power parity (PPP)”—a measure economists question anyway when used in reference to production, as Brown does.

Economist Patrick Honohan argues,

China’s GDP at PPP recently passed that of the United States. But such calculations neglect the fact that PPPs take account of the systematic tendency of poorer countries to have lower prices….

If cross-country comparisons are to be robust, they need to take account of factors such as environmental degradation and the globalization of production. In at least 10 countries, the required resource depletion adjustment for environmental degradation amounts to more than 15 percent of GDP. The far-fetched 25 percent GDP growth rate in Ireland in 2015 reflects the role of multinational corporations.

In any event, PPP stats hardly establish the nature of the system in the terms given.

Further, and no proof either, he cites China’s once “very egalitarian 0.16” Gini coefficient, noting that currently (2015) it is 0.37, between Sweden’s (0.25) and that of the United States (0.41). Having said this, it is true that, as Brown implies, 1), not all modernization (in the sense of productivity and reduction of poverty) occurred after 1978, when liberalization generally is considered to have begun, and 2), not all post-1978 reform and transformation has been neoliberal, save for the qualification of reputed Chinese cheating. Yet, these also fail to demonstrate that China is “communist-socialist” rather than capitalist.

As Brown’s first proof of China’s “communist-socialist” system he offers an extended quote from China’s constitution, specifically its 1982 version. But the passage, unsurprisingly, is not much more than the CCP’s self-reported hagiographic nonsense. Yes, a decrease in poverty has been achieved, both under Mao and during the post-1978 period. Dispute as to the exact number and measures used remains, but the achievement is not insignificant. On the other hand, the assertion that “The exploiting classes as such have been eliminated” is fanciful today even if it was arguable in the Maoist period.

The constitution is quick to assert the government is a “people’s democratic republic led by the working class and based on the alliance of workers and peasants”. In this regard, it might be of interest to know that the actual membership of the Chinese Communist Party has changed over time. If it was ever a meaningful worker/peasant organization (and arguably in the pre-civil war days it was), it isn’t now. As Chuangcn notes, in June 2022, “the Organization Department of [the] CCP published the latest statistics about members composition”. Chuangcn observes that while “workers and peasants are in a constant trend of decrease”, “managers, specialists and retirees have one of increase.” This being the case, it is no stretch to say this latter group is roughly similar to the professional-managerial class (PMC) in the United States.

In John and Barbara Ehrenreich’s 1977 essay, The Professional-Managerial Class’, they write,

To generations of radicals, the working class has been the bearer of socialism, the agent of both progressive social reform and revolution. But in the United States in the last two decades, the left has been concentrated most heavily among people who feel themselves to be ‘middle class,’ while the working class has appeared relatively quiescent. This ‘middle class’ left, unlike its equivalent in early twentieth-century Europe or in the Third World movement; it is, to a very large extent, the left itself. It has its own history of mass struggle, not as an ally or appendage of the industrical class, but as a mass constituency in and of itself. At the same time, most of the U.S. left continues to believe (correctly, we think) that without a mass working-class left, only the most marginal social reforms is possible.1

Has a similar class arisen in China, where one party perhaps can even tighten elite political control over “the most marginal social reforms”? Are we to suppose, even if we take seriously the notion that the dictatorship of the workers and peasants can be something other than just a dictatorship, that the current make-up of the Party can deliver anything but, in this case, party-state-capitalist control and, for the rest, a demand for docility?

What about social programs as a proof? The implication that social welfare programs makes China “communist-socialist” is transparently ridiculous, and it echoes right-wing views about such programs. Plainly, I think, social welfare programs demonstrate at most that China is social democratic. While social democracies certainly do provide real assistance to populations, they have never approached the core of capitalist social relations in any real sense. That neoliberalism butts heads with social democracy remains a debate within capitalism.

Next on Brown’s short list of supposed evidence is China’s supposedly collectivized land.

Brown writes that “China is still very much communist, because every square meter of this country is owned collectively by the Chinese people, via the state.” In the next paragraph, he gives the punchline. “Anybody on Planet Earth can invest in China’s real estate, but if you wish to keep it longer than 70 years [70 years!], you will have to renew your lease contract and pay its going market value, to do so.” I defy you to find a capitalist who is significantly unnerved by such an arrangement.

We might have guessed, of course, that collective land ownership could be as meaningful or meaningless as democracy, freedom, or popular sovereignty. In fact, in China, “swindling locals and forcing them off their land” so that it might be converted “to state-ownership” and then “placed on the market” is “all too common in China since the capitalist transition spread to the sphere of land ownership and became more centered on real estate over the past two decades”.

Further,

‘socialist modernization’ has, in reality, only led to the further entrenchment of the private property system. The party has overseen the destruction of essentially all remaining communal or semi-communal conventions in land and enterprise management, alongside all remaining forms of socialist welfare, systematically replacing them with conventions of private ownership modelled on the legal systems of the leading capitalist nations. This cultivation of commodification, combined with the repression of all potential for communist organizing to emerge among the population at large, seems to pose this Chinese ‘socialism’ against all prospects for proletarian emancipation. Placed in global context, it is not an exaggeration to say that socialism, as it actually exists today, is largely anti-communist.

The next piece of evidence is that of state-owned enterprise.

A recent report published by The Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE), finds that,

China’s private sector has grown not only in absolute terms but also as a proportion of the country’s largest companies, measured by revenue or (for listed ones) by market value, from a very low level when President Xi was confirmed as the next top leader in 2010 to a significant share today. SOEs still dominate by revenue among the largest companies, but their preeminence is eroding. To be sure, the Communist Party has attempted to develop its presence in the corporate world, including in the private sector, through various means. But equity ownership structures matter. China’s private-sector companies are focused on profit maximization and value creation in ways SOEs are not.

The authors note that everyone from the Rockefeller-founded Asia Society to The Wall Street Journal, and, incidentally, state propagandists in China, take seriously Xi Jinping’s supposed “pivot to the state”. They also remind us that claims of a “pivot back to state-sector dominance have been made multiple times before, with reference to policy shifts in 1989-1990, 2003, the mid-2000s, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2012, 2017, 2019, and early 2020. Meanwhile, China’s private sector has kept advancing. There is no compelling indication that this time is different.”

(Regarding the subtitled pieces of evidence (that land and the most important industries are state owned), it is probably not a coincidence that, as a left-wing Chinese writer claims, these “form the basis of the [Chinese] regime’s claim to be ‘socialist’”. Brown, a resident of Beijing (at least as of 2015), has probably heard them before on TV.)

Chuangcn recently offered an array of answers to the broader questions: ‘What Do Chinese Workers Think about the CCP?’,’Is China a capitalist country?’, ‘Is China a socialist country?’, and ‘Wasn’t China a Communist Country under Mao?’. Chuangcn members, both in China and internationally, supplied answers. These replies can be summed up as ‘not much’, ‘yes’, ‘no’, and ‘no’.

Still, a few quotes are helpful.

Regarding workers’ opinions about the CCP, one respondent, Ruirui, said that though he or she originally took the Party to be genuine and even “sacred”, he or she nevertheless “came to realize that the CCP truly had nothing to do with communism, so my interest in it completely disappeared.” Another, Kaixuan, said that “There is nothing socialist or communist or even mildly progressive about the CCP.” Cheng Yeng said that since he or she became an actual communist, they had no interest in the Party whatsoever. There are many more similar replies.

As for the questions whether China is capitalist or socialist, Chuangcn gives the following rejoinders. “China is capitalist. It is capitalist both because it is fully integrated in the global capitalist system and because capitalist imperatives have penetrated all the way down to everyday life.”. As for socialism, Chuangcn says that if China is socialist it is only because the word has “lost any relationship to the destruction of capitalist society”.

Chuangcn substantially says regarding communism under Mao that, no, China was not communist. Additionally, they claim that Maoist China really matched more the description “developmental regime”, a system of building up the capacities and wealth of the country while modernizing it. The developmental regime more or less described every Third World and Non-Aligned country. They attempted to develop either via Western methods or Soviet methods (or some variation thereof).

In closing, it is important to note, and just as important as the facts of the matter, that there is more generally the subject of judgment. The term religiosity as a criticism of Brown’s interpretation refers to secular, political simplified, good-vs.-evil belief system. It applies well to nationalism. As the British political scientist, Frank Wright, put it, “Nationalisms are not merely ‘like’ religions – they are religions.” Brown, who “grew up in Oklahoma, USA, in the 50s-60s” and like many Cold War babies, perhaps, tended to perceive the world in very stark dualistic terms, probably clung then to a United States-focused nationalism. In an apparent case of transferred-nationalism2, though, has he traded one simplified view for another, this time one echoing tenets set forth in Beijing?

There is a further sense in which Brown’s view may be seen as religious-like and relevant to my argument. The sociologist Daniel DellaPosta considers the problem of simplified, good-vs.-evil worldviews specifically in regard to “an increase of mass polarization” arising from “belief consolidation, entailing the collapse of previously cross-cutting alignments, thus creating increasingly broad and encompassing clusters organized around cohesive packages of beliefs”. This means a person is likely to have a set of views governed first by their perceived occurrence on a political spectrum instead of independently-judged beliefs that may, secondarily, seem more-or-less scattered or clustered across a political spectrum.

Naturally, when one is raised with a simplified view (like nationalism), at least parts of which are found to be significantly distorted or unfair, adopting a transferred- or negative nationalism might seem like a reasonable reaction, and doing so may lead to some insight. It’s also a readily-useful position to fall back on, particularly when faced with limited information. Invariably, though, a flexible, complex view fully expecting the unexpected, the inconsistent, and the ambivalent, is the only worthy replacement for a simplified view like nationalism or transferred-nationalism.

1Barbara and John Ehrenreich, ‘The Professional Managerial Class’, Radical America (March 1977), p. 7.

2In the sense of reflexive and total support for another nation-state rather than the one in which one was born or resides. No support or criticism, certainly, can be applauded or dimissed merely on the basis of one’s birthplace or location. But the over-simplicity and Manichean nature of a worldview sets it out as religious-like. Of course, Orwell can be dismissed for having the wrong politics, but the points he makes refer to faulty thinking and cannot be so easily dismissed.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ron Leighton.

Image by Catgirlmutant.

The Greanville Post recently republished China watcher Jeff Brown’s 2015 piece, ‘The Myth of Chinese Capitalism’. Brown calls the supposed myth, “One of the greatest fabrications of Western media, among academics and on Wall Street…” He asserts that the West promotes a “self-assuring message…that China is fully in the fold of Western capitalism, except…Beijing plays dirty, using its own set of rules” (emphasis in the original). Further, he disputes the “superficial image” of China as “just a copycat, eastern version of crass Americana.” He is correct that these messages and images are simplistic. In their place however, rather than a more complex, and importantly, more accurate variation, he offers his own superficial image.

Despite appearances, Brown really only offers four gaunt pieces of evidence for his claim that China is “communist-socialist”, instead of capitalist, two of which are highlighted in the subtitle. “Every last inch of China’s land is collectively owned. And so are the ‘commanding heights of the economy’” (arguing the latter, he includes more general claims about state-ownership of industry). The remaining pieces of evidence concern China’s constitution and its welfare state. I will look at them in the order they are presented.

Before explaining his proofs, Brown engages in some general applause for the Chinese system—though the causes for his cheer-leading are basically beside the point regarding whether China is communist-socialist or capitalist. He states that “China has become, in one generation, the world’s largest economy in purchasing power parity (PPP)”—a measure economists question anyway when used in reference to production, as Brown does.

Economist Patrick Honohan argues,

China’s GDP at PPP recently passed that of the United States. But such calculations neglect the fact that PPPs take account of the systematic tendency of poorer countries to have lower prices….

If cross-country comparisons are to be robust, they need to take account of factors such as environmental degradation and the globalization of production. In at least 10 countries, the required resource depletion adjustment for environmental degradation amounts to more than 15 percent of GDP. The far-fetched 25 percent GDP growth rate in Ireland in 2015 reflects the role of multinational corporations.

In any event, PPP stats hardly establish the nature of the system in the terms given.

Further, and no proof either, he cites China’s once “very egalitarian 0.16” Gini coefficient, noting that currently (2015) it is 0.37, between Sweden’s (0.25) and that of the United States (0.41). Having said this, it is true that, as Brown implies, 1), not all modernization (in the sense of productivity and reduction of poverty) occurred after 1978, when liberalization generally is considered to have begun, and 2), not all post-1978 reform and transformation has been neoliberal, save for the qualification of reputed Chinese cheating. Yet, these also fail to demonstrate that China is “communist-socialist” rather than capitalist.

As Brown’s first proof of China’s “communist-socialist” system he offers an extended quote from China’s constitution, specifically its 1982 version. But the passage, unsurprisingly, is not much more than the CCP’s self-reported hagiographic nonsense. Yes, a decrease in poverty has been achieved, both under Mao and during the post-1978 period. Dispute as to the exact number and measures used remains, but the achievement is not insignificant. On the other hand, the assertion that “The exploiting classes as such have been eliminated” is fanciful today even if it was arguable in the Maoist period.

The constitution is quick to assert the government is a “people’s democratic republic led by the working class and based on the alliance of workers and peasants”. In this regard, it might be of interest to know that the actual membership of the Chinese Communist Party has changed over time. If it was ever a meaningful worker/peasant organization (and arguably in the pre-civil war days it was), it isn’t now. As Chuangcn notes, in June 2022, “the Organization Department of [the] CCP published the latest statistics about members composition”. Chuangcn observes that while “workers and peasants are in a constant trend of decrease”, “managers, specialists and retirees have one of increase.” This being the case, it is no stretch to say this latter group is roughly similar to the professional-managerial class (PMC) in the United States.

In John and Barbara Ehrenreich’s 1977 essay, The Professional-Managerial Class’, they write,

To generations of radicals, the working class has been the bearer of socialism, the agent of both progressive social reform and revolution. But in the United States in the last two decades, the left has been concentrated most heavily among people who feel themselves to be ‘middle class,’ while the working class has appeared relatively quiescent. This ‘middle class’ left, unlike its equivalent in early twentieth-century Europe or in the Third World movement; it is, to a very large extent, the left itself. It has its own history of mass struggle, not as an ally or appendage of the industrical class, but as a mass constituency in and of itself. At the same time, most of the U.S. left continues to believe (correctly, we think) that without a mass working-class left, only the most marginal social reforms is possible.1

Has a similar class arisen in China, where one party perhaps can even tighten elite political control over “the most marginal social reforms”? Are we to suppose, even if we take seriously the notion that the dictatorship of the workers and peasants can be something other than just a dictatorship, that the current make-up of the Party can deliver anything but, in this case, party-state-capitalist control and, for the rest, a demand for docility?

What about social programs as a proof? The implication that social welfare programs makes China “communist-socialist” is transparently ridiculous, and it echoes right-wing views about such programs. Plainly, I think, social welfare programs demonstrate at most that China is social democratic. While social democracies certainly do provide real assistance to populations, they have never approached the core of capitalist social relations in any real sense. That neoliberalism butts heads with social democracy remains a debate within capitalism.

Next on Brown’s short list of supposed evidence is China’s supposedly collectivized land.

Brown writes that “China is still very much communist, because every square meter of this country is owned collectively by the Chinese people, via the state.” In the next paragraph, he gives the punchline. “Anybody on Planet Earth can invest in China’s real estate, but if you wish to keep it longer than 70 years [70 years!], you will have to renew your lease contract and pay its going market value, to do so.” I defy you to find a capitalist who is significantly unnerved by such an arrangement.

We might have guessed, of course, that collective land ownership could be as meaningful or meaningless as democracy, freedom, or popular sovereignty. In fact, in China, “swindling locals and forcing them off their land” so that it might be converted “to state-ownership” and then “placed on the market” is “all too common in China since the capitalist transition spread to the sphere of land ownership and became more centered on real estate over the past two decades”.

Further,

‘socialist modernization’ has, in reality, only led to the further entrenchment of the private property system. The party has overseen the destruction of essentially all remaining communal or semi-communal conventions in land and enterprise management, alongside all remaining forms of socialist welfare, systematically replacing them with conventions of private ownership modelled on the legal systems of the leading capitalist nations. This cultivation of commodification, combined with the repression of all potential for communist organizing to emerge among the population at large, seems to pose this Chinese ‘socialism’ against all prospects for proletarian emancipation. Placed in global context, it is not an exaggeration to say that socialism, as it actually exists today, is largely anti-communist.

The next piece of evidence is that of state-owned enterprise.

A recent report published by The Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE), finds that,

China’s private sector has grown not only in absolute terms but also as a proportion of the country’s largest companies, measured by revenue or (for listed ones) by market value, from a very low level when President Xi was confirmed as the next top leader in 2010 to a significant share today. SOEs still dominate by revenue among the largest companies, but their preeminence is eroding. To be sure, the Communist Party has attempted to develop its presence in the corporate world, including in the private sector, through various means. But equity ownership structures matter. China’s private-sector companies are focused on profit maximization and value creation in ways SOEs are not.

The authors note that everyone from the Rockefeller-founded Asia Society to The Wall Street Journal, and, incidentally, state propagandists in China, take seriously Xi Jinping’s supposed “pivot to the state”. They also remind us that claims of a “pivot back to state-sector dominance have been made multiple times before, with reference to policy shifts in 1989-1990, 2003, the mid-2000s, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2012, 2017, 2019, and early 2020. Meanwhile, China’s private sector has kept advancing. There is no compelling indication that this time is different.”

(Regarding the subtitled pieces of evidence (that land and the most important industries are state owned), it is probably not a coincidence that, as a left-wing Chinese writer claims, these “form the basis of the [Chinese] regime’s claim to be ‘socialist’”. Brown, a resident of Beijing (at least as of 2015), has probably heard them before on TV.)

Chuangcn recently offered an array of answers to the broader questions: ‘What Do Chinese Workers Think about the CCP?’,’Is China a capitalist country?’, ‘Is China a socialist country?’, and ‘Wasn’t China a Communist Country under Mao?’. Chuangcn members, both in China and internationally, supplied answers. These replies can be summed up as ‘not much’, ‘yes’, ‘no’, and ‘no’.

Still, a few quotes are helpful.

Regarding workers’ opinions about the CCP, one respondent, Ruirui, said that though he or she originally took the Party to be genuine and even “sacred”, he or she nevertheless “came to realize that the CCP truly had nothing to do with communism, so my interest in it completely disappeared.” Another, Kaixuan, said that “There is nothing socialist or communist or even mildly progressive about the CCP.” Cheng Yeng said that since he or she became an actual communist, they had no interest in the Party whatsoever. There are many more similar replies.

As for the questions whether China is capitalist or socialist, Chuangcn gives the following rejoinders. “China is capitalist. It is capitalist both because it is fully integrated in the global capitalist system and because capitalist imperatives have penetrated all the way down to everyday life.”. As for socialism, Chuangcn says that if China is socialist it is only because the word has “lost any relationship to the destruction of capitalist society”.

Chuangcn substantially says regarding communism under Mao that, no, China was not communist. Additionally, they claim that Maoist China really matched more the description “developmental regime”, a system of building up the capacities and wealth of the country while modernizing it. The developmental regime more or less described every Third World and Non-Aligned country. They attempted to develop either via Western methods or Soviet methods (or some variation thereof).

In closing, it is important to note, and just as important as the facts of the matter, that there is more generally the subject of judgment. The term religiosity as a criticism of Brown’s interpretation refers to secular, political simplified, good-vs.-evil belief system. It applies well to nationalism. As the British political scientist, Frank Wright, put it, “Nationalisms are not merely ‘like’ religions – they are religions.” Brown, who “grew up in Oklahoma, USA, in the 50s-60s” and like many Cold War babies, perhaps, tended to perceive the world in very stark dualistic terms, probably clung then to a United States-focused nationalism. In an apparent case of transferred-nationalism2, though, has he traded one simplified view for another, this time one echoing tenets set forth in Beijing?

There is a further sense in which Brown’s view may be seen as religious-like and relevant to my argument. The sociologist Daniel DellaPosta considers the problem of simplified, good-vs.-evil worldviews specifically in regard to “an increase of mass polarization” arising from “belief consolidation, entailing the collapse of previously cross-cutting alignments, thus creating increasingly broad and encompassing clusters organized around cohesive packages of beliefs”. This means a person is likely to have a set of views governed first by their perceived occurrence on a political spectrum instead of independently-judged beliefs that may, secondarily, seem more-or-less scattered or clustered across a political spectrum.

Naturally, when one is raised with a simplified view (like nationalism), at least parts of which are found to be significantly distorted or unfair, adopting a transferred- or negative nationalism might seem like a reasonable reaction, and doing so may lead to some insight. It’s also a readily-useful position to fall back on, particularly when faced with limited information. Invariably, though, a flexible, complex view fully expecting the unexpected, the inconsistent, and the ambivalent, is the only worthy replacement for a simplified view like nationalism or transferred-nationalism.

1Barbara and John Ehrenreich, ‘The Professional Managerial Class’, Radical America (March 1977), p. 7.

2In the sense of reflexive and total support for another nation-state rather than the one in which one was born or resides. No support or criticism, certainly, can be applauded or dimissed merely on the basis of one’s birthplace or location. But the over-simplicity and Manichean nature of a worldview sets it out as religious-like. Of course, Orwell can be dismissed for having the wrong politics, but the points he makes refer to faulty thinking and cannot be so easily dismissed.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ron Leighton.

Climate campaigners across South Africa and beyond celebrated a Thursday court ruling against Shell seismic blasting in search of fossil fuels along the country's Wild Coast, which opponents warned threatened both the local marine life and fishing industry.

"The fight of coastal communities versus Shell is a struggle for environmental justice, for the protection of rural livelihoods, for sustainable development, and for the life of the planet."

Like its interim decision last December, the new ruling by the Makhanda-based court is a win "for the people and planet," and "sets an important precedent during this climate emergency," said Pooven Moodley, director of the group Natural Justice.

The judgment set aside the Department of Mineral Resources and Energy's 2014 decision giving Shell the right to explore local waters, concluding that it was not lawfully granted.

"The court was clear that communities need to be properly consulted and that environmental impact assessments are critical. The cultural and spiritual connection to the land and ocean featured strongly in the judgment," Moodley noted, adding that the decision "provides hope and momentum" for those standing up against other planet-wrecking projects.

Greenpeace Africa interim program director Melita Steele similarly called the ruling "proof that the world is moving into an era of social and environmental justice, where the voices of people are put before the profits of toxic fossil fuel companies."

"There is still much work to be done to undo the destructive colonial legacy of extractivism in Africa, but this decision gives South Africans renewed hope that people's lives and precious ecosystems are valuable and worthy of protection from climate criminals," she added. "The future is renewable!"

Natural Justice and Greenpeace Africa applied to join the court case, which was brought by Sustaining the Wild Coast NPC, All Rise Attorneys for Climate and the Environment NPC, and local communities and small-scale fishers.

As Agence France-Presse detailed:

Shell planned to map more than 6,000 square kilometres (2,300 square miles) by bouncing sonic waves off the sea floor and using the reflection to build up a 3D image.

The area lies off South Africa's so-called Wild Coast. The 300-kilometer (185-mile) stretch boasts rich waters housing exquisite marine life and natural reserves.

Campaigners argued that the research would have sent… "extremely" loud shockwaves every 10 seconds, 24 hours a day for five months, potentially harming migration, feeding, and other routines for marine mammals and other species.

A Shell spokesperson did not address whether the company will appeal the decision, only saying that "we respect the court's decision and are reviewing the judgment to determine our next steps regarding the Wild Coast block. We remain committed to South Africa and our role in the just energy transition."

Meanwhile, critics of the fossil fuel giant celebrated at the courthouse.

"Winning this means we are all moving towards an understanding that we need to find sustainable livelihoods; we need to move away from fossil fuels," said Sinegugu Zukulu of Sustaining the Wild Coast.

"It is not about us," Zukulu emphasized. "We are in this fight for the good of the planet and the good of future generations. The fight of coastal communities versus Shell is a struggle for environmental justice, for the protection of rural livelihoods, for sustainable development, and for the life of the planet. Shell and the government are fighting for profit in the face of climate change that is putting the future of humanity at risk."

Nonhle Mbuthuma of the Amadiba Crisis Committee similarly declared that "this victory is not just a victory for Wild Coast communities and making our voices heard. This is a victory against capitalist extraction and destruction of our future."

"This victory is not just about protecting the ocean upon which rural coastal communities depend. This is about protecting the planet and the whole of humanity," Mbuthuma added.

As Wild Coast resident Siyabonga Ndovela explained, "we live off the land and the ocean," and "the ocean is our best defender against climate change, shielding us from its worst impacts. By helping the ocean we help ourselves. Ocean action is climate action."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jessica Corbett.

The post The Truth About Markets, Pillar of Capitalist Ideology appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Richard D. Wolff.

Around 1 in 10 people went hungry last year in a world losing ground on its collective goal of ending all forms of hunger, a report released Wednesday by United Nations agencies revealed, prompting sharp censure from a leading charity.

"Long-standing political failure to address how we feed all the people in the world has made our food system susceptible to fragility and failure."

As many as 828 million people experienced hunger in 2021, 150 million more than were affected just two years earlier, according to the latest State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI) report.

The paper—a joint publication of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), the U.N. Children's Fund (UNICEF), the U.N. World Food Program (WFP), and the World Health Organization (WHO)—cited conflicts, climate-driven extreme weather events, and economic shocks as primary causes of hunger.

The report also found that nearly 1 in 3 people worldwide last year were moderately or severely food insecure, meaning they lacked reliable access to enough affordable, nutritious food.

"It is deeply concerning that global hunger has been spiraling since 2019 and is now at such devastating levels around the world," Hanna Saarinen, Oxfam International's food policy lead, said in response to the report.

"This is happening not because of a shortage of food," Saarinen continued, "but rather as a consequence of a broken food system further undermined by conflicts, the effects of the Covid pandemic, and worsening climate change."

"Despite this being a global food crisis, seeing millions of people going hungry today, food billionaires' wealth has reached stratospheric levels, increasing by $382 billion just over the last two years," she added. "Our food system has for years perpetuated inequality, impoverished small-scale farmers, and pushed millions of vulnerable people into hunger while wreaking havoc on the climate."

Saarinen said that while "it is easy to blame today's food crisis" on Russia's ongoing invasion of Ukraine that began in February, "long-standing political failure to address how we feed all the people in the world has made our food system susceptible to fragility and failure well before now."

The U.N. report projects that nearly 670 million people, or around 8% of the world's population, will still be facing hunger at the end of this decade.

"These are depressing figures for humanity. We continue to move away from our goal of ending hunger by 2030," IFAD President Gilbert F. Houngbo said, referring to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which was adopted by all U.N. member states seven years ago.

"The ripple effects of the global food crisis will most likely worsen the outcome again next year," he added.

Oxfam's Saarinen warned that "we will not break the vicious cycle of hunger and food inflation without addressing the deep inequalities fueling them."

"We must fundamentally reimagine a new, more just, and sustainable global food system—one that serves the planet and millions of people, rather than a handful of big agribusinesses," she asserted.

Noting the dramatic shortfalls in pledged funding for anti-hunger initiatives in places like East Africa—where tens of millions of people are facing famine amid a historic drought—Saarinen said that "governments must stop making empty promises or creating more bureaucratic processes."

"Instead, they need to invest in small-scale food producers and food workers," she argued. "They need to repurpose our global agriculture and food system to better serve the health of people, our planet, and our economies."

"Western governments must also free up resources," added Saarinen, "including by taxing food companies and billionaires, in order to invest in diverse, local, sustainable food production that helps countries to become less dependent on food imports; and support smallholder food producers, especially women."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

“Global yields lowest in 500 years of recorded history. $10 trillion of negative rate bonds. This is a supernova that will explode one day,” — tweet from Bill Gross, the ‘bond king’, in 2016.

Global debt – of households, private firms and governments – reached a staggering $305tn (£254tn) in 2021, up from $83tn in 2000.

Furthermore, global debt now equals 355% of global GDP, up from 120% in 1980 and 230% in 2000.

The events we are witnessing mirror the dynamic that kicked off our current phase of capitalism in the first place.

In 2021, debtors of all types handed $10.2trn – 12% of global GDP – in interest payments to their creditors. In comparison, the annual income of the poorest 50% of humanity is just 8.5% of GDP.

Global debt has grown twice as fast as global GDP since 1980 and is accelerating, while global GDP growth is slowing and threatening to go into reverse.

While global debt has rocketed, global interest rates have been in almost continual decline since 1980. So low have interest rates fallen since the global financial crisis of 2008 that, by 2021, $17trn of bonds were trading at negative interest rates, even before inflation is taken into account. That’s $7trn more than the figure that astounded Bill Gross in 2016, referenced at the beginning of this article.

As a result, interest on debt, as a share of GDP, is well below its peak at the beginning of the neoliberal era. The Economist calculates, for instance, that 27% of US GDP was swallowed by interest payments in 1989, but ‘only’ 12% of it in 2021, despite the massive growth in US debt.

But the world of ever-low interest rates has now come to an end. The decision of the US Federal Reserve on 15 June to hike interest rates by 0.75% – the sharpest increase in nearly three decades, with the promise of more to come – sent shockwaves around the world and has wiped trillions of dollars off the values of stock and bond markets.

Any rise in interest rates means a huge shift of purchasing power from indebted households, firms and governments to their creditors. The Economist calculates that a 2% increase in US interest rates in 2021 would, by 2026, double the share of global GDP absorbed by interest payments.

Decades of ever-lower interest rates have inflated what Nouriel Roubini, one of the few economists to predict the 2007-8 financial crash, famously called “the mother of all asset bubbles, eventually leading to a bust, another massive financial crisis, and a rapid slide into recession.”

However, a bubble is insubstantial and delicate, and bursts with barely a sound. A far more appropriate and useful metaphor is that of a star, which is immense, and dies in a stupendous explosion. As Bill Gross, the ‘bond king’, tweeted in 2016, “Global yields lowest in 500 years of recorded history. $10 trillion of negative rate bonds. This is a supernova that will explode one day."

The dance of death: inflation, interest rates and debt

What has forced the Fed to aggressively raise its interest rate is the dramatic reappearance of a most feared monster: inflation. The events we are witnessing mirror the dynamic that kicked off our current phase of capitalism in the first place.

The neoliberal era was inaugurated in October 1979 by a huge hike in US interest rates aimed at quelling entrenched and rampant inflation. The “Volcker shock”, as it became known (after Paul Volcker, then head of the US Federal Reserve), was likened by journalist Naomi Klein to “a giant Taser gun fired from Washington, sending the developing world into convulsions… Higher interest payments on foreign debts… could only be met by taking on more loans. The debt spiral was born.”

This hike in interest rates succeeded in killing the inflation monster, but at the cost of a sharp recession in imperialist countries and a devastating debt crisis throughout Africa, Asia and Latin America. The debt crisis immiserated millions and forced these notionally independent countries to submit to the dictates of the ‘Washington Consensus’: wholesale privatisation, austerity and removal of obstacles to cross-border flows of capital and commodities (but not of people!).

Now the inflation monster has risen from the dead, prompting the Fed and other central banks to attempt to kill it again before it has had a chance to gain in strength. Thus the Bank for International Settlements, which provides banking services for the world’s central banks, has called on them to “not be shy of inflicting short-term pain and even recessions to prevent any move to a persistently high-inflation world.”

As a result, the debate has moved on from whether there will be a global recession to how severe it will be – and whether central banks really have the guts to carry out their threats and risk a global economic crash. Over the next 18 months we will find out.

Are we heading towards a capitalist supernova?

Why did Bill Gross liken global bond markets to a star about to explode? What are the chances that his prediction may come to pass? What would such a cataclysmic event actually mean in practice?

A star is a production process, in which heavier elements are fused out of lighter elements, releasing huge amounts of energy. When the energy released by the fusion of lighter elements is insufficient to counter the gravity exerted by the growing mass of heavier elements, the star dies.

It either ends its life as a burned-out cinder or, if it is big enough, in a supernova, an extremely violent implosion that incinerates anything in its vicinity and scatters debris throughout space.

Will the coming crash take the form of a brief recession, or a long and deep depression (as in the 1930s) or something many magnitudes worse?

Capitalism is also a production process, and the energy that fires it is living labour, performed by workers and farmers who produce more wealth than they consume. The surplus is converted into capital – that is, self-expanding wealth, wealth that must either make profits or shrivel and die. Capital, whether in the form of stocks and shares, bonds, real estate or fine wines, is, in the words of Karl Marx, “dead labour which, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks”.

As with a star, when the mass of accumulated capital exceeds the capacity of living labour to breathe life into it, the moment of crisis has arrived, and swathes of capital are destroyed in a financial crash.

With the interest rate hikes, our moment of crisis has arrived. But will the coming crash take the form of a brief recession, or a long and deep depression (as in the 1930s), or something many magnitudes worse – a capitalist supernova?

To understand why this is a real question, we need to introduce a crucial feature of capitalism that has no solar analogy. The accumulated mass of capitalist wealth is an enormous dead weight that long ago exceeded the capacity of current living labour to breathe life into it.

It has avoided meltdown until now thanks to the exponential growth of debt, which is nothing else than borrowing from the future, or more precisely, using the promise of future flows of surplus value to convert today’s dead labour into capital. In contrast, our dumb sun lives entirely in the present.

At the age of 56, I know more about money and wealth than I ever did as a banker. Here’s what I’ve learned

Ever-falling interest rates is a major reason why capitalist wealth – in the form of financial assets such as bonds – has grown so vertiginously during the neoliberal era. Thomas Piketty famously reported that billionaires’ wealth rose by 1,800% between 1987 and 2013. Their wealth doubled between 2014 and 2022 and during the COVID-19 pandemic, it grew faster than ever, as trillions of dollars of debt-financed stimulus flowed, in the words of the Financial Times, “into financial markets, and from there into the net worth of the ultra-rich”.

Central banks have repeatedly cut interest rates and created more and more debt precisely because they feared that a recession, and the ensuing waves of bankruptcies and debt defaults, could quickly develop an unstoppable momentum and crash the global economy. But each cut in interest rates, each new twist in the debt spiral, not only postpones the inevitable day of judgement, it ensures that it will be all the more terrible when it comes.

So much debt has been accumulated in the global economy that we cannot assume that the coming global depression, triggered by the interest rate hikes, will merely be a repeat of the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Scientists tell us that our sun is not massive enough to die in a supernova. We can’t say the same of our capitalist death star.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by John Smith.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

“I think you could call it a disinformation-driven heist of public policy.”

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Amy Westervelt.

Wearing certain items of clothing, such as tight-fitting pants or t-shirts with foreign words, or having hair longer than a certain length, has always been potentially problematic in North Korea. But now the government is redoubling its efforts to make sure that people don’t flaunt styles associated with capitalistic countries.

“At the end of last month, the Socialist Patriotic Youth League held an educational session nationwide, where they defined the act of imitating foreign fashion and hairstyles as ‘capitalist flair,’ and examples of ‘anti-socialist practices,’” a resident of the city of Hamhung in the eastern province of South Hamgyong told RFA’s Korean Service on condition of anonymity for security reasons.

The league, formerly known as the Kimilsungist-Kimjongilist Youth League until last year, is modeled after the Soviet Komsomol, a group of teenagers and young adults who spread communist propaganda.

“The youth league’s patrols are cracking down on young people who wear long hair down to their waists, and those who dye their hair brown, as well as people who wear clothes with large foreign letters and women who wear tight pants,” the source said.

“This time the crackdown mainly targets women in their 20s and 30s. If they are caught, they are made to wait on the side of the road until the patrols can finish their crackdown in that area. Only then will they be taken to the youth league office in the district, where they must write letters confessing their crimes. They must then contact someone at home to bring acceptable clothes for them, and then they are released,” she said.

The country has been on a crusade against the infiltration of foreign — especially South Korean —culture.

RFA previously reported that authorities ordered members of the country’s main youth organization to turn in the cellphones for inspection, so they could determine who was watching and distributing foreign media or spelling words in the South Korean way or using Southern slang.

Patrols in the city of Chongjin, in the province of North Hamgyong, targeted the marketplace where many young people are known to hang out, a resident there told RFA on condition of anonymity to speak freely.

“If they are caught, the company they work for and the Socialist Patriotic Youth League will be notified. They are then subject to criticism and in the most severe cases, the violator’s name, home address and workplace will be revealed publicly on the Third Broadcast,” she said, referring to government-controlled loudspeakers placed throughout most cities and towns to spread messages of propaganda.

“Even though they have these kinds of crackdowns all the time, the young people do not stop trying to look and dress like people in foreign films and TV.”

Illegal activities

The government is also working to suppress what it deems to be illegal capitalistic activities, an official in Chongjin told RFA.

“Recent arrests here in Chongjin caught five property brokers who illegally facilitated state-owned housing transactions and collected fees for their services. Meanwhile, six fortune tellers and a fake medicine seller were also arrested. The guy selling fake traditional medicines claimed they could treat diseases,” he said.

“Everyone was sentenced five to seven years of hard labor and put in jail,” said the official.

Chongjin authorities are also targeting the scalping of rail tickets, bribes given to train crews and rail police by merchants who don’t have the proper government permission for travel, and payments to police to look the other way when they catch someone doing something illegal, he said.

In Ryanggang province, west of North Hamgyong, authorities there have been using the Third Broadcast to warn citizens against the evils of drugs, superstitions like fortune telling, and fake medicines, a resident there told RFA.

“The people are complaining that the authorities are coming down hard on them again so soon after the April national holidays have ended, under the pretext of eradicating anti-socialist acts,” she said, referring to holidays that commemorated the life of country’s founder Kim Il Sung on April 15 and the formation of the country’s military on the 25^th.

Translated by Claire Lee and Leejin J. Chung. Written in English by Eugene Whong.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Chang Gyu Ahn and Myung Chul Lee.

The post The Capitalist Frame appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Michael Schwalbe.

I encountered a relatively new piece of graffiti art in my neighborhood (above) and — as I shot the photo — thought to myself: You know you live in a monopoly capitalist culture when living human beings are regularly compared to pieces of green paper we agree (for now) to be worth something.

Thanks to more than a century of conditioning, our personal dreams have been co-opted and replaced with the American Dream of wealth, material possessions, sexual conquests, being on TV, etc. The American Dream myth tells us we can and will accomplish all this on our own. It’s the fable of individualized success: If you outwork and outthink and out-hustle the competition, this is truly the land of opportunity. Anything is possible and if you succeed, it’s because you worked harder and better and deserved it more.

This myth is conveniently helpful for praising success but mighty damaging in explaining failure. If you don’t attain your goals (or at least the goals forced upon you), the blame is on you and you alone. It’s your fault that you’re not living up to the standards set by fashion magazines, TV commercials, and social media.

“Our lives prior to that war were, to a great extent, pre-industrial,” wrote author Murray Bookchin. “We still had the extended family, communities, neighborhoods, and small retail stores, usually of the Mom & Pop variety. We were not thoroughly absorbed into capitalism in our daily lives so you had a capitalist economy but not a capitalist society. This was undone by the war [WWII] as capitalism permeated every aspect of our daily lives. The family, the culture, and the neighborhood have been integrated into the market. People have become atomized and our very language has been corrupted.”

We no longer pass time… we spend it. We no longer fall in love… we invest in relationships. Everything we care about has been turned into a commodity.

Did you ever notice how animated people get when you ask them what they’d do if they ever won the lottery? They can suddenly articulate dreams and wants and desires in a hopeful, confident way. It’s as if someone has given them a shot of adrenaline — a new lease on life (if you will). Wouldn’t it be neat if we could all get excited and optimistic about our lives and our future without the promise of some unattainable monetary prize?

P.S. Whenever I write something like this, a few folks respond by “accusing” me of praising communism or socialism. I’ll save you the (waste of) time and answer you now: Are you limited to the choices imposed upon you by the powers that shouldn’t be or can you use your infinite mind to imagine infinite other possibilities?

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Mickey Z..

The post The Capitalist Roots of U.S. Racial Oppression appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by W. T. Whitney.