Orientation

The golden age of left-wing economists

In part because the 1960s was still a period of capitalist abundance, there were few socialists in Yankeedom who pointed to the economic contradictions of capitalism as a motivator for the coming revolution. “Western Marxists” ignored the economy, imagining capitalism could go on forever. As first anarcho-communist and then as Situationists, the group I was in never talked about any economic laws that would drive the economy into a crisis. But a couple of my comrades, one from France, had been closely studying a book by Lyn Marcus (later his public name became Lyndon LaRouche) called Dialectical Economics. Here was a wake-up call for all of us to get back to economics, especially since by the late 1970s the days of economic abundance were over.

Throughout the next thirty years, good economic Marxists like Richard Wolff, David Harvey, Robert Brenner and John Bellamy Foster have carried the torch for political economy. However, it was not until The Great Recession of 2008 and the Occupy movement in 2011-2012 really brought economic crisis into the foreground of life in Mordor. Since then, more Marxist economists have emerged such as Michael Perelman, Michael Roberts, and Anwar Shaikh. They have all added depth and scope. Non-Marxist economics such as Michael Hudson, Steve Keen and Jack Rasmus have made acidic analyses of finance capital. The great value in all these economists is that they speak in natural language, not mathematical language. This makes it easier for the Yankee population to understand them.

Varieties of capitalist crises theory and their rivals

In his book The Long Depression Michael Roberts asks four key questions from which he derives eight possible answers about the nature of economic turmoil or even whether there is a crisis at all.

• Is capitalism subject to economic crisis?

Within the camp which says no, a second question is answered.

1b) Do periodic fluctuations need fixing?

If the answer is “yes” you are a Keynesian like Paul Krugman. If the answer is “no” you are a libertarian like Milton Friedman. For the libertarians capitalism only goes through “business cycles”.

Within the camp that says “yes”, that capitalism is subject to crisis, a second question is asked:

• Is the kernel of the crisis found in production?

If the answer is “no” you are an underconsumptionist like Marxists David Harvey or Rosa Luxemburg.

If the answer is “yes” about the kernel of the crisis found in production, there is another question:

2b) Are crises more than struggle over wages and profit shares?

If no, you are a profit-squeeze supporter. Economics associated with this are Baron and Sweezy and Richard Wolff.

If the answer to the kernel of the crisis is found in production is “yes”, a further question should be:

3a) Are crises integral to the accumulation crisis?

If the answer is “yes” you follow Marx’s argument about the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. This is advocated by Michael Roberts, Anwar Shaikh and Robert Brenner.

If the answer to the question is crisis integral to the accumulation process is “no” then a further question is asked.

4a) Does extra-consumption come from outside the system?

If the answer is “yes” you are a follower of Rosa Luxemburg or David Harvey and claim that capitalism has limited resources and needs imperialism to survive.

If the answer is “no” to the question then there is second question.

4b) Does extra consumption come from state intervention?

If the answer is “yes” you are a post Keynesian such as Steve Keen.

If the answer is “no” you are a Malthusian.

In this article I will be drawing from David Harvey’s book The Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism. I picked this book, not because I agree with Harvey’s theory of crisis, but because he lays out the contradictions so exhaustively. I am not a political economist by training but I have studied hard to understand him. What is most important for my readers to understand is that there are a great number of reasons that capitalism is in very, very, very serious trouble.

What is a contradiction?

Harvey says a contradiction is when two seemingly opposing forces are simultaneously present within a particular situation, an entity, a process or an event. A contradiction can be produced either by innovations, disasters or slow decline.

Contradiction 1 Exchange-value is More Important than Use Value Though Use-Value Matters More in Real Life

The use value of a house is contained in the cost of its production. This includes all the materials that went into building the house as well as the cost of labor to complete the house. The use value of the house is its protection from bad weather conditions, prowlers, a place of comfort, privacy and social reproduction, including sex and taking care of children. The use value of a commodity is relatively stable.

But the exchange value of housing is not fixed. It is interdependent on surrounding houses. Property values can go down on my house if my neighbors’ houses are not kept up, even if my house has been kept up. On the other hand, a house that is not kept up can sell for a high price if it is located in a gentrifying neighborhood. Harvey points out that there have been property market crashes in 1928, 1973, 1987 and 2008. The contradiction is that use-values are captive to exchange values and this constantly destabilizes the economy. Harvey says exchange value is always in the driver’s seat.

Contradiction 2 Money is Valued Above the Social Value of Labor

Harvey identifies four constructive functions that money provides:

• It is the means or medium of circulation. Before money, with barter exchange was dependent on both parties having goods the other wanted. Money overcomes the incongruity in immediacy of goods and services that limits direct barter.
• It provides a single measuring rod for economic values of all commodities.
• It provides a way to store value.
• It delays the need to buy a commodity immediately.

But there is a gap between money and the labor that ultimately produces it. Money hides the social labor that went into its material form. The problem is that money, which is supposed to be used to measure value, itself become a kind of commodity— that is money capital. Its use value is that it can be used to produce more value profit or surplus value. Its exchange value is, for example, an interest payment.

Commodity money such as gold and silver are rooted in tangible commodities with definite physical qualities like:

• It is relatively scarce.
• The supply is relatively inelastic so they maintain their relative value against all other commodities over time.
• These metals do not oxidant and deteriorate.
• The physical properties are known and their qualities can be assayed accurately so their measure can easily be figured out.

The problem is these commodity moneys are awkward to use on a daily basis of coin tokens. Bits of paper and then electronic moneys became much more practical in the exchange of goods. They are good at storing value but not so good in circulating commodities.

The problem is also the desire for finance capital as a means of social power becomes an end in itself. This distorts the concrete relation of the money that would be required simply to facilitate exchange. It also throws a monkey wrench into the supposed rationality of capitalist markets. Harvey writes that one of the most dangerous contradictions of capital is that of compounding growth so that with the abandonment of the metallic base, money could be printed infinitely by whoever was authorized to do so. This is exactly what is happening now with the Fed freely printing money without any foundation in gold or any real social wealth. Money out-of-control from material products is what leads to financial depression.

Contradiction 3 Private Property and the State Often have Conflicting Interests

Keeping refugees and immigrants out vs the need for cheap labor

The kind of rationality the state typically imposes is illustrated by its urban and regional planning practices.The job of the nation-state is to protect their borders from unwanted refugees or immigrants. On the other hand, capitalists need migrants to work under-the-table for dirt cheap wages. Capitalists indirectly fight with the state over the status of migrant workers.

Capitalists vs the matriarchal state

Secondly, the state can be divided into its matriarchal and patriarchal functions. Matriarchal functions include unemployment insurance, pensions, welfare, road construction and repair. The patriarchal state functions include the military, the police and prisons. Capitalists are against the matriarchal functions of the state because they cut into profits. However, capitalists are more than willing to invest in the police to protect them, prisons to house the unemployed or the military to take the natural resources of other countries.

Patriotism vs global trade

Even within the patriarchal state there are contradictions. On one hand the military is very patriotic and expect that people will buy Yankee cars. Harvey says the state is interested in the accumulation of wealth and power on a territorial basis. On the other hand, capitalists will seek to make a profit anywhere in the world and will import foreign cars and many other goods. As many of you know, capitalist oil businesses were making profits from Germany during the Nazi era and the Yankee state had to force them to leave.

Neocon war of all against all vs liberal laissez-faire trade policies

Lastly, the patriarchal state often opposes capitalists in its international ambitions. For example, neocon foreign policy war mongers like Victoria Nuland wants war with Russia and China. Liberal capitalists on the other hand, want to trade with China. Capital is not the only agent involved in the pursuit of technological advantages in civil society. The state apparatus looks for superior weaponry, surveillance and other methods for policing the population.

Contradiction 4 Capitalists Acting in Their Own Short-term Self-interest Undermine the Conditions of Their Own Reproduction

If the use value of a product and the price of the commodity were the same, there would be no room for capitalist profit. One the one hand, the common wealth created by social labor comes in a great variety of use values from the most basic knives and forks, to the food we eat, to the cars we drive. to the houses we live in and the clothes we wear. The capitalist private appropriation of common wealth along with the expropriation of social labor is legally sanction under normal conditions of trade. But there is a dark unseen and illegal side of the market which Harvey includes such as robbery, thievery, swindling, corruption, usury, predation, violence which goes unaccounted for. In addition, there is market cornering, price fixing and Ponzi schemes. All these activities weaken the socio-production process. Harvey writes:

It is stupid to seek to understand the world of capital without engaging with the drug cartels, traffickers in arms and the various mafias and other criminal forms of organization that play such a significant role in world trade. (53)

All this swindling and double-dealing is labor expended in counter-production which weakens the amount of energy left for production. This production includes the amount of wages paid and products consumed by workers to get to the next day.

Contradiction 5 The Class Struggle Over the Proportion of Wages given to Workers as Part of the Working Day

Harvey states that one of the most outstanding aspects of the capitalist system is that it does not appear to rely on cheating. For Marxists, labor has two aspects. On one hand, labor as human species is activity which distinguishes us from the rest of the animals and produces all real social wealth. One the other hand, there is labor power which is a commodity the capitalist rents for roughly half the working day. This “fairness” of the wage rests on the assumption that laborers have an individualized private property right over the labor they are capable of furnishing. But in reality, workers have a social property right over their labor because the cooperative social labor of all the workers in factories and offices produces all the wealth.

The commodification of labor power is the only way to solve a seemingly intractable contradiction within the circulation of capital. This contradiction is that in a fully functioning capitalist system, where coercion, cheating and robbery are supposedly ruled out, the exchanges should be based on the principle of equality – we exchange use values of products with each other and the value of those use values should be roughly the same. For all capitalists to realize a positive profit requires the existence of more value at the end of the day than there was at the beginning means an expansion of total output of social labor. Without that expansion there can be no capital. Zero growth defines a condition of crisis for capital. Here there is no room for profit. So where does the profit come from? As Harvey says, there must exist a commodity that has the capacity to create more value than it has itself. That commodity is labor power.  And this is what capital relies upon for its own reproduction. It’s the exploitation of the extra five or six hours of the workers’ pay that is pocketed by capitalists. In reaction to workers joining in unions for higher wages and better working conditions capitalists will:

• lock workers out or close the businesses completely:
• refuse to invest or reinvest in workers or infrastructure;
• deliberately create unemployment and create an industrial reserve army; and
• move jobs to peripheral world countries for their cheap land or labor.

So there is a long-term, relentless struggle between capitalists and labor over the proportion of wages given to workers on a given day.

Capitalist contradictions about education

Another part of this conflict is over education. On one hand, capitalists want to keep workers as uneducated as possible so that they find out as little of the workings of capitalism as possible. But on the other hand, capitalists must make workers more creative in order to fix problems on the job. The problem for capitalists is they can’t control how the workers may use their creativity on the job to undermine capitalism one way or another.

Contradiction 6 The Contradiction Between Fixed and Circulating Capital

Capital investment takes three forms: as an investment in fixed capital – machinery, plants, land and investment and an investment in variable capital which is labor power. Labor power is remunerated afterproduction has occurred, whereas the means of production are usually paid for prior to production (fixed capital). But capital also invents the circulation of commodities. When the commodity is sold, then capital becomes liquid again. In the circulation of commodities, the speed of its circulation is also important. If one capitalist can circulate their commodities faster than another they have a certain competitive advantage. So they attempt to accelerate the turnover time of capital.

Limitations of making a profit on fixed capital

However, there are limits to the speed of circulation. To paraphrase Harvey, if I want to make steel, the iron ore and coal are still buried in the ground and it takes a lot of time to dig them out. There are not enough workers close by who are willing to sell their labor power. I need to build a blast furnace and that takes time. There are physical barriers to reducing this turn-around time to zero. Workers, furthermore, are not automatons. They may lay down their tools or slow down their labor process. (73-74)

Once the steel is finished it has to be sold. The commodity can sit on the market for some time before the buyer shows up.  The capitalist has a vested interest in securing and accelerating the turnover time of consumption. One of the ways is to produce steel that rusts so fast it needs rapid replacement: planned obsolescence (73-74)

These problems center on the category of long-term investments in fixed capital.

In order for capital to circulate freely in space and time, physical infrastructures and built environments must be created that are fixed in space – anchored on the land in the form of roads, railways, communication towers and fiber-optics plants, airports and harbors, factory buildings offices, houses, schools, hospitals.  More mobile forms of fixed capital are ships, trucks, planes and railway engines. (75)

Capital in danger of social sclerosis

The part which is moveable capital cannot be replaced during the item’s lifetime without loss of value. As time goes by the sheer mass of this long-lived and often physically immobile capital for both production and consumption increaserelative to capital that is continuously flowing. Whole sites are abandoned and wasted as in the rust belts of Mordor. On one hand, in order for capital to circulate freely in space and time, physical infrastructures and built environments must be created that are fixed in space. Yet capital has to periodically break out of the constraints imposed by the world it has constructed. As Harvey says, it is always in mortal danger of becoming sclerotic. Why?

Capital is forever in danger of becoming more sclerotic over time because of the increasing amount of fixed capital required. Fixed and circulating capital are in contradiction with each other but neither can exist without the other. The flow of that part of capital that facilitates circulation has to be slowed down. But the value of immobile fixed capital (like the container port terminal) can be realized only through its use. It is generally much slower.

From physical goods to spectacles

One solution for capitalists is to sell events rather than physical commodities. Harvey says there is a huge difference between, for example, the live transmission of a World Cup football match and lugging around bottled water, steel girders, furniture or perishable items like soft fruit, hot pork pies, milk and bread. Commodities are variably mobile depending upon their qualities and transportability. Production, with some exceptions, like transportation itself is the least mobile form of capital. It is usually locked down in place for a time. In shipbuilding it is considerable.

Contradiction 7 The Contradictory Nature of Low Wages vs Capitalist Realization

The goal of capitalism is to sell as many products as it can at the cheapest possible price. But in the process of making a profit the capitalist must:

• exploit labor power (surplus value) so it can raise the price of a commodity;
• realize the sale of the product in the market – which is far from easy

The problem for capitalists is that if wages are kept low the aggregate demand of laborers won’t be enough to buy the products off the shelf. So if the cost of social reproducing of the laborers is being forced back into the household, then those laborers will be less likely to buy goods and services off the market. Lack of aggregate effective demand creates a serious barrier to the continuity of capital accumulation. Working class consumer power is a significant component of that effective demand. Yet if the capitalist insists on paying minimum wage how can the workers buy the products?

Between 1945 and the mid-1970s, the problem for capitalist was in the production of enough surplus valuebecause of unions were strong and wages high. When unions became weaker, wages dropped beginning in the 1970s. Then the problem for capitalists was was not in the achievement of extracting surplus value but in cultivating conditions for its realization since workers had less money to buy commodities. This is why in the early 1970s capitalists began issuing credit cards to workers in order for capitalist profits to be realized.

Contradiction 8 Contradiction and Alienation of Labor

Harvey says there is an important distinction between the technical and social division of labor. By technical he means a separate task within a complex series of operations, that anyone can do. By social he means the specialized task that only a person with adequate training or social standing can do, like a doctor, or an architect. In the technological division labor, the unity of mental and manual aspects of laboring was broken.

The meaning of the term “alienation” has psychological and sociological components. As a passive psychological term, it means to become isolated from connection to others whether at work or in leisure. As an active psychological state, it means being angry and hostile or feeling oppressed, deprived or disposed of. The person acts out that anger, lashing out without any clear definition. Teenage rebellion movies of years ago, The Wild One or Rebel Without a Cause, are examples.

As beautifully laid out by Bertell Ollman, sociologically alienation means the worker is estranged from his or her product of labor as well as the process of work. He/she is also alienated from other workers, from nature and from their own creativity. As Marx said it is only outside of work that the worker has the possibility to achieve any personal fulfillment. Uneven geographical development in the divisions of labor and the parallel increase in social inequality in life choices, are exacerbating that sense of alienation. This creates a danger for capitalists in the form of labor unions, strikes, labor parties and agitation for socialism. On one hand, the accumulation of capital requires squeezing the life out of the worker. On the other hand, this repression creates militancy on the part of workers.

Contradiction 9 Automation Might Shrink the Ratio of Necessity and Freedom vs Automation as the Driver od Unemployment

One of the mythological stories told by capitalists is that technological innovation would lead to more leisure time for workers. Well, since about 1970 in Yankeedom, we have seen an increase in the amount of full-time work from 40 hours to at least 50 hours per week. This is because capitalist motivation is not to create more leisure for workers, but to replace workers, especially militant workers, with machines.

On the other hand, automation and artificial intelligence now provide us with abundant means to achieve the Marxian dream of freedom beyond the realm of necessity. In other words, the population could have more leisure time to use their creativity for new inventions, new arts and new sciences. Full advantage could be taken of automation and artificial intelligence. But for the capitalists the more time that has been released from production, the more imperative it has become (for the capitalist) for the workers to absorb their leisure time in consumption. It has no room for authentically free time which neither produces nor consumes commercial wealth.

Contradiction 10 Technological Innovation vs Monopoly Capitalism

From competition to monopoly

According to Harvey, the development of technology first became a focus for capitalists in the second half of the 19^thcentury with the rise of the machine tool industry. Harnessing energy like the steam engine was applied to multiple industries. The classic Marxist argument is that through capitalist competition, the productive forces (technology) increase and outdistance the capitalist capacity to use this productive power. This overabundance of products creates the conditions for socialism. But what Marx didn’t anticipate is that capital demonstrates a trend towards monopoly rather than competition. This is a less favorable environment for innovation.

Wealth of Nations is the founding myth of liberal economic theory. Capital is imagined as constructed by a plethora of molecular and competitive collisions of individual capitalists moving freely and searching for profitable opportunities within a chaotic sea of economic activity. But in fact by the end of the 19^th century, corporations has overwhelmed Adam Smith’s competitive invisible hand. All this is news to market fundamentalist economists. Right-wing market libertarians present monopolies as an exception to the rule, rather than the predominant way of life under capitalism. Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, Walmart and Apple are all examples of oligarchies tending towards monopolies. The tendencies in many sectors of the economy – pharmaceuticals, oil, airlines, agribusiness, banking software, media and social media – suggest strong tendencies towards oligopoly, if not monopoly. In fact, says Harvey, most capitalists, if given the choice prefer to be monopolists rather than competitors

Lenin saw capital moving into a new phase of monopoly power associated with imperialism at the turn of the 20^th century when the big industrial cartels combined with finance capital to dominate the leading national economies. This view re-emerged in the 1960’s with Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy’s book Monopoly Capitalism. The crisis of the 1970s – stagflation and inflation – was widely interpreted by Marxists as a typical crisis of monopoly capital.

Why monopolies put the brakes on innovation

Capitalism today limits the rate of technological innovation because:

• The organization of cooperation and divisions of labor must be made in ways to maximize efficiency, profitability and accumulation. This means that innovations that will not be very profitable, such as long-lasting technologies, will be repressed.
• The capitalist needs to facilitate the acceleration of capital circulation in all its phases, along with the need to annihilate space through time. What I mean is increasing speed of transport and communication reduces the friction and barrier of geographical distance. This requires minimizing capitalist occupation of space.
• Capitalist must shorten the turnover time by shortening the lifetime of consumer products (planned obsolesce).
• Capitalist can shorten the lifetime of products’ shift from the production of things that last to the production of spectacles which are ephemeral and contain faster turn-around time.
• Capitalists technologies of knowledge are used to identify consumer preferences.
• The speeding up and turnover time by the use of the technologies of finance. Beginning with invention checks and credit cards, the goal is faster turn-around time. The rise of cyber moneys, like bitcoin, is just the beginning of an inexorable descent of the monetary system into chaos.
• Capitalists must not only speed up the realization and consumption process, but they must develop technologies that speed up the workers. This includes time motion studies, the Hawthorn experiments, and surveillance. This attempted control encompasses not only physical efficiency but also the rise of robotization. As Harvey writes, robots do not complain, answer back, sue, get sick, go slow, lose concentration, go on strike, demand more wages, want tea breaks or refuse to show up.

All this means is that that the because the capitalist must speed up the production and consumption process, it is far from the ideal conditions of innovation. Scientific innovators are in no hurry and want their products to last. The contradiction is that capitalists want scientific innovation to create ever new processes and products. Yet in their efforts to shorten the turnover time of products, they undermine the innovative processes themselves. They will not be able to innovate at the pace that would develop the productive forces and would stagnate and shrink the rate of profit.

Contradiction 11   Globalization of Capital: Promises and Perils

The division of labor within capitalism is now taking place at a world-wide scale. Harvey writes that what is now in place is radically different from anything that existed prior to 1850.

There are three sectional classifications of the division of labor between:

• primary – agriculture, forestry, fishing and mining;
• secondary – industry and manufacturing; and
• tertiary – services, finance, insurance and real estate sectors.

On one hand a world market in grains can forestall a local crop failure. At its best all capitalist countries have the technology to support each other during famines, extreme weather, floods, earthquakes and droughts. The fact that capitalist countries limit these interventions to countries that are their allies does not limit their potential to serve the whole world.

One the other hand, as Harvey points out today the clothing factories in Bangladesh, the electronics factories of southern China, the maquiladora factories strung along the Mexican border or the chemical complexes in Indonesia are all interdependent.  Small disruptions in a supply chain can have very large consequences. A strike in a key car parts factory in one region of the world can bring the whole production system to a halt everywhere. Supply chain blockages thanks to Covid result in delays in both the process of production and the delays on the product.

Contradiction 12 Uneven Geographical Developments: Super-Concentrations of Production  and Wastelands

The capitalist division of labor has reached a world scale and this results in uneven pockets of production with high concentration of work in some areas and wastelands in other areas. Time is money for capitalism. Traversing space takes both time and money. As much as possible the near elimination of transport costs and times is a factor in location decision making. This permits capitalists to explore different profit opportunities in widely disparate places.

Harvey writes that what arises is “agglomeration” economies where many different capitals cluster together. For example, car parts and tire industries locate close to car plants. Different firms and industries can share facilities and access labor skills, information and infrastructures. However other regions may become wastelands increasingly bereft of activities. They get caught in a downward spiral of depression and decay. The result is uneven regional concentrations of wealth, power and influence.  Affections and loyalties to particular places and cultural forms are destroyed and treated as anachronisms. Large blotches of the world become wastelands where nothing is grown and people can no longer live.

Capital never has to address its systemic failings because it moves them around geographically. Since myopic capitalists treat these wastelands as “externalities” the problem grows worse. The heads of nation-states are enslaved to capitalists and are in no position to address the geographical mess capitalists have created. There are, however, limits to continuous centralization through agglomeration. It results in overcrowding and rising pollution. In addition, labor may become better organized in its struggles against exploitation because of its regional concentration.

Contradiction 13 Finance Capital vs the Physical Economy

There are two ways in which capitalist crises might be produced:

1) chronic inequalities produce imbalances between production and realization; and

2) financialization of profit means capitalists will not invest in their own infrastructure.

In the case of financialization, what makes the current phase special is the phenomenal acceleration in the speed of circulation of finance capital and the reduction in financial transaction costs. If all capitalists seek to live off finance, insurance and real estate interests and are just speculating in asset value or living off capital gains the gap between finance capital and the real physical economy grows.

The problem of compound interest

Harvey points out that – Michael Hudson in the Bubble and Beyond is one of the only political economists who takes the issue of compound growth seriously. He says that most people do not understand very well the mathematics of compound interest.

Nor do they understand the phenomenon of compounding growth and the potential dangers it can pose. Harvey writes that compound interest curve rises very slowly for quite a while and then starts to accelerate and by the end the curve becomes a singularity as it sails off into infinity. Harvey goes into much more detail on pages 223-228 of his book.

There is one form that capital takes which permits accumulation without limit and that is the financial form. Today finance capital is now unchained from any physical limitations. In Mordor today the Fed issues fiat moneys that can be created without limit. Adding a few zeros to the quantity of money in the circulation is no problem for them. The danger is that the result will be a crisis of inflation. The contradiction is in disparities between accumulation process that is necessarily exponential and the conditions that might limit the capacity of exponential growth. These conditions are the requirements to invest in the physical aspects of the economy such as buildings, harnessing of energy and infrastructure.

Fictious capital instruments

Besides the printing of fiat money another financial instrument in the purchase of assets includes debt claims. Harvey writes an asset is simply a capitalized property title. This was paralleled by the creation of wholly new assets markets within the financial system itself such as currency futures, credit default swaps, and CDOs.

This was fictitious capital feeding off and generating even more fictitious capital.

Harvey writes there is a labyrinth of countervailing claims that were almost impossible to value except by way of some mix of future expectation, beliefs and outright crazy short-term betting in unregulated markets with no prospect of any long-term payoff.

Contradiction 14 Capital’s Relation to Nature

Liberal environmental politics has preferred to ignore entirely the fact that it is capitalism that produced the current ecological crisis. Harvey writes that they nibble away at issues on the periphery of the capitalist system while they never reach the core of the system that is producing the problem. “Deep ecologists” wrongly call Marxism “Promethean” which has a disregard for nature and claims that only human history matters. But John Bellamy Foster has dedicated the better part of his life arguing for the belief that Marx was ecologically sensitive and had a concept of capitalism as creating a “metabolic” rift with nature.

In addition, by training David Harvey is a geographer and has written books on a Marxist criticism of what capitalism has done to the natural world. The change in climate and the frequency of severe weather events is increasing.  Catastrophic local events can be readily accommodated by capital since a predatory disaster capitalism is ready to go. But pollution problems do not get solved, only moved around in uneven benefits and losses. The capitalist system is not prepared for the slow, cancerous degradations. Harvey says that whereas the problems of in past were typically localized, they have now become more regionalized such as acid deposition, low level of ozone concentration, stratospheric ozone holes, habitat destruction, species extinction and loss of biodiversity.

Conclusion

Harvey points out that this one-at-a-time presentation of capitalist contradictions does not address that all these contradictions are feeding into each other forming an organic whole. Do capitalists understand these contradictions? For the most part, no. Most are enthralled with market fundamentalist theories. A minority have read Marx. But even so, their short-term material interests as capitalists blocks them from understanding the full ramifications of their system. So capitalists as a class do not understand their system. They blithely roll along accumulating finance capital and pay no attention to the fourteen fractures I’ve identified. What problems occur are dismissed as “business cycles”. As the fractures deepen we can count on capitalists to ramp up  their ideology and distract us with more extreme forms entertainment, including football games, escapist movies and increasing violence in movies coupled with special effects.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

Charter schools and vouchers are the two main forms of privatization in the sphere of American education. Both have wreaked havoc on public education and the public interest for decades. Together they have lowered the level of culture and education, misled parents and the public, greatly enriched a handful of people along the way, and damaged the economy. These privatized education arrangements have not served the national interest in any way.

Extensive information and analysis of school privatization in its various forms can be found in many places, including at the Network for Public Education, Tultican, In The Public Interest, Common Dreams, and Truthout. Hundreds of scholarly peer-reviewed articles and books also expose many serious problems with school privatization.

The main theory behind the privatization and deregulation of public education is “free-market” theory, which maintains that treating education as a commodity, as a business, as an exchange phenomenon in a dog-eat-dog world where everyone fends-for-themselves, is the best of all worlds and the most effective, civilized, and fair way to save children, the economy, society, and the nation.

“Free-market” theory openly promotes a survival-of-the-fittest ethos for schools, families, and individuals, which ends up consolidating inequality and reinforcing a system of winners and losers. In practice, “school choice” leaves many children and families behind. In this connection, it is important to appreciate the segregationist origins of “school choice”.

Such a dog-eat-dog system is anachronistic and negates arrangements based on the affirmation of basic human rights that belong to all by virtue of being human. In the “free market” you may end up in a great school or you may not, which is often the case. It is on you alone to find a school that serves the needs of your children, and to do so in an environment that is increasingly complex and confusing. And “buyer beware” because when your school closes, often without warning, there is no way to secure redress. You have to live and die by the “free market.” Nothing is guaranteed.

Indeed, privately-operated charter schools close every week, leaving many low-income black and brown families feeling violated. A recent example of this disaster comes from Philadelphia (August 26, 2022) where a news headline reads: Families left scrambling after 2 Philadelphia charter schools announce closure days before start of school. Many Philly families say that they are shocked and at a loss for what to do. Another recent example (September 24, 2022) comes from Florida: ‘Devastated’: Weeks after opening, Red Hills Academy charter school set to close. Financial malfeasance, mismanagement, and poor academic performance are the three most common reasons privately-operated charter schools close every week.

Such upheavals and chaos are common in the crisis-prone charter school sector. They are a salient feature, not just a bug, of charter school arrangements. In some cases parents receive only a short cold email from charter school operators informing them that their charter school is closing abruptly—and at the worst possible time. It is an irresponsible approach to education in a modern society. And with no sense of irony, “free market” ideologues present such “churn” and disorder as a good and normal thing, as the way things are supposed to be.

Charter schools now have a 31-year record of failure, corruption, fraud, controversy, scandal, and closure. So do vouchers. Poor accountability and low transparency are hallmarks of the crisis-prone charter school sector. However, none of this has stopped charter school promoters from working tirelessly to oversell and prettify charter schools. Charter schools have become notorious for over-promising and under-delivering. Intense advertising and marketing are central to this business-centric drive. The nation’s 100,000 public schools, on the other hand, spend nothing on advertising and marketing because they are not businesses or promoters of consumerism, competition, and the “law of the jungle.” They do not view students and parents as customers shopping for a school. Education is not seen as a commodity or as something provided to society by private interests obsessed with maximizing profit as fast as possible.

“Free-market” theory does not recognize education as a modern human social responsibility. It does not view education as a collective responsibility in the 21st century. It does not consider education to be a basic human right that government must guarantee in practice. It does not accept that public schools in a society based on mass industrial production need to be universal, well-organized, world-class, fully-funded, integrated, locally-controlled by elected individuals accountable to the public, and available for free in every neighborhood.

Education in a complex society such as ours cannot be left to chance and a fend-for-yourself outlook. Such an orientation is at odds with contemporary conditions and requirements. The “law of the jungle” is not fit for human beings. For centuries, humans have needed and wanted a society fit for all, not a society for “the fittest.”

If private schools wish to exist—and thousands do in America—that is perfectly fine. They simply should not have access to any public funds, assets, facilities, services, or resources because these belong legitimately and wholly to the public alone and no one else. Only schools that are public in the proper sense of the word should receive public funds. Calling charter schools “public” 50 times a day does not automatically make charter schools public. Over the years courts in many jurisdictions have even ruled that charter schools are not public schools. Unlike public schools, charter schools are not state agencies. There is ultimately no justification for funneling public wealth to deregulated charter schools run by unelected private persons. The private sector has no valid or legitimate claim to public funds and resources produced by working people.

Public and private are antonyms and should not be mixed up. They are different categories with distinct characteristics. The public sphere and the private domain have different features and embrace different aims, roles, and agendas, which is why they cannot be reconciled. They are also governed by different laws. The rich and their representatives continually blur the critical distinction between these different realms for self-serving reasons. For example, if they can get away with calling privately-operated deregulated charter schools “public schools,” then they can lay false claim to public funds and resources, which is really nothing more than private parasitic expropriation of public property under the banner of high ideals. Such self-serving claims make the rich richer while wrecking public education and the public interest.

According to “free market” theory, anything other than “free-market” arrangements leads to “special interests,” “politics,” “inefficiency,” “economic distortions,” “government tyranny,” and more. Government is typically the bogeyman in “free market” theory. Government is automatically and permanently evil in “free market” theory, which is ironic because government today actively imposes the neoliberal outlook and agenda of the rich on everyone and everything, leading to greater inequalities and tragedies at all levels. Like the welfare state, the neoliberal state ensures that the rich keep getting much richer. This is all consistent with the theory of private property expounded by political philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, David Hume, and Adam Smith. They argued that government’s main role is to protect private property rights, which means, among other things, prioritizing individualism over the general interests of society. To be sure, states and governments intervene regularly in the “free market” to privilege big business. The rich seem to have no issues or concerns when government guarantees them even more benefits denied to others. The rich, in reality, do not like to live and die by the “free market.” They want the state and government to guarantee them profit at all times, regardless of how damaging this is to the natural and social environment.

Private property, it should be recalled, means that only one individual can use said property. All others are excluded from use of said property; the legal individual owner has the exclusive right to use it as he or she sees fit and no one else is allowed to benefit from this property. Private property is about exclusion.¹

Further, any notion of consciously planning an economy to secure stability, sustainability, and growth for all is rashly rejected as irrational by “free market” ideologues. They maintain that it is absurd and impossible to plan for the needs of all humans in a deliberate and conscious way that ensures that all parts of the economy operate in a harmonious pro-social manner. “Things are too complex or too big to be controlled or planned” say “free market” ideologues. In this way, uncertainty, chaos, instability, individualism, consumerism, and a fend-for-yourself lifestyle are normalized.

According to “free market” ideologues, if everything were just left to the “free market” we would supposedly have the best of all worlds where “the best and brightest,” “the winners,” and “the most meritorious” would rise to the top, lead, and make everything better for everyone. Talent, ability, and initiative would be properly rewarded, according to “free market” theory. All the chips would land fairly and correctly in their proper place if everyone just played by the rules of “free market” theory. “Free market” ideologues claim that everything would be high quality if we just upheld “free market” ideas.

This ahistorical and apolitical approach ignores 50 things, including the unequal distribution and control of economic and political power in a class-divided society, that is, who is already-advantaged and who is already-disadvantaged. It ignores inherited wealth, unequal access to information, differing levels of literacy, uneven cultural capital, the exploitation of workers by owners of capital, and much more. The game, as they say, is already rigged, which is why “might makes right” and “winner takes all” prevail in the “free market.” After all, since “not everyone can be excellent” in the “free market,” then not everyone can be “a winner.” Only the “fittest survive” in this obsolete set-up. Many have to fail. Put differently, competition in the “free market” is already heavily pre-conditioned by economic and other considerations.

Mountain States Policy Center

The newest entity to enter the “free market education” foray is a “nonprofit” group called the Mountain States Policy Center. According to Idaho Ed News, the Mountain States Policy Center:

advertises itself as a nonpartisan research group. Its goal is to promote the free market, individual liberty and limited government in Washington, Montana, Wyoming and Idaho.

We are also told that, “Education is one of the group’s top concerns.” Indeed, “school choice” is the group’s “top education priority,” which means more school privatization (e.g., charter schools and vouchers).

The group is led by committed long-standing “free market” ideologues and claims to be “above” politics and rhetoric, even though it is heavily involved in both. Chris Cargill is the co-founder, President, and CEO of Mountain States Policy Center. He “spent the last 13 years with the Washington Policy Center, a similar free-market think tank headquartered in Seattle.”

In an ideological sleight of hand, the Mountain States Policy Center explicitly equates the “free market’ with “the people.” This is a particularly dark form of disinformation because the “free market” and “the people” are not the same. They are different categories with different qualities. The “free market” is the way commodities are exchanged in a society based on individualism, commodity production, exchange relations, and private property. It is a set-up based on profit-maximization, not one based on meeting social needs. This is why there are six vacant homes for every homeless person in the U.S. The people, on the other hand, refers to the modern polity made up of citizens with equal rights and duties. There is no necessary or automatic connection between the “free market” and “the people.”

People have lived and worked in many periods that did not have a “free market.” Entrepreneurialism, for instance, did not exist in most economic formations; it is specific to capitalism and serves as a euphemism for “rugged individualism,” fend-for-yourself, and survival-of-the-fittest. Promoters of entrepreneurialism also try to equate it with “innovation.” It should also be noted that the concept of “the people” did not exist in periods prior to the rise of capitalism. Under slavery and feudalism many humans were not even part of “the people.”

The “free market,” it should be stressed, rests on instability, uncertainty, chaos, anarchy, competition, consumerism, possessive individualism, and private property. It fosters turmoil (“creative destruction”) and blocks the rise of a self-reliant, diverse, and balanced economy whose parts work together in harmony to meet the needs of all. Humans, however, do not need or want instability, uncertainty, and insecurity in the 21st century. People in a modern society based on mass industrial production need and want a society that ensures stability, peace, security, and prosperity for all on a planned, conscious, sustainable basis. Constantly lurching from one economic crisis to another is inhumane and avoidable.

The aim of conflating the “free market” with “the people” is designed to make it seem like the “free market” is somehow pro-social and human-centered when, in fact, it stresses possessive individualism and denies the existence of society and the social relationship between individuals. “Free market” theory does not see individuals as social beings but rather as self-interested, disconnected, isolated (“independent”) beings that just want to be left alone while they “make their way” in this dog-eat-dog world that perpetuates many inequalities and tragedies. The “free market” essentially ignores social responsibility and lionizes individualism and individual responsibility. It has no dialectical conception of the relationship between individuals and society.

The Mountain States Policy Center also creates a false dichotomy between government and “the people.” This is done in an attempt to de-link “the people” from the government, even though no civilized society can exist without government. Such disinformation is meant to foster the idea that government is not and cannot be an arrangement that actually represents and serves people. Indeed, government is seen as a big nuisance. “People” for “free market” ideologues really means capitalists, entrepreneurs, business people, stakeholders, and consumers. It does not mean humans and citizens with rights that belong to them by virtue of their being and which must be upheld by a modern government. “Free market” ideologues never distinguish between a human-centered government versus a capital-centered government. They do not recognize that a government that upholds a public authority worthy of the name differs from a government that puts the narrow interests of big business in first place all the time.

The neoliberal character of the Mountain States Policy Center comes out again in this statement: “We believe that parents should have the right to use the dollars that they put into the public school system to educate their children as best as they see fit.” This is one of many versions of the worn-out neoliberal disinformation to funnel public money into private hands. The statement combines “parents” and “choice” in a way that makes it seem like the Mountain States Policy Center is simply defending some sort of benign choice and rights, when they are really promoting consumerism, individualism, a fend-for-yourself mentality, and the commodification of education. It also ignores the fact that public school funds do not belong to parents or students, per se. Public school funds are not “portable” and free for any individual to use as they wish whenever and wherever they want. This is not the premise, purpose, and function of public school money in the U.S.

It is worth recalling that charter means contract, that contracts are part of private law, and that charter schools are contract schools. Contracts are the quintessential market category; they make markets ‘work’. Contracts are the expression of exchange relations in a society based on commodity production and the social division of labor and private property underlying such an economy. Individualism, competition, utilitarianism, and consumerism are the companion ideologies of such an outdated set-up. The link between private property and charter schools cannot be overlooked, especially because such a connection negates the oft-repeated irrational claim that charter schools are public schools. In practice, the concept and practice of charter schools forsakes public control and benefit. This is why charter schools are not, in fact, open to all students and do cherry-pick their students using many different methods.

Further, like private businesses, charter schools treat teachers as “at-will” employees, which means that they can be hired and fired at any time for any reason. In addition, many states allow charter school teachers to teach without a license or certificate. This is on top of the fact that charter school teachers, on average, are paid less, are less experienced, and work longer days and years than their public school counterparts.

Moreover, widespread fraud and corruption are perhaps the most striking features of cyber charter schools and brick-and-mortar charter schools. Not a day goes by where there is not some sort of scandal, crime, or controversy in the charter school sector. Arrests, indictments, and incarceration of charter school employees are commonplace.

Charter school owners and operators are also known for manipulating student waiting list numbers to create the illusion that most, or all, charter schools have long student waiting lists, which is supposed to “prove” and signal to the public that charter schools are popular and a superior alternative to the public schools that educate 90% of America’s youth. Apparently, parents and students are clamoring to escape “dreadful” public schools as fast as possible, just to get into a privately-operated, deregulated, segregated charter school governed by unelected private persons focused on the bottom line. In reality, countless charter schools manipulate their waiting lists and many cannot meet their own enrollment targets. This is besides the never-ending problem of high student (and teacher and principal) turnover rates in charter schools. Every week, many students are pushed out of charter schools in one way or another and dumped back into the “dreadful” public schools that accept all students at all times. But, as researcher Jeff Bryant notes, No Matter What the Charter School Movement Says, Parents Like Their Public Schools (October 5, 2022).

The list of problems plaguing the charter school sector, along with the damage that this sector is doing to education, society, the economy, and the national interest is lengthy, damning, and indicting.

Today, a robust and growing body of unassailable evidence documents many serious problems in the crisis-prone charter school sector. This has had the effect of steadily and methodically strengthening the ideological, theoretical, educational, and political battle against neoliberal educational ideas, policies, and arrangements.

After two generations of failure and scandal, privatizers and neoliberals continue to push aggressively for more school privatization in order to transfer as much public wealth away from the public and into the hands of narrow private interests seeking new sources of profit in an economy that is tapped out and steadily collapsing.

Working people, students, parents, educators, public education advocates, and others have an objective interest in ending privatization in all its forms and defending the public interest. Neoliberals, privatizers, and “free market” ideologues determined to further wreck public education, society, the economy, and the national interest under the banner of high ideals can and must be stopped.

1. Private property and personal property are not the same.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Shawgi Tell.

There is something decidedly sinister about the way the right-wing media is pursuing the “elimination strategy is madness” argument so doggedly. Yes, it’s always interesting to discover what people are saying about New Zealand overseas, but The New Zealand Herald republishing anti-Jacinda Ardern editorials from the Daily Telegraph — mouthpiece of the British Conservative Party — points to an altogether more disturbing preoccupation.

These misgivings are only reinforced when one considers the near unanimous hostility directed towards the Prime Minister and her government by New Zealand’s talkback hosts.

At the most superficial level, one could argue that the right-wing media’s editorial hostility is generated almost entirely by bottomline anxieties. With most of its advertising revenue generated by realtors, retailers, the hospitality industry and tourist operators, the big media outlets must experience significant financial pain whenever New Zealand and/or its most important economic hub, Auckland, goes into lockdown.

The pressure brought to bear on the media bosses to get the doors open for their advertisers’ paying customers is easily imagined.

More than anything else, commercial enterprises hate surprises. Certainty and predictability are what they need to go on generating profits for their shareholders. The sudden appearance of covid-19 in the community, followed by lockdowns of a severity to make the eyes of overseas commentators water, bring with them consequences that are costly, disruptive and generally bad for business.

Unsurprisingly, a significant fraction of the business community would very much prefer that covid-19 was responded to in a fashion less injurious to their financial health.

Those business leaders less bound by the short-term selfishness of their colleagues take a more responsible position. They understand how very bad it looks for businesspeople to convey the impression that they care a great deal less about people getting very ill, and quite possibly dying, than they do about making money.

Short, sharp, uncompromising lockdowns
They also know that New Zealand’s style of short, sharp, uncompromising lockdowns protect the economic interests of the business community a whole lot more effectively than the loose, dangerously porous, lockdowns on display in the UK, the USA, and across the Tasman in Australia.

Not that anything as mundane as “the facts of the matter” have ever slowed the government’s critics down. Neither New Zealand’s extraordinary success in keeping the number of covid-19 deaths below 30, nor the powerful bounce-back of its economy, cuts any ice with the “elimination strategy is madness” brigade. Indeed, the obvious success of Jacinda Ardern’s elimination strategy only seems to make them madder.

So what is it? What drives Ardern’s critics so crazy?

Sadly, a great many of her right-wing opponents seem to be inspired by nothing more edifying than sexist antipathy towards a young, female prime minister, from a tiny and powerless country at the bottom of the world, who has outperformed (by a wide margin) the male leaders of much larger and more powerful nations.

Something about this picture is just wrong, wrong, wrong. Young women are supposed to defer to the “big dogs” of the international community — not show them up. Ardern has produced a disturbance in the conservative “Force” that makes them shudder: as if an entire political ideology suddenly cried out in indignation and was rudely silenced.

They fear something terrible is going on.

And, in a way, they’re right. From the perspective of those responsible for creating a world in which the interests of business take precedence over even the ordinary person’s right to stay safe and well (some might say especially over the ordinary person’s right to stay safe and well) the sight of a young, female prime minister putting the interests of ordinary people first is a terrible thing.

Ardern’s “kindness” works way beyond neoliberalism’s explanation
Because Jacinda Ardern’s “kindness” doesn’t just work a little bit, it works way beyond neoliberalism’s capacity to supply a credible explanation.

Take Sweden, for example. For a while it was the “who needs lockdowns?” brigade’s poster child. But Sweden, with just twice the population of New Zealand, racked-up a horrifying 14,000+ covid fatalities. Had Ardern followed the Swedish prime minister’s example, her country would have sustained upwards of 7,000 deaths.

By following its leader’s strict elimination strategy, however, New Zealand’s “Team of Five Million” kept their country’s covid death toll to 26.

On the Right, however, this sort of science-guided, humanitarian response to covid-19 just doesn’t compute. Conservatives around the world react by accusing Ardern of political cowardice. She simply doesn’t have the balls to adopt a strategy that will lead directly to hundreds, if not thousands, of deaths.

Look at the Brits; look at the Yanks; they had the courage to condemn tens-of-thousands of their people to early and unnecessary deaths; they know that “you can’t live in a cave forever”; that, in the end, the economy must come first.

This is the upside-down world towards which the right-wing media’s wayward editorial decisions are dragging its readers, viewers and listeners. A world in which saving New Zealanders’ lives is the wrong thing to do. A world where “freedom” means nothing more than being able to go shopping wherever and whenever you want – without a mask.

That the big media companies haven’t quite arrived there yet is because there are still some executives who understand that, ultimately, the news media relies on ordinary people to read its copy and listen to its broadcasters’ opinions.

Ordinary people who, if right-wing editors and producers ever get around to actually swallowing the insanity-inducing Kool-Aid swishing about in their mouths, will be offered-up to deranged conservatives (and the advertisers) as unavoidable human sacrifices to the Moloch god of the free market.

The only elimination strategy the right-wing media will ever wholeheartedly support.

This essay, by Chris Trotter, was originally posted on the Bowalley Road blog of Thursday, 26 August 2021, under the title: “A Disturbing Preoccupation: Why the Right-Wing Media Hates Jacinda’s Covid Elimination Strategy”.  It is republished by Asia Pacific Report with the permission of the author.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Let me be clear: capitalism without competition isn’t capitalism. It’s exploitation—tweet from President Joe Biden, July 9, 2021

Capitalism is exploitation, period. Lol—a twitter response to Biden’s tweet, July 9, 2021

Not a day goes by in which major owners of capital and their political representatives do not promote illusions and disinformation about the obsolete capitalist economic system. The ruling elite and their entourage rejected economic science and embraced irrationalism, incoherence, and dogmatism more than a century ago. They are unable and unwilling to offer any useful analysis of economic realities. Nothing they put forward helps advance public understanding of the economy. The mainstream news, for example, is saturated with endless mind-numbing nonsensical economic headlines. It is no accident that mainstream economics has long been called the dismal science.

The internal core logic and intrinsic operation of capital ensures greater poverty, inequality, and monopoly over time. This is the inherent nature of capital. It is how capital moves and develops. These catastrophes are not the result of external forces, extenuating circumstances, or “bad people” making “bad decisions.” They are not the outcome of ill-conceived policies made by self-serving, immoral, or uninformed people. These worsening problems did not arise because something is wrong with the intentions of some individuals who make antisocial decisions. Such notions are facile.

While individuals have consciousness, autonomy, self-determination, and agency, many phenomena (e.g., laws of economic development) operate objectively outside the will of individuals; they do not depend on the will of individuals. The laws of motion governing economic phenomena can be known, controlled, and directed, but not extinguished; they have to be consciously mastered, harnessed, and directed in a way that meets the needs of all.

Capital is first and foremost an unequal social relationship, not a person or a thing. This unequal social relationship is relentlessly reproduced in today’s society, preventing the healthy balanced extended reproduction of society. On the one side of this unequal social relationship are the majority who own nothing but their labor power and on the other side are a tiny handful who own the means of production and live off the labor of others.

Major owners of capital are the personification of capital, the embodiment of capital. This critical theoretical insight helps us avoid the rabbit hole of personal intentions and personal will, and allows us instead to objectively locate greed, insecurity, inequality, poverty, unemployment, endless debt, and other tragedies in the intrinsic built-in nature, logic, and movement of capital itself.

One of these is the inexorable tendency of competition to lead to monopoly under capitalism. Competition means winners and losers. By definition, not everyone can win when competing. Competition means rivalry for supremacy. Thousands compete in the Olympics, for example, but only a select few (“winners”) go home with a gold medal.¹ It is no accident that the economy, media, and politics are heavily monopolized by a handful of billionaires while billions of people who actually produce the wealth in society and run society remain marginalized and disempowered.

This brutal reality cannot be reversed or overcome with the utterance of a few platitudes, the passage of some policies, or the creation of some agencies that claim to be able to fix the outdated economic system, especially when all of the above come from billionaires themselves.

On July 9, 2021, President Joe Biden issued an Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy.

The order is about 7,000 words long and full of anticonscious statements. Disinformation pervades the entire order.

The opening paragraph begins with the following disinformation:

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, and in order to promote the interests of American workers, businesses, and consumers, it is hereby ordered….

Here, “American workers, businesses, and consumers” are casually misequated and no mention is made of citizens or humans. The implication is that consumerism is normal, healthy, and desirable, and that workers and big business somehow have the same aims, world outlook, and interests. This conceals the fact that owners of capital and workers have antagonistic irreconcilable interests and that people exist as humans and citizens, not just utilitarian consumers and shoppers in a taken-for-granted system based on chaos, anarchy, and violence.

Disinformation is further escalated in the next paragraph:

A fair, open, and competitive marketplace has long been a cornerstone of the American economy, while excessive market concentration threatens basic economic liberties, democratic accountability, and the welfare of workers, farmers, small businesses, startups, and consumers.

“Market concentration” has been the norm for generations. Monopolies, cartels, and oligopolies have been around since the late 1800s. Mergers and acquisitions have been taking place non-stop for decades. The so-called “free market” largely disappeared long ago. Objectively, there can be no fairness in a system rooted in wage-slavery and empire-building. Wage-slavery is the precondition for the tendency of the rich to get richer and the poor poorer. It is not a recipe for prosperity and security for all. This is also why inequality, tyranny, violence, and surveillance have been growing over the years. Moreover, what “threatens basic economic liberties, democratic accountability, and the welfare of workers, farmers, small businesses, startups, and consumers” is the ongoing political and economic exclusion of people from control over the economy and their lives by the financial oligarchy. There can be no liberty, accountability, and welfare when most people are deprived of real decision-making power and major owners of capital make all the decisions. Problems would not constantly worsen if people had control over their lives. The “best allocation of resources” cannot be made when the economy is carved up, fractured, and controlled by competing owners of capital.

Although recurring economic crises for well over a century have repeatedly discredited “free market” ideology, the 7,000-word executive order is saturated with the language of “choice,” “competition,” and “consumers.” This is the same worn-out language used by privatizers of all hues at home and abroad.

Further, while the executive order gives many examples of “economic consolidation” in numerous sectors, the government is not interested in creating a self-reliant vibrant diverse economy that meets the needs of all. It is not committed to reversing “the harmful effects of monopoly and monopsony.” Numerous antitrust laws have not stopped either. Big mergers and acquisitions have been going on for years. Rather, the executive order is an attempt to restructure economic and political arrangements among different factions of the wealthy elite; it reflects a new stage or form of inter-capitalist rivalry for even greater domination of the economy by fewer owners of capital. In other words, moving forward, the economy will remain monopolized by a few monopolies. Wealth is only going to become more concentrated in fewer hands in the years ahead. Mountains of data from hundreds of sources document growing wealth and income inequality every year.

The bulk of the executive order is filled with endless directives, strategies, rules, and suggestions for how to curb “unfair practices” and promote “fairness” and “competition.” But these all ring hollow given concrete realities and past experience.

Today, governments at all levels have been taken over by global private monopoly interests and have become instruments of decisions made on a supranational basis. There is a fine-tuned revolving door between officials from government and the private sector; they have become synonymous for all essential purposes. The same people who run major corporations also serve in high-level government positions where they advance the narrow interests of the private sector and then they leave government and return to their high-level corporate positions. There is a reason why the majority of members of Congress are millionaires. The Executive Branch in the United States, especially the President’s Office, is a major tool for the expression of the will of the most powerful monopolies. This is why billions of dollars are spent every few years to select the President of the country.

A modern economy must be controlled and directed by workers themselves. Only such an economy can provide for the needs of all and avoid endless economic distortions. Uneven economic development, “unfair” arrangements, “market concentration,” monopolies, oligopolies, and recurring crises cannot be avoided so long as those who actually produce the social product have no control over the social product. Workers have first claim to the wealth they produce and have the right to decide how, where, and when that wealth is used. Major owners of capital are historically superfluous and a big block to progress. They are not needed for a healthy vibrant self-reliant economy that meets the needs of all.

1. Under capitalism the ideology of competition also falsely assumes scarcity because if nothing was scare then there would be no need for competition.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Shawgi Tell.

While the corona virus has created a menace seemingly beyond what was already becoming obvious about the end of private profit domination of earth, it also unleashed the greatest outpouring of high, low and no IQ speculation, charges, countercharges and more surpassing past reactions at times of great crisis with moments of extreme fantasy bordering on dementia being experienced and practiced both by people of supposed expertise and higher education in the sciences to folks who may still dance under a full moon with their bodies covered in slime as a way to avoid cancer. Sadly, so far the slime-covered dancers are making about as much sense as the allegedly more critical gang.

The horrendous death toll inflicted by the virus is thought by many to be the work of a Chinese plot to exterminate everyone on earth but the Chinese and blame it on America, an American plot to exterminate everyone on earth but Americans and blame it on China, and assorted tales of twitness and omni-anti-social media to make those two sound relatively thoughtful. The fact that capitalism has transformed nature and made it far more easy to spread a lethal virus than to feed, clothe and shelter billions of people has escaped many, even some critics of capital who seem shocked that big pharma profits from illness. Hello? As does every and all other business entities and aspects of free market private profit pursuit which has less to do with evil individuals and far more to do with a corrupt debased system controlled by minorities at ever great cost to the majority. Dog food, bombs, broccoli, burgers, health food, high fashion, health care, garbage, death and every other aspect of life are all subject to market forces creating private profit at the mall, school, factory, lab, convenience store and all other venues where goods are exchanged by one and all except for those without enough market force, and they can just drop dead.

And this is only a small part of the dis-mis-cis mind attacks on the population to assure mass confusion that doesn’t notice billions the world over, and hundreds of thousands in America, unable to afford food, clothing, and shelter while a relatively tiny number increase their wealth to become the equal of gods while their subjects cringe at threats to what is called “our” democracy originating from people with little to no political economic power save to vote for candidates mostly bought, rented and leased by the richest of the rich who look down on them lined up at the polls, malls and battlefields from their wealth created mountain-top fortresses and smile at the blessings of capitalist democracy.

What’s a failing empire to do but continue failing, as in rushing to increase aid to Israel when a global majority has reacted in critical anger over its most recent abuse of the indigenous people whose land was taken on behalf of Europeans and the Palestinians were made to pay and are still paying for European atrocities? While the new American CEO leads a struggle to return to a form of social democracy that spreads a few more loans among the barely surviving and more taco-pizza-burgers to the fast food hungry while assuring that the system responsible for creating hunger is maintained and billions of American tax dollars continue to be rewarded to a colonial apartheid nation? And this while decent Americans in great numbers are enraged by the conditions of life of America’s indigenous people robbed of their land, culture and heritage long before Israel or the Middle East occupied any of the consciousness of Americans.

Confusing?

Like the humanitarian decency at the root of all Americans when reaching out to immigrant populations having the usual difficulties of discrimination inflicted first by their cheap labor exploiters and later by the native people whose jobs they take and at whose expense they frequently survive. Not to mention the difficulty of having to step over the bodies of Americans reduced to sleeping in the street while on our way to rescue an animal to save it from, um, having to sleep in the street. Are we confused? Does a snake have wings? Is a bluebird blue?

Of course, all of these systemic curses of inhumanity and often near madness can be written off as Russian and Chinese assault on our sacred democracy, enshrined in the constitution-bible, written by slave owners and others of the 1% who believed the common people should leave the important business of ruling to those with the most money, purchased knowledge and sanctification by those biblical gifts handed down – or up? – by an invisible force called god, or later, high finance.

The financialization of capitalism has cursed the world with worse contradictions than existed in the time of the system’s birth when Marx pointed out most of them. Now, money makes money without the production of anything but more money which may soon lead to much of humanity with indoor toilets eating bitcoins and excreting buttcoins while trying to live with junk filled oceans, overflowing sewers and forests turned to deserts while praying that nobody pushes the nuclear button. On the hopeful side, workers here and all over the world are acting up, unionizing and fighting for democracy in political economic dictatorships worshipped as democracies by Wall Street and its wholly owned subsidiary: the American government.

Time is growing short for Americans to get beyond symbolic challenges to capitalism that merely offer more profits by “branding” various movements with marketplace stature assuring that Gay Inc., Feminist Inc., Black Lives Matter Inc., and Latino-a-x Inc.  do not, perish the thought, turn into American Democracy Inc. That is still to come and as always, we’d better hurry to join up with much of the world our media mind managers don’t tell us about but which is setting an example for everyone by opting for a system that puts the public good before private profit. So far, as expected, the American regime of warfare, petcare and egomaniacal behavior personified by Trump – which is why they had to get rid of him for exemplifying what the nation really is – has succeeded in keeping division, individual mental illness and group therapy uppermost in consciousness while social reality sinks more deeply into a massive sea of moral sewage.

The “memes” of an all too often me-me-me-me culture need to and will soon become a plural “we “encompassing all of us and leaving no one out. Capitalism cannot be saved but humanity must be, from the social pandemic of private profit first, humanity later, if ever. The viral brain surgery performed on our collective consciousness by our rulers is an aspect of capitalism and could not exist without market forces under minority and anti-democratic control. The sooner “we” understand that, the sooner “we” end pandemics and thought control on our way to real democracy in a collective human environment favoring the best for all and leaving no one out.

You gotta problem with that?

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Frank Scott.

Bitcoin, invented during the financial crisis in 2008, is free from the central authority of governments and banks. In its 12 years of existence, the technology, with its unique feature of censorship resistance and permissionless use, has allowed people to store value securely and transact with one another freely in a way that is unprecedented in human history.

Born and raised on the internet, Bitcoin is stateless money that is now even considered to be the best candidate for the world reserve currency. Some see the significance of this innovation and its impact that goes beyond finance. Billionaire hedge fund manager Paul Tudor Jones, who became bullish on Bitcoin in 2020 remarked, “A bet on Bitcoin is a bet on human ingenuity”.

The issues that we are now facing, from poverty and climate change to conflicts among nations and human rights abuses are global, and cannot be resolved by any one country. In this article I will argue how Bitcoin is a gift for humanity that can help ordinary people around the world to work together collaboratively to meet those challenges, and is perfect money that can guide us into the next stage of our civilization.

Rejection of Nature’s God

The roots of the problems that now confront humanity have to do with our modern world’s loss of its connection to nature. We now have created a highly technological civilization and our way of life has become out of tune with the natural world.

Society’s separation from nature is traced back to the birth of the modern nation-state. The major events that broke civilization’s harmony with nature took place in the continent of North America when European settlers encountered Indigenous peoples. Back then, a true meeting of cultures did not occur. The possibility of creating a civilization through dialogue, by opening and integrating other perspectives did not happen.

Led by the God-ordained manifest destiny, European colonists crusaded toward the westward expansion. They destroyed the life of the indigenous people and their culture and they declared nature dead. Philosopher Jacob Needleman (2002) elucidated how in their conquest of the land, men who were influenced by Enlightenment ideas failed to understand the indigenous culture that “was resting on a different state of consciousness than does our modern civilization” (p.202), one that was more deeply connected to the earth.

This placed America in the trajectory of its development away from the original vision that lived in the land. At the time of the revolt against the British monarchy, Thomas Jefferson acknowledged in the Declaration of Independence that the separation of 13 colonies from Great Britain was entitled by “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God”. In their assault on nature, founders of the constitutional republic betrayed the ideals that inspired their own independence, and denied the source of legitimacy that granted them their sovereign existence.

American monotheism

In America, the New World, that promised to liberate people from the arbitrary power of the King, a force of monarchy – the political system based upon the rule of a single figure has quietly persisted. In establishing the US constitutional republic, there was recognition of the importance of the state’s ability to function independently, free from church’s influence. This was articulated by Jefferson’s concept of a “wall of separation” between church and state, and was placed in the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, as the premise of religious freedom that prohibits the government from either advancing or hindering religion.

Despite this safeguard against the creation of a church-state, the European colonists’ unconscious bias against the indigenous people’s way of life and a relationship to the land that was radically different from theirs, influenced the establishment of a predominant religion in America.

Jungian psychotherapist Rafael López-Pedraza (1990) noted how the Bible has become a basis of religious belief of Westerns and described its essence as “monotheism: the worship of one God, and the jealousy and wrath of that God if any other is worshipped” (p. 29). To the frame of mind shaped by Judeo-Christian tradition, Native American tribes’ animistic worldview that regards all things –animate and inanimate possessing a living spirit as an embodiment of the divine was considered primitive and inferior.

This European’s one-sided beliefs and attitudes, without having been carefully examined, formed a religion of American monotheism. The federal government worked to enforce this national religion by confining Native Americans to reservations, banning them from practicing their worship of nature, ceremonial dances, and rituals that were deeply woven into their everyday life. In the name of assimilation, their children were put in boarding schools and those First Nation people were made to adopt European cultural values including conversion into Christianity.

The doctrine of materialism

One god that has now occupied America denounces the supernatural world that underlies the natural world. It preaches the doctrine of materialism – a belief that only the things that can be perceived through external senses exist, and denies the reality beyond physical.

The republic, under monotheistic persuasion has charted a path of development that stands in opposition to nature and measures its progress through the advancement of physical comfort. In this, money became an instrument for the ruling elites to maintain their exclusive control over people’s choices of faith.

The US dollar that was declared as legal tender by government decree, with the symbol of the Eye of Providence watching over humanity began to circulate across the nation. Later, through the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913, private corporations took the power to create money away from the government.

Central banks have become the overlord to remake the world according to its own image. Economists, with the idea of unlimited growth and the concept of gross domestic product (GDP), began their evangelism to promote a materialistic view of the world.

The invention of GDP

The GDP was created as a common denominator to assess the health of the nation’s economy. It is defined as “the total monetary or market value of all the finished goods and services produced within a country’s borders in a specific time period.” This concept has transformed economics into empirical science.

Physician and activist Vandana Shiva spoke how the GDP was invented during the war as a part of the war machine, and was used by economists as a weapon to support war economy. She explained how the GDP which was called the “Manhattan Project” of economics, creates a very artificial production boundary that says “If you produce what you consume you don’t produce”.

Shiva noted how nature produces and consumes in an amazing cycle that sustains life, yet according to this arbitrary defined growth measure that excludes economic activities such as services and goods for personal consumption, this nature’s regeneration is treated as non-production.

The GDP as a key concept in economics was used to create a Pyramid Ponzi scheme that extracts from nature, turning it into lifeless objects to increase the material wealth of those on the top. It is a system of enslavement, in which people are deprived of their ability to produce for themselves and be self-reliant. Instead, they are made to depend on large corporations to deliver the goods and services that they need.

Creation of model citizen

This plunder economy has been accelerated by 21st century consumer capitalism. The state sponsored orthodoxy of materialism denied the internal life of man, making people find value and meaning outside of themselves. Through sales marketing with advertising and branding, big business found a way to create in people a desire for consumption, and manufacture a need for mass production.

Through Hollywood, celebrities became idols for people’s worship. With their glamour, they presented to the public the myth of American Dream that promises everyone equal opportunities to achieve a materially affluent lifestyle. One by one, people were lured into the market, and began to look for meaning through material acquisition.

This abstract concept of the GDP that now drives this consumer economy has been used to set a standard for a model citizen. Now the market sends a message; ‘the more one engages in mindless consumption, the more one contributes to the increase of the GDP and becomes virtuous’.

Guided by the invisible hand of this engineered market that incentivizes passivity and obedience, people were made to chase after products striving to become good citizens, to be accepted and be recognized as being valuable.

Petrodollar hegemony

While keeping people insulated in a bubble of consumer culture, the US government under the thumb of private corporations carried on their missionary work around the globe to advance the dominance of their single-minded faith. In 1933, the US abandoned the gold standard for domestic transactions. Then, through the Bretton Woods Agreement in 1944, the dollar was accepted as the international currency for most trade.

What appeared to be the final victory of supremacy of matter over nature came in 1971 when President Nixon severed the final link between the dollar and gold, by ending international convertibility of the dollar to gold. All those developments led to the creation of the petrodollar, a hegemony of one currency backed up by the military, which was acknowledged by Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman’s telling comment that US fiat currency is “backed by men with guns”.

The all-seeing eye of the godhead that floats at the top of the currency index has a limited vision. It can only see a mechanistic view of the future, and aims to create a world of machines that enslave humanity. In its own self-righteous American exceptionalism, one nation under a single god acts as if it is the absolute moral authority of the world.

Crisis of the Western view of the world

With an abstract sense of moralism that creates a duality of evil and good, the US empire projects external enemies. By creating the axis of evil with lies of weapons of mass destruction, the nation with the most powerful military power spreads fear and hatred, keeping the world under a perpetual state of war.

With an edict of “You’re either with us or against us”, the superpower state divides the world, coercing all to accept the doctrine of War on Terror. They demonize countries that challenge their petrodollar moral superiority and ostracize them from the international community, subjecting them to sanctions and military invasion.

In ways other than outright violence, this tyrannical god weaponizes finance against innocent people. Calling it “Jihadi of banking”, Max Keiser, a host of a popular show that reports on finance explained how the heads of central banks commit fraud and blow up the economy. He described that they are trained in madrasa of Ivy League schools, and they misinterpret Adam Smith and use it instead of the Koran as a religious pretext to commit “financial terrorism”. They lower interest rates for investors, allowing large companies to take away jobs and people’s livelihood, and destroy the whole economy.

As the expansion of West’s single vision of the world became destructive, its extractive war economy now meets the earth’s finite reality. As the end game for their money printing nears and world leaders frantically try to reset the system to bail out their god, Bitcoin has begun to shine a light on a new path where the materialistically driven civilization reaches its limit.

Separation of money and state

The invention of Bitcoin made the separation of money and state for the first time possible in history. This ended the oligarchy’s monopoly of faith that denied people an access to a true nature of reality, and freed people from the moral insanity that has turned the world upside down.

This breakthrough in computer science revived Nature’s God that has been made to disappear from our society. Bitcoin is money backed by nature. While fiat money is debt-based and subject to printing at will through ‘fractional reserve lending’, Bitcoin is a new asset class and as a digital gold, it has intrinsic value derived from energy that is required for computational work, in a way no different than the energy used to dig gold from the ground.

Unlike the US dollar that infinitely expands through the money printing press, Bitcoin with its fixed monetary supply of 21 M has a built-in scarcity being tied to real resources. In the article “Bitcoin and thermodynamics”, author Kunt Svanholm described Bitcoin as a battery, one that was the best ever invented. He noted how Bitcoin “offers a way of converting energy into a small part of a specific number”. He describes it like a kind of “mathematical battery” and how it converts electricity into digital scarcity”, which “then can be programmed to express value”.

The world’s truly free market

At the heart of creation of this mathematical battery is Bitcoin mining. It is a broadcast math competition engaged by a network of computers (called miners) around the world with clear rules including the total number of bitcoin created and a predictable issuance rate. In a decentralized network where rules are applied to everyone equally, miners use their precious resources (harnessing computational power) to engage in Proof of Work- a process of solving difficult mathematical problems.

With economic incentives that align everyone’s self interest and make the rewards for playing by the rules higher than the value of attacking the network, it incentivizes all to act honestly and follow the rules of consensus. Every 10 minutes, a math problem is solved and whoever solves the problem first wins a fixed number of bitcoins. This process creates bitcoin, clears transactions, and most importantly provides the security of a system.

The creator of Bitcoin known by the pseudonymous name Satoshi Nakamoto used bitcoin as a token of value and with a combination of cryptographic hash functions and game theory created the world’s first truly free market. While economists with their modern monetary policy insulated the market from any feedback, Bitcoin regulates itself algorithmically and enables organic price discovery.

The market adjusts mining difficulty according to demand with a tight feedback loop that resets every 2 weeks. It is programmed to regulate and maintain the rate of bitcoin creation, and corresponds more naturally with the demand and supply of the market, creating efficiency in the market. This brings an alternative to the existing model of economy based on the idea of infinite growth that creates a destructive cycle of endless consumption.

Nature’s economic standard

Bitcoin introduces a new economic standard that is different from a gold standard or any other economic models that came before. Mathematics that is enlivened through imagination reunites matter that has fallen from its original source.

With Bitcoin, money becomes energy. At the kernel of Bitcoin capital is the production of the mathematical battery. It is based on non-material consumption in the form of energy and this process is facilitated by nature’s act of giving.

Nature provides abundantly. With her selfless love, she both produces and consumes to regenerate energies. Bitcoin invites us to participate in an economy in a manner such that we all live up to this nature’s standard of altruism.

The genesis of Bitcoin was Satoshi’s generous act of releasing the open source protocol online and making it freely available to anyone in the world. In responding to this act of altruism developers around the world brought their skills and intelligence to work on Bitcoin. Miners began contributing their precious resources to build a network.

This creates a new model of economy based on reciprocity, in which everyone makes a contribution to the network through voluntarily sharing his or her labor, time and resources and mutually benefit from each other’s gifts.

Individual sovereignty

Bitcoin, with its new economic standard, now frees us from the orthodoxy of materialistic economics and its scientific dogma of infinite growth that keeps people as passive consumers in the global debt Ponzi scheme. Globalization has created a race to the bottom where transnational corporations that do not have allegiance to any nations have abandoned workers, by shipping jobs and manufacturing bases overseas, and lowering costs with cheap labor to maximize their own profit.

As people become indentured servants being exploited in corporate feudalism, Bitcoin restores the sovereignty of people and nations, allowing them to claim their power to actively engage in economy on their terms. The ecosystem fueling innovation and entrepreneurship has created opportunities for people to exit from this autocratic fiat control system that keeps them in slavery and steals from their labor. Many are able to walk away from 9-5 jobs and start up their own businesses to create values and share with one another through trade.

Now, through a network of free and sovereign individuals around the world, Nature’s God begins to reveal itself as the supreme judge of the world. New economic activities that are emerging around this technology are creating a currency of revolt like a Tsunami against a warmongering god, whose legitimacy is backed by violence.

The “survival of the fittest” brutal mining market, channeling energies that have been funneled into weapons manufacturers, begins to defund the Pentagon and move a global society into building peace. From Iran to Kazakhstan and Russia, nation-states have now joined the Bitcoin mining race, accelerating the non-violent destruction of the military industrial complex. The hash power generated largely by renewable energies, being subordinated to the laws of thermodynamics began to secure sanctity of life for all beings.

Perfect money for humanity

Founders of nation-state treaded the path of developing a civilization that was divorced from nature. Modern man has become estranged from the world that birthed him. But this separation was necessary. The act of rebellion against Nature’s God was the right entitled by Laws of Nature, granted to everyone in order for each of us to become independent and free.

Now, through Bitcoin’s computer programming language, nature that has become silent begins to speak again. Each 10 minutes, through distributing accountability across the network, the heart of Bitcoin performs checks and balances of power keeping a harmony among all living beings.

The Internet of Money transcending borders protects people of all nations from resource wars, exploitation and dictatorship. Bitcoin surrounding us everywhere 24/7 can guard us against hyperinflation, theft and wealth confiscation, helping us steward this precious planet for the Seven Generations to come.

For so long, we have tried to compete and outsmart nature. Now, the pristine protocol of Bitcoin calls us to become a co-creator with Mother Nature and invest in her wisdom to engineer a new civilization. As the old fiat world begins to collapse, Bitcoin now provides a superior form of money that is secure, censorship-resistant, and self-sustaining. It is perfect money for humanity, for we are a part of the divine nature and that we are all Bitcoin.

This article was posted on Monday, March 15th, 2021 at 1:06pm and is filed under Bitcoin, Currency, Economy/Economics, Free Market.

The ruling elite have repeatedly shown their inability to tackle any serious problems effectively. They are at a loss for how to deal with current problems and refuse to consider any alternative to their obsolete economic system. The best they can do is recycle old ideas to maintain their class power and privilege. Their efforts to block the New focus mainly on promoting disinformation about “new and better forms of capitalism,” including oxymorons like “inclusive capitalism,” “responsible capitalism,” and “ethical capitalism.”

Since the outbreak of the “COVID Pandemic” in March 2020 every week has been a roller coaster for humanity. The economy and society keep lurching from one crisis to another while incoherence and stress keep amplifying. It is said that 1 in 6 Americans went into therapy for the first time in 2020.

Unemployment, under-employment, inequality, mental depression, anxiety, suicide, environmental decay, inflation, debt, health care costs, education, and poverty are worsening everywhere. Thousands of businesses that have been around for years keep disappearing left and right.

Top-down actions in response to the “COVID Pandemic” have made so many things worse for so many people. Many are wondering which is worse: the covid-19 virus or the top-down response to the pandemic. Governments everywhere have steadfastly refused to mobilize the people to solve the many problems that are worsening. The moral climate is low and more people are worried about the future.

An atmosphere has been created whereby people are supposed to feel like the exhausting “COVID Pandemic” will last forever and we can all forget about getting back to any normal healthy non-digital relations, activities, and interactions. No society in history has worn face masks for an entire year. We are told over and over again that there is no returning to anything called “normal.” Moving everything online and repeatedly asserting that this is great, “cool,” and wonderful is proving to be unsatisfactory and unfulfilling. People want and need real, direct, non-digital connections and interactions with other human beings. Life behind a screen is not life.

Even with all the restrictions and shutdowns the virus, according to the mainstream media, continues to wreak havoc at home and abroad. It is almost like none of the severe restrictions on people’s freedoms made any difference. People have had to endure this humiliation while also not being permitted any role in deciding the aim, operation, and direction of the economy or any of the affairs of society; they are left out of the equation every step of the way and not even asked for superficial “input” that always goes unheeded anyway. Existing governance arrangements are simply not working to empower people or affirm their rights. The people’s interests and will are blocked at every turn by an outdated political setup that advances only the narrow interests of the rich.

Despite intense pressure to blindly rely on the rich and their political representatives to “figure things out,” this is not working. Nor does it help that the mainstream media approaches multiple crises and issues with endless double-talk, disconnected facts, catchy sound-bites, dramatic exaggerations, angry voices, political axe-grinding, and lots of confusion. Coherence and a human-centered outlook are avoided at all costs. People are constantly left disoriented. Jumping arbitrarily and rapidly from one thing to another in the most unconscious way is presented as useful analysis and information. This is why sorting out basic information has become a full-time job for everyone. People are understandably worn-out and overwhelmed. Disinformation overload degrades mental, emotional, and physical health.

The world has become an uglier and gloomier place—all in the name of “improving health.” It is no surprise that a recent Gallup Poll shows that the majority of Americans are extremely dissatisfied with government, the economy, the culture, and the moral climate.

In this hazardous unstable context, there are two ever-present key pieces of disinformation operating side by side. Both are designed to deprive working people of any say, initiative, outlook, or power.

First there is the “once everyone is vaccinated things will be much better” disinformation. This ignores the fact that capitalist crises have endogenous causes not exogenous causes and that the economic crisis started well before the “COVID Pandemic.” More than 150 years of recessions, depressions, booms, busts, instability, chaos, and anarchy have not been caused by external phenomena like bacteria, germs, and viruses but by the internal logic and operation of capital itself. A so-called “free market” economy by its very nature and logic ensures “winners” and “losers,” “booms” and “busts.” It is called a “dog-eat-dog” fend-for-yourself competitive world for a reason. The modern idea that humans are born to society and have rights by virtue of their being is alien to “free market” ideology.

Despite the fact that millions have been vaccinated at home and abroad, poverty, inequality, unemployment, debt, and other problems continue to worsen. Businesses continue to suffer and disappear. Hospitality, leisure, recreation, and other sectors have been decimated in many countries. Air travel is dramatically lower. So are car sales. It is not enough to say, “Yes, the next few months will be rough and lousy economically speaking but we will get there with more vaccinations. Just be patient, it will all eventually work out.” This is not what is actually unfolding. The all-sided crisis we find ourselves in started before the “COVID Pandemic” and continues unabated. Such a view also makes a mockery of economic science and the people’s desire to decide the affairs of society and establish much better arrangements that exclude narrow private interests and do not rely on police powers.

In the coming months millions more will be vaccinated but economic decline and decay will continue. Both the rate and amount of profit have been falling for years. And owners of capital are not going to invest in anything when there is no profit to be had and when it is easier instead to balloon fictitious capital and pretend everything is a stock market video game. The lack of vaccinations did not cause the economic collapse the word is currently suffering through, nor will more vaccinations reverse economic decline and decay. The “COVID Pandemic” has largely made some people vastly richer and millions more much poorer. The “COVID Pandemic” has significantly increased inequality. Unfortunately, the so-called “Great Reset” agenda of the World Economic Forum and Pope Francis’s recent call for a “Copernican Revolution” in the economy will make things worse for millions more because they will perpetuate the existing moribund economic system. Such agendas are designed to fool the gullible, block working class consciousness and action, and keep the initiative in the hands of the global oligarchy.

The same applies to so-called “stimulus packages.” Various versions of these top-down monetary and fiscal programs have been launched in different countries, and while they have assuaged some problems for people, they have not been adequate or fixed any underlying problems. They have not prevented poverty or mass unemployment. Economies remain mired in crisis. In most cases “stimulus packages” have made things worse by increasing the amount of debt that many generations will have to repay. This is in addition to the many other forms of debt Americans suffer from and rent payments that will one day have to be paid.

Many are also wondering why trillions of dollars can be printed and instantly turned over to the banks and corporations with no discussion but the same cannot be done for social programs, public enterprises, and the people. Why, for example, can all not get free healthcare or have taxes eliminated? Why can’t various forms of personal debt be wiped out instantly? If the government can print money for “them” why can’t they print money for “us”? Who is government supposed to serve? Billionaires?

Nether the CARES Act of 2020 nor the stimulus package passed in December 2020 nor the one President Biden is pushing for in March 2021 will be adequate or solve any major problems. Many felt that the $600 stimulus checks that went out in December 2020 were pathetic and insulting.

The problem lies with a socialized productive economy run by everyone but owned and controlled by a tiny handful of competing private interests determined to maximize profit as fast as possible regardless of the damage to the social and natural environment. There is no way for the economy to benefit all individuals and serve the general interests of society so long as it is dominated by a handful of billionaires. The social wealth produced by workers cannot benefit workers and the society if workers themselves do not control the wealth they produce and have first claim to.

The outlook, agenda, and reference points of the rich must be rejected and replaced by a human-centered aim, agenda, direction, and outlook. The current trajectory is untenable and unsustainable. The situation is dangerous in many ways, but perhaps one good thing to come out of the accelerated pace of chaos, anarchy, and instability are the contradictions that are presenting new opportunities for action with analysis that favors working people.

This article was posted on Sunday, February 14th, 2021 at 8:28pm and is filed under Capitalism, COVID-19, Debt, Economic Inequality, Economy/Economics, Environment, Evictions, Fearmongering, Federal Reserve, Free Market, Health/Medical, Masks, Media, Mental Health, Neoliberalism, Pandemics, Propaganda, Rent/rent strikes, Ruling Elite, Surveillance, Unemployment, Vaccines, Working Class, World Economic Forum (WEF), World Health Organization (WHO).

Privately-operated charter schools have always over-promised and under-delivered on accountability. This is closely related to why fraud and corruption remain entrenched in the charter school sector. The worn-out assertion that charter schools will deliver “results” and be accountable in exchange for autonomy and independence has always been a pretext to privatize education and fool the gullible. It has nothing to do with improving schools. The closing of several thousand charter schools over the years shows that charter schools are not a worthwhile “innovative experiment” or a “better alternative” to public schools. So much for “results-based accountability in education.”

As “free market” schools charter schools operate according to market accountability, which really means no accountability. Market accountability is a way to dodge public oversight and do as you please. The “free market” mainly delivers chaos, anarchy, and instability and allows many “bad actors” to stay in business. Market accountability also means treating parents and students as consumers, not as humans with a right to education that must be provided with a guarantee in practice. None of this is a modern, responsible, human-centered way of doing things.

The recent appointment of Karega Rausch as the new president and CEO of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA) will not result in any improved accountability for non-profit and for-profit charter schools, no matter how much fanfare surrounds his appointment. The former long-time president of NACSA, Greg Richmond, was well aware of the absence of meaningful accountability in the crisis-prone charter school sector. He made many direct and indirect references to this stubborn problem in different statements, press releases, and reports.

Karega has been a long-time promoter of deregulated charter schools and has worked in a range of organizations and settings funded by billionaires that advocate school privatization and the elimination of the public interest. Experience, facts, theory, analysis, and logic show that there is no reason to believe that charter school accountability will improve in 2021, with or without Karega. Without a change in the aim, direction, and outlook of education, society, and the economy things will actually go from bad to worse. Rosy words, grand promises, and repeating the word “innovation” 50 times a day will not change this.

The fact that charter school accountability bills drafted by legislators in many states over the years have usually gone nowhere is a testament to the power of the rich and their representatives to wreck the public sphere and promote school privatization with impunity. The rich are vigorously opposed to anything that hinders profit maximization and use every means at their disposal to restrict public right.

Moving forward, the rich are more determined than ever to privatize more schools as a way to avert the falling rate of profit under capitalism. This will further reduce transparency and accountability.

No one should be fooled by lofty phrases that promise all kinds of things that never materialize. Social consciousness must rise to a level that overcomes disinformation and unleashes the human factor to bring about change that favors the people. Old ideas, words, platitudes, practices, and institutions no longer work; they just contribute to going from bad to worse and leaving people frustrated, overwhelmed, and disempowered. Pressuring and begging politicians to serve the public interest is not going to suddenly start working in 2021. The existing political arrangements stand discredited and cannot provide a path forward. How many times has begging politicians and “leaders” left people feeling humiliated, exhausted, and with no meaningful solutions? Why keep doing the same ineffective thing over and over again? Why not learn from this experience and draw the warranted conclusions?

A new way of thinking and acting is the necessity of the times. This includes relying on and organizing ourselves and speaking up in our own name. It means paying attention to our own organizational, political, and ideological needs instead of relying on others to serve our interests. In this sense, accountability begins at home.

Workers, students, youth, and women must step up resistance to all aspects of the neoliberal antisocial offensive and strengthen action with analysis. They must establish their own reference points and abandon the reference points imposed on them by the rich and their political and media representatives. The retrogressive vision and agenda of the rich must be replaced by a vision and agenda that advances the public interest.

More privatization and marketization of education means less accountability.

This article was posted on Thursday, January 7th, 2021 at 1:00am and is filed under Charter Schools, Education, Free Market.

Orientation

When I first considered myself a socialist revolutionary in 1970, I was hounded by free marketers’ challenge: “name me one country where socialism works”. These market fundamentalists would then hold up the most strident expectations for socialism:

• Everyone is exactly equal with no classes.
• There is an abundance of goods which are conveniently circulated.
• Political rule is not dictatorial.
• All competition is banished.
• There are no capitalist markets.
• People are working together, collectively and creatively.
• The state has withered away.
• Anything less than this was proof that it didn’t work.

Without really understanding how difficult it is to create any of these conditions when surrounded by a sea of capitalist sharks, I was at first intimidated. I was driven away from examining Russia, China and Cuba because they were “authoritarian”. Without realizing it, I had accepted that more than one political candidate was the ultimate measuring rod. I didn’t know how high the literacy rate was in socialist countries, that they had health care systems that were affordable or free, low-cost housing, free education, and there was little or no unemployment. What mattered was there was a single party rule. I was intimidated by that argument, without knowing that for the people in those countries having two parties to vote for instead of one was not their priority. As first an anarchist and then a council communist, I then would refer to the workers’ councils that existed during the Paris Commune, the Russian Revolution, the Spanish Revolution and say, “here you are, that works”. While I was right that workers’ councils were a stunning achievement, the rebuttal would be “why didn’t they last?” At 20 years old I didn’t really have an answer for this.

Ten years later things got really bad when capitalism seemed to be restored in China in the 1980s and when the Soviet Union fell apart ten years later.  Now I would hear: “the Cold War is over, capitalism has won.” Writers like Francis Fukuyama would announce this in his book End of History and Samuel Huntington would crow about the glories of the West.

Six varieties of socialism

There are at least six socialist tendencies on the left. Moving from right to left, the first school is social democracy, typified by the SPD in Germany in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; the Socialist Party of Debs in Yankeedom at the turn of the 20th century and then the Social Democratic Labor Party in power in Sweden from the 1930s to the 1970s. There are three varieties of Leninism – Trotskyism and Stalinism, typified by Russia and Cuba, and Maoism, mostly prevalent in China from 1949-1976. Then there are small grouplets of council communists who were prevalent during the Russian and Spanish revolutions and among the Dutch and Germans.  Lastly, anarchism was prevalent during the Russian and Spanish revolutions and in Rojava today. The criticism that capitalists usually make of socialism is really only of the Stalinist or Maoist version. They are also the only types of socialism that ever succeeded in defeating the bourgeoisie—at least for a while, and built powerful and in many regards extraordinary nations.

Adam Smith’s Criteria for a well-functioning capitalist society.

Well, it has been 30 years since the “fall of communism”. Thirty years in which capitalists could show the world why Margaret Thatcher was right when she said, “There is no alternative (TINA)”. No more communist menaces to gum up the free market. What do we have? What do capitalists have to show the world after their so-called victory?

Adam Smith —in his time seen, like many of his peers, as a “moral philosopher” trying to discover the “maximum social good”—is considered by capitalists to be their founding father. His criteria for a highly functioning capitalist society is a high standard of living, not just for the elites but for the middle classes, the working classes and gradually the poor; a decrease in the amount of work done because of high technology; opportunities for anyone to start a small business who wants to; and a relatively stable economic life. No reason for wars because the invisible hand of the market would benefit all countries and make fighting over resources a thing of the past.

The purpose of this article is to assess what capitalism has done. The books I’ll be referring to are Introduction to Political Economy by Zachary, Schneider and Knoedler; David Harvey’s The Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism; Michael Roberts The Long Depression; Michael Parenti’s Blackshirts and Reds and Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine.

Capitalism: Twenty-five Myths and Reality

Capitalism has always existed

One of the first things you will be told about capitalism is that it has always existed. This is claimed by Adam Smith as well as the neoclassical economists. This is hardly the case for the entire school of Marxists and economic institutionalists who will tell you that capitalism is roughly 500 years old. In addition, no anthropologist will agree that tribal societies or even agricultural civilizations like Egypt, Mesopotamia, China or India had purely capitalist economic exchanges within their societies. Even external trade cannot be characterized as capitalist. The merchants in these civilizations were given lists of goods to buy by temple administrators. They did not “truck, barter and exchange” independently of the ruling elite.

Capitalism commences when hardworking, thrifty, shrewd capitalists take risks

Smith claims that capitalism starts when frugal, hard-working, shrewd traders identify a need and invest capital in land, goods or services. In the best of all possible worlds, the product sells and the budding capitalist makes a profit. This capitalist has to compete with other traders and the results of this competition are better products for everyone. Smith called this process “the invisible hand” of the market. Today Smith might be surprised to find out that the wealth capitalists possessed was less the result of personal ingenuity but more based on inheritance. Last time I checked, about 2/3 of capitalist got their wealth from the inheritance they received.

Marxists and post-Keynesians contest that the origin of capitalism begins with trade. Marx argued that capitalism begins with what he called “the primitive accumulation of capital” when peasants are thrown off the land (to create enclosures) and their tools and animals are taken away from them. The capitalist uses the land for commercial farming, growing coffee, sugar, cotton and tobacco which are tended by slaves. Meanwhile, former peasants are driven to work in cities and eventually in factories the capitalists built in the 19^th century. Michael Perelman in his book The Invention of Capitalism describes how Smith papered over the primitive accumulation process.

Specialization of labor is justified because it produces a high volume of cheap projects

Adam Smith was sensitive to the cost the specialization of labor might have on the body and mind of the worker that resulted in alienation on the job. Despite that, he felt that the volume of goods that would result from specialization was worth that cost. If capitalists today wished to have a stable, satisfied work-force they would pay attention to what factory work does to workers. The most obvious effect of aliening conditions on workers is that as a class, working-class men die on the average at about 67-72 years of age, which is at least seven years earlier than middle-class men and women. That’s seven years of lost labor and the training of labor for capitalists.

Workers are lazy and need a carrot to motivate them

Capitalists imagine that people are generally stupid, unmotivated and shortsighted and it is only the few, heroic, risk-taking capitalists who show creativity and ingenuity. But capitalists take how workers behave in their leisure time, after they are exhausted from 50 hours a week (or more) of work, as their point of departure. These workers do want to cool-out, sleep, watch a ballgame or get drunk. But capitalists pay no attention to the fact that workers will work on their cars, build engines and create all kinds of crafts with their free time without being paid at all. Capitalists also ignore the fact that in cases when workers have control of what, how and when they produce – as in worker self-management or worker cooperative experiments – they have higher rates of productivity than they do when working for a capitalist.

Competition between capitalists leads to better products and lower costs

Adam Smith believed that the fruits of competitive capitalism would lead to lower prices for consumers. This is not what has happened.  Competition between capitalists leads to a concentration of capital in a few corporations and the elimination of smaller capitalists. As Marxists Baran and Sweezy point out, corporate capitalists agree not to engage in cut-throat competition and the prices of commodities are pretty much the same. Corporations compete through advertising, not on the prices themselves.

The state is minimally necessary in the orchestration of capitalism

State intervention was extremely important in helping to get the United States out of the depression through the New Deal programs. Furthermore, today the lack of state intervention is directly connected to the amplification and spreading of COVID-19 because there has been no national plan developed at the federal level. Additionally, their professed but rarely implemented ideology of patriotism notwithstanding, capitalists are globalists, and they need the state to intervene in the process of both subordinating workers in colonized countries and attacking and overthrowing governments who do not want to hand over all their natural resources to foreign corporations. Capitalists require a visible fist to work hand and glove with the invisible hand.

The abundance of goods and services is what justifies capitalist profits

In Adam Smith’s time, making a profit on material [consumer] goods was the only way to make a profit. However, after World War II, capitalists realized that there were great profits to be made on war industries – and that it was far less risky. In addition, with the rise of the banks in the 20^th century, it was profitable to make money based on the speculation of stock and bonds. This means that today capitalists are far more interested in making a profit in defense of spending and stock-market speculation than investing in commodities or building infrastructures. The fickle moods of the spending public are too dangerous to invest in on their own. So too, profits made on infrastructure is too slow a turn-around time to wait for. This is the reason Yankeedom has trillions of dollars of infrastructural work that sits waiting. One problem for capitalists is that profits made on the military destroy productive forces and the wealth made on paper transactions produces no social wealth. Yet both are counted as profits along with the real wealth based on selling goods and services. The result is a society whose profit claims are wildly exaggerated if wealth is judged the way Adam Smith thought best.

 The wealth of capitalists will have a trickle-down effect on workers

Roughly 50 years ago, Yankeedom was rated around fifth in the world in the steepness of its stratification system. Today it is number one. The standard of living for the average working-class person today is nowhere near what it was in 1970. The average work-week is at minimum 10 hours longer. One of the clearest indicators of the decline in the standard of living is the amount of debt working-class people have been accumulating over the past 50 years. This is because their wages or salaries cannot keep up with the cost of living.

Capitalism works for all social classes

Capitalism has never worked for people in poverty, which over the last 70 years has fluctuated between 10% and 20%. Capitalism (in America and then gradually in Western Europe) has worked for white working-class people within a window of time between 1948-1970. [That was an anomaly caused by the devastation of industrial capacity and financial ruin in most nations during WW2 which made the US the world’s chief center of production for consumer and capital goods).  Since then, it has ceased to benefit white working-class people. Since the crash of 2008, political economist Richard Wolff has said that those who have benefited from capitalism are the upper middle class (10%), the upper class (5%), and the ruling class (1%). Actually, the actual ruling class is far more concentrated than 1% of the population, an arbitrary figure chosen by the Occupy Wall Street activists for the sake of expedient propaganda. A more realistic estimate is between 0.2 and 0.01% of the total population. As of today, capitalism works for less than 20% of the population.

Capitalism shrinks racial tensions because it doesn’t pay to exclude skilled workers

This is the argument made by neo-classical economist Gary Becker. Judging from the behavior of Trump followers, the militarization of the police and the number of racial minorities killed by the police or in prison, race relations have gotten worse than they were 60 years ago. Far from refining their work skills to compete with white prison workers, minorities work for slave wages. The lack of class mobility for working- class whites and minorities has inflamed race relations as many working-class whites have blamed minorities (including “illegal” immigrants) for a decline in their standard of living. A far better explanation for inflamed race relations is that capitalists benefit from racial competition for jobs, by a divide-and-conquer strategy:

• By paying white workers a little more; and,
  
• By keeping a pool of unemployed minorities available to work in order to keep wages low and undermine strikes by white working-class workers. This is part of the “army of the unemployed” mentioned in Marxist literature, never quite eliminated by the capitalists since it acts as a wage depressant and facilitates working class docility. 

There are no significant capitalist downturns, it’s just the oscillation of business cycles

Michael Roberts in his book The Long Depression, names four major global capitalist crises: the long depression of the 1870s; the Great Depression of the 1930s; the Great Recession of the 1970s and the Great Financial crisis of 2007 – which we are still in. For Roberts, when there is a recovery, it is not truly a recovery in that it returns us to previous levels. It starts at a lower level. The concept of “business cycles” is a flat denial of long-term irreversible capitalist crisis.

Economics can be best understood by separating it from politics

Neoclassical economics, unlike Adam Smith, imagine that economic exchanges can be understood as separate from politics. This completely ignores all the money capitalists invest in controlling their political parties. William Domhoff in his book Who Rules America and the Powers that Be researched all the mediating institutions that influence both the Republican and Democratic parties long before the population actually votes. These mediating organizations include universities, foundations, think tanks, policy campaigns, news dissemination, book publications and lobbyists. Capitalists absolutely need to be in control of politics in order to control the state’s domestic and foreign policies.

The invisible hand: the pursuit of individual self-interest leads to economic order

The Yankee population satisfies their self-interest by driving their big cars and paying their taxes to a military that is the world’s greatest polluter. The collective result is extreme weather and fires. Another example is that some people find it convenient to not wear masks during the pandemic while others do wear them. Each produces what seems to be in their short-term self-interest, but the result is an expansion of the virus, the loss of work and the shutting down of small businesses. The invisible hand in the present leads to a long-term collective disaster.

People have unlimited individual wants and needs and the market scurries to satisfy them all. The consumer is king.

If this were true, there would be no need for advertising. Through advertising wants are artificially created and then are turned into perceived “needs”. Many actual wants are neglected if the rate of profit on them is too low. Planned obsolescence makes sure that products don’t last too long.

Economics is a science

If neoclassical economics were a science, it would have an agreed-upon explanation for the causes of previous depressions and it would predict what is likely to happen in the future. Mainstream economics is propaganda for a particular school of economics – neoclassical economics. The use of mathematical formulas does not make neoclassical economics a science. It only obscures all the myths we have been challenging.

The size of the income is directly proportional to contributions to production and choosing work over leisure

Income is hardly proportional to contributions to production. In the case of doctors, architects or lawyers this may be true. Conversely, there are jobs that are highly dangerous that have low compensation. Working class exposure to hazardous waste is an example. On the other hand, the salaries of those in the insurance industry, real estate, and finance is completely disproportionate to the goods and services they actually produce.

Poverty and unemployment are linked to bad individual choices between leisure and work

Unemployment is a necessary part of the capitalist system. An unemployed army of workers is necessary to keep workers from working together and joining unions to raise wages and better their working conditions. Many workers are in poverty, not because they “choose” to stay home, watch tv and play poker. The “choice” of workers is between working at various kinds of low wage job or starving.

Causes of downturns are “externalities”: bad crops, bad weather

Neoclassical economists deny that there are any built-in problems intrinsic to the capitalist economy. It is claimed that “externalities” such as bad weather or crop failure can be overcome by changes in monetary policy. But in this “externalities” claim neoclassical economists are in the vast minority. Marxians, post-Keynesians and Keynesians all agree that downturns are internal to the capitalist system. Keynes said downturns are due to inadequate spending by capitalists on infrastructure and wages. Wages are too low for workers to buy products off the shelf.  Institutionalists like Thorstein Veblen would say the problem is in the gap between industrial wealth and pecuniary wealth (conspicuous consumption). Michael Hudson would say that crises are due to the accumulating bubble between finance and industrial capital. Marxians like Michael Roberts and Anwar Shaikh say crisis is due to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.

International Sphere (Modernization Theory)

Capitalism appeals to rationality and is the opposite of fascism

As it turns out, there is an invisible fist of fascism behind the invisible hand. Apologists of capitalism treat fascism as having nothing to do with capitalism. They would say it was just a spontaneous irruption of irrationality as a result of the existence of conflicts within “mass society”. In fact, capitalists have been very friendly to fascists both before and after World War II and continue to be so today. Franz Neumann has argued that fascism is a product of monopoly, finance capital. Fascism provides a simplistic outlet for some working-class whites and large numbers of small business owners who are being crushed by large corporations. The outlet is to blame religious or racial minorities for their problems rather than capitalists.

Michael Parenti tells us that in Germany the greatest source of Hitter’s wealth was a secret slush fund to which the leading German industrialists regularly contributed. Fascism in Germany was favorably looked on in Yankeedom. Henry Ford traveled to Rome to pay homage to and strike economic deals with Mussolini. Mussolini was hailed by the press in Yankeedom throughout the 1920s and 1930s including Fortune Magazine, the Wall Street journal, the Saturday Evening Post, the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune and the Christian Science Monitor. They hailed Mussolini as the bearer of order to Italy. Newspaper giant William Randolph Heart instructed his correspondents in Germany to only file positive reports about Hitler’s regime. They even opened their columns to the occasional writings of major Nazi leaders like Alfred Rosenberg and Hermann Goring. During the early war years, western capitalist states were still cooperating with fascism. English prime minister Chamberlain was on very good terms with Hitler and like many members of the ruling class saw fascism as a defense against communism.

The Rockefellers’ Chase Manhattan Bank used its Paris office in France to launder German money to facilitate Nazi trade during the war. Corporations like DuPont, Ford, General Motors and ITT owned factories in enemy territories that produced fuel, tanks and planes. Pilots were given instruction not to hit factories that were owned by US firms including those that produced military equipment for the Nazis. See Charles Higham’s Trading With the Enemy for more.

Within a year after the war, almost all Italian fascists were released from prison while the communists who fought the fascists languished in prison. According to Parenti, “under the protection of the Yankee occupation authorities, the police, the courts, military, security agencies and bureaucracy remained largely staffed by those who had served the former fascists regimes.” After World War II, the United States brought the top military and scientists from fascist Germany to the United States to work for them. See Martin Lee’s The Beast Reawakens for more on this. Between 1945-1975 the Yankee rulers helped to keep fascism afloat in Italy, suppling roughly $75 million to right-wing organizations in Italy.

The modernization process is inevitably good for all societies

Modernization theory divided modern societies into western Europe and the United States and the rest were “traditional societies”. Fascist and communist societies were excluded from the category of modernization. Traditional societies (tribal and agricultural societies) were seen as economically and technologically backward, superstitious and driven by irrational customs. Modernization theorists believe modernization would improve traditional societies. In fact, modernization is relatively good for Western Europe and the United States core. Modernization theory ignores the fact that an increasing number of traditional societies have been colonized and this is the reason for their lack of material resources. Andre Gunder Frank’s book The Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America demonstrates this.

Nation-states are autonomous from each other and whether their country is wealthy or poor depends on the economic policies of that country

Capitalism is a global system that is far more powerful than any individual nation-state. Capitalism constantly needs new markets and imperialistically exploits countries on the periphery in the core states’ quest for cheap land, natural resources and labor. Nation-states are interdependent.

Western societies have created a model for modernization because of something inherent to them

There is nothing in the inherent make-up of western societies that makes them more suitable to modernization. It is true that western societies developed capitalism first because their adequate rainfall and mountainous terrain made it unnecessary to develop a unitary empire based on centralized irrigation system. Merchants were not beholden to emperors or kings as in the great agricultural civilizations. But that was happenstance and had nothing to do with any immanent “European miracle”.

Western European societies developed capitalism without any pressure or colonization from other parts of the world. Countries outside of Western Europe that are striving to modernize have to overcome their history of colonization by western societies. Furthermore, it is difficult to develop a scientific and engineering base. Many of these colonized nations are in debt and beholden to the IMF and World Bank for loans. These banks do not want colonized countries to develop an independent scientific base because those scientists and engineers might develop a resource base that is separate and might make obsolete the resource bases of the west.

Economic history and cross-cultural economics are not very important

Since neoclassical economists like to think that capitalism has always existed, they tend to play down the history of European economic systems. They also are not very aware of the comparative economic systems of tribal societies or agricultural states. Both the study of history and other cultures from around the world give a relativity to the current capitalist system that works against its propaganda.

International trade benefits all nations: theory of comparative advantage

In her book The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein identifies “the Chicago Boys” (meaning the followers of Milton Friedman) as initiating the economics of Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, Poland, Russia, South Africa and Iraq for the glories of market fundamentalism. Was the result what Adam Smith would have expected? Hardly. These economies had their social safety nets decimated, conditions for workers resulted in insecure jobs, lower income, longer hours and growing debt to the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund. They were given loans for the support of the tourist industry, growing of cash crops rather than for subsistence or taking care to develop industries that were most efficient in developing the natural resources of their own country.

History has proven that capitalism works and socialism is a failure

This assessment is purely propaganda. When a neoclassical economist picks a capitalist society it picks the most favorable example, such as the United States in the 1960s or Germany in the 1990s. It fails to acknowledge that since most of the world is capitalist, this includes authoritarian capitalist dictatorships that exist in many parts of the world, especially the so-called “capitalist periphery”, places such as Indonesia ruled by military tyrants and oligarchic cliques beholden to foreign interests. These dictators were installed by core capitalists to repress rebellion. Conversely, when a neoclassical economist picks a socialist country it usually refers to the worst time periods in Russian, Chinese, Cuban, Venezuelan or North Korean history. It conveniently ignores Sweden, Norway or Denmark in their best periods (even if these Scandinavian nations were still far more capitalist than socialist) or the achievements of Russia, China or Cuba in their best periods.

In Defense of Leninist Communism

I am not a Leninist but since capitalists insist that Leninism is the only kind of socialism, Leninism is worth defending. To do this I will be guided by Michael Parenti’s book Blackshirts and Reds. One of the things Parenti points out is that capitalists make unfalsifiable claims, putting state socialist countries in a position of “damned if you do, damned if you don’t.” For example:

If Soviets refuse to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent. If they appeared willing to make concessions, this was a skillful ploy to put us off our guard.

By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative.

If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people rejected the regime’s atheistic ideology.

If the workers went on strike, this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn’t go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom

A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population. (p. 41-42)

So, in other words, capitalists fail to state the conditions in which they could be proven wrong.

The performance of socialist states must be compared to the political economy of the country before socialism came to power

What is not considered by capitalists in challenging socialist institutions is those countries that became socialist societies were far worse off before socialism arrived. So, for example, whatever the shortcomings of state socialism under Leninist/Stalinist/Maoist rule in Russia, China, and Cuba must be seen against what life was like for workers and peasants under Czarist Russia, China under Chiang Kai-shek or Cuba under Battista. Other countries were subjected to the miseries of colonial rule by the West before becoming socialist. Relative to those conditions socialism in those countries was a clear improvement.

Cuba: Improvements in housing, schools, literacy, sanitation, health clinics, jobs, human services, life expectancy

Speaking of Cuba, Michael Parenti writes:

For all its mistakes and abuses, the Cuban Revolution brought sanitation, schools, health clinics, jobs, housing and human services to a level not found throughout most of the Third World and in many parts of the first world.

Life expectancy rose from 55 to 75. Smallpox, malaria, tuberculosis, typhoid, polio and numerous other diseases have been wiped out by improved living standards. Cuba has enjoyed a level of literacy higher than the US. The Cuban revolution has sent teachers, doctors, and workers to dozens of Third World countries without charging a penny. It is the country with the most teachers and doctors per capita of all counties. Most third world capitalist regimes are far more oppressive. (p. 38-39)

In Russia less stratification between classes in income housing and gender relations

In Russia within thirty years after the Bolshevik revolution, the Soviets made industrial advances equal to what capitalism took a century to accomplish. In communist countries there was less economic inequality than under capitalism. Parenti continues:

The perks enjoyed by party and government elites were modest by corporate CEO standards in the West as were their personal incomes and lifestyles.

Soviet leaders live in large apartments in a large housing project near the Kremlin, set-aside for government leaders.

The income spread between the highest and lowest earner in the Soviet Union was about five to one. In the US the spread is 10,000 to one.

There is guaranteed education, employment, housing and medical assistance. (Blackshirts and Reds, p. 45)

The fall of the Soviet Union had a negative impact on revolutionary movements all over the world

With capitalist fundamentalism having taken over Russia, that meant that any liberation struggles on the capitalist periphery were on their own. In the past they had received aid from Russia (and its allies in the Soviet sphere of influence, such as Eastern Germany, Poland, etc.). In addition, capitalists would no longer have to convince workers or national leaders of liberation movements that they offered a better way of life than communism. They seemed to be the only game in town.

Immanent Criticisms of Leninism

Why the standard of living is not higher and political governance less democratic

It must be said that all socialist countries are not free upgrades for the living standards of their population in a timely way. All socialist countries are under constant attack from capitalist countries and have to devote a great deal of their economy to building up their military. All this is revenue taken away from domestic infrastructure projects and consumer goods. Additionally, socialist states have to be extremely cautious in both setting up their political systems and holding elections. Capitalists will do everything they can to overthrow socialism as a system as well as the socialist leaders. Given the record of the CIA attempting to overthrow roughly 60 governments since its inception, socialist revolutionaries have good reason for being cautious and less willing to have elections resembling a free-for-all. Yet, there were a number of difficulties that seemed inherent in the system itself.

Despite his sympathy for Russia, Parenti is no true believer. He says “The exigencies of the revolutionary survival did not make inevitable”:

• The heartless execution of hundreds of Old Bolshevik leaders.
• The suppression of party-political life through terror, or peer pressure.
• The eventual silencing of debate regarding the pace of industrialization and collectivization.
• The ideological regulation of all intellectual and cultural life. 
• The mass deportation of suspect nationalities. (p. 57)

In his book Inventing Reality, Parenti admits:

The truth is, in the USSR there exist serious problem of labor productivity, industrialization, urbanization, bureaucracy, corruptions and alcoholism. There are production and distribution bottlenecks, plan failures, consumer scarcities, criminal abuses of power, and the suppression of dissidents.  (p. 287)

Limits of centralized planning

Parenti points out the centralized planning in some historical periods is better than others:

Central planning was useful and even necessary in the earlier period of siege socialism to produce steel, wheat and tanks to build an industrial base and withstand the Nazi onslaught. But it eventually hindered technological development and growth.  No system could gather and process the immense range of detailed information needed to make correct decisions about millions of production tasks. (p. 59-60)

Had they tapped the collective creative energy of the workers and included them in the planning process via workers councils, things might have been different.

Disincentives for innovation

Managers were little inclined to pursue technological paths that might lead to their own obsolescence. Managers received no rewards for taking risks. Experimentation increased the chances one might miss their quotas.

Improvements in production would lead only to an increase in one’s productive quota. In effect, well-run factories were punished with greater workloads. There would be deliberate slowdowns so as to not surpass the quotas. Or they would work faster, finish the job in 4-6 hours and go somewhere to work for extra money. High-priced quality goods and luxury items were hard to come by. All this affected work performance. Why work hard to earn more when there was not that much to buy? There was strong resentment concerning consumer scarcities, the endless shopping lines and housing shortages.

Greater affluence rather than political democracy mattered

Usually there were relatively prosperous craftsmen, small entrepreneurs, well-educated engineers, architects and intellectuals that were the most aggressive about becoming richer. It was this desire for greater affluence rather than the quest for political freedom that motivated most of those who emigrated to the West.

Signs of Structural Collapse

In my article “Like a Rowboat in a Typhoon” I’ve identified 12 crises that face Western capitalism. Each crisis was either there before the 1990 breakup of the Soviet Union and has continued to become worse during the next thirty years of the free reign of market fundamentalism or the crisis is new and the result of neo-liberal economic policies.

COVID-19 has expanded rather than leveled off because the nation-state is not allowed to have a national plan since that is against the ideology of neoliberal economics. Local states are left to fend for themselves and the results are an incoherent mess. Large parts of the Yankee population, full of rugged individualism, are in denial there even is a pandemic. They are ignoring what scientists say and are spreading the virus as they dance together in clubs and on beaches. Other countries have risen to the occasion with half the resources. Socialist countries like Cuba, China, Venezuela and North Vietnam have responded well and admirably.

Extreme weather is a very serious problem that has been building for 50 years, if not longer, but it has become especially obvious in the last 20 years. There is no long-term plan to address this problem either. Every year we have record-breaking heat in the summer, along with fires and in the winters, record cold spells in the east and north-central states. Glaciers are melting and water is rising. Has the absence of the Soviet Union unleashed market forces to solve this extreme weather problem? No.

Police departments have turned into state terrorist organizations which have been gathering more and more weapons for the last 50 years. There is no structural reform, as the police are handed bloated budgets while they are trained to mutilate and kill as a matter of course. Now that neoliberal capitalism does not have to worry about communism, have they reigned in the police? Is it a new day for racial minorities to enjoy the blessings of the free market as its minority citizenry? Far from it. The problems with the police have only gotten worse.

There is an open rebellion against police terror which the ruling class has failed to address structurally. Besides police attacks there is the prison industrial complex, filled with a disproportionate number of minorities, many in for minor crimes. Any claim for reparation for minorities is like spitting in the wind. This has gotten even worse since the killing of Oscar Grant in Oakland in 2011. Since 1990, when the capitalists thought they won, things have gotten worse. Kamala Harris refused to let non-violent prisoners out, because capitalists who have invested in prison labor needed the workers!

Has market fundamentalism, triumphant since 1990, given the working class and small business owners a better life? The answer is a resounding no. In fact, it has attracted them to fascism. Openly armed fascistic groups publicly wave confederate flags and white power signs. We know better than to think these groups originated with Trump. With its policy mantra of austerity at home and abroad, it is more likely that white working-class people and small business owners will continue to be drawn to fascism – with or without Trump. Their economic circumstances have deteriorated particularly since 2008, especially because of the absence of a socialist alternative here.

We are in the worst capitalist crisis in history because the Coronavirus has crippled the physical economy: political economist Jack Rasmus says the real unemployment rate is between 25-30%. Those who are working are working at reduced workloads. Consumer spending is very low. Both parties sing a capitalist tune that workers might die so the economy can live. This is an economic policy? This is what capitalists say we can look forward to with its happy victory over socialism?

For Adam Smith, capitalist wealth was based on building infrastructures, goods and services and making life easier for the lower classes. Free market fundamentalists since 1990 has continued to ignore these things. After 1970 finance capital got increasingly out of control. Has the absence of the Soviet Union allowed neo-classical economists to reign in the banks? Fat chance. Today fictitious capital greatly outstrips industrial capital in terms of its claim on social wealth. The banks were responsible for the crash in 2008.

The ruling class made a decision shortly after World War II that more stable (bigger) profits could be made from the military than investing in commodities. After all, we have to defend ourselves against the Cold War nemesis – the Soviet Union – that wants world communism. Surely by the mid 1990s the military budget would shrink because after all, capitalism had slain the communist dragon. What do we have today? The US military budget is larger than the whole world military budget combined.

Now that capitalists no longer had to worry about the communist menace, we might think the role of the Federal Reserve would be smaller because markets would be stable after 1990. Today 30 years after the reign of market fundamentalism the Federal Reserve has to pump blood transfusions (money) on a regular basis into financial markets to keep them from tanking. Would Adam Smith think there might be something wrong with printing more money as an economic policy? We think he would be horrified.

Politically, both major political parties are hated by their populations with the winning party not being able to attract more than about a third of the vote. More people don’t vote than do vote. Has the absence of the Soviet Union and a world socialist threat (to the capitalists not the people of the US at large) brought more people out to vote? I would think that if under capitalism “all boats will rise”, the voter turnout would be more active because voting is an expression of faith in the system.  It hasn’t brought more people out to vote. In fact, the Democratic Party in the wake of the 2016 debacle developed a conspiracy theory that they lost the elections because of the Russians. But these Russians aren’t even communists anymore. Yoo-hoo, Democratic Party, you can’t have an evil red menace if you’ve already slain the communist menace.

Now that the Western Free World has triumphantly won over communism, it can set its sights on dealing with long-term problems, ecological, climatic, infrastructural and political. Has this happened since the evil Russians were defeated? Capitalists—for whom short-term thinking is natural and endemic— continue to not expand their vision beyond “quarterly objectives”. They want their assets liquid and ready to move at any time. Is this the economic rationality capitalist are yammering about?

Conclusion

The origins of capitalist mythology go back to Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. This mythology is told and retold in introductory economic classes at the undergraduate college level. The trouble is, market fundamentalism today is nothing like what Smith argued for. I’ve exposed 25 myths of Smith’s that have been broken by the neoclassical, finance, monopoly capitalism of today. At the same time, I’ve tried to show that the socialism of Lenin-Stalin had some commendable qualities as well as shortcomings.

Lastly, I’ve named twelve crises that economies all over the world must face. How well has market fundamentalism solved them since 1990 when it had triumphed over socialism? The answer is that many of the crises have predated the capitalist restoration, but neoliberal capitalism has done nothing to solve them and, in most cases, made things worse. In addition, some crises are new and broke out after 1990 when market fundamentalism had control.

So, I ask you, name me one capitalist society that works? “Works” means it does what Adam Smith promised. A high standard of living not just for the elites but for the middle classes, the working classes and gradually the poor. A decrease in the amount of work done because of high technology. Opportunities for anyone to start a small business who wants to and a relatively stable economic life. Where is this happening? The United States? Hardly. The standard of living has been declining for 50 years. Germany? Up until about seven years ago, this claim might have been valid. No more. Japan? They have never recovered from the 1987 crash. Brazil, possibly for a while under Lula but no more. Argentina? Decades ago, but not since they were visited by the Chicago boys and now buried in debt. It’s a similar case as Chile. Western capitalism all over is a failure, it is incapable of solving the 12 problems I identified. It is collapsing.

Meanwhile, whether we call China state-capitalist or “socialism with Chinese characteristics”, it is clearly becoming a powerhouse. With its infrastructural projects including the Belt Road Initiative, it is providing selective countries with infrastructure and work. Through its alliance with Russia and Iran, it is helping the besieged socialist countries like Cuba and Venezuela survive the collapse of western capitalism and the constantly rising imperialist threats. Western capitalism is a collapsing failure and all the king’s’ horses and all the king’s’ men won’t be able to put Humpty together again.

• Published first in Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism 

This article was posted on Thursday, December 10th, 2020 at 12:37pm and is filed under China, Economic Inequality, Economy/Economics, Education, Environment, Free Market, History, Labor, Markets, Media, Media Bias, Media Criticism, Privatization, Propaganda, Russia, Socialism, United States.

If central banks were to allow asset prices to reflect the actual underlying fundamentals – record levels of debt, record low productivity growth, record unemployment, record populism – the resulting crashes in financial markets would be so large that most Western economies would be plunged into deep and lasting depressions.

Putting aside the fact that many countries and regions are already in a deep and lasting economic depression that started long ago, the stock market is once again rising thanks to massive non-stop infusions of digital dollars from the private institutions of the rich like the Federal Reserve. Central banks in other parts of the world are also printing colossal sums of money around the clock. However, no jobs or social programs are being printed.

Like the banks, the stock market produces nothing. Neither creates value. Both are driven by anti-consciousness and both are a drain on the socialized economy.

While the stock market reflects the contradictions inherent to the capitalist economic system and is not an entity unto itself completely detached from the production of goods and services, stocks themselves are not the economy. Stocks are largely property titles to claims to anticipated wealth. An increase in the price of stocks, for example, does not necessarily represent an increase in real wealth. In short, there exists a mediated relationship between the stock market and the actual production of real value.

Today, stock values have become very far removed from the value of real assets and material goods and services. The idea of “bubbles” reflects this growing disconnect between the economy and the stock market. In 2008, for example, most could not even explain what “derivatives” were because they were so convoluted and so far removed from reality. It was next to impossible to determine which claims of wealth (real and fictitious) belonged to whom because toxic financial instruments were essentially made-up and resold over and over again.

In reality, much of the stock market relies on fictitious capital—value beyond what can be realized in the form of commodities. It is capital above and beyond actual capital. Fictitious capital is parasitic and can arise from printing money, lending between banks, compound interest, credit, speculation, fractional banking, fake toxic financial instruments, and more. Fictitious capital spontaneously duplicates and triplicates real capital. It is not real value produced by real workers in the sphere of production. Workers do not produce fictitious capital. Speculation, for example, represents a projected legal claim to value that may or may not materialize in the future. It is a gamble. It is akin to trading in promises and risks, without actual existing funds. Not surprisingly, risk-taking and recklessness have reached new heights under the current surreal circumstances.

The “free-market” under conditions of imperialism causes many individuals and organizations to become blind to reality and the laws of motion of economic development. Many get lost in a radically-detached subjective reality where anything goes (so-called “animal spirits” take over). The market appears as a land of infinite unicorns and rainbows. Material reality dissolves. After all, the private Federal Reserve has repeatedly signaled to the mega-rich that they have nothing to worry about: the super-rich will be taken care of under all circumstances. Since they are “too big to fail and too big to jail,” digital dollars will keep flowing to them perpetually. This eliminates risk for a tiny few.

Keeping in mind the important principle that what is not produced cannot be distributed, the stock market mainly re-divides and re-distributes already-produced value. It represents the parasitism and decay within the economy. It is an arena in which the richest and most powerful capture the wealth seized not only by weaker and smaller owners of capital, but also the pensions and other funds that belong to workers and the public. “Might makes right” prevails throughout the obsolete “dog-eat-dog” capitalist economic system.

The notion that “money begets money” (“capitalization”) is a capital-centered prejudice that fosters the illusion that production does not matter and workers are irrelevant; workers supposedly have nothing to do with the production of social wealth. Money just arises magically. But the fairy tale that “money begets money” is a main reason why the stock market always becomes “over-valued” and eventually crashes. Asset valuations and speculation may extend well beyond the stratosphere, but ultimately they are governed by the laws of motion of economic development and must return to Earth. The chickens always come home to roost, as the saying goes. The “good times” never last. Anxiety and insecurity are always around the corner. Unplanned and anarchic economic activity cannot escape frequent catastrophic reckonings.

Such crashes and the havoc they wreak are inevitable in an economic system based on the private ownership of competing parts of the economy. The generalized anarchy of production in society negates conscious human control and planning of the economy and inevitably leads to disharmony between production and consumption, resulting in regular upheavals and chaos. Sustained prosperity, peace, and stability for all are impossible under such outmoded conditions and further reveal the need for new relations of production. A new direction and motivation for the economy are sorely needed.

The economy, properly speaking, is the relations people enter into with each other in the course of producing value. Every society has to produce and reproduce their means of existence. Any society that fails to do so, even for a few months, will experience serious problems.

Capital is the dominant unequal social relation in modern society. Workers and owners of capital enter into a relation with each other that legally permits owners of capital to seize the added-value stemming from the labor-time of workers. The claims of workers and owners of capital over this added-value clash frequently, and today this unequal social relation is in deep crisis and needs to give way to a new relation in which the working class controls what it alone produces.

To be clear, value comes only from the labor-time of workers producing goods and services in material space-time. Only the work-time of the working class can impart value to commodities. Without workers, there would be no social wealth. In this sense, owners of capital are historically superfluous, a drain on society and the economy. They are not needed. They play no positive role. They are not interested in nation-building and have not solved any problems. Owners of capital are blocking social progress by preventing the rise of new relations of production that are in harmony with the socialized nature of production.

All the chicanery, parasitism, and schemes of the imperialist oligarchs, including the stock market, will only intensify economic and social problems. Inequality, unemployment, and poverty will continue to worsen as private central banks print more money and stock markets climb.

The law of the falling rate of profit is coercive and inescapable. Under capitalism, the amount of capital invested in production eventually necessarily exceeds the profit returned. And eventually a point is reached where there is no incentive to invest, thereby establishing the conditions for crisis. Efforts to counter this law are temporary and ineffective in the long run; such efforts cannot avert crises altogether. Attempts to avert this law lead only to more tragedies for the people. The law of the falling rate of profit is a main reason why, over the past few decades, owners of capital have reduced investments in real production and shifted towards financial parasitism. According to some, the rate of profit in the U.S. has been steadily declining for 70 years.

In the coming months, the domino effects of the current world-wide economic fiasco will become even more painful and visible. The consequences of the global economic collapse will be unfolding for some time. More social unrest is bound to arise at home and abroad. And to be sure, finding a vaccine for Covid-19 will not end the depression or its torturous consequences. The obsolete capitalist economic system has been in decline for decades.

Nonetheless, while multiple overwhelming crises are unfolding simultaneously, this is not the time to drown in pessimism and hopelessness. That won’t help.

Taking up the hard and drawn-out work of developing independent thinking and politics is critical at this juncture. There are openings to do this. The social unrest unfolding worldwide provides an opening to advance ideas, thinking, perspectives, and measures that advance the general interests of society and its members. For instance, people everywhere are raising demands for accountability for state violence in its many forms. They are also rejecting past symbols of oppression. A new form of consciousness is unfolding and its direction and content are up for grabs. When far more people start to say things like “nothing surprises me anymore,” it is clear there are significant contradictions in motion.

Growing social unrest is intensifying the need to reject the ideas, views, agendas, arrangements, and fear-mongering of the rich and the democrats and republicans who govern on their behalf. Conditions are compelling more people to take nothing for granted and to investigate things and phenomena for themselves. There is a heightened sense of skepticism about information from mainstream sources. In the current rapidly-changing context, one must persistently engage in a conscious act of finding out and not automatically believe the rich and their political and media representatives. The mainstream media and the cartel political parties work tirelessly to impose ideas, agendas, and arrangements on people that deprive them of their own outlook, motivation, drive, and path forward.

Women, students, youth, workers, and senor citizens must take up serious investigation and analysis of what is unfolding and connect the dots. Action with no analysis won’t work. Nor will blindly repeating what the mainstream media or social media says. That just increases confusion and incoherence. Resorting to knee-jerk reactions, one-liners, or clever idioms will not do either. The need for analysis and coherence is more critical than ever.

Old ideas and old ways of thinking are not going to be useful moving forward. People must establish their own reference points and their own perspective on how to move society forward. A new direction, aim, motivation, and organization of society and the economy are needed and possible.

People everywhere want real decision-making power over their lives, society, and economy. This power is key to unleashing the human factor essential to building the new and guaranteeing the rights of all.

This article was posted on Monday, June 29th, 2020 at 7:11pm and is filed under 2008 Financial Collapse, Capitalism, Economy/Economics, Federal Reserve, Free Market, Opinion, Stock Markets, Unemployment.

Medicine has changed. We used to be a calling that catered to the public welfare, and our prime consideration was the patient. Now we are a business, and some of us practice as impersonal corporations, with the bottom line the profits, not the well-being of the patient.”

— From The Doctor, by Dr. Edward E. Rosenbaum, 1991

The most shocking thing about the neoliberal health care model is not that it bankrupts and murders hundreds of thousands of Americans each year, but that vast numbers of physicians continue to support it. The insatiable depravity of the anti-single-payer virus has metastasized throughout every organ of the American teaching hospital, an institution which has betrayed its sacrosanct purpose, and which increasingly inculcates residents with the pernicious idea that good health care is a privilege and not a right.

The teaching hospital has become a dangerous place, not only for patients, but also for trainees, who are being forged into physicians without having been inculcated with a respect for basic principles of medical ethics. In this way have American physicians largely been reduced to an army of automatons trained to make money for the medical industrial complex. Indeed, it should come as no surprise that many residents lose themselves in a pitiless sea of soulless careerism, as they are immersed for years in an environment where they are beholden to, and at the mercy of, rapacious interests that place profit-making over all other considerations.

The teaching hospital is to health care what the ballet academy is to ballet and the music conservatory is to the symphony orchestra. All who covet this career must pass through its gates, and the values it imparts to its pupils form the basis of the light — or the inexorable darkness — that will assuredly follow.

Knowing that patients are often confined to extremely narrow networks, it is standard practice for teaching hospitals to arm-twist patients with inferior insurance into being medical models during physician office visits. This underscores the sociopathy of the contemporary teaching hospital, and serves as a metaphor for how these institutions have become inhuman machines that harm patients and sully the souls of their trainees. Cornell Dermatology, a department that could win an award for teaching residents how to coerce patients with inferior insurance into being clinical teaching tools, takes great pride in their villainy, writing on their website:

In addition to basic and clinical dermatology training, we strive to instill ethical behavior, compassion, communication and the recognition that we are here to serve our patients.

Residents that are the most amenable to the dictates of unscrupulous attendings position themselves to become chief resident or to be awarded a prestigious fellowship. In the American teaching hospital, this is the only thing on the mind of most trainees.

It is incontrovertible that the multi-tier system, the spawn of privatized health care, is incompatible with the oath to do no harm. Cornell Oncology, which once assigned me to a fellow due to my unglamorous insurance, writes on their website that “We care for the whole person and put the needs of our patients at the center of everything that we do.” Despite a blatant predilection for medical Jim Crow, Weill Cornell claims in their literature to have “a legacy of putting patients first.” In actuality, American teaching hospitals put profit-making first, research second, the attending’s comfort (vis-à-vis their desire to have a medical scribe or chaperone present in the examination room) third, the teaching of the trainee fourth, and the patient last.

In “I am a physician and I am not your enemy,” by Megan Gray, MD, the author laments the fact that her patients are wary of doctors. “I am asking you to trust that every day I put your needs above my own,” she writes entreatingly. It is possible that Dr. Gray does, in fact, put the needs of her patients above her own. Regrettably, this is often not the case, as evidenced by the fact that American physicians wrote over two hundred million prescriptions for opioids each year from 2006 – 2016, millions of our countrymen have been made addicted to psychotropic drugs, while Vioxx took the lives of roughly the same number of Americans as died in the Vietnam War.

It is clear that the physician-patient bond, regarded as inviolable for millennia, cannot coexist within the mores of privatized health care. Yet many doctors would argue otherwise. In “Being a doctor is not what it used to be,” by Raviraj Patel, MD, the author writes that “in my humble opinion, the patient-physician relationship is sacred, and the entire system is designed to facilitate that relationship.” In “To combat COVID-19, we endanger our doctors in training,” Gali Hashmonay, MD, writes of our uniquely dysfunctional for-profit apparatus, that “This system attracts doctors in training who are eager to put a patient’s well-being in front of their own.” Indeed, accepting gifts from pharmaceutical companies, performing practice pelvic exams on anesthetized patients, not disclosing long-term chemotherapy side effects, getting patients addicted to drugs (formerly benzodiazepines and barbiturates), imposing unwanted observers on patients during their physician office visits, pushing unnecessary surgeries, and ignoring do not resuscitate orders are some of the many things that residents have to look forward to when training at our esteemed teaching hospitals. After the corporate lexicon of “humanism,” “patient-centered care,” and “compassion” are stripped away, blind obedience is the attribute most coveted by teaching hospitals when interviewing prospective residents.

By refusing to acknowledge that corporatization has been a catastrophe, anti-single-payer physicians have sacrificed their autonomy to the devilish whims of the private health insurance companies, which have usurped the medical decision-making process. They have also sold their souls to the pharmaceutical companies, which continue to corrupt medical knowledge and foment quackery; and to hospital executives, who treat doctors as if they were employees at an investment bank.

The successful Cuban response to the pandemic underscores the fact that money and technology are useless when profits are placed over human lives. Vietnam, also a poor country with limited resources, has likewise mustered a stronger defense against the virus than the Beacon of Liberty. Cuba’s health care system is so robust that they have continued to send teams of doctors abroad, even in the midst of the pandemic.

Successfully completing a residency is analogous to being awarded a black belt in karate. Without a sense of compassion and virtue, such an individual is destined to become a danger to themselves, and a danger to others. As profiteering and the multi-tier system have become normalized in the American teaching hospital, this can only result in the commodification of the patient in the mind of the debased trainee.

In “5 things that make U.S. health care great,” by Suneel Dhand, MD, the author posits, without satire, that “A homeless American entering the doors of a hospital with an acute medical issue — be it sepsis, a myocardial infarction, or a stroke — will get better care than a rich person almost anywhere else in the world.” Writing for KevinMD, Kent Holtorf, MD, concedes that “The U.S. far exceeds any nation in expenditures for insurance administration, where the essential means of cost control is denial of service and rationing of care via ever increasing complex treatment approval systems, resulting in spiraling costs.” He then concludes:

A free-market system is shown to be the only reasonable method of reform that addresses the true underlying problems of the U.S. health care system and effectively lowers health care costs, allowing for universal insurance coverage for most everyone so any reasonable person — doctor, patient, Republican or Democrat — could support.

Not to be outdone, Kevin Tolliver, MD, asks In “A framework to understand universal health care:”

At its core, universal health care forces healthy people to pay for others’ medical care. Is this fair? Why should an active, healthy-eating, non-smoker pay for health care for an obese, sedentary diabetic who chain smokes all day?

In “Corporate games have ruined the health care system,” Osmund Agbo, MD, acknowledges that “When an insurance executive is making a seven-figure bonus, it’s very clear his loyalty lies somewhere else outside the interest of regular Americans struggling to pay an infinitely rising monthly premium.”  He then informs us that “I am not a fan of socialist medicine. On the contrary, I am a firm believer in the free market enterprise system.”

Where does all of this irrationality and deranged thinking come from? Surely, the media has played a role. And yet we cannot discount the deleterious influence of the teaching hospital, which far more than medical school, profoundly shapes an impressionable trainee’s sense of right and wrong. Polluted and defiled by the pathogen of amorality, the fallen wallow in the plague wards of neoliberalism, banished from the world of compassion and rationality, and forever condemned to live out their days enveloped by a shroud of blindness.

Let us recall Pope’s haunting words in An Essay on Man: Epistle II:

Vice is a monster of so frightful mien,
As, to be hated, needs but to be seen;
Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face,
We first endure, then pity, then embrace.

Only by collectively acknowledging that health care cannot be sold as cars, kitchen appliances, and soap are sold; that it is the doctor’s sacred duty to treat all patients equally, regardless of their ability to pay; and that medical ethics can only flourish in a nonprofit socialized system, can we take this desperately needed step in reclaiming our humanity. For too long have American teaching hospitals been bastions for every form of knavery, perfidy, and skulduggery. These institutions must cast off their shackles of corporate thralldom, and join the fight to restore dignity and honor to American health care.

This article was posted on Friday, June 12th, 2020 at 4:44pm and is filed under Cuba, Free Market, Health/Medical, Medical Ethics, Medical Insurance, Patient Rights, Pharmaceuticals, Teaching Hospitals.