It's completely clear that no matter how wrong racism itself is (and the position of this blog is that racism is both immoral and sinful in the Christian sense), modern anti-racism (de facto race denial) of the PC, Cultural Marxist variety has gone completely out of control.
Allow me to share with you some examples of some of the trouble I have gotten into with the anti-racist lunacy that stalks our land.
We're going to avoid one case completely because some of the idiots involved in this case keep coming back to the blog trying to engage in character assassination of me.
I have some hangouts where I like to go to, buy coffee, read a paper, whatever.
One is up in the mountains. The town is all White for the most part and extremely conservative, but lunatic anti-racism has penetrated to the core nevertheless.
I had some posts on my blog called "Spot the Language". It's a little game where I posted a snippet of a widely-spoken foreign language, gave a bunch of oblique, strange and obscure clues about the country dealing with history, religion, culture, the language itself, sociology, psychology, history, famous people, cuisine, geography, native plants, animals and ecosystems, etc.
I quit showing them to people because either no one can understand it, or no one gives a shit about it, or they don't want to read it because they hate me, or some combination, I'm not sure which. Mostly it seems like nobody can make heads or tails of it, and most people I gave it to act really disturbed and upset by it for some weird reason. I think they can't understand it, so they think it's evil and dangerous.
Well, I made the mistake of showing it to this guy at this place in the mountains. He's White in an all-White town, but he loves Hispanics and illegal aliens, probably because he never had to live with lots of them. He's a pretty typical White person in this part of California. There was another post interspersed with the language stuff dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and he got all caught up in that.
He kept flipping the pages, looking through the stuff and getting more and more confused, baffled, agitated and freaked out. He started saying, “What is this? Jews? Arabs?” He was saying that over and over. He acted like I was showing him child porn. That's the way most people react to my writing, which is why I never show anyone my stuff anymore.
I answered, jokingly, “Jews? Arabs? Oh, those are just excitable Semites.”
He didn’t get it, of course. A lot of the time, no one ever gets my jokes. “What’s a Semite?” He’s baffled. He acts like it must be something evil, or a disease.
“Oh, it’s a branch of the Caucasian Race." I smile.
Now he's really upset. The guy goes nuts. “What? What?! What’s that?! What’s Caucasian? What's the Caucasian RACE?! What's that? What do you mean RACE?!"
"Caucasian is a race. It's one of the three main races. The Caucasian race. The White race." I'm still smiling because this whole incident is starting to get amusing.
Now he's visibly agitated. "White race!? What?! What’s the White race!? What's that!? Do you believe in that stuff!?”
He’s angry now. I decide to speak up in favor of my blighted and abused people: “Well, I think White people have a right to be proud. I think White people should be proud. Everyone else is. Only Whites are supposed to hate themselves. I don't think we should hate ourselves or deny our existence. We are not bad people.”
“You believe in that?!” Now he looks like he’s going to hit me.
I look up and there’s two White girls working in the shop, frozen, staring, mouths open.
I try to backtrack my way out of the conversation and get the handout back.
A few days later, I come in and apologize for making him mad. The high school girl behind the counter says, “Well, in the future if you could avoid discussing that. You know. Discussing people’s races.”
I will note that everyone involved in this idiotic event is a White person.
Another time I was in another hangout. I was talking to a woman there who used to work in a coffee shop in town that I used to hang out at all the time.
We were talking about the people who had taken it over, a mother and her daughter. I was describing them. "They're Spaniards," I said noncommittally. She gave me this look like, "I'm shutting this conversation down." I guess it's not ok to discuss the heritage of White folks anymore? Wait a minute. I like Spaniards.
I was in a dentist's office and unfortunately the conversation somehow wormed around to our heritage. I'm French, British and German. The hygienist was Hispanic from back before California was a state, back in the days of the Californios. We have a lot of those around these parts and it's always interesting to meet them. The dentist, well, I forget, but I think he didn't want to discuss it.
"Let's not talk about anymore of this racist stuff," the hygienist said, like we were talking about grubby worms or something. The dentist agreed.
One time a guy gave me his business card. I looked at it said, "Oh, you're Italian," with a big smile. It's the name of a famous family of winemakers. The guy acted like I had challenged him to a fight. Why? I'm not supposed to say that anymore?
Actually, I love Italians. Tell you what. I'll trade you 10,000 illegal Mexicans from my city for 10,000 glorious, civilized, hard-working, law-abiding, patriotic Italian-Americans. Deal?
Seemed like when I was younger, Whites always talked about their heritage. It was, "I'm Italian," "I'm Irish," "I'm half Greek and half Mexican." Everyone was always proud of their heritage. I guess that's all banned now. It's racist.
On and on it goes.
There's a Russian neo-Nazi video on this site. It's clearly labeled that it's up there for anti-fascist and anti-racist purposes. The local Hispanics have all seen it. According to them, having this video on my site means I'm a Nazi. I've explained to them over and over why it's up there, but it's like they don't get it.
At another hangout, there was a Black guy and an Hispanic guy who I used to sit with, drink coffee and talk. The Black guy never did tell me his name in all the time I knew him. That was one of his weird things: he wouldn't tell you his name.
Anyway, when I first met the guy, we were talking about the Jena 6 case. I was writing it up on the blog. I said I thought the whole thing was a fake White-racism hoax a la Tawana Brawley, that race had little or nothing to do with the case, that the Jena 6 were a bunch of thugs, and that Mychal Bell had dislocated his girlfriend's eye socket. Well, this was evidence that I was a racist.
The guy had long Black dreadlocks and loved to go on and on about the Evil White Man. There are Blacks like this everywhere here, and American Indians, and Hispanics too. They just open right up on us and start ranting away about all the evil shit we did or still do or whatever. I always just sit there and listen to them and nod my head and more or less agree that I'm evil.
Funny thing is, if a White person ever unloads on any American Indian, Black or Hispanic about all the evil stuff they did or still do, that's like Capital Offense Racism of the First Degree. So we Whites just have to sit there and grovel masochistically and admit how evil we were, and probably still are. Of course non-Whites never admit to any such thing.
I lived in a White town for 16 years and hardly got ripped off at all. I move to an Hispanic city and there have been little ripoffs all the time. Little "loans" that of course never get paid back. Young Hispanics invite their way into your home, you turn your back on them, and they steal from you. That's happened five times now. The "loans" go out to the Hispanics and Blacks, and they never come back.
So I complain to Dreadlocks. "I wonder if they are ripping me off because I'm White," I offer dubiously, since I've run out of theories. The guy jumps out of his seat, "Racist! Racist! Racist!" He's almost yelling. His Hispanic Tonto is on on it too.
I can't use the words "Black" and "White". Dreadlocks corrects me. That's racist. I have to use the words "African" and "European" instead. And never forget that the Europeans are the most evil race that ever set foot on this planet.
I was in a specialist's office, on the phone with a friend. I'm into race and ethnicity, I eat it for breakfast. I was telling her about how I was in my town, in a doctor's office, looking at a man and his daughter. Were they Mestizos? Were they Mediterranean of Middle Eastern Whites? You can never tell in this town, they all blur together.
Finally, the little girl was walking out the door and she had a t-shirt that said "Greece". The Med Whites in this town are really ethnocentric. They're always walking around with shirts saying "Italy" or "Portugal". It's kind of neat, ethnocentric ethnic Whites, the way our country used to be.
"Greeks are White," I note to my friend on the phone.
My mulatto specialist starts waving his hand like a traffic cop. There's such thing as Whites. There's no such thing as a White race. There's no such thing as race. Plus, Whites all got a little Black in em anyway. Especially those swarthy Meds.
Hispanics are the craziest of all about this stuff. Most Hispanics don't seem to understand that they are part White and part Indian. I don't know what they think they are. They are especially pissed off by the notion that they may have a drop of White in them, and most don't have the slightest idea of what a mestizo is. White's the enemy, after all, right?
It's like the opposite of Latin America, where the mestizo crabs are all climbing to the top of the White barrel, pulling each other down as they near the top.
Some Hispanics have told me that people think that they are Asian due to their eyes. I point out that that was because, being part-Mexican, they were part-Indian, and Indians came from Asia. They never seem to understand, and then they get upset and act like they're shutting down the conversation. It's like I'm speaking Greek.
I'm not saying Hispanics are stupid, because my opinion, having been around a lot of them, is that they are way smarter than you might think in terms of sheer brain speed, but it's like there is not much in their brains most of time other than the latest rap songs and the usual quotidian stuff.
Note: Readers should carefully read the Commenting Rules before commenting to avoid having their comments edited or deleted and to avoid being banned from the site.
Thursday, July 31, 2008
Monday, July 28, 2008
More on Socialist Institutions in Capitalist States
In response to my post, In America, Socialism is Everywhere, Dr. Andrew Austin (blog here), a sociology professor at the University of Wisconsin - Green Bay, and one of the smartest people I know, commented, rejecting my notion that all government structures in a capitalist system were de facto socialist institutions.
His response is a typical, but very explicitly and eloquently stated, Marxist rejoinder. Refer to the post linked above to see what he is talking about.
Andrew Austin:
On the other hand, astute commenter James Schipper agrees with me, but takes a non-Marxist and more social democratic view of socialism.
Keep in mind that social democrats call their system socialism, while Marxists reject that, calling social democrats "bourgeois democrats" when they are in a good mood and "social fascists" when they are in a bad mood (recall the epithet used by the German Communists against the German social democrats in the 1920's and early 1930's).
Schipper:
Indeed, what we have under Bush seems to be something like a socialism for the rich. The rich are allowed to gamble all they want with their money and possibly even blow up the economy. If they make money, they get to keep all of it. If they lose, we taxpayers cover all of their losses. Hence there is nothing to prevent them from making mad and wild gambles with money, which are quite risky for the economy.
Guaranteeing the losses of capitalists is something that economists call "moral risk". It's like if I get to go to the casino all day and win as much as I want, but once I start losing, I get to come hat in hand to the taxpayers and demand that they bail out all my losses. I might just stay at the casino all the time if that were the case.
This is the moral risk inherent in today's corporatist system.
On the other hand, we cannot allow big banks and strange institutions like Freddie Mae and Fannie Mac to fail. In return for bailing these clowns out, though, taxpayers must demand either an ownership share in Freddie Mae and Fannie Mac (I would argue that there is an excellent for nationalizing these institutions, but after Ronald Reagan, that's hardly possible).
Or those two institutions, and the entire finance industry for that matter, must submit to the kind of intense state regulation that they formerly labored under, and that worked very well from 1935 until 1973 or so when capitalists started destroying it.
Surely socialist states can be run solely for an elite as James notes. This is why I object to supporting the Burmese state. Some Leftists are supporting Burma on the basis that the Western sanctions on Burma are not because it is an evil murdering state, but because it refuses to open up its state economy sufficiently to multinational capital. They are correct that this is the real reason for the sanctions on Burma.
But while Burma is formally a socialist state and most of the economy is in state hands, the state sector is run by a venal, callous, paranoid and murderous military elite as a cash cow. They pocket the substantial profits of this state sector while disallowing any private competition with it and at the same time treating their people little better than chattel.
This is something like a crony state capitalist state, and there is nothing progressive about it, especially while the vast majority of Burmese wallow in the worst misery. Just to show that there is nothing progressive about it, the Burmese Communist Party (admittedly very radical Maoists) has been waging armed struggle against the Burmese "socialist" junta since it was formed in 1962.
The junta has oppressed the various Burmese nationalities, most of whom never even consented to be a part of the new Burmese state freed from colonialism in 1948 in the first place.
A proper progressive state gives substantial rights and autonomy to national minorities, and the USSR, Vietnam and China have all done this, despite a lot of problems along the way. The progressive socialist states in Europe also give cultural rights to national minorities.
Vicious repression of minorities is a quality of fascism and ultranationalism and not properly of the Left. On the other hand, the divergent, quirky and twisted Khmer Rouge ferociously attacked all non-Khmers, though they were surely Marxists. The Khmer Rouge was a sad case of ethnic nationalist and racist Marxists. I would agree that a racist Marxist is still a Marxist, but he just isn't a very good one.
Note: Readers should carefully read the Commenting Rules before commenting to avoid having their comments edited or deleted and to avoid being banned from the site.
His response is a typical, but very explicitly and eloquently stated, Marxist rejoinder. Refer to the post linked above to see what he is talking about.
Andrew Austin:
Socialism is a political economic system in which the workers own and control the means of production. That means the workers run the firm, so to speak.I'm not going to comment on this because I am more or less at a loss for words. Feel free to comment in the comments section.
Leaving aside the question of whether they produce anything of value (in an exchange sense), soldiers and police officers do not run the firm. They are employees of the state and are told what to do by those who run the state. They have no say-so in determining who stands above them. The hierarchy that controls their work lives (and to a large extent their leisure lives) is not comprised of democratically-elected offices.
Moreover, the military and the police serve the interests of the capitalist class and its managers and associated functionaries, not the interests of the working class.
Government functions are socialist to the degree that they are controlled by and benefit the working class.
An example of a public system in the US that is often said to have the appearance of socialism is the educational system. School board members are elected, subject to public pressure, and every child can access the system. However, public education has become a system for indoctrinating children into the values and norms of capitalist society.
Just because the state sector is involved does not signal socialism. The capitalist state is by definition not socialist because it is controlled by capitalists for the benefit of capitalists and the perpetuation, expansion, and entrenchment of capitalist relations.
States reflect the character of the underlying mode of production. I see a lot of people make the error of thinking that extensive state intervention means socialism. The only way state intervention is socialist is if the social relations are socialist or society is undergoing a revolutionary transformation.
Authoritarian capitalism - fascism, whatever - has a massive state sector, but it is the antithesis of socialism. Capitalism can be more or less democratic - though there are always sharp limits on how democratic capitalism can be. Socialism can be more or less democratic. Unlike capitalism, the more democratic socialism becomes, the more socialist it is.
On the other hand, astute commenter James Schipper agrees with me, but takes a non-Marxist and more social democratic view of socialism.
Keep in mind that social democrats call their system socialism, while Marxists reject that, calling social democrats "bourgeois democrats" when they are in a good mood and "social fascists" when they are in a bad mood (recall the epithet used by the German Communists against the German social democrats in the 1920's and early 1930's).
Schipper:
I agree totally with you. Every country in the world has a socialist sector. The market can't exist without the state, but the state can exist without the market. A country in which the state ran everything would be a disaster, but it could exist. A country in which literally everything were left to the market would sink in anarchy and misery. Some African countries have come close to this.I respond, agreeing with James:
Socialism means essentially three things: state-directed production, state-directed distribution of income and state-regulated private production. There is plenty of that all over the world.
The biggest department in the socialist sector in the US is the Pentagon. Many American generals might balk at being called employees in the socialist sector, but that's exactly what they are. They don't get their paychecks from a corporation.
However, I would like to add that socialism in the sense above does not necessarily mean egalitarianism. There can be such a thing as socialism for the rich. Even a totally socialist economy could be run mainly for the benefit of an elite, in the same way that a corporation can be run mainly for the benefit of senior managers and at the expense of shareholders and employees.
Indeed, what we have under Bush seems to be something like a socialism for the rich. The rich are allowed to gamble all they want with their money and possibly even blow up the economy. If they make money, they get to keep all of it. If they lose, we taxpayers cover all of their losses. Hence there is nothing to prevent them from making mad and wild gambles with money, which are quite risky for the economy.
Guaranteeing the losses of capitalists is something that economists call "moral risk". It's like if I get to go to the casino all day and win as much as I want, but once I start losing, I get to come hat in hand to the taxpayers and demand that they bail out all my losses. I might just stay at the casino all the time if that were the case.
This is the moral risk inherent in today's corporatist system.
On the other hand, we cannot allow big banks and strange institutions like Freddie Mae and Fannie Mac to fail. In return for bailing these clowns out, though, taxpayers must demand either an ownership share in Freddie Mae and Fannie Mac (I would argue that there is an excellent for nationalizing these institutions, but after Ronald Reagan, that's hardly possible).
Or those two institutions, and the entire finance industry for that matter, must submit to the kind of intense state regulation that they formerly labored under, and that worked very well from 1935 until 1973 or so when capitalists started destroying it.
Surely socialist states can be run solely for an elite as James notes. This is why I object to supporting the Burmese state. Some Leftists are supporting Burma on the basis that the Western sanctions on Burma are not because it is an evil murdering state, but because it refuses to open up its state economy sufficiently to multinational capital. They are correct that this is the real reason for the sanctions on Burma.
But while Burma is formally a socialist state and most of the economy is in state hands, the state sector is run by a venal, callous, paranoid and murderous military elite as a cash cow. They pocket the substantial profits of this state sector while disallowing any private competition with it and at the same time treating their people little better than chattel.
This is something like a crony state capitalist state, and there is nothing progressive about it, especially while the vast majority of Burmese wallow in the worst misery. Just to show that there is nothing progressive about it, the Burmese Communist Party (admittedly very radical Maoists) has been waging armed struggle against the Burmese "socialist" junta since it was formed in 1962.
The junta has oppressed the various Burmese nationalities, most of whom never even consented to be a part of the new Burmese state freed from colonialism in 1948 in the first place.
A proper progressive state gives substantial rights and autonomy to national minorities, and the USSR, Vietnam and China have all done this, despite a lot of problems along the way. The progressive socialist states in Europe also give cultural rights to national minorities.
Vicious repression of minorities is a quality of fascism and ultranationalism and not properly of the Left. On the other hand, the divergent, quirky and twisted Khmer Rouge ferociously attacked all non-Khmers, though they were surely Marxists. The Khmer Rouge was a sad case of ethnic nationalist and racist Marxists. I would agree that a racist Marxist is still a Marxist, but he just isn't a very good one.
Note: Readers should carefully read the Commenting Rules before commenting to avoid having their comments edited or deleted and to avoid being banned from the site.
Problems of Leftwing Democracy
In the comments section, astute commenter huy remarks on the conundrum of socialist democracy when capitalists retain control over the media and culture::
huy, you are correct as far as your first two sentences go. I will deal with the third sentence at the end.
This conundrum is why Communists opted for the dictatorship of the proletariat, not because they are lovers of repression and haters of freedom.
The rich capitalists, through their media control and also their cultural construction and fertilization creating Gramscian cultural hegemonies (what you referred to as "control over people's thoughts"), are typically able to prevent social services and state planning in a democracy.
This is why Communists say that you never really have a democracy in capitalism. You always have a dictatorship of capital. Be that as it may, most folks nowadays do not seem to want to live under a dictatorship of the proletariat. Nevertheless, the roadblocks in the way of socialist democracy present a a serious problem.
Not only are the capitalists able to thwart significant progressive change via media and cultural control, but the same capitalists, via control over the economy, are able to stage lockouts and capital strikes, to send their capital out of the country, to artificially create shortages, and to send wealthy housewives out into the streets beating pots and pans in a middle and upper class strike, etc.
These housewife pot-banging strikes occurred in Chile under Allende, Venezuela under Chavez, and just recently occurred again in Argentina when President Kirchner tried to tax booming agricultural exports.
The big ag producers in Argentina responded by trying to starve the cities by staging ag strikes and refusing to ship produce to the cities so the people would have nothing to eat.
What is ominous about this is that these same rich housewife pot-banging demos and a latifundista (large landowner elite) strike presaged the coup that brought the death squads into power in Argentina in the late 1970's and early 1980's.
The generals stayed in power for several years, during which they murdered 30,000 leftwing Argentines, the vast majority of whom were just idealistic young people working with the poor and had not taken up arms at all.
The capitalists will usually try to stage a coup through their control over the military too. That is why Hugo Chavez is correct in cleansing the corrupt bosses' oil workers' union, in cleansing the officer corps of the military of reactionary elements, and putting in some state media.
The corrupt state oil workers union was a white collar union of well to do managers who had been operating the state oil company as a personal ATM for decades. They were behind the owners' lockout strike that followed the coup, and after Chavez fired those who had been behind the lockout and sabotage, they destroyed much of the records and paperwork of the oil company before they left. Clearly they had to go.
In the previous coup attempt, the middle and upper-class officer corps supported the coup, but the enlisted men, who came from the poor, did not. The poor rank and file military refused their officers' orders and the officers backed down. Hence, cleansing the officer corps of coup supporters was a must.
Getting a foot in the door of the Right's media monopoly was also important. Previously, the rich had all of the papers, magazines and especially TV stations and they used these to wage continuous lying propaganda war against Chavez.
Furthermore, the entire rightwing media not only supported the coup attempt against Chavez but were actively complicit in it. For that treason, Chavez is perfectly within his rights to shut down the entire rightwing media. He only does not do this because of the international outcry it would arouse.
The Right did the same thing with their media control during the Allende regime in Chile, printing wild lies about Cuban armies offshore and hiding in Chilean bases ready to invade Chile and impose Communism at gunpoint.
Middle class and upper class capital strikes can be devastating to the economy, and most folks, no matter how revolutionary, just get tired of the economic pain after a while and vote to put the reactionaries back in power.
Sanctions work the same way. The US and UK and sometimes France and Canada (when those two latter states are in an imperialist mood) usually slap sanctions on democratic Left states as soon as possible.
Recent examples are Nicaragua, Haiti and Zimbabwe (at first democratic, now increasingly dictatorial), and this alone is enough to devastate the economy and cause the people to vote out the Left and put reactionaries back in power.
What happens is that in an effort to get some control of the country back and fight back against all of this US plots, the Left regime often starts becoming more authoritarian and less democratic. Then the US says it's a dictatorship and needs to be overthrown on that basis.
If that doesn't work, the US forms a reactionary contra counterrevolutionary army that goes around killing any civilian that is pro-Left, murdering teachers and health care workers, burning down schools, ag cooperatives and health care facilities and just making the place ungovernable. In order to fend off contras and coups, Chavez has built up his military and even armed the population.
One more thing the US does is to flood money into the democratic Left country to buy the election of the reactionaries via all sorts of fake civil society groups. A good way to stop this is to ban all money coming to political groups from outside the country, but that is easier said than done. The money seems to find its way in anyway.
The US and its reactionary allies also stage bombings, shootings, riots, etc, against democratic Left states, and then often blames them on the Left. This is what they did in Chavez' Venezuela, Aristide's Haiti and Mossadegh's Iran.
If worse comes to worse and none of the above works, the Left regime is overthrown by a coup and replacement by a reactionary dictatorship. This dictatorship typically then institutes a reign of terror in which anywhere from 100's to 1 million progressives are killed all over the land. This is what happened in Indonesia in 1965, when 1 million Leftists were killed in a CIA coup.
What is even creepier is that while the Left is in power, the CIA is usually running around the country making up lists of leftwingers. As soon as the coup comes, the CIA hands over the lists to the death squad Right now in power, and they use these lists to hunt down progressives and murder them.
So if a Left regime is in power, there is always the terror of a future coup followed by a murder spree against anyone politically active in the regime. This is enough to make people afraid to get politically active.
The reign of terror itself so so terrorizes the population that most people are afraid to get involved in progressive politics for years or even decades afterwards. Why get involved? Who is to say when the death squads will come back in power and try to kill you for being politically active in Left politics.
All of this makes socialist democracy or even social democracy in backwards states almost impossible to achieve.
On the other hand, lots of leftwingers are trying to figure out a way to have some sort of socialist or even Marxist democracy, despite all the challenges. The Sandinistas had a democratic socialist revolution and Hugo Chavez is having one too. The Nepalese Maoists support 100% democracy. There's new thinking with a lot of Communists nowadays that socialism is not really possible without total democracy.
When I look at Cuba and I think about a few dissidents getting thrown in prison, is that really worse than masses of people dying early from preventable death or not having enough food to eat, or living in shantytown hovels, or prostituting themselves, or homeless kids sniffing glue, turning into criminals and getting killed by cops as happens all over Latin America?
Third World capitalist nightmare states punish an awful lot of innocent people too. Doesn't Cuba punish a lot fewer innocent people by clapping a few dissidents in prison than are harmed in these failing 3rd world capitalist states?
In India, capitalism is killing 4 million people a year. That's a five-alarm fire right there. If we had a socialist revolution there even with a dictatorship and saved 4 million lives a year, would it be worth it for a few folks slapped in prison?
I do think that the new way of Chavez, the Sandinistas, the FMLN of El Salvador and the Nepalese Maoists is the better way to go. Nothing wrong with democracy. If the people reject socialism at the polls and go back to capitalism and lots of them go hungry, go homeless, drink sewage water, get sick, get crippled and start dying, I guess we can say that they made a choice to have that happen to themselves.
Most socialist countries did go socialist for a while (usually decades) to develop the economy and then go towards capitalism after they were pretty well developed.
People have no idea how much of China's economic growth is based on the foundations laid by decades of Maoism. At any rate, most do not realize China is still a very socialist country in many ways.
The Communists in Russia built that place up from nothing. Without the USSR, Russia would probably be like India or Afghanistan. The Vietnamese and Laotian Communists are also putting in a lot of capitalism, and North Korea now has joint partnerships for foreign investors. I support Vietnam, Laos, North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela in their experiments at mixed economy. I also really like social market of Belarus.
Really what we ought to look at is does the system give us the outcomes that we want? If it does, it doesn't matter what mixtures of socialist, collective and private ownership it has.
There are also all sorts of ways of enterprise ownership.
We can have nonprofits, labor collectives, families, single owners, neighborhoods, towns, cities, states and nations. All of these forms of ownership are operating all over the world as you read this.
The cooperative sector in particular is a great way to go, and most do not realize it is a non-capitalist economic system. Worker-owned firms compete with each other, and there is no exploitation of labor as in capitalism.
One of the best examples of that is the Mondragon cooperatives in the Basque Country. Most Cuban agriculture is now run by cooperatives. In the cooperative model, you get away from the management-labor conflict you see in capitalism.
Note: Readers should carefully read the Commenting Rules before commenting to avoid having their comments edited or deleted and to avoid being banned from the site.
The only problem is that a socialist revolution would probably require a dictatorship and repression.I respond:
This is because without dictatorship and repression, rich capitalists would be able to prevent significant social services and state planning in a democracy via their control of the media and peoples' thoughts.
I'm not for socialism as a long term thing, but only as a way to quickly develop a country's infrastructure and economy, before gradual privatization of suitable sectors.
huy, you are correct as far as your first two sentences go. I will deal with the third sentence at the end.
This conundrum is why Communists opted for the dictatorship of the proletariat, not because they are lovers of repression and haters of freedom.
The rich capitalists, through their media control and also their cultural construction and fertilization creating Gramscian cultural hegemonies (what you referred to as "control over people's thoughts"), are typically able to prevent social services and state planning in a democracy.
This is why Communists say that you never really have a democracy in capitalism. You always have a dictatorship of capital. Be that as it may, most folks nowadays do not seem to want to live under a dictatorship of the proletariat. Nevertheless, the roadblocks in the way of socialist democracy present a a serious problem.
Not only are the capitalists able to thwart significant progressive change via media and cultural control, but the same capitalists, via control over the economy, are able to stage lockouts and capital strikes, to send their capital out of the country, to artificially create shortages, and to send wealthy housewives out into the streets beating pots and pans in a middle and upper class strike, etc.
These housewife pot-banging strikes occurred in Chile under Allende, Venezuela under Chavez, and just recently occurred again in Argentina when President Kirchner tried to tax booming agricultural exports.
The big ag producers in Argentina responded by trying to starve the cities by staging ag strikes and refusing to ship produce to the cities so the people would have nothing to eat.
What is ominous about this is that these same rich housewife pot-banging demos and a latifundista (large landowner elite) strike presaged the coup that brought the death squads into power in Argentina in the late 1970's and early 1980's.
The generals stayed in power for several years, during which they murdered 30,000 leftwing Argentines, the vast majority of whom were just idealistic young people working with the poor and had not taken up arms at all.
The capitalists will usually try to stage a coup through their control over the military too. That is why Hugo Chavez is correct in cleansing the corrupt bosses' oil workers' union, in cleansing the officer corps of the military of reactionary elements, and putting in some state media.
The corrupt state oil workers union was a white collar union of well to do managers who had been operating the state oil company as a personal ATM for decades. They were behind the owners' lockout strike that followed the coup, and after Chavez fired those who had been behind the lockout and sabotage, they destroyed much of the records and paperwork of the oil company before they left. Clearly they had to go.
In the previous coup attempt, the middle and upper-class officer corps supported the coup, but the enlisted men, who came from the poor, did not. The poor rank and file military refused their officers' orders and the officers backed down. Hence, cleansing the officer corps of coup supporters was a must.
Getting a foot in the door of the Right's media monopoly was also important. Previously, the rich had all of the papers, magazines and especially TV stations and they used these to wage continuous lying propaganda war against Chavez.
Furthermore, the entire rightwing media not only supported the coup attempt against Chavez but were actively complicit in it. For that treason, Chavez is perfectly within his rights to shut down the entire rightwing media. He only does not do this because of the international outcry it would arouse.
The Right did the same thing with their media control during the Allende regime in Chile, printing wild lies about Cuban armies offshore and hiding in Chilean bases ready to invade Chile and impose Communism at gunpoint.
Middle class and upper class capital strikes can be devastating to the economy, and most folks, no matter how revolutionary, just get tired of the economic pain after a while and vote to put the reactionaries back in power.
Sanctions work the same way. The US and UK and sometimes France and Canada (when those two latter states are in an imperialist mood) usually slap sanctions on democratic Left states as soon as possible.
Recent examples are Nicaragua, Haiti and Zimbabwe (at first democratic, now increasingly dictatorial), and this alone is enough to devastate the economy and cause the people to vote out the Left and put reactionaries back in power.
What happens is that in an effort to get some control of the country back and fight back against all of this US plots, the Left regime often starts becoming more authoritarian and less democratic. Then the US says it's a dictatorship and needs to be overthrown on that basis.
If that doesn't work, the US forms a reactionary contra counterrevolutionary army that goes around killing any civilian that is pro-Left, murdering teachers and health care workers, burning down schools, ag cooperatives and health care facilities and just making the place ungovernable. In order to fend off contras and coups, Chavez has built up his military and even armed the population.
One more thing the US does is to flood money into the democratic Left country to buy the election of the reactionaries via all sorts of fake civil society groups. A good way to stop this is to ban all money coming to political groups from outside the country, but that is easier said than done. The money seems to find its way in anyway.
The US and its reactionary allies also stage bombings, shootings, riots, etc, against democratic Left states, and then often blames them on the Left. This is what they did in Chavez' Venezuela, Aristide's Haiti and Mossadegh's Iran.
If worse comes to worse and none of the above works, the Left regime is overthrown by a coup and replacement by a reactionary dictatorship. This dictatorship typically then institutes a reign of terror in which anywhere from 100's to 1 million progressives are killed all over the land. This is what happened in Indonesia in 1965, when 1 million Leftists were killed in a CIA coup.
What is even creepier is that while the Left is in power, the CIA is usually running around the country making up lists of leftwingers. As soon as the coup comes, the CIA hands over the lists to the death squad Right now in power, and they use these lists to hunt down progressives and murder them.
So if a Left regime is in power, there is always the terror of a future coup followed by a murder spree against anyone politically active in the regime. This is enough to make people afraid to get politically active.
The reign of terror itself so so terrorizes the population that most people are afraid to get involved in progressive politics for years or even decades afterwards. Why get involved? Who is to say when the death squads will come back in power and try to kill you for being politically active in Left politics.
All of this makes socialist democracy or even social democracy in backwards states almost impossible to achieve.
On the other hand, lots of leftwingers are trying to figure out a way to have some sort of socialist or even Marxist democracy, despite all the challenges. The Sandinistas had a democratic socialist revolution and Hugo Chavez is having one too. The Nepalese Maoists support 100% democracy. There's new thinking with a lot of Communists nowadays that socialism is not really possible without total democracy.
When I look at Cuba and I think about a few dissidents getting thrown in prison, is that really worse than masses of people dying early from preventable death or not having enough food to eat, or living in shantytown hovels, or prostituting themselves, or homeless kids sniffing glue, turning into criminals and getting killed by cops as happens all over Latin America?
Third World capitalist nightmare states punish an awful lot of innocent people too. Doesn't Cuba punish a lot fewer innocent people by clapping a few dissidents in prison than are harmed in these failing 3rd world capitalist states?
In India, capitalism is killing 4 million people a year. That's a five-alarm fire right there. If we had a socialist revolution there even with a dictatorship and saved 4 million lives a year, would it be worth it for a few folks slapped in prison?
I do think that the new way of Chavez, the Sandinistas, the FMLN of El Salvador and the Nepalese Maoists is the better way to go. Nothing wrong with democracy. If the people reject socialism at the polls and go back to capitalism and lots of them go hungry, go homeless, drink sewage water, get sick, get crippled and start dying, I guess we can say that they made a choice to have that happen to themselves.
Most socialist countries did go socialist for a while (usually decades) to develop the economy and then go towards capitalism after they were pretty well developed.
People have no idea how much of China's economic growth is based on the foundations laid by decades of Maoism. At any rate, most do not realize China is still a very socialist country in many ways.
The Communists in Russia built that place up from nothing. Without the USSR, Russia would probably be like India or Afghanistan. The Vietnamese and Laotian Communists are also putting in a lot of capitalism, and North Korea now has joint partnerships for foreign investors. I support Vietnam, Laos, North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela in their experiments at mixed economy. I also really like social market of Belarus.
Really what we ought to look at is does the system give us the outcomes that we want? If it does, it doesn't matter what mixtures of socialist, collective and private ownership it has.
There are also all sorts of ways of enterprise ownership.
We can have nonprofits, labor collectives, families, single owners, neighborhoods, towns, cities, states and nations. All of these forms of ownership are operating all over the world as you read this.
The cooperative sector in particular is a great way to go, and most do not realize it is a non-capitalist economic system. Worker-owned firms compete with each other, and there is no exploitation of labor as in capitalism.
One of the best examples of that is the Mondragon cooperatives in the Basque Country. Most Cuban agriculture is now run by cooperatives. In the cooperative model, you get away from the management-labor conflict you see in capitalism.
Note: Readers should carefully read the Commenting Rules before commenting to avoid having their comments edited or deleted and to avoid being banned from the site.
Sunday, July 27, 2008
In America, Socialism Is Everywhere
There seems to be a lot of confusion about what a welfare state really is. A commenter in the comments section who says he supports the free market also supports the welfare state.
But the two are antithetical. A free market wants to eliminate all welfare statism, and in a welfare state, there are substantial restrictions on the free market. What the commenter meant was that he supported most of the economy being in private as opposed to state hands.
Truth is that a welfare state is socialism in practice. It's a form of socialism often called social democracy. Any state with welfare statism in whatever quantity or quality has some form of social democracy or socialism, no matter how meager. That is why we socialists are happy to say that almost all states on Earth have at least some socialism these days and we predict that clearly, the future of the world will be some form of socialism.
All welfare state programs are socialist programs. Any government or public program is a socialist program, de facto. There is much confusion about the word socialism.
Everything public is generally socialist.
Let us make a list of all of the de facto socialist programs in the US:
Public lands, parks, roads, housing, food stamps, health care, education from kindergarten to graduate school, education grants and loans, stipends and assistance for low income folks such as renters' assistance and negative income tax, national forests, national parks, public airports, public railways, pubic mass transportation such as buses and trains, libraries, research, utilities such as water, electricity and radio and TV airwaves, shipping lanes and public ports, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, WIC, welfare, disability, unemployment insurance, health and building code inspectors and laws, environmental laws and regulations, health and safety codes in the workplace, labor laws many and varied, the Federal Reserve, the FDIC, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the Post Office, garbage collection and recycling, road sweeping, irrigation canals, dams and water districts, ambulances, disaster personnel and homeland security, firefighters urban and wildland, prisons and corrections, including prison labor provided free to cities and towns that cannot afford to hire labor, public hospitals and border controls, immigration laws and enforcement personnel, vaccination and public health initiatives, flood control districts and projects, mosquito abatement, predator and pest control, sewage pipes and treatment, telephone lines, the Internet, customs laws and enforcement, alien pest control at the borders, disease epidemic abatement and control including mass food recalls (salmonella epidemic) groundwater recharging, cloud-seeding, road-salting and snowplowing, public campaign financing, game wardens, fishing and hunting regulations, conservation easements, government land buyouts in regularly flooded areas, wildlife refuges, homeless shelters, election teams, business licenses, drug approval and regulation, laws against misleading advertising and drug claims, rural electrification, consumer protection laws, animal control including destruction of rabid or dangerous animals and pets, fish stocking, anti-fraud legislation, civil rights laws and enforcement, the list goes on and on.
No doubt I have left some out.
Nowadays, towns, cities and possibly even states even run for-profit enterprises. This is actually one of the fastest growing sectors of our economy, believe it or not. The cooperative sector (cooperatives or labor collectives) is also growing very fast, but you never hear about it either.
All of the are socialist programs. Even police and military are best seen as socialist programs, since in the 3rd world, the rich are loath to fund them, and both police and military are paid out of taxes. Most any government service that is paid out of taxation is in some way or another a socialist program.
The libertarians are quite correct on this when they say that all of the above are socialist programs.
The hardest core libertarians want to get rid of all or most of them on the grounds that they are all socialist programs. I don't agree with that, but they are ideologically correct in identifying a socialist program for what it is.
When you look at that list above, it's actually kind of frightening. At first glance, it seems like government barely exists in the US, but when you sit down and tally it all up, socialist and government programs are just about everywhere. If you hate government and socialism, there is a lot to be upset about.
Note: Readers should carefully read the Commenting Rules before commenting to avoid having their comments edited or deleted and to avoid being banned from the site.
But the two are antithetical. A free market wants to eliminate all welfare statism, and in a welfare state, there are substantial restrictions on the free market. What the commenter meant was that he supported most of the economy being in private as opposed to state hands.
Truth is that a welfare state is socialism in practice. It's a form of socialism often called social democracy. Any state with welfare statism in whatever quantity or quality has some form of social democracy or socialism, no matter how meager. That is why we socialists are happy to say that almost all states on Earth have at least some socialism these days and we predict that clearly, the future of the world will be some form of socialism.
All welfare state programs are socialist programs. Any government or public program is a socialist program, de facto. There is much confusion about the word socialism.
Everything public is generally socialist.
Let us make a list of all of the de facto socialist programs in the US:
Public lands, parks, roads, housing, food stamps, health care, education from kindergarten to graduate school, education grants and loans, stipends and assistance for low income folks such as renters' assistance and negative income tax, national forests, national parks, public airports, public railways, pubic mass transportation such as buses and trains, libraries, research, utilities such as water, electricity and radio and TV airwaves, shipping lanes and public ports, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, WIC, welfare, disability, unemployment insurance, health and building code inspectors and laws, environmental laws and regulations, health and safety codes in the workplace, labor laws many and varied, the Federal Reserve, the FDIC, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the Post Office, garbage collection and recycling, road sweeping, irrigation canals, dams and water districts, ambulances, disaster personnel and homeland security, firefighters urban and wildland, prisons and corrections, including prison labor provided free to cities and towns that cannot afford to hire labor, public hospitals and border controls, immigration laws and enforcement personnel, vaccination and public health initiatives, flood control districts and projects, mosquito abatement, predator and pest control, sewage pipes and treatment, telephone lines, the Internet, customs laws and enforcement, alien pest control at the borders, disease epidemic abatement and control including mass food recalls (salmonella epidemic) groundwater recharging, cloud-seeding, road-salting and snowplowing, public campaign financing, game wardens, fishing and hunting regulations, conservation easements, government land buyouts in regularly flooded areas, wildlife refuges, homeless shelters, election teams, business licenses, drug approval and regulation, laws against misleading advertising and drug claims, rural electrification, consumer protection laws, animal control including destruction of rabid or dangerous animals and pets, fish stocking, anti-fraud legislation, civil rights laws and enforcement, the list goes on and on.
No doubt I have left some out.
Nowadays, towns, cities and possibly even states even run for-profit enterprises. This is actually one of the fastest growing sectors of our economy, believe it or not. The cooperative sector (cooperatives or labor collectives) is also growing very fast, but you never hear about it either.
All of the are socialist programs. Even police and military are best seen as socialist programs, since in the 3rd world, the rich are loath to fund them, and both police and military are paid out of taxes. Most any government service that is paid out of taxation is in some way or another a socialist program.
The libertarians are quite correct on this when they say that all of the above are socialist programs.
The hardest core libertarians want to get rid of all or most of them on the grounds that they are all socialist programs. I don't agree with that, but they are ideologically correct in identifying a socialist program for what it is.
When you look at that list above, it's actually kind of frightening. At first glance, it seems like government barely exists in the US, but when you sit down and tally it all up, socialist and government programs are just about everywhere. If you hate government and socialism, there is a lot to be upset about.
Note: Readers should carefully read the Commenting Rules before commenting to avoid having their comments edited or deleted and to avoid being banned from the site.
Saturday, July 26, 2008
Do Capitalists Support Pubic Health and Education?
In a response to my post, The Paradox of Capitalist Regulation, brilliant British commenter huy suggests that capitalists nowadays are enlightened enough to see that public health and education are needed for the workforce. I argue otherwise below.
Huy:
If you look at the 3rd World, the capitalist classes there do not want public education and they certainly do not want state health care. Even here in the US, the capitalist class has waged all-out war on public education and national health care through the Republican Party, although the Democratic Party also now seems to oppose national health care.
In parts of the world where national health care has been put in, the capitalists and their rightwing parties quickly wage ideological warfare to get rid of it.
Europe is an unusual case, probably due to circumstances discussed in my earlier post, For Justice, A River of Blood.
Europe was a very rightwing place in the 1930's. WW2 completely destroyed most of the European Right, defeated all rightwing governments, killed, wounded or imprisoned many of the rightwingers themselves, destroyed or made illegal their organizations and dissolved much of their wealth and power, and more importantly, humiliated them and completely discredited rightwing ideology.
As a consequence, the Right was in disarray for decades after WW2 in Europe, and they have not yet regained their power. After the war, there was a Cold War threat from the USSR and from Left groups all over the rest of Europe.
In order to co-opt the Soviet model and the West European Left, the ruling classes in Europe cut deals with workers, consumers and society in which a Social Contract was erected in the form of a socialism called variously the social market or social democracy. Due to the decimation and discrediting of the European Right, even European elites and media bought into social democratic ideology.
Hence we see in France large Leftwing papers like Liberation, huge Euro-Communist parties getting 10-30% of the vote and even ruling states in Italy. A Gramscian cultural hegemony was constructed by the Left in post-war Europe, such that the media and culture itself promoted social democracy as the normal way for a society to operate.
Elites in Scandinavia formed collegial relations with Communist and Leftist states and Leftist guerrillas on the basis that they were all socialists. For instance, Scandinavian governments had friendly relations with Sandinista Nicaragua, Cuba and Vietnam, along with the FMLN and FARC guerrillas in El Salvador and Colombia.
Scandinavian governments gave generous aid to the Third World, often in pro-people forms with no capitalist or reactionary strings attached. This had the effect of taking the wind out of the sails of West European Communists. In a relatively just social democratic society, most saw little need for revolution.
In Europe, even the capitalists have gone along with national health care, although in the UK they have been whittling away at it since Thatcher. European executives love their free national health care and paid six week vacations.
However, in much of the rest of the world, capitalists have rolled back national health and education. In China, national health care is apparently gone as a right. In Russia, too, it scarcely exists anymore, while education has been decimated along with educated persons and professions.
In some of East European states like Bulgaria, health care has been devastated. The first thing the hero of both US parties, Nicaraguan President Violeta Chamorro, did when the Sandinistas were voted out was to get rid of free public education and free national health care.
In Canada right now, the rightwing party and the business class have declared war on the national health care system (an ongoing project for a good 15 years or so now), but it is popular, so they have to tread lightly.
If the business classes in the US supported public education and national health care, we would not have a decades-long war against both of them waged by the party of business, the Republican Party, and supported by the business class in its entirety. It is true that some more enlightened US capitalists (especially big businesses) do support public education and even national health care, but they are an exception.
In this sense, the US small business class is even more reactionary than US big businesses. The US small business class supported Ross Perot and Ron Paul and are often far to the Right of the corporate guys.
This rightwing populism can and does lead to fascism. Small business and the petit bourgeois were the army behind fascism in Nazi Germany and have led many far-right movements in the US too.
The petit bourgeois resents the plutocratic elites for screwing them, but on the other hand also resents the working classes for being unionized and making good money via union wages. They feel oppressed by both groups.
Also, many petit bourgeois did not go to college, so they resent those white collar workers (seen as intellectuals and professionals) who got degrees and the resulting higher-paying jobs.
The petit bourgeois work in offices, banks and stores as clerks, tellers, low-ranking managers, etc. This class sector is often equated with something like the lower middle class. They often have no class consciousness at all, which is why they are often fodder for the Far Right.
What you are advocating above, huy, is not the free market at all, since the free market advocates getting rid of most to all government spending and regulation. Instead, you are advocating for socialism in one of its many forms. This form being the social market or social democracy.
I am a strong supporter of social democracy along the lines of the European model. The social market is a regulated capitalism with many government programs as a safety net and considerable government involvement in and even ownership of parts of the economy. In Sweden, 93% of the economy is private, but almost everyone, including managers and office workers, is unionized.
Government involvement in the economy takes the form of industry guidance as a corporatist element. Ownership of aspects of the economy takes the form of ownership of large industries like aircraft and ship building, national airlines, vehicle manufacturing, national rail, etc. It's worked quite well.
Keep in mind that capitalists are loath to invest in industries like ship building in which it may take 100 years to make your first profit. These industries need to be state-run for a long time.
Further, passenger rail is almost never profitable for the private sector, so they just don't run passenger trains. Since it operates at a loss as its nature, it must be run by the state.
This is what is so sick about the endless demands on Amtrak to make a profit - it is almost impossible for Amtrak to make a profit, because large passenger rail networks almost never do. In order to profit, they would have to charge so much money that they would hardly get any passengers.
In the same way, city buses never run at a profit either, hence we never see the private sector running passenger buses inside cities. Do you see any private rail lines running passenger rail in any areas of the US? Of course not.
Why? Because it's not profitable. Passenger rail must be run by the state for it to exist at all. Demands for Amtrak to run a profit are perverse, dishonest and wrong. How many Americans think Amtrak needs to run a profit? Of those with an opinion, possibly most. This is what rightwing propaganda will do to you.
Note: Readers should carefully read the Commenting Rules before commenting to avoid having their comments edited or deleted and to avoid being banned from the site.
Huy:
I would say that history has taught capitalism that free education and law and order run by the state is essential for capitalism to work, as without those things capitalism fails.I respond:
It looks like capitalism is learning across the globe that free and equal health provided by the state is also essential for capitalism to run (from a free market economic point of view).
Socialism wants national health and education for the benefit of the people, while capitalism wants national health and education for the benefit of the market and growth of the economy, An economy with higher-skilled, more versatile workers who are in good health is a more productive one.
I consider myself vey leftwing and technocratic, and I'm deeply in favour of the free market, but only if the state provides good free education and health for all, minimum wage, poverty benefits, unemployment benefits and the chance for adults to get apprenticeships and qualifications for free when ever they need to or want to (within reason) so as to allow the lower-skilled workers to keep up with the fast pace of the free market and all the job cuts and creations that come with it.
The free market is humanity's best hope for destroying poverty, but only if it is galvanized by the state properly, whereby social mobility and equal opportunity and social justice and lack of social deprivation is followed through. This makes both moral and economic sense.
If you look at the 3rd World, the capitalist classes there do not want public education and they certainly do not want state health care. Even here in the US, the capitalist class has waged all-out war on public education and national health care through the Republican Party, although the Democratic Party also now seems to oppose national health care.
In parts of the world where national health care has been put in, the capitalists and their rightwing parties quickly wage ideological warfare to get rid of it.
Europe is an unusual case, probably due to circumstances discussed in my earlier post, For Justice, A River of Blood.
Europe was a very rightwing place in the 1930's. WW2 completely destroyed most of the European Right, defeated all rightwing governments, killed, wounded or imprisoned many of the rightwingers themselves, destroyed or made illegal their organizations and dissolved much of their wealth and power, and more importantly, humiliated them and completely discredited rightwing ideology.
As a consequence, the Right was in disarray for decades after WW2 in Europe, and they have not yet regained their power. After the war, there was a Cold War threat from the USSR and from Left groups all over the rest of Europe.
In order to co-opt the Soviet model and the West European Left, the ruling classes in Europe cut deals with workers, consumers and society in which a Social Contract was erected in the form of a socialism called variously the social market or social democracy. Due to the decimation and discrediting of the European Right, even European elites and media bought into social democratic ideology.
Hence we see in France large Leftwing papers like Liberation, huge Euro-Communist parties getting 10-30% of the vote and even ruling states in Italy. A Gramscian cultural hegemony was constructed by the Left in post-war Europe, such that the media and culture itself promoted social democracy as the normal way for a society to operate.
Elites in Scandinavia formed collegial relations with Communist and Leftist states and Leftist guerrillas on the basis that they were all socialists. For instance, Scandinavian governments had friendly relations with Sandinista Nicaragua, Cuba and Vietnam, along with the FMLN and FARC guerrillas in El Salvador and Colombia.
Scandinavian governments gave generous aid to the Third World, often in pro-people forms with no capitalist or reactionary strings attached. This had the effect of taking the wind out of the sails of West European Communists. In a relatively just social democratic society, most saw little need for revolution.
In Europe, even the capitalists have gone along with national health care, although in the UK they have been whittling away at it since Thatcher. European executives love their free national health care and paid six week vacations.
However, in much of the rest of the world, capitalists have rolled back national health and education. In China, national health care is apparently gone as a right. In Russia, too, it scarcely exists anymore, while education has been decimated along with educated persons and professions.
In some of East European states like Bulgaria, health care has been devastated. The first thing the hero of both US parties, Nicaraguan President Violeta Chamorro, did when the Sandinistas were voted out was to get rid of free public education and free national health care.
In Canada right now, the rightwing party and the business class have declared war on the national health care system (an ongoing project for a good 15 years or so now), but it is popular, so they have to tread lightly.
If the business classes in the US supported public education and national health care, we would not have a decades-long war against both of them waged by the party of business, the Republican Party, and supported by the business class in its entirety. It is true that some more enlightened US capitalists (especially big businesses) do support public education and even national health care, but they are an exception.
In this sense, the US small business class is even more reactionary than US big businesses. The US small business class supported Ross Perot and Ron Paul and are often far to the Right of the corporate guys.
This rightwing populism can and does lead to fascism. Small business and the petit bourgeois were the army behind fascism in Nazi Germany and have led many far-right movements in the US too.
The petit bourgeois resents the plutocratic elites for screwing them, but on the other hand also resents the working classes for being unionized and making good money via union wages. They feel oppressed by both groups.
Also, many petit bourgeois did not go to college, so they resent those white collar workers (seen as intellectuals and professionals) who got degrees and the resulting higher-paying jobs.
The petit bourgeois work in offices, banks and stores as clerks, tellers, low-ranking managers, etc. This class sector is often equated with something like the lower middle class. They often have no class consciousness at all, which is why they are often fodder for the Far Right.
What you are advocating above, huy, is not the free market at all, since the free market advocates getting rid of most to all government spending and regulation. Instead, you are advocating for socialism in one of its many forms. This form being the social market or social democracy.
I am a strong supporter of social democracy along the lines of the European model. The social market is a regulated capitalism with many government programs as a safety net and considerable government involvement in and even ownership of parts of the economy. In Sweden, 93% of the economy is private, but almost everyone, including managers and office workers, is unionized.
Government involvement in the economy takes the form of industry guidance as a corporatist element. Ownership of aspects of the economy takes the form of ownership of large industries like aircraft and ship building, national airlines, vehicle manufacturing, national rail, etc. It's worked quite well.
Keep in mind that capitalists are loath to invest in industries like ship building in which it may take 100 years to make your first profit. These industries need to be state-run for a long time.
Further, passenger rail is almost never profitable for the private sector, so they just don't run passenger trains. Since it operates at a loss as its nature, it must be run by the state.
This is what is so sick about the endless demands on Amtrak to make a profit - it is almost impossible for Amtrak to make a profit, because large passenger rail networks almost never do. In order to profit, they would have to charge so much money that they would hardly get any passengers.
In the same way, city buses never run at a profit either, hence we never see the private sector running passenger buses inside cities. Do you see any private rail lines running passenger rail in any areas of the US? Of course not.
Why? Because it's not profitable. Passenger rail must be run by the state for it to exist at all. Demands for Amtrak to run a profit are perverse, dishonest and wrong. How many Americans think Amtrak needs to run a profit? Of those with an opinion, possibly most. This is what rightwing propaganda will do to you.
Note: Readers should carefully read the Commenting Rules before commenting to avoid having their comments edited or deleted and to avoid being banned from the site.
The Necessity and Benefits of Unions in Capitalism
Responding to my Unions and Wage - Productivity Increases post, James Schipper notes:
James, your comments about restricting the labor supply as a necessity for the working class are spot on. I personally never met a labor shortage I could not love. Labor surpluses cannot ever be good for any workers, but it's the capitalists' dream.
That's why they speak solemnly of such things as "the reserve army of surplus labor" - this entity, capitalist economics classes will ponderously intone, is necessary for the proper working of the capitalist system. Getting rid of this reserve army will be a disaster for the capitalist system.
I believe that we could easily have full employment in the US via public sector jobs at the minimum wage. I should be quite affordable, but the capitalist class would scream bloody murder at the tightening of the labor supply and the drying up of their "reserve army of surplus labor".
In general, those countries that are the most unionized have the highest wages and best working conditions for their workers, along with the best social democratic societies for everyone as a whole. I point out that the Swedish workforce is about 90% unionized.
Also, the US labor force was 43% unionized during the 1950's. During this period, all economic classes in the US were getting a fairly equivalent share of the economic pie. That means that if the top 20% gained an ~18% rise in income, the bottom 20% also gained about a ~18% rise in income.
It does not mean that the top 20% and the bottom 20% had anywhere near equivalent incomes. It only means that as the economic pie grew, each income sector was accorded a democratic slice of the pie.
Around 1973, this started to collapse, and things have been falling apart ever since. I pointed out in an earlier post that the bottom 80% of US workers have actually suffered a wage decline in the past 28 years, a time of good economic growth and great increases in productivity.
This can be attributed, more than anything else, to declines in the % of the US workforce that is unionized. We can practically match these two lines on a chart.
It is true that Latin America is not a paradise for workers. Nevertheless, many workers are in unions, and the unions are often very, very militant. They call strikes all the time, and the strikes are often violent street actions that bring out the police and even army.
It's clear that Latin American workers benefit from their unions, but I'm not sure how unionized they are. Clearly they would be much worse off if they were not unionized.
Your comments about unions lowering wages are somewhat theoretical and that is not necessarily the way things work in the real world.
In the real world, when Sector A of an industry goes union, non-union companies, while still fighting off the unions ferociously, will often up wages and benefits to near the levels of the unionized sector just to compete for workers. In this way, unionizing even a part of an industry can benefit the whole industry, even the non-union sectors.
Any sensible union will work with management to get a fair share for the workers while still enabling the business to remain profitable and stay in business. If the company goes out of business, no one will have a job and the union will be superfluous, with no members.
Sensible unions have demanded that management open their books and in some cases, have even taken pay and benefit cuts in order to keep their jobs. A pay-benefit cut with a job is still better than no job and no benefits at all.
Without unions, the management - union power ratio is 100-0. Management has all the power and workers have zero. With the union, ideally it is now 50-50. Each side has the power that they ought to have. If for no other reason, unions are good only in that they guarantee the proper and moral democratic rights of workers in an enterprise.
With a growing economy, a raise in teacher pay does not necessarily result in a tax increase as long as tax revenues are increasing in tandem with economic growth.
In comments to the same post, huy, a bright commenter from the UK, notes:
Unions are *always* needed in capitalism. Otherwise the workers pretty much get zero, or less than zero. The capitalists automatically have all the power. Unions are just the way for workers to have power too. It equalizes the score.
Productivity increases are certainly possible during a period of declining wages and these increases are also caused by technology, not only workers themselves. So it is not really necessary for capitalists to pay workers more to get productivity increases. There are many other ways - speedup, technology, overwork.
Without a union, a capitalist is free to brutalize workers to get more per hour out of them. If they complain, he can fire them and there will be someone ready to take their place. In the past 28 years, wages for 80% of the US workforce declined while productivity had major increases. This shows you that capitalists need not pay workers more to get more productivity out of them.
The rich entrepreneur will not "sometimes" forget this, he will always forget this. Wages are a cost to the capitalist, and all costs are to be kept to a minimum using whatever means are possible. If you get an MBA these days at a business school, they will hammer this into your head until you have a headache.
Capitalism only works for workers, in general, to the extent that they are organized in unions. In the US, office workers have always resented unionization, due to class sensibilities. They tend to come from a bourgeois background, and they feel superior on cultural grounds to the working classes.
It's the old white collar versus blue collar thing. Office workers associate unions with the blue collar workers they feel superior to. Joining a union would be like putting on overalls and a cap and bringing a lunch pail to work. It's humiliating, and this is why they do not join unions.
Teachers and nurses are an exception to that trend. These are some of the last of the powerful unions in the US, and this is why there is so much rage directed against them in the corporate media and rightwing culture that is now equivalent to American culture.
Note: Readers should carefully read the Commenting Rules before commenting to avoid having their comments edited or deleted and to avoid being banned from the site.
You are quite right in arguing that no capitalist will increase wages as long as he can hire more workers at the going wage. That's why it's important to restrict the supply of labor within a country by immigration controls and by convincing workers to limit their offspring.I respond:
One 19th French economist was once asked what advice he had for the proletariat, and he answered: "Faites moins d'enfants" = make fewer babies. Not bad advice. As long as the proletarians keep increasing their numbers, their chances of prospering are so much smaller.
With open borders, the very large number of unskilled workers in the Third World are a huge reserve army of the unemployed.
And then some people still wonder why so many capitalists like immigration.
I quite agree with you that unions can be very beneficial for their members. However, it is very doubtful that unions can do much for the wage-earning class as a whole.
Suppose that the entire workforce of Peru became unionized, then workers in that country would still receive very low wages simply because average Peruvian productivity is very low. People can't consume more than they produce, unless they are subsidized from abroad.
A good case can even be made that the gains of unionized workers often comes at the expense of non-unionized workers. Suppose that in a country there are two sectors, A and B. Neither sector is unionized and in both sectors the hourly wage is 10 dollars. Now sector A becomes unionized and the union drives up the wages in that sector to 15 per hour.
As a result, sector A may employ fewer workers, and the laid-off workers then enter sector B, where they drive down wages to for instance 8 dollars.
What also may happen is that the products of sector A become more expensive, thereby reducing the purchasing power of workers in sector B, who also consume those products.
I'm certainly not a union basher, but there are limits to what unions can accomplish. If the economy is growing fast, then it becomes so much easier for unions to get wage increases. That's what happened in Western Europe after WWII.
In Canada, some of the strongest unions are now in the public sector, which makes them rather unpopular because the high wages of their members will translate into tax increases. Everybody understands that, if teachers get big wage increases, this will mean higher taxes for the general public.
James, your comments about restricting the labor supply as a necessity for the working class are spot on. I personally never met a labor shortage I could not love. Labor surpluses cannot ever be good for any workers, but it's the capitalists' dream.
That's why they speak solemnly of such things as "the reserve army of surplus labor" - this entity, capitalist economics classes will ponderously intone, is necessary for the proper working of the capitalist system. Getting rid of this reserve army will be a disaster for the capitalist system.
I believe that we could easily have full employment in the US via public sector jobs at the minimum wage. I should be quite affordable, but the capitalist class would scream bloody murder at the tightening of the labor supply and the drying up of their "reserve army of surplus labor".
In general, those countries that are the most unionized have the highest wages and best working conditions for their workers, along with the best social democratic societies for everyone as a whole. I point out that the Swedish workforce is about 90% unionized.
Also, the US labor force was 43% unionized during the 1950's. During this period, all economic classes in the US were getting a fairly equivalent share of the economic pie. That means that if the top 20% gained an ~18% rise in income, the bottom 20% also gained about a ~18% rise in income.
It does not mean that the top 20% and the bottom 20% had anywhere near equivalent incomes. It only means that as the economic pie grew, each income sector was accorded a democratic slice of the pie.
Around 1973, this started to collapse, and things have been falling apart ever since. I pointed out in an earlier post that the bottom 80% of US workers have actually suffered a wage decline in the past 28 years, a time of good economic growth and great increases in productivity.
This can be attributed, more than anything else, to declines in the % of the US workforce that is unionized. We can practically match these two lines on a chart.
It is true that Latin America is not a paradise for workers. Nevertheless, many workers are in unions, and the unions are often very, very militant. They call strikes all the time, and the strikes are often violent street actions that bring out the police and even army.
It's clear that Latin American workers benefit from their unions, but I'm not sure how unionized they are. Clearly they would be much worse off if they were not unionized.
Your comments about unions lowering wages are somewhat theoretical and that is not necessarily the way things work in the real world.
In the real world, when Sector A of an industry goes union, non-union companies, while still fighting off the unions ferociously, will often up wages and benefits to near the levels of the unionized sector just to compete for workers. In this way, unionizing even a part of an industry can benefit the whole industry, even the non-union sectors.
Any sensible union will work with management to get a fair share for the workers while still enabling the business to remain profitable and stay in business. If the company goes out of business, no one will have a job and the union will be superfluous, with no members.
Sensible unions have demanded that management open their books and in some cases, have even taken pay and benefit cuts in order to keep their jobs. A pay-benefit cut with a job is still better than no job and no benefits at all.
Without unions, the management - union power ratio is 100-0. Management has all the power and workers have zero. With the union, ideally it is now 50-50. Each side has the power that they ought to have. If for no other reason, unions are good only in that they guarantee the proper and moral democratic rights of workers in an enterprise.
With a growing economy, a raise in teacher pay does not necessarily result in a tax increase as long as tax revenues are increasing in tandem with economic growth.
In comments to the same post, huy, a bright commenter from the UK, notes:
To increase productivity, workers need decent pay in order to work at their most productive, and sometimes unions are needed for this.I respond:
So capitalism actually needs unions to an extent, as sometimes a rich entrepreneur may forget that in order for his workers to work best, they need decent pay.
Unions are *always* needed in capitalism. Otherwise the workers pretty much get zero, or less than zero. The capitalists automatically have all the power. Unions are just the way for workers to have power too. It equalizes the score.
Productivity increases are certainly possible during a period of declining wages and these increases are also caused by technology, not only workers themselves. So it is not really necessary for capitalists to pay workers more to get productivity increases. There are many other ways - speedup, technology, overwork.
Without a union, a capitalist is free to brutalize workers to get more per hour out of them. If they complain, he can fire them and there will be someone ready to take their place. In the past 28 years, wages for 80% of the US workforce declined while productivity had major increases. This shows you that capitalists need not pay workers more to get more productivity out of them.
The rich entrepreneur will not "sometimes" forget this, he will always forget this. Wages are a cost to the capitalist, and all costs are to be kept to a minimum using whatever means are possible. If you get an MBA these days at a business school, they will hammer this into your head until you have a headache.
Capitalism only works for workers, in general, to the extent that they are organized in unions. In the US, office workers have always resented unionization, due to class sensibilities. They tend to come from a bourgeois background, and they feel superior on cultural grounds to the working classes.
It's the old white collar versus blue collar thing. Office workers associate unions with the blue collar workers they feel superior to. Joining a union would be like putting on overalls and a cap and bringing a lunch pail to work. It's humiliating, and this is why they do not join unions.
Teachers and nurses are an exception to that trend. These are some of the last of the powerful unions in the US, and this is why there is so much rage directed against them in the corporate media and rightwing culture that is now equivalent to American culture.
Note: Readers should carefully read the Commenting Rules before commenting to avoid having their comments edited or deleted and to avoid being banned from the site.
Friday, July 25, 2008
For Justice, a River of Blood
Or at least a rivulet.
Abimael Guzman, imprisoned leader of the Shining Path guerrillas in Peru, famously said that for the revolution to succeed, "Peru would have to cross a river of blood". Much of the civilized world was horrified by this bloodthirsty statement, but was he onto something?
I would argue that the vast majority of social progress achieved in the past 150 rivers has unfortunately occurred only after rivers of blood were shed. Or at the very least trickles. To but it bluntly, people had to die. They had to get hurt and die.
It's sad that it has to be that way, but it seems that that is just the way it is. Powerful people do not give up stuff just because they wake up in a good mood one day or go to church, find God and start feeling guilty.
Here in the US, Blacks only gained their liberation in the context of a devastating Civil War in which 100,000's of Americans shed their blood and lost their lives. Haitians only got rid of slavery by rising up and killing every single one of 25,000 Frenchmen on the island. For Algeria to blast free of colonialism and to shock the French out of the colonial habit, 1 million people, including 25,000 Frenchmen, died.
Britain only chucked colonialism after British soldiers died in Malaysia, India, Palestine and other places. Does anyone think even a modicum of a Palestinian state would exist had Palestinians not taken up the gun? Without the armed struggle of the Iraqi guerrillas, US troops would have ovverun Syria and possibly Iran by now.
The Basque Country has the considerable autonomy it does today only after 800 Spaniards died in the ETA's armed struggle. Land reform was only instituted in South Korea, Japan and Taiwan after the war to ward off the threat of Communism from North Korea and China.
Apartheid is gone in South Africa and one man one vote democracy is in its place for the most part only due to an armed campaign by the ANC stretching over decades.
US workers only got rights after bloody strikes in which workers were killed by goon squads.
The social market that James Schipper praised in Europe in earlier comments is also the project of massive labor union mobilization in Europe.
I would also argue that it was created by devastating the European Right, first by killing 10 million of them (10 million dead fascists in WW2), next by making rightwing ideology toxic for many years after the war, and finally by revolutionary pressure from the Far Left before and after the war, which led the business sector to seek out a class compromise and a social contract, mostly to ward off revolution.
Even the Swedish model mostly came into play in the 1930's when the nation was wracked by violent, radical and revolutionary labor actions all up and down the land. This so rocked the business and ruling classes that the Swedish model was created as a lesser evil alternative to ward off revolution.
Most do not realize that Swedish society was not very liberal during the 1930's. People are misled by the fact of Sweden's neutrality in the war to think that Swedes themselves were neutral. Most of the middle classes and certainly the business classes were firm Nazi supporters. Furthermore, I understand that Swedish businesses continued to supply the Nazis well into the war.
In Costa Rica, radical pressure helped create Costa Rican social democracy, now deteriorating after Reagan ordered the Costa Ricans at gunpoint in the 1980's to get rid of it.
After WW2, Costa Rica outlawed the Communist Party, killed 6,000 Communists, instituted a social democracy to buy off social unrest and got rid of the military as a rather interesting way to top it off. Without revolutionary pressure in 1946 and the bodies of 6,000 Communists, Costa Rican social democracy may never have occurred.
Mexico today has some semblance of socialism and a land reform that enables to poor to own small plots and at least survive and eat if they cannot find work only because 20 million Mexicans died during Pancho Villa's revolution that put Mexican feudalism in the grave forever. Most do not realize that Mexico was actually a horrible and truly feudal society as late as 1910. Yet it was.
In the same way, in El Salvador now, one can at least farm a small plot, eat and survive, something often not possible before the Revolution started. For that meager reform, 70,000 people died and Salvadoran feudalism was crushed, possibly forever.
Lenin said power never gives up without a fight. And most social reforms in capitalism have come on the heels, tragically, of a river of blood. Or at least a small stream.
Without pressure from below by revolutionaries and radicals, it is uncertain how many of the progressive social contracts in place in the world would exist.
Note: Readers should carefully read the Commenting Rules before commenting to avoid having their comments edited or deleted and to avoid being banned from the site.
Abimael Guzman, imprisoned leader of the Shining Path guerrillas in Peru, famously said that for the revolution to succeed, "Peru would have to cross a river of blood". Much of the civilized world was horrified by this bloodthirsty statement, but was he onto something?
I would argue that the vast majority of social progress achieved in the past 150 rivers has unfortunately occurred only after rivers of blood were shed. Or at the very least trickles. To but it bluntly, people had to die. They had to get hurt and die.
It's sad that it has to be that way, but it seems that that is just the way it is. Powerful people do not give up stuff just because they wake up in a good mood one day or go to church, find God and start feeling guilty.
Here in the US, Blacks only gained their liberation in the context of a devastating Civil War in which 100,000's of Americans shed their blood and lost their lives. Haitians only got rid of slavery by rising up and killing every single one of 25,000 Frenchmen on the island. For Algeria to blast free of colonialism and to shock the French out of the colonial habit, 1 million people, including 25,000 Frenchmen, died.
Britain only chucked colonialism after British soldiers died in Malaysia, India, Palestine and other places. Does anyone think even a modicum of a Palestinian state would exist had Palestinians not taken up the gun? Without the armed struggle of the Iraqi guerrillas, US troops would have ovverun Syria and possibly Iran by now.
The Basque Country has the considerable autonomy it does today only after 800 Spaniards died in the ETA's armed struggle. Land reform was only instituted in South Korea, Japan and Taiwan after the war to ward off the threat of Communism from North Korea and China.
Apartheid is gone in South Africa and one man one vote democracy is in its place for the most part only due to an armed campaign by the ANC stretching over decades.
US workers only got rights after bloody strikes in which workers were killed by goon squads.
The social market that James Schipper praised in Europe in earlier comments is also the project of massive labor union mobilization in Europe.
I would also argue that it was created by devastating the European Right, first by killing 10 million of them (10 million dead fascists in WW2), next by making rightwing ideology toxic for many years after the war, and finally by revolutionary pressure from the Far Left before and after the war, which led the business sector to seek out a class compromise and a social contract, mostly to ward off revolution.
Even the Swedish model mostly came into play in the 1930's when the nation was wracked by violent, radical and revolutionary labor actions all up and down the land. This so rocked the business and ruling classes that the Swedish model was created as a lesser evil alternative to ward off revolution.
Most do not realize that Swedish society was not very liberal during the 1930's. People are misled by the fact of Sweden's neutrality in the war to think that Swedes themselves were neutral. Most of the middle classes and certainly the business classes were firm Nazi supporters. Furthermore, I understand that Swedish businesses continued to supply the Nazis well into the war.
In Costa Rica, radical pressure helped create Costa Rican social democracy, now deteriorating after Reagan ordered the Costa Ricans at gunpoint in the 1980's to get rid of it.
After WW2, Costa Rica outlawed the Communist Party, killed 6,000 Communists, instituted a social democracy to buy off social unrest and got rid of the military as a rather interesting way to top it off. Without revolutionary pressure in 1946 and the bodies of 6,000 Communists, Costa Rican social democracy may never have occurred.
Mexico today has some semblance of socialism and a land reform that enables to poor to own small plots and at least survive and eat if they cannot find work only because 20 million Mexicans died during Pancho Villa's revolution that put Mexican feudalism in the grave forever. Most do not realize that Mexico was actually a horrible and truly feudal society as late as 1910. Yet it was.
In the same way, in El Salvador now, one can at least farm a small plot, eat and survive, something often not possible before the Revolution started. For that meager reform, 70,000 people died and Salvadoran feudalism was crushed, possibly forever.
Lenin said power never gives up without a fight. And most social reforms in capitalism have come on the heels, tragically, of a river of blood. Or at least a small stream.
Without pressure from below by revolutionaries and radicals, it is uncertain how many of the progressive social contracts in place in the world would exist.
Note: Readers should carefully read the Commenting Rules before commenting to avoid having their comments edited or deleted and to avoid being banned from the site.
Unions and Wage - Productivity Increases
James Schipper's comments in the comments section suggest that productivity naturally leads to increased wages in capitalism due to the laws of capital and labor. I argue that productivity increases during conditions of labor surplus normal in most capitalist states probably come mostly due to the militant actions of Organized Labor.
James does aver that the replacement of American workers with illegal alien labor did have an effect on the destruction of wages in the construction industry. I argue that there were two stages to the process.
First they broke the unions, then they hired the illegals. Those were the two stages. The exact same thing occurred in many manufacturing plants, especially meat processing. Slaughterhouses, poultry-processing and seafood processing plants all used to be good union jobs with high wages as recently as the 1980's.
First they took out the unions, then they brought in illegals or other immigrants to the work. Many other fields besides construction have been taken out by illegals, including painting and landscaping. My White friends did all of these jobs and made good or decent money doing it. Having your own landscaping business is still a good way for young White men to earn some decent money. So much for Americans won't mow lawns. This is all gone now as most of this has gone straight on over to illegals.
James' argument operates only in the cases of a labor shortage. With a vast surplus of labor, an "army of labor" as the capitalists call the teeming hordes of unemployed, there is not much need to raise wages to compete with other businesses for top employees, as there are 5 guys waiting to take the place of the guy who quits.
The notion that unions are not necessary for workers to have good working conditions is unique to union busters. If unions are superfluous, do nothing but harm workers, and don't even raise wages or improve conditions, why would anyone join one? Better yet, why would capitalists oppose them so ferociously?
The record all over the West seems to be that the more unionized a labor force is or was, the higher wages were. Economic growth used to be spread out among all income classes in the US back in the 1950's and 1960's. In the 1970's, this started to decline to the point now where, from 1980-1992, only the top 20% gained money and the entire bottom 80% of the population lost money.
I would argue that this is exactly how the capitalists wanted it. This occurred during the pro-business Reagan and Bush Administrations. Furthermore, the decline in US wages and the lack of filtering down of productivity dovetails perfectly with the devastation of US unions. Not only that, but the war on US unions, along with the theft of workers' productivity growth, was all part of a project by US business.
To say that in the US, the businessman is the worker's friend stretches reality. Unless the worker organizes to get a good wage, a share of economic and especially productivity growth and better conditions, thing look quite bleak.
James argues that it is better to work for a big business than a small one in Canada. This is probably true, but I would argue that workers are often treated better by very small businesses, who, around here anyway, often treat workers as if they are part of a family.
Note: Readers should carefully read the Commenting Rules before commenting to avoid having their comments edited or deleted and to avoid being banned from the site.
James does aver that the replacement of American workers with illegal alien labor did have an effect on the destruction of wages in the construction industry. I argue that there were two stages to the process.
First they broke the unions, then they hired the illegals. Those were the two stages. The exact same thing occurred in many manufacturing plants, especially meat processing. Slaughterhouses, poultry-processing and seafood processing plants all used to be good union jobs with high wages as recently as the 1980's.
First they took out the unions, then they brought in illegals or other immigrants to the work. Many other fields besides construction have been taken out by illegals, including painting and landscaping. My White friends did all of these jobs and made good or decent money doing it. Having your own landscaping business is still a good way for young White men to earn some decent money. So much for Americans won't mow lawns. This is all gone now as most of this has gone straight on over to illegals.
James' argument operates only in the cases of a labor shortage. With a vast surplus of labor, an "army of labor" as the capitalists call the teeming hordes of unemployed, there is not much need to raise wages to compete with other businesses for top employees, as there are 5 guys waiting to take the place of the guy who quits.
The notion that unions are not necessary for workers to have good working conditions is unique to union busters. If unions are superfluous, do nothing but harm workers, and don't even raise wages or improve conditions, why would anyone join one? Better yet, why would capitalists oppose them so ferociously?
The record all over the West seems to be that the more unionized a labor force is or was, the higher wages were. Economic growth used to be spread out among all income classes in the US back in the 1950's and 1960's. In the 1970's, this started to decline to the point now where, from 1980-1992, only the top 20% gained money and the entire bottom 80% of the population lost money.
I would argue that this is exactly how the capitalists wanted it. This occurred during the pro-business Reagan and Bush Administrations. Furthermore, the decline in US wages and the lack of filtering down of productivity dovetails perfectly with the devastation of US unions. Not only that, but the war on US unions, along with the theft of workers' productivity growth, was all part of a project by US business.
To say that in the US, the businessman is the worker's friend stretches reality. Unless the worker organizes to get a good wage, a share of economic and especially productivity growth and better conditions, thing look quite bleak.
James argues that it is better to work for a big business than a small one in Canada. This is probably true, but I would argue that workers are often treated better by very small businesses, who, around here anyway, often treat workers as if they are part of a family.
Note: Readers should carefully read the Commenting Rules before commenting to avoid having their comments edited or deleted and to avoid being banned from the site.
Jesus Loves Tortillas
Look closely and you can see the Son of God in yellow outline, Shroud of Turin-like, in the center of the heated and rolled slab of dough. If you're schizophrenic, this is a secret message telling you to go to the nearest taco truck, buy two rolled tacos of any type, and eat them, right now. If you aren't and are merely a believer, you may be having a religious experience right now. I'm not, but then, I'm so secular, I'm just this side of agnosticism.Guy shows up everywhere, huh? All those Mexican Catholics going to Mass all the time and praying finally had an effect. Jesus repays their prayers by showing up on their favorite form of flattened dough.
Wonder if he likes tacos too?
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The Paradox of Capitalist Regulation
James Schipper writes in the comments section:
The historical record shows that wage increases eventually follow productivity growth. For instance, in 1960 South Korea was dirt-poor, and naturally wages were extremely low. By 1990, SK had become a prosperous country, due to massive productivity growth, and wages were also much higher.
As workers become much more productive on average, they become more valuable to employers, who are therefore willing to pay them higher wages, for the same reason that a dairy farmer is willing to pay a higher price for a cow which gives 10,000 liters of milk per year than for a cow which gives 5,000 liters per year.
It seems to be true that wage increases in the US have not kept pace with productivity growth in the last 3 decades. I have no explanation for it.
It can't be doubted that the transition to a market economy in Russia was handled very badly. Such major changes should be introduced gradually. Just compare China's performance with Russia's in the 1990's.
The problem with Chile between 1973 and 1983 was that the country was completely opened to foreign economic influences almost overnight while the exchange rate was kept fixed. They liberalized the entire foreign sector, except the exchange rate. If they had also brought in flexible exchange rates, the results would have been less catastrophic.
I hate neoliberalism as much as you, but I'm a moderate economic liberal. I believe that durable prosperity is not possible without considerable private ownership of the means of production and free markets. The motto should be: the market when possible and the state when necessary.
The Chicago boys are like a doctor who always prescribes the same medicine and then argues that the medicine wasn't taken properly when some patients get worse.
Inflation is not bad for all capitalists. As a rule, inflation, or at least unexpected inflation, is bad for lenders and good for borrowers. Most companies are borrowers. Inflation tends to reduce the real wealth of lenders and increase the real wealth of borrowers.
Suppose that I lend you 10,000 for a year at 5% interest and on the assumption that inflation for the coming year will be 0%. Instead, inflation is 20%. After a year, I get my 10,000 back, but their real value is only 8,000. I lost 2,000 and you gained 2,000.
It is a libertarian myth that big government equals oppressive government. In what way do I become less free because in Canada the state provides most health care for free? I can't just demand any treatment that I like, but I wouldn't be able to that either if I were privately insured.
There is something fraudulent about neoliberalism. They constantly talk about freedom, but what they really mean is that they are opposed to economic egalitarianism. The freedom that they are most interested in is the freedom to make lots of money. Still, hostility to neoliberalism should not blind us toward the virtues of free enterprise, which are considerable.
I respond:
I really dislike capitalism, James, but I am the first to admit that pure socialism has some very serious problems. Socialism has done great at building economies for a while, but after a few decades, it starts bogging down into bureaucracy. Furthermore, while alleviating poverty, we have only been able to provide a low standard of living for the people. Social capital only goes so far - people want stuff too.
My attitude is that some capitalism may be necessary, like death and disease, but that doesn't mean it's a good thing by any means. Lots of nasty stuff is necessary.
Class war is continuous under capitalism.
Owners are continuously waging war against workers to take more of the profits generated by their enterprises. If there is X amount of profits from an enterprise, owners must decide how much to take out for themselves and how much to give to workers. Clearly they wish to give as little as possible to workers. So there is a battle between workers and owners to divvy up the profits from the enterprise.
Owners oppose increased % of profits going to workers since that means less for them, so they are always trying to cut down on the workers' % to get more for themselves. The tendency among capitalists would be to take 100% of productivity increases if they could get away with it. The only reason that workers get any % of productivity increases at all is when they organize to fight for it.
During the period you mention, the South Korean labor movement emerged and became extremely combative. This is probably the reason for the wage increases you mention. Capitalists will never give a wage increase just to be nice. Their whole project, in part, is to screw the worker to the greatest extent possible and even kill him if they can get away with it.
Indeed, capitalists kill millions of workers every year in the world, which is exactly what their project is designed to do. Workers and management are de facto enemies in capitalism, and if workers do not organize, they don't get much of anything.
I'm sure there were productivity increases in housing construction from 1975 to today and the prices of houses have certainly gone through the roof. At the same time, wages for construction workers have probably collapsed by anywhere from 50-80%. 100% of that vast surplus and probable productivity increase went into the hands of owners. Workers got less than zero. In a time of booming profits and probable productivity raises, instead of getting even a meager slice, they got a massive pay cut.
Builders reaped massive benefits from declining wages and from increased prices for their homes. Many industries have seen declining wages in the US since 1980 due in part to the busting of unions and their replacement typically with illegal immigrant or H-1B guest worker labor.
During a 15-year period in Guatemala from 1948-1963, the economy grew by 5% per year. During that same period, the % of the population living in poverty actually increased from 87% to 93%. 5% economic growth over 15 years equals a 75% increase in the size of the economy. 0% of the benefits of this economic growth went to the vast majority of the population.
This is how capitalism is supposed to work.
Every capitalist on Earth wants to live in a country like that - where owners, the rich and the upper middle class reap all or almost all of the benefits from economic growth and the workers get little, nothing, or even lose money. To avoid this, workers must organize into unions, since workers usually never get anything from capitalists without a fight. In the the 3rd World where murders of trade unionists are par for the course, it's often a deadly fight.
I repeat, capitalism is evil, but pure socialism doesn't seem to work very well.
I don't have much issues with small businesses, who often seem to really care about their employees and consumers (customers) and even in some cases, the environment and the society they live in. But Organized Small Business is always profoundly reactionary.
But big business is just bad. Whatever benefits it gives us in terms of jobs and decent products, good service or reduced prices is typically vastly outweighed by havoc it wreaks on society, the environment, the workers and consumers.
It's true that regulation and organized workers and consumers can ameliorate a lot of this downside, but in capitalist nations, the capitalist classes buy all the media and institute a Gramscian cultural hegemony over society with their media and cultural control. At the same time, they use their money and media and cultural power to buy the state itself which ideally ought to be regulating them in the interests of workers, consumers, the environment and society itself.
So you have a state that will do nothing in the face of the bulldozer of capital. The result is a flattened social society, a wrecked public sector, slums, homelessness, disease, early death, environmental devastation, harmed consumers and crippled workers and nothing in government to stop any of this.
The housing crisis is a case in point. Contra your assertion that the New Deal failed (which is actually rightwing revisionism against the New Deal), in fact, the New Deal, in particular the financial reforms - the FDIC which restored confidence in the banks, the SEC that regulated the stock market and Fannie Mae to bring back the mortgage market - is what finally got the economy going again.
This was one of the greatest accomplishments the US government ever did, it was wholly socialist in nature, and it was opposed ferociously by the Republican Party and the entire US business sector at the time. After Roosevelt rammed it through anyway, the business class vowed to wage struggle, for decades if they had to, to overturn these things.
Finally, by the 1990's, much of this regulatory structure had been whittled away.
Whittling away this structure had been a project of Capital since this regulatory apparatus had been put in place. Now that the regulation is a shadow of its former self, we have another Depression-like phenomena with the housing crisis, all the way to failed banks, bank runs, loss of deposits, etc. As one might expect.
This is the problem. The only way to keep capitalism from being completely nightmarish is to regulate it, and the capitalist sector reflexively fights to the death any attempts to regulate it.
Furthermore, they grab the media and culture itself to brainwash gullible workers and consumers to support their elitist agenda and to get the workers, consumers and society itself to oppose their own interests and support the contrary interests of Capital. Then they grab the state itself and prevent it from enacting those very regulations necessary for a civilized capitalism.
This is one of my primary problems with capitalism. Regulation is mandatory to keep capitalism halfway civilized, but the nature of the capitalist system, as described above, works in such a way as to make such regulation often extremely difficult or impossible.
span style="font-weight: bold;">Note: Readers should carefully read the Commenting Rules before commenting to avoid having their comments edited or deleted and to avoid being banned from the site.
The historical record shows that wage increases eventually follow productivity growth. For instance, in 1960 South Korea was dirt-poor, and naturally wages were extremely low. By 1990, SK had become a prosperous country, due to massive productivity growth, and wages were also much higher.
As workers become much more productive on average, they become more valuable to employers, who are therefore willing to pay them higher wages, for the same reason that a dairy farmer is willing to pay a higher price for a cow which gives 10,000 liters of milk per year than for a cow which gives 5,000 liters per year.
It seems to be true that wage increases in the US have not kept pace with productivity growth in the last 3 decades. I have no explanation for it.
It can't be doubted that the transition to a market economy in Russia was handled very badly. Such major changes should be introduced gradually. Just compare China's performance with Russia's in the 1990's.
The problem with Chile between 1973 and 1983 was that the country was completely opened to foreign economic influences almost overnight while the exchange rate was kept fixed. They liberalized the entire foreign sector, except the exchange rate. If they had also brought in flexible exchange rates, the results would have been less catastrophic.
I hate neoliberalism as much as you, but I'm a moderate economic liberal. I believe that durable prosperity is not possible without considerable private ownership of the means of production and free markets. The motto should be: the market when possible and the state when necessary.
The Chicago boys are like a doctor who always prescribes the same medicine and then argues that the medicine wasn't taken properly when some patients get worse.
Inflation is not bad for all capitalists. As a rule, inflation, or at least unexpected inflation, is bad for lenders and good for borrowers. Most companies are borrowers. Inflation tends to reduce the real wealth of lenders and increase the real wealth of borrowers.
Suppose that I lend you 10,000 for a year at 5% interest and on the assumption that inflation for the coming year will be 0%. Instead, inflation is 20%. After a year, I get my 10,000 back, but their real value is only 8,000. I lost 2,000 and you gained 2,000.
It is a libertarian myth that big government equals oppressive government. In what way do I become less free because in Canada the state provides most health care for free? I can't just demand any treatment that I like, but I wouldn't be able to that either if I were privately insured.
There is something fraudulent about neoliberalism. They constantly talk about freedom, but what they really mean is that they are opposed to economic egalitarianism. The freedom that they are most interested in is the freedom to make lots of money. Still, hostility to neoliberalism should not blind us toward the virtues of free enterprise, which are considerable.
I respond:
I really dislike capitalism, James, but I am the first to admit that pure socialism has some very serious problems. Socialism has done great at building economies for a while, but after a few decades, it starts bogging down into bureaucracy. Furthermore, while alleviating poverty, we have only been able to provide a low standard of living for the people. Social capital only goes so far - people want stuff too.
My attitude is that some capitalism may be necessary, like death and disease, but that doesn't mean it's a good thing by any means. Lots of nasty stuff is necessary.
Class war is continuous under capitalism.
Owners are continuously waging war against workers to take more of the profits generated by their enterprises. If there is X amount of profits from an enterprise, owners must decide how much to take out for themselves and how much to give to workers. Clearly they wish to give as little as possible to workers. So there is a battle between workers and owners to divvy up the profits from the enterprise.
Owners oppose increased % of profits going to workers since that means less for them, so they are always trying to cut down on the workers' % to get more for themselves. The tendency among capitalists would be to take 100% of productivity increases if they could get away with it. The only reason that workers get any % of productivity increases at all is when they organize to fight for it.
During the period you mention, the South Korean labor movement emerged and became extremely combative. This is probably the reason for the wage increases you mention. Capitalists will never give a wage increase just to be nice. Their whole project, in part, is to screw the worker to the greatest extent possible and even kill him if they can get away with it.
Indeed, capitalists kill millions of workers every year in the world, which is exactly what their project is designed to do. Workers and management are de facto enemies in capitalism, and if workers do not organize, they don't get much of anything.
I'm sure there were productivity increases in housing construction from 1975 to today and the prices of houses have certainly gone through the roof. At the same time, wages for construction workers have probably collapsed by anywhere from 50-80%. 100% of that vast surplus and probable productivity increase went into the hands of owners. Workers got less than zero. In a time of booming profits and probable productivity raises, instead of getting even a meager slice, they got a massive pay cut.
Builders reaped massive benefits from declining wages and from increased prices for their homes. Many industries have seen declining wages in the US since 1980 due in part to the busting of unions and their replacement typically with illegal immigrant or H-1B guest worker labor.
During a 15-year period in Guatemala from 1948-1963, the economy grew by 5% per year. During that same period, the % of the population living in poverty actually increased from 87% to 93%. 5% economic growth over 15 years equals a 75% increase in the size of the economy. 0% of the benefits of this economic growth went to the vast majority of the population.
This is how capitalism is supposed to work.
Every capitalist on Earth wants to live in a country like that - where owners, the rich and the upper middle class reap all or almost all of the benefits from economic growth and the workers get little, nothing, or even lose money. To avoid this, workers must organize into unions, since workers usually never get anything from capitalists without a fight. In the the 3rd World where murders of trade unionists are par for the course, it's often a deadly fight.
I repeat, capitalism is evil, but pure socialism doesn't seem to work very well.
I don't have much issues with small businesses, who often seem to really care about their employees and consumers (customers) and even in some cases, the environment and the society they live in. But Organized Small Business is always profoundly reactionary.
But big business is just bad. Whatever benefits it gives us in terms of jobs and decent products, good service or reduced prices is typically vastly outweighed by havoc it wreaks on society, the environment, the workers and consumers.
It's true that regulation and organized workers and consumers can ameliorate a lot of this downside, but in capitalist nations, the capitalist classes buy all the media and institute a Gramscian cultural hegemony over society with their media and cultural control. At the same time, they use their money and media and cultural power to buy the state itself which ideally ought to be regulating them in the interests of workers, consumers, the environment and society itself.
So you have a state that will do nothing in the face of the bulldozer of capital. The result is a flattened social society, a wrecked public sector, slums, homelessness, disease, early death, environmental devastation, harmed consumers and crippled workers and nothing in government to stop any of this.
The housing crisis is a case in point. Contra your assertion that the New Deal failed (which is actually rightwing revisionism against the New Deal), in fact, the New Deal, in particular the financial reforms - the FDIC which restored confidence in the banks, the SEC that regulated the stock market and Fannie Mae to bring back the mortgage market - is what finally got the economy going again.
This was one of the greatest accomplishments the US government ever did, it was wholly socialist in nature, and it was opposed ferociously by the Republican Party and the entire US business sector at the time. After Roosevelt rammed it through anyway, the business class vowed to wage struggle, for decades if they had to, to overturn these things.
Finally, by the 1990's, much of this regulatory structure had been whittled away.
Whittling away this structure had been a project of Capital since this regulatory apparatus had been put in place. Now that the regulation is a shadow of its former self, we have another Depression-like phenomena with the housing crisis, all the way to failed banks, bank runs, loss of deposits, etc. As one might expect.
This is the problem. The only way to keep capitalism from being completely nightmarish is to regulate it, and the capitalist sector reflexively fights to the death any attempts to regulate it.
Furthermore, they grab the media and culture itself to brainwash gullible workers and consumers to support their elitist agenda and to get the workers, consumers and society itself to oppose their own interests and support the contrary interests of Capital. Then they grab the state itself and prevent it from enacting those very regulations necessary for a civilized capitalism.
This is one of my primary problems with capitalism. Regulation is mandatory to keep capitalism halfway civilized, but the nature of the capitalist system, as described above, works in such a way as to make such regulation often extremely difficult or impossible.
span style="font-weight: bold;">Note: Readers should carefully read the Commenting Rules before commenting to avoid having their comments edited or deleted and to avoid being banned from the site.
Thursday, July 24, 2008
Wikipedia Jews Attack James Petras
James Petras is a fine man of the Left who has long been interested in Latin America and especially revolutionary movements down there. He has long supported the FARC revolutionaries in Colombia (as does this blog) and lately he has been supporting the Movement of the Landless in Brazil.
He's a great labor organizer who goes down to Latin America and works with the people, getting his hands dirty with the workers and peasants themselves. He's a towering intellect, and has often criticized Left movements from a Far Left perspectives, accusing them of being sellouts. For instance, he has gone after the FMLN in El Salvador lately for pursuing a half-hearted effort at reform.
I believe he was going after Evo Morales in Bolivia lately. He's great for tearing the masks off these Latin American Leftists who the US press is screaming Commie Bloody Murder about, showing us that many of them are not even very far to the Left and the proposals they are offering are quite moderate and unlikely to seriously shake up socioeconomic relations in these places.
It's always great to read him on anything having to do with the Latin American Left.
Lately he has sort of gone off on a bender against US Jews and particularly the Israeli Lobby and Israel. He has received some criticism for this from the Left, especially the anarchist Left (see Three Way Fight) and Maoists. Maoists and anarchists (Three Way Fight critique here) are among those on the Left who are particularly sensitive to charges of anti-Semitism and go to great lengths to avoid such.
This despite the recent rightwing Jewish - Zionist rewriting of history that shows the entire 20th Century Left as being anti-Semitic. See Why the Jews? The Reasons for Contemporary Anti-Semitism by Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin for more on that - it's actually an excellent read and I recommend it.
The ADL has recently weighed in against Petras, accusing him of fomenting some kind of "New Anti-Semitism" (this means an anti-Semitism focussed mostly on Israel). All of this crap is a rather minor sideshow to Petras' excellent corpus and career, but as you can see in his Wikipedia entry, most of the entry is given over his tussle with the Jews.
On the discussion page, the Wikipedia Jews have gone nuts, accusing him of being an "anti-Jewish racist" and other bullshit. There's the usual crap about Israel Shamir on there, straight from the UK Spotlight Trotskyite antifa loonie-tunes accusations - Shamir as a Swedish neo-Nazi living in Norway.
In fact, Israel Shamir, whatever one thinks of him (and he surely has his anti-Semitic moments) is a Russian Jew, son of a famous rabbi, who immigrated to Israel, fought in the Israeli military, wrote for some Israeli papers, moved to Japan where he translated Japanese haiku books, moved back to Russia where he got involved in some dubious anti-Semitic far right Russian publications, moved back to Israel, where he currently resides in Jaffa (in fact, you can probably even visit him there - lots of folks do).
It's really sad that this "Swedish neo-Nazi" bullshit has been allowed to gain as much traction as it has. Yes, his Wikipedia page says that too. I know what you were thinking. Chip Berlet is one of the leaders of the Israel Shamir Lynch Mob. Berlet, the strange "Marxist" who is in deep with the radical right libertarians that rule Wikipedia.
Looks like the Wikipedia Jews got pretty much thwarted on this one. Maybe someone is finally starting to reign them in over there. Note that "Humus Sapiens" is one of the most notorious Wikipedia Jews, active for years now. Still at it, I guess.
Check out the article history. Real food fight.
Links to some Wikipedia nasties.
Wikipedia Jews: Jayjg, one of the worst Jewish POV-pushers on Wikipedia. Humus Sapiens, a Russian Jewish immigrant to the US. Izak, one of their sidekicks.
Slim Virgin , one of the worst ones of all. I understand that SV is not even Jewish (!); she's just some Gentile philosemite. She's obsessed with 1. The Jews, 2. 9-11. SV is one of the most horrible and abusive administrators on Wikipedia. She was so abusive that the Wikipedia Review undertook an investigation of her.
She was very hard to track down as she covers her tracks very well, but they eventually determined that she is a former Cambridge University graduate student named Linda Mack who was hired by investigative reporter Pierre Salinger and John K. Cooley to investigate the Lockerbie bombing.
Two Libyans were eventually convicted of the bombing, and Ghaddafi was ordered to pay a huge fine, but there is good evidence that Libya had nothing to do with the bombing. There is also evidence that UK law enforcement knew this but went after Ghaddafi anyway because they hated him and wanted to wrap up the case.
It is still not known who was behind the bombing, but the Iranian regime was probably the author of the attack. The attack was probably a payback for the US shooting down of an Iranian airliner during the Iran-Iraq War, an act that the US said was accidental. Iran refused to accept the accidental shootdown theory.
Linda Mack was instrumental in steering Salinger and Cooley towards the Libyans. Salinger and Cooley eventually decided that Mack was a spy with the UK's notorious MI5 intelligence agency (the British CIA). Linda Mack is now reportedly living in Alberta, Canada under the name Sarah McEwan.
Antifascist, who uses the same handle and has the same obsessions as a notorious Jewish Zionist who used to stalk anti-Zionists on Indymedia, often issuing them horrible death threats. He's obsessed with Wendy Campbell and Gilad Atzmon.
His name is Ketlan Ossowski ( blog here) and he is described as an obsessive Jew who uses Leftism and anti-fascism as a cover to promote Zionism. I strongly suspect that he is the same guy who stalked and threatened Wendy Campbell. Zeq, long-notorious, the lone Wikipedia Jew busted in the CAMERA fiasco, now banned.
Others: Roland Rance, a Jewish Marxist (Jewish first, Marxist far distant second) from London, famous from the wars over Gilad Atzmon and Mary Rizzo's Peace Palestine blog, apparently active in the Socialist Workers Party and in with the Lenin's Tomb crowd. I'm not going to comment on this guy much as he's written me civilly via email.
Just another frothing Trot about sums it up though.
Note: Readers should carefully read the Commenting Rules before commenting to avoid having their comments edited or deleted and to avoid being banned from the site.
He's a great labor organizer who goes down to Latin America and works with the people, getting his hands dirty with the workers and peasants themselves. He's a towering intellect, and has often criticized Left movements from a Far Left perspectives, accusing them of being sellouts. For instance, he has gone after the FMLN in El Salvador lately for pursuing a half-hearted effort at reform.
I believe he was going after Evo Morales in Bolivia lately. He's great for tearing the masks off these Latin American Leftists who the US press is screaming Commie Bloody Murder about, showing us that many of them are not even very far to the Left and the proposals they are offering are quite moderate and unlikely to seriously shake up socioeconomic relations in these places.
It's always great to read him on anything having to do with the Latin American Left.
Lately he has sort of gone off on a bender against US Jews and particularly the Israeli Lobby and Israel. He has received some criticism for this from the Left, especially the anarchist Left (see Three Way Fight) and Maoists. Maoists and anarchists (Three Way Fight critique here) are among those on the Left who are particularly sensitive to charges of anti-Semitism and go to great lengths to avoid such.
This despite the recent rightwing Jewish - Zionist rewriting of history that shows the entire 20th Century Left as being anti-Semitic. See Why the Jews? The Reasons for Contemporary Anti-Semitism by Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin for more on that - it's actually an excellent read and I recommend it.
The ADL has recently weighed in against Petras, accusing him of fomenting some kind of "New Anti-Semitism" (this means an anti-Semitism focussed mostly on Israel). All of this crap is a rather minor sideshow to Petras' excellent corpus and career, but as you can see in his Wikipedia entry, most of the entry is given over his tussle with the Jews.
On the discussion page, the Wikipedia Jews have gone nuts, accusing him of being an "anti-Jewish racist" and other bullshit. There's the usual crap about Israel Shamir on there, straight from the UK Spotlight Trotskyite antifa loonie-tunes accusations - Shamir as a Swedish neo-Nazi living in Norway.
In fact, Israel Shamir, whatever one thinks of him (and he surely has his anti-Semitic moments) is a Russian Jew, son of a famous rabbi, who immigrated to Israel, fought in the Israeli military, wrote for some Israeli papers, moved to Japan where he translated Japanese haiku books, moved back to Russia where he got involved in some dubious anti-Semitic far right Russian publications, moved back to Israel, where he currently resides in Jaffa (in fact, you can probably even visit him there - lots of folks do).
It's really sad that this "Swedish neo-Nazi" bullshit has been allowed to gain as much traction as it has. Yes, his Wikipedia page says that too. I know what you were thinking. Chip Berlet is one of the leaders of the Israel Shamir Lynch Mob. Berlet, the strange "Marxist" who is in deep with the radical right libertarians that rule Wikipedia.
Looks like the Wikipedia Jews got pretty much thwarted on this one. Maybe someone is finally starting to reign them in over there. Note that "Humus Sapiens" is one of the most notorious Wikipedia Jews, active for years now. Still at it, I guess.
Check out the article history. Real food fight.
Links to some Wikipedia nasties.
Wikipedia Jews: Jayjg, one of the worst Jewish POV-pushers on Wikipedia. Humus Sapiens, a Russian Jewish immigrant to the US. Izak, one of their sidekicks.
Slim Virgin , one of the worst ones of all. I understand that SV is not even Jewish (!); she's just some Gentile philosemite. She's obsessed with 1. The Jews, 2. 9-11. SV is one of the most horrible and abusive administrators on Wikipedia. She was so abusive that the Wikipedia Review undertook an investigation of her.
She was very hard to track down as she covers her tracks very well, but they eventually determined that she is a former Cambridge University graduate student named Linda Mack who was hired by investigative reporter Pierre Salinger and John K. Cooley to investigate the Lockerbie bombing.
Two Libyans were eventually convicted of the bombing, and Ghaddafi was ordered to pay a huge fine, but there is good evidence that Libya had nothing to do with the bombing. There is also evidence that UK law enforcement knew this but went after Ghaddafi anyway because they hated him and wanted to wrap up the case.
It is still not known who was behind the bombing, but the Iranian regime was probably the author of the attack. The attack was probably a payback for the US shooting down of an Iranian airliner during the Iran-Iraq War, an act that the US said was accidental. Iran refused to accept the accidental shootdown theory.
Linda Mack was instrumental in steering Salinger and Cooley towards the Libyans. Salinger and Cooley eventually decided that Mack was a spy with the UK's notorious MI5 intelligence agency (the British CIA). Linda Mack is now reportedly living in Alberta, Canada under the name Sarah McEwan.
Antifascist, who uses the same handle and has the same obsessions as a notorious Jewish Zionist who used to stalk anti-Zionists on Indymedia, often issuing them horrible death threats. He's obsessed with Wendy Campbell and Gilad Atzmon.
His name is Ketlan Ossowski ( blog here) and he is described as an obsessive Jew who uses Leftism and anti-fascism as a cover to promote Zionism. I strongly suspect that he is the same guy who stalked and threatened Wendy Campbell. Zeq, long-notorious, the lone Wikipedia Jew busted in the CAMERA fiasco, now banned.
Others: Roland Rance, a Jewish Marxist (Jewish first, Marxist far distant second) from London, famous from the wars over Gilad Atzmon and Mary Rizzo's Peace Palestine blog, apparently active in the Socialist Workers Party and in with the Lenin's Tomb crowd. I'm not going to comment on this guy much as he's written me civilly via email.
Just another frothing Trot about sums it up though.
Note: Readers should carefully read the Commenting Rules before commenting to avoid having their comments edited or deleted and to avoid being banned from the site.
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
More on Laissez Faire Economics
In the comments section, James Schipper makes some interesting comments about laissez faire economics and libertarianism in general. His comments are in italics, mine are follow in normal font.
JS: Laissez-faire usually means short-term gain for a small minority and short-term pain for a large majority, medium-term gain for a larger minority and medium-term pain for a smaller majority and only long-term gain for the majority.
RL: I don't agree with this at all. The case of neoliberalism seems to show us that the gains never do filter down to anyone below the top 20%. This is what the neoliberal advocates keep saying - "Give it time, give it time." But no matter how much time you give it, it never seems to work. We are now 28 years into a neoliberal revolution in the US, and have things gotten any better for any larger majority?
Of course not. Things just seem to get worse and worse. Neoliberalism only accomplishes massive wealth transfers from the bottom 80% to the top 20%. It's designed to do that in perpetuity, since class war never ends in capitalism, even in fascism.
JS: The Chicago boys are actually right in that speculative bubbles are only possible if the government engages in massive monetary expansion or allows the banks to do so. This means that the most essential part of government regulation in a modern economy is the regulation of credit and the currency. Too much money and credit = inflation and speculation.
RL: The problem here is that these Chicago Boys characters have been cheering on every single speculative bubble that ever existed, and they created quite a few of them themselves. Their libertarian project in Chile ended in massive failure such that even Pinochet had to step in with major government intervention to save the economy. Huge intervention by the state was the only thing that saved the economy.
In Russia, the Boys succeeded in looting the nation, transferring the money out of the country, engineering a Depression 3.5 times worse than the US Depression and killing 15 million Russians. The Chicago Boys and their acolytes were behind the Asian Flu crashes in the late 1990's too.
The only way to prevent speculative bubbles is through government regulation of an economy, and the Chicago Boys apparently oppose all such. The business sector, whom the Chicago Boys represent, always supports a loose money policy during the good times in order to facilitate the cheap money necessary for economic expansion and of course speculation.
Furthermore, the US capitalist class, nor any other capitalist class, would never support the Chicago Boys' apparent prescription here - getting rid of the Fed's regulation of the money supply. Business loves and needs the Fed, despite all of its rants against socialism. Anyway, the role of a central bank is overestimated. Even in a state without a strong central bank regulating money, you can still get massive speculative inflows. This was the case with the nations harmed by the Asian Flu.
The Fed itself is run by economists who are themselves working hand in hand with Big Business and are generally followers of Chicago School Economics. The only thing the rich care about is inflation, and business everywhere on Earth has cheered on every speculative bubble that ever existed. They can't get enough of them.
To blame these bubbles on a reactionary government institution called the Fed, implying the Fed is some kind of socialist institution (though its recent actions have indeed been socialist) is beyond perverse.
What's deadly to business and the rich is inflation. The rich hate inflation because it cuts into their incomes. Most rich people don't even work at all. They just kick back and live off rents and equities. Nothing cuts into their lazy money more than inflation. Further, inflation engenders demands for wage increases, which is why business hates it so much. It also increases costs for supplies, which they may or may not be able to pass on.
In order to stop inflation from hurting the rich and business, the Fed fights inflation by throwing millions of Americans out of work, since inflation and unemployment are two ends of a scale. As unemployment gets "too low", workers start getting "uppity" and demanding wage increases. This is deadly to capitalism, so the Fed responds by deliberately increasing unemployment and throwing millions out of work.
If you take a university course in capitalist economics, they will tell you that capitalism operates on the premise of "the benefits of mass unemployment". The benefits lie in the disciplining of the worker. The notion that mass unemployment has any benefits at all is enough to turn my stomach against capitalism.
Further, I'm not enamored of any Austrian economist.
JS: Too much money and credit = inflation and speculation.
RL: Problem here probably being that the Fed cares little about speculation (although it does worry about it a bit - witness Alan Greenspan's famous "irrational exuberance" comments a while back) but cares a lot about inflation.
Speculation does not necessarily lead to increases in core inflation, but it surely runs up some prices. Housing market, oil and dot com stock speculation surely created bubbles in those sectors, but in the case of housing and dot com's, did not effect core inflation.
JS: As to the New Deal, it was a colossal failure.
RL: I can't comment on this. The general analysis here in the US is that the New Deal saved US capitalism from Revolution, hence it was painful but worth it. This analysis comes from the more enlightened among capitalist sectors themselves.
Of course Western Europe and the Asian Tigers were not built on laissez faire. Even today that Japan, Singapore and Korea have extreme government intervention in the economy in terms of state planning of the economy. That's often termed corporatism.
It's not like Gosplan where the social economy is planned down to the # of eggs you will eat in a year. Instead this sort of economic guidance actually works. Government works with firms to help them compete against foreign sectors, goosing some sectors while letting others wilt.
No country with a mostly private education system and a poor public education system has ever produced any kind of an educated population.
Up here in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, we have many roads that are private. The country never got around to making them county roads. Without exception, they are horrible. In many cases, there are expensive homes and properties lining these roads. The homes sell for about ~$300,000+ now. Most people living there have some money and they are not poor at all.
Thing is, everyone would have to get together to pitch in to fix the road and maintain it. People, even well to do folks, can never seem to get together to do that, so you have a horrific road. It's really strange to try to drive down a nightmarish road while looking at very nice, fancy houses with new cars on either side.
Note: Readers should carefully read the Commenting Rules before commenting to avoid having their comments edited or deleted and to avoid being banned from the site.
JS: Laissez-faire usually means short-term gain for a small minority and short-term pain for a large majority, medium-term gain for a larger minority and medium-term pain for a smaller majority and only long-term gain for the majority.
RL: I don't agree with this at all. The case of neoliberalism seems to show us that the gains never do filter down to anyone below the top 20%. This is what the neoliberal advocates keep saying - "Give it time, give it time." But no matter how much time you give it, it never seems to work. We are now 28 years into a neoliberal revolution in the US, and have things gotten any better for any larger majority?
Of course not. Things just seem to get worse and worse. Neoliberalism only accomplishes massive wealth transfers from the bottom 80% to the top 20%. It's designed to do that in perpetuity, since class war never ends in capitalism, even in fascism.
JS: The Chicago boys are actually right in that speculative bubbles are only possible if the government engages in massive monetary expansion or allows the banks to do so. This means that the most essential part of government regulation in a modern economy is the regulation of credit and the currency. Too much money and credit = inflation and speculation.
RL: The problem here is that these Chicago Boys characters have been cheering on every single speculative bubble that ever existed, and they created quite a few of them themselves. Their libertarian project in Chile ended in massive failure such that even Pinochet had to step in with major government intervention to save the economy. Huge intervention by the state was the only thing that saved the economy.
In Russia, the Boys succeeded in looting the nation, transferring the money out of the country, engineering a Depression 3.5 times worse than the US Depression and killing 15 million Russians. The Chicago Boys and their acolytes were behind the Asian Flu crashes in the late 1990's too.
The only way to prevent speculative bubbles is through government regulation of an economy, and the Chicago Boys apparently oppose all such. The business sector, whom the Chicago Boys represent, always supports a loose money policy during the good times in order to facilitate the cheap money necessary for economic expansion and of course speculation.
Furthermore, the US capitalist class, nor any other capitalist class, would never support the Chicago Boys' apparent prescription here - getting rid of the Fed's regulation of the money supply. Business loves and needs the Fed, despite all of its rants against socialism. Anyway, the role of a central bank is overestimated. Even in a state without a strong central bank regulating money, you can still get massive speculative inflows. This was the case with the nations harmed by the Asian Flu.
The Fed itself is run by economists who are themselves working hand in hand with Big Business and are generally followers of Chicago School Economics. The only thing the rich care about is inflation, and business everywhere on Earth has cheered on every speculative bubble that ever existed. They can't get enough of them.
To blame these bubbles on a reactionary government institution called the Fed, implying the Fed is some kind of socialist institution (though its recent actions have indeed been socialist) is beyond perverse.
What's deadly to business and the rich is inflation. The rich hate inflation because it cuts into their incomes. Most rich people don't even work at all. They just kick back and live off rents and equities. Nothing cuts into their lazy money more than inflation. Further, inflation engenders demands for wage increases, which is why business hates it so much. It also increases costs for supplies, which they may or may not be able to pass on.
In order to stop inflation from hurting the rich and business, the Fed fights inflation by throwing millions of Americans out of work, since inflation and unemployment are two ends of a scale. As unemployment gets "too low", workers start getting "uppity" and demanding wage increases. This is deadly to capitalism, so the Fed responds by deliberately increasing unemployment and throwing millions out of work.
If you take a university course in capitalist economics, they will tell you that capitalism operates on the premise of "the benefits of mass unemployment". The benefits lie in the disciplining of the worker. The notion that mass unemployment has any benefits at all is enough to turn my stomach against capitalism.
Further, I'm not enamored of any Austrian economist.
JS: Too much money and credit = inflation and speculation.
RL: Problem here probably being that the Fed cares little about speculation (although it does worry about it a bit - witness Alan Greenspan's famous "irrational exuberance" comments a while back) but cares a lot about inflation.
Speculation does not necessarily lead to increases in core inflation, but it surely runs up some prices. Housing market, oil and dot com stock speculation surely created bubbles in those sectors, but in the case of housing and dot com's, did not effect core inflation.
JS: As to the New Deal, it was a colossal failure.
RL: I can't comment on this. The general analysis here in the US is that the New Deal saved US capitalism from Revolution, hence it was painful but worth it. This analysis comes from the more enlightened among capitalist sectors themselves.
Of course Western Europe and the Asian Tigers were not built on laissez faire. Even today that Japan, Singapore and Korea have extreme government intervention in the economy in terms of state planning of the economy. That's often termed corporatism.
It's not like Gosplan where the social economy is planned down to the # of eggs you will eat in a year. Instead this sort of economic guidance actually works. Government works with firms to help them compete against foreign sectors, goosing some sectors while letting others wilt.
No country with a mostly private education system and a poor public education system has ever produced any kind of an educated population.
Up here in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, we have many roads that are private. The country never got around to making them county roads. Without exception, they are horrible. In many cases, there are expensive homes and properties lining these roads. The homes sell for about ~$300,000+ now. Most people living there have some money and they are not poor at all.
Thing is, everyone would have to get together to pitch in to fix the road and maintain it. People, even well to do folks, can never seem to get together to do that, so you have a horrific road. It's really strange to try to drive down a nightmarish road while looking at very nice, fancy houses with new cars on either side.
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The "Benefits" of Deregulated Capitalism
Lack of regulation in capitalism leads to the ability to roll up huge gains in wealth for those at the top of the food chain, and also leads to huge economic disasters on a national scale such as we are experiencing now in the US.
The italicized portion of the previous sentence is precisely why business, the rich, the media and the plutocratic political parties in the US (originally the Republican Party, but now both parties), support the deregulation of the capitalist system in the US and all over the world.
The verdict is in on the deregulation of capitalism that has been the rage all over the world for the past 30 years. Almost everywhere it has been tried, it has caused massive discrepancies in wealth distribution. The top 20% of the income earners everywhere on Earth have benefited, and the bottom 80% have lost out.
That's why Latin America has been voting in leaders who have campaigned on platforms that can be roughly translated as, "The Hell with neoliberalism". Far from being Leftists or Communists, most of the new Latin American Left is simply objecting to the observable failure of 20-30 years of neoliberalism in Latin America and trying to fashion some sort of social democratic alternative.
Even honest proponents of neoliberalism in the US media like Fareed Zakaria have admitted that neoliberalism in Latin America has failed. The usual lie has been, "It hasn't had enough time to work yet."
This is a lie.
Neoliberalism in Latin America is working exactly as planned.
It was designed to enrich the top 20% and impoverish just about everyone else. Everyone on Earth, neoliberalism has devastated the public sector, wages, working conditions, schools, health care, etc. It has probably killed millions of people. In fact, there is good evidence that it is killing millions of people all over the world every single year.
Read about the history of the US economy in the late 1800's as it lurched from one panic to another, with wild run-ups in wealth for the rich in between.
Unregulated capitalism is like a cocaine addict with a trust fund. He can have a real wild blast as long as the money lasts, get high as a damned kite and soar to the skies. There's almost no limit to how high he can get. When the crash comes, he's going to be pounded physically and psychologically, and his trust will be drained. Freemarketeers argue that it's worth it for the fun of the run.
Regulated capitalism is like a middle-aged man who drinks a couple of glasses of wine a night. He's not able to get rip-roaring drunk like he did in his youth, nor is he able to drink his troubles away, but the hangovers are nonexistent, and he's not committing slow suicide anymore either.
Regulation is like a fog layer on the coast in a Mediterranean climate. It takes the extreme heat and cold out of a climate and leaves it at a moderate, some would say boring, middle.
During the Roaring 20's, people forget 80% of the US population actually lost money. It was only "roaring" for the top 20%. Nevertheless, most Americans think of this as a time unlimited prosperity. As we can see, not only is America governed and reported on exclusively by the Rich, but even our very history is the History of the Rich.
The Great Depression was directly caused by unregulated capitalism in the US, despite the desperate efforts of rightwing economist Chicago School professional liars to lie their way out of the facts. In the 1930's, a huge regulatory structure was put into place in part to prevent a second Great Depression from occurring.
It's worked well, but now a lot of the regulations that were put in post-Depression have been whittled away, such as the Glass-Seagall Act, that attempted to build a wall between commercial and investment banking. That way, if high-risk investment banking goes under (as it is prone to) it doesn't take down the commercial banking sector (where Mrs. Jones has her nest egg) with it.
Deregulated capitalism quickly leads to a state of affairs where you have wild economic growth and bubbles followed by bubble deflations and panics.
It's no way to run an economy, but this is the way every capitalist on Earth wants it.
Every capitalist on Earth is like a gambler in a casino with a credit card with no limits. Sensible nations do not listen to what the capitalists want - they never want anything good for the nation in the long run. The capitalist perennial children need to be continuously regulated on a short leash by regulatory adults in government in order to have any semblance of a decent society under capitalism.
Since 1980 and the beginnings of massive deregulation, the wages of 80% of the US population (nonsupervisory workers) have declined by 1% in constant dollars. They should have been going up in tandem with productivity increases, and productivity has gone up a lot in 28 years. 100% of the productivity increases in the last 28 years went to the top 20%, and 0% to the bottom 80%.
Before anyone screams race, this is the way unregulated capitalism works in any society - even an all-White one. The bottom 80% of the US population that got screwed massively in the Roaring 20's and resulting capitalist hangover called the Great Depression was overwhelmingly White.
A regulated capitalism would look a lot like what we had in the US in the 1950's and especially 1960's and 1970's. It works pretty well for a capitalist system. It's true that it tends to stifle massive wealth run-ups and bubbles (almost always caused by massive fraud anyway) but it also makes for a smoother ride and much fewer crashes, panics, recessions and depressions.
The Taoists discuss the Middle Way. So it is in capitalist economics as in the rest of life. "Live fast, die young and leave a pretty corpse," sounds romantic at 18, but a 50-yr-old who makes such a statement is a moron. Our economy has been run by 18-yr-olds for decades now. As long as we have a capitalist economy, it's time for some adult supervision.
Note: Readers should carefully read the Commenting Rules before commenting to avoid having their comments edited or deleted and to avoid being banned from the site.
The italicized portion of the previous sentence is precisely why business, the rich, the media and the plutocratic political parties in the US (originally the Republican Party, but now both parties), support the deregulation of the capitalist system in the US and all over the world.
The verdict is in on the deregulation of capitalism that has been the rage all over the world for the past 30 years. Almost everywhere it has been tried, it has caused massive discrepancies in wealth distribution. The top 20% of the income earners everywhere on Earth have benefited, and the bottom 80% have lost out.
That's why Latin America has been voting in leaders who have campaigned on platforms that can be roughly translated as, "The Hell with neoliberalism". Far from being Leftists or Communists, most of the new Latin American Left is simply objecting to the observable failure of 20-30 years of neoliberalism in Latin America and trying to fashion some sort of social democratic alternative.
Even honest proponents of neoliberalism in the US media like Fareed Zakaria have admitted that neoliberalism in Latin America has failed. The usual lie has been, "It hasn't had enough time to work yet."
This is a lie.
Neoliberalism in Latin America is working exactly as planned.
It was designed to enrich the top 20% and impoverish just about everyone else. Everyone on Earth, neoliberalism has devastated the public sector, wages, working conditions, schools, health care, etc. It has probably killed millions of people. In fact, there is good evidence that it is killing millions of people all over the world every single year.
Read about the history of the US economy in the late 1800's as it lurched from one panic to another, with wild run-ups in wealth for the rich in between.
Unregulated capitalism is like a cocaine addict with a trust fund. He can have a real wild blast as long as the money lasts, get high as a damned kite and soar to the skies. There's almost no limit to how high he can get. When the crash comes, he's going to be pounded physically and psychologically, and his trust will be drained. Freemarketeers argue that it's worth it for the fun of the run.
Regulated capitalism is like a middle-aged man who drinks a couple of glasses of wine a night. He's not able to get rip-roaring drunk like he did in his youth, nor is he able to drink his troubles away, but the hangovers are nonexistent, and he's not committing slow suicide anymore either.
Regulation is like a fog layer on the coast in a Mediterranean climate. It takes the extreme heat and cold out of a climate and leaves it at a moderate, some would say boring, middle.
During the Roaring 20's, people forget 80% of the US population actually lost money. It was only "roaring" for the top 20%. Nevertheless, most Americans think of this as a time unlimited prosperity. As we can see, not only is America governed and reported on exclusively by the Rich, but even our very history is the History of the Rich.
The Great Depression was directly caused by unregulated capitalism in the US, despite the desperate efforts of rightwing economist Chicago School professional liars to lie their way out of the facts. In the 1930's, a huge regulatory structure was put into place in part to prevent a second Great Depression from occurring.
It's worked well, but now a lot of the regulations that were put in post-Depression have been whittled away, such as the Glass-Seagall Act, that attempted to build a wall between commercial and investment banking. That way, if high-risk investment banking goes under (as it is prone to) it doesn't take down the commercial banking sector (where Mrs. Jones has her nest egg) with it.
Deregulated capitalism quickly leads to a state of affairs where you have wild economic growth and bubbles followed by bubble deflations and panics.
It's no way to run an economy, but this is the way every capitalist on Earth wants it.
Every capitalist on Earth is like a gambler in a casino with a credit card with no limits. Sensible nations do not listen to what the capitalists want - they never want anything good for the nation in the long run. The capitalist perennial children need to be continuously regulated on a short leash by regulatory adults in government in order to have any semblance of a decent society under capitalism.
Since 1980 and the beginnings of massive deregulation, the wages of 80% of the US population (nonsupervisory workers) have declined by 1% in constant dollars. They should have been going up in tandem with productivity increases, and productivity has gone up a lot in 28 years. 100% of the productivity increases in the last 28 years went to the top 20%, and 0% to the bottom 80%.
Before anyone screams race, this is the way unregulated capitalism works in any society - even an all-White one. The bottom 80% of the US population that got screwed massively in the Roaring 20's and resulting capitalist hangover called the Great Depression was overwhelmingly White.
A regulated capitalism would look a lot like what we had in the US in the 1950's and especially 1960's and 1970's. It works pretty well for a capitalist system. It's true that it tends to stifle massive wealth run-ups and bubbles (almost always caused by massive fraud anyway) but it also makes for a smoother ride and much fewer crashes, panics, recessions and depressions.
The Taoists discuss the Middle Way. So it is in capitalist economics as in the rest of life. "Live fast, die young and leave a pretty corpse," sounds romantic at 18, but a 50-yr-old who makes such a statement is a moron. Our economy has been run by 18-yr-olds for decades now. As long as we have a capitalist economy, it's time for some adult supervision.
Note: Readers should carefully read the Commenting Rules before commenting to avoid having their comments edited or deleted and to avoid being banned from the site.