A Return to Basics: Rasmus, the “Neoliberal” Turn, and Exploitation

Instead of the conservative motto, 'A fair day's wage for a fair day's work!' they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword: 'Abolition of the wage system!' Karl Marx, Value, Price, and Profit

Today, the point that Marx made in his 1865 address to the First International Working Men’s Association is largely lost on the trade unions and even with many self-styled Marxists. The distinction between the goal of “a fair day's wage” and the goal of eliminating exploitation-- the wage system embedded in capitalism-- is lost before a common, but unfocused revulsion to the exploding growth of inequality. It is one thing to deplore the growth of inequality, it is quite another to establish what would replace the logic of unfettered accumulation.

Marx offered no guidelines for a “fair wage”. Indeed, his analysis of capitalism made no significant use of the concept of fairness. Instead, he made the concept of exploitation central to his political economy. He used the concept in two ways: First, he employed “exploitation” in the popular sense of “taking advantage of” -- the sense that the capitalist takes advantage of the worker. “Exploitation of man by man” was a nascent concept, arriving in discourse with the expansion of mass industrial employment and borrowed from an earlier, morally-neutral usage regarding the exploitation of non-humans. Its etymology, in that sense, arises in the late eighteenth century.

Marx also uses the word in a more rigorous sense: as a description of the interaction of the worker and the capitalist in the process of commodity production. Even more rigorously, it appears in political economic tracts like Capital as a ratio between the axiomatic concepts of surplus value and variable capital.

As a worker-friendly concept, exploitation is most readily grasped by workers in the basic industries, especially in extractive and raw-material industries. Historically, an early twentieth century coal miner-- bringing the tools of extraction with him, responsible for his own safety while risking a more likely death than a war-time soldier, and accepting the “privilege” of going into a cold, damp hole to dig coal for someone else’s profit-- intuitively understood exploitation. A reflective miner would recoil from the fact that ownership of a property could somehow-- apart from any other consideration-- confer to someone the right to profit from a commodity that someone else had faced mortal danger to extract from the earth. What is a “fair day’s wage” in such a circumstance?

Organically, from its intuitive understanding by workers, and theoretically, from class-partisan intellectuals like Marx and Engels, as well as their rivals like Bakunin, exploitation became the central idea behind anti-capitalism and socialism.

Today, most workers’ connection to the exploitation relation appears far removed from the direct relation of a coal miner to the coal face and to the owner of the coal mine. The immediacy of labor and labor’s product in extraction is often of many removes in service-sector or white-collar jobs. Moreover, the division of labor blurs the contribution of the individual’s efforts to the final product.

Well into the twentieth century, “labor exploitation” fell out of the lexicon of the left, especially in the more advanced capitalist countries, where Marx thought that it would be of most use. Left thinkers, as well as Marxists, rightly attended to the colonial question, focusing on the struggle for independence and sovereignty; they were discouraged by the tendency for class-collaboration in many leading working-class organizations; Communist Parties correctly felt a primary duty to defend the gains of the socialist and socialist-oriented countries; and the fight for peace was always a paramount concern.

Exploitation was attacked from the academy. The Humanist “Marxist” school trivialized the exploitation nexus to a species of the broad, amorphous concept of alienation. The Analytical “Marxist” school congratulated itself by proving that given an inequality of assets, a community of exchange-oriented actors would produce and reproduce inequality of assets, a proof altogether irrelevant to the concept of exploitation, which the school promised to clarify. Both schools influenced a retreat from Marxism in the university, followed by a stampede after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Liberal and social-democratic theory revisits the “fair day's wage” with the explosion of income inequality and wealth inequality of the last decades of the twentieth century that was too impossible to ignore. But what is a “fair wage”? What level of income or wealth distribution is just, fair, socially responsible, or socially beneficial? The questions are largely unanswerable, if not incoherent. 

Thanks to the empirical, long-term study of inequality shared in Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-first Century, we learn that capitalism’s historical tendency has been to always produce and reproduce income and wealth inequality, a conclusion sobering to those who hope to refashion capitalism into an egalitarian system and making a “fair wage” even more elusive. Piketty’s work offers no clue to what could constitute a “fair wage.”

Others point to the productivity-pay gap that emerged in the 1970s, where wage growth and productivity took entirely different courses at the expense of wage gains. Researchers who perceptively point to this gap as contributing to the growth of inequality often harken back to the immediate postwar era, when productivity growth and wage growth were somewhat in step, when the gains of productivity were “shared” between capital and labor. But what is magical about sharing? Why shouldn't labor get 75% or 85% of the gain? Or all of the gain? Is maintaining existing inequalities the optimal social goal for the working class?

Where the concept of a “fair wage” offers more questions than answers, Marx’s concept of exploitation suggests a uniquely coherent and direct answer to the persistent and intensifying growth of income and wealth: eliminate labor exploitation! Abolish the wage system!

Thus, the return to the discussion of exploitation is urgent. And that is why a serious and clarifying account of exploitation today is so welcome.

*****

Jack Rasmus takes a step toward that end in a carefully argued, important paper, Labor Exploitation in the Era of the Neoliberal Policy Regime. I have followed Rasmus’s work for many years, especially admiring his respect for the tool of historical inquiry and his scrupulous research, interpretation, and careful use of “official” data. On the other hand, I thought that his work failed to fully consider the Marxist tradition, unduly drawn to engaging with the pettifoggery of academic “Marxists.”

However, his new work proves that assessment to be mistaken. Indeed, his latest work reflects an admirable reading of Marx’s political economy and offers an important tool in the struggle to end the wage system.

Rasmus understands that we are in a distinct era of capitalism, forced by the failure of the prior “policy regime” and typified by several features: intensified global penetration of capital and trade expansion (“globalization”), a massively growing role for financial innovation and notional profits (“financialization”), and most significantly, the restoration and expansion of the rate of profit (“the intensification of labor exploitation in both Absolute and Relative value terms that has occurred from the 1980s to the present”). 

It should be noted that Rasmus does not discuss why a new “policy regime” became necessary in the 1970s. Both the stagflation that proved intractable to the reigning Keynesian paradigm and the attack on the US profit rate by foreign competition (see Robert Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence, NLR, 229) necessitated a sea change in the direction of capitalism.

I might add that while so-called globalization was an important feature of “the neoliberal policy regime,” the 2007-2009 economic crisis has diminished the growth of global trade. Indeed, its decline has fostered the rise of economic nationalism, the latest wrinkle on the “neoliberal policy regime.”

Rasmus carefully and methodically documents and explicates the intensification of labor exploitation in commodity production (what he calls “primary exploitation”) over the last fifty years. He recognizes the important and growing role of the state in enabling this intensification. This is, of course, the process that Lenin foresaw with the fusing of the state and monopoly capitalism-- a process associated in Marxist-Leninist theory with the rise of state-monopoly capitalism. Today’s advanced capitalist states fully embrace the goal of defending and advancing the profitability (‘health’) of monopoly corporations (‘a rising tide lifts all boats’), including intensifying labor exploitation.

Just how that intensification is accomplished is the subject of Rasmus’s paper.

*****

Rasmus is aware that Marx expressed the exploitation nexus in terms of labor value. He avoids the scholasticism that side-tracks academically trained economists who obsess over the price/value relationship-- the so-called transformation problem. Value-- specifically a labor theory of value -- is central to Marx because it explains how commodities can command different, non-arbitrary exchange values and how the different proportionalities between the exchange values of commodities are determined. That is the problem Marx sets forth in the first pages of Capital, and value-- as embodied labor-- is the answer that he gives.

Using labor value as his theoretical primitive enables Rasmus to discuss exploitation in Marx’s framework of absolute and relative surplus value-- exploitation by extending the working day or intensifying the production process. While Rasmus offers a persuasive argument that his use of “official” data couched in prices can legitimately be translated into values, it is unnecessary for his thesis. The relations are preserved because the proportionalities are, in general, preserved. It is a reasonable and adequate assumption that prices and values run in parallel, though a weaker claim than that prices can be derived from values.

Methodological considerations aside, Rasmus sets out to show-- and succeeds in showing-- that exploitation has accelerated in the “neoliberal” era in terms of both relative and absolute surplus value:

Capitalism’s Neoliberal era has witnessed a significant intensification and expansion of total exploitation compared to the pre-Neoliberal era. Under Neoliberal Capitalism both the workday (Absolute Surplus Value extraction) has been extended while, at the same time, the productivity of labor has greatly increased (Relative Surplus Value extraction) in terms of both the intensity and the mass of relative surplus value extracted.

Regarding Absolute Surplus Value, he demonstrates: 

[I]t is true the work day was reduced during the first two thirds of the 20th century—by strong unions, union contract terms, and to some extent from government disincentives to extend the work day as a result of the passage of wages and hours legislation. But that trend and scenario toward a shorter work day was halted and rolled back starting in the late 1970s and the neoliberal era. The length of the Work Day has risen—not continued to decline—for full time workers under the Neoliberal Economic Regime.

Through a careful combing and analysis of government data, as well as original arguments, Rasmus shows how capital has succeeded in extending the workday. His discussion of changes in mandatory overtime, in temporary employment, in involuntary part-time employment, in paid leave, in changing work culture, in job classifications, in work from home, internships, and other practices form a persuasive argument for the existence of a trend of the lengthening of the average workday. 

Similarly, Relative Labor Exploitation has accelerated in the “Neoliberal” era, according to Rasmus:

Rising productivity is a key marker for growing exploitation of Labor. If real wages have not risen since the late 1970s but productivity has—and has risen at an even faster rate in recent decades—then the value reflected in business revenues and profits of the increased output from that productivity has accrued almost totally to Capital.

In this regard, the numbers are widely recognized and non-controversial. Labor productivity has grown significantly, while wages have essentially stagnated. Rasmus tells us that it is even worse than it looks:

So, wages have risen only about one-sixth of the productivity increase.  But perhaps only half of that total 13% real hourly wage increase went to the top 5% of the production & nonsupervisory worker group, according to EPI 10 (Economic Policy Institute, February 2020). That means for the median wage production worker, the share of productivity gain was likely 10% or less. The median wage and below production worker consequently received a very small share in wages from productivity over the forty years since 1979. It virtually all accrued to Capital…

According to the US Labor Department, there were 106 million production & nonsupervisory workers at year end 2019—out of the approximately 150 million total nonfarm labor force at that time. Had they entered the labor force around 1982-84, they would have experienced no real wage increase over the four decades.

Rasmus notes that the US maintained the same share of global manufacturing production through the first two decades of the twenty-first century, but doing it with six million fewer workers. This, of course, meant a rising rate of exploitation and a greater share of surplus value for the capitalists. Though the job losses struck especially hard at an important section of the manufacturing working class relegated to unemployment, the remaining workers lost further from concessionary bargaining promoted by a business-union leadership. Thus, they were unable to secure any of the gains accrued by rising productivity. They experienced a higher rate of exploitation.

*****

Demonstrating that labor exploitation has increased in the last 45-50 years in terms of absolute and relative surplus value does not, according to Rasmus, close the book on labor exploitation. Drawing on a suggestive quote in Volume III of Capital, he develops an original theory of “secondary exploitation.” Marx writes:

That the working-class is also swindled in this form [usury, commerce], and to an enormous extent, is self-evident… This is secondary exploitation, which runs parallel to the primary exploitation taking place in the production process itself. Capital, Volume III, p. 609 

Rasmus explains secondary exploitation this way: “Secondary Exploitation (SE) is not a question of value being created in exchange relations. It’s about capitalists reclaiming part of what they paid initially in wages. It’s about how capitalists maximize Total Exploitation by manipulating exchange relations as well as production relations.” 

To be clear, Marx is not using the technical sense of “exploitation” here, but the popular sense. However, the fact that the worker has “earned” a measure of value and that capitalists can wrest some of it away in various ways is exploitation and important and worthy of study. 

Here, however, Rasmus digresses, reverting back to the price form in his explanation of secondary exploitation. He seems to assume, without elaboration, that systemic “taking advantage of workers” outside of the production process must be explained in terms of prices and not values. He also seems to believe that all means of secondary exploitation must be within the exchange nexus. And he seems to believe that all secondary exploitation must be systemic. It is not clear why these assumptions should be made.

These methodological questions, however, bear little relevance to his fresh and original insights on secondary exploitation. Rasmus presents five mechanisms for capital to “claw back” from the working people the variable capital captured by the class in the value-producing process: credit, monopolistic price gouging, wage theft, deferred or social wages, and taxes. Importantly, Rasmus connects much of this exploitation to the active intervention of the state on behalf of capital.

Credit: Allowing workers to acquire commodities through deferred payment is not a sympathetic act by the capitalist, but a method of furthering accumulation in an environment where demand is restricted by the inequalities of income and wealth. The capitalist extracts additional value from the worker through interest charges. Additional value is “swindled” from the worker through the credit mechanism. Rasmus points out that interest-bearing loans to working people have expanded from $10 trillion-plus in 2013 to $17 trillion-plus in 2024, with dramatically higher interest rates in the last few years.

Monopolistic price gouging: Rasmus is fully aware that when prices go up, they are the result of decisions by capitalists to secure more revenue-- that action is not to benefit society, not to help the workers, but to secure more for investors. Insofar as they succeed, their gains are at the expense of workers-- a form of secondary exploitation.

Our current run of inflation is the result of a cycle of price increases to capture more of the consumers’ (in the end, the workers’) value and to catch up with competitors. But the impression must not be left unchallenged that this price gouging is painlessly left to the capitalist at his or her whim or that it is without risk. The impression must not be left, as it was in the 1960s with Sweezy/Baran, Gillman, and others, that monopoly concentration meant a sharp decline in the power of competition to retard and even thwart monopoly power to do as it liked. That lesson was sharply brought home in the 1970s with humbling of the US big three automakers and the US electronics industry. Monopoly and competition play a dialectical role in disciplining price behavior around labor values.

Wage theft: While theft is not exploitation, when it is common, frequent, and rarely sanctioned, it resembles exploitation more than theft! Rasmus provides an impressible list of common ruses-- “The methods [of wage theft] have included capitalists not paying the required minimum wage; not paying overtime wage rates as provided in Federal and state laws; not paying workers for the actual hours they work; paying them by the day or job instead of by the hour; forcing workers to pay their managers for a job; supervisors stealing workers’ cash tips; making illegal deductions from workers’ paychecks; deducting their pay for breaks they didn’t take or for damages to company goods; supervisors arranging pay ‘kickbacks’ for themselves from workers’ pay; firing workers and not paying them for their last day worked; failing to give proper 60-day notice of a plant closing and then not paying workers as required by law; denying workers access to guaranteed benefits like workers’ compensation when injured; refusing to make contributions to pension and health plans on behalf of workers and then pocketing the savings; and, not least, general payroll fraud.”

Deferred or Social wages: Rasmus shows how the government mechanisms that are meant to socially meet needs are skewed to draw more from workers proportionally while benefiting them less proportionally. He has in mind retirement, health care, and welfare programs that politicians persistently demand more sacrifices from working people to fund, while restricting their ability to draw the benefits through various tests of eligibility.

Taxes: Rasmus reminds us that the dominant political forces espousing the “Neoliberal policy regime” have dramatically increased the tax burden on workers:

Since the advent of Neoliberalism, the total tax burden has shifted from capitalists, their corporations, businesses, and investors to working class families.

In the post-World War II era the payroll tax has more than doubled as a share of total federal tax revenues, to around 45% by 2020. During the same period, the share of taxes paid by corporations has fallen from more than 20% to less than 10%. The federal individual income tax as a percent of total federal government revenues has remained around 40-45%. However, within that 40-45%, another shift in the burden has been occurring—from capital incomes to earned wage incomes…

Not just Trump, but every president since 2001 the US capitalist State has been engaged in a massive tax cutting program mostly benefiting capital incomes. The total tax cuts have amounted to at least $17 trillion since 2001: Starting with George W. Bush’s 2001-03 tax cuts which cut taxes $3.8 trillion (80% of which accrued to Capital incomes), through Obama’s 2009 tax cuts and his extension of Bush’s cuts in 2008 for another two years and again for another 10 years in 2013 (all of which cost another $6 trillion), through Trump’s massive 2017 tax cuts that cost $4.5 trillion, and Biden’s 2021-22 tax legislation that added another $2 trillion at minimum—the US Capitalist state has reduced taxes by at least $17 trillion!

Reducing capital’s taxes, as a proportion of tax revenue, increases future national obligations-- national debt-- that will ultimately be paid by working-class taxes. Or, if that proves unfeasible, it will be met by a reduction of social spending, which reduces social benefits for workers. Either way, the working class faces secondary exploitation through ruling-class tax policy.

Interestingly, Rasmus acknowledges that the state plays a big role in what he deems “secondary exploitation.” Yet, he also suggests that the proper province of secondary exploitation is in the bounds of exchange relations. This seeming anomaly can be avoided if we understand the increasing role of the state in engaging, broadly speaking, in the arena of exchange, as well as regulation. It is precisely this profound and broad engagement that many twentieth-century Marxists explained as state-monopoly capitalism.

*****

Jack Rasmus’s contribution is most welcome because it argues that returning to the fundamentals-- the concept of exploitation-- can be a fruitful way of looking at contemporary capitalism. It establishes a firm material base for an anti-capitalist politics that addresses the interests of working people as a class, the broadest of classes. 

Further, the theory of exploitation unites people as workers, but allows for the various ways and degrees of their exploitation. And it links the material interests of the protagonists in the class struggle to the many forms of social oppression and their contradictory interests in promoting or ending those oppressions: the capitalist sows oppressive divisions to gain exploitative advantage; the worker disavows oppressive divisions to achieve the unity necessary to defeat exploitation. That is, exploitation motivates the capitalist to divide people around nationality, race, sex, culture, social practices, and language. Ending exploitation motivates the worker to refuse these divisions.

In an age where capitalism owns a decided, powerful advantage because of the splintering of the left into numerous causes and where capitalism elevates individual identity to a place superseding class, the common goal of eliminating exploitation is a powerful unifying force.

Today’s left has too often interpreted anti-imperialism as simply the struggle for national sovereignty, rather than through the lens of exploitation. Consequently, the dynamics of class struggle within national borders is often missed. 

Of course, for Lenin and his followers, an advanced stage of capitalism-- monopoly capitalism-- was the life form of imperialism. And its beating heart was exploitation.

The vital tool that Marx, Engels, and Lenin brought to the struggle for workers’ emancipation was the theory of exploitation. 

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

Never to be Forgotten: A Life too Short

January 12 marked 60 years since the death of Lorraine Hansberry at the age of thirty-four. Hansberry was a brilliant intellectual and cultural worker who would earn the begrudging respect of the highest cultural gatekeepers, despite her activism in Communist and anti-racist circles. At a time in the early post-war period when lynching was commonplace and anti-Communism was in full crescendo, it was rare for anyone to risk membership or association, especially for a young African American from a prominent family on Chicago’s South Side. Most of her contemporaries were running away from Communism as fast as their feet would take them.

Her Communist activism on the Wisconsin-Madison campus coincided with her full support of the 1948 Henry Wallace Progressive Party campaign. Her commitment took her to New York, where she worked on Freedom, a newspaper created and contributed to by Black Communists and leftists, including Paul Robeson, W.E.B. DuBois, Louis Burnham, John Oliver Killens, Lloyd Brown, and others (Freedom was the forerunner to Freedomways, an equally leftist publication brought to life in the civil rights era). That Hansberry enthusiastically jumped into this cauldron of ostracized and blacklisted African American intellectuals in 1951 at the age of 21 and at the height of Cold War hysteria is a tribute to both her courage and her integrity.

In 1957, Hansberry wrote the play, A Raisin in the Sun, a masterpiece that came to be associated with her name. Despite the racism of the times and the insularity of the theater, Hansberry became the first African American to have a play produced on Broadway and the youngest playwright to win the prestigious NY Drama Critics Circle Award in 1959.

A Raisin in the Sun (a title taken from a poem by Langston Hughes) profoundly exposes the scars of racial oppression, not in a patronizing or crudely emotion-evoking way, but as social contradictions to be answered through struggle and liberation. It shares with Brecht’s theater universal messages expressed by the unique particulars of real, vulnerable, flawed, but evolving people.

The setting is a working-class Black family living in a poor neighborhood of segregated Chicago’s South Side. The death of the father brings a $10,000 insurance payout and the latent tensions from the possible realization of the family members’ different aspirations. The possibilities of escaping the neighborhood, of a safer, more comfortable home, a better environment for the grandchild, a higher education for the talented daughter, or an entrepreneurial venture for the son all arise. But those possibilities also become threatened by the allure of an attractive, but meager and insufficient payout earned from a life of labor.

The family matron wisely thinks of an investment in a new home as serving the whole family, but in an all-white segregated neighborhood, bringing forth further contradictions. She shares the common working-class dream of gaining a better life. When resisted by family members, she decides, with the wisdom of Job, to divide the settlement, providing a boost to all the dreams. After making a down payment on the house, she entrusted the money to her son, who recklessly gives all of the remaining money to his dishonest business associate.

With the money gone, the play could have become another scolding liberal morality play about victimization, dysfunction, and broken dreams.

Instead, Hansberry has the son meet the white homeowners’ racism, not with supplication but with dignity and defiance. It is not a story of individual redemption, but of finding family pride, familial solidarity, and in a small, but significant way, a commitment to a better world.

The play seamlessly addresses resignation, individualism, class, escapism, racial pride, family dynamics, and, of course, the full scourge of racism.

Because it is not about glass ceilings, elite access, or language policing, it is a good reminder today of the continuing oppression of Black workers and the poor.

Columbia Pictures remade Raisin into a film in 1961, retaining Hansberry as the screenwriter and winning many accolades. The American Film Institute counts the film version as one of their top 100.

Turner Classic Movies showcased the film this past January 20, for Martin Luther King's birthday.

Hansberry’s brilliance was apparent to all who met her. The electric, politically charged singer, Nina Simone-- a close friend of Hansberry-- beautifully performed the song To Be Young, Gifted, and Black as homage to her friend. A recording reached a wide audience in the late 1960s.

Perhaps nothing demonstrates the power and integrity of Hansberry like her 1963 confrontation with Attorney General Robert Kennedy, organized by the celebrated writer, James Baldwin. Baldwin’s prominence prompted Kennedy to arrange an informal meeting with a group of civil rights activists to be assembled by Baldwin. Included in the small group were Jerome Smith, a young CORE freedom rider, who had been beaten and jailed in the South, along with Hansberry.

After hearing Kennedy recounting all of the actions that he claimed the Justice Department had undertaken in the desegregation battles, Smith differed sharply, citing the many times he had seen Federal agents stand by while his cohorts were beaten.

After Kennedy seemed shocked by this audacious response, Hansberry is said to have stated: "You've got a great many very, very accomplished people in this room, Mr. Attorney General. But the only man who should be listened to is that man over there. That is the voice of twenty-two million people" [pointing to Smith].

After Smith maintained that he would rather die than fight a war for the US, Hansberry addressed an appalled Kennedy: "Look, if you can't understand what this young man is saying, then we are without any hope at all because you and your brother are representatives of the best that a White America can offer; and if you are insensitive to this, then there's no alternative except our going in the streets ... and chaos."

After a lecture on how the immigrant Kennedy family suffered poverty, Hansberry walked out.

In a 1979 article in Freedomways, Baldwin warmly remembered that meeting and Hansberry’s contribution: “I must, now… do something which I have never done before: Sketch the famous Bobby Kennedy meeting… I want merely to suggest something of Lorraine Hansberry’s beauty and power on that day; and what the incomprehension that day’s encounter was to cause the nation and presently, the world.”

He recalled the meeting’s close: “The meeting ended with Lorraine standing up. She said, in response to Jerome’s statement concerning the perpetual demolition faced every hour of every day by black men who pay a price literally unspeakable for attempting to protect their women, their children, their homes, or their lives, ‘That is all true, but I am not worried about black men-- who have done splendidly, it seems to me, all things considered.’”

“Then she paused and looked at Bobby Kennedy who, perhaps for the first time, looked at her.”

“‘But I am very worried,’ she said, ‘about the state of the civilization which produced that photograph of the white cop standing on the that Negro woman’s neck in Birmingham’.”

“Then, she smiled. And I am glad that she was not smiling at me. She extended her hand.”

“‘Goodbye, Mr. Attorney General,’ she said and walked out of the room.”

Leaving for another meeting, Baldwin remembers: “We passed Lorraine who didn’t see us. She was walking toward Fifth Avenue-- her face twisted, her hands clasped before her belly, eyes darker than any eyes I had ever seen before-- walking in an absolutely private place.

I knew I couldn’t call her.

Our car drove on; we passed her.

And then, we heard the thunder.”

Her commitment-- her complete commitment to social justice-- never ebbed, even facing her mortality. In the spring of 1964, months before her death of pancreatic cancer, she literally rose from a hospital bed to speak at a fundraiser for Monthly Review. She concluded:

As we all know, there is something which we might call the “civil rights game” going on in this country, and it is being played right now in Washington. It is a game in which individuals, and indeed whole classes of individuals, who are in every way imaginable committed to the perpetuation of the oppression of Negroes, pretend for a whole variety of fashionable reasons that they are not. A portion of those who play this game go so far as to pretend that not only are they against the present condition of Negroes but they would like to alter that condition for the better; and according to the rules of the game, they are designated by their co-players as civil rights champions and, depending on what is happening on a given day, they debate with one another on the best methods of stalling Negro demands for equality while appearing to be laboring on behalf of Negro equality. Naturally whenever Negroes assert that their situation is intolerable, these game-players point to the game which is going on and say that if those Negroes do not shut up they will stop playing altogether and reveal their true sentiments with regard to Negro freedom—which of course would be one of the healthiest things that could happen to this not-so-healthy country.

That is why I have come here this evening to celebrate with you the recognition of the fact that there is only one place from which that desperately needed pressure on the game is going to come when all is said and done. It’s going to come from 20 million discontented black people who, however, must be led by a new and presently developing young Negro leadership—a leadership which must absolutely, if the present Negro revolt is to turn into a revolution, become sophisticated in the most advanced ideas abroad in the world, a leadership which will have had exposure to the great ideas and movements of our time, a Negro leadership which can throw off the blindness of parochialism and bathe the aspirations of the Negro people in the realism of the twentieth century, a leadership which has no illusion about the nature of our oppression and will no longer hesitate to condemn, not only the results of that oppression, but also the true and inescapable cause of it—which of course is the present organization of American society. Monthly Review, 2015, Volume 67, Issue 01 (May)

A friend since her days at Freedom, the esteemed writer John Oliver Killens recalls: “To me, Lorraine Hansberry was a one-woman literary warrior for change-- qualitative and fundamental change.” He adds: “In my view, Lorraine was a Black nationalist with a socialist perspective… Have not all the revolutions of the 20th century been about national liberation? And haven’t they all been socialist revolutions-- Russia, China, Cuba, Vietnam?”

But Hansberry was also an internationalist, he elaborates: “As with Robeson and Malcolm, her nationalism had an internationalist context that is reflected by one of her African characters in Les Blancs [her last play]. Tshembe tells the white man, Charles Morris:

I shall be honest with you, Mr. Morris. I do not ‘hate’ all white men-- but I desperately wish I did. It would make everything infinitely easier! But I am afraid that, among other things, I have seen the slums of Liverpool and Dublin and the caves of Naples. I have seen Dachau and Anne Frank’s attic in Amsterdam. I have seen too many raw-knuckled Frenchmen coming out of the metro at dawn and too many pop-eyed Italian children to believe that those who raided Africa for three centuries ever ‘loved’ the white race either."

Killens sums up Lorraine Hansberry, as if anyone could really sum up such a brilliant giant among Lilliputians:

Lorraine Hansberry was an extraordinarily articulate young black woman, committed to the struggle and very fast on the draw. Indeed, literarily and intellectually, she was one of the fastest guns in the East-- and her gun was for revolution and change. She was a humanist; she was anti-slavery (meaning she was anti-capitalist). The pity of it, and the loss to us, are that she was with us for so terribly short of a period. Who knows to what heights this courageous falcon might have soared? (Freedomways, fourth quarter, 1979)

A great loss, not to be forgotten…

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

Essential Reading for the New Year

If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution, Vincent Bevins and Blue Collar Empire: The Untold Story of US Labor’s Global Anticommunist Crusade, Jeff Schuhrke were maybe the two most important books that I read this past year. I have read many good books, many well written books, many timely books, but these were arguably the two most important books. 

They are important because they attempt to tackle questions that are neglected or only superficially discussed on the political left. They are most important because they surface popular assumptions that are among the greatest obstacles to the success of any authentically left project: spontaneity as an organizational philosophy and anti-Communism as political orthodoxy.

Recommended reviews of both books can be found on Marxism-Leninism Today here and here.  

Bevins’ book highlights the failure of impressive mass risings that rocked several countries and their ruling classes in the twenty-first century. He chronicles the objective conditions that inspired people to rise in opposition and in great numbers; he confirms the breadth and depth of the movements that arose; and he demonstrates how the movements fell far short of their goals, even resulting in setbacks.

In the cases Bevins studies, though the movements met with resistance, they melted away far before any final reckoning with that resistance. In his post-mortem-- based on many interviews with leaders, participants, and activists-- he concluded that a strong commitment to spontaneity, a rigid rejection of hierarchies, and a naive concept of participatory democracy hindered moving from demonstrations to successful social change, not to mention, revolutions. 

It is this prominence of neo-anarchism or radical democracy-- two ideologies that collapse, in practice, into one-- that doomed the Arab Spring, the Occupy movement, and many other promising movements that succeeded in bringing millions into action, but left the stage with little gain. 

While Bevins insists that he is only a journalist-- a reporter and interpreter of findings-- he strongly suggests that structure and leadership were the missing elements from mass struggles of this century. One cannot help but sense that he has something akin to a Leninist organizational model in mind, without an explicit endorsement. And why not? After all, weren’t highly organized, vision-driven, often worker-led parties the most formidable, the most successful movements for change, for revolution in the last century? 

Today’s tragedy is that a handful of sentences describing a grievous injustice on social media can bring mighty masses to the streets, but the reigning simplistic ideology of spontaneous, undirected, unfocussed action will go no further. Political demonstrations become exercises in mass therapy-- “performances” of democracy-- rather than goal-directed measures in a larger political program of change.

Of course, these same “spontaneous” risings are also easily hijacked by other political operators with a wholly different agenda, like the infamous color revolutions that have reshaped Eastern Europe and other places in the interest of imperialism. Where there are no organic leaders, where there is no master plan, leaders and direction will likely be supplied from somewhere else.

The student movements of the 1960s codified the idea of participatory democracy-- a decision-making approach that sought to engage everyone equally, renounced the idea of authority, and scorned traditional roles of leadership. But the world is not a college seminar room. Millions of workers and peasants have-- in the past-- deferred the role of leadership to those who have earned it from their dedication and sacrifices. They understood that a revolution itself is the most democratic act of all, breaking the bonds of domination and exploitation and opening the gates to popular rule. 

The overarching focus on democratic procedure-- an obsession of the privileged left-- too often dilutes the commitment to outcomes. The final lap of social change is the replacement of one system with another, the overthrow of one ruling order with another. If, as anarchists and liberals maintain, the democratic procedure is everything, then there is no need to prefigure an outcome. Instead, we can take it on faith that masses-as-a-whole will spontaneously choose the outcome that is best in some imagined, country-wide utopian townhall meeting of the future. 

Unfortunately, history gives us no example of great social change secured by consensus. Nor has a parliament ever handed working people a victory without the pressure of mass militancy. 

Behind the left cult of bourgeois democracy is a deeply ingrained anti-Communism. At the height of the Cold War, Communism, socialism, and even popular frontism came under vigorous attack throughout the capitalist countries and especially in the US. Association with progressive ideas advocated by Communists or the center-left popular front (including the New Deal) risked social isolation, job loss, even jail. Unless accompanied by a conspicuous disclaimer condemning Communism, progressive ideas such as labor rights, social equality, anti-racism, or even mild criticism of capitalism, were cause for ostracization. Few had the integrity to risk the consequences of the Cold War inquisition. Instead, even the most tepid reformism necessarily had to be presented with the tag “democratic” or “free” (to separate itself from Communism), as in “democratic socialism,” “democratic planning,” or “free trade unionism.”

As the worst of the inquisition resided, a “new left” was born that consistently paid homage to the official doctrine of anti-Communism. To the new generation of activists, the problem was not that the capitalist countries needed a radical, even revolutionary makeover, but that they needed their flawed democracies to be reformed, to be more “democratic.” Yes, the institutions were imperfect-- infected with racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny, elitism, prejudices of all kinds, militarism, or corruption-- but they were sound and could be fixed with an injection of democracy. 

Fear of redbaiting-- dread of violating the secular religion of anti-Communism-- closed the door to the kind of really radical answers that working people had sought since the dawn of the industrial age. 

Which brings us to Jeff Schurhke’s important book, Blue Collar Empire. 

If the hope of a radically more just, more egalitarian, more humane society lies in the hands of the working class-- and I think it does-- then it cannot be shackled by the dogma of anti-Communism. Yet Schurhke shows that our organized US labor movement-- the AFL-CIO-- has been thoroughly infected with this disease-- a disease that incubated in the business unionism of Samuel Gompers, the American Federation’s founder, spread throughout the years of AFL craft unionism, and killed the promising spark of class-struggle unionism generated by the nascent CIO. 

We learn from Schurhke of the Cold War betrayal of global workers’ solidarity culminating in US labor’s sabotage of The World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU). We are told of the undermining of Communist and left-led unions throughout the world and the disasters that befell foreign workers as a result.

Anti-Communism wedded the AFL-CIO to the CIA stooges Jay Lovestone and Irving Brown, and served as a litmus test for leadership, even participation in the AFL-CIO, effectively vetting the most militant, class-conscious organizers. Through the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), the AFL-CIO collaborated with only the most backward, US-friendly, anti-Communist international union leaders, spreading US dollars to deny workers the right to choose their own way forward.

Schurhke provides us with the most comprehensive account of the insidious AFL-CIO/CIA cooperation since George Morris’s long-out-of-print classic, CIA and American Labor (1967), a book that unfortunately received more attention from the CIA than from most of his contemporary labor historians.

Genuflecting to anti-Communism and mechanically disdaining organizational principles will inevitably cripple left movements today, as they have so often in the past.

For Bevins and Schurhke in their own words, interviews are available from Coming From Left Field: Bevins, Schurhke.

The authors underscore the obstacles to moving beyond the ugly choices currently available, as we enter a new and foreboding year.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

Some Clarity on Imperialism Today

Imperialism is not the creation of any one or of any group of states. It is the product of a particular stage of ripeness in the world development of capital, an innately international condition, an indivisible whole, that is recognizable only in all its relations, and from which no nation can hold aloof at will…  Rosa Luxemburg, The Crisis of German Social Democracy (1916)

The arguments embroiling the left on the nature of imperialism, over whether Peoples’ China or Russia is capitalist or imperialist, whether the pink tide in Latin America is a socialist trend, whether the BRICS development is an anti-imperialist movement, and so forth, are becoming more and more heated as they proceed further and further into the academic weeds. 

There is a host of issues and positions entangled in these debates, as well as numerous vested interests: deeply felt, long held theories, research platforms, and networks of intellectual allies.

Moreover, these arguments are decidedly one-sided: long on academic opinion, short on working-class or activist participation.

That said, they are important and deserve discussion. 

A recent interview of Steve Ellner by Federico Fuentes in LINKS International Journal of Socialist Renewal is a place to begin to unravel some of these disputes. Now Steve Ellner is neither a surrogate in nor a straw man for this discussion. Ellner is a thoughtful, analytical academic with a long-committed history in the Latin American solidarity movement and with a background on the left. He is more likely to say “X may mean…” rather than “X must mean…” than many of his academic colleagues. That is to say, he is no enemy of nuance.

Ellner begins with Lenin, as he should, and asserts that Lenin’s theory is both “political-military” and “economic.” This, of course, is correct. In Chapter seven of Imperialism, Lenin specifies five characteristics of the imperialist system. Four are economic: the decisive role of monopoly capital, the merging of financial and industrial capital, the export of capital, and the internationalization of monopoly capital. One is political-military: the division of the world between the greatest capitalist powers.

Lenin gives no weight to these characteristics because they are together necessary and sufficient for defining imperialism as a system emerging in the late nineteenth century. Imperialism, for Lenin, is a stage and not a club.

Following John Bellamy Foster, the editor of Monthly Review, Ellner posits that there are two interpretations of imperialism that some believe follow from the two aspects of imperialism. Indeed, there may well be two interpretations, but given Lenin’s unitary interpretation of imperialism in Chapter seven, they are misinterpretations of Lenin’s thought. Recognizing that Lenin explicitly says that he offers a definition “that will embrace the following five essential features…,” there is, perhaps to the dismay of some, only one valid interpretation-- an interpretation that combines the economic with the political-military.

That said, Foster and Ellner are correct in critically appraising those who do misinterpret imperialism as solely political-military (contestation of territories among great powers) or as solely economic (capitalist exploitation). Truly, most of the misunderstandings about imperialism since Lenin’s time come from advocating one misinterpretation rather than the other, while failing to perceive imperialism as a system. 

Ellner gently rejects one political-military interpretation that he associates with Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin: equating “imperialism with the political domination of the US empire, backed of course by military power…” Ellner rejects that thesis, “given declining US prestige and global economic instability.” An interpretation that separates and privileges the political-military from the economic necessarily decouples imperialism from capitalism-- something that Lenin explicitly denies. Accordingly, it follows that modern-day imperialism-- including US imperialism-- would be akin to the adventures of Alexander the Great or Genghis Khan, leaving exploitation as, at best, a contingent feature.

A solely political-military explanation of imperialism is a step removed from the more robust Leninist explanation.

Ellner considers the economic interpretation: “At the other extreme are those left theorists who focus on the dominance of global capital and minimize the importance of the nation-state.” Ellner has in mind as his immediate target the position staked out by William I Robinson, Jerry Harris, and others in the late 1990s, a position that rides the then-dramatic wave of globalization to posit a supremely powerful Transnational Capitalist Class (TCC) that overshadows, even renders obsolete, the nation-state. 

At the time, others pointed out that the substantial quantitative changes in trade and investment and their global sweep had been seen before and were simply a repeat of the past, most telling in the decades before the first world war. Were these changes not a continuation of the qualitative changes addressed in Lenin’s Imperialism? 

Like many speculations that overshoot the evidence, the projected decline or death of the nation-state was made irrelevant by the march of history. The many endless and expanding wars of the twenty-first century underscored the vitality of the nation-state as an historical actor. And the intense economic nationalism spawned by the economic crises of recent decades signals the demise of globalization-- a phenomenon that proved to be a phase and not a new stage of capitalism. Sanctions and tariffs are the mark of robust, aggressive nation-states.

The tempest in an academic teapot stirred by the artificial separation of the economic and the political-military in Lenin’s theory of imperialism is enabled by lack of clarity about the nature of the state. Left thinkers, especially in the Anglophone world, have neglected or derided the Leninist concept of State-Monopoly Capitalism-- the process of fusion between the state and the influence and interests of monopoly capitalism-- which explains exactly how and why the nation-state functions today in the energy wars between Russia and the US and the technology wars between Peoples’ China (e.g., Huawei) and the US. Paul Sweezy and Paul Baran’s casual dismissal of the concept of State-Monopoly Capitalism in Monopoly Capital (1966) is representative of the utter contempt shown for Communist research projects by many so-called “Western Marxists.” While the theory of State-Monopoly Capitalism gets no hearing among Marxist academics, the slippery, but ominous-sounding concept of “deep state” has achieved wide-spread acceptance, while not taxing the comfort of Western intellectuals.

Nonetheless, Robinson’s stress on the political economy of imperialism cannot easily be dismissed. His reliance on the key concepts of class and exploitation are certainly essential to Lenin’s theory. 

In fact, the greatest challenge to the political-military aspect of Lenin’s theory was not the alleged decline of the nation-state, but the demise of the colonial system, especially with the wide-spread independence movements after World War II. The crude and totalizing domination of weaker nations favored by the Spanish, French, Portuguese, and British Empires-- the division of the world into administered colonies-- was, with nominal independence, replaced by a system of more benign economic domination. Kwame Nkrumah, the Ghanaian revolutionary, designated this system “neo-colonialism” in his book, Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. Nkrumah’s elaboration of Lenin’s theory preserved the integrity of Lenin’s “political-military” aspect by reconstituting the colonial division of the world by the great powers into a neo-colonial division of the world into spheres of interest and of prevailing economic influence.

Since Ellner correctly acknowledges that Lenin’s economic and political-military aspects are essential to his theory of imperialism, he must contend with an awkward, vexing question that continually divides the left: how does the People’s Republic of China (PRC) fit into the world imperialist system? What does its deep and broad participation in the global market mean?

Ellner appeals to the facts that the PRC does not have bases throughout the world, does not use sanctions (not true!), and does not exploit the excuse of human rights to intervene in the affairs of other countries. 

But surely this side steps Nkrumah’s powerful thesis that imperialism in the post-World War II era is not simply the vulgar exercise of administrative and military power and the exhibition of national chauvinism. It is, rather, the division of the world into spheres of interest that both benefit the great powers through exploitation and the competition with other great powers for shares of the bounty. 

Certainly, the PRC does not avow a policy of imperial predation, but neither does the US or any other great power from the past. Indeed, imperialism has always been presented-- sincerely or not-- as beneficial to all parties, whether it is a civilizing function, a paternalistic boost, or protection from other powers. The Chinese leadership may well truthfully believe that their trade, investment, and partnership with other countries is a victory for all-- a “win-win” as some like to say.

But that is always the answer that great powers give that are using their capital, their know-how, and their trade to profit their corporations. Perhaps, the most notorious of these “win-win” projects was the Marshall Plan. Sold to Europe as a “win-win” based on Europe’s impoverishment and the US’s generosity, billions were allocated for loans, grants, and investments in Europe. History shows that billions in new business for US corporations were thus created, Cold War political dependency and loyalty were achieved, and the US retained new markets for decades. The big winners, of course, were US corporations and their capital-starved European counterparts.   

Other US investment and “aid” projects, like The Alliance for Progress, were more blatantly guided by US interests and even less a “win” for their targets.

This was the era of the development theories of W. W. Rostow that offered a blueprint and a justification for the investment of capital in and the corporate penetration of poorer countries. It was, in fact, a justification for neo-colonialism. Yet Rostow’s stage theory of lifting countries from poverty can appear surprisingly consonant with the logic of the PRC’s foreign investment strategies.

It is hard to resist the temptation to ask: How is this different from the PRC Belt and Road Initiative? How is the BRI different from the Marshall Plan? Or, to use an example from Lenin’s time, the Berlin-Baghdad railroad project?   

It is beyond dispute that Peoples’ China-- whatever the goals of its ruling Communist Party-- has a massive capitalist sector, with many corporations arguably of monopoly concentration rivaling their US and European counterparts, that similarly seek investment opportunities for their accumulated capital. That is, after all, the motion of capitalism. 

What is baffling and frustrating for those sympathetic to the Communist Party of China is the failure for the CPC’s leaders to frame their economic policies towards other states in the language of class or employ the concept of exploitation. In Comrade Xi’s recent speeches at the Kazan meeting of BRICS+, there are many references to “multilateralism,” “equitable global development,” “security,” “cooperation,” “advancing global governance reform,” “innovation,” “green development,” “harmonious coexistence,” “common prosperity,” and “modernization,” -- all ideas that would resonate with the audience of the G7. How would these values change the class relations of the BRICS+ nations? What does this thinking do to alleviate the exploitation of capitalist corporations? 

These are the questions Ellner and others should be asking of the PRC’s leaders and the advocates of BRICS+. These are the questions that probe how today’s nation-states participate in the imperialist system and how that participation affects working people.

The problem is that many on the left would like to believe that there is a form of anti-imperialism that is not anti-capitalist. They find in the BRI and BRICS+ a model that competes with United States imperialism and could be said to be therefore anti-US imperialist, but leaves capitalism intact. Of course, it is impossible to embrace this view and retain Lenin’s theory of imperialism. Every page in the pamphlet, Imperialism, affirms the intimate relation between imperialism and capitalism. The very subtitle-- The Final Stage of Capitalism-- is testimony to that connection.

Ellner suggests that a political case can be made in the US for singling out US imperialism over imperialism, in general. He wants us to believe, through an example of Bernie Sanders’ strategic thinking, that criticizing US foreign policy is far more threatening to the ruling class than Sanders’ “socialism.” That may be true of Sanders’ tepid social democratic posture, but not of any serious “socialist” stance against capitalism and its international face. 

We get a taste of Ellner’s vision of the role of BRICS-style anti-imperialism when he conjectures that “Anti-imperialism is one effective way to drive a wedge between the Democratic Party machine and large sectors of the party who are progressive but vote for Democratic candidates as a lesser of two evils.” Rather than take the failed “lesser-of-two-evils” policy head on, rather than contesting the idea of always voting for candidates who are bad, but maybe not as bad as an opponent, the left might instead wean Democrats away from slavish support for the Democratic Party agenda by standing against US foreign policy (which is largely bipartisan!). If trickery and parlor games count as a left strategy within the Democratic Party orbit, maybe it's time to leave that orbit and look to building a third party.

Ellner’s interrogator, Federico Fuentes, correctly questions how making US imperialism the immediate target of the Western left might possibly overshadow or even conflict with the class struggle, the fight for socialism. He opines: “There can be a problem when prioritising US imperialism leads to a kind of ‘lesser evil’ politics in which genuine democratic and worker struggles are not just underrated, but directly opposed on the basis that they weaken the struggle against US imperialism…” 

Fuentes and Ellner, in this regard, are fully aware of the recent dispute between the Maduro government and the Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV) over the direction of the Bolivarian process, a dispute that resulted in an attempt to eviscerate the PCV on the part of Maduro’s governing party. Because the PCV was opposing the Maduro party in the July, 2024 election, Maduro maneuvered to have the PCV stripped of its identity, securing an endorsement from a bogus PCV constructed of whole cloth by Venezuelan courts.  

From the PCV’s perspective, the Maduro government had abandoned the struggle for socialism in deed, if not word, and turned on the working class, compromising Chavismo in order to hold on to power. As a Leninist party, PCV held fast to the view that there is no anti-imperialism without anti-capitalism. Thus, the government’s reversal of many working-class gains had lost working-class support and, therefore, the support of the PCV.

Some Western leftists uncritically support the Maduro government and deny or ignore the facts of the matter. They are delusional. The facts are indisputable. Ellner is not among those denying them.

Still others argue that defense of the Bolivarian process against the machinations of US imperialism should be an unconditional obligation of all progressive Venezuelans, including the Communists. Therefore, the Communists were wrong to not support the government.

But surely this thinking calls for Venezuelan workers to set aside their interests to serve some bourgeois notion of national sovereignty. It is one thing to defend the interests of the workers against the enslavement or exploitation of a foreign power. It is quite another to defend the bourgeois state and its own exploiters without taking exception. 

This was the question that workers and their political parties faced on many occasions in the twentieth century: whether they would rally around a flag of national sovereignty when they essentially had little to gain but a fleeting national pride. 

As Lenin, Luxemburg, Liebknecht, and their contemporaries argued during the brutal bloodletting of the First World War, workers should refuse to participate in the “anti-imperialism” of national chauvinism, the clash of capitalist states.  

The road to defeating imperial aggression-- US or any other-- is to win the working class to the fight, with a class-oriented program that attacks the roots of imperialism: capitalism. Unity around the goal of defeating the imperialist enemy-- in Russia, China, Vietnam, or anywhere else-- was won by siding with workers against capital, not accommodating or compromising with it. That was the message that the Communist Party tried to deliver to the Maduro government. 

Restraining, containing, or deflecting US imperialism will not defeat the system of imperialism, anymore than restraining, containing, deflecting, or even overwhelming British imperialism, as occurred in the past, defeated imperialism. Only replacing capitalism with socialism will end imperialism. 

That in no way diminishes the day-to-day struggle against US domination. It does, however, mean that the countries participating in the global capitalist market will reinforce the existing imperialist system until they exit capitalism. While there can be an anti-US imperialist coalition among capitalist-based countries, there can be no anti-imperialist coalition made up of countries committed to the capitalist road. 

The left must be clear: a multipolar capitalist world has no more chance of escaping the ravages of imperialism than a unipolar capitalist world. If anything, multipolarity multiples and intensifies inter-imperialist rivalry. 

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com