Mamdani and Beyond

It should not surprise that many US leftists are excited by the victory of Zohran Mamdani in last Wednesday’s New York City primary election. They should be buoyed by a rare victory in a bleak political landscape.

Mamdani defeated an establishment candidate showered with money and endorsed by Democratic Party royalty. His chief opponent, Andrew Cuomo, enjoyed the support and the forecasts of all the major media, locally and nationally. Cuomo fell back on every cheap, spineless trick: redbaiting (Mamdani is a member of Democratic Socialist of America), ethnic and religious baiting (Mamdani is a foreign-born Muslim), and “unfriendliness” to business (Mamdani advocates taxing the rich, freezing rents, and fare-less transit). And still Mamdani won.

Admittedly, Cuomo is ethically challenged and tarnished by his prior resignation from New York’s Governorship. One supposes that Democratic bigwigs could easily have seen an advantage in masculine sliminess after witnessing the king of vulgarity-- Donald Trump-- enjoy great electoral success.  

But for the left, the important fact was that Cuomo represented the strategy and tactics, the program (such as it is), and the machinery of the Democratic Party leadership. The left needed a victory against the Clintons, Obamas, and Carvilles to demonstrate that another way was possible. And more pointedly, the left needed to see that a program embracing a class-war skirmish against developers, financial titans, and a motley assortment of other capitalists can win in the largest city in the US. Nearly every major policy domestically and internationally that the Democratic Party considers toxic was embraced by Mamdani’s campaign. And still Mamdani won.

And why shouldn’t he? 

Democratic Party consultants methodically ignore the views of voters-- views expressing economic hardship, a broken health care system, mounting debt, a housing crisis, etc.-- delivered by opinion polls. Mamdani listened. And he won.

Clearly, the seats of wealth and power were shaken, reacting violently and crudely to Mamdani’s victory. A major Cuomo backer, hedge fund exec, Dan Loeb, captured the moment: “It’s officially hot commie summer.” 

We wish!

Wall Street quickly panicked, according to the Wall Street Journal: 

Corporate leaders held a flurry of private phone calls to plot how to fight back against Mamdani and discussed backing an outside group with the goal of raising around $20 million to oppose him, according to people familiar with the matter.

The WSJ quotes Anthony Pompliano, a skittish CEO of a bitcoin-focused financial company: “I can’t believe I even need to say this, but socialism doesn’t work… It has failed in every American city it was tried.”

Others, including hedge-fund manager, Ricky Sandler, threaten to take their business outside New York City.

The Washington Post editorial board scolds readers with this ominous headline warning: Zohran Mamdani’s victory is bad for New York and the Democratic Party.

It gets even wackier in the right wing's outer limits. My favorite libertarian site posted a near hysterical call for the application of the infamous 1954 Communist Control Act to remove him from office, even put Mamdani in prison. The never-disappointing, notorious thug, Erik D Prince, calls for Kristi Noem to initiate deportation proceedings.

Yet not so shockingly, many fellow Democrats nearly matched the scorn and contempt heaped on Mamdani by Wealth, Power, and Trumpers. Senate and House minority leaders-- Schumer and Jeffries-- refused to endorse the primary winner. New York Representative Laura Gillen declared that Mamdani is the "absolute wrong choice for New York." Her colleague, Tom Suozzi, had “serious concerns,” as reported by Axios under the banner: Democratic establishment melts down over Mamdani's win in New York. Other Democrats ran away from discussing the victory and, of course, the overworked, overwrought, and abused charge of “antisemitism” was tossed about promiscuously.

Where there is no fear and alarm, there is euphoria. Nearly every writer for The Nation enthused over the primary victory, with the capable Jeet Heer gleefully proclaiming that “Zohran Mamdani Defeated a Corrupt, Weak Democratic Party Establishment”.

Similarly, David Sirota, former advisor and speechwriter for Bernie Sanders, wrote-- with understandable gloating-- on The Lever and in Rolling Stone:

Democratic Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral primary victory in New York City has prompted an elite panic, the likes of which we’ve rarely seen: Billionaires are desperately seeking a general-election candidate to stop him, former Barack Obama aides are publicly melting down, corporate moguls are threatening a capital strike, and CNBC has become a television forum for nervous breakdowns. Meanwhile, Democratic elites who’ve spent a decade punching left are suddenly trying to align themselves with and take credit for Mamdani’s brand (though not necessarily his agenda).

This breakthrough-- he surmises-- could lead to a “Democratic Party reckoning.”

But wait a minute.

We can’t let euphoria blind us to the track record of other Democratic Party insurgencies. We cannot forget how deeply opposed the Democratic Party’s bosses, consultants, and wealthy benefactors are to popular reforms and even modestly visionary candidates. Party intellectuals fully understand-- as hotshot consultant James Carville bluntly reminds us-- that in a two-party system all the oppositional party has to do is wait for the other party to stumble and then take its turn. Why would the Democrats bother to construct a voter-friendly program leaning towards social justice?

A glance at the crude sabotage of two Bernie Sanders Presidential campaigns by the Democratic Party Godfathers should dispel even the most gullible from any delusion that the party will change course.

Should Mamdani actually win the mayoral race-- and we must work hard to see that he does-- there is absolutely no reason to believe that the Party of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama will draw even the most modest conclusion about the way forward. They are not interested in going forward, only in returning to power. Of course, they will-- as they have in the past-- welcome idealistic foot soldiers who want to believe that the Democratic Party is the path to social justice. Generations of well-meaning, change-seeking youth have been ground up by this cynical process of bait-and-switch.

Though the Party’s leadership will not acknowledge it, the Democrat brand is widely discredited. As Jarod Abbott and Les Leopold conclude: “Polling shows Americans are ready to support independent populists running on economic platforms. But what they don’t want is anything associated with the Democratic Party’s brand.” 

Stopping short of calling for a new party, Abbott and Leopold asked poll respondents in key rust-belt states if they would support a worker-oriented association independent of both parties to support independent candidates. Fifty-seven percent of respondents would support or strongly support such an association. 

This squares with recent polls that show strong disapproval of elected Democrats and the Democratic Party. The recent late-May Financial Times/YouGov poll shows that 57 percent of respondents have an unfavorable view of Democrats in Congress. And a similar 57 percent have an unfavorable view of the Democratic Party. Only 11 percent have a very favorable view of the Democratic Party. 

Whether an “association” or a party is necessary, Abbott and Leopold are correct in recognizing that it must have a strong working-class base in order to break away from the corporate ownership of the Democratic Party.

As Charles Derber has perceptively noted on a recent podcast, the worse outcome of the current multi-faceted crisis is to revert to the earlier times that spawned the Trump phenomena. And that is exactly what the Democrats are offering.

With the Republican Party leadership facing a schism over Iran between war hawks and non-interventionists (Greene, Bannon, and Carlson) and with the growing split between cultural warriors and Silicon Valley libertarians (Musk’s threat to launch a third party), the Democrats may well slip back into power by default.  

Surely, we can do better.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

Does China have an Internationalist Foreign Policy?

A number of observant commentators have raised questions about Peoples’ China’s Belt and Road Initiative and more broadly, the foreign policy of the PRC. 

Reliable left observers like Ann Garrison, writing in Black Agenda Report, have voiced concerns about Chinese investments in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, based on Siddharth Kara’s book, Cobalt Red, How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives. Kara contends that Chinese are engaged in a brutal competition to acquire a raw material essential to battery manufacturing, participating in the highly exploitative practice of artisanal cobalt mining. 

More recently, Razan Shawamreh has challenged the PRC’s economic engagement with Israel. Writing in Middle East Eye. Shawamreh cites three different Chinese state-owned companies heavily invested in Israeli firms servicing or operating in illegal settlements-- ChemChina, Bright Foods, Fosum Group-- that own or have a majority stake in an Israeli corporation. She charges Peoples’ China of hypocritically publicly denouncing Israeli policies while quietly aiding the cause of Israeli settlers.

On May 22, Kim Petersen posted a thoughtful, well reasoned piece on Dissident Voice, entitled Palestine and the Conscience of China. Petersen persuasively lauds the many achievements of Peoples’ China. It is easy to forget the century of humiliation that this once proud, advanced society suffered at the hands of European imperialism. After 12 years of fighting Japanese invaders and enduring a bloody civil war costing tens of millions of casualties, China’s advance since-- under the leadership of the Communist Party of China-- has been truly remarkable. 

As Peoples’ China celebrates meeting its goal of becoming a “moderately prosperous” society, it is important to see how far it has come from 1949. When Western apologists for the market economy brag of the aggregate economic gains that global markets have brought to the developing world, they are largely talking about China (and, more recently, Vietnam and India). 

By any measure of citizen satisfaction with their government by international surveys, the PRC consistently ranks at or near the top.

At the same time, Petersen raises questions about the seeming inconsistency of the Chinese government’s vocal criticism of Israel’s genocidal policies in Gaza and Peoples’ China’s continuing economic engagement with Israel. The PRC accounts for over 20% of Israeli imports. 

Petersen quotes Professor T. P. Wilkinson: “Non-interference is China’s top principle — business comes first. If there is any morality it only applies in China.” And it is precisely China’s moral conscience that Petersen finds wanting.

Nick Corbishley, writing on June 6 in Naked Capitalism adds:

However, not everyone is trying — or even pretending — to distance themselves from Tel Aviv right now. The People’s Republic of China, for example, is actually seeking to strengthen its ties with Israel.

After initially siding with Palestine (and Hamas) following October 7, Beijing is now looking to rebuild ties with Israel. Just four days ago, as Israel’s Defence Forces were unleashing coordinated attacks on aid depots, China’s ambassador to Israel Xiao Junzheng discussed “deepening China-Israel economic and trade cooperation” with Israel’s Minister of Economy and Industry, Nir Barkat.

Still others ask why Peoples’ China, a self-described socialist country, has failed to replace the Soviet Union in guaranteeing the economic vitality of tiny socialist Cuba-- a country starved by a US blockade and harsh sanctions upon anyone defying that blockade. It is difficult to reconcile the PRC’s modest economic aid to Cuba with China’s $19 billion dollars of annual exports to proscribed Israel. 

China’s Foreign Policy in Retrospect

China’s foreign policy is a direct reflection of the political line of the Communist Party of China, a line changing often in the Party’s history. At the 10th National Congress (August, 1973) -- the last before Mao’s death -- Zhou Enlai delivered the main report. He affirmed that:

In the last fifty years our Party has gone through ten major struggles between the two lines… In the future, even after classes have disappeared… there will still be two-line struggles between the advanced and the backward and between the correct and the erroneous… there is the struggle between the socialist road and the capitalist road, there is the danger of capitalist restoration… The Tenth National Congress of the Communist Party of China (Documents), p. 16 [my emphasis]

Zhou explains that the opposition in the last two Congresses-- led by Liu Shaoqi and Lin Biao-- advocated that the main contradiction facing the party was “not the contradiction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, but that ‘between the advanced socialist system and the backward productive forces of society’”. In short, the two lines continually challenging the Party, as explained at the tenth congress, were that of the “productionists” --those giving priority to the development of the productive forces-- and that of the class warriors-- those giving priority to political struggle. 

The CPC’s failure to simultaneously advance the productive forces and, at the same time, carry out a consistent, comprehensive class line accounts for its often inconsistent foreign policy.

Since the “opening” -- the Deng reforms, beginning in 1978-- the productionist line has held sway in the Communist Party of China.

From the time of the rebuilding of the Party based on the rural peasantry after the destruction of its urban working-class base in 1927, Mao had sided with the class warriors. 

Even in the era of the united front against Japanese aggression, Mao wrote in On New Democracy (1940) of the necessity of a cultural revolution, a focus on political and cultural struggle over other forms:

A cultural revolution is the ideological reflection of the political and economic revolution and is in their service. In China there is a united front in the cultural as in the political revolution… and the cultural campaign resulted in the outbreak of the December 8th Movement of the revolutionary youth in 1935. And the common result of both was the awakening of the people of the whole country… The most amazing thing of all was that the Kuomintang's cultural "encirclement and suppression" campaign failed completely in the Kuomintang areas as well, although the Communist Party was in an utterly defenceless position in all the cultural and educational institutions there. Why did this happen? Does it not give food for prolonged and deep thought? It was in the very midst of such campaigns of "encirclement and suppression" that Lu Hsun, who believed in communism, became the giant of China's cultural revolution… New-democratic culture is national. It opposes imperialist oppression and upholds the dignity and independence of the Chinese nation. It belongs to our own nation and bears our own national characteristics… [my emphasis]

The centrality of cultural revolution likely comes from the class base shaping the trajectory of Chinese Communism. Because the Kuomintang wiped out the CPC’s urban working-class centers in 1927, the Party became based in the rural peasantry, as Mao freely concedes in On New Democracy: 

This means that the Chinese revolution is essentially a peasant revolution.... Essentially, mass culture means raising the cultural level of the peasants… And essentially it is the peasants who provide everything that sustains the resistance to Japan and keeps us going. By "essentially" we mean basically, not ignoring the other sections of the people, as Stalin himself has explained. As every schoolboy knows, 80 per cent of China's population are peasants. So the peasant problem becomes the basic problem of the Chinese revolution and the strength of the peasants is the main strength of the Chinese revolution. In the Chinese population the workers rank second to the peasants in number…

On New Democracy suggests that Mao places primacy of place in the struggle for the support of the peasantry, a struggle that is cultural in form and national in scope. While Mao locates the Party’s battles within the world revolutionary process, he doesn’t see it as an immediate fight for socialism, but apart from it, for China’s national liberation:

This is a time … when the proletariat of the capitalist countries is preparing to overthrow capitalism and establish socialism, and when the proletariat, the peasantry, the intelligentsia and other sections of the petty bourgeoisie in China have become a mighty independent political force under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party. Situated as we are in this day and age, should we not make the appraisal that the Chinese revolution has taken on still greater world significance? I think we should. The Chinese revolution has become a very important part of the world revolution… [my emphasis]

The separation between the proletariat's role in the capitalist countries and the Party’s “independent” role in shaping a multi-class force could not be clearer.

Absent from the 1940 statement of Mao’s vision is any endorsement of the Communist International’s broad principles of solidarity. Instead, the Party operated under the Three Principles of the People, the CPC’s revision of Sun-Yat Sen’s original Three Principles. On New Democracy defines them as:

Three Great Policies of alliance with Russia, co-operation with the Communist Party and assistance to the peasants and workers. Without each and every one of these Three Great Policies, the Three People's Principles become either false or incomplete in the new period…

Thus, “alliance with Russia” (USSR) became central to China’s foreign policy and expanded to alliance with other socialist countries. After liberation in 1949, the PRC practiced that line by aiding the Democratic Peoples’ Republic of Korea, especially in repelling the US and its allies as they invaded DPRK territory. The PRC military fought in the DPRK until the armistice of 1953. Over 183,000 Chinese died resisting the invasion of the North.

The CPC established ties with various liberation movements after the Korean War, with Peoples’ China offering military aid and training to many movements in Asia and Africa. At the same time, the PRC adopted Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence to lead foreign relations: respect for territory and sovereignty, non-aggression, non-interference in internal affairs, equality and cooperation for common benefit, and peaceful coexistence.

The Five Principles were strikingly similar to the natural-law doctrines adopted by the early mercantilist theorists of bourgeois international relations; they constituted an even less robust version of the eight points of the 1941 Atlantic Charter crafted by Roosevelt and Churchill. Nonetheless, they were enshrined in the constitution of Peoples’ China:

China pursues an independent foreign policy, observes the five principles of mutual respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, mutual nonaggression, mutual noninterference in internal affairs, equality and mutual benefit, and peaceful coexistence, keeps to a path of peaceful development, follows a mutually beneficial strategy of opening up, works to develop diplomatic relations and economic and cultural exchanges with other countries, and promotes the building of a human community with a shared future. [my emphasis]

By the end of the 1950s, The CPC had rejected the first of the “three great policies”: the “alliance with Russia”. The PRC had embarked on a period of bitter conflict with the USSR, culminating with a split in the unity of the World Communist Movement. It is source of great irony that many of the charges the CPC made against the Soviets in the Mao era were and are features of China today that have drawn the same charges from some on the left: The Chinese attacked the Soviet policy of peaceful coexistence with the US, taunting the US as a paper tiger; they accused the Soviets of being “social-imperialist” intent on global hegemony; they claimed a restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union; they accused the Soviet Party of revising Marxism-Leninism. All charges that resonate for some in current policies of Peoples’ China. 

It is difficult to reconcile the Five Principles with the PRC support for the US proxies in the former Portuguese African colonies. For over a decade, the PRC sided with South Africa, Israel, the US, and bogus liberation movements in Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau, delivering weapons, training, and material support to surrogates fighting the internationally recognized freedom fighters. It was left for thousands of Cuban internationalists to give their lives to finally close the door on this ugly chapter and open the door to the fall of Apartheid.

It is difficult to reconcile the Five Principles with the PRC 1979 invasion of Vietnam, ostensibly in response to Democratic Vietnam’s overthrow of the Khmer Rouge-- an intervention, if principally motivated, that cannot be squared with the PRC’s vocal denunciation of the Warsaw alliance’s engagement in Czechoslovakia in 1968.  

It is difficult to reconcile the twists and turns of Peoples’ China’s foreign policies with its once radical denouncement of Soviet foreign policy as “social-imperialist.” The late, estimable Al Szymanski-- a scrupulous researcher-- met those charges in great detail (Soviet Socialism and Proletarian Internationalism, in The Soviet Union: Socialist or Social-Imperialist?, 1983), showing that Soviet “export of capital” outside of the socialist community was minimal, largely limited to establishing enterprises that expedited trade. Soviet assistance was limited almost entirely to countries outside of or escaping the tyranny of global markets. Soviet trade was minimal-- Szymanski argued that it was the world’s most self-sufficient system (no doubt often through forced isolation). Its importing of raw material was minimal: “In short the Soviet economy, unlike those of all Western imperialist countries… has no… need to subordinate less developed countries to obtain raw materials.”

Also, the Soviet Union frequently paid higher prices for imported goods than market prices. Citing Asha Datar, “[O]f the 12 leading export commodities studied…, six were consistently purchased by the USSR at higher than their world prices, three usually purchased at prices higher than those paid by the capitalist countries, and two purchased on a year to year basis sometimes above and sometimes below the world market price.”

Suffice it to say, the Soviet Union substantially subsidized trade with fraternal countries, especially within the socialist community (CMEA), Cuba receiving especially generous terms of exchange.

It would be interesting to compare the PRC’s current foreign policy with the internationalist standards set by the former Soviet Union.

Nonetheless, Peoples’ China-- since the victory of the productionist line under Deng’s leadership-- has largely been a force for stability in international relations. Over the last thirty or so years, the PRC has sought to maintain a peaceful stage for its trade-based economic expansion while the US and its capitalist allies have engaged in one bloody, imperialist adventure after another. Entry into the global market and acceptance into its market-based institutions has been well served by its Five Principles foreign policy.

But it has been naive to expect capitalist great powers to respect the high-minded, Enlightenment values of the Five Principles and simply stand by while the PRC rises to challenge their dominance of the world economy. Since Engels’ early writings, Marxists have understood that competition is the motor of the commodity-based economy. And since Lenin, Marxists have understood that competition between monopoly capitals and their hosts have spawned aggression and war. 

It is equally naive-- or disingenuous-- to equate the Five Principles with the proletarian internationalism, class solidarity that has been embraced by the international Communist movement throughout the twentieth century. From Comintern activity, to the internationalist sacrifices made for democratic Spain, to the generous support for liberation movements, and the aid to the people of Vietnam, militant, principled internationalism differs fundamentally from the neutrality embodied in the Five Principles. The Five Principles serve a world with no injustice, a world without class struggle, a world without aggression and war.

Indeed, the solidarity advocated in the PRC constitution-- “China consistently opposes imperialism, hegemonism and colonialism, works to strengthen its solidarity with the people of all other countries, supports oppressed peoples and other developing countries in their just struggles to win and safeguard their independence and develop their economies, and strives to safeguard world peace and promote the cause of human progress”-- is inconsistent with the neutrality and non-intervention of the Five Principles, in any realistic sense.

Where neutrality may have borne few negative consequences during the PRC’s isolation from global markets, China’s profound economic relations with virtually every country in the twenty-first century, do have consequences, consequences of enormous moral impact. 

Like other countries that engage economically or refrain from engaging economically (sanctions, tariffs, boycotts, blockades, etc.), the PRC must be judged by that engagement. 

With the daily slaughter of Gazan civilians, the brutal actions of Israel cannot be separated from its trading partners: China, the US, Germany, Italy, Turkiye, Russia, France, South Korea, India, and Spain, in descending order of dollar volume of exports to Israel.

And now with the brazen, unprovoked Israeli attack on its putative “friend” Iran, the neutrality of the Five Principles is even less defensible. The “win-win” strategy of many CPC leaders and their allies is a utopian dream that social justice cannot afford.

Greg Godels 

zzsblogml@gmail.com

Obscene Wealth

Gabriel Zucman is a French-born economist who teaches at California, Berkeley and the Paris School of Economics. Zucman’s academic specialization is in wealth inequality, using tax data to track the stratification in wealth in the US and the rest of the world. A student of famed inequality expert, Thomas Piketty, he is an important figure in the World Inequality Database.

His most recent findings expose a gross obscenity, a level of wealth inequality in the US that should shame every politician, every mainstream-media commentator, and every cultural influencer who fails to make recognition of this travesty central to his or her message. 

Discussed in some detail in an article by Juliet Chung, appearing in the Thursday, April 24 Wall Street Journal, Zucman’s most recent findings draw little attention from the other corporate media. 

Zucman claims that the wealth of 19 households in the US grew by one trillion dollars in 2024, more than the GDP of Switzerland. That top 0.00001% of households accounted in 2024 for 1.81% of all the wealth accumulated in the US-- nearly 2% of all US wealth is held by those 19 households.

Other conclusions drawn from the WSJ article:

● Total US wealth in 2024 was $148 trillion.

● The share of total US wealth held by the 0.00001% of households was, by far, the greatest since 1913, when the US income tax system originated.

● JP Morgan Chase estimates that there were 2,000 billionaires in the US in 2024; 975 in 2021.

● The top 0.1% of households constitute approximately 133,000 households and each holds an average of $46.3 million in wealth, accumulating $3.4 million a year since 1990 (Steven Frazzari, Washington University, St. Louis).

● The next 0.9% of households-- approximately 1.2 million households-- were each worth $11.2 million and grew by $450,000 per year in the same period (Frazzari).

● The cumulative 1% of households account for 34.8% of total US wealth in 2023.

● In capitalist counterpart countries, the 1% account for 21.3% of the total wealth in the British Isles, 27.2% in France, and 27.6% in Germany (2023).

● The top 10% of US households hold 67% of all the wealth in the US.

● The top half of US households have secured 97% of all US wealth.

● CONSEQUENTLY, THE OTHER HALF OF US HOUSEHOLDS (~ 66 MILLION HOUSEHOLDS, ~166 MILLION CITIZENS) SHARED ONLY 3% OF ALL THE WEALTH ACCUMULATED IN THE US.

These data underscore the fact that the US is a radically unequal society, with wealth concentration increasing dramatically as one ascends the class ladder.

What conclusions can we draw from the Zucman/Wall Street Journal report?

First, it is important to distinguish wealth inequality from income inequality. 

Income inequality is a snapshot of the remuneration that an individual or household might receive in a given period. For example, a sports figure or a celebrity might receive a huge compensation package for two or three years of success, but otherwise fall dramatically in income and end with modest wealth.

Wealth on the other hand, is inheritable and cumulative. In a capitalist society, it is possible to have income without accumulating wealth, but it is almost impossible to have wealth without effortlessly gaining income. 

Among the employed, income is always contingent. Wealth, to the contrary, is owned and can only be alienated by legal action.

While income is empowering, accumulated wealth imbues its owner with both security and degrees of power and influence proportionate to its quantity.

Thus, wealth is a better measure of personal or household economic status than income.

For those academics and media pundits who prattle on about “our democracy,” it must be pointed out that over half of the US population is effectively economically disenfranchised from the political system. With so little accumulated wealth (3% of the total wealth), they cannot participate meaningfully in an electoral system driven by money. They lack the means to contend for office, as well as to affect the choice of candidates or the outcomes. 

Even if the bottom half of households were to pool their resources, they could not match the financial assets readily available to the top 1% in order to dominate political power. 

Cold War intellectuals constantly heralded the formal democracy-- the rights to participate in electoral politics-- enjoyed by citizens in the advanced capitalist countries. They assiduously avoided mentioning citizens’ actual means to participate in any meaningful way, influenced by the vast and telling inequalities in those means. Clearly, the bottom half of all US households have little means of engagement with politics, apart from casting an occasional vote for limited options, for which they have little say in determining. 

Further, the next 40% of households have between them, in diminishing amounts as they approach the bottom half, just 30% of US wealth to express their political prerogatives. No doubt that provides the false sense of political empowerment that the two bourgeois parties prey upon.

The victory of form-over-substance in the legitimation of US social and political institutions is surely threatened by the reality of wealth inequality-- a reality that empowers the wealthy over the rest.

The fact that the top 10% of US households have a grip on 67% of the wealth makes a mockery of “our democracy.” 

Talk of “oligarchs” or “the 1%” -- so popular with slippery politicians or internet naïfs -- actually masks the rot behind our grossly unequal society. Neither “evil” nor “greedy” people can explain the travesty recorded by the Zucman data. 

Instead, it is a system that produces and reproduces wealth inequality. While wars, economic crises, or the militant action of workers and their allies may temporarily slow or set back the march of wealth inequality under capitalism, the system continues to regenerate wealth inequality. That system is called “capitalism.”

As Paul Sweezy explained most clearly:

The essence of capitalism is the self-expansion of capital, which takes place through the production and capitalization of surplus value. Production of surplus value in turn is the function of the proletariat, i.e., the class of wage earners who own no means of production and can live only by the sale of their labor power. Since the proletariat produces for capital and not for the satisfaction of its own needs, it follows that capitalism, in Marx’s words, “establishes an accumulation of misery corresponding with accumulation of capital.” The Transition to Socialism, lecture, 1971

Economic historians like Piketty and Zucman who carefully track the trajectory of capitalism demonstrate empirically, again and again, that capitalist socio-economic relations give rise to economic inequality. 

While the distribution of wealth in advanced capitalist countries is not captured perfectly by the Marxist class distinctions, class-as-ownership-of-capital goes far to explain how wealth is distributed. 

With two-thirds of all wealth concentrated in the top 10% of households and an estimated 89% of all capital-as-stocks held by that same 10%, it seems reasonable to conclude that the capitalist class resides within the top 10% of wealthy households.

It should be just as clear that the bottom 50%-- with 3% of the wealth, and nearly all of that in personal real estate and other personal property-- survives on income from some form of compensation; its members work for a living. 

Thus, as one might anticipate from reading the 1848 Communist Manifesto, capitalist society today-- 177 years later-- remains substantially divided between those who create the wealth by working for a living and those who own the means of wealth creation and, therefore, gain most of their wealth from that ownership. Capital-- whether it coalesces as factories, banks, or other enterprises-- concentrates wealth at the top.

Between the bottom 50% and the top 10% of households is a contested field of largely income earners-- workers-- as well as professional, self-employed, and small business owners. While most are, strictly speaking, working class, many have illusions about their class status (“middle class”) or harbor the illusion that their class status will improve.

Some have been characterized as “aristocrats of labor” because of their relatively elevated possession of income or wealth among workers. Others are even better characterized-- to follow Marx-- as “petty-bourgeois”: small, insignificant capitalists.

From the classical texts through Louis Althusser and Nicos Poulantzas to Soviet analyst S. N. Nadel, Marxism has yet to produce a robust and rigorous theory of the upper-middle strata, though their members often prove to be the pivotal factor in denying social change. Accordingly, it is the segment most intensely courted by the centrist political parties.

If we are to remove the stain of wealth inequality, it must be its sufferers-- the working class-- who assume that task. And that task will only be decisively accomplished with the replacement of capitalism with socialism.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

Antonio Gramsci: Theirs and Ours

It has been forty-eight years since Eric Hobsbawm delivered a paper, Gramsci and Political Theory, before the Gramsci Conference held on March 5-6, 1977 (Reprinted as an article in Marxism Today, July, 1977).

Hobsbawm, contemplatively, reviews the forty years that had transpired since Antonio Gramsci’s death in 1937 after over a decade in a fascist prison. For the first ten years (1937-1947) Gramsci was virtually unknown outside of Italy, where Communist Party leader Palmiro Togliatti sought to integrate Gramsci-thought into the PCI’s work. 

The next decade (1947-1957) found Gramsci’s influence in Italy expanding even beyond Communist circles, establishing him as an important national cultural figure. 

It is with the third decade (1957-1967) that Gramsci became familiar to many people outside of Italy, with interest especially strong in the English-speaking world as noted by Hobsbawm. The recent strong critique of Stalin in the world Communist movement and the post-war strength and independence of the Gramsci-influenced PCI played a role in expanding the influence of Gramsci. Though not mentioned by Hobsbawm, the first (1957) limited US publication of Gramsci’s works was a brief (64 page) translation/commentary by Carl Marzani, Man and Society, published by the indomitable, Cold War-defiant publisher Cameron Associates. Marzani’s admiration and view of Gramsci as a model and contrast to Soviet practices is readily apparent.

With the fourth decade (1967-1977), Hobsbawm maintains that “Gramsci has become part of our intellectual universe. His stature as an original Marxist thinker-- in my view the most original such thinker produced in the west since 1917-- is pretty generally admitted… Such typically Gramscian terms as ‘hegemony’ occur in Marxist and even in non-Marxist, discussions of politics and history as casually, and sometimes as loosely, as Freudian terms did between the wars”. 

By 1977, Hobsbawm’s thinking was converging with the emergent school of Eurocommunism, perhaps helping to explain his estimation of Gramsci’s importance.

Would Hobsbawm-- if he were alive today-- be surprised that, nearly a half century after he made his address in London, Antonio Gramsci’s most influential admirers were thinkers on the Trump right? Would he be shocked to see an article in The Wall Street Journal entitled Meet MAGA’s Favorite Communist? 

The WSJ reports:

Christopher Rufo is perhaps the most potent conservative activist in the U.S… For the past year, Rufo has been working on a book called “How the Regime Rules,” which he describes as a “manifesto for the New Right.” At its core is a surprising inspiration: the Italian Communist thinker Antonio Gramsci, a longtime boogeyman of American conservatives. “Gramsci, in a sense, provides the diagram of how politics works and the relationship between all of the various component parts: intellectuals, institutions, laws, culture, folklore,” said Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

Author Kevin T. Dugan notes that many international right-populist leaders pay homage to Gramsci, including Georgia Meloni, Marine Le Pen, and Jair Bolsonaro, while Argentina’s president, Javier Milei, told Tucker Carlson that “he had to wage a culture war every single day” against opponents who “have no problem with getting inside the state and employing Gramsci’s techniques; seducing the artists, seducing the culture, seducing the media or meddling in educational content.”

Other right-wing intellectuals have adopted Gramsci, according to the WSJ:

Gramsci’s name appears in the writing of paleoconservative thinkers Paul Gottfried, Thomas Fleming and Sam Francis, who influenced Pat Buchanan’s Republican presidential bids in the 1990s. One of Gramsci’s biggest proponents in the pre-Trump era was Andrew Breitbart, the founder of Breitbart News, who quoted his axiom that “politics is downstream of culture.”

More recently, far-right writers like Curtis Yarvin, who’s influenced Vice President JD Vance, have talked about how to capture power through a culture war.

Regardless of how selectively MAGA appropriates Gramsci-thought, however differently right-populists interpret Gramsci from his original intent, the mere fact that Gramsci is taken far more seriously by the right than by all but the Marxist left is cause for deep reflection. 

The right sees politics as a contest-- even a war-- over how people interpret the world. They borrow this notion from how Gramsci writes about ideology. They intend to conduct that war with fervor. 

Conversely, the center-left and even some “Marxists” embrace a market-model that imagines a forum of idea-sellers, who fairly exchange and value ideas. In this fantasy, everyone has an equal voice. They imagine that institutions like universities and media forms are neutral social and political instruments that objectively pursue, project, and protect the unvarnished truth.

Like Gramsci, the populist-right recognizes that the ideological superstructure-- what the right broadly and cynically calls “culture” -- is always captured by social forces. For Gramsci, following Marx, “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness” (Gramsci roughly quotes this from memory often, throughout The Prison Notebooks). Unlike the populist-right, Gramsci sees the forces shaping ideas as those constructed and maintained by the ruling capitalists.

When “Reaganism” arrived on the scene decades ago, astute left observers noted that “class war had broken out, with only one side fighting,” a commentary on the ineffectual labor movement. 

Today, with the Trump-right attacking the universities, public media, school books, publishers, law firms, and other aspects of the superstructure, it can be said that “cultural” war has broken out, with only one side fighting, a commentary on the ineffectual center-left.  

Quite obvious, the populist-right has-- crudely appropriating Gramsci-- launched a cultural war on hollow, complacent institutions blind to their own vulnerability.

Lessons for the Left

As Hobsbawm points out, by 1977 Gramsci-thought was becoming as popular and used “as loosely, as Freudian terms did between the wars.” Subsequently, Gramsci quote-mongering became fashionable and academic hipness was often assured by grounding discourse in the more enigmatic writings of Gramsci. “Hegemony” became one of the most used and misused words in the academic lexicon. Since most of Gramsci’s prison writings were necessarily cast in coded language, his thought lent itself to broad interpretation and misinterpretation. 

Too often “hegemony” was understood as a writer’s personal interpretation of ruling-class dominance: something richer and more extensive than the simple statement in the Manifesto that “The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” Gramsci is explicit in exposing “the hegemony of a social group [‘beyond the dictatorship of coercive apparatus’] over the entire national society exercised through the so-called private organizations such as the church, the trade unions, the schools, etc.” -- not exactly an earth-shaking conclusion for Leninists in his time, but well worth endorsing. 

As Hobsbawm points out: “What is new in Gramsci is the observation that even bourgeois hegemony is not automatic but achieved through conscious political action and organization.” That is the lesson that the MAGA right draws, even if Gramsci’s left acolytes miss it.

In addition, hegemony is not merely an analytic tool for understanding capitalist-class rule, but, in Hobsbawm’s words, it is a “struggle to turn the working class into a potential ruling class” that “must be waged before the transition to power, as well as during and after it.” Liberals and social democrats who pay homage to Gramsci’s grasp of the mechanisms of class power, show no interest in Gramsci’s primary interest in establishing competitive, alternative mechanisms: media, entertainment, schools, activities, recreation, governance, and social life. He saw a need for preserving and protecting what was good and useful in existing working-class ethos and culture, while constructing what was even better for the future. Togliatti and the PCI sought to establish that hegemony in Italy’s Red Belt with different degrees of success. Italian Communist--influenced cinema, from Giuseppe De Santis’ 1949 Bitter Rice to Bernardo Bertolucci's 1976 Novecento, represent that attempt made available to international audiences.

Nothing like this conscious collective attempt to nourish and promote working-class cultural life has been attempted on any scale in the US since the demise of the pre-neutered Congress of Industrial Organizations. Even the days of an independent radio station (WCFL, in Chicago) are past.

As Hobsbawm explains, “The basic problem of hegemony, considered strategically, is not how revolutionaries come to power, though that question is very important. It is how they come to be accepted, not only as the politically existing or unavoidable rulers, but as guide and rulers.” Two examples from Hobsbawm are telling: “The Polish communists in 1945 were probably not accepted as a hegemonic force, though they were ready to be one… The German social-democrats in 1918 would probably have been accepted as a hegemonic force, but they did not act as one.”

Marxist-Leninists in many, but not all, capitalist countries are cut off today from working-class life-- they are led by intellectuals, but not organic intellectuals, paraphrasing Gramsci-- with no vital connection to working-class life. 

Apart from the Communist Parties, leftists have willfully or from ignorance failed to acknowledge that Gramsci wrote as a Leninist, accepting the critical importance of a vanguard party (The Prince), though he had ideas about party organization that reflected conditions peculiar to Italy in his time (e.g., the Turin movement). Without a party, no sense can be made of an “organic” connection to the working class. 

John Womack reminds us that Gramsci’s “original” thoughts are often elaborations on ongoing debates in the Marxist movement. For example, the military-sounding contrast between wars of position and wars of maneuver predate Gramsci’s argument, with the Kautsky-Luxemburg dispute over the strategy of attrition versus the strategy of overthrow. These debates were carried forward into the early Comintern and played an important role in shaping Communist strategy.

It is commonplace on the left to view Gramsci’s idea of a “war of position” as a passive interregnum between the “wars of maneuver” where the working class and its allies can directly challenge the capitalist class from a position of relative strength. Too often this idea of positional warfare has been interpreted to be a period of defensive treading water. In the US, Gramsci’s war of position has often been used as a justification for supporting the Democratic Party in its turf war with the other bourgeois party or as grounds for taking a back seat to other organizations in an unnegotiated united front.

Hobsbawm addresses this misreading of Gramsci:

[T]he failure of revolution in the West might produce a much more dangerous long-term weakening of the forces of progress by means of what he called “passive revolution.” On the one hand, the ruling class might grant certain demands to forestall and ward off revolution, on the other, the revolutionary movement might find itself in practice (though not necessarily in theory) accepting its impotence and might be eroded and politically integrated into the system… In short, the “war of position” had to be systematically thought out as a fighting strategy rather than something to do for revolutionaries when there is no prospect of building barricades. (my emphasis)

Today’s left often neglects the essential questions of place and time in evaluating Gramsci’s thinking. Hobsbawm is careful to point out that Gramsci was writing about specifically Italian conditions and lessons for the Italian left: “Italy in Gramsci’s day had a number of historical peculiarities which encouraged original departures in Marxist thinking.” Hobsbawm discusses six “peculiarities” in great detail.

In addition, it is necessary to note when Gramsci was writing, as well as when Hobsbawm was commenting on Gramsci.

Writing from prison with Italian fascism securing its hold over Italy, Gramsci was understandably motivated to take a critical eye toward the tactics and strategy of the PCI, as much forward looking as retrospectively. Hence, his revisiting the Southern question. It would be ill-advised to generalize his conclusions to every revolutionary project under different conditions.

Further, Hobsbawm writes at a time (1977) when the PCI’s electoral share was growing (34%, up 7%, 1976), when the PCI committed to a Gramsci-inspired historical compromise, and Eurocommunism was on the rise. At the same time, the Portuguese revolution-- met with great expectations by the socialist left-- appeared to be dashing those expectations and heading toward conciliation with the mainstream European community. Hobsbawm, like others favoring the Eurocommunist road, turned to Gramsci for an explanation: “...we see in countries in which there has been a revolutionary overthrow of the old rulers, such as Portugal, in the absence of hegemonic force even revolutions can run into sand.” History was not kind to Eurocommunism and the PCI project.

Perhaps the most cited Gramsci quote is: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

The great blacklisted, expatriate director, Joseph Losey, used the Gramsci quote, to good effect, as the preamble to his film version of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Others have used it to introduce the many crises that have afflicted the capitalist system.

One could argue that we are in just such an interregnum today, with the capitalist system struggling to continue ruling in the “old way.”

Therefore, there may be much that we can learn from Gramsci. But we must remember that he remained a Leninist. If he were alive today, he would be searching for the party capable of giving birth to the new.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com