Imperialism, Multipolarity, and Palestine

It is a continuing source of frustration that an important segment of the left holds the view that weakening the United States’ long-established grip on the top rungs of the hierarchical system of imperialism is-- in itself-- an attack on imperialism. 

Many of our friends, including those who claim to aim at a socialist future, mistakenly see an erosion in the US position as the imperialist system’s hegemon as necessarily a step guaranteeing a just future, lasting peace, or a step towards socialism.

While it is true that those fighting the most powerful nation-state in the imperialist system for sovereignty, for autonomy, for a path of their own choosing always deserve our enthusiastic and complete support, victory in that fight may or may not secure a better future for working people. They may, as happened so often in the anti-colonial struggles of the post-war period, find themselves cursed with a power-hungry, exploitative, undemocratic local ruling class continuing or expanding the oppression of the people, but maybe with a more familiar face.

Or they might suffer the replacement of a former, declining or defeated great power by another more powerful great power. Germany and Turkey, defeated in World War I, lost many of their colonies to the victors; after World War II, some of Japan’s colonies were recolonized, falling into the clutches of another superior power; and, of course, Vietnam defeated France, only to be oppressed into the US sphere of interest-- a result decisively overturned by heroic Vietnam.

To contend that the decline or fall of the US as the leading great power in the imperialist system could close the book on imperialism is to grossly misunderstand imperialism. Imperialism lingers as a stage of capitalism as long as monopoly capitalism exists.The ultimate battle against imperialism is the struggle against capitalism.

We must not confuse the participants in the global imperialist system with the system itself, any more than we should equate individual capitalist corporations with the capitalist system itself.

History offers no example of a global or semi-global power falling or removed from the heights of its domination leading to a period of world-wide peace and prosperity. Neither the fall of the Roman or the Eastern Roman Empire or the Holy Roman Empire ushered in such a period of harmony. Nor did the rise and fall of the Venetian Republic, the Dutch Republic, or the Portuguese or Spanish colonial empires of the mercantilist era. In Lenin’s time, the rivalries challenging Britain’s global dominance brought world war rather than peace. And its aftermath brought no harmony. Instead, capitalist rivalries with Germany and Japan generated even more devastating aggression and war. And with the dissolution of the once dominant British Empire after the war, the US assumed and brutally enforced its position at the top of the hierarchy of global powers.There is no reason to believe that matters will change with the US knocked off its reigning perch. Capitalism and its tendency toward war and misery persist.

Thus, history provides no evidence for the supplanting of a unipolar world with a sustainable multipolar capitalist world of mutual respect and harmony. Multipolarity alone, as a solution to the oppression of imperialism, is, in fact, never found in world history.

Of course it may be factually true that United States dominance of the world imperialist system may be on the wane. Certainly, the decisive defeat in Vietnam was an enormous setback to the US government’s ability to dictate to weaker states. Further the defeat in Afghanistan after a twenty year war shows a weakening. The defiance of the DPRK and Cuba’s resilience also show limitations to US imperialism today.

Further, the rise of Peoples’ China as an economic powerhouse and as a sophisticated military power is perceived by the US government as both an economic and military adversary, though there is no reason to believe that the PRC presents any greater threat to the imperialist system than does the Papal State. Both today express well-deserved outrage at the worst excesses of imperialism, but make little material contribution to its overthrow.

Marginalizing, weakening, or defanging the arch-imperialist power is to be welcomed, though the left should suffer no illusion that the action would be an end to imperialism, a decisive blow against the capitalist system, or of long-lasting benefit of working people.

A recent example of the multipolarity fallacy-- the romantic illusion that imperialism is only US imperialism-- is the many leftist reports on the early September meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) attended by President Xi, President Putin, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and other Eurasian leaders. Professor Michael Hudson enthused that:

The principles announced by China’s President Xi, Russian President Putin and other SCO members set the stage for spelling out in detail the principle of a new international economic order along the lines that were promised 80 years ago at the end of World War II but have been twisted beyond all recognition into what Asian and other Global Majority countries hope will have been just a long detour in history away from the basic rules of civilization and its international diplomacy, trade and finance.

Hudson foresees a new economic order fulfilling a promise made eighty years ago. But he doesn’t tell us how a new capitalist international order will be different from the earlier capitalist international order, apart from the idealistic words of its advocates. He doesn’t explain how the inter-imperialist rivalries associated with capitalist great powers are to be avoided. He fails to show how the competitive, cut-throat nature of capitalist social-relations can be somehow tamed. He builds his case around high-minded words uttered at a conference, as if those or similar words were not uttered eighty years ago at the Bretton Woods conference.

Much has been made of the warm announcement by Xi and Modi that they are “partners not rivals”. But as the insightful Yves Smith relays:

A new Indian Punchline article, India disavows ‘Tianjin spirit’, turns to EU, reviews the idea that India is jumping with both feet into the SCO-BRICS camp is overdone. Key section from that post: 

….no sooner than Modi returned to Delhi, External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar had lined up the most hawkish anti-Russia gang of European politicians to consort with in an ostentatious display of distancing from the Russia-India-China troika.

To underscore the skepticism of the Indian Punchline article, Modi chose not to attend the virtual BRICS trade summit subsequently called by Brazilian President Lula da Silva.

In his place, minister Jaishankar chose the occasion to raise the issue of trade deficits with BRICS members, noting that they are responsible for India’s largest deficits and that India is expecting to secure a correction-- hardly a gesture of mutual confidence in India's BRICS brothers and sisters. It is more an example of geo-political bargaining.

Nor does Peoples’ China embrace the romantic idealism of our leftist friends”, as the following quote asserts:

“China is very cautious about working with these two countries [Russia and PDRK]. Unlike what is depicted in the West as them being allies, China is not in the same camp. Its view of warfare and security issues is very different from theirs,” said Tang Xiaoyang, chair of the department of international relations at Tsinghua University, pointing out that Beijing hasn’t fought a war for more than four decades. “What China wants is stability on its borders.”

One might conclude that the left’s hope in a BRICS led new, more just international order is little more than a chimera. BRICS appears to be, at best, an opportunistic economic alliance, with neither the political or military weight to press multipolarity on a unipolar world.

*****

There is. as well, a theoretical argument for a left investment in the idea of multipolarity as an answer to imperialism. It is an old argument. It was crafted by Karl Kautsky and advanced in an article entitled Ultra-imperialism and published in Die Neue Zeit in September, 1914, just a month after the beginning of World War I.

In short (I deal with the arguments more fully here, here, and here), Kautsky argued that the great powers would divide the world up among themselves and resolve to avoid further competition and rivalry. They would recognize the irrationality and counterproductiveness of aggression and war, opting for a harmonious imperialism that Kautsky called “ultra-imperialism”. He maintained that:

The frantic competition of giant firms, giant banks and multi-millionaires obliged the great financial groups, who were absorbing the small ones, to think up the notion of the cartel. In the same way, the result of the World War between the great imperialist powers may be a federation of the strongest, who renounce their arms race.

Similarly, today’s multipolaristas/ultra-imperialists envision a world in which a covey of powerful countries will expel the US from its leadership of the global capitalist system for its bad behavior, with its EU satrapy falling in line. In its place, they will create a new “harmonious”, “win-win” order that will eliminate the inequalities between the “global north” and the “global south”. The en-actors and enforcers of this new order will be a motley crew of class-divided, capitalist-oriented states led by an equally motley crew, including despots, theocrats, and populists. All but one of the BRICS+ espouse anything other than a firm allegiance to capitalism; most are hostile to any alternative social system like socialism.

Lenin, in a 1915 introduction to Bukharin’s Imperialism and World Revolution, mocked Kautsky’s argument and ideas like ultra-imperialism:

Reasoning theoretically and in the abstract, one may arrive at the conclusion reached by Kautsky… his open break with Marxism has led him, not to reject or forget politics, nor to skim over the numerous and varied political conflicts, convulsions and transformations that particularly characterise the imperialist epoch; nor to become an apologist of imperialism; but to dream about a "peaceful capitalism." "Peaceful" capitalism has been replaced by unpeaceful, militant, catastrophic imperialism… In this tendency to evade the imperialism that is here and to pass in dreams to an epoch of "ultra-imperialism," of which we do not even know whether it is realisable, there is not a grain of Marxism… For to-morrow we have Marxism on credit, Marxism as a promise, Marxism deferred. For to-day we have a petty-bourgeois opportunist theory -- and not only a theory -- of softening contradictions (quoted in my article cited above)

The key relevant thoughts here are “peaceful capitalism”, “Marxism on credit”, and “softening contradictions”. Lenin is shocked at Kautsky-- a self-styled Marxist-- even entertaining the notion of a peaceful capitalism, an idea that violates the very logic of capitalist social relations; it should be a wake-up call to multipolaristas.

“Marxism on credit” is a mockery of the notion that counting on some hoped for agreement between capitalist great powers to tame imperialism is as foolish as running your credit card to its limit. For multipolaristas, it is pushing the day of reckoning with capitalism off into the far, far distant future.

Likewise, Kautsky “softens” the contradiction between rival capitalist states by imagining an impossible agreement to guarantee “harmonious” relations, a proposition Lenin completely rejects. Concisely, Lenin sees Kautsky’s opportunism as a retreat from the socialist project. The same can be said for the multipolarity project.

Far too many on the left refuse to look at multipolarity through this lens of Lenin’s theory of imperialism, especially as expressed with considerable clarity in his 1916 pamphlet, Imperialism.

Regarding the promise of multipolarity, Lenin here offers a hypothetical scenario where imperialist powers do manage to cut up the world and arrive at an alliance dedicated to peace and mutual prosperity. Would that idealized multipolar system-- what Kautsky calls “ultra-imperialism”-- succeed in eliminating “friction, conflicts and struggle in all and every possible form”?

The question need only be stated clearly enough to make it impossible for any other reply to be given than that in the negative… Therefore in the realities of the capitalist system, and not in the banal philistine fantasies of English parsons [Hobson], or of the German “Marxist,” Kautsky, “inter-imperialist” or “ultra-imperialist” alliances, no matter what form they may assume, whether of one imperialist coalition against another, or of a general alliance embracing all the imperialist powers, are inevitably nothing more than a “truce” in periods between wars. Peaceful alliances prepare the ground for wars, and in their turn grow out of wars; the one is a condition for the other, giving rise to alternating forms of peaceful and non-peaceful struggle out of one and the same basis of imperialist connections and the relations between world economics and world politics. [Lenin’s emphasis]

Thus, while capitalism persists, Lenin makes the case for unabated intra-class struggle on the international level, struggles that manifest as inter-imperialist rivalry and war.

Of course it is possible to reject Lenin’s argument, even Lenin’s theory of imperialism. It is also possible to praise Lenin’s views as relevant for its time, but inapplicable today, in light of the many changes in global capitalism. That would be to say that the system of imperialism that Lenin set out to analyze no longer exists, replaced by a different system.

There is a precedent for correcting Lenin’s theory. Kwame Nkrumah, writing in 1965, showed that imperialism had largely abandoned the colonial project in favor of a more rational, efficient, but still brutally exploitative form of imperialism: neo-colonialism. His book, Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism makes that case persuasively.

One cannot assume that Lenin’s is the final word on today’s imperialism.

And that is the tactic that Carlos Garrido takes in his recent essay, Why Russia and China are NOT Imperialist: A Marxist-Leninist Assessment of Imperialism’s Development Since 1917. Garrido ambitiously explores many subjects in this brief essay, including the errors of “Dogmatic Marxist-Leninists”, the place-- if any-- of Russia and the PRC in the imperialist system, Marxist methodology, the contemporary status of finance capital, Michael Hudson’s notion of super imperialism, the significance of Bretton Woods and the abandonment of the gold standard, as well as the relevance of Lenin’s theory of imperialism to today’s global economy.

Addressing all of these issues would take us far away from the current discussion, though they deserve further study.

To the point, he writes:

It appears to me that the imperialist stage Lenin correctly assessed in 1917 undergoes a partially qualitative development in the post-war years with the development of the Bretton Woods system. This does not make Lenin “wrong,” it simply means that his object of study – which he correctly assessed at his time of writing – has undertaken developments which force any person committed to the same Marxist worldview to correspondingly refine their understanding of imperialism. Bretton Woods transforms imperialism from an international to a global phenomenon, embodied no longer through imperialist great powers, but through global financial institutions (the IMF and the World Bank) controlled by the U.S. and structured with dollar hegemony at its core.

He adds that with Nixon’s move from the gold-standard, “imperialism becomes synonymous with U.S. unipolarity and hegemonism.”

This is wrong. As Garrido affirms, “Imperialism [in Lenin’s time] was not simply a political policy (as the Kautskyites held), but an integral development of the capitalist mode of life itself.” [my emphasis]

Likewise imperialism today is not a set of political policies, but an essential expression of contemporary capitalism.

Yet Garrido follows Kautsky in confusing today’s imperialism with a set of political policies: Bretton Woods and the US withdrawal from the gold- standard. The entire post-war trade and financial infrastructure was the result of policy decisions. They were shaped not by a “new” imperialism, but by the overwhelming economic power of the US after the war. As Garrido knows, that asymmetry is being challenged today, but it is a challenge to the policies or the power enjoyed by the US and not to the imperialist system.

The “transformation” that Garrido believes he sees is simply a reordering of the international system that existed before the war with New York now replacing London as the financial center of the capitalist universe. It is the replacement of the vast colonial world and the bloody rivalries and shifting alliances and hierarchies of the interwar world with the creation of a neo-colonial system dominated by the US and reinforced by its assumption of the role of guardian of capitalism in the Cold War. The monopoly capitalist base is qualitatively the same, but its superstructure changes with historical circumstances. The Bretton Woods system and the later discarding of the gold standard reflect those changing circumstances.

How does Garrido’s “new” imperialism function?

What matters is that capitalism has developed into a higher stage, that the imperialism Lenin wrote of is no longer the “latest” stage of capitalism, that it has given way – through its immanent dialectical development – to a new form marked by a deepening of its characteristic foundation in finance capital. We are finally in the era of capitalist-imperialism Marx predicted in Volume Three of Capital, where the dominant logic of accumulation has fully transformed from M-C-M’ to M-M’, that is, from productive capital to interest-bearing, parasitic finance capital.

Garrido’s reference to volume III of Capital would seem to be at odds with mine and others’ reading of that volume. In chapter 51, the last complete chapter, Marx, via Engels, brings matters back to the beginning, to commodity production. He dispels the view that there is any independent source of value in distribution-- in circulation, rent or “profit”. It is wage labor in commodity production that produces value in the capitalist mode of production. That is why Marx notes in Volume III that “The real science of modern economy only begins when the theoretical analysis passes from the process of circulation to the process of production.” (Vol. III, International Publishers, p.337).

Of course Marx acknowledges stock markets and would not be shocked by the financial sector's suite of exotic instruments like derivatives and swaps. Marx explains them under the rubric: "fictitious capital”. By “fictitious” Marx means forward-looking-- promissory notes against future value or “bets”. They circulate among capitalists and are acquired as contingent value. They become attractive in times of overaccumulation-- the super-concentration of capital in few hands-- when investment opportunities in the productive economy grow slim. And they disappear miraculously when the future that they depend upon does not materialize.

Garrido’s misunderstanding of the international role of finance capital leads him to make the claim that “...the lion's share of profits made by the imperialist system are accumulated through debt and interest.” At its peak before the great crash of 2007-2009, finance (broadly speaking, finance, insurance, real estate) accounted for maybe forty percent of US profits; today, with the NASDAQ techs, the percentage is likely less. But that is only US profits. With deindustrialization, industrial commodity production has shifted to the PRC, Indonesia, Vietnam, India, Brazil, Eastern Europe, and other low-wage areas and the US has become the center of world finance. If commodity production sneezes, the whole edifice of fictitious capital collapses, along with its fictitious profits.

As all three volumes of Capital explain in great detail, commodity production is the basis of the capitalist mode of production and wage-labor is the source of value, not the mystifying maneuvers of Wall Street grifters.

Garrido joins many leftist defenders of multipolarity in decoupling imperialism from the capitalist system, whether through revising the mechanism of exploitation, denying the logic of capitalist competition and rivalry, or redefining its characteristics. Garrido’s unique contribution to this maneuver is to locate the injustice of imperialism not in labor exploitation, but in “debt and interest”.

In the world of left multipolaristas, the real anti-imperialists are the BRICS states (for Garrido, Russia and the PRC). But for those of a lesser theoretical bent, for those reluctant to go into the weeds of theoretical debate, we have a handy litmus test: Palestine. If a genocidal assault on the Palestinian people by a greater-Israel theocratic state is the signal imperialist act of this moment, where are these anti-imperialists? Have they organized international opposition, stopped trade, imposed sanctions, withdrawn recognition or cooperation, sent volunteer fighters, or otherwise offered material resistance?

In the past, Chinese and Soviet material, physical aid benefited Vietnam fighting imperialism; the Soviets pushed to the brink of war to support Cuba against imperial threats in the early 1960s; the Cubans fought and died in Angola against imperialism and apartheid in the 1970s and 80s. Even the US joined the Soviet Union in thwarting British, French, and Israeli imperial designs on the Suez Canal in 1956.

Will today’s acclaimed “anti-imperialists” step up or is multipolarity all talk?

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

The Cold War and Anti-Zionism

Most if not all of the contradictions that are maturing today emerge from long ago events shaped by the US’s national religions of anti-Communism and racial supremacy. The Cold War and its deeply embedded assumptions account for a great share of the waste, irrationality, brutality, and chaos that we are living through today.

The fanatical consensus that the US was engaged in a life and death struggle with the specter of Communism provided a bulwark against any but the most insipid challenges to the reigning capitalist order.

Our spineless labor leaders-- today faced with Trump’s cancellation of union contracts across the Federal sector-- owe their impotence to the Cold War compact that defanged a promising, vibrant, militant union movement. Trading the purging of Communists, leftists, even international unions and locals, and the most ardent of fighters in return for long periods of labor peace and an uncontested slender piece of the economic pie, generations of labor union “managers” collaborated with both the boss and wild-eyed Cold Warriors. Their answer today to this existential threat to hundreds of thousands of workers stripped of their union rights? The AFL-CIO politely asks me to call my legislator: “Will you call your representative and urge them to sign the discharge petition and speak out in support of the Protect America’s Workforce Act (H.R. 2550) right now?” The idea of a general strike, a sit-down strike, a march on Washington, or other forms of mass resistance is beyond their imagination, a faint memory of a bygone era when the labor movement had a left.

It was the Cold War that smashed the popular front and the New Deal legacy in the US. Rabid anti-Communism, guilt by association, and callow opportunism derailed the 1948 Progressive Party, an attempt to rescue Roosevelt’s social democratic coalition. Roosevelt’s party-- the Democrats-- relied on a compromised coalition between social liberals and unreconstructed segregationists until the 1970s, a tenuous coalition only held together by a common battle against Communism. The Johnson era Great Society provided the last gift from the New Deal. The Democrats soon realized that they could not afford to conduct an anti-Communist crusade in Southeast Asia and deliver a social safety net to its people. They choose guns over butter.

Thanks to the Cold War, US citizens became inured to endless war and dangerous aliens under every bed-- Communists, Muslims, Foreigners, terrorists, and again-- today-- Russians and Chinese Communists! The once promised peace dividend from the end of the Cold War has been drowned by waves of new faux-threats manufactured to pose the same existential threat as the once feared Soviets and their allies.

The Cold War established the universal truth that defense of “liberty” and “our democracy” would require enormous sacrifice by all. Indeed, even “our democracy” might need to be sacrificed or closeted to protect the US from its imagined foes, a continuing fear that persists today in the forms of illegal immigrants and urban violators. As civil liberties decline, we can thank the Cold War for mass passivity and submissiveness in its face.

The broadly subscribed ideas of “the military-industrial complex” and “the deep state” owe their common usage to social structures that expanded dramatically in the Cold War.

Less well-known, perhaps, is the Cold War antecedents of the current weaponizing of anti-Zionism as antisemitism. Today, the genocide in Israel is understood by growing numbers as a Zionist project, a product of an ultra-nationalist, settler-colonial ideology. Since its origin in the late nineteenth century, Zionism has sought a homeland for Jews, scattered through a vast diaspora. For some, that homeland was envisioned aspirationally. Still others brought a democratic, egalitarian vision to the notion of Zion. But the dominant thread-- boosted by the maneuvers of the British Empire-- was the creation of an exclusive, theocratic state in Palestine.

Other efforts to create a Jewish homeland-- for example a Jewish Autonomous state in the Soviet Union-- were scorned by the Zionist leadership. It was to be Israel: installed shamefully by the victorious powers after World War II in a land already occupied by a nation long suffering under British domination. Over decades, Israeli leaders sought to displace more and more indigenous Palestinians to create a Greater Israel (from the river to the sea!). Any resistance to this displacement (what we now call ethnic cleansing) was met with the cry of “antisemitism!”.

In the mid-nineteen sixties, the Israelis, along with their powerful friends in the US, devised a devious, but ingenious plan to both populate Greater Israel and discredit and disrupt the Palestine Liberation Organization.That the US security apparatus was likely involved should come as no surprise. As Kit Klarenberg and Wyatt Reed uncovered recently, after scrutinizing a recent release of CIA files, the Agency’s Counter-Intelligence Division under James Jesus Angleton was deeply engaged with Israeli interests, Mossad, and “the thousands coming from the Soviet Union”.

Beginning in 1963 with the Cleveland Council on Soviet Anti-Semitism, a movement swept across the US to “Save Soviet Jewry”. In a few short, remarkable years, banners were hanging from every synagogue and a host of other buildings throughout the US. The media decried Soviet antisemitism, portraying the Soviet Union as a hotbed of Jew-hating. Politicians of both parties joined the crusade, calling for economic sanctions against the USSR, culminating eventually in the Jackson-Vanik amendment. Students were mobilized in a “human rights” campaign to condemn the Soviets.

As the chief international material and moral sponsor of Palestinian liberation-- arming and training the Palestine Liberation Organization-- the Soviet Union argued that its foreign policy rejected the Zionist project and aimed at defending the fate of an oppressed nation pushed off its land. The relentless propaganda campaign waged in the West sought to create the opposite impression-- that opposing the Zionist ideology was tantamount to antisemitism, a conflation that weighs heavily today.

The campaign furthered another goal: the wholesale exodus of privileged, educated Soviet Jewish citizens to Israel to help build Greater Israel. It became less of a campaign to attack alleged antisemitism in the USSR and more of a ruse to direct Soviet Jews to Israel.

Consequently, the main slogan of the movement became: Let My People Go!. That is, remove any emigration barriers that Soviet authorities might place in the way of a brain drain. At the time, Jews held seventeen-times more highly honored Ph.Ds as their percentage of the population. As quoted by William Mandel, Professor Zvi Gitelman of the University of Michigan wrote in his article The Jewish Question in the USSR since 1964 that Jews “play social, political, cultural, and economic roles greater than their numbers would indicate.” In fact, at the time of the “Save Soviet Jewry” campaign, Jewish cultural life was undergoing somewhat of a renaissance.

One rare voice in the US resisting the Cold War entangled stereotypes of Soviet Jewry (Congress appropriated $50 million in 1972 “to assist in the movement and resettlement of Soviet emigrants”-- code for stimulating immigration to Israel) was author William Mandel. A Jewish-American who was once the United Press International expert on the Soviet Union and a Hoover Institute fellow at Stanford, Mandel wrote two well-informed books that dealt extensively with Soviet nationalities with a strong focus on Soviet Jews: Russia Re-examined (1964) and Soviet, but not Russian (1985).

Mandel acknowledged that “The overwhelming majority of Soviet Jews, like the overwhelming majority of American Jews, have no desire whatever to leave their native land. Zionism cannot admit that, because it would undermine U.S. government economic and military aid as an ally against the USSR. Therefore it maintains an unending campaign against non-existent persecutions of Jews in the Soviet Union.”

Of course sane, informed voices like Mandel’s carried little weight against the media and the punditry’s relentless charge of Soviet antisemitism. Once again, hysteria, ignorance, and political calculation trumped the truth. The “Save Soviet Jewry” movement became a further example of how official anti-Communism turned the truth on its head.

Thus, it was the Cold War and its intrigues that brought the idea that anti-Zionism is antisemitism into the US mainstream and established it as an unassailable truth.

Overcoming these Cold War myths and indoctrinations remains one of the biggest obstacles to building a formidable left in the US.

Greg Godels
zzsblogml@gmail.com

Two-Party Duplicity

And yet there never was a more widespread feeling in England than now, that the old parties are doomed, that the old shibboleths have become meaningless, that the old watchwords are exploded, that the old panaceas will not act any longer… But in England, where the industrial and agricultural working-class forms the immense majority of the people, democracy means the dominion of the working-class, neither more nor less… Yet the English working-class allows the landlord, capitalist, and retail trading classes, with their tail of lawyers, newspaper writers, etc., to take care of its interests. No wonder reforms in the interest of the workman come so slowly and in such miserable dribbles. The workpeople of England have but to will, and they are the masters to carry every reform, social and political, which their situation requires. Then why not make that effort? Frederich Engels, A Working-Men’s Party, July 23, 1881

In the middle of July, the House of Representatives considered amendment 114 to H.R. 580 that would reduce US military aid to Israel by $500 million, the amount designated for Israeli missile defense. Sponsored by Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the amendment offered a rare opportunity for our national leaders to show a modest objection to Israel’s genocidal foreign policy or, as in the case of Greene, to voice opposition to an unnecessary subsidy from a debt-ridden country to a country with universal healthcare and subsidized education-- the lack of which account for two of the biggest factors in personal debt in the US. 

Though only a gesture, a yes-vote on the amendment would have brought great attention to the ongoing brutal genocide in Gaza, to the nuclear-weapon-backed bully daily slaughtering starving Gazans as though it were a sport. It would have slowed the flow of US dollars supporting Israeli violence.

A yes-vote would have shown some actual principle behind the hollow slogan of “Make America Great Again” espoused by so many who neither really care about the US people nor have any idea where its greatness would lie. 

But the amendment received only six votes, and few “news” purveyors even bothered to report it. 

Some will heap praise on the four Democrats and two Republicans, citing their courage and independence.

But that profoundly misunderstands the moment.

It is wrong to offer accolades to those who are simply doing what they should do. The fact that there are so few supporting the amendment is less an expression of the moral worth of the six than a measure of the depravity of the many. We expect our representatives to do that which is morally correct. Gratitude is reserved for those who exceed their duty, not those who simply do what any decent person should do. 

Voting no-- as did 422 House members-- is a despicable, scurrilous act. Voting to give the Israeli government even a dollar for its death-dealing enterprise deserves our utter scorn. 

It is important to fully grasp what it means for nearly the entire legislative body of a country to back the genocide of another people, a people virtually defenseless for over eighteen months.

It would be easy, but cynical to see the House vote as reflecting their constituents or their apathy. A recent Gallup poll shows that only 32 percent of US respondents approve of Israel’s actions in Gaza, a substantial decrease since the beginning of Israel’s systematic killing of Gazan civilians. Therefore, the House vote is far from a reflection of the sentiments of all US citizens. 

Instead, it is a result of the corruption of US politics, specifically the two-party system. AIPAC-- the leading lobbying group for Israel’s interests in the US-- distributed $29,078,901 to 335 House members last year, according to Open Secrets. Other Israeli interest-groups contributed to House members, as did US apocalyptic fundamentalists that identify with Israel’s supposed Biblical role. 

Of course, it is not only the issue of Palestine’s right to exist that is shaped by the wholesale purchase of the two-party system. Publicly-run national healthcare, free of insurance companies-- overwhelmingly popular with the people-- never gets a serious legislative debate because of the influence of the profit-sodden insurance industry and Big Pharma. And the unpopular wars and massive defense spending keep coming, thanks to the effective, generous lobbying of the military-industrial behemoth.

My Italian-born grandmother often repeated a saying meant to explain crass opportunism and shamelessness: “Sei come Bertoldo, che mostra il culo per un soldo” (Bertoldo, shows his ass for a penny). Over fifty years of following the Democratic Party has taught me the real meaning of the insult.

Besides our morally corrupt representatives, the US mainstream media has historically thrown its support behind Israeli policies, almost without exception. Only alternative media and a profound distrust of the capitalist “news” outlets nourish opposition to official support for genocide.

What is truly remarkable, given the long standing “bipartisan” toadying to Israel and the high and growing costs of dissent in the US, is the noble actions by students and activists in the US who risk careers, arrests, and even deportation to show that everyone is not bought and sold in political life. 

The old Nixonian notion of a silent majority in the US has been turned on its head. Today, it is not an alleged conservative trend that exists beneath the political life shaped by elites, but a latent pacifism, egalitarianism, and class partisanship smoldering beneath the surface of ruling-class politics (a part of which has defected to right populism out of impatience and frustration). 

That sentiment is ill-represented by the broken, bankrupt two-party system. 

Neither major US political party captures this undercurrent. But this fault is especially true of the Democratic Party that traditionally claimed to be a home for more progressive policy. A mid-July poll conducted by The Wall Street Journal shows how distant the Democratic Party is from the people. Sixty-three percent of those surveyed have an unfavorable view of the Democratic Party-- the highest number since the poll was initiated in 1990.

Where the Republican Party broke into negative net favorability in 2005, the Democrats sank into negative territory in 2016 and today stand 20 points below the Republicans, who, nonetheless, also remain out of favor. 

The WSJ article captures well both the decline of the two-party system and the collapse of the Democratic Party in the face of Trumpism:

On the whole, voters disapprove of the president’s handling of the economy, inflation, tariffs and foreign policy. And yet in each case, the new Journal poll found, voters nonetheless say they trust Republicans rather than Democrats to handle those same issues in Congress. 

In some cases, the disparities are striking. Disapproval of Trump’s handling of inflation outweighs approval by 11 points, and yet the GOP is trusted more than Democrats to handle inflation by 10 points. By 17 points, voters disapprove rather than approve of Trump’s handling of tariffs, and yet Republicans are trusted more than Democrats on the issue by 7 points.

By any rational standard, one would have to conclude that voters are dissatisfied with both parties, but view the current Democratic Party as beyond hope. They may disapprove of Trump, but find nothing suggesting an alternative with the Democrats.

The WSJ article quotes Democratic Party pollster, John Anzalone: “The Democratic brand is so bad that they don’t have the credibility to be a critic of Trump or the Republican Party… Until they reconnect with real voters and working people on who they’re for and what their economic message is, they’re going to have problems.”

The hope that they will reconnect flies in the face of years, even decades of tailing the Republican Party, locating their platform slightly left of the Republicans, a place that Party leaders felt confident would hold labor, African-Americans, women, and other groups in the Party’s clutches. 

Meanwhile, the Democrats were vigorously pursuing the suburbanites and bedroom communities with lifestyle politics. Democrats gave the people answers to micro-aggressions when they were desperately looking for help with economic macro-aggressions.

Many loyal Democrats and earnest liberals are pressing the Party’s watchdogs to read the polls and repent, citing recent studies that show that working-class voters are hungering for an active social justice agenda. The Democratic Party left represented by DSA and Jacobin hope to rescue the Democratic Party from its leaders by underscoring the recent Mamdani primary victory as well as polling that shows that working people want what Mamdani offers and much more-- better pay, better benefits, cheaper prices, affordable housing, health care, etc.

But experience teaches that the Clintons, Obamas, Pelosis, Schumers, Jeffries, and Bookers are determined to steer the Democratic Party ship on the course dictated by its billionaire donors. They are perfectly happy allowing Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez to paint the ship with left-wing slogans, provided that they don’t threaten to abandon the ship.

However, there is good news and cause for hope.

A mid-May poll conducted by the ultraright Cato Institute and YouGov found that-- with 18 to 29-year-olds-- socialism is quite popular and-- to their shock-- Communism has substantial support as well. Despite years of indoctrination, the Cato fellows were hysterical to discover that 62 percent of these youngsters had a favorable view of socialism and even 34 percent had a favorable view of Communism. After all the years, the money, and the effort in painting Marx, Engels, and especially Lenin as agents of Satan, the kids still don’t get it! One can only hope that more of their elders will show the same independence and escape the clutches of the capitalist propaganda mill.

But there is more good news, coming from the UK! 

In a bold move, Jeremy Corbyn and Zara Sultana have announced the founding of a new party to the left of the Labour Party. The Labour Party-- since its brief flirtation with left social democracy after World War II-- has been drifting, even rushing, rightward. In many ways, like the Democrats, it has postured as the home of liberal and reformist ideas. And like the Democrats, it will not depart from business friendliness, minimal social advance, and an imperialist foreign policy today. Any deviance from conformity has been met with strict discipline and ostracization.

Former popular leaders of Labour-- counterparts to Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez in the US Democratic Party-- have signaled that they have had enough by announcing the creation of a new, left party on Thursday, July 24. In first-weekend polling, Corbyn and Sultana’s no-name party drew 15% of the respondents, roughly the same share as the in-power Labour Party polls.

On the following Monday, Morning Star commented enthusiastically: 

Four hundred thousand and counting. Sign-ups to be part of founding the new party initiated by Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana already surpass the membership of any existing political party in Britain.

While the appetite for a left alternative to Labour has long been clear, even supporters of the project cannot have expected a response on this scale…

[The] …rejection of the post-Thatcher political settlement is in reality a rejection of the consequences of the right’s policies — privatisation, deregulation and deindustrialisation — since these have been pursued by both governing parties since the 1980s…

[T]his is a very encouraging beginning. The march of authoritarianism and racism across this country, the disgusting consensus behind complicity in Israeli genocide and the attempt to keep public ownership and wealth redistribution off the table can all be challenged by the emergence of a left movement on this scale. No socialist can close their eyes to that.

Of course, we have to temper our optimism by acknowledging the tremendous challenges ahead. We saw how the auspicious start of the German alternative left party organized by Sahra Wagenknecht in 2024 faltered after remarkable early success. Nonetheless, the new German party, while failing to maintain its momentum, succeeded in shifting politics leftward and restoring confidence in a class-based agenda.

In the Corbyn/Sultana party, many see even greater opportunity to escape the stale politics of social austerity and military aggression. The initiative has already rocked the UK political system.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com 

Revisiting Paul Baran’s The Political Economy of Growth for Today

And this brings me to what I referred to earlier as a reaffirmation of my views on the basic problem confronting the underdeveloped countries. The principal insights, which must not be obscured by matters of secondary or tertiary importance, are two. The first is that, if what is sought is rapid economic development, comprehensive economic planning is indispensable… if the increase in a country’s aggregate output is to attain the magnitude, of, say, 8 to 10 per cent per annum; if in order to achieve it, the mode of utilization of a nation’s human and material resources is to be radically changed, with certain less productive lines of economic activity abandoned and other more rewarding ones taken up; then only a deliberate, long range planning effort can assure the attainment of the goal…

The second insight of crucial importance is that no planning worth the name is possible in a society in which the means of production remain under the control of private interests which administer them with a view to their owners’ maximum profits (or security or other private advantage). For it is of the very essence of comprehensive planning for economic development - what renders it, indeed, indispensable - that the pattern of allocation and utilization of resources which it must impose if it is to accomplish its purpose, is necessarily different from-the pattern prevailing under the status quo… (xxviii-xxix, Foreword to 1962 printing) The Political Economy of Growth, Paul A. Baran [emphasis added]

It is surely of some interest that the late Professor Baran-- reassessing his important, insightful, and extremely influential 1957 book, The Political Economy of Growth-- grounds his contribution to the liberation of the post-colonial world in two “insights”: 1. The necessity of “comprehensive” economic planning over the irrational decision-making of the market, and 2. The impossibility of having effective planning with the major productive forces in the hands of private entities operating for profits. 

Put simply, Baran is arguing that the most promising humane and rational escape from the legacy of colonialism is for the developing countries to choose the socialist path going forward and adopt planning as a necessary, rational condition for achieving that goal.

It is of equal interest that many who consider Baran to be one of the fathers of dependency theory-- the theory that development is most significantly hindered by the state-to-state structural barriers imposed by the “core” on the “periphery” or the “North” on the “South” -- have abandoned Baran’s key “insights” for an approach that argues for open, unhindered “fair” exchange and the rationality of markets. 

For many of today’s Western left, the locus of international inequalities is found in the economic relations between states. Exploitation-- in the form of taking advantage of uneven development or resource differences-- undoubtedly occurs in the relations between states, systematically in the colonial era, more indirectly today. That is just to say that competition between capitalist states within a global imperialist system will produce and reproduce various inequalities. It is popular to capture this as conflict between an advantaged North and a disadvantaged South-- while the geographical reference is most inexact, it is widely understood. From Wallerstein, Arrighi, and Gunder Frank, through Amin, and an important consensus today, the central feature of imperialism is thought to be the vast differences in wealth between the rich and poor countries. Moreover, they share the belief that existing structures maintain those differences, structures established and protected by the richest countries.

Of course, they are right to object to these inequalities and the practices and institutions that preserve them. And Paul Baran was acutely aware of these structures, but also attendant to the specific historical conditions influencing the individual countries-- their differences and similarities. He understands the trajectory of the post-colonial states:

Thus, the peoples who came into the orbit of Western capitalist expansion found themselves in the twilight of feudalism and capitalism enduring the worst features of both worlds, and the entire impact of imperialist subjugation to boot. To oppression by their feudal lords, ruthless but tempered by tradition, was added domination by foreign and domestic capitalists, callous and limited only by what the traffic would bear. The obscurantism and arbitrary violence inherited from their feudal past was combined with the rationality and sharply calculating rapacity of their capitalist present. Their exploitation was multiplied, yet its fruits were not to increase their productive wealth; these went abroad or served to support a parasitic bourgeoisie at home. They lived in abysmal misery, yet they had no prospect of a better tomorrow. They existed under capitalism, yet there was no accumulation of capital. They lost their time-honored means of livelihood, their arts and crafts, yet there was no modern industry to provide new ones in their place. They were thrust into extensive contact with the advanced science of the West, yet remained in a state of the darkest backwardness (p. 144). 

At the same time, Baran is fully aware of the predatory nature of foreign capital, denying its “usefulness” and affirming its sole domestic benefit to the merchant class.

Perhaps his clearest statement of the logic of imperialism appears on pages 196-197: 

To be sure, neither imperialism itself nor its modus operandi and ideological trimmings are today what they were fifty or a hundred years ago. Just as outright looting of the outside world has yielded to organized trade with the underdeveloped countries, in which plunder has been rationalized and routinized by a mechanism of impeccably ‘correct’ contractual relations, so has the rationality of smoothly functioning commerce grown into the modern, still more advanced, still more rational system of imperialist exploitation. Like all other historically changing phenomena, the contemporary form of imperialism contains and preserves all its earlier modalities, but raises them to a new level. Its central feature is that it is now directed not solely towards the rapid extraction of large sporadic gains from the objects of its domination, it is no longer content with merely assuring a more or less steady flow of these gains over a somewhat extended period. Propelled by well-organized, rationally conducted monopolistic enterprise, it seeks today to rationalize the flow of these receipts so as to be able to count on it in perpetuity. And this points to the main task of imperialism in our time: to prevent, or, if that is impossible, to slow down and to control the economic development of underdeveloped countries.

Notice that Baran acknowledges, along with today’s fashionable dependency theory, that imperialism’s “main task” is to impose underdevelopment. But imperialism’s agent is identified as the “monopolistic enterprise” and not specifically an antagonistic state or its government. Of course, the state hosting monopoly corporations does all it can to promote and protect their interests, but it should not be confused with either the exploiter or the beneficiary of exploitation: it is “the well-organized, rationally conducted monopolistic enterprise” that bleeds the workers of the developing countries. With monopoly capitalism dominating the state, the state plays a critical, essential role as an enabler for the most powerful monopolies in the global economy.  

For Baran, the key to liberating the former colonies from the stranglehold of rapacious monopolies is not a reordering of international relations, not a campaign for a level international playing field, not alternative market institutions, nor a coalition of dissenters from the status quo, but a radical change in the social and economic structure of the oppressed country.

In this regard, Baran differs from many contemporary dependency theorists who pose multipolarity as an answer to the North-South inequalities and welcome the BRICS development as constituting an anti-imperialist stage. They believe that breaking the stranglehold of the dominant great power-- the US-- will somehow eliminate the logic of contemporary imperialism, that it will disable the “mechanism of impeccably ‘correct’ contractual relations” at the heart of “core” / “periphery” relations. 

But this is not Baran’s thinking. He opts instead for an active engagement of the workers, peasants, and intellectuals on the periphery. His is a class approach. For Baran, working people are not dried leaves, blown this way and that by the powerful winds of great powers. Rather, they are the agents of their own liberation.

Baran draws out the potential of the post-colonial masses through his innovative concept of “surplus.”1 Baran asks revolutionaries in the emerging countries to realize the potential surplus that they may access for development provided that they engage in a “reorganization of the production and distribution of social output” and accept “far reaching changes to the structure of society.” (p. 24). Baran emphasizes four available sources for the surplus:

One is society’s excess consumption (predominantly on the part of the upper income groups…), the second is the output lost to society through the existence of unproductive workers, the third is the output lost because of the irrational and wasteful organization of the existing productive apparatus, and the fourth is the output foregone owing to the existence of unemployment caused primarily by the anarchy of capitalist production and the deficiency of effective demand. (p. 24)

By recovering this surplus, Baran contends that the post-colonial world can begin “the steep ascent” -- the escape from the legacy of colonialism and the stranglehold of capitalism. At the same time, Baran concedes that a resource-poor country, an economy violently distorted by a close neighbor-- a country like Cuba-- will need assistance from the socialist community, an assistance that has been less forthcoming since the demise of the Soviet Union.

The Multipolaristas and the BRICS advocates do not share Baran’s confidence in working people. They cannot conceive a revolutionary answer to the problem of development. They relegate socialism to the far, far-off future, and argue for a more humane capitalism. Their vision ends with establishing a new regime of “structural adjustments” that will blunt the economic power of the US to make way for a plurality of powers competing for global markets, but in a “friendly” way. This is the social-democratic vision taken to the global level. But this is not Baran’s vision.

Like their national counterparts, these global social democrats envision a world in which reforming capitalist social relations-- taming the worst monopoly scoundrels-- will result in the proverbial arc bending toward justice. BRICS, they believe, will give us a level playing field for the monopoly corporations to roam more fairly.

*****

Is Baran’s 1957 (1962) recipe for development relevant to today’s world? Could the so-called global South escape the clutches of the imperialist system by applying the “insights” offered by The Political Economy of Growth?

A recent Oxfam report on inequality in Africa suggests that there is plenty of potential surplus available for building a developmental program based on a class-based approach of appropriation and surplus recovery:

● Africa’s four most affluent billionaires have $57.4 billion in wealth, which is greater than ~50% of the continent’s 1.5 billion people.

● While Africa had no billionaires in 2000, today, there are 23 with a combined wealth of $112.6 billion. The wealth of these 23 ultra-rich Africans has grown by 56% in the last 5 years.

● The richest 5% on the continent have accumulated almost $4 trillion in wealth, more than twice the wealth of the rest of the people in Africa (by comparison, the richest 10% of US households hold two-thirds of US wealth).

● Almost half of the world’s most unequal countries are in Africa.

● The bottom 50% of Africans own less than 1% of the wealth of the continent (by comparison, the bottom 50% of US households own 3% of US wealth).

Presumably, the report does not include the billionaires like Elon Musk, Patrick Soon-Shiong, Rodney Sacks, and many others who relocated and invested outside of Africa. Eight of the top foreign-born US billionaires are from Africa.

Clearly, class, and not state-to-state relations, is at the center of Africa’s human development problem. The “potential surplus” accumulated in the hands of so few would well serve a peoples’ development program that could reverse the concentration of wealth now starving the continent’s poor. Appropriated wealth could well serve an industrial drive and the rationalization of agriculture. More than enough wealth is available in Africa to implement Paul Baran’s twin insights that open this article. 

The BRICS movement-- a coalition of partners aligning to create a different international exchange network that would be less one-sided, less privileging wealthy nations-- is not itself a bad thing. The proverbial level playing field-- the fair and free marketplace-- is a proper goal for capitalist participants competing internationally. But it is not a Left project. It moves the goal no closer in the struggle for justice for working people. It is not class-partisan, and thus ultimately will likely benefit those who gain from the proper functioning of capitalist economic relations in the various countries disadvantaged by existing relations. And we know from the Oxfam report who they are.

One can see the limitations of multipolarity from the recent Rio de Janeiro meeting of BRICS leaders. There is much talk of a “more equitable global order,” of state-to-state “cooperation,” of broader “participation,” even a pledge to fight disease and extreme poverty. The foreign ministers and heads of state dutifully denounce war and aggression. The current President, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva “called BRICS a successor of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM).” What he didn’t say was that NAM broke up when Cuba transcended toothless resolutions and declarations and actually defended Angola against apartheid South African aggression in a bloody war that brought the criminal regime to its knees. The BRICS response to the attack on Iran brings “toothlessness” back to mind.

Baran’s revolutionary path is not an easy one. Others have tried and failed. From Nkrumah and Lumumba to Thomas Sankara, revolutionaries in Africa have taken steps in this direction, only to be thwarted by powerful forces determined to snuff out even a beginning. That alone should tell the EuroAmerican left that it is the path worth following. 

We should not pretend that reforming global market relations—any more than reforming national market relations-- will secure justice for working people. That will come when the workers, peasants, and intellectuals of the global South decide that justice is impossible while “the means of production remain under the control of private interests which administer them with a view to their owners’ maximum profits.”

1  While useful in this context, the concept of surplus is less successful as developed in Baran and Sweezy's 1966 work, Monopoly Capital.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

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