Is There a Future for the Left?

…the Left narrative, no matter how accurate and intellectually powerful it may be, cannot expect to catch the imagination of the citizenry without including a vision for a real alternative future. Moreover, working-class institutions need to be reinstituted for the enhancement of class consciousness and authentic socialist parties need to be rediscovered for the Left narrative to become politically effective. Social movements are important, but their actions rarely have lasting effects. Only political parties can succeed in forging the Left narrative into the policy agenda and turn it into a programmatic plan for social change. Understandably enough, this is quite a tall order, but the Left needs to win once again the hearts and minds of the laboring classes. But it needs the necessary political agencies and cultural instruments to do so. It cannot accomplish it on intellectual grounds alone, especially with the politics of identity acting as a spearhead for social transformation... The Communist Manifesto would have remained just a mere political document if it wasn’t for the existence of radical political parties across the globe to embrace it as their guide and vision for the emancipation of the working class from the yoke of capital. The Left has a Great Story to Share About Alternatives to Capitalism-- But Sucks at Telling It, CJ Polychroniou (Common Dreams)

Shorn of the academic jargon, Polychroniou’s conclusion to his Common Dreams article gets a lot right about the failings of the US and European left and the road back to relevance.

It is true that today the left’s unstated action model is a plethora of focused, but single-issue social movements. However, that model has enjoyed, at best, limited success in the US since single-issue activism won big gains in the anti-Vietnam War and Civil Rights era of the 1960s and 1970s. One of the movements effectively complemented a bloody defeat of US Cold War aggression and the other completed the formal constitutional promise of full-citizenship rights for Blacks, women, and other minorities.

But substantial, larger, associated issues remain unresolved. US imperialism continues unabated with ever-more casualties and injustices; the inequalities suffered by oppressed groups remain intact, with a token stratum of those groups allowed through the door of privilege, even to elite status, but with most lagging far behind.

Social movements have focused on specific policies (NAFTA, tax structure, minimum wage, healthcare, immigration reform), emerging trends (globalization, “neoliberalism”), gross inequality (Occupy), changes in governance (Arab spring, police reform), environmental degradation (fracking), or US foreign intervention among many other identifiable wrongs, all of which burn brightly in the beginning, then unfortunately just as quickly fade, as protest confronts the glacial, fractured electoral system.

It is also true that most of the left operates and acts without any overarching program of reform or revolution. The majority of US leftists, for example, enthusiastically, reluctantly, or by default rely upon the Democratic Party and electoral politics to drive broad, systemic change. They may hope that their issues will be embraced by the party’s policy makers, they may struggle with the party’s entrenched leaders for a suitable program, or they may simply defer to the Democrats out of desperation. DSA, a self-described ‘democratic’ socialist party, is very far from cutting the umbilical cord with the Democrats. While the Green Party expends impressive effort to achieve ballot status, it brings a hodge-podge of candidates to the ballot, seldom aligned with any kind of common program or larger goal. And the small Marxist parties have failed to impact the labor movement or pressure reform movements from the left, as last did the US Communist Party of Gus Hall’s era when anti-Communist repression was far more intense than today and the word “socialism” was then a term of abuse.

But it is not just a program that is missing, but a vision as well.

‘Anti-capitalism’ is not a vision, but a defiance; it expresses hostility and resistance, but not rejection. It gives us no alternative to capitalism. Most of the US left counts itself as anti-capitalist, but one can only guess at what that might mean.

Some are more specific: they are anti-neoliberal capitalism, anti-disaster capitalism, anti-racial capitalism, or perhaps anti-monopoly capitalism. But, by implication, are they for some other kind of capitalism? Do they pine for the era before neoliberalism? Do they imagine capitalism without racism? Do they wish to turn the clock back to the stage before monopoly capitalism? An imagined time when capitalism did not spawn disasters?

These are not political visions, they’re mere fantasies!

The dominant alternative vision to capitalism until the collapse of real-existing-socialism in the late-twentieth century was Marxist socialism. From the rise of mass socialist parties in the final decades of the nineteenth century, the vision sketched by Marx and his followers dominated the hopes of ‘anti-capitalist’ working people. Whatever else the early Marxist militants meant by socialism, they agreed that socialism should end the exploitation of workers by capitalists; they envisioned ending capitalism once and for all and not merely managing it or buffering its worse aspects.

With the birth of real-existing-socialism, creating, shaping, and developing the vision proved to be a lengthy, often messy process, as though serious onlookers would expect it to be otherwise. Previously rare or unheard-of levels of economic, cultural, and human growth were achieved. Enormous sacrifices were made. And internal and external enemies were met.

Some leaders rose to meet challenges, some failed to do so. Mistakes were plentiful, as were acts of unparalleled heroism. The costs of change and of development were enormous, which any thoughtful observer would concede in a life-and-death struggle against capitalism. Ultimately, those living in the lands where socialism was won, no matter how briefly or for how long, must weigh the sacrifices against the gains made, and discount the judgment of smug, privileged foreign critics.

Ironically, Polychroniou, who correctly steers the left away from aimlessly drifting in the political maelstrom of left-wing faddism and unmoored posturing, paints a picture of real-existing-socialism so without merit or achievement as to turn anyone away from the socialist alternative.

Polychroniou, like his sometime collaborator, Noam Chomsky, often shows an impressive critical eye toward the failings of the capitalist system and of imperialism, but follows unfailingly the conventional, stereotypic Cold War demonization of real-existing-socialism; he cannot even credit twentieth-century socialism with being ‘real,’ calling it “actually-existing-socialism.” Like Chomsky, Polychroniou mistrusts the mainstream media at every turn, recognizing its obedience to the ruling class, but accepts everything it sells about the ruling class’s arch-enemy: the real-existing-socialism of the last century.

As a result, Polychroniou’s often perceptive comments are diminished, lost before disdain for a project that he believes has proven, in reality, to be an unmitigated disaster. According to Polychroniou, “actually existing socialism” was “undemocratic,” undermining its “social, cultural, and economic achievements…” “Workers had no say in economic decisions… [T]he rulers possessed no wealth and had no private property of their own but made all of the decisions for the rest of society. The USSR was at best a ‘deformed workers’ state’.” [my emphasis]

Polychroniou sees this ‘deformation’ as a huge impediment to the achievement of socialism. Consequently, he is surprised that its disappearance did not bring on a flowering-- a revival-- of interest and commitment to socialism. “Instead of feeling liberated by the collapse of ‘actually existing socialism’ the western Left felt a loss of identity and entered a long period of intellectual confusion and political paralysis.” In other words, the Western Left suffered malaise, lost its bearings, and floundered at a time when Polychroniou thought his “real” socialism was within reach.

Surely this bizarre psychologistic explanation of the failure of a Left unburdened by the legacy of Communism is as unsatisfying as Polychroniou’s comic strip characterization of over 70 years of real-existing-socialism. As he concedes, the so-called Western Left found its opportunity to fulfill its promise of a different alternative. But the promise collapsed before it got started, degenerating into scholastic quarrels over truth, identity, and forms of governance.

Still Polychroniou recognizes the urgent need for a Left political party -- a class-based organization of those committed to a common road to social change-- to serve as the vehicle for a program and a vision. In his words, “[The] Left needs to win once again the hearts and minds of the laboring classes.” In his judgment, systemic change must be realized through the political party. However, he surely knows that the idea that radical political ideas can be realized through centrist parties has long been discredited, though far too many radical organizers continue to pursue that dead end in the US and Europe.

It must be acknowledged that the popular idea that a Left political party can be constituted by addition, simply bringing all the various social movements together, is equally flawed, relying on the magical thinking that ideological proximity or contiguity is the same thing as the organic unity necessary for party-building.

Similarly, the seductive idea that a political party can be constructed around the mere fact that it is new and different from the failed, bankrupt center-left parties of Europe and the US has been proven wrong by the corruption or decline of Europe’s new wave. From the German Greens to Spain’s Podemos, Italy’s Five Star, or Greece's SYRIZA, the promise of a shiny new toy filling the political vacuum left by a dying center-left is decidedly broken.

Without a distinctive vision, without a concrete program, with only a pledge for more “democracy,” all of the new wave disappointed its idealistic followers, leaving many disgusted and disenchanted with political action.

To his credit Polychroniou is critical of this trend. In a September, 2023 article (Endgame for Syriza, The Unbearable Lightness of the Greek Left) in Common Dreams, he chronicles the rise and fall of Greece’s SYRIZA party, a new-wave, self-styled radical party that actually grasped the brass ring of political power in 2015, but soon capitulated to capital without a fight. Since SYRIZA’s fall from its former heights, Polychroniou ponders its future.

“The answer to that mystery,” he says, “was revealed during the leadership election that was held just this past Sunday [September 24, 2023] when party members elected a gay, liberal, former Goldman Sachs trader, shipping investor, and political neophyte Stefanos Kasselakis to head the once radical left-wing Syriza party.” The once “radical” SYRIZA has devolved into a nondescript liberal party of the center/center right (as has the German Greens).

But he concludes his insightful essay on SYRIZA’s rapid decline with this bizarre note: “Under Kasselakis, Syriza will cease having affinity to leftist politics in any form or shape, which means that Greece will now be left with a Leninist-Stalinist Communist Party as the only large-scale organized political force fighting for the interest of the working class.” [my emphasis]

Is the idea of the KKE-- the Greek Marxist-Leninist party “fighting for the interest of the working class” which he dismissively refers--  so distasteful to Polychroniou as to rule it out-of-hand? Would Greek working people be better off if the KKE were not fighting for their interests? Is the fourth largest political party in Greece declared “untouchable” by Polychroniou? Is he apologizing because Greece actually has a committed fighter for the interests of its working class? 

Polychroniou’s dismissal comes with no logic and no evidence. It is simply the deeply entrenched, unexamined anti-Communism that he shares with so many middle-strata, academic and intellectual leftists of his and past generations. Despite KKE’s long history of contesting capitalism and imperialism, its unwavering, heroic resistance to fascism, and its persistent promotion of a Greek society free of exploitation, Polychroniou and others of his ilk can find no circumstances in which they could even conditionally support “the only large-scale organized political force fighting for the interest of the working class” in Greece.

Surely, this is the epitome of blind, foolish, and counterproductive anti-Communism.

It is ironic that the KKE pointed out-- long before 2015 and Polychroniou-- that SYRIZA would not and could not answer the challenges facing Greece in the throes of crisis. At the time, intellectuals like Polychroniou, dismissed KKE’s assessment and charged it with sectarianism for refusing to join in coalition with the now admittedly discredited SYRIZA.

*****

It is, however, a good thing that Polychroniou and others are reexamining the tactics and strategies of the European and US Left in the twenty-first century. It is difficult to reconcile the occurrence of economic catastrophes unseen since the Great Depression, numerous tragic and bloody wars of aggression and domination, and social and political crises with the lack of significant social change or revolution over the last quarter-century. The title of Vincent Bevins’s recent book, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution, captures the dilemma well. Arguably more people have been motivated to protest existing conditions than ever before, but no revolutionary change has ensued. Why?

The question, or one very much like it, is taken up by Anton Jäger and Arthur Borriello in their recent book, The Populist Moment: The Left After the Great Recession. Both books are the subject of a critical review in the 8 February 2024 issue of The London Review of Books (A Circular Motion, James Butler).

Certainly, the failure of the Left and the current numerous fractures on the Left deserve serious retrospection and assessment. The way forward could well come from such study. But it will falter if poisoned from the onset with mindless anti-Communism. It will be prone to the same limiting calls to individualism, to identity, and the vacuous, vague, but always heralded cry for more “democracy.” A challenge to capitalism will require more than virtue-signaling.

Surely, the lessons of a century of social upheaval, confrontation, and revolution animated by working-class organizations cannot be cavalierly dismissed. The role of Communists and Communist Parties was decisive in colossal social change in the twentieth century. Might they be decisive again?

Greg Godels
zzsblogml@gmail.com

Mired in Opportunism

It should be obvious to everyone that the US left is in difficult straits. It is not even remotely clear who or what counts as left in this country.

To most-- encouraged by the capitalist media-- the left is the Democratic Party. But that must undoubtedly be mistaken. To be left, one surely has to be outside of the centers of power, looking in; and that certainly is not true of the Democrats and their leaders. Since the beginning of the modern two-party system, the Democrats have been the Pepsi to the Republican Coke, taking its turn in ruling. There may be an estranged left wing of the Democratic Party, but the Democratic Party itself is not a left organization. Only deranged columnists for the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal could believe that fantasy.

Aside from dismissing the Democratic Party as an example of the left, it remains difficult to capture what is left in today’s political life. Historically, the thread that united the “left” politics of the last millennium was its rejection of existing political and/or socio-economic formations. Looking back or forward from the eighteenth or nineteenth century, opposition to the existing order generally defined the left, whether that opposition was broadly democratic, liberal democratic, anarchist, or socialist. 

Today, that is no longer true in the US.

Even before the collapse of the Soviet Union, self-proclaimed US leftists had lowered their designs from advocacy of a new order to a defense of the more “progressive” old order: The New Deal, the Great Society, and a human rights-based foreign policy.

James Carter’s presidential administration was perhaps the high point of and the point of departure from expanding the social democratic vision of a better world. Carter’s electoral platform captured the highest aspirations of the non-revolutionary left to date, with job guarantees, national healthcare, and reduced militarism. Within two years of his presidency, Carter had jettisoned his platform and Ted Kennedy picked up the tattered banner.

Since the election of Ronald Reagan, the broad left has been in retreat, engaged in a defensive posture, lowering its expectations with every electoral cycle.

Marginalized by the Red Scare, ostracization, official repression, and petty-bourgeois self-indulgence, the radical, revolutionary left clung at the margins of political life, advocating a new world against the cynicism and despair fostered by the rout of the “progressive” hordes.

Of course, the fall of the Soviet Union only added to the difficulties of the radical left with the flight of careerists, opportunists, and fair-weather friends from the Marxist-Leninist left.

“Lesser-of-two-evils-ism” became the guiding light of most of the left from the Reagan era onward. With an emboldened, more radical Right emerging, this posture had some merit. The idea of thwarting the rightward march above all other considerations appealed to many. But far too many equated a new Republican-initiated aggression against the gains of working people with Mussolini’s march on Rome.

But nearly half a century later, it has only hardened into a policy of settling for any concession-- no matter how small or of little consequence-- that the ruling elites will grant. “Lesser-of-two-evils” has inexorably moved the US left to begging for a place within the respectable tent, into a role as the loyal opposition. Too much of our left substituted “please” for “we demand.”

We see this in recent lows in left journalism and commentary. The website Portside-- a creation of 1991 dissidents from the Communist Party USA, recovering members of the New Communist Movement, and assorted other activists-- illustrates this decline. Portside proves the futility of combining loyal opposition to the Democratic Party mainstream with nostalgia for the New Deal and the Great Society.

While the war in Ukraine has exacerbated and exposed the weaknesses of the US left, there has been slow, but encouraging move toward opposition to the war and the demand to negotiate an end (nearly the entire organized US left picked a side early on and hesitated in calling for the war’s end, with the notable exception of Code Pink).

So it was disappointing, but not surprising to see that Portside recently reposted a provocative article, The Surprising Pervasiveness of American Arrogance, from Foreign Policy in Focus. Author John Feffer attacks those within the generic left who dare to challenge the rigid narrative on the Ukraine war established by the US State Department and slavishly followed by the mainstream media. 

Feffer finds arrogance because the US left-- undoubtedly justified in believing that the US manufactures consensus-- does not embrace the views of the Ukrainian “left” (part of an equally manufactured consensus). Feffer suggests that first hand, authentic opinions of those who are living in Ukraine trumps the opinion of outsiders, while concealing the well-known fact that the Ukrainian government suppresses those who oppose the war. With eleven parties banned in Ukraine, it is surely likely that public opinion in Ukraine is stifled by this reality. It would be equally silly to value the opinion of the Russian left on the war over what we can independently establish, given similar official pressure. 

Feffer’s argument is pure sophistry-- a variation on the fallacious argument from authority (ad Verecundiam) as taught in beginning logic textbooks.

Further, Feffer denies that there is a place for US pressure in ending the war. He mocks those who may well exaggerate the possibility of a quick, decisive end to the war, but asks us to believe that it could continue indefinitely without US material aid and encouragement. To promote this view, Feffer pictures the US as a mere ineffective leaf blowing in the global political winds-- a vulgar reversal of the real US situation. He conveniently forgets the consequential effects of the international anti-war movement in the 1960s.

If Feffer mounts the best case for Portside’s siding with the US State Department, the editors have no case at all.

But a week later, Portside stoops even lower. 

Reposting an incendiary article worthy of Hedda Hopper, Walter Winchell, or Red Channels, the editors returned to the era of guilt by association and Moscow Gold. “People’s Media” Network, but Pro-Russia and Pro-China-- taken from The Daily Beast, the self-described “high-end tabloid”-- purports to connect a media outlet and a number of left groups and personalities to a wealthy funding source, Neville “Roy” Singham. 

Author William Bredderman desperately wants to foster the impression that these entities take the positions that they take because they are directly or indirectly on the payroll of the Russian Federation and/or the People's Republic of China, that they are Putin’s or Xi’s puppets. His sole evidence is a two-year old raid and accompanying allegations by the Indian authorities that Singham served as a conduit for foreign money to an Indian opposition media outlet. Even the two-year-old Times of India article cited by Bredderman puts the “link” between Singham and the PRC in quotation marks.

But of course, a link between foreign monies and the Indian medium, NewsClick-- should it be established with Singham as an intermediary-- would have little evidentiary bearing, other than innuendo, upon the relationship between US leftists and the RF or the PRC. No further evidence is introduced.

Bredderman goes to great lengths to show that the organizations and individuals cited all oppose US foreign policy toward the RF and the PRC. He wants the reader to conclude that this opposition is due to influence, rather than principle, despite the well-established fact that these groups and individuals have long been consistently critical of US foreign policy! 

The experts that Bredderman surfaces are all deeply hostile to the left, including the discredited Alexander Reid Ross, the popularizer of the laughably imaginary Red/Brown alliance-- a particularly nasty notion that served to divide the left since the 1930s. 

Many of us have seen this before: the charge that the civil rights movement was directed and funded by Communists, that the anti-war movement was guided by Moscow, that opposition to US foreign and domestic practices must have insidious origins kept from the general public.

The temptation to point to the source of support is especially tempting when power and wealth bear such overwhelming influence through think tanks, institutes, foundations, grants, non-profits, and a host of other ruling-class fronts posing as “independent” voices. Exposing their hypocrisy is a useful service to those who naïvely take their products at face value.

However, “Gotcha” journalism can be an impediment to critical thinking, a diversion from the substance of unconventional views. Since we cannot know if donors support the left because they agree with them, because they insist on compliance for their donations, or if they are solicited by those they fund, we cannot judge the effect upon the recipient’s independence, nor should we be obsessed with it. To be sure, the money won’t come from the US ruling class to seriously subvert  itself!

And that should have crossed the minds of the editors of Portside who posted this scabrous assault on the left. And it should be understood as an attack on the left, since it serves no purpose beyond casting a shadow on a section of the left and raising distracting questions about the rest of the left. 

Are the editors still mired in the nonsense of RussiaGate? Do they still see foreigners under our political bed?1

History will decide many of our differences, without help from ruling-class apologists and hucksters.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

1  While this was being written, Portside reposted an hysterical, crude revival of the RussiaGate nonsense and related conspiratorial gibberish by radio host and spiritualist, Thom Hartmann. By revisiting every discredited, distorted, and misleading claim, Portside demonstrated that it will stop at nothing to get a Democrat elected President in sixteen months. 

Out of the Wilderness

As the Soviet Union and our historical memory of it disappear in the rear-view mirror, ideological clarity about socialism disappears with it. It is not that the Soviet Union had a monopoly on socialist thinking-- there were certainly contributors from within and without the then-existing socialist world who reflected different times, different circumstances, and different traditions-- but the Soviet Union represented a historical constant, an evolving constant that connected the rise of revolutionary Marxism in the early twentieth century to later socialist thought.

One didn’t have to agree with Soviet socialist theory in the late twentieth century, but one had to reckon with it; one had to locate one’s thinking longitudinally and latitudinally from that pole.

Because it served as a frame of reference for other leftist movements-- purported Communist, non-Communist, and anti-Communist leftism-- there was a certain logic to the politics of the global left, best expressed by the division between the Communist, revolutionary left and the social-democratic, reformist left. These two trends captured left politics, with various wrinkles and departures playing a lesser role.

Subsequent to the demise of the Soviet Union, left ideology became unhinged. Social democracy retreated to applying a modest, slightly more human face to capitalist triumphalism, reaching full-expression with the self-described Third Way of Clinton, Blair, and Hollande. Without competition from the historical legacy of revolutionary Marxism (Marxism-Leninism), a rightward swing was inevitable.

Within the Marxist-Leninist movement, frustration and disappointment led to bitter fights, splits, and retreat to what Lenin described so well as “the years of reaction” after the defeat of the 1905 Russian revolution:

All the revolutionary and opposition parties were smashed. Depression, demoralisation, splits, discord, defection, and pornography took the place of politics. There was an ever greater drift towards philosophical idealism; mysticism became the garb of counter-revolutionary sentiments… It is at moments of need that one learns who one’s friends are. “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder

Many academic Marxists-- theorists whose ideas never took root in the working class, but who commanded much influence, nonetheless-- abandoned revolutionary socialism for social criticism, spurred on by a shiny new intellectual toy, postmodernism. The ideology that coalesced around the idea of class was shattered into the politics of individual identities and varied interests. Too often this thinking seeped into left-wing politics, confusing younger comrades, by nature, enthralled with the new.

Other academics believed that they had found a more rigorous foundation for Marxism in the neo-positivism of optimized choice, self-interest, and individualism, the growing intellectual consensus of bourgeois social science. After sterile debates-- often couched in formal language-- proponents concluded that the most interesting, most original ideas in Marxism could not be reduced to statements about isolated individuals maximizing their self-perceived, narrow, immediate interests. So Marxism must be abandoned to preserve the beloved method, a patent absurdity!

In the last decade of the 20th century, a process of soul searching had begun in major sections of the left, especially in the West. Both the centrality of class politics and the legacy goal of constructing socialism receded in the newly minted approaches of the broad left.

In the wake of the 2007-2009 global economic crisis, the idea of class reemerged, albeit in a simplistic, primitive way. In 2011, activists, organizing around the slogan “Occupy!”, introduced the dichotomy of the 1% and the 99% as an expression of the great and growing inequalities of wealth and income in the US. Lacking any grasp of the complexities of class and strata, the slogan “the 99%” was bound to conjure an illusory unity of the supposed have-nots that was naive and unattainable. And the idea of “the 1%” reduced the historically evolved power and rule of the capitalist class to a mere actuarial number.

The retreat from class (as Ellen Meiksins Wood so aptly characterized it) continued unabated. And the retreat from any real advocacy of socialism accompanied it.

Dissatisfaction with a soulless Democratic Party increasingly catering to a more affluent, petty bourgeois base, revived an interest in social democracy in the US. This new interest grew from the campaign of independent Democrat Bernie Sanders who refused to renounce the moniker “socialist.” Young people, in particular, were drawn in great numbers to a ‘legitimized’ socialism, energizing a number of leftist organizations and electoral campaigns.

Ironically, this new social democratic moment occurred in the US when social democracy in Europe-- its traditional address-- was discredited and marginalized.

While acceptance of the word “socialism” in the US was welcome, it was attached to a tepid, incremental socialism deeply embedded in the Democratic Party and virtually indistinguishable from its 1930s New Deal precedent.

Certainly, this leftish turn was welcome, and the freeing of the word “socialism” from its Red Scare chains marked progress.

But so-called democratic “socialism” was not socialism by any measure, but a brand associated with the left-wing of the Democratic Party.

The retreat from the real-- real-existing and real-theoretical-- socialism and the abandonment of the tool of class analysis disables and disarms the left in every way, leaving it vacillating between accommodating capitalism with patchwork reforms and surrendering the socialist project all together until a time off in the distant future.

My own advocacy of socialism has often been met with the patronizing dismissal: “Sure, but tell us how we get there from here.”

But we can’t get anywhere unless we settle on where we want to go. And surely, we must choose our route collectively.

The signs that our left has abandoned the goal of socialism, along with class partisanship abound… unfortunately.

The contradiction-- and the Marxist term is most appropriate-- between surging inflation and shrinking growth has capitalist policy makers in a bind. Their consensus-- and their consensus follows from bourgeois theory-- is that spending must be retarded. The conventional way to do this is through restraining economic activity, exactly what the Federal Reserve’s interest-rate increases are meant to do.

Given that a hard braking of the economy will inevitably produce widespread and deep pain on an already struggling working class, one would think that this would be a powerful, unassailable argument for socialism. Given that this moment in US history presents a seemingly intractable problem for the ruling class with only two possible and disastrous outcomes-- escalating inflation or a deep recession-- that the left would lay the portended disaster at the doorstep of capitalism.

But, no, that is not happening.

Instead, the left is blaming the Federal Reserve or searching vainly for ways to save capitalism from its dilemma.

● A headline in Jacobin-- a journal of “socialism”-- and reposted in Portside states ominously: To Fight Inflation, The Fed is Declaring a War on Workers. No, it is not the Federal Reserve declaring war on workers. The Federal Reserve is a capitalist institution. It is always at war with workers-- that’s its job. It is-- as it always is-- capitalism that is at war with workers. Say it! C-a-p-i-t-a-l-i-s-m…

The article ends by suggesting how capitalism could “forge” an alternative path to reducing inflation-- a brief suggestion unrelated to the dilemma that capitalism finds itself facing, but having the merit of evading the elephant in the room.

● Then there is Michael Hudson’s response to the Federal Reserve's interest-rate action, The Fed’s Austerity Program to Reduce Wages, found on numerous websites from Counterpunch to TeleSur. Hudson commands a huge following, despite having no history or connection with the organized left aside from apparent youthful happenstance with Trotskyism. His long history as a financial industry insider and his loquaciousness seem, somehow, to bolster his popularity.

Again, it is not capitalism that is responsible for the mess facing working people, but “neoliberalism,” “the tunnel vision of corporate managers and the One Percent,” and “Biden’s Cold War.” Hudson punches the explanation up by invoking his two favorite bêtes noires: debt and the rentier-class. But not capitalism.

I have no quarrel with the term “neoliberalism” if it is shorthand for the socio-politico-economic adjustment made by and for capitalism during the 1970s stagflation crisis and after the failure of Keynesian solutions. But today it is used far too often and with zeal to conjure an evil malignancy that attacks otherwise stable and enduring capitalism and imposes onerous conditions on a disgruntled, but somewhat-satisfied-with-capitalism working class.

This is sheer nonsense, of course, but it is the latent assumption behind the obsession with neoliberalism held by most left punditry. If only we could expel neoliberalism… Again, capitalism as an all-determining socio-economic formation gets a free pass.

● Professor Richard Wolff is an impressive expositor of many Marxist ideas. He is the go-to interview when center-left media, like Democracy Now!, wants to hear from Marxism. But Professor Wolf is no Marxist. Nor is he a socialist, though he might challenge this claim. While he is unquestionably dedicated and earnest, it is not to socialism that he is dedicated. Instead, he advocates for a snail's-pace assault on capitalism through small-business-like consumer and producer cooperatives, a persisting utopian strategy of nipping away at the edges of capital. That strategy has no answer for monopoly capitalism, the capitalism of our ages.

Like so many others, Wolff demonstrates an aversion to locating capitalism as the material, formal, efficient, and final cause of today’s crises, preferring to find the reparable flaws in capitalism and to search for a fix.

In his Three Anti-Inflation Alternatives to Raising Interest Rates appearing in Economy for All, In These Times, Popular Resistance, and other places, Wolff signals more interest in finding a way to manage the inflation-stagnation crisis than attacking its cause.

Wolff proposes not one, but three alternatives available to capitalism to escape the clutches of inflation.

First, he proposes a wartime solution: ration cards. One can only imagine how that would be received by a citizenry already divided by masks, vaccines, and lockdowns, not to mention guns. Indeed, this proposal might unwittingly be a stealth spark for further misunderstanding and mindless conflict.

Second, Wolff revives the Nixon-era tactic of the wage-price freeze. Like rationing, a freeze-- including Nixon’s brief wage-price freeze-- freezes injustices as well and merely temporarily bottles up the growing, deep-seated inflationary pressures. In Nixon, Ford, and Carter’s case, those pressures exploded for the rest of the decade to no relief or benefit to working people. Like rationing, price freezes give the impression of action, while leaving the cause of economic distress-- capitalism-- untouched and unspoken.

While not mentioning socialism, Wolff’s third “alternative” invokes its spirit with the possibility of “[t]the socialization of private capitalist enterprises…” But before one can anticipate Marx’s call in The Communist Manifesto for “the abolition of bourgeois property,” Wolff dashes our hopes. He is not calling for the end of “the exploitation of the many by the few” but something else entirely. Instead, he says, let’s borrow from the history of public utility commissions that have failed so miserably to protect consumers from fraud, unjustifiable price increases, and other abuses:

Across the United States, insurance, utility, and other public commissions limit private capitalist enterprises’ freedom to raise their prices in the markets they regulate. Private capitalists in such markets cannot raise prices without the permission of those commissions to do so. A government could establish all sorts of commissions in all sorts of markets with criteria for granting or refusing such permissions. Suppose, for example, that some or all food items were socially (democratically) deemed to be basic goods, such that no producer or seller could raise its prices without approval by a federal food commission. Fighting inflation could be among the approval criteria in this case (just as that is a criterion now for the Fed’s monetary policies).

Is this less utopian, less fabulist, less unrealistic, more promising than the call to abolish bourgeois property? Is championing socialism a more remotely possible solution than establishing “commissions” that would regulate capitalist prices and, accordingly, profits? Wolff simply issues a fanciful wishlist to address an impending disaster.

A survey of the various “solutions” to the contradiction of exploding capitalist prices and slowing economic activity offered by prominent left thinkers shows that they have no solution at all. Moreover, the offered “solutions” all portend to manage capitalism better than its bourgeois managers. They all seek to improve capitalism, to make it friendlier, to tame its “excesses” while guiding it through its internally generated crises.

If today’s left refuses to seriously discuss socialism, deferring it to another time and place, it consigns the people to eternal wandering in the biblical wilderness.

It is not another half-hearted attempt at reformist or utopian change (after centuries of disappointing attempts), but a commitment to revolutionary socialism that will deliver the working class “out of the hands of the [capitalists], and to bring them up out of that land unto a good land and a large, unto a land flowing with milk and honey…” (with apologies to Exodus 3:8).

The working class deserves better than another thirty years of wandering through the wilderness of misdirection, muddled ideas, and fear of socialism.

Greg Godels
zzsblogml@gmail.com

No to the Imperialist War!

Amidst echoes of 1914 and World War I, the political left-- far less potent than a century ago-- is split between the contestants in a European war.

As in 1914, the rush to pick sides in the conflict in Ukraine clouds all judgment, conjuring the adolescent emotions engaged while witnessing a schoolyard fight. Some on the left portray Ukraine as an innocent victim of a notorious bully and the bully’s long history of belligerence.

Others, long cognizant of the nefarious role of the US and NATO in bringing perceived rivals, renegades, or defiers to their knees, see Russia as the hapless victim of betrayed promises and existential threats.

Those who rush to Ukraine’s defense without qualification display an ignorance of history and the transparent roles of all the players in the global imperialist chess game. They also succumb to the crudest propaganda campaign since the 2003 exaggerations and fabrications employed to sell the Iraq invasion. Their jump onto the Western imperialist bandwagon is, at best, naive beyond hope, at worst, complicit in the aggressive foreign policy of the US and NATO.

Invoking Ukraine’s right to self-determination would seem to have more credibility. But it is necessary to remember how Western imperialism has often twisted the doctrine to fit its own predatory goals. When Vietnam was moving towards independence, the US and its allies artificially created a Republic of Vietnam in the south, basing US support and long war on defending its right of self-determination against “Communist aggression.” The West used the same ruse with mineral-rich Katanga, Kosovo, and oil-rich Cabinda to name a few. Ukraine lost any pretense of self-determination after it underwent a Western-sponsored coup in 2014. Western imperialism is always anxious to defend the spurious right of self-determination of its clients and puppets.

On the other hand, those opposing the unqualified support of “heroic” Ukraine certainly have a case. The aggressive posture of the US and NATO towards Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union is real, though seldom explored by anyone in the monopoly-media commentariat. Surrounding Russia with NATO member states, bases, war-game simulations, and troop deployments is inexplicable, except by attributing hostile intent. Meddling in the civil and political life through unrequested NGOs and bombarding Russia’s citizens with critical, oppositional messages cannot be seen as friendly acts.

Nonetheless, these acts of aggression fall short of military action and do not justify military action by another party. Saber-rattling is qualitatively different from going to war. An invasion is not a justified response.

Also, the proffered notion that the Russian invasion was actually a defensive action to rescue the Russian-speaking citizens of Eastern Ukraine reeks of the same doublespeak that the US and NATO employ with their putrid doctrine of humanitarian interventionism. The shame of this excuse for imperialist aggression does not validate it for Russian use.

A strong case can be made that the Russian leadership was once again drawn into the ‘Brzezinsky trap.’ US signals before the invasion were remarkably ambiguous. While the US military and State Department were warning of a Russian build-up and imminent invasion, the usual, expected bellicose warnings were not heard from Washington. Typically, when a great power senses that a rival is threatening, it responds with exaggerated threats of its own, military maneuvers, troop build-ups, heightened alerts, etc. Instead, President Biden gave assurances that the US would not be drawn into a war.

Brzezinski, President Carter’s National Security Advisor, devised a scheme to draw the Soviet Union into a long, bloody, fruitless war in Afghanistan by encouraging and supporting Islamic zealots to destabilize a country on the USSR border.

Similarly, George Bush, the elder, allowed his ambassador to give mixed signals about a US response to Saddam Hussein when Hussein contemplated an invasion of Kuwait. Hussein took the bait, precipitating a US invasion of Iraq.

If it was a trap and the Russian leadership fell for it, then not only was the invasion not justifiable, but it was tragically misguided. The result, to date, has generated greater military, economic, and public pressure on the Russian Federation, a situation that Russian leaders said they wanted to forestall with their action.

Thus, defending Russia’s invasion, despite the context, is defending the indefensible.

Many want to portray Russia as “anti-imperialist,” given its commendable acts of opposition to US aggression in countries like Syria, Cuba, or Venezuela. But as I explained in an earlier article, that is not a helpful way of understanding Russia’s role in the imperialist system and certainly not consistent with V.I. Lenin’s theory of imperialism. Those who harbor this illusion-- whether from Cold War nostalgia or a misreading of Lenin’s writings-- are attempting to detach today’s Russia from its capitalist economic base and deny that its rulers act on behalf of its capitalist class.

It is possible to grant that Russia objectively acted against US imperialism in militarily aiding Syria while also asserting that the conflict in Ukraine is an imperialist war. That is, the battle raging in Ukraine is, in the final analysis, fought over the material interests of capitalist ruling classes, not the interests of the people of Ukraine or Russia.

The great tragedy is that the broad left-- the historical foil to war and imperialism-- remains divided, confused, and inactive while a bloody, destructive war rages, threatening to expand and escalate. As the war continues with no resolution, the only winner is US imperialism.

In sharp contrast, over 40 Communist Parties have signed a joint statement --No to the Imperialist War in Ukraine!-- affirming that the war in Ukraine is an imperialist war and that the people “have no interest in siding with one or another imperialist or alliance that serves the interests of the monopolies.” The statement recognizes that ending the conflict-- “the meat grinder of imperialist war” -- is the foremost task and goes further to “demand the closure of military bases, the return home of troops from missions abroad, to strengthen the struggle for the disengagement of the countries from imperialist plans and alliances such as NATO and the EU.”

One signatory-- the Greek Communist Party-- has led the way by protesting at the US and Russian embassies, organizing mass demonstrations against the war, and leading the effort to stop NATO weapons shipments. Italian labor organizations have also resisted NATO arms shipments.

To the magazine’s credit, the editor of Monthly Review, the influential US left publication demonstrates a similar understanding:

At present, we are once again seeing “an old-style struggle for power” in the form of a war in Ukraine, which has taken on a “ghostly character” because of the presence of thermonuclear weapons on both sides of what… is essentially a “proxy war” between two capitalist states: the United States (along with the whole of NATO) and Russia.

By bringing the threat of nuclear war into sharp focus, editor John Bellamy Foster shows the folly of those caught in the blame-game, those immobilized by the allure of war pornography spread by monopoly capital’s powerful propaganda machine, and underscores the urgency of stopping the war now.

To perhaps the surprise of some, Pope Francis has brought clarity to the war in Ukraine, in earthy, but direct language. Supposedly, he told the Russian Orthodox Patriarch that the Russian church leader should not be “Putin’s altar boy.” While this brought glee from those supporting “Glory to Ukraine” at all costs, he followed up with the charge that the cause of the war might be the “barking of NATO at the door of Russia,” an apt metaphor. The Pope's blunt analysis supports his commitment to ending the war above all other concerns. He has offered to visit all belligerents and negotiate, the sane way to end hostilities.

While Pope Francis’s position as peacemaker may seem unremarkable, it must be placed against the backdrop of the “just war” concept that has allowed Catholics and church leaders in the past to tailor the Church’s message to please right-wing regimes, war makers, and xenophobia, while appearing doctrinaire.

A recent commentary in The Wall Street Journal explores the Church’s historic relationship to the concept. Francis seems to prefer a just peace to a just war, forestalling its expansion and flirtation with nuclear war.

We can but hope that these sane voices can unite a divided left into vacating the debate hall and returning to the streets to protest an imperialist war and the elites that profit at the expense of the masses. We cannot repeat the mistakes of 1914.

Greg Godels
zzsblogml@gmail.com

Searching for Meaning in a Pandemic

Driven indoors by a deadly virus, most people, especially in the wealthier, advanced capitalist countries, are facing uncertainties unknown in their entire lives. The virus’s ruthless defiance of borders and all but the most privileged social cleavages has cast a shadow over expectations and prospects, while bringing the global economy to a near-standstill.

What can We Learn?

For those who have money and power, their interests come before the health and welfare of the rest of us. Most bourgeois politicians, top corporate executives, bankers, and billionaire investors are willing to risk the lives of the vulnerable to secure their own status and restart the capital accumulation process. Every day, we see anxious politicians lobbied by the agents of monopoly capital. They are ready to ignore the advice of academics and professionals who are experts in disease control and public health in order to send safely isolated workers back into danger. 

In the US, we have private health insurance and market-based health services rather than universal, equitable health care. The fact that the victims of the novel coronavirus could not be promptly diagnosed, triaged, and given care, the fact that response was so uneven, and the fact that health care providers had to compete for the scarce, but essential means to combat the virus demonstrates the tragic inadequacy of an industrial model relying on the market, profit, and the fetish of “efficiency.” Tens of thousands of lost lives expose this failure.

Where politicians in other countries have callously shrunk their national health services for political expediency, they, too, must answer for the unnecessary deaths of thousands.

We should learn that health industry administrators, faced with medical supply shortages and accelerating demand, are prepared to make life-and-death decisions based on protocols devised by so-called “bio-ethicists.” Rather than rallying behind victims’ families and health care workers, rather than seeking emergency powers to ramp up production or purchases, rather than mobilizing volunteers or lobbying for a more rational distribution of national resources, hospital administrations opt to choose which victims deserve to live.
Misnamed “bio-ethicists” compete to find the most “humane” way to select those for death. Some will remember the righteous indignation over “death panels” during the Obama-era healthcare debates. With real life-or-death decisions being taken, the anti-reform zealots are remarkably silent. 

The all-too-popular slogan “We are all in this together” has proven to be nonsense. Class and race remain the decisive factors in determining who wins and who loses. It’s not that Black, Latino, and poor people are selected as victims by the primitive infectious agent, but that social neglect, inequality, and discrimination renders them more vulnerable to the virus. The behavioral choices, access to information and prophylaxis, health care, conditions of shelter, transportation options, and general resources available to the disadvantaged determine that they will more likely be victims, suffer, and die. The media feign shock at numbers that reveal the vast overrepresentation of African American cases and deaths, as though racism, urban segregation, and poverty were already conquered.

Similarly, the media are astounded by the miles of backed-up cars clogging highways waiting for relief from food banks, as though food banks came into existence when the virus struck. Before the virus, the needy were expected to stand in line in shame for their modest handouts.

The virus has shown the privilege of celebrities, the ultra-rich, and the political stratum, who have secured tests and expedited, preferred attention to the dangers threatened by the virus. Forbes magazine documents how a “loophole” in the recovery act could allow up to 43,000 of the richest people in the US to enjoy a gift of up to $1.7 million while everyone else tries to pay their bills and live on a $1,200 stipend from the US Treasury.

The bottom feeders-- the scam artists, the predators on the elderly, the price gougers, the hoarders-- have come out in force to take advantage of fear. Despite unleashing these vermin in an era of deregulation and laissez faire, the government that spies on everyone shows no desire to stop the predation of a populace experiencing unprecedented insecurity.

The lessons learned in the last economic disaster go unheeded. Once again, the banks and monopoly capitalist firms are assured that their vulnerabilities and missteps will be publicly covered, even rewarded. The once detested excuse of “Too big to fail” has roared back with a vengeance. Despite the collapse of real economic activity, the equity markets have begun to recover and, shamefully, bounce back when new, unparalleled unemployment numbers are announced. Even The Wall Street Journal is compelled to notice “..a confounding reality: soaring share prices and a floundering economy” (4-17-2020). Investors know that relief for capitalism will always be in the wings, even if there is no bailout for the rest of us.

We should learn to scoff at talk of “recovery.” Since 2000, “recovery” has only meant that global financial institutions will manipulate interest rates, juggle questionable, inflated assets, and create new financial games of chance in order to put lipstick on an ugly capitalist pig. That corpulent pig-- stuffed with near-worthless financial junk-- has threatened to deflate for over twenty years. Only persistent manipulation by central banks has re-inflated the global monster. The “product” that economists and statisticians purport to measure is really bloated equity markets, debt-driven economic activity, and unhinged property values; all connection to reality-grounded value is long broken.

While this fictional “recovery” has been heralded, the circumstances of those who work for a living has stagnated or sunk (median household income in the US has risen by less than 4% since 2000), buoyed only by taking on more and more debt. The “desperation”  indicators-- like the inability of 40% of the people to sustain even a $400 unexpected bill-- are well documented. The coronavirus crisis has only brought into the spotlight the desperation that has followed in the wake of low wages, gig jobs, grinding healthcare costs, unaffordable housing, student-loan debt, and declining public services. For the vast majority, talk of a recovery is an insult.

Should we not ask why it is that the People's Republic of China has avoided the worst consequences of the virus, especially since they were the first to face its devastation? Could we learn how it is that the International Monetary Fund expects that the PRC economy is expected to grow this year, while the US is projected to decline by 5.9% and the EU by 7.5%? Could it be that its state-owned enterprises were able to respond quickly and decisively? Should we see the fact that the PRC banking sector is largely publicly owned and able to put the prompt and rational distribution of financial assets above profit-taking? Does it matter that the political leadership of the CPC-- the Chinese Communist Party-- is more responsible to the public than the soulless bourgeois parties of the West? Is it a coincidence that the Democratic Republic of Vietnam has accounted for no coronavirus deaths? These are ideas that never enter the conversation in the West.

What can We Expect?

As with the last major crisis over a decade ago, this crisis spawns numerous analyses and prognostications. Uncertainty breeds speculation and “experts” feel compelled to venture opinions. 

The truth is that even the experts remain baffled by the course of the coronavirus. Its behavior and the effectiveness of chaotic Western public policy are uncertainties at this stage, rendering the media blame-game meaningless, if not harmful. The exposure of the systemic weaknesses of capitalism in arresting a pandemic and serving the people is far more significant and immediate than the Trump-Biden horse race.

The state of the US economy is another matter. The nearly universal declining numbers do not lie. Nor does the immediate expectation of further decline. We also know that, in many ways, the economic collapse is unprecedented in the lifetime of almost everyone living today. 

In a short span, JPMorgan Chase forecast an annualized GDP drop of 25% and a rise in unemployment to 10%, only to revise their estimates to a 40% decline in GDP accompanied by 20% unemployment. Goldman Sachs projects that the downturn “will likely be four times worse than the financial crisis [of 2007-2009] and the U.S. will see its highest unemployment rate since World War II…” But the forecasts turn more pessimistic almost before the ink dries.

Ahead is a massive restructuring of global capitalism. Where it goes depends, of course, on subjective, political factors. But history teaches that the trajectory of capitalism, when experiencing a severe economic collapse, will generate a process of what Joseph Schumpeter, an apologist for capitalism, euphemistically called “a gale of creative destruction.” What that process produces, of course, could be deflected or shaped somewhat by political forces of right or left, but the prevailing tendency will be for stronger countries to shift their distress to weaker countries. The tendency will be for big capitals to smash or absorb smaller capitals, for concentration. The tendency will be to use unemployment and its accompanying pain to cheapen the cost of labor, to increase the rate of exploitation. The tendency will be to shift the balance of economic and political power further toward elites. In short, capital will attempt to restore its health by shifting its problems to the weak, destroying many and much in the process. 

Whether this trajectory is repeated as it was after the 2007-2009 crisis depends upon subjective factors-- today’s politics. 

Sterile debates, like the argument between the debt scolds (advocates of minimal government spending, austerity) and the new-age proponents of Modern Monetary Theory (the uncoupling of money expansion from a long-thought rigid relation to negative economic consequences like inflation), are not helpful today, though they are crowding other political options off the stage. 

The last 20 years of persistent, deeply rooted global deflationary pressure have left the zealots for balanced budgets and “moderate” debt with no argument. Central banks have injected trillions into economies with barely a hint of inflation resulting. Relatively extreme monetary inflation has barely contained the underlying deflation plaguing world economies. Thus, none of the near-hysterical inflation warnings proved justified.

The Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) proponents took this relatively limited experience of mounting debt and tepid inflation to demonstrate that MMT was more than a policy of limited application to a specific time and place, but a universal theory of money. In fact, it is a conditional theory, conditional upon very specific, historically determined conditions being met. 

In practice, MMT disconnects monetary policy from any objective standard of value (like gold, for example) and attaches it to the ultimate subjective standard, a fiat national currency. In as much as subjective confidence persists, MMT can persist. But a subjective standard-- because it is decoupled from objective value-- masks the underlying dynamics of the capitalist system; it distorts, rather than settles the chronic problems that plague the accumulation process. The massive bailouts of the last decade and of today appear to use central bank monetary activity to restore equity markets and financial institutions, but they merely isolate the rot and postpone a day of reckoning. The underlying problem remains unresolved, only to surface again, triggering another deflationary spiral, an unloading of “assets” without real value.

It would appear that bourgeois politics has found no other policy approach than austerity or MMT. Austerity, the prescription of the right and much of the center, has failed again and again, bringing countries like Greece to the brink of collapse.

And MMT-- applying a sling to a broken arm-- is the last gasp of the social democratic left, a panacea that promises to bring the best of all possible worlds: giving more to the needy without taking from the greedy. MMT sells an easy tactic that kicks the can of capitalist failure further down the road.

What is needed today is a radical solution to radical, unrivalled problems. 

Standing in the way of an effective approach is a wimpy, Nostalgia Left. 

For most of the trade union leadership, the dream is a return to the 1950s when the pesky Reds were subdued, the bosses allowed wages and benefits to track productivity in return for labor's cooperation with imperialism, and Blacks and women were not disrupting labor peace. 

The current centerpiece of the US Democratic Party-- financially secure, suburban social liberals-- long for a time before Trump when politics were courteous and the vast, growing economic inequalities were an unsightly, unfortunate, but tolerable blemish on the harmony of US civil society. 

Nearly all that remains of the old Democratic coalition, today ignored by the Democratic Party leadership, dreams of the era before Reagan, when Democrats actually gave a tepid voice to economic justice and worshipped at the altar of equal opportunity. Devoted to a fading memory of the New Deal, they place their hopes in a Democratic Party soul transplant. It’s not capitalism, but its ugly stepchild, neoliberalism, that they abhor. 

Too many of the aging radicals of the Old New Left were terrorized by McCarthyism, leading them to forage for something distant from Communism, to the left or right of real, existing Communism. Their search dashed, they have settled for a stale, visionless pragmatism. Their old 1960s antagonists would surely be amused at the irony. 

Thankfully, there are new generations of the left searching for big answers to the big problems of the moment. The last twenty years have shaped a less-than-promising future for millions of young people. And the spring of 2020 only promises far, far worse. To meet these challenges, one can hope that their journey takes more and more of them to revolutionary socialism, to the socialism of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, to the socialism that animated the working class movements for most of the last century and a half.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com