The Con Man and the Big Con

One can too easily blame capitalism for debasing the culture and intellectual life of the US. The profit motive has surely placed commercial success ahead of artistic merit. Independent purveyors of art and ideas have been either co opted and absorbed by monopoly corporations or ground to a pulp attempting to compete with corporate-sponsored rivals. Culture has become corporate culture, despite the democratizing relief sometimes offered by the Internet.

From producer to consumer, arts and entertainment corporations are the ever-present intermediaries for successful production and realization of cultural commodities. Their goal is profit and not artistic merit.

Similarly, the humanities have been marginalized through the marketization of higher education. The ever present mantra of “running everything like a business” has deeply infected the process of learning, thus sending philosophy, political studies, literature, history and other humanities to the dustbin. That which cannot pay its way deserves no place in the university, say administrators wedded to best business practices. Consequently, the appreciation for and vibrant generation of the humanities is stunted by the dominance of the “practicality” of the sciences and business. Higher learning becomes learning for a purpose, namely, getting ahead.

But the arts and independent thought are threatened by other factors as well. While even those friendly to capitalism will give a reluctant acknowledgment of the economic factors that diminish culture and humanistic pursuits, few accept the significant role of politics in stunting culture and learning. Of course many will readily agree that right wing zealots chip away politically at the liberal values that are believed to be the foundation for cultural and intellectual enrichment. They will eagerly concede that pornography police and music censors retard the free flow of ideas. But they, nonetheless, celebrate the US democratic spirit that continues to nourish the spring of cultural production and intellectual innovation.

Accordingly, they forget, or purposely overlook, the insidious role of Cold War repression that befell intellectual and cultural life in the US from the late 1940s through the early 1960s, with loud echoes today. For nearly a decade and a half, intellectual conformity on class, race, and Communism was rigorously enforced through punishment or fear, especially in the sensitive areas of culture and ideas (the battle of ideas is not merely in academia or among the men and women of letters but in the unions and mass organizations, where a vibrant incubation of radical ideas was replaced with a tepid, mediocre, and intolerant uniformity). Thousands of cultural and intellectual workers lost their jobs, were shunned, or blacklisted. Tens of thousands were frozen with fear and determined to assiduously avoid anything controversial.

Artists and intellectuals grew timid: ironically, some of the best popular cinema of the otherwise mediocre era was offered by ex-Communists who had made their mea culpas and thus earned the right to tackle edgy themes (for example, A Face in the Crowd (Kazan), Sweet Smell of Success, and The Big Knife (Odets). The best of television, a then-new medium seemingly happy to wallow in mediocrity, came from deeply covert writers who had been expelled from Hollywood. When vibrant African American music in the form of a subversive Rhythm and Blues stood to crack the cultural barriers, US entertainment corporations co-opted and whitened the music while transforming it into mildly titillating Rock and Roll (RCA and Elvis Presley), a safer alternative.

The false radicalism of Abstract Expressionism was promoted by a deeply conservative coterie of wealthy art impresarios intent upon overshadowing any subversive messages borne by representational art (see How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, Guilbaut). And mildly mocking satire of upper-middle-class and suburban mores a la New Yorker magazine became the gold standard of popular literature.

Youth rebellion, thought to be a biological imperative, found expression in the middle-class angst of the “beat” generation or through revisiting frontier toughness through the cult of the motorcycle. “Alienation” replaced “exploitation” as the theme of critiques of industrial society.

Moral and political philosophy shunned social criticism for the fetish of linguistic analysis while the social sciences fell under the sway of the paradigm of the self-interested, rational individual.

But it was not simply fear and intimidation that drove the vapidity of culture and thought in the high season of anti-Communism. The best and brightest of Cold War liberals readily collaborated with the US government's security forces and propaganda offensives. As Frances Stoner Saunders thoroughly documents (The Cultural Cold War), the CIA's front organization, The Congress for Cultural Freedom, purchased or captured in its net some of the most illustrious intellectuals in the US and the world. Recruitment and manipulation of writers, editors, journalists, academics exerted a strong influence on the direction of intellectual and cultural life for decades. It would be naïve not to believe-- and contrary to what has been uncovered-- that these same government tentacles had not reached into the US labor movement and numerous NGOs.

It is a pity that no one has taken on the daunting task of assembling all of the glimpses, hints, testaments, and documents that have allowed us to peek behind the curtain of secrecy and deception shielding the vast apparatus of thought control employed by US rulers. What we know about the co-option of a student organization like NSA, a labor front like AIFLD, a publishing house like Praeger, or public intellectuals like Isaiah Berlin, Mary McCarthy, Clement Greenberg, or Arthur Schlesinger Jr. suggests that the instruments of influence stretch far and wide and ensure limits to discussion, debate, and artistic expression.

A Swamp of Gullibility: The Case of Paul De Man

It was in the context of reflecting upon the Cold War clamp-down on US culture and intellectual life that I approached Evelyn Barish's new book, The Double Life of Paul De Man. From the mid-sixties until his death in 1983, De Man acquired a scholarly, intellectual reputation that secured him a position as one of the most influential intellectuals in the Western world. His students and colleagues in the intellectual school popularly known as “deconstructionism” held prestigious positions at many academic centers, influenced most of the humanities, and succeeded in penetrating into popular culture. Deconstruction-- as an intellectual current-- has the curious distinction of being nearly incomprehensible to the uninitiated, yet purporting to be a devastating critique sweeping away all that comes before it.

Not long after de Man's death, an admiring student of his discovered evidence that de Man collaborated with the Nazi occupiers in his native Belgium, contributing pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic articles to Belgium's leading newspaper. This revelation rocked the academic community and beyond, raising questions about de Man's integrity and fitness to retain his celestial place in the liberal arts heavens. De Man loyalists sought to cast the collaboration as an aberration and, perhaps with some merit, as irrelevant to the value of his work. As with other fascists or collaborators-- Martin Heidegger, Herbert von Karajan, Werner von Braun, etc.-- it may be possible to separate their life's work from their work with the devil (possible, but difficult).

Critics like David Lehman in his 1991 book, Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man, offered no such life line to de Man and deconstruction. He argues forcefully that deconstruction is as tainted by hum-buggery as de Man is flawed as a human being.

But like the Western debate over Heidegger's past, sides were drawn, but no minds were changed.

Now comes Ms. Barish's book which shows that Paul de Man was thoroughly a cad, a thief, and, with few exceptions, cavalier with the truth. While Barish indulges in annoying flights of psychological speculation, while she gets some minutiae wrong, she marshals a most convincing case that de Man neglected a wife and children, falsified official documents, stole from investors, lied about academic credentials (even about his own paternity), failed to pay debts-- the list of crimes and misdemeanors goes on and on... Those curious of the myriad, lurid details should buy the book; they will find it more bizarre than fiction.

Predictably, the Barish book drew many responses. At one extreme, de Man friend and Sterling Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Yale (succeeding de Man as Sterling professor) and Andrew W. Mellon Scholar at Princeton, Peter Brooks, brought his scholarship to bear on the book in a review published in The New York Review of Books. Notable for its prickliness, the review challenges Barish's “scholarship” but fails to engage or correct any of the substantive claims at play. Nor do Brooks’ scholarly sensitivities note that the NYRB published several de Man articles previously, perhaps a fact that might be seen as tainting the editors' objectivity.

Robert Alter, writing in The New Republic, saw the Barish book as demonstrating that de Man was simply a “total fraud,” a conclusion with which those of us less concerned with scholarly niceties might concur. Carlin Romano, writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, similarly recoils from de Man's demonstrated moral corruption.

Harvard Professor Susan Rubin Sulieman, writing in the New York Times concedes that de Man is a “con man,” but cannot resist the academic urge to cast a long shadow by scolding Barish over her scholarly standards. Her sense of moral proportion seems to be overshadowed by her outrage over professional standards.

Writing in The New Yorker, Louis Menand details de Man's sins with a school-boy relish, while attempting to separate his turpitude from the intellectual views associated with his work. Menand writes, in defense of deconstructionism:

 

We could say that deconstruction is an attempt to go through the looking glass, to get beyond or behind language, but a deconstructionist would have to begin by explaining that the concepts “beyond” and “behind” are themselves effects of language. Deconstruction is all about interrogating apparently unproblematic terms. It’s like digging a hole in the middle of the ocean with a shovel made of water.

“... go through the looking glass...”? “...digging a hole in the middle of the ocean with a shovel made of water...”? Is this nonsense or an example of the elevated, urbane wit so long associated with The New Yorker?

Chickens Coming Home to Roost

While writers milk the de Man affair for its full entertainment value, and academics debate the damage to the deconstructionist program, critical questions are quietly passed over: How did de Man, the con man, slip through the filters of some of the world's most prestigious universities? How did Bard, Harvard, Cornell, and Yale allow this man who never completed a baccalaureate snooker the gatekeepers on his journey to claiming one of the most prestigious academic chairs in the US? More broadly, how were the celebrated New York intellectuals, especially Mary McCarthy and Dwight McDonald, seduced into sponsoring de Man into the highest intellectual circles?

In her fashion, Barish speculates on the personalities and psyches of those taken in by de Man in order to supply an explanation. But such an explanation would reduce the rise of Paul de Man to an unprecedented, finally inexplicable historic accident.

A better answer is found by returning to the historical context of Paul de Man's journey. De Man arrived and maneuvered his way into a position to launch his career at the peak of the Cold War repression in the US. Academics and intellectuals were not expanding horizons nor inviting fresh currents. Rather, they were circling the wagons and banning controversial ideas. This was, of course, fertile soil for opportunists, people who could read the signs and conform.

It is important to remember that de Man's chosen field of literature and literary criticism underwent a radical transformation coincident with the rise of anti-Communist hysteria in the US. Formerly, critics sought to understand literature in broadly open ways, groping for social, cultural, historical, and personal factors that would inform the meaning of texts. A prominent exponent and acknowledged leader of this school was V. L. Parrington. While not a Marxist, Parrington's “...progressive interpretation of American history was highly influential in the 1920s and 1930s and helped define modern liberalism in the United States..." (Wikipedia) Parrington's Pulitzer Prize winning book “... dominated literary and cultural criticism from 1927 through the early 1950s...,” according to a source cited in the same article. At that time a Marxist, Granville Hicks, wrote a critical appreciation of Parrington's work for Science and Society in 1938 (The Critical Principles of V L Parrington), concluding that “...if he were alive, Parrington would be fighting for democracy. Certainly his work is a powerful weapon on that side.” Apparently, too powerful for the malignant 1950s.

Moderately progressive views such as Parrington's were squelched in this time of toadyism:

 

After receiving overwhelming praise and exerting enormous influence among intellectuals in the 1930s and 1940s, Parrington's ideas fell out of fashion around 1950. Richard Hofstadter says "the most striking thing about the reputation of V L Parrington, as we think of it today, is its abrupt decline....during the 1940s Parrington rather quickly cease[sic] to have a compelling interest for students of American literature, and in time historians too began to esdert [sic] him."Hofstadter shows how Parrington's ideas came under heavy assault in the 1940s and 1950s, naming Lionel Trilling as especially influential in the attack. (Wikipedia)

Trilling was one of the most important "hard-liners" in the CIA's Congress for Cultural Freedom. 

Today, Parrington is largely forgotten, thanks to Cold Warriors and academic opportunists. And in his place, the “New Critics” arose in the late 1940s to rescue literary texts from a fulsome, rich interpretation, especially an interpretation that might even remotely suggest Marxism. From that time on, everything was text and only text. Like the shift from representational art to Abstract Expressionism, the movement to “new criticism” was a Cold War gambit masquerading as a new, daring approach to culture, a safe officially sanctioned rebellion that barred the door from seditious art and interpretation.

Arriving in New York in 1948, Paul de Man's brand of charm, salon wit, and shameless opportunism fit perfectly into the intellectual milieu of the emerging Cold War. A European, without the baggage of Communism or leftism, but emitting vague hints of participating in the Resistance, proved attractive to Cold War liberals. But when he packed up and left Bard College for Harvard ahead of bill collectors and scandal, his fortunes took another even more significant turn. Harvard's heralded Humanities Six class gave de Man a taste of the flavors enjoyed at the US's elite universities. The gift of the New Critics' method of “close reading” became the foundation for his meteoric career. Add European exoticism, a profound rejection of inter-subjective meaning, and convey this package in a dense, impenetrable language, and you have a ticket to stardom for an incorrigible con man. Paul de Man punched the ticket.

Intellectual life in the US was irreparably damaged by the stifling, suffocating atmosphere imposed by Cold War hysteria. Cultural and intellectual watchdogs collaborated with administrators to master promoting the illusion of a free and open society while blocking any potential challenges to the bourgeois canon. Central to that task was the project of creating and shaping ersatz rebellion, of channeling the natural skepticism and contrariness of young minds towards benign expressions of revolt. Paul de Man became a willing participant in that game, molding deconstruction into an instrument for thumbing one's nose at an ambiguous, amorphous establishment. A difficult, frustratingly opaque language coupled to a defiant rejection of the most basic category of understanding-- meaning-- seduced initiates into the world of deconstruction. While it challenged no center of real power, deconstruction tasted, smelled, and looked like rebellion. Thus, it joined a long list of carefully constructed cultural and intellectual manifestations that absorb the rebelliousness of youth while producing a harmless release of energies.

Many believe that with the loosening of the repressive noose popularly called McCarthyism, the US returned to openness and freedom of expression. However, that is a misleading perspective. Openness and freedom of expression mean nothing when intellectual and cultural ideas were purged and remain forgotten or uncritically scorned. Openness and freedom of expression mean nothing when intellectual and cultural workers have had their spines surgically removed to the point that they cannot muster the courage to call out frauds and poseurs.

Though hardly revolutionary, V.L. Parrington's ideas and those of many similarly purged, remain lost to a new generation, while the ideas of the discredited Paul de Man and those of other intellectual opportunists and charlatans continue to circulate through the universities and in prestigious journals. The same could be said in the arts and many other intellectual pursuits where the limits of debate are not stated, but inherited. This is the legacy and cost of hysterical, unrestrained anti-Communism.

Zoltan Zigedy

zoltanzigedy@gmail.com

Beyond Piketty: The Democratic Conundrum

In a country where sports stars are offered as role models and actors aspire to political office, celebrity intellectuals are a rarity. Thus, the meteoric rise of economist Thomas Piketty to celebrity status comes as a surprise. The English language edition of his book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, sold out swiftly while reaching best-seller stature, a unique achievement for a book originating from an academic press. Possessing charm, wit, and youthful good-looks, Piketty toured the US, generating demand from myriad talk-show hosts and magazine interviewers.

A month before its release, sensing that Piketty had something fresh to offer, I wrote:

Piketty's argument is a welcome antidote to the paucity of explanatory theory presented by the liberal and social democratic punditry. The controversy stirred by Piketty's argument well before its English-language availability is a sure sign that he offers something beyond the conventional... Closer examination of Piketty's interesting thesis must await publication of the book. (ZZ's Blog, Tuesday, February 11, 2014)

Little did I suspect that Piketty-mania would spawn a sustained discussion penetrating the highest reaches of the mass media. Piketty's argument has shattered the navel-gazing of academic economists, while demonstrating an intuitively obvious fact in a way that even the most thick-headed pundit can understand: capitalism produces and reproduces inequality. Unfortunately, Piketty timidly hesitates to draw an equally compelling conclusion: the only way to eliminate unjust inequality is by eliminating capitalism. It's as though a researcher has discovered the cause of cancer, but is reluctant to endorse its cure.

My own thoughts on Piketty's provocative, stimulating book are posted on Philosophers for Change.

The Piketty phenomenon overshadows what may well be an even more provocative, suggestive study by two US professors, Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page. Their paper, Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens (forthcoming in Perspectives on Politics), offers results that could shake the complacency of political theory in much the way that Piketty's book rocked bourgeois economics. Unfortunately, Gilens and Page lack Piketty's panache and insist upon writing in the arid, formal style of academic political science. Consequently, few have commented upon it, notably excepting a column by Margaret Kimberley aptly entitled Democracy is Dead in the inestimably incisive Black Agenda Report.

Democracy or “Democracy”?

For the apologists for capitalism, “democracy” is the sure and sole path of escape from the grip of economic inequality-- capitalism's tendency to produce and reproduce wealth and income disparity. Outside of the revolutionary left, liberals and social democrats promise to harness the legislative system and existing political institutions to tame, regulate, reform, or manage the capitalist system. They argue for a strategy that would engage citizens, coalitions, and interest groups in lobbying and electoral politics in order to shift the balance of power into alignment with the people's will. Taking the existing political institutions as adequate for change, as sufficiently democratic, they opt for a road that will supposedly trump economic power with people's power through bourgeois democracy.

It is to test this perspective, and ones like it, that researchers Gilens and Page ask the following pertinent questions:

Who governs? Who really rules? To what extent is the broad body of U.S. citizens sovereign, semi-sovereign, or largely powerless? (p. 3)

They are querying whether “democracy” as we know it is really democratic: Does it generate or realize the will of the people? Or does it only give the appearance?

As they acknowledge and document, these are questions that have animated scores of philosophers, social scientists, and political activists. But in this case, Gilens and Page actually engage an empirical study to determine what others have only speculated. The results of their study are telling:

The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence. (p. 3)

As with Piketty's findings, these results cohere with what any honest observer of recent history would expect. They are consistent with what a Marxist analysis predicts. It is only the social science establishment that continues to believe that bourgeois democratic institutions function democratically. Gilens and Page make this point in academese: “...a good many scholars – probably more economists than political scientists among them– still cling to the idea that the policy preferences of the median voter tend to drive policy outputs from the U.S. political system.” (p. 5).

Credit the authors for calling out the various schools of thought that provide intellectual cover for the myth of the US as the world's model for democracy. The smug intellectual foundation that supports US intervention in places where US elites claim a surfeit of democracy crumbles under the weight of hypocrisy.

Without a shred of irony, Gilens and Page offer the following caveat to their picture of the failure of US democracy:

...the preferences of economic elites (as measured by our proxy, the preferences of “affluent” citizens) have far more independent impact upon policy change than the preferences of average citizens do. To be sure, this does not mean that ordinary citizens always lose out; they fairly often get the policies they favor, but only because those policies happen also to be preferred by the economically elite citizens who wield the actual influence. (p. 22)

In other words, average citizens do see their desires heeded provided that they want the same thing as elites! It is only in that case that bourgeois democracy works for the average citizen.

What Does This Mean?

Gilens and Page are showing us that elites wield a veto over US political institutions. The collective will of the majority cannot trump the will of the privileged minority. Nor does the collective will organized into interest groups: “...existing interest groups do not serve effectively as transmission belts for the wishes of the populace as a whole.” (p. 22) Thus, unions and other mass organizations fail today to effectively advance the political interests of the majority against wealth and power when those interests are in conflict.

Couple this empirical conclusion with Piketty's findings and we are presented with a seeming inescapable conclusion: growing inequality and the diminishing power of the majority are inevitable. The remedies for inequality can not be realized when the interests and will of the majority are locked out of democratic discourse. The path towards economic justice is blocked by undemocratic institutions only posturing as democratic.

While Gilens and Page refrain from explaining the causes of the failings of US democracy, they are not difficult to adduce.

The US two-party system that consistently bends towards money and influence surely explains much of the corruption of democracy. As grass-roots organizing has been supplanted with costly media campaigns, the power of wealthy contributions has been amplified accordingly. The two US political parties have long since scorned the mass participatory model for a model constructed solely around fund raising and regular electoral campaigns. Aided by a legal system that establishes near insurmountable barriers to third-party efforts, the two parties are largely insulated from any external shocks to their narrow field of operation. At the same time, corporate interests control the internal life of both parties.

Aiding and abetting the two-party system, the mass media in the US are nearly entirely owned and directed by monopoly corporations. The limits of discourse are shaped by both the interests of wealth and power and the programs of the two parties. No fresh air enlivens the public debate except on the fringes. Under these conditions, the interests of the majority and arguments for those interests are marginalized.

A Way Out?

Surely, the Gilens and Page study offers compelling reasons that continuing on the same road will not lead to significant change in favor of poor and working people, the vast majority of US citizens. Those who insist upon data-driven, fact-based evidence now have what they want; they must face more than impressions, more than speculation, but ugly facts: capitalism tends to generate inequality and choke off the democratic process.

What road is the same road? The dead-end road?

The road that brings failure leads through the two-party system, particularly the false friend, the Democratic Party. Those who remain faithful to securing change through the Democratic Party must ask themselves and others how that has worked for most of our lifetimes. If it had worked well, Piketty, Gilens, and Page would not have raised the alarms that their works bring forth.

And those who hold out hope for changing the Democratic Party must surely see the unlikelihood of that prospect after six years of a disappointing Democratic administration. Surely, the euphoria of 2008 is now replaced with a justified skepticism.

Instead, advocates for change must add their endorsement and support to third-party movements and extra-electoral action. They must fight to overcome the barriers to democratic expression in the US and the inertia fostered by the occasional electoral circus. Public demonstration of advocacy energizes political life and counters the passivity of purposely narrow electoral participation. Agents of change must understand that defining electoral life merely as marginal campaign engagement and dutiful voting serves well the ruling elites. The lack of a vocal, militant, and disruptive peace and anti-war movement, for example, has given US militarism a free hand throughout the world.

The potentially most game-changing mass group-- organized labor-- cannot lead us to a new road without undergoing substantial change. Business unionism, class collaboration, partnership-- call it what you like-- has shortchanged working people, contributing to the erosion of US democracy. The Gilens and Page study shows that economic elites like monopoly corporations do not compromise their interests-- they insist on and get what they want through the US political system. With both enormous economic resources and unfettered political clout, US corporations are not inclined to “negotiate.” They are equipped for and disposed toward class struggle, even if the trade union leadership is not.

Only through a radical change in the ideology and tactics of organized labor will an answer to expanding inequality and shrinking democracy be found.

History shows that the socialist option-- a movement to sweep unjust inequality away by strangling capitalism-- serves as an ever useful prod to “liberalizing” bourgeois democracy and engaging social justice. The progressive gains laid claim to by the Democratic Party in the US were forced upon the political agenda by Communists, socialists, and other radical critics of the capitalist order. Republican and Democratic leaders are not inclined to fault or correct capitalism without organized anti-capitalist pressure. From the New Deal to the War on Poverty, concessions to the masses, to democracy and social justice, were accepted to counter the internal or external influence, pressure, or leadership of a radical left.

The revitalization of the movement for socialism, therefore, counts as a vital and urgent component of the fight for social justice and democracy.

Zoltan Zigedy

zoltanzigedy@gmail.com

Communist Unity and Its False Friends

To paraphrase de Maistre, every political party has the leadership it deserves. It is confidence in the wisdom of this maxim that keeps me from commenting extensively on the continuing effort to retreat from Marxism-Leninism on the part of Chairman Sam Webb and the rest of the Communist Party USA top leadership. As the membership continues to shrink-- discounting internet “friends” and “likes”-- one can only marvel at the dogged loyalty of most of the remaining membership, a loyalty perhaps leftover from times when the Party was under attack from all sides. But the Party is under attack from no one today, especially since the Party's entire body of work coincides with working selflessly for Democratic Party election victories while slavishly following (off-electoral season) the leadership of the AFL-CIO.

Apparently changes are afoot in the CPUSA as it approaches its June National Convention. There will be leadership change. Unfortunately, it does not promise to be accompanied by a shift in ideological perspective. Nonetheless, some will entertain an unfounded “hope” in a new direction, a hope that will immobilize dissent.

There is also talk of dropping references to “Communism,” the final barrier, if the Webbites are to be believed, to the CPUSA becoming a party with mass support.

For an honest, critical discussion of the latest musings of Sam Webb, go here: Houston Communist Party.

Apart from its continual decline, the CPUSA counts as a small voice, but an authoritative voice, to the US left on matters pertaining to the World Communist Movement. Recently, Sue Webb, who represented the CPUSA at the International meeting of Communist and Workers Parties held in Lisbon in November of last year, gave a report of that meeting, highlighting the CPUSA’s and other parties' assessments and views on the current situation and the way forward.

Much of Sue Webb's commentary is a thinly-veiled attack upon the Greek Communist Party (KKE) under the guise of supporting diversity and independence in the world movement. At the same time, she exploits differences between Parties to justify the CPUSA's exodus from Marxism-Leninism.

Now the KKE needs no one to defend its honor or its positions; it is supremely capable of supporting both. However, it is important for all Communists and friends of Communism to examine carefully and critically the views represented in Lisbon. Sue Webb's commentary fails to reach those standards.

She disparagingly suggests that the KKE obstinately and unreasonably thwarted a final, unifying statement: “The Greek party's criticisms were so strong that it rejected and blocked issuance of any consensual final statement summarizing the thinking of the conference. In doing so, the Greek party and its supporters from a few other countries clearly went up against the thinking and policies of the overwhelming majority of parties represented at the meeting.”

At the same time, she heralds the diverse roads taken by various Parties and their relative autonomy from a single path, citing Lenin copiously as well as her Party's reliance upon "our own experiences and conditions of struggle.” In other words, she faults the KKE for not acceding to the will of others by drawing upon its “own experiences and conditions of struggle.” Apparently, she finds no inconsistency in touting the old Euro-Communist line of national Communism while chiding the KKE for its principled, independent stance in the Lisbon meeting.

The charge of instigating disunity is particularly spurious when the KKE's big role in revitalizing the international meetings, conferences, and exchanges is recognized.

Lost in Sue Webb's simplistic account is the singular contribution that the KKE brings to any discussion of the path to socialism. Without judging the merits of its every conclusion, one must respect the deep analysis that the KKE has made of the collapse of mass European Communist Parties since the Second World War. While most Parties have wrestled with the lessons of the loss of the Soviet Union and the Eastern European socialist community, few explore the theoretical consequences of the near-complete self-destruction of powerful mass Communist Parties in Italy, France, and Spain as thoroughly as does the KKE. The process of evisceration of Marxism-Leninism in non-ruling Communist and Workers Parties began well before the fall of Soviet power. It is the KKE that draws the most profound lessons from this experience. Webb ignores it entirely.

Failure to grapple with the lessons of the collapse of Eastern European socialism and the failure of Euro-Communism leads to a one-sided, distorted map of the road ahead.

It is in this context that the KKE challenges the position that there are “stages” between capitalism and socialism. After World War Two, many Parties projected an anti-monopoly stage in the transition to socialism. Still others sought to construct a stage built on a “democracy of a new type,” a system of rule that was neither bourgeois nor socialist. These strategies entailed a focus upon parliamentary struggle and collaboration with all non-monopoly capitalist forces. The Italian “Historic Compromise” was the symbolic culmination of this perspective, engaging a strategy that opened the door to the bourgeoisification of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and consequently its inevitable demise.

One of the ideological salesmen of this approach, Giorgio Napolitano, demonstrates, with the trajectory of his life, the cruel tragedy of the PCI's failure: once a member of a university fascist youth group, Napolitano engaged with the resistance, joined the PCI, assumed a leading role in its new direction, and today reigns as the President of the Italian bourgeois Republic. With measured civility and dignity, he legitimized the government of the buffo-fascist, Silvio Berlusconi. His many honors, decorations, and prizes testify to his service to capitalism.

In an interview in 1975, Napolitano, then the economic spokesperson for the PCI, deftly danced around hard questions posed by Eric Hobsbawn: “I believe that in any country the process of socialist transformation as well as socialist regimes have to be founded on a broad basis of consensus and democratic participation... My argument about the principles and forms of democratic life to be upheld in the context of an advance to socialism and the construction of socialist society refers more concretely to the countries of Western Europe in which bourgeois democracy was born, where representative institutions have a more or less strong tradition and diverse democratic,ideological, cultural and political currents have operated more or less freely... [and] which are characterized in varying degrees... by the presence of sizable intermediate groups between the proletariat and a big bourgeoisie controlling the basic means of production.” Only a mere thirty years after Communists played a key role in the fall of anti-democratic European despotism, Napolitano vigorously celebrates the dubious Euro-tradition of bourgeois democracy while catering opportunistically to the interests of the middle strata. Unfortunately, these illusions still linger with many Communist Parties. It is this failed perspective that is vigorously opposed by the KKE.

Similarly, the mass Spanish Party, under the leadership of Santiago Carillo, collapsed into near irrelevancy thanks to the fetish of bourgeois democracy and the pandering to non-proletarian strata. Carillo argued that ”... the Communist Party should be the party of freedom and democracy...We must bring into our programme as an integral part, not only the demands of the workers, but also those of all sections of society which are under privileged.” These vacuous, shallow slogans serve the bourgeoisie well, as they do when inscribed in the platforms of modern bourgeois congressional or parliamentary parties. No wonder workers fled the PCE in droves; they understood Marxism far better than did the Party leaders.

Reflections on these tragic miscalculations should lead one to heed the warnings against opportunism issued by the KKE:

It leaves them defenseless against the corrosive work of the bourgeois and opportunist forces which are trying to assimilate the CPs into parliamentarianism, to castrate them and make them a part of the bourgeois political system, with unprincipled collaborations, with participation in governments of bourgeois management which have a “left”-“progressive” label, with entrapment in the logic of class collaboration, with support for imperialist centres, as is happening e.g. with the CPs of the so-called European Left Party, as well as other CPs that are following the same path. (G. Marinos, Member of the PB of the CC , KKE)

In the wake of the deepest global economic crisis since the Great Depression, the idea that Communist and Workers Parties should struggle to lead capitalism out of the weeds-- to better “manage” capitalism-- is an absurd strategy guaranteed to further marginalize the prospects for socialism. If only the Communists (or Communists in alliance with others) can rescue capitalism, why would they do so?

Sue Webb fails to frame the KKE positions in the context of class partisanship, an error that guarantees confusion and misunderstanding. She fails to find a difference between fighting for reforms in the framework of capitalism and refusing to take the side of a bourgeois class, a distinction that the KKE sharply makes. Where reforms benefit working people-- increases and improvements in public education, social welfare, public health, etc,-- Communists fight harder than anyone and accept allies unconditionally. But where workers are asked to stand with the bourgeoisie-- in sacrificing wages and benefits to make their employer more competitive, in boycotting products produced by foreign workers-- Communists urge that workers stand aside.

Sue Webb charges the KKE with discounting emerging economies as rivals to Western imperialism: “the concept of the BRICs countries... or others, such as in Latin America, emerging as challenges to Western imperialism is rejected.” But this is absurd; Communists see these countries as imperialist rivals to Western imperialism. That is, they have their own designs upon the global economy, their own expansionist interests. At the same time, Communists oppose aggression and war on the part of imperialist powers in every case and of every stripe. For example, Communists fervently oppose US intervention in Venezuela; they oppose EU and US meddling in Ukraine. However, they do not support the respective national bourgeoisies. This is in contrast to some “Marxist” organizations that vacillated on or capitulated to regime changes or “democratic” missionary work in countries such as Iraq or Libya.

Sue Webb scoffs at the KKE rejection of the term “financialization.” “Identifying financialization as a particular feature of today's capitalism is a hoax, a diversion. Capitalism is capitalism.” One might well ask her: if capitalism is not capitalism, then what is it? I'm sure it’s lost on her that the notion that there is good capitalism and there is bad capitalism is alien to Marxism. Social Democracy and its genetic relatives all attempt to find a good capitalism to ride toward socialism. Of course in every case they have failed-- capitalism doesn't go in that direction.

Profit is the driving force of capitalism; it is impossible to imagine capitalism without profit. And profit-seeking shapes the trajectory of capitalism. Like a rabid predator, capitalists seek profits everywhere-- in the capital goods sector, in the consumer goods sector, in the service sector, and in the financial sector. The fact that the financial sector played a bigger role in profit-seeking in recent times sheds little light on capitalism's fundamental operation. Rather, anointing financial activity as a unique species of capitalism only obfuscates the basic mechanisms of capitalist accumulation. It adds nothing.

That the global crisis first broke out in capitalist financial centers is undeniable. But the fact that the initial eruptions were the result of processes long set in motion is equally undeniable. Social democrats would have us believe that the crisis was caused by aberrant behavior, a feverish fixation on financial maneuvers easily repaired by regulation and reform. This is nonsense. This is not Marxism.

Thus, the term “financialization” is a kind of hoax. A term favored by those too lazy or too afraid to examine the inner workings of a rapacious system.

One does not have to agree with every perspective, every formulation of the KKE to recognize that they are taking the lead on issues facing the World Communist Movement; they are asking the hard questions that challenge old habits, easy assumptions, and unexamined positions. Yes, they challenge convenient beliefs that make for easy interaction with other left forces, but they do so from fidelity to the Communist tradition. Yes, they do not put consensus-for-the-sake-of-consensus ahead of principle. But those of us who want to restore vitality to the Communist movement must show a deep appreciation-- and not contempt-- for their selfless commitment to resurrecting a militant Communism based upon the foundations laid by Marx and Lenin.

For all its self-congratulatory bluster about escaping from dogmatism, sectarianism, and “alien” ideas, Sue Webb's Party is about to sink into oblivion. As with a sinking ship, the CPUSA 's leadership is jettisoning its deck chairs and cabin furniture as fast as the water rises. Gone are the Party archives, the Party newspaper, Party bookstores, Party organizations, education, and even Party meetings. Gone are the Party symbols, the organizational principles, the ideology, and even the greetings of comradeship. In their place are Facebook and Twitter communications, telephone and video conferences, and common cause with liberal groups between the mandatory efforts in support of Democratic Party election campaigns.

Sue Webb says: “The outlook and policies of our party fit well into the mainstream of the world communist movement as expressed at the Lisbon meeting last November.”

Would that it were so! The current CPUSA leadership rejects audacious approaches to reaching socialism while waiting passively for the second coming of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and The New Deal. They draw their strategic line from the desperate, defensive measures necessitated by the rise of fascism eighty years ago, a temporary front with non-working class forces that quickly betrayed that alliance after World War II and the fall of fascism. Sam Webb and his leadership coterie remain locked in the thinking of another time.

“Well into the mainstream”? I think not. The World Communist Movement is growing again thanks, in part, to lively, frank conversations about the way forward, as occurred in Lisbon. While consensus remains illusive, the process of discussion is, nevertheless, clarifying and unifying. But for those captured in the web of opportunism, the future is bleak.

Zoltan Zigedy

zoltanzigedy@gmail.com

Ukraine: War on the Horizon?

As I wrote elsewhere (http://mltoday.com/tragedy-in-ukraine), Ukraine is a great tragedy for the people. Caught in the web of imperial powers, many Ukrainians were seduced by the European Union and the US into collaborating in the overthrow of the elected government. While the US and European media depicted events as reflecting a yearning for Western values and culture, they conveniently sidestepped the questions of constitutionality and electoral legitimation. The fact that the former leaders of Ukraine came to power through mechanisms worshiped in the West as the foundations of civility and the rule of law counts for nothing in the carving up of spheres of influence.

Even at the last moment, when the Ukraine government struck a deal with the opposition favorable to the anti-government insurgents and guaranteed by the EU, the Western media ignored the blatant betrayal of that agreement and the complicity of the guarantors. Shamefully, the media masked the critical role of the hyper-nationalist, Jew-baiting fascists in the front lines of the opposition’s street fighters.

In the US, the intellectual courtiers-- the obsequious academics-- dutifully filled the airwaves and newsprint with tributes to the heroic, democracy-loving opposition. They assured us that the opposition represented exactly what the US State Department said they were. How convenient!

Before the coup against Yanukovych, the Washington Post's Anne Applebaum wrote a column (Ukrainian smears and stereotypes, 2-20-14) promising to explain the Ukrainian “crisis” to those who might foolishly believe an illegal coup was brewing (“the Ukrainian crisis can seem murky”). She mocks the language of those questioning the legitimacy of the opposition in Ukraine and paints the Russians with vulgar Cold War invective and Russo-phobia: “At the same time, those who throw these terms [“fascist” or “Nazi”] around should remember that the strongest anti-Semitic, homophobic and xenophobic rhetoric in this region is not coming from the Ukrainian far right but from the Russian press, and ultimately the Russian regime.” So if the Ukrainian right are fascists, we should overlook it because the Russians are worse. Tu quoque!

It is a measure of our times that the Washington Post, on whose editorial board she serves, fails to reveal that Applebaum is married to the Polish foreign minister and is herself a Polish national, relationships that link her with the regime most ardently supportive of the opposition.

Others will know her as the Pulitzer prize-winning author of numerous “histories” of the Soviet era, all marked by an unconcealed hostility towards socialism. Her zeal for damning every aspect of the Soviet experience has earned her a place in the hearts of old Cold Warriors and on the pages of such rabid anti-Communist publications as The New York Review of Books. Her newly found status as a major media gas bag of the Bill O'Reilly school of historiography has apparently not tarnished her intellectual reputation among liberals.

Reaching for the same stature, her colleague, Timothy Snyder, is equally notorious with his histrionic and unfortunately celebrated book, Bloodlands, another victim-counting effort meant to equate Hitler and Stalin. Like Applebaum, Snyder is among a newer generation of offspring of Robert Conquest, the Cold War hack who gathered anecdotes and inflated them into millions of deaths at the hands of “blood-thirsty Bolsheviks.” We now know from Soviet archives that Conquest's numbers were vastly exaggerated. We now know from further revelations that Conquest enjoyed sponsorship from US security agents in his efforts to rally gullible minds in the West. Unfortunately, no one with sufficient credentials and major media access will today counter the similarly inflated horror stories of Applebaum and Snyder.

But we can wonder why Amy Goodman would invite Snyder on her radio/TV show, Democracy Now! (2-24-14) for his opinion of events in Ukraine. From a promising beginning as a Left media voice, Goodman has too often given credence to those fawning after US imperial posture in her coverage of Eastern Europe, Libya, Syria and other imperialist ventures.

Predictably, Snyder mounts a vigorous defense of the opposition:

It [the opposition] included people from—included Muslims. It included Jews. It included professionals. It included working-class people. And the main demand of the movement the entire time was something like normality, the rule of law.

Strange that Snyder could paint such a diverse, liberal picture of the opposition from his perch at Yale University, particularly when Goodman's other guest, Professor Petro, reporting from his vantage point in Ukraine, depicted an opposition welded together by fervent Ukrainian nationalism. Interestingly, the opposition-in-power's first acts, as reported by Professor Petro, were to restrict local use of the Russian language and a resolution to outlaw the Communist Party-- hardly an endorsement of diversity or liberalism. Snyder did not dispute this claim.

And Snyder demonizes Yanukovych:

And the reason why this demand [for the rule of law] could bring together such people of different political orientations, such different regional backgrounds, is that they were faced up against someone, the previous president, Yanukovych, whose game was to monopolize both financial and political as well as violent power in one place. The constitution, the legitimacy of which is now contested, was violated by him multiple times, and most of the protesters agree to that.

What a tangled argument! Snyder charges the former Ukrainian president with seriously violating his constitution which is immediately dismissed as “contested”! Which is it? Inviolable or not?

Nor does his concern for constitutionality and the rule of law lead him to condemn the opposition for ignoring the constitutionally sanctioned mechanisms for removing a president. Yanukovych's alleged “monopoly” on violence fails to account for the street violence conceded by Western media through lurid pictures of masked “protesters” throwing fire bombs and attacking police. Snyder treats Goodman's listeners to a dose of propaganda rather than a truthful commentary.

Professor Petro gently challenged Snyder's account, returning again and again to the fanatical Ukrainian nationalism of the opposition. Snyder responded patronizingly:

Yeah, I mean, as Professor Petro probably knows, that’s the subject of my specialization. And, of course, I share his concern. Svoboda takes its example from the history of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, an interwar, extreme-right party which I would not hesitate to call fascist. The Pravi sector also refers to the same historical symbolism. Both of them speak of the necessity for a national revolution, especially Pravi sector. They are significant.

An honest “specialist” would note that the OUN was not merely extreme-right or even fascist, but made up of Nazi collaborators responsible for the deaths of thousands upon thousands of innocent Soviet civilians including much of the Jewish population. The OUN's equation of Judaism and Bolshevism invited its identification with the Nazi occupiers. One would think that Snyder's “specialization” in Eastern European history would demand that he call out the opposition on this point. At the very least, he should issue a demand to purge the coup-installed government of such elements. One would think, as well, that Amy Goodman would call out Snyder on this failing.

As Ukraine moves towards becoming the flash point of a regional or even broader war, my colleagues remind my of the similarities with Europe in 1914, with imperial powers elevating threats and demands, with a reckless empowering of forces beyond anyone's control, and with nativist sentiments rabidly unleashed.

Unfortunately, we lack a significant anti-imperialist front in most European countries and the US. Even Samuel Gompers, the reactionary leader of the AFL at the turn of the last century joined US writer Mark Twain and numerous other luminaries in founding a US Anti-Imperialist League. Today, our labor movement leaders are complicit in or silent on US meddling in Ukraine and numerous other countries. And US liberals, in all too great numbers, endorse US imperialism as a crusade for democracy and the vaunted “rule of law.” With peace so desperately needed, we lack a vibrant peace movement to counter the threat of war.

We must aggressively act to change this confusion and complacency before it is too late.

Zoltan Zigedy

zoltanzigedy@gmail.com

Getting Serious about Inequality

“The tenacity of the Yankees... is a result of their theoretical backwardness and their Anglo-Saxon contempt for all theory. They are punished for this by a superstitious belief in every philosophical and economic absurdity, by religious sectarianism, and by idiotic economic experiments, out of which, however, certain bourgeois cliques profit.” Frederich Engels, letter to Sorge, London, January 6, 1892. Translation by Leonard E. Mins (1938)

One hundred and twenty-two years later, the Yankees remain bereft of theory while clinging to every outlandish scheme promising to curtail the appetite of an insatiable capitalist system. Churning on without interruption, capitalism generates greater and greater wealth for its masters while devouring everyone else in its wake. From regulatory reform to alternative life styles, from tax policies to cooperative endeavors, self-proclaimed opponents of this rapacious economic behemoth have announced newly contrived exits from its destructive path. While “...people [in the US] must become conscious of their own social interests by making blunder upon blunder...” as Engels put it in another letter to his US friend Frederich Sorge, the contented capitalists merrily continue profiting.

Engels' brutal indictment of the North American allergy to theory and the affinity for unfocussed activism was tempered by an optimism based more upon hope than reality: “The movement itself will go through many and disagreeable phases, disagreeable particularly for those who live in the country and have to suffer them. But I am firmly convinced that things are now going ahead over there... notwithstanding the fact that the Americans will learn almost exclusively in practice for the time being, and not so much from theory.”

That conviction may well seem misplaced today as many of those who claim opposition to capitalism continue to decry theory and invest instead in utopian schemes and isolate burning issues from a general critique of capitalism and its social policies.

Nothing illustrates the Engels' diagnosis more than the current public discussion of inequality and poverty. It is tempting to call the new-found interest a fad or fashion, since it seems to spring from nothing more than a sitting President's alarm. But the present-day rage to address economic inequality is far more cynical. With interim national elections on the horizon and a competitive Presidential race on its heels, Democratic Party leaders served notice on the lame-duck President that it is time again to rouse the Party base, the labor unions, the progressive single-issue organizations, internet lefties, and the deep-pockets social liberals. Hence, despite the fact that inequality and poverty are neither newly discovered nor newly arrived, the alarm goes up: inequality is with us! Poverty is on the rise!

It is true, of course. Only a few outliers would deny that income and wealth growth for most people in the US have been stagnant or declining since some time in the 1970s (Even right-wing ideologue, Representative Paul Ryan, concedes that there are 47 million US citizens living in poverty). Health care has been in crisis, with millions left without any significant health options and untold numbers dying prematurely. The education system, like the physical infrastructure, is underfunded and crumbling. Employment continues to decline as discouraged workers exit the labor market. In short, poverty, disease, declining living standards, crime-- all the attendant problems of social and political neglect-- continue unabated, increasing dramatically over the last forty years.

At the same time, a privileged minority has enjoyed increasing income and wealth, a sharp rise in that group's share of the economic pie. As the economy marched forward, the “fortunate few” marched forward as well, but at an ever accelerating pace.

Without Theory

“Data, not stultifying political or ideological rhetoric, must drive our agenda.” So says rising Democratic Party superstar, Senator Cory Booker, in a newsprint debate with Republican policy icon, Representative Paul Ryan. Sponsored by The Wall Street Journal (A Half Century of the War on Poverty, 1-25/26-14) to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Lyndon Johnson-era “War on Poverty,” the two contestants demonstrate the futility of addressing poverty without a broad and deep understanding of its sources and its history-- the “how” and “why” of social theory. Representing the “respectable” Left in the US two-party political pantomime, Booker rehearses a host of liberal think tank palliatives based on education, job training, apprenticeships, de-criminalized drug use, and a bare-bones safety-net designed to shrink the number of those unlucky enough to fall below official government floors.

Solutions, for Booker, come through the tools of business and commerce: investments, cost-benefit analysis, returns on investment, cost savings etc. Rather than improving peoples' lives, the task of reducing poverty resembles an MBA project of this new generation of Democratic Party politician. He draws on suspect, often out-of-date correlations once found between education levels and future economic outcomes to sell education as a magic elixir. These long unexamined verities are now shaken by the absence of good paying jobs, the declining worth of higher degrees, and the enormous growth of student debt. Booker's feeble defense of the leaky safety-net that remains as a tarnished legacy of the New Deal and Johnson's anti-poverty legislation centers on food stamps and Medicaid, a formula to barely sustain life, but to not escape poverty. Add a dash of Moynihan-like sermon against single-motherhood and you have the anti-poverty program of the new generation of Democratic Party leaders-- truly a patchwork of “economic absurdity” worthy of Engels' contempt.

As for the Republicans, they argue for nothing, only against Democratic Party plans. Theirs is a simple contention: Forty-seven million US citizens remain in poverty. While the “War on Poverty” may have shifted the victims of poverty demographically, the poor are still with us and in great, stubborn numbers. For Representative Ryan, charity and moral suasion-- the remedies of two centuries ago-- are the only alternative to liberal interventionism and its failure.

Now liberals will recoil from these harsh conclusions. They can and will point to significant pockets of improvement, temporary declines in the poverty rate, or promising social experiments. But what they can neither explain nor address is the persistent reproduction of poverty by our economic system. For nearly forty years, measures of income and wealth inequality have grown, signally an inevitable increase in poverty. Even those ill-disposed to theory can surely see a relationship between growing inequality and increasing poverty.

Glaringly absent from Booker's program is any significant plan to redistribute income and wealth. We can attribute that absence to the near complete ownership of elected officials of both parties by the corporations and the wealthy. But on the periphery of mainstream politics, voices can be heard advocating measures both to grow the economy beyond mass impoverishment and/or to redistribute wealth through taxation.

The Krugmans, Reichs, and Stiglitzs and the like enjoy a measure of independence afforded by their academic tenure and widely celebrated intellectual stature, allowing them to somewhat sidestep fealty to corporate masters. As esteemed economists, they understand that the continued growth of inequality will ultimately bring harsh economic or social consequences. But their nostrums, like those of the political establishment, only treat the symptoms of a persistent malady that continually generates inequality, unemployment, and crises. A study of economic history demonstrates that bursts of economic growth and progressive taxation have indeed tempered, even slightly reversed inequality and the growth of poverty, but over time both return to their former trajectory.

A Dose of Theory

A new study by a French economist, Thomas Piketty, brings forward the view that the long-term tendency of capitalism is to produce and reproduce inequality. Though his book, Capital in the Twenty-first Century, is not scheduled for release in the English language until March, it has already generated serious discussion across the spectrum of the US commentariat. New York Times columnist, Thomas B. Edsell, asserts that the book “suggests that traditional liberal government policies on spending, taxation and regulation will fail to diminish inequality.” (Capitalism vs. Democracy, 1-28-2014)

How can that be? The liberal and social democratic consensus cries out for government spending, progressive taxation, and corporate regulation as the answer to growing inequality. A gaggle of Nobel laureates embrace these tools, attesting that they are effective means to combat inequality. What does Piketty see that they do not? 

History.

Piketty is not afraid to study the history of inequality, a necessary condition for any proper socioeconomic theory. What he finds, according to Edsell, is that:

...the six-decade period of growing equality in western nations – starting roughly with the onset of World War I and extending into the early 1970s – was unique and highly unlikely to be repeated. That period, Piketty suggests, represented an exception to the more deeply rooted pattern of growing inequality.

According to Piketty, those halcyon six decades were the result of two world wars and the Great Depression.

In other words, growing inequality is the normal for capitalism and its shrinkage the aberration. Apologists would have us believe otherwise, that capitalism does not carry a gene for inequality. Unlike his Yankee counterparts, Piketty is willing to study the economy as a system-- capitalism-- and explore its historical trajectory. Both methodological dispositions give rise to a theory of inequality, an incomplete theory, but a theory no less.

Now Piketty and his frequent collaborator Emmanuel Saez are widely acknowledged to be among the leading experts documenting inequality world wide as well as in the US. Undoubtedly this gives a high plausibility to his core claim to identify a strong correlation between capitalism's typical course and the growth of inequality.

Of course students of Marxist theory or followers of this blog should not be surprised by Piketty's findings. For over a hundred and fifty years Marxists have maintained that inequality and impoverishment are necessary products of the capitalist system. That is, the logic of capitalism necessitates growing inequality. By locating profit at the heart of the capitalist organism, Marxists understand that wealth will invariably flow to the tiny minority of the owners of capital and away from the producers. It is this process of profit generation that overwhelms all barriers, all “reforms,” to channel society's resources to the capitalist class.

Piketty's argument is a welcome antidote to the paucity of explanatory theory presented by the liberal and social democratic punditry. The controversy stirred by Piketty's argument well before its English-language availability is a sure sign that he offers something beyond the conventional.

However, his interpretation of the long-term trajectory of capitalism, especially its departure from the norm, may be incomplete. He reportedly sees the time between 1914 and 1973-- a time when he claims that the growth of inequality was uncharacteristically retarded-- as a period when the after-tax rate of return on capital lagged behind economic growth. One could quibble that this is perhaps too simple and mechanical, the era was certainly one in which many factors worked to change the “normal” course of capitalism and often buffered the growth of inequality, together constituting a tendency.

But it would be a simplification to locate these factors entirely in economic or political events while overlooking policy. For example, throughout most of the twentieth century capitalism paid an anti-Soviet levy or rent to the working class as an inoculation against the threat of socialist or Communist ideology. That factor played no small part in moderating inequality, creating the mirage of working class equality, and ensuring labor peace.

Closer examination of Piketty's interesting thesis must await publication of the book.

For a Robust Theory of Inequality

We needn't wait for Piketty, however, to find an adequate theory of inequality. Elements of Karl Marx's theory of socioeconomic development offer the key to understanding the production and reproduction of inequality in our time as well as earlier times.

There are, of course, many possible causes for the concentration of wealth. Theft, good fortune, guile, dishonesty are only a few of the ways that humans have redistributed wealth since antiquity. Such causes occur often in history, but only haphazardly. The only systemic cause of inequality is the expropriation of the labor of one by another under the protection of social norms. Marx called this process exploitation. He was the first to identify its forms and its trajectory. He was the first to explain adequately the mechanisms of expropriation. Armed with Marx's theory of exploitation, the inequalities of slavery, feudalism, and, of course, capitalism are revealed with all their specific features. Thus, the concentration of wealth produced by expropriation of the labor of slaves, serfs, and employed workers is connected to unique socially protected forms of exploitation.

Exploitation explains how inequality arises and continues. Without recognition of this mechanism embedded in capitalist economic activity, liberals and social democrats cannot explain the persistence of inequality. They will apply inadequate reformist measures to stem the tide of wealth and income concentration springing from capitalist exploitation, but the tide will not be forestalled by reforms.

It cannot be overemphasized that inequality springs from a process, a process definitive of capitalist economic relations. Outside of the Marxist orbit, commentators view inequality as a state-of-affairs, a state-of-affairs existing between various social groupings. While they authentically decry the misery generated by inequality, they are at a loss to find the proper quantitative relationship between different groups constitutive of society. Sure, some have more than others, but what is the socially just distribution of society's goods? Granted that inequalities exist, what is the optimal way to assign shares of wealth? How much and for whom? Should everyone get an equal share? Should those on the bottom get a 10% larger share? 20%? These are the questions that perplex the non-Marxists.

The best answer from the best minds of Anglo-American social philosophy is a pretty nasty and unsatisfactory principle called Pareto efficiency. Rather than solving the inequality puzzle, Pareto efficiency justifies an unequal state-of-affairs provided that it does not diminish the well-being of others, including the least advantaged. Because of the theoretical intractability of settling on exactly what constitutes a just distribution of goods and services, modern bourgeois academic philosophers attempt to establish what would be the least objectionable, but unequal state-of-affairs. Nothing demonstrates the theoretical barrenness of Anglo-American social thought than this misguided, impossible task of determining distributive justice once and for all and for all times and places. There is no idealized state-of-affairs that could answer this question. The question itself is misguided.

Rather, in our time, the task of reducing inequality, of advancing distributive justice, is to eliminate exploitation. There can be no ideal, perfect solution to the inequality issue, but there is a way of eliminating the primary cause of indefensible inequality in a capitalist society: end labor exploitation.

Liberals and social democrats have no answer to the rightist challenge that workers today are immeasurably better off under capitalism than they were two hundred years ago. It is certainly true that most workers now live longer, are healthier, and have more free time than did their counterparts two centuries earlier. Marxist theory does not challenge that point. Instead, it asserts that the logic of the capitalist system tends to impoverish working people at all times. Whether capitalism succeeds in suppressing living standards is entirely a different matter. Other factors-- labor fight back, labor shortages, the cheapening of the means of subsistence, etc.-- may buffer, even overwhelm this tendency for a time, but the tendency never disappears.

The tendency towards impoverishment flows logically from the Marxist understanding that labor under capitalism is a commodity like any other commodity. Capitalists buy and sell the labor power of workers just as they do any other factor of production or distribution. And as with any other cost, they seek to pay the lowest possible price for it. Accordingly, the capitalist system, through the cost-cutting actions of individual capitalists (or corporations), is constantly pressuring the compensation of workers downward to levels of mere maintenance-- that is, poverty. The only systemic constraint upon that pressure is the necessity of securing labor in the future.

Therefore, we find in Marxism a basis for understanding (and addressing) inequality and poverty. Thanks to a theory that identifies the two closely related afflictions with specific historically evolved mechanisms and that connects their production and reproduction to economic systems, we can avoid the muddiness and ineffectiveness of the liberal and social democratic approaches. Both mystify the causes, offer a balm instead of a cure, and fail to halt the continuing reproduction of inequality and poverty. Like quacks and faith healers, liberals and social democrats may make the patient more comfortable, but only excising the cancer of capitalism will finally end the suffering.

Zoltan Zigedy

zoltanzigedy@gmail.com