Towards a New Political Order

Of course, Putin had not manufactured Trump or his Make America Great Again movement. Trump was the homegrown product of a political order that, in the eyes of majorities of Americans, on the left and right, had failed. A neoliberal order prizing global free markets and free movement of people had left too many people behind. It had favored Wall Street over Main Street; tolerated extreme levels of inequality; ignored the problem of mass incarceration and the massive loss of wealth experienced by minority homeowners in the wake of the Great Recession; legitimized a war on Iraq that America had no business fighting and then a reckless stab at reconstruction that failed in Iraq and that spread additional misery to much of the Middle East. Distress in America had been palpable years before Trump seized America’s political stage. That a master manipulator of grievance and resentment would arise in this moment hardly seems surprising. The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order

Professor Gary Gerstle, Paul Mellon Professor of American History Emeritus and Paul Mellon Director of Research at the University of Cambridge has an important new book, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order.

This is not a review of the book, however, but a critical discussion of the interesting theory elaborated in the book and the implications of that theory.

Gerstle is no Marxist. In fact, his book exhibits a common, vulgar anti-Communism and anti-Sovietism of the odious variety of Timothy Snyder and his ilk.

But Gerstle, nonetheless, takes the data of history-- revealed contemporary history-- and constructs a credible account of how these events weave together into an explanatory fabric. He proposes a theory that develops a historical thread-- liberalism-- that, should we follow it closely, will take us from the US bourgeois revolution of the late 1700s to the rise of Trump and Sanders.

This theory takes a throw-away word “neoliberalism” -- a word abused by left and right to denote a dark era of unhinged capitalism or a life-saving revival of capitalism-- and gives it both a definite meaning and a status as a politico-socio-economic order.

Where others saw neoliberalism as a disposition, a policy, or a philosophy ushered in by political change, Gerstle proposes that we view it as a definite, enduring shift based on “a distinctive program of political economy.” For Gerstle, this means that neoliberalism, as a political order, transcends the mere changes between election cycles, the shift in popular tastes, or the adoption of intellectual fashions.

The ideal-types of his theory are the twentieth-century orders of what might be called laissez faire that precede 1930, the New Deal order enduring from 1930 until 1970, and the Neoliberal Order beginning in 1970 and lasting until 2020. Gerstle is well aware that the dates are inexact markers and the transitions are not discrete, but continuous. Moreover, the dimensions of these orders are somewhat fuzzy and the transitions are uneven; neither fact detracts from the theory as a first approximation.

Insofar as the scope of Gerstle’s theory of successive political orders is primarily focused on the transition between the New Deal Order and the Neoliberal Order, his discussion of the preceding order (what he calls laissez faire) is sketchy, only sufficient to explain the conditions that gave rise to the New Deal-- that is, that necessitated a new order.

Prior to the New Deal, the dominant order celebrated free, unfettered markets, marginally regulated by a minimalist government removed from economic matters. This was the era of recovery from the First World War and its immediate post-war economic disruptions. While Europe struggled to achieve stable growth, the US became the leading industrial power. Innovative industrial organization, new marketing and financial schemes, and intensifying concentration made the US the driving force of this order. Perhaps unfairly, this era is associated with the fulsome, but ultimately misplaced optimism of US President Herbert Hoover.

The New Deal Order

Of course, the fragility of this order was brought forward by the stock market crash in the fall of 1929. The story of the subsequent Great Depression is often told and Gerstle adds little to it. But he does frame it as the factor bringing the old order down and paving the way for a new one. The instability, the hardships, the uncertainties spawned by an unparalleled economic crisis called the laissez faire order into question, rocking the very foundations of capitalism. Moreover, the example of an emerging, but radically different order-- socialism-- loomed threateningly over the shaken foundations.

The rise of a new order answering to the failure of the previous one came through the vehicle of the Roosevelt administration, though Gerstle would acknowledge that the leaders, ideas, and movements driving the new order were incubating far earlier.

The features of the New Deal order are well known. Most importantly, it assigned a central role to the government. That is, the government was unleashed to design programs, fund initiatives, employ the unemployed, initiate projects and enterprises, goad, regulate, and discipline business, and intercede in virtually every other aspect of life.

The construction of the new order was far more complex than a change of administration. It involved vital, militant movements in labor, agriculture, small business, and political forces beyond the two parties. It was shaped over time, with setbacks and retreats.

Gerstle does not fear designating events as cardinal in the transition from one order to another:

General Motors capitulated in March 1937, as did the Supreme Court, which voted by the slimmest of margins (5-4) to uphold the constitutionality of the congressional act that created the new system of labor relations. At that moment (March 1937), laissez-faire in America lost whatever was left of its moral and jurisprudential hold on American politics.

A key ideological building block of the New Deal was the idea that government was an anchor for shaping economic life with a role in conditioning social life as well. While this is today often associated with the economic doctrines of John Maynard Keynes, Gerstle recognizes that the New Deal was crafted before Keynesianism was deeply rooted.

After World War II, the New Deal order consolidated. For Gerstle, the final ascension of a new order is established when its opponents-- the former advocates of the old order-- embrace it. Gerstle finds that victory embodied in the administration of Dwight Eisenhower. While Eisenhower paid lip service to the old Republican vérités of laissez faire, he and the majority of his party ruled in step with the principles of the new order (many astute historians note that governance during the Nixon years were likewise more “liberal” than during the subsequent rule of later Democratic Party liberals).

The dynamic of this mature version of the New Deal order was driven by the fear of Communism, just as its rise was forged by fear of the Communist alternative to the 1930s collapse of capitalism. Gerstle sees anti-Communism as the gravity pulling political parties together in a common crusade.

The post-war reorganization of the New Deal paralleled the Cold War. In Gerstle’s words: “The Cold War, then, secured the New Deal order.”

The purging of the Communist left and its Popular Front allies from political and social life was an essential element in establishing the New Deal consensus.

For labor, a trade-off was constructed-- labor surrendered militancy, internationalism, and social justice while embracing business unionism and, in return, capital granted wage and benefit growth commensurate with productivity increases, job protection, and longer contracts. A template for this consensus was the UAW’s so-called treaty of Detroit.

To combat the Cold War over racism and colonialism, the New Deal consensus began to set the conditions for the dismantling of US segregation and the worst features of its apartheid racial regime. Gerstle does a thorough and able job of explaining these profound changes in terms of the competition with Communism. Brutal US race policies were a constant embarrassment to the US ruling class in an era of decolonization.

Anchored in the government’s support of Brown versus Board of Education, the New Deal order sought to build a new image of racial harmony that in some ways encouraged, but could not contain the popular movement for civil rights and against racism.

Likewise, the New Deal order coalesced around militant anti-Communism in foreign relations, aggressively meeting, overtly or covertly, Communist gains anywhere and everywhere in the world. The demands of a domestic war on poverty, especially Black poverty, and policing the world against Communism would prove too much of an economic burden for the order, a burden that would play a big role in the fall of the New Deal Order.

The 1970s proved to be the fatal decade for the New Deal order. A particularly pernicious species of economic crisis-- stagflation-- plagued the era. The unprecedented combination of stagnant, even slacking economic growth and high inflation overwhelmed the Keynesian tools favored by the New Deal order.

Intense competition from countries devastated by World War II-- earlier weaned from left-wing influence by the Marshall Plan and other aid packages-- now pressured US corporate profit rates with their technologically superior, cost-savings industries. US monopolies found their home market invaded with cheaper, often superior products. Thus, the economic crisis hurt corporations as well as working people. Mills and plants closed, stripping workers of good paying jobs, especially in the Midwest.

The decade also brought social and political crises with the defeat of the US military in Vietnam and the scandals associated with President Richard Nixon’s criminal actions and forced resignation.

The Neoliberal Order

The fatal decade ended with the election of Jimmy Carter, a relatively unknown Southerner, who Gerstle considers to be a transitional figure towards a new order-- Neoliberalism. Carter did indeed anticipate Reagan with his distrust of government and urge to deregulate. In perhaps one of the more controversial of Gerstle’s claims, he locates the roots of Carter’s departure from New Deal policies in his association with Ralph Nader. Both viewed the government “not as a tool for restoring democracy but as an instrument of corporate domination and bureaucratic drift.” Given the penetration of capital into every nook and corner of the state-- what Marxists call “State-Monopoly Capitalism” -- the Carter/Nader thesis is not far-fetched. Gerstle sees this as the beginnings of left-neoliberalism, a theme that he returns to again and again.

Gerstle suggests three critical reasons that the commanding corporate heights-- including many capitalists who had made their peace with the New Deal-- were ready for a new order, an order to be realized beginning with the election of Ronald Reagan:

1. “First, the American economy performed poorly for much of the 1970s, its reputation for global preeminence now tarnished, the instruments in the Keynesian toolkit stiff and rusty.” The blow to profitability in key industries long dominated by US monopolies challenged capital to find new answers.

2. “Second, the sharp escalation of foreign goods invading the US marketplace made many in corporate ranks less willing to tolerate the power of organized labor.” The intense competition with low wage, modernized industries in West Germany and Japan brought class peace-- secured by compromises like the Treaty of Detroit-- to an end. Henceforth, capital would be on the offensive against labor.

3. “...unhappiness about the steady creep of government regulations that neither the recession of the 1970s nor the political leadership of America… seemed capable of stalling or reversing.” New Deal regulation was meant to protect capitalism from itself by dampening insurrectionary waves through the enhancements of the welfare state and by stifling capital’s self-destructive impulses. By the 1970s, the Great Depression and the system’s collapse seemed far off and improbably recurring to the captains of industry.

As with the New Deal and its identification with the Roosevelt election, the Neoliberal order became identified with the Reagan election, but the ideas and movements associated with Neoliberalism incubated much earlier.

Gerstle points to the post-war creation of the Mt. Pelerin society, a proto-think tank of free-marketeers who helped shape and popularize the ideology of Neoliberalism. Their members brought the idea of extending markets to all aspects of life. Further, they subscribed to a fetish-like ascription of personal freedom to every question.

He overlooks the contemporaneous development of a new social science based upon Kenneth Arrow’s pioneering work and the Rand Corporation’s application of it to strategic and military matters. Rational Choice theory and Game Theory became the intellectual foundations for Neoliberalism, a development brilliantly developed by S. M. Amadae in her neglected work, Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy.

In the 1970s, an infamous memo circulated by future Supreme Court justice, Lewis Powell, served to alarm corporate leaders to the new “dangers” posed to capitalism by the New Deal order.

Since the debacle of the Goldwater campaign in 1964, an ideologically fueled series of think tanks had risen to construct alternatives to New Dealism. Funded by right-wing figures like Joseph Coors, John M. Olin, and the Koch brothers, these institutions substituted intellectual gravitas for the previously conventional ultra-right rants and conspiracy theories. Figures like Paul Weyrich, George Gilder, and William Simon carried the messages forward. Thus, was built a Neoliberal intelligentsia to counter the New Deal establishment. Gerstle explains:

The constituent parts of this order-- the capitalist donors, the intellectuals, the think tanks, the politicians, the media, and the personal networks linking them together-- were all visible in the 1970s. The speed with which the neoliberal order implanted itself on politics in the 1980s is inconceivable without what we might call the “silent phase” of its construction.

Reaganism quickly implemented and shaped the rudiments of a Neoliberal order, laying waste to the existing regulatory regimen and dismantling the progressive-tax structure. The Reaganaut attack on the judiciary laid the foundation for the rigid “original intent” silliness that dominates the courts today.

The overthrow of the media’s Fairness Doctrine in 1987 removed the last vestige of the media’s pretense to political impartiality and opened the door to the further influence of wealth and power.

Despite the rhetoric, Reaganism was not about budget busting or small government. Government spending for the military grew at an unprecedented peace-time rate. Federal debt reached new heights.

And the roots of the carceral state-- the filling of the jails with poor, often Black youth-- are to be found in the Reagan years and became a signature feature of Neoliberalism.

The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 further consolidated Neoliberalism. Gerstle recounts the results of the end of Soviet power:

One result of communism’s fall is obvious: It opened a large part of the world… to capitalist penetration… capitalists and capital poured into Eastern Europe… After 1991, no country or movement in the world was in a position… to challenge the capitalist way of organizing economic life. Perhaps, then, there was no longer a need for capitalists to purchase insurance against such challenges by paying American workers the high wages that the New Deal order demanded. To the contrary, high wage insurance policies could be dropped and labor protests against wage cuts ignored or met by threats to ship production abroad. The defenders of this hyper-globalized capitalist order argued that whatever American workers lost in wages would be counter-balanced by falls in the cost of consumer products now manufactured abroad for a fraction of their former costs…It is hardly surprising that economic inequality rose sharply in these circumstances, to pre-New Deal levels.

Gerstle understands a consequence of the fall of the Soviet Union upon the left-- the real left, the radical left-- that few acknowledged then or now:

The collapse of communism… shrank the imaginative and ideological space in which opposition to capitalist thought and practices might incubate, and impelled those who remained leftists to redefine their radicalism in alternative terms, which turned out to be those that capitalist systems could more, rather than less, easily manage. This was the moment when neoliberalism in the United States went from being a political movement to a political order. [my emphasis]

By the mid-1980s, many Democrats had gravitated towards Neoliberalism. A beachhead was firmly planted in the Democratic Party with the founding of the Democratic Leadership Council. Prominent Democrats like Paul Tsongas, Gary Hart, Bill Bradley, Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, and Bill Clinton were drawn into the arms of Neoliberalism (old New Dealers like Tip O’Neill and Ted Kennedy were less easily seduced).

If Eisenhower’s presidency signaled the Republican surrender to the New Deal order, then Clinton’s presidency did the same for the Democrats' surrender to Neoliberalism.

Certainly, the victory of Bill Clinton in the 1992 presidential election sealed the capture of the Democratic Party, but the process began earlier. Market-based solutions to social problems attracted some Democrats engaged in “The War on Poverty.” Gerstle, again, locates left-wing roots of Neoliberalism in the Nader campaign for “consumer sovereignty” and the frustration with regulation as a solution to corporate abuse.

Of course, part of the Democratic Party surrender was pure opportunism-- Reagan’s revolution held power for twelve years, so they felt that they must give up the fight and join them.

Gerstle recognizes another factor: “the giddiness that accompanied the information technology (IT) revolution.” Infatuated with “tech hipsters,” the Democrats saw the new tech industry titans-- often libertarians and free marketeers-- as creators of a new market-based era. The pundits of the new era-- Esther Dyson, George Gilder, George Keyworth, and Alvin Toffler-- preached a renewal of “the American Dream.” Toffler “framed the revolution in terms of ‘Third Wave’ innovation.”

The seduction of these techno-libertarians and futurists was pervasive. This wedded the Democrats to Wall Street investors backing the tech phenomenon and moved politicians like Al Gore towards a reinvented, less intrusive government which would be more agreeable to a “third wave” economy.

The Telecom Act of 1996 completed the liberation of media and communication from non-partisanship and diversity, as media consolidated into the hands of a few mega-corporations that are producing the vulgarity, sensationalism, and conformity that exists today.

The Clinton era’s Gramm-Leach bill performed a similar function, liberating the financial industry from restrictions imposed in the 1930’s, enabling the economic crises of 2000-2001, 2007-2009, and that of today.

Despite unanimity on the core values of Neoliberalism, the two parties split on social values. Nonetheless, as Gerstle explains: ”The contrasting cultures embraced by the two parties-- cosmopolitanism in the case of the Democrats, neo-Victorianism in the case of the Republicans-- were both compatible with the ascendant political economy.” With consensus on political economy, culture-- including identity issues-- became the battleground for political discourse in the twenty-first century.

The Clinton decade was the triumphant highpoint of Neoliberalism; its decline began in the early years of the twenty-first century.

Neoliberal foreign policy became a disaster with military adventures in the Middle East and elsewhere. The idea that the US was the international police and responsible for imposing Neoliberal values, free markets, cultural and political values-- in other words, a Neoliberal civilizing mission-- fell apart before resistance in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. Gerstle writes of US “hubris” -- a proper term for the US’s Neoliberal missionary role in imposing the order’s infrastructure on the entire world.

Nothing exhibits its failure better than the two-decade-long war in Afghanistan, a failure that pitted history’s greatest military against a guerilla army of a pariah movement rooted in feudal social and political ideologies.

Nothing demonstrates the arrogance of Neoliberalism more than the failure to remake Iraq in the Neoliberal image.

Gerstle tells these familiar stories well.

Likewise, Neoliberal hubris was demonstrated domestically. The first two decades of the new century were rocked by two serious economic crises, a devastating, poorly managed viral pandemic, and a third unfolding economic crisis. Neoliberalism’s response to all four was devastating to millions of people, yet the political order sheltered-- even enriched-- the wealthy and powerful. Hubris, indeed.

Credibly, Gerstle sees the political rise and election of Barack Obama as Neoliberalism’s last political hurrah. Obama may have been perceived as a champion of the people with new ideas, but he was, in fact, a fireman for the Neoliberal order charged with extinguishing the greatest economic challenge since The Great Depression. Insofar as he did so, he did it with the partisans and tools of that now-shaky order.

Gerstle writes:

In the aftermath of the Great Recession, globalization and neoliberalism could no longer be promoted as policies that lifted all boats. Techno-utopianism could no longer hide the truth that serious structural imbalances in the global economy threatened not to collapse economies but to rend the social fabric of nations. The economic hardship and distress caused by the crash would linger for years. Political anger would smolder for a time and then erupt into a series of whitehot insurgencies. The neoliberal order would not be able to stand the heat.

The group that had benefited most from the New Deal order-- whites in the small Midwestern towns and in the industrial pockets spread across the US became big losers with the Neoliberal order. Premature deaths, alcoholism, suicide, drug addiction-- the usual afflictions of the poor and neglected-- were now the common afflictions of the unemployed, underemployed, discouraged workers that had loyally celebrated and trusted capitalist rule.

Gerstle chose a 2012 study of a largely white Philadelphia neighborhood to illustrate the despair wrought by Neoliberalism, despite the fact that its author, Charles Murray, would likely be the last person to blame the order for the plight of those in Fishtown.

Of course, the Neoliberal order was even less kind to the Black working class, a demographic that always was the first and hardest hit with the economic crises. African American home ownership and household wealth were devastated in the aftermath of the 2007-2009 crisis.

The Neoliberal answer to despair was the imprisonment of more people proportionally than any other country, a harsh solution that fell especially hard on Black people because of the racist criminal justice system.

Perhaps the statistic most telling of the end-state crisis of Neoliberalism is life expectancy. The average US life expectancy dropped for the first time in the four-year period between 2014 and 2018. Of course, the drop is even greater for Blacks and Latinas/Latinos.

And of course, inequality in the US has reached levels unseen since the Great Depression.

Gerstle recounts the emergence of popular movements against Neoliberalism, both left and right. The Tea Party marked a backlash against the Neoliberal, corporate Republicans who lead the party. Wealthy rightwingers like the Koch brothers used their financial might to channel the movement into cultural directions and away from any serious economic critique, but its core attraction remained a hazy anti-elitism.

The left had its own uprising with the unexpected rise of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Undoubtedly, its surprising appeal sprung from its direct and unambiguous outrage at inequality expressed by the attack on the 1%. Gerstle explains: “In the short term, organizational chaos and indecision resulted from the movement’s anarchist-inflected resistance to having formal leaders.” Nonetheless, the experience led to hordes of young people entering electoral politics in protest, most eventually nesting in the Bernie Sanders campaign to convert the Democratic Party into the social democratic vehicle that it never really was.

Sanders garnered considerable support in both his runs for the US presidency. Given the growing dissatisfaction with the Neoliberal order, it should come as no surprise that he did well in the Democratic primaries, where his outlier counterpart, Donald Trump, also did well, given their common vocal rejection of the Neo-liberal order. But the dominant Democratic Party Neoliberals were successful in knee-capping Sanders in both campaigns.

Trump was more successful, shocking everyone that he emerged as a candidate, shocking everyone that he won the primary, and further shocking everyone that he actually won the election in 2016.

Putting aside Trump’s checkered, volatile rule during his four years, Trump exists as the product of rejectionist populism. And whether voters understand the essence of what they are rejecting, the political and economic substratum spurring that rejection is Neoliberalism. Whether Trump, an ideological slippery creature, represents any commonality with the grievances of most of his electoral supporters, he stands against something and he has convinced many that it is what they are against as well.

Like Sanders, whose supporters think they understand how he will secure the changes needed, Trump is the standard bearer for a movement looking to defeat the old order.

The new order is yet to emerge.

The New Deal order sold a large majority of Americans that a strong central state could manage a dynamic, but dangerous capitalist economy in the public interest. The neoliberal order persuaded a large majority of Americans that free markets would unleash capitalism from unnecessary state controls and spread prosperity and personal freedom throughout the ranks of Americans and then throughout the world. Neither of these propositions today commands the support or authority that they once possessed. Political disorder and dysfunction reign. What comes next is the most important question the United States, and the world, now face. The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order

Assessing Gerstle’s Theory

Like the celebrated academic wealth and income expert, Thomas Piketty, before him, Gerstle is not a radical in any sense. Piketty’s empirical work unintentionally revealed what Marxist theory had long deduced: the tendency, over time, for capitalism to produce and reproduce inequality-- it is in its DNA. His results, upon further study, moved him leftward, though he remains distant from being a Marxist.

Gerstle, an academically esteemed historian, has made a uniquely thorough study of the political, social, and economic history of the United States in the modern era. Like any good historian, Gerstle searches for patterns, commonalities, and trends when he places the facts of history next to each other. Despite his solid mainstream credentials, his review of the last hundred years of US history surfaces a theory of the evolution of US capitalist society that is strikingly similar to what a Marxist might accept.

1. Gerstle sees history unfolding between 1930 and today as a dynamic process of different regimes trying to manage the US economy by establishing a widespread consensus around a specific capitalist ideology, a set of policies, and a core constituency. These regimes, when successful, become a political order.

2. Insofar as the practice of the new order stabilizes capitalism, promotes the advance of capital, and sustains or raises the profitability of capital, it is widely accepted and retains the loyalty of elites. In the case of the US, the elites voice their consensus through the subscription of the two major parties.

3. When capitalism becomes unstable, the existing order comes into question.

4. In the face of crises, pre-existing factions within the old order question the existing consensus and shift their allegiance to another political order.

5. A vigorous struggle ensues to determine a successor order to the failed one, usually decided in the electoral contests.

6. The winner enjoys the opportunity to stabilize US capitalism and establish a new order.

As competently as Gerstle organizes and establishes this sequence of events into a coherent theory of political motion, he hesitates to attribute it to the inherent instability of capitalism. He clearly finds the US unstable to the point that-- every thirty or forty years-- the old political order decays and necessitates rescue by a new order. He clearly sees that the new order, while initially enjoying some success, carries the seeds of its own demise. Yet he never asks why this instability arises so frequently and what might be its cause.

This failure to seek ultimate causes is peculiar because Gerstle shows that he is fully aware of the significance of Communism as “capitalism’s most ardent opponent.” He acknowledges: “Generally missing from studies of the international roots and reach of neoliberalism… is a reckoning with the Soviet Union and communism more generally. And yet, this book argues, the Soviet Union and international communism cannot be ignored. Few international events in the twentieth century matched the Russian Revolution of 1917 in importance.”

While Gerstle sees successive political orders as threatened by Communism, he fails to concede that the credibility of that threat is precisely because capitalism is inherently unstable, therefore potentially unpopular, and ripe for rejection. His anti-Communism blinds him to take that step.

While Gerstle affirms that “no other single political force [than Communism and anti-Communism] had a comparable influence on the world or American politics across the twentieth century,” one must wonder if he really understands the full consequences of this affirmation. The construction of US anti-Communism as a veritable religion stains virtually every aspect of life and thought in the US to this day, including the building of alternatives for the creation of a new political order.

Since Gerstle confines his study mostly to the US, he fails to recount how the US political orders he exposed-- laissez faire, The New Deal, and Neoliberalism-- spread like a virus throughout the capitalist world in their time. Margaret Thatcher-- considered a co-henchwoman of Neoliberalism with Ronald Reagan-- has only two brief references in the book.

But the very fact that these political orders became a feature of global capitalism and not limited to individual states surely demonstrates that their dynamic is generated from capitalism and not anything peculiar to the US or the UK. The Neoliberal political order, like its antecedents, was adaptive in the Darwinian sense, for the survival of global capitalism.

Gerstle’s theory suggests a weak, but definite sense of irreversibility-- the laissez faire order of the early twentieth century was spent; it could not solve the contradictions of the 1930s; nor could it return to solve the contradictions of the 1970s (though it shared features with Neoliberalism).

The New Deal order of the 1930s was also spent; it could not solve the contradictions of the 1970s; nor can it solve the contradictions of Neoliberalism (though elements of it may appear in Neoliberalism’s successor).

And Neoliberalism-- as we know it-- will not return in the future, but, if we fail to break the cycle with socialism, an order may emerge with some of its features.

Of course, this is neither inevitability nor fatalism. As Engels reminds us-- and it is particularly apt today-- another option is that society could simply perish. But within the bounds of twenty-first century capitalism, Gerstle is arguing that Neoliberalism is spent and its replacement as a political order is yet to be decided. He leaves no doubt of his conclusion when he ends his book with the charge that determining the next political order “is the most important question the United States, and the world, now face.”

But political orders do not arise from nothing; nor do they prevail arbitrarily. Gerstle shows in his narrative of the rise and fall of orders that antagonistic political currents percolate in the recesses of the existing order, preparing to vie for succession when the dominant political order falters. The balance of social and political forces determines the successor political order, typically fought out on the electoral field-of-play in the advanced capitalist countries.

Despite the neat dynamic of Gerstle’s theory, one senses that we have arrived at a crossroads. Certainly, the theory accounts for the rise of Trumpism (and its global right-wing, populist counterparts in the UK, the Baltics, Poland, Hungary, India, etc.) as a logical development from the decline of the Neoliberal order and a desperate attempt to establish a new counter-Neoliberal order. But what are the other alternatives?

Absent from Gerstle’s account is the widespread collapse of the center-left and center-right parties that historically resolved the transition to a new order. In most advanced capitalist countries, they have been electorally marginalized or racked with division and factionalism. They no longer serve as the guarantee of transitional moderation, nor have they escaped the clutches of Neoliberalism.

For the US, Gerstle only projects Bernie Sanders and his quasi-New Dealism as both a response to Neoliberalism and an alternative to Trumpism. However, Sanders refuses to break with the solidly Neoliberal Democratic Party, a party that has twice demonstrated its obstinate refusal to accept Sanders' program.

Thus, at this moment, from the perspective of Gerstle’s theory, the only viable alternative that has emerged to Neoliberalism is the right-wing populism associated with Trump. Sadly, Gerstle, like much of our left, cannot imagine escaping the succession of political orders that strive to rescue and manage capitalism.

“…the most important question… [we] now face.”

It was not so long ago that Rosa Luxemburg’s famous comment-- “Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to Socialism or regression into Barbarism” -- resonated with millions of people, including many in the Western capitalist countries. Today, that is not so.

Gerstle explains why this has come to be. The setback to international socialism that came with the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991 ushered in an era when leftists would “redefine their radicalism in alternative terms, which turned out to be those that capitalist systems could more, rather than less, easily manage.” [my emphasis]

With some high drama, he adds: “This was the moment when neoliberalism in the United States went from being a political movement to a political order.”

With this, Gerstle is astonishingly insightful, though the Neoliberal order has blocked his imagination as well. Neoliberalism has effectively stunted the radical imagination, leaving the vision of socialism to a small, but determined minority.

In place of politics driven by a vision of socialism-- the end of the exploitation of labor and its attendant injustices-- Neoliberalism has cultivated an era of political cynicism and overwrought moral outrage. As Gerstle observes, what counts as leftism today fits neatly into what capitalism allows: reforms that fail to challenge not only the relations between capital and labor, but even the balance of power between the capitalists and the rest of us; a fetish of capitalist democratic procedure which projects that-- should all the obstacles to popular participation be removed-- the interests of the people will magically be recognized and satisfied by the ruling apparatus; and an absorption with an adolescent notion of freedom that celebrates the individual not of the collective, but outside of it.

Today’s left, coloring inside the lines of what capitalism allows, would be aghast at the idea of revolutionary socialism. Better to talk of local politics, humanizing the Democratic Party, small-scale cooperatives, human rights campaigns, non-profit corporations, foundations, expanded welfare, democracy promotion projects, networks of progressive interest groups, etc., etc. All relatively inoffensive to the Neoliberal order and unthreatening to capitalism.

Today’s left makes angry noises about the threat of fascism, dangers to “our” democracy, and the rise of right-wing populism without acknowledging that all are the children of capitalism. It is, and has been, capitalism that fears the rising of the people and seeks to disable the tools that enable the people to rise. Defending capitalism from itself will not secure a bright future for working people.

Let us suppose that Gersle is right-- and I think he is-- that we are at a crossroads where one political order is dying and another is yet to take its place. What does that mean for the left?

In past transitions from one order to another, the specter of Communism was a decisive factor in shaping the new political order, as Gerstle concedes. The New Deal would not have taken the form it did without a powerful left formed around militant working-class organizations, especially the Communist Party. A workers’ state did not ensue, but a political order that conceded far more to working people than it would have without the socialist alternative looming.

In the transition to Neoliberalism, the specter played a negative role. The advances of Communism-- victories in Asia, Africa, and even in Latin America, with Communist Parties enjoying greater influence in global politics-- shocked capitalist elites and rocked the economically shaky New Deal order, hastening the rise of Neoliberalism.

Today, the lack of a militant left committed to advancing socialism stunts any attempt to establish a new political order that will both rival the hollow posturing of left and right populism and answer the unprecedented challenges facing the world today.

As insightful as Gerstle’s theory is, it suffers a failure of imagination. Understandably, he and many others fear what will succeed Neoliberalism. The prospects of managing capitalism are growing dim. It's time to look beyond rescuing a failing, rotten system; it’s time to build a movement for socialism.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

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

Sinking in the Economic Quicksand

In late November of last year, I wrote of the dangers of stagflation-- stagnant or declining growth and price inflation-- suggesting that the global economy was heading for a history-repeating reckoning: “The crisis of the 1970s bears some similarities with today’s turmoil.”

In January, I explained the source and persistence of inflation, thusly:

…the Federal Reserve engaged in a massive inflation of financial assets to fend off the deflationary pressures inherited from the 2007-9 catastrophe, presenting investors and bankers with the gift that kept on giving: perpetual asset inflation and an assurance that the Fed would always have their back… It is a misconception to see inflation as only arising in 2021. The first signs of fast-rising consumer inflation were indeed in 2021, but artificially induced asset inflation had preceded this for nearly a decade.

At the end of May, I wrote that these projections were proving to be accurate and ominous and the available tools placed policy makers in a tenuous situation:

 

The raging inflation that emerged late in 2021 places the masters of the capitalist economic universe in a policy vice. To stem inflation, they must raise interest rates, which invariably dampens economic growth. But economic growth has already slowed-- indeed, turned negative in the US for the first quarter of this year. With so many economic indicators declining or going negative, rising interest rates will only accelerate the slowdown of consumer spending, productivity, wage growth, investment, and social spending, while increasing debt and its costs.

Since then, Jamie Dimon, the head of the US’s largest bank and a celebrity financial pundit, has declared before investors and analysts that it is time to prepare for an economic “hurricane”: “That hurricane is right out there down the road coming our way. You just have to brace yourself.” His counterpart at Goldman Sachs, David Solomon, sees a reasonable risk of a recession. And Solomon’s predecessor at Goldman Sachs and Elon Musk also joined in pointing to the growing danger of recession. Talk of a “soft landing” -- avoiding a deep recession-- has dissipated.

It’s fair to say that today a majority of economists, politicians, even TV stock market cheerleaders expect continued inflation and likely recession-- a cruel brew for all, but especially the working class.

As mid-year approaches, the foretold crisis appears even more inevitable and more severe.

While the growth figures for the second quarter won’t be in for several weeks, the Atlanta Federal Reserve optimistically projects US Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to grow by a mere .9% (annualized). Couple that with the 1st quarter drop of 1.5% and we technically already are in recession.

Both the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the World Bank have recently drastically lowered their global growth estimates for 2022, by a third and more than a quarter, respectively.

Stock markets continue to deflate, losing trillions of dollars in nominal value. US equity markets have lost value for ten of the last twelve weeks. As of Monday, June 13, the Standard and Poor’s market index fell 21% from its January high, officially becoming what investors call a bear market, associated with recessions. Equity losses affect most those who are farther up the economic ladder; they create a negative wealth effect, discouraging spending on the part of the upper income, wealthiest sector. A bear market also applies pressure on middle and lower strata retirement funds, especially for those employed in the public sector.

Inflation continues to rise unabated, hitting another four-decade high with a May annualized growth of 8.6%. Prognosticators thought that the slight drop in April might signal a peak, but the May acceleration put an end to their wishful thinking.

Galloping inflation again took a big bite out of real average hourly wages, with the average dropping .6% from April to May, or 3% for the last twelve months. The 3% May-to-May comparison actually amounts to a 3.9% drop in real average weekly earnings, given a drop in the hours worked.

For the first time this year, consumer spending is down, dropping .3% from April to May. Consumer spending-- by far the largest component of total national economic growth-- was the last bastion of optimism available to the few remaining academic and media pollyannas.

The first signs of a deteriorating housing market are appearing, with mortgage demand at the lowest level in 22 years. For the week of June 5th, applications for home mortgages were down 7%, and 21% against the same week in 2021. And refinancing was down 75% against the same week a year ago.

A revealing, but seldom explored, set of statistics addresses the US economy from the perspective of the capitalist or the investor. Non-farm business sector labor productivity dropped 7.3% in the first quarter, the most since the 3rd quarter of 1947. And unit labor costs increased 12.6%, the highest increase since the 3rd quarter of 1982.

These two results describe the costs of the commodity--labor-- in terms of how much the capitalist pays for that commodity relative to what the capitalist acquires from the use of that commodity, a rough measure of the rate that labor is exploited. Further, taken together, they are an indicator of profit expectations when taking account of the cost of the commodity, labor. Put simply, when labor productivity drops and the cost of labor to the capitalist rises, profits are expected to drop.

In the first quarter of 2022, even though workers worked 5.4% more hours, they produced 2.3% less (reflected in the 7.3% productivity decline). At the same time, their hourly compensation, not adjusted for inflation, rose 4.4%.

So, capitalists paid workers more, worked them longer hours, while the workers produced less. This is not a happy result for the capitalist class.

How could this happen?

With an extremely tight, competitive labor market, capitalists are paying more to acquire and retain workers-- they are hoarding labor, just as they might any other commodity-- even though they are getting less production from them. This has and will result in lower profits.

The Wall Street Journal notes on June 13 (Weaker Earnings Pose New Threat to Markets): “...recent days have cast doubt on the durability of corporate profit growth, further darkening the outlet for stocks. Companies from Target to Microsoft Corp. have warned that their results will be lower than expected, while analysts have trimmed earnings forecasts across industries.”

As in previous downturns with sinking labor productivity, the capitalist class will respond with layoffs in an attempt to discipline labor, to squeeze more from the workers. The resulting unemployment, absent a fighting labor movement, will undermine labor's bargaining power, tend to restore the rate of exploitation, and increase capital’s share of the economic product.

Forced unemployment will surely be the coming corporate response to falling profit.

Though the strategy will remain behind a veil of official obfuscation, the captains of industry and the lieutenants of capital understand the mechanism. A revealing article in the June 14th edition of The Wall Street Journal tells us that: “Federal Reserve officials are beginning to signal that higher unemployment rates might be a necessary consequence of their efforts to damp inflation by raising interest rates.”

A commentator cited in the article advised his clients: “We should prepare ourselves for projections intended to communicate the Fed’s resolve to reduce inflation by targeting a higher level of unemployment.”

Once again, pundits are discussing the mythical “natural rate” of unemployment. The WSJ reminds us that a decade ago, the “natural rate” was seen as between 5 and 6% (it currently is 3.6%). Prepare for more unemployment!

So workers are working more for less, with their wages eaten away by galloping inflation. A recession is here or looming on the near horizon. They have depleted their savings and are maxing out their credit cards. And rising unemployment is imminent.

In the US, neither political party offers any relief for workers. The Republicans preach the ugly, stale, and counterproductive sermon of austerity. The Democrats pretend that everything is or will soon be better.

Both parties obsess over symbols, cultural choices, and manners, while the material foundations of social life rapidly deteriorate. Both parties worship at the altar of individualism and herald the singular value of free choice, while the conditions necessary for informed choices and wise decisions are swept away by a cynical, corrupted capitalist media. Both parties place the claims of capital ahead of the urgent needs of the working masses and oppressed peoples.

With economic storms battering the people for the third time in twenty-two years, as inequality continues to expand, as the quality of life is threatened and vulgarized, as stresses erupt in violence and nihilism, as war continues to be the constant of daily life, one must wonder if this is the time for new ideas, new approaches-- out with the old, in with the new.

Are the dominant political parties and organizations in the capitalist world up to these challenges? Are the old social democrats or their new incarnations addressing these catastrophic crises? Do the rising populists of the right or left offer solutions or distractions?

Time is running out.

Greg Godels
zzsblogml@gmail.com

The Peace Question and Imperialism

The war in Ukraine is a propaganda war, with all of the belligerents, sponsors, and their allies churning out-- through an abjectly subservient media-- masses of lies and disinformation. In this regard, they resemble other wars, but with an added dose of shamelessness.

For that reason, it is difficult to discern how the war is being conducted or who has the military advantage at any time. Like all modern wars, atrocity stories abound and losses are wildly exaggerated.

But what separates this war from wars in the recent and not-so-recent past is the near-absence of an organized anti-war movement. It is more than a curious oddity that there are few actions in the streets or campaigns of influence or resistance to stop the mayhem of this brutal war. Sure, there are generic appeals to cut military budgets or oppose war philosophically, but little action to stop this particular war. In spite of the so-called “fog” of war, everyone knows that soldiers and civilians alike are dying in significant numbers, that bodies are ripped apart, homes destroyed, and people dislodged from their homes. No amount of “fog” can hide this.

Of course, there are a few prominent voices-- Pope Francis, even Henry Kissinger-- who have called for a cessation of fighting and negotiations. And Communists and trade unionists in Italy, Greece, and Turkey have blocked NATO weapons shipments, staged demonstrations, and picketed embassies.

But in most cities, states, and countries, there are few actions directed against the war in Ukraine. And most surprisingly, the leftists in Europe and the Americas, usually leading the way against war, are largely silent. They haven’t even minimally demanded that their own countries stay out of this war.

Instead, they have tacitly or openly sided with one belligerent or another. I have written and spoken on different occasions against taking sides in the conflict. Moreover, I have sought to place the war in the context of classical imperialism and suggested that the left’s support of either belligerent or its sponsors is misplaced, akin to the collapse of left opposition at the beginning of World War I. In that case, the left succumbed to narrow nationalist appeals. In this case, the left is succumbing to a muddled concept of imperialism and anti-imperialism.

Rather than repeat the argument, it might be useful to look at how and why leftists justify their support for one side or the other and refrain from adding their voice to the cause of peace in Ukraine.

It is easy to dismiss those who uncritically support Ukraine. Apart from the rabid nationalists of the “Glory to Ukraine” crowd, who welcome the conflict and hope to draw the Western capitalist countries into a crusade against Russia, there are those who simplistically see the war as a naked aggression with no back story. From ignorance of the post-Soviet Ukrainian history of corruption, reaction, Western meddling and aggression, or from willful collaboration with US and NATO intrigue, these new Cold Warriors seek a Russian defeat and have no interest in an immediate peaceful settlement or concern about the mayhem.

Against them are the more measured comrades who, remembering the Cold War standoff between the US and its allies and the Soviet Union and its allies, conflate today’s Russia with the Soviet Union. They recognize how the Soviet Union constituted a pole of resistance that countered and sometimes reversed the Cold War imperialist alliance’s designs on the world. US imperialism, the dominant imperialist power at the time, was effectively checked by the Soviet Union from 1945 until the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991. These anti-imperialists see Russia, in its war on Ukraine, as a similar emerging pole against US imperialism and see Russia’s invasion as an expression of a break-up of the absolute military and economic US dominance of the world established after the departure of the Soviet Union. For them, a multipolar world is in birth.

There are shards of truth in this view, but Russia is not the Soviet Union. It does not share its ideology; rather, its motives replace Soviet internationalism with an aspiring great power nationalism. While it exploits cracks in US global hegemony, it does not offer an alternative vision or unconditional assistance to the victims of capitalism and imperialism. In that regard, Russia is no Cuba, either.

Russia’s foreign policy is capitalist opportunism: friends with Turkey or Israel one moment, in conflict the next moment. Russia aligns with Saudi Arabia when it's economically profitable, while fighting Saudi proxies in Syria. There are no consistent principles guiding it. Nor can there be for a country that rejected socialism for capitalism. Those who see Russian foreign policy and alliances as progressive are very selective in their examples.

Russia’s leaders readily embrace the capitalist ethos and reject the Soviet project, though they appeal, when needed, to Soviet symbols and traditions when useful.

It may be true that the Russian invasion ultimately will achieve the goals sought by its ruling class. And it may be true that these gains will come at the expense of US imperialism and its ruling class, but how does that move us any closer to a world of peace and social justice? The rivalries remain, the goals of the respective ruling classes remain uncertain and unstable, despite their claims of peace-loving and democracy-seeking; and the danger of conflict remains high or even higher.

There are others who envision the war-- insofar as Russia is challenging US power-- as a blow for those on the bottom of what we might envision as the imperialist “pyramid” -- the developing countries. Jenny Clegg, for example, writing in The Morning Star, sees the development of “competitors” to US dominance as establishing the first steps toward a multipolar world. She correctly notes that multipolarity “is not a policy but an emerging objective trend…”

Further, she sees unequal exchange between the highly developed countries and the developing countries as the principal contradiction-- the contradiction defining imperialism and anti-imperialism.

While this center-periphery distinction was popular and influential among independent Western “Marxists” in the era when the working classes in the center-- the West-- were generally tamed by social democratic opportunism, it was neither particularly insightful nor of continued relevance. Marx went to great lengths to show that exchange, under capitalist relations of production, was not generally unequal-- values exchange for values. But those same relations of production always produce and reproduce inequality. The locus of inequality-- capitalist exploitation-- is embedded in the capitalist system, not in the thievery of unequal exchange.

As Lenin elaborated, uneven development is a feature of relations between people, social institutions, firms in the same industry, between industries, and between countries, and even continents. It is not unequal exchange that accounts for the uneven development, but differences in the pace of development, cultural and social practices, political and other institutions, and most importantly, especially in the epoch of imperialism, the stunting effects of colonialism, neo-colonialism, and their legacy.

In the last half-century, technological developments have freed capitalists to move, access, and service the material productive forces-- factories, transportation networks, resources-- in order to gain access to formerly inaccessible labor markets, cheapening labor in general. At the same time, this development created rising living standards in some developing countries, while lowering them in some advanced capitalist countries.

Consequently, some capitalist countries-- like India, Turkey, Brazil, Indonesia-- have become powerful rivals to the late-twentieth-century great powers.

The concept of “unequal” exchange as an explanation for the inequality between developed and developing countries (and for the difference between imperialism and anti-imperialism) fails because it implies that should exchanges become equal, that same inequality between states would evaporate. Even more importantly, it suggests that equal exchange-- and not an end of capitalism-- would signal the demise of imperialism.

To understand imperialism as a conflict between advancing and lagging development based upon the unequal terms of economic activity-- a kind of organized thievery-- is to misunderstand the nature of exploitation under capitalism. Intense competition between players-- big and small-- for markets, resources, labor, and capital are the essence of capitalism and imperialism. There is no sharp line between this competition and war.

Clegg wants us to believe that in a multipolar world, with US power diminished, establishing equal exchange will bring forth a period of civil, well-behaved, respectful competition. She insists that this contrast with today’s dangerous world is captured by the distinction between competition and rivalry, a distinction that I think few will find satisfying. In an aside, she explains: “competition is not the same as rivalry-- think competing in a race as opposed to deliberately tripping over your rival in that race.” To think that sporting competition doesn’t evolve commonly into no-holds-barred conflict and into violence is surely out of touch with the history of both sports and international politics in the twentieth century.

From the reliance on the now intellectually fashionable and prominent rational choice or game theory to the behavior of capitalist enterprises, from the constant haggling over borders, sea lanes and territorial waters to establishment of military and economic alliances, there is little evidence that capitalist countries are striving for a fair economic playing field with fixed, transparent, and respected rules. "Win-win" is not part of the capitalist vocabulary.

Clegg writes of “the old-- US hegemonic power” as having “been in relative decline” and the “new-- a more equal distribution of wealth and power” as developing, albeit slowly. While one might happily concede that aspects of US power and influence have been challenged and dampened, while one might add that the US shows many signs of economic, political, and social decline, it does not follow, nor is it likely, that any “new distribution of wealth and power” will be more equitable or just. And most importantly, even if wealth and power were more equitably distributed between countries, there is little reason to believe it would be more equitably distributed within those countries. Clegg’s multipolarity can make no such promises to the working classes.

Finally, there are those on the left who have carried on a lifelong struggle against US imperialism and can only see an enemy of our enemy as our friend. There are few people on the righteous left now alive who can remember a time when the US was not the leading great power and the anchor for the capitalist alliance against socialism, socialism as a legitimate political current, as a rival to global capitalism, and as a pole rallying the forces of anti-imperialism.

Therefore, it is hard to envision the world not benefitting from the defanging of US imperialism, from its fall as a great power. No great power in our time has caused more deadly mischief. But that surely displays a weak understanding of capitalism and its stages of development.

There were nationalist leaders in various countries under the boot of British imperialism in the interwar period who welcomed the rise of Hitler and Tojo, greeting them as possible saviors from hundreds of years of suppression by the British Empire, the leading imperialist of the time.

Subhas Chandra Bose, for example, an Indian nationalist leader who was once president of the Indian National Congress, was so deeply committed to overthrowing British rule in India that he actively and unapologetically collaborated with the Nazis and Japanese in World War II. This myopia is an extreme version of the blinders worn by many anti-imperialists who fail to understand the logic of imperialism and its unbreakable link to capitalism.

Chandra Bose demonstrates the hollowness of narrow nationalism and obsessive self-regard over viewing the world through the lens of class and class solidarity.

The struggle against US imperialism, like the struggle against its predecessor, the British Empire, will ultimately be resolved at home when the people finally refuse to continue paying the price for their rulers’ grand designs. Of course, those oppressed by imperialism play an equally important role, that of resisters; though imperialism like rust, never sleeps. It is an imperative, a demand made by capitalist accumulation-- if it is defeated in one place, it will surely find another place to satisfy its lust. This dynamic only finally ends when our world finds socialism. The wishful thinking of a benign capitalism with all participants peacefully on an even playing field is just that-- a wishful thought.

Multipolarity-- a notion first discussed by bourgeois academics looking for tools to understand the dynamics of global relations-- has been adopted by a segment of the anti-imperialist left. While it assuredly describes an actual trend emerging, as Jenny Clegg acknowledges, it has often been presented as an anti-imperialist stage shifting the world balance of forces in the direction of a better world.

I have argued that this is a retreat from classical imperialism as understood by VI Lenin and his followers. In the context of an unstable world in ideological disorder and suffering untold crises, there are no guarantees that the poles that emerge or challenge the post-Cold War super-pole are a step forward or a step back simply because they are alternative poles. Undoubtedly, any resistance that weakens the asymmetry of power that the US holds should be welcome. But we should not presume that every opponent will become a force for stability, justice, and peace. Knowing what we know about the history of capitalism from its first expansionist era accumulating involuntary human capital to exploit the riches of the new world should chasten our expectations about new rivals to US imperialism.

With the fall of the Soviet Union as a backdrop and the uncertainty left in its wake, we should be cautious about anointing any new candidates for the role of arch-rival not only to US imperialism, but to all imperialism as well as its genesis, capitalism.

While the left futilely disputes the victim and the victimizer, working people are dying unnecessarily, suffering horrific wounds, homelessness, and despair-- all the products of modern war. Working class lives should not be proxies in ideological debates. Events will decide who has the correct understanding of imperialism, but history will not be kind to those who failed, in the meantime, to oppose the war and to seek a peaceful solution.

Greg Godels
zzsblogml@gmail.com

Report Card on a Failing Economic System

On Friday, May 6, the Federal Reserve released data showing that consumer credit (debt) has been accelerating since the fourth quarter of last year, with revolving credit (largely credit card debt) speeding up at an even greater pace since the third quarter of 2021. Total consumer credit grew by an annualized rate of 7% in the fourth quarter of last year, increased to 9.7% in this year’s first quarter, and expanded to 14% in March.

At the same time, revolving credit-- the debt largely incurred through credit cards-- grew 8.3% in the third quarter and 12.7% in the fourth quarter of 2021, and then 21.4% in the first quarter of this year, and an astonishing 35.3% in March!

Clearly, the US economy’s reliance on consumer spending is more and more dependent upon consumer debt, especially the credit card. For months, the business press has been hailing the continued expansion of consumer spending-- a huge contributor to overall economic growth-- as the one bright spot in the news. Now we see that consumer spending is built on the sands of consumer debt.

Likewise, personal savings (as a percentage of disposable personal income) in April, 2022 reached a low unseen since September of 2008, a sure sign that people are dipping into savings to make ends meet.

And subprime-- low credit score-- loans are failing. Subprime car loan and lease delinquencies hit a record high in February.

To make matters worse, the Federal Reserve has, after more than a decade of unprecedented near-zero Federal funds target interest rates, raised the rate by half a percentage point, the greatest one-time increase in 22 years. Without a doubt, this will translate into higher credit card interest rates going forward, applied to a broad, rapidly growing mass of consumer debt.

Thus, the consumer is turning to the credit card-- incurring debt-- precisely when the cost of using the card is rising.

Higher interest rates are exploding mortgage rates-- and dampening the over-heated housing market-- in some cases, doubling this year. Because of rising mortgage rates, new home sales fell 16.6% in April from March, yet prices of homes continue to rise: the median existing home price rose 14.8% from April, 2021 to April 2022. While it’s dramatically costlier for the homebuyer to finance a new home, the price of a house continues to rise alarmingly-- a perfect, classic housing-market bubble on the verge of bursting!

But the plight of the consumer gets worse: inflation continues to drive the cost of living for the average consumer higher and higher. For eight months, the annualized rate of inflation has been rising, culminating in an 8.5% rate in March and 8.3% rate in April-- rates rarely seen in the last 40 years. Food prices alone-- the most critical consumer goods for the least advantaged-- are up 10.8% for the year ending in April, 2022, the greatest 12-month increase since November, 1980.

When inflation raised its ugly head last year, pundits and the Federal Reserve dismissed it as temporary, an anomaly caused by dislocations following the Covid pandemic. In response, I wrote:

Despite the admonitions of the central bankers and financial gurus, inflation seldom self-corrects. It rarely runs its course. Instead, inflation tends to gather momentum because all the economic actors attempt to catch up and get ahead of it.

Today, the central bankers and financial gurus agree that inflation will be around for some time, eroding the buying power of the average worker.

Despite the dire accusations in the business press that increases in worker compensation is driving inflation, the truth is the opposite. The average worker’s hourly income-- adjusted for inflation-- has dropped by 2.6% from last April! Whatever gains are made, they are soon devoured by inflation.

Nor does the future portend well. US economic growth (GDP) sunk by 1.5% in the first quarter of 2022. As they did with the inflation crisis, pundits are shrugging this off as a self-correcting aberration. Yet, it is hard to imagine that the shrinking incomes, expanding debt, and fierce inflation will not take its toll on consumer confidence and spending, the factors that contribute far-and-away the most to US growth.

A powerful indicator of roadblocks ahead for growth was the first-quarter collapse of labor productivity. Thus, labor productivity dropped by an astonishing 7.5% in the nonfarm business sector, the largest decrease since the third quarter of 1947-- nearly 75 years ago! This collapse was brought on by a 5.5% increase in hours worked and a 2.4% drop in economic output (this is a broad measure of hours worked, including employees, proprietors, and unpaid family workers).

Companies continue to compete for employees and hire new employees, while the economic product shrinks, a formula-- under capitalism-- for future slowing accumulation, a coming decline in the rate of profit. Some of the US’s largest retailers are reporting a decline in earnings.

This employment boom arose especially in the technology sector, where tech start-ups round up capital, borrow heavily, and hire furiously on the faith that profits will come later. Risk taking, future high return-seeking venture capitalists and the extremely low cost of borrowing, combine with a young, educated, competitive workforce to create the perfect conditions for inflated expectations and recklessness. With interest rates rising and uncertainty growing, the tech bubble is now leaking-- hiring freezes, layoffs, and austerity are occurring or in the offing.

The technology sector is the most vulnerable sector of the capitalist economy because of a long period of easy access to capital and a long incubation period before returns on investment appear. Banks have become impatient for profits from the latest glitzy app, just as they gave up waiting for returns on their investment in promiscuous fracking a few years ago (that is being corrected with the greatly increased demand for energy in Europe as a result of the Ukraine war).

The tech sector's troubles are reflected in equity markets, with the tech-based NASDAQ sinking faster, yet dragging down the S&P index as well. So far this year, as of May 20, the NASDAQ composite has dropped well over a quarter, with the S&P falling 19%, the S&P’s worst start to a year since 1970. With 8 straight weeks of losses, the Dow Jones Industrial Averages has incurred its worst stretch since 1932. For those whose only exposure to the stock market is their 401(k) retirement plans, stock performance is a disaster-- investment advisors and managers have put a greater proportion of their funds into stocks (as opposed to other investment instruments like bonds) than in the past. This will be catastrophic for those planning to retire in the next few years.

Bonds, a usual safe haven when the markets are down, are also down for the year. And bitcoin, the darling of the financial hipsters and the crooks, has lost a third of its value this year.

Nonetheless, investors are buying in the face of a deepening bear market, seduced by the old saw of “buying on the dip” -- buying stocks when they are at the bottom and, therefore, a bargain. Despite the market's abysmal performance in March, individual investors bought a net $28 billion in stocks and ETFs-- a record. This would appear the greatest exercise in wishful thinking since the 2007-2009 crash. Maybe it's an omen!

Certainly, if equity markets continue to lose trillions of dollars of hypothetical wealth (the top six Standard and Poor’s companies lost $3.76 trillion of nominal value through May 20), the negative wealth effect will restrain spending, especially among those in the middle strata and in the bourgeoisie. Bloomberg estimates that global stocks have lost over $11 trillion in value: “Investors continue to reduce their positions, particularly in technology and growth stocks,” said Andreas Lipkow, a strategist at Comdirect Bank. “But sentiment needs to deteriorate significantly more to form a potential floor.”

What does all of this bad economic news mean?

The end of the Cold War brought not a peace dividend, but a gift to the victorious capitalist ruling classes. It was, after all, a struggle between capitalism and socialism, despite what the bogus left thought about Soviet socialism. Without question, the capitalist class understood the Western confrontation with the Soviet Union as an existential battle.

With capitalist triumphalism came decades of super-exploitation of millions of workers thrust into the global labor market. Billionaires abounded, income and wealth inequality exploded, and the resultant accumulated capital sought new and creative destinations. To a large extent, the financial sector enthusiastically accommodated this need by devising innovative, complex instruments, new investment structures, and opaque financial operations.

Capital’s imperative to reproduce itself took it into riskier and riskier places; the growing volume of accumulated capital became more difficult to productively reinvest; investors booked “profits” that were more and more contingent or hypothetical; the euphoria of hyper-accumulation invited greater and greater leverage; and the accumulation mechanism finally crashed under the weight of tenuous, hypothetical, and “fictitious” capital in 2007.

The history of the twenty-first century since the 2000 tech collapse has been one continuous struggle on the part of the Central Banks, international economic organizations, government administrations, and financial institutions to rescue capitalism from the giddy orgy of speculation and overinvestment triggered by capitalist triumphalism.

These actors have attempted to seal off the trash-- bad investments, overvalued, unredeemable bonds, unrecoverable debt-- from the healthier economy, while injecting massive volumes of no- or low-cost (near-zero interest rates) liquidity into a shell-shocked economy.

The raging inflation that emerged late in 2021 places the masters of the capitalist economic universe in a policy vice. To stem inflation, they must raise interest rates, which invariably dampens economic growth. But economic growth has already slowed-- indeed, turned negative in the US for the first quarter of this year. With so many economic indicators declining or going negative, rising interest rates will only accelerate the slowdown of consumer spending, productivity, wage growth, investment, and social spending, while increasing debt and its costs.

This is truly a bleak picture and it's not clear what useful tools remain in the hands of the policy makers to brighten it. The NATO/Russia/Ukraine blunder of a disruptive, grinding war can only worsen global economic conditions for everyone except the arms makers.

We can only hope that people will make the connection: capitalism breeds misery and war.

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