When “No” means “Yes” to War

At a time when divisions and confusion in the anti-war, anti-imperialist movement have made many activists bystanders to the war in Ukraine, CodePink has boldly led the way in denouncing the war and calling for negotiation. Unlike some groups that buried the war question in a laundry list of grievances, causes, and injustices, CodePink focuses laser-like on the danger of escalation and possibly nuclear war.

Thus, when I got an email from CodePink on October 25 with “Finally!” on the subject line, I fully expected to learn of a new and important development in the peace movement.

I wasn’t disappointed. 

The hard-working peace warriors of CodePink announced-- with some measure of pride-- that “After months of grassroots activism, 30 Democrats in Congress have signed on to Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal's letter to President Biden calling for a ceasefire and diplomatic settlement to the war in Ukraine.”  Thirty members of the House Democratic [self-styled] Progressive Caucus had signed on to-- an admittedly tepid-- statement departing from the Biden Administration’s rabid instigation of war in Ukraine. 

With a growing call for negotiation from unlikely public figures like Henry Kissinger, Jeffrey Sachs, and Elon Musk, with a mid-September Quincy Institute poll showing that most US citizens (57%) support negotiations to end the war, with 57 Republicans voting in May against an additional $40 billions of military aid to continue the war, and with Republican leadership suggesting that, should they win the interim election, they might not support further US military aid to continue the war, one would welcome “Progressive” Democrats seizing the opportunity to help bring this dangerous war to an end. 

Despite a complete and total lack of confidence in the Democratic Party and a belief in its limitless appetite for political opportunism, I decided to celebrate CodePink’s efforts by forwarding the group’s email to my comrades and friends in the Pittsburgh Anti War Committee; we had only recently staged demonstrations in Pittsburgh to call for an end to the war. Democrats breaking away from their party’s shameful role in sparking the war and fueling its escalation certainly deserved acknowledgement and praise.

But the celebration ended within 36 hours when the leadership of the “progressive” Caucus rescinded the letter. Caucus chair Jayapal and some who signed the letter unceremoniously and cravenly blamed staff members for releasing the letter while declaring continued loyalty to the Administration’s war huckstering.

I was compelled to apologize for misleading my comrades. It was not the first time I underestimated the spinelessness of the Democratic Party.

While the “progressive” Democrats shamed themselves, the Democratic Administration chose that moment to reveal their reckless nuclear policy. The Defense Department announced that the “Pentagon’s Strategy Won’t Rule Out Nuclear Use Against Non-Nuclear Threats,” as Bloomberg headlined. Further, Bloomberg writer Anthony Capaccio claimed that the “Defense strategy shuns limits on use once embraced by Biden.”

Earlier, the monopoly capitalist media vilified Putin for suggesting that Russia would use nuclear weapons under certain circumstances, a suggestion that Putin recently pulled back. Yet not a word of alarm or condemnation over an explicit policy of potentially using nuclear weapons when there is no counterpart nuclear threat, a serious escalation of the tension in Ukraine.  

With an approaching interim election, have the Democrats given the anti-imperialist left any reason to vote for them?

Margaret Kimberley-- writing in The Black Agenda Report– said this about the Congressional Progressive Caucus’s opportunism:

This fiasco is yet another reminder that the left in this country had better start speaking up for themselves. The democrats are the party of war and will not allow even a tiny expression of dissent. Some of the letter signatories have fallen on their swords, yelled loud mea culpas and joined in condemning themselves. Others are silent after having stepped out only to be stepped upon.

No one should think that help is coming from Washington. The U.S. involvement in Ukraine will end with negotiations or with a hot war. That determination will not be made by Pramila Jayapal or anyone else in congress who calls themselves progressive.

Democrats are welcome to join us, but we must cancel this war without relying on the Democratic Party leadership. They are the problem.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

Ruling Class Angst

There is a profound difference between the economic crisis of 2007-2009 and the evolving crisis of 2022. In 2007, capitalists feared the collapse of their own enterprises, but they had no doubt that the system was salvageable, albeit at costs that might prove difficult to impose. They knew that if the politicians could be won over to endorsing Wall Street’s prescriptions, if the people kept their pitchforks tucked away, and if the capitalists, in their greed, could be kept from devouring each other, then there was a good chance that an elite economic version of an “EMS” rescue team could save capitalism from further decline. Sure, the executives at Lehman Brothers, Bank of America, AIG, and many other firms had every right to fear for the future of their companies. But few capitalists imagined an existential threat to the system; few failed to believe in a way out.

This time is different.

Stagflation is a different kind of beast and that beast has the bourgeoisie, its friends, and its hangers-on terrified. The problem is that economic “science,” as they know it, only offers one possible escape and it has dire economic and political consequences. Once they recognized that inflation was not simply a momentary speed bump (as I predicted nearly a year ago), Central Bankers and economic gurus who have studied the 1970s-- the long, painful decade of stagflation-- prescribed a drastic remedy of slamming on the brakes of economic growth to contain inflation. Some nonetheless fear a long period of inflation and stagnant growth.

The 1970s taught that cheerleading, patience, and half-measures would not work. The Whip Inflation Now (WIN) campaign, price controls, and other approaches failed until the then-Federal Reserve chair, Paul Volker, boldly imposed draconian interest-rate increases that threw the economy into deep recession. Inflation tamed. Lesson learned. 

Certainly, no political regime wants to be associated with income-and-wealth-devouring inflation. But neither would it want to suffer through a job-devouring, wage-declining recession. Voters and subjects seek to punish the politicians in office when either situation arises. 

Thus, politicians and rulers are caught on the horns of a dilemma. If they ignore inflation, they pay a political price. If they attack inflation and bring on economic decline, they also incur the wrath of the electorate or their subjects. Either option taken constitutes a deep threat to the incumbent party or the ruling regime. 

Recently, some politicians have chosen to ignore the lesson that bourgeois economists have drawn from the 1970s bout with stagflation. Turkish president Erdogan decided to defy the convention by coercing the country’s central bank into lowering interest rates in the face of growing inflation, betting that the benefits of economic growth would outweigh any increase in inflation. He was wrong. Inflation has soared with devastating results on the people’s living standards and security.

Even more recently, the newly selected Conservative UK prime minister, Liz Truss, out of sheer arrogance or a profound economic ignorance, offered a budget based upon promoting growth (predictably through tax cuts for the rich!) and ignoring the anti-inflation moves of the Bank of England (BOE). Financial markets immediately reacted violently, forcing the BOE to go on a corrective bond-buying spree, and earning a rare rebuke of European government policy from the International Monetary Fund. Once again, the lesson of the 1970s stagnation crisis was harshly driven home.

With an interim election only weeks away, the ruling party in the US fears a severe beatdown from the angry electorate, devastated by sharp price increases imposed by profit-hungry monopoly corporations, declining incomes, and exploding interest payments on loans. At best, President Biden can only browbeat his Saudi allies for sustaining high energy prices in a global market disrupted by US corporate interests and US-instigated war, while the Federal Reserve slams on the economic brakes.

Liberal and social democratic labor leaders, party leaders, and pundits correctly object to the frequent blaming of inflation upon “greedy” workers or bloated union contracts. Even a cursory glance at the Bureau of Labor Statistics demonstrates that throughout this inflationary period income growth trailed and did not lead the growth in prices. That said, what do they think caused this persisting inflation? What can they offer in response to the bitter pill prescribed by bourgeois economists and the Central Banks?

Hell bent on saving capitalism from itself, some liberal and left thinkers like Dean Baker and Richard Wolff see price controls, ration cards, or public commissions as possible approaches (I refute these solutions here). Even if these fixes were likely to be enforced by governments thoroughly captured by capitalism, it would be unlikely that they could even be adopted in today’s volatile political atmosphere. The impending severe crisis cannot be met by wishful bromides or failed tactics.

More seriously, some on the left point to “financialization” as the cause of capitalism’s ills today. While the much-abused term begs many questions, it does describe one side of the restructuring of roles assumed by the leading capitalist countries as a response to the previous, 1970s version of stagflation. That is, so-called “financialization” was the new role of some advanced capitalist countries that deindustrialized after the stagflation of the 1970s. The flight of industry to low-wage countries was part of the answer to 1970s stagflation, stabilizing global capitalism and restoring the rate of profit for most of the next two decades. 

“Financialization” was the accompanying new role for those capitalist countries that surrendered their industries to emergent low-wage countries.

The stagflation of the 1970s caused the demise of the Keynesian consensus that had come to dominate economic policy since the Great Depression. That toolbox contained nothing to fix what was over a decade of roaring inflation. Indeed, many orthodox economists blamed the Keynesian tools for creating the conditions that led to that round of stagflation. In any event, it was the “financialization” era that superseded 1970s stagflation and was then believed to restore capitalist accumulation after its assault by stagflation. Therefore, it’s difficult to envision “financialization” as both a solution and cause of stagflation. 

While it is fashionable, since the crisis of 2007-2009, to see the dramatic rise of financial engineering and activity-- centered on the development of the many new financial instruments-- as the sand in the gears of capitalism, there is no reason to believe that it is any more than another adaptive stage in a resilient, but constantly crisis-plagued socio-economic system. 

It is difficult to foresee an easy, relatively painless capitalist solution to stagflation. That is not to discount the durability of capitalism. But the history of the 1970s teaches that any answer comes with enormous pain. We are only beginning to experience the rising costs from interest payments on top of the rising consumer prices. We are only beginning to feel the effects of galloping inflation compounded by stagnant incomes and growing unemployment. We are only beginning to recognize the strain on retirement funds and 401k’s. The lessons of the 1970s are distant and poorly remembered. But they are there for those who wish to heed them.

It should not be lost to anyone studying those lessons that hourly wages in the US adjusted for inflation have remained stagnant since the 1970s. More families now have two or more earners to compensate. Household debt has risen to counteract the loss in earning power. And income and wealth inequality has exploded, topping any other historic period. 

With a lost decade to stagflation and forty subsequent years of a tepid, crisis-ridden “recovery,” it is hard to imagine how people can endure another round of stagflation. It is hard to imagine how people can fail to explore the alternative to the capitalist system that brings so much unnecessary pain and misery.

Of course, part of the reason for ideological stagnation lies with the political parties, institutions, and misleaders that are so deeply invested in seeing capitalism persist. There would be no “social justice” industry-- the tens of thousands of foundations, NGOs, and charities-- without capitalism. Their criticism of capitalism ends, when the subject of socialism arises. Similarly, educators, writers, and media figures cannot risk alienating those who guarantee their stature and incomes. It goes without saying that both major US political parties are entirely invested in capitalism.

Yet their cynicism and hypocrisy would evaporate if it weren’t for the enormous material resources that capitalism makes available to those who safeguard the system's future. That will not change until the masses of the people use the power of their numbers to change it.

Whatever joy we may derive from the ruling class’s fears and anxiety over the current crisis is overshadowed by the hardships yet to disrupt the lives of millions of working people. 

Socialism is the alternative.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

Could We Reconsider Socialism?

We swim in a sea of obfuscation, confusion, and fabrication.

We are bombarded by academics, commentators, consultants-- experts of every type-- who build their brands on telling us what our rulers want us to hear. Through calculated ruses, they penetrate our entertainment, even our escapism, with embedded messages that strengthen conformity and consensus.

The purveyors of this conformity-- the messengers-- are given the stolid image of trustworthy tradition or the superficial appearance of daring nonconformity or diversity, depending on the sensibility of the audience, though the message is the same in all cases.

Some on the left like to dress this domination of the field of ideas-- a relentless, ongoing process-- with the sexy Gramscian notion of ruling class “hegemony,” but it has long been a part of the leftist legacy of Marx-- “The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class” -- and recognized, but undoubtedly unspoken even before Marx.

But today’s bourgeois society has utilized previously unimaginable advances in communication and technology to achieve even more unimaginable control over the thinking of the people. This is what Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky so insightfully called “manufacturing consent.”

There is, and will always be, resistance to this conformity-- the attempt at mass hypnosis. From Marx’s time, it has mostly been aimed at the ruling class-- then understood almost universally as the capitalist class and its courtiers. 

But two related events have changed the character of this resistance. First, the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the collapse of its role as an alternative model to capitalism. Since 1991, the idea of a radical departure-- a complete rupture-- with capitalism has been shattered, replaced by tactical attacks on aspects or types of capitalism: disaster-capitalism, neoliberal capitalism, racial-capitalism, carbon-fueled capitalism, and a host of other hyphenated capitalisms. The hyphens tell us that it is not capitalism, per se, that must be rejected, but variants of an otherwise benign economic system. Countless activists and organizations propound anti-capitalism, but never tell us what they think should replace capitalism. The word “socialism” never appears in their narrative.

And second, the retreat of social democracy, which was once understood as a socially more egalitarian alternative to raw capitalism, and yet an alternative that paradoxically retained the capitalist class at the summit of economic and political activity. The once popular social democracy abandoned the program of leveling the effects of capitalism for a promissory note of expanded opportunity and the inherent justice of markets. In place of wealth and income redistribution and welfarism, the new social democracy subscribes to the clever maxim that a rising tide lifts all boats, so let’s unleash the tide and let the boats fend for themselves!

Nothing more clearly demonstrates that classic redistributive social democracy is not merely ill, but in its death throes than the swift, unprincipled, and complete destruction of the Jeremy Corbyn program in the UK Labour Party or the stealth undermining of the progressive wing of the US Democratic Party by party conservatives and the wing’s own ready capitulation.

The left suffers from a foreign policy disconnect as well. Where Marxism and real-existing socialism insisted that capitalism and imperialism were intrinsically tied, the vast majority of the left today drink from the capitalist goblet, associating global social justice with the moral crusades of the advanced capitalist powers. A carefully groomed notion of human rights-- rights anchored in petty bourgeois interests-- and a long-soiled, class-biased, strictly formal concept of democracy seduce the weak-tea left. 

Unfortunately, those seduced by these views side with the US and its allies or occupy the sidelines in aggressions aimed at Cuba, Venezuela, the former Yugoslavia, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and today’s war in Ukraine, among others.

Fortunately, there is a small, but dedicated segment of the left that staunchly and consistently opposes Great Power imperialism, though many of them myopically see it as solely the adventures of the US and its NATO allies. They fail to recognize the Leninist thesis that imperialism is the inevitable product of mature capitalism. And all capitalist powers-- big and small-- engage with imperialism; they have no choice in the matter. Whether they have a dominant capitalist sector or a robust public sector, capital will pursue its expansion within the imperialist system and compete with other capitals within that system. Invariably, capital influences states on a local, regional, national or international level, everywhere that capital seeks profit. In the era of imperialism, capital does not influence the state, it typically is the state.  With the demise of the Soviet-centered socialist community, there is no place uninfected by capital. 

The long dominance of US-based capitalism-- just as the long dominance of British capitalism before it-- has led some to believe that the logic of capitalism is not relevant to countries with weaker or fewer monopolies or less integrated finance capital. In a sense, they believe that because the less powerful national capitals fail to compete successfully, because they are restricted in markets, denied financial resources, barred from resources, sanctioned, threatened, or otherwise pressed into a dependent or subordinate role by US capital and its enormous, powerful coercive structures, both the people and their rulers alike-- and their battered capitalist enterprises-- are, therefore, equally victims of US capital.

Indeed, the people are victims, but they are victims of capitalism, not solely US capitalism.

In today’s imperialist game of capitalist competition, US monopoly capital is the big winner, but if they weren’t, someone else would be. And if some other state monopoly capitalist great power replaces the US, everyone else would, in some way or another, be losers. That is the essential feature of capitalist competition since its origin; it is the heart beat of capitalism.

Of course, US capitalism and its predatory ways must be exposed and resisted. The people of Europe must understand that the sacrifices that they are being told to make to maintain a war in Ukraine are extorted by US capitalism’s plan to wrest the European energy market from Russia. 

But the pain that they will experience from tenacious inflation and government-induced recession must be laid at the capitalist system’s doorstep and not only that of the US empire.

The tragedy unfolding in Europe is a consequence of imperialist competition, imperialist alliances, and the instability of capitalism, none of which can be completely overcome without a full-scale attack on capitalism and its replacement with a cooperative, profit-free social system. 

Capitalism, exploitation, and its associated oppression constitute the ultimate source of the misery and suffering that afflict a world that produces unprecedented wealth-- wealth sufficient to eliminate most of that suffering endured by humanity. 

When the left forgets that intimate connection between capitalism, imperialism, and war, it tragically takes sides in the war in Ukraine. Lenin, who best articulated the connection, called for ending all imperialist war or --should it break out-- turning war into civil war to overthrow capitalism; he saw no other choice that served the working class and its interests.

Consider Iran. Today, we may see the recent rising in Iran depicted as a feminist revolution liberating Iranian women from the tyranny of a moral police; we may see the opposition as a sign of the stirrings of oppressed people, both religiously and nationally oppressed; we may rightly warn of the always present stealth hand of hostile outside forces working to create a more pliable regime, specifically the US security services.

Yet there is no complete picture without noting the class question-- the matter of social inequality under capitalism. Today’s Iran has social inequality rivaling the US (World Bank). Iranian figures show the bottom 10% getting 2% of gross national income while the top 10% get 31%. The afflictions of global capitalism such as rampant inflation strike Iran hard.

While economic aggression by the US and the EU affects the Iranian economy and must be opposed, the economic system and its supporters are the ultimate enemy of the people. The left must recognize this reality and applaud and encourage the Iranian people’s resistance to capitalism and all of its symptoms. Solidarity with the working class is not negotiable.

For many decades, the left has experienced a “retreat from class,” to borrow Ellen Meiksins Wood’s deeply insightful words. The left must not misjudge this moment; it must halt the retreat and recognize the enemy: capitalism.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

Clinging to the Anthropocene

“Anthropocene” is a twenty-first century word-- not that it never appeared before the current century. But its wide acceptance, its broad usage is a feature of the last two decades or so.

Like its late-twentieth-century counterpart, “globalization,” its currency, its popularity in social policy circles, has far outstripped any common, agreed-upon understanding of its meaning.

In a very broad sense, the word “Anthropocene” could refer to the era when the appearance of homo sapiens made an impact upon the earth. That sense of the word, tracing humans back 300 millennia, is of little popular interest outside of researchers in University anthropology departments.

A more interesting sense of the word refers to the era since World War II when the possibility that humans could destroy all life on the planet became a reality-- more than mere science fiction. The actual possibility-- even likelihood-- of a war with nuclear weapons means that a tiny elite holds within its hands the means to reduce the Earth to a lifeless rock orbiting the Sun.

Thus, “Anthropocene” could take on the explicit meaning of “the age when homo sapiens evolved the necessary and sufficient means to destroy all living things on earth.”

Unfortunately, this danger-- though real and seemingly horrendous to contemplate-- has never generated sufficient alarm in the advanced capitalist countries where the elites wield the power of committing global suicide. Yes, there have been mass movements-- often led by Communists and socialists-- to wrest these powers and eliminate the option, but they have so far failed to remove the danger.

In this century, the word “Anthropocene” has become popularly attached to apocalyptic consequences of environmental anarchism. That is to say, the Anthropocene era could be, and most often is, construed as the age when human inattention and freedom of action has threatened to make life for almost everyone a living hell with regard to environmental consequences.

The Anthropocene era, understood in this way, is the era when human interaction with the material world produces waste, harmful physical properties of productive processes, and a host of other byproducts of human activity that damage or spoil the environment to a degree that threatens how most living things will survive or even whether they will survive.

It’s a fool's errand to weigh whether one threat to life (nuclear holocaust) or the other (environmental catastrophe) is worse or more likely. At the same time, it is irresponsible to recognize one but not the other.

Where Marxists and other critics of capitalism have been in the forefront of the struggle against nuclear war, with few exceptions, we have not been as engaged in the struggle for environmental justice. We have not thoroughly brought to bear the unique and incisive Marxist method upon the issues raised by the growing environmental crisis. We have largely conceded that terrain to the liberals and social democrats.

As with all life, human interaction with the world has left a “footprint” on the surrounding environment since hunters and gatherers stripped the prairies, woodlands, and streams of other matter-- organic and inorganic-- for the food and shelter crucial for human survival.

Human gains have often forced changes on the material world, changes that have had consequences to the environment, both good and bad.

It is easy to forget the medieval and later waves of deforestation of Europe, as an example, that left profound changes of climate, shifted migration patterns, and led to social and economic changes.

Human’s adjusting to those changes and nature’s remarkable resilience compensated readily for these usually unforeseen changes.

But as the productive forces developed rapidly and the social relations shifted, impact on the environment grew accordingly. The advancing productive forces that generated and spurred capitalist social relations created, in a relatively short time, a dramatic and profound impact on the environment, an impact that brought harm to humans as well as other living things. The capitalist industrial system created a man-made environment bringing a host of new diseases, spreading old ones, and even changing universal natural processes like the climate.

These environmental consequences threaten to overwhelm nature’s resilience and humanity’s adaptability.

As people attempt to respond to these new and growing threats, it should be expected that Marxists would point to those factors unique to capitalism that bear on and stand in the way of resolving the environmental crisis: capitalist profit, class inequality, imperialist competition, militarism, and war.

Insofar as only socialism can eliminate these features of capitalism, the environmental crisis cannot be resolved once and for all without revolutionary change.

Unfortunately, we have done an inadequate job of introducing these considerations into environmental debates and struggles.

We have failed to show that since profits are the lifeblood of capitalist productive activity, corporations will always place corporate interests above social goods. Environmental safety and corporate profits will always come into conflict.

We have failed to persuade the movement that the poor and working class cannot be asked to sacrifice living standards, to bear the burden of saving the environment, while elites use their wealth to shelter their lifestyles from those sacrifices.

Similarly, we must make a better case that any answer to the global environmental crisis must not demand that less developed countries remain undeveloped, that the cost of environmental soundness not be borne by those who never participated in causing the crisis, while the beneficiaries of capitalism’s environmental abuse self-righteously point to their sacrifices in banning plastic bottles.

Too often overlooked in environmental struggles is the enormous footprint of the US military and other countries’ militaries. The exposure of the linkage of militarism to capitalism and to environmental degradation is a role for the Marxist left.

Is there anything more insanely wasteful and environmentally threatening than imperialist war? The current war in Ukraine is an orgy of pointless wastage of energy resources, of deadly and costly fires, explosions, and destruction. Marxists should make the connections.

What we don’t need are theories inspired less by Marx or Marxism and more by the cachet of Marx fandom among young people and the understandable desperate search for alternatives by those fearful of environmental catastrophe.

According to a zealous article in the Guardian, a new book is forthcoming from Kohei Saito with the enticing title of Capital and the Anthropocene. The allusion to Capital (Marx’s and Piketty’s?) and the invocation of the fashionable “Anthropocene” will surely have many anxious with anticipation. And the tease is that the Japanese version has already sold a half-million copies. Before publication of the popular book in English, an “academic” text is in preparation by Cambridge University Press, we are told.

So why does the Guardian article leave me-- well-- guarded?

The Marx-invoking hype raises my gut suspicions. I remember all too well the hype around the execrable Hardt and Negri book, Empire, published in 2000 by Harvard University Press to great acclaim, promising to explain an era of declining nation-state influence and a “new” transnational empire of international organizations and multinational corporations, an explanation bathed in nearly impenetrable prose. Simplified, Empire was a stylized revisit to Kautsky’s “ultra imperialism”, a modern "refutation" of Leninism.

On the heels of its publication, the US (a nation-state) went on an orgy of invasion and occupation worthy of the era of classical imperialism so aptly described by the “obsolete” V.I. Lenin more than eighty years earlier. So much for the new and fashionable.

Alarming is the Guardian article’s attribution of the idea of “degrowth” to Saito. Degrowth-- halting or reversing the expansion of economic activity-- is a return to Malthusianism-- a doctrine roundly rejected by Marx. Degrowth is a surrender to the idea that humans cannot continue to expand the quality and content of our shared life and have a healthy environment. It negates the optimism of a world of greater, more diverse, and more egalitarian opportunities that come with economic growth.

Degrowth places the blame for environmental destruction, not on capitalism, consumerism, militarism, imperialism, war, and inequality, but on the productive forces that have elevated humanity from a Hobbesian brutish state of nature to the safety and security that many know today and the even higher state that all could know in the future.

Hopefully, Saito has not been confused by the distinction between consumption and consumerism. Tens of millions have been denied adequate consumption-- the minimal material means to thrive, reproduce, and retire comfortably-- by capitalist inequality. At the same time, capitalism promotes consumerism-- the vulgar indulgence in false needs, contrived obsolescence, overindulgence, addictive behavior, and a host of other rapacious marketing traps laid by capitalism. Adequate consumption must be a key feature of environmental justice; consumerism counts as an enormous, unnecessary weight on sustainability

Though the Guardian article alludes to a “non-capitalist” solution, it never mentions “socialism,” a curious omission that again triggers my skepticism.

Let’s hope I’m wrong about the new book.

Greg Godels
zzsblogml@gmail.com

End the War in Ukraine

War… What is it good for… Absolutely nothing! … written by Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong, famously recorded by Edwin Starr

Today, over fifty years after Edwin Starr’s Vietnam-era song reached number one on the Billboard chart, people are searching desperately to figure out what the six-month war in Ukraine is good for.

Of course, it depends on who you ask.

For the weapons manufacturers in the US, NATO, and Russia, the Ukraine war is a delightful gift. Weapons are pouring into Ukraine and quickly expended. The arms makers enjoy what they must consider a too-rare opportunity to showcase new and inventive systems in actual combat, before the eyes of customers, and against competitive adversaries. The Ukraine war-- thanks to near-hysterical media alarmism-- finds new customers throughout Eastern Europe and beyond.

For bourgeois politicians, the war provides a great distraction from their failings and their corruption. The economic crises raging through Europe are obscured by the flames of war. Thanks to a compliant media, Europe’s leaders are transformed from inept bureaucrats into martial giants defending democracy, self-determination, and national sovereignty.

For the narrow, reactionary nationalists, the Ukraine war is an inspiration. The tribal glory, heroism, and sacrifice of war are the lyrics of nationalism. The decades of fragile European unity organized around partnership in US- led globalism was already stretched to the limits by the disastrous economic crisis of 2007-2009. The economic impact, the political contradictions, the mass displacements are fodder for the growth of right-wing populism and beyond. Further, the existing and emerging tensions between the culturally distinct, unevenly developed nations of Europe are highlighted by the war.

The irredentist impulses suppressed by socialism in Eastern Europe are now inflamed by the Ukraine war. Multiethnic countries with ever-shifting borders use the war to rewrite their history and restore their myths. The destruction of the monuments to Red Army liberation in the Baltics is just one example of war-generated hysteria.

The energy corporations in both the US and Russia have benefitted from the war. The US pressed the war on Ukraine and Europe to free them from their predominant dependence on Russian energy sources and to shift them to the vast fracking-liberated gas and oil supplies held by the US. As I argued nearly six years ago and many times since, energy has been and remains at the center of big power rivalry. In New Developments in Political Economy: The Politics of Oil, the then-intensifying US hostility towards Russia was explained by two factors-- 1. Russian nationalization of some of its energy industry freezing out US investors, and 2. the revolutionary opening of vast US energy resources through fracking. I wrote in January of 2017:

During the later years of the Obama administration, officials and a compliant press ginned up a new Cold War against Russia. Sanctions, saber-rattling, and hysteria brought tensions far beyond the actual points of contention. An energy-hungry, resource-poor EU has grown dependent upon Russian energy supplies, particularly natural gas. As the US is fast achieving energy independence and beginning the export of liquefied natural gas, the battle for the European market is intensifying and driving hostility with Russia.

With the invasion of Ukraine, the US found the cause célèbre to wrest the enormous European energy market from the Russians. Behind the provocations, the contests between Russian-friendly and EU-friendly presidential candidates, the EU and Russian Federation courtships, the 2014 coup, the suppression of the eastern Ukraine, and the Crimean referendum lies energy imperialism.

After six months, the US is winning the “battle for the European market,” but at great costs to Europe. US energy corporations are making profits, while the supplicating EU struggles desperately to shift to alternative energy sources and scrambles to build infrastructure to receive more expensive liquified natural gas and find cheaper oil. Nothing short of an unnecessary war would produce this costly, unpopular result.

While US corporations enrich themselves from energy politics, the beginnings of a popular European blowback are now apparent. In Prague, for example, mass demonstrations are threatening the government over the war “sacrifices” imposed on the people, as energy prices skyrocket. The beneficiary of this popular rising will likely be the populist right, unless the European lame-left can extricate itself from decades of retreat from class partisanship and rank opportunism.

Ironically, the Russian energy sector has actually benefited from the disruption of traditional markets. Russia’s energy corporations have enjoyed incredibly high oil and natural gas prices, thanks to the chaos in the wake of the war. But they have also found new customers to replace the business lost in Europe-- growth in South Asia, Latin America, and other regions has kept Russian oil shipments nearly at the level they were in 2019. Of course, the price commanded by a barrel of oil is much higher today. As a consequence, Russia is earning $20 billion a month in oil sales now, compared to $14.6 billion last year. The US-imposed sanctions war has failed miserably.

But aside from the corporations, the politicians, and the ultra-nationalists, the war is good for no one.

Ukrainians who might have believed that they were fighting for Western “values” of democracy and economic prosperity have seen their country-- the poorest in Europe-- become even more deeply mired in poverty. They have seen the Zelensky regime outlaw opposition political parties, strip labor protections, and criminalize speech and opinion.

Both Russia and Ukraine have acted forcefully against anti-war sentiment. In nearly all imperialist wars, the belligerents’ media serve as faithful lap dogs, recording every “official” announcement of victories and extolling the prowess of their respective fighters. Therefore, media reports must be taken with a grain of salt. In time, victories will become defeats and vice versa.

In this war, the US media has taken sides, marshaling an unparalleled propaganda blitz behind “heroic” Ukraine. The European news media does little better. Consequently, truth in the advanced capitalist countries grows ever-more elusive. The war has done further damage to the already discredited monopoly media.

But the raw, direct human losses from the destructive power engaged by modern warfare are profoundly tragic. While we have no definitive reports, tens of thousands of military personnel surely have died, even more thousands have been wounded, maimed, and mentally scarred. Modern war exacts a nearly equal toll on civilians, regardless of the disclaimers of military apologists. We hear of millions of civilians uprooted from their homes in war zones.

Since the Ukraine war is an imperialist war fought over the energy supplies for one-sixth of global economic activity, it has huge consequences for the global economy. Economic growth, jobs, transportation, utilities, every aspect of life dependent on energy in the EU is jeopardized by the war. The coming winter promises extreme stress on the European population denied access to essential energy supplies.

A global economy already reeling from galloping inflation and stagnant growth undoubtedly will be rocked by the US ruling class’s determination to reset the energy markets. The people be damned.

The war in Ukraine is the logical outcome of the unwinding of globalization, a process that began with the 2007-2009 world economic crisis. As the post-Soviet global infrastructure collapsed, economic nationalism rose in the advanced capitalist countries. Competition intensified and rivalries became more virulent. Inevitably, economic competition leads to confrontation and confrontation leads to war.

The circumstances of war become less important and the deadly outcomes and possible escalations take center stage. Today, the likelihood of a long, bloody war and its potential expansion beyond borders demand action.

As this tragedy unfolds, the only answer-- the working-class answer-- is to pull all stops to end it. We desperately need a militant movement to stop this war.

Greg Godels
zzsblogml@gmail.com

Imperialism revisited

The war in Ukraine has surfaced many of the ideological weaknesses of the left, including the Marxist-friendly, pro-socialist left. With the decline of many Communist Parties and the fascination of so-called “Western Marxism” and the few remaining academic Marx scholars with rethinking, reimagining, or otherwise reinventing Marxism, it is no wonder that today’s Marxist “theory” often seems to lack a mooring in either precedent theory or actual practice. This weakness is apparent in the writing and thinking on imperialism of many friends and comrades, including in their views on the Ukrainian conflict.

In March, I argued that debates over whether Russia-- a belligerent in the war in Ukraine-- was an imperialist country were neither productive of any useful conclusions nor sanctioned by an understanding of V.I. Lenin’s account of imperialism as expressed in his influential pamphlet, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism.

Rather than describing a club of wealthy states that met a strictest of membership criteria, Lenin sought to explain a stage of capitalism that emerged after the extensive, expansive, competitive growth of capitalism reached its zenith and begin to be replaced with intensive, concentrated growth typified by the monopolization or cartelization of industries.

The new stage, beginning in the 1870s, sprang from the logic of capitalism, most importantly the rise of monopoly, the domination of the economy by extremely large enterprises: “…the formation of international capitalist monopolies which share the world among themselves.”

Lenin enumerates other features of the new stage-- imperialism-- including the complete division of the world “among the greatest capitalist powers…” For Lenin, writing in 1916, and others like John Hobson, Rosa Luxemburg, and Rudolf Hilferding, the world was divided into the greatest capitalist powers [the colonizers], the semi-colonies, and the colonies.

No one in Lenin’s time seriously questioned that the late-nineteenth century saw a rapidly completing division of the world, especially Africa, with tensions growing enormously between the “great powers” over their territorial acquisitions. This was commonly dubbed the “new imperialism” to separate it from the earlier empires constructed in the inappropriately named “age of discovery,” a time when Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, and the Netherlands conquered the new world.

In Hobson’s famous 1902 study, Imperialism, A Study, he documents 38 distinct regions in Asia, Africa, and even Europe that were “acquired” by a European Power between 1871 and 1901.

He also charts 13 Great Powers, 3 of which are non-European, and one-- Russia-- that is Euro-Asian, all of which held over half a billion people in colonial subjugation.

By 1916, Lenin additionally noted the rise of Japan into a great power, a country that defeated Russia in the interim and acquired Korea and other lands. 

Where Hobson counted China and Turkey as great powers with colonies, Lenin viewed them (and Persia) as semi-colonies because they were nominally “independent” but “subordinate” to the dictates of finance capital. It is well worth noting that this status-- specified by Lenin in 1916-- became the dominant form of imperialism in the post-colonial era. What we might call “neo-colonies,'' following Nkrumah, were called “semi-colonies” by Lenin. Imperialism today is determined by the dominance of economic and financial relations and more rarely by out-and-out subjugation and physical occupation.

It is even more noteworthy that the semi-colonial countries in 1916-- Turkey, China, and Persia-- themselves held colonies. That is, they participated in the imperialist system as both colonies (by means of their economic domination by greater powers) and as small-time colonizers. Lenin does not paint a simple, naive picture of solely state-victims and state-victimizers. Instead, the victimizer is capitalism in its final, imperialist stage. It is the system that generates the international monopolies that drive their home countries to expand and capture markets, secure the safety of capital export, and guarantee the availability of raw materials. Capitalism is the driving force behind the various states’ division of the world, according to Lenin.

Lenin’s contemporary critics debated on two fronts. First, they took issue with the theorem that imperialism was fundamentally based upon economic factors. Rather than economic self-interest, they suggested that imperialism sprang from national aggrandizement, innate human instincts, personalities, global insecurities, missionary zeal, etc.

Second, they disagreed that imperialism was linked to capitalism. And if it was linked, it was not intrinsically linked, as Lenin argued, and not a logical outcome of a specific stage of capitalism.

Joseph Schumpeter, later a prominent professor of economics at Harvard University, wrote an essay in 1919 that argued, contra Lenin, that capitalism, in fact, was actually antagonistic to imperialism-- capitalism as anti-imperialism! Paradoxically, this obscure paper was edited by socialist Paul Sweezy and republished in English in 1951 (Imperialism and Social Classes) in the high Cold War and the beginnings of rapid decolonization, no doubt as an answer to Leninism.

Bourgeois academic apologists for capitalism clearly saw, and see today, that the essence of Lenin’s theory of imperialism is that capitalism, in its monopoly stage, breeds imperialism. They grasp that the force of Lenin’s argument is directed at the economic system of capitalism and not at providing a criterion for states to gain membership in the imperialist club.

It is commonplace for liberals to attack the link between economic self-interest, capitalism, and imperialism by pointing out that individual empire-hungry nation-states participated in the imperialist system in spite of their economic shortcomings. For example, the once-prominent professor and economic advisor, Eugene Staley, writing in 1935, noted that Tsarist Russia, once a great predatory power by everyone’s estimate, “had no ‘surplus capital’ in any reasonable sense of that term; Russia had very little capital at all and borrowed heavily from abroad.” (War and the Private Investor. A Study in the Relation of International Politics and International Private Investment).

Were he alive, Lenin would not dispute this claim about Russia's economic backwardness, he would no doubt point out that it was irrelevant to his thesis. The point is that imperialism is the economic imperative forced upon all capitalist countries in the era of monopoly capitalism, whether it springs from weakness or strength. Whether a capitalist country is expanding or defending its economic interests, it must participate in the imperialist system. It matters little whether we wish to call one capitalist country imperialist, another imperialist, or all imperialists, it is the capitalist system that generates systemic imperialism. And it is that system that generates war in the age of monopoly capitalism. It is the system that is the target of Lenin’s pamphlet, Imperialism.

Yet, some comrades and friends try to enlist Lenin’s writings in support of Russian Exceptionalism. For the most part, they do not deny that Russia is a capitalist country. Nor do they deny that Russian capital has international objectives and global interests. Nor can they deny that in the short time since the demise of the Soviet Union, Russian capital has become remarkably concentrated.

Still, they believe that Russia’s relatively new and junior status in the capitalist pantheon excepts Russia from the imperialist architecture. They contend that Russia is not enough of a capitalist power to participate in imperialism. Both Stan Smith and Stewart McGill (Communist Review 104, Is Russia an Imperialist Power?) recently marshaled an impressive amount of evidence to show that Russia falls far short of other advanced capitalist countries in exhibiting the features that Lenin maintains are characteristic of the imperialist system. But that in no way shows that Russia stands outside of the imperialist system looking in.

Smith and McGill believe that relative economic backwardness disqualifies a state, even a capitalist state, from imperialism. But as the liberal, Eugene Staley, showed, Tsarist Russia-- though a paragon of great power imperialism by everyone’s estimation-- nonetheless, fails to measure up to those same features that Smith and McGill mistakenly believe define state-driven imperialism. A great power in the imperialist system need not be an economic great power to pursue imperialist ends. Moreover, ascribing this view to Lenin does a disservice to his views as expressed in Imperialism. Calling out “imperialist” countries by name was not Lenin’s project.

The tendency to see Russia as a non-participant in the imperialist game is somewhat understandable, but mistaken. Russia has, in recent years, commendably resisted US imperialism, sided with others resisting US imperialism, and offered aid to victims of US imperialism. But one would expect a rival great power to resist another great power and seek allies.

Neither Lenin’s analysis nor the events-of-the-day support a case for Russian exceptionalism. Andrew Murray, in a recent letter to the UK Morning Star (August 20), underscores the point succinctly:

[Lenin] wrote that “in its essence imperialism is monopoly capitalism.” It was not necessary for a state to be “advanced” to be under monopoly control. That was the case in the tsarist empire of Lenin’s time – definitely backward and replete with feudal hangovers, but also definitely imperialist.

 Capitalism in Russia had developed late and fast on a monopoly basis. To assert that “Russia is not and never was an imperialist state” to Lenin flies in the face of his writings.

 Is today’s Russia monopoly capitalist? Comrades seeking to deny that Russia is imperialist never offer a political economy of the country for fear of what they might find.

In fact, Russian capitalism is monopolist to a very high degree, with a huge percentage of key industries and banking in the hands of a very few oligarchic groups. Again, this despite the country’s relative backwardness. A later-arriving capitalist power, as it was in the 19th century, Russian monopoly is driven by the demands of competition, nationally and globally.

So Russia is a monopoly capitalist regime with a leader who seeks to emulate Peter the Great and who denies the principle of self-determination. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it might actually be a duck.

Whatever kind of a “duck” Russia may be, it has not escaped the dangerous capitalist game of great-power rivalry. That is the point that should not be lost.

Greg Godels
zzsblogml@gmail.com

No, to a New Cold War

Few people alive today would remember, first-hand, the ugly origins of the first Cold War. But surely events must have proceeded much as they are unfolding today.

Within the highest echelons of the US government, factions feared that they were losing control over global developments after World War II. The burgeoning credibility of the Soviet Union and the various Communist parties was earned by serving as the bulwark against fascism. Accordingly, they were seen as posing a challenge to the US and other capitalist powers. To many in the Washington centers of power, Communism conjured a far greater existential threat to the capitalist world order in the post-war era.

Those fears spread like a wildfire to all other elite factions. Fear of a threat --or fear of appearing to be “soft” towards that perceived-- threat captured commitment from the entire US ruling class. Those who embraced or tolerated Soviet anti-fascism were summarily cowed into submission, joining the broad consensus.

A compliant, lapdog media accepted the consensus and swung into line. Newspapers, radio and television stations parroted the Cold War line far and wide.

Cold War fear permeated every nook and cranny of social and institutional life.

Of course, some factions sought to turn a Cold War into a hot one. Still others sought to conduct a hotter war through proxies and covert actions. For some, the long-term benefits of profits from a war economy alone justified the Cold War. Many different goals, but a common purpose.

When the first Cold War ended, the defense spending of the US for the war’s entirety was conservatively estimated by one source to be 13 trillion in 1996 dollars (24 trillion today), with well over 100,000 US deaths, and with the deaths of untold millions elsewhere. With non-direct military spending added (the nuclear weapons r&d, the nuclear weapons industry, veterans’ benefits, other associated government expenses), the dollar cost would be much, much higher. Further, the lost incomes, benefits, and welfare from the investment of military funds which could have been invested into more productive and socially useful areas is incalculable. Few of us who are today absorbed with the environmental impact of Styrofoam cups have stopped to calculate the real and potential damage of the forty-plus years of Cold War environmental destruction and pollution by the belligerents.

We are now embarking on a new Cold War. It is not a matter of speculation or foretelling. The new Cold War is happening now.

The fear driving the new Cold War is unquestionably rooted in the rise of The People's Republic of China (PRC) and the defiance of a number of other independent countries, loosely or relatively more closely aligned with the PRC. Whether Western hostility, common interests, or some commitment to anti-imperialism drives them closer to each other, they are perceived by the US and its closest allies as threatening to the existing global balance of power, a balance arranged by and maintained by the US.

It doesn’t matter that none of the countries said to “threaten” the US pose any real military threat to the integrity or sovereignty of the US or its NATO allies; rather they are portrayed as outlaws-- as representing systems inconsistent with what are touted as historically validated Western values.

That these so-called values are neither historically validated nor appropriate for different social and cultural experiences is never considered. Instead, they are simply assumed, though they are largely founded on myth and arrogance. Despite the many hundreds of foreign military bases, the regular and frequent covert and overt intervention in nearly every country’s affairs, the economic and physical sanctions, the frivolous “terrorist” designations, and boundless sanctimony, the US and many of its European allies feel qualified to serve as judge and jury on the behavior of the world’s diverse states. Add hypocrisy to the list of Western sins.

It takes incredible hubris to abuse the political system of capitalist Russia as “undemocratic” when it mimics Western bourgeois democratic institutions, shares their flaws, and ill-serves the people in exactly the same manner as the corrupted, corporately owned “democracies” in the US and Europe.

Where Putin is portrayed as a “dictator,” though elected by the same flawed pseudo-democratic mechanisms employed in the West, the PRC government earns even harsher condemnation, earning the ultimate Cold War insult of “totalitarian” governance-- a charged, but fatally ambiguous memento of mindless anti-Communism. Cynically, NO high-paid courtier of the capitalist commentariat has ever noted that even Western opinion polling shows the PRC government to be more trusted, more highly approved than any of its Western counterparts. Apparently, the peoples of the PRC wholly embrace “totalitarianism.” Therefore, the people sorely need Western liberation offered by governments with little popular trust and minimal approval!

In the post-war period, fear of Communism soon reached hysterical levels. No claims about the Soviet Union were too ridiculous to make. No policy toward its government was too risky to take.

Some say that US and European vitriol aimed at the PRC today is unprecedented. That would be to belie the horrors of the rabid anti-Communist crusade of the 1950s.

Yet, events are moving quickly in that direction.

Professors, think tankers, and media pundits are stepping on each other in a rush to paint Peoples’ China as an aggressor, a danger, an existential threat.

A recent lengthy article in the weekend edition of The Wall Street Journal gives a foretaste of just how ugly things can get. Two academics and think-tank fellows, Hal Brands and Michael Beckley, charge that “Mr Xi’s China is fueled by a dangerous mix of strength and weakness. Faced with profound economic, demographic and strategic problems, it will be tempted to use its burgeoning military power to transform the existing order while it still has the opportunity.”

To any casual observer of global politics, this description seems to capture Mr. Biden’s US better than it does Mr. Xi’s China. Mr. Biden’s US is mired in a nagging stagflation that only exacerbates a huge, fast-growing income and wealth gap. Racial, class, and political divisions pose challenges to a dysfunctional, discredited political system. Internationally, Mr. Biden’s US holds its allies together with a tenuous dollar-diplomacy that is failing to guarantee both the unity and stability of its capitalist allies. More than ever, fear of the US and its sanctions drives their allegiance.

The PRC, on the other hand, has just completed a campaign to eliminate extreme poverty, has tightened the screws on corruption, and consistently enjoys economic growth at least two percentage points greater than the US does. The PRC has few foreign military bases and has engaged in no major military action for decades, while the US has hundreds of foreign bases and has been at constant war over those same decades.

Do Brands and Beckley have the two countries confused?

The authors continue with further exaggerations, fables, and distortions.

Take this wild claim, supported by nothing and worthy of the most extreme Cold Warriors:

They want to absorb Taiwan, make the Western Pacific a Chinese lake and carve out a vast economic empire across the global south-- all part of the “national rejuvenation” that will return China to its former place as the most powerful country on Earth.

Like the fear-mongering of the first Cold War, these writers want us to see a benign PRC as an aggressor biding its time until it takes over the world-- an utterly ridiculous projection based on no historical evidence whatsoever.

But the real danger that these two distinguished professors pose comes from their zealous prescription of more US aggression, more weapons, more provocation-- in short, their irresponsible war-mongering.

They advise:

The US also needs to ensure that its military doesn’t have a glass jaw [incredible!]... the US must scatter those forces across dozens of small operating sites in East Asia. The few big bases that remain must be outfitted with hardened shelters, robust ballistic missile defenses and fake targets to absorb Chinese missiles… a ramping up production of key munitions, so that America has adequate stockpiles and active production when the shooting starts [my emphasis]…

No doubt these acts would be received well by the Communist Party leadership in the PRC.

They go on:

If Taiwan doesn’t pick up the pace [of military spending], there is nothing the US can do to save it. If Taiwan redoubles its efforts, however, then America should provide money, hardware and expertise to make the island a tougher target… The US can help by donating ammunition and sensors, subsidizing Taiwanese procurements of missile launchers and mine layers, matching Taiwanese investments in vital military infrastructures and expanding joint training on crucial defense missions [and on and on…]

No doubt Brands and Beckley’s recipe for Taiwan’s “defense” will be met gleefully by the weapons industry. No doubt the rest of us will see chicken hawks meeting Dr. Strangelove.

Brands and Beckley’s book, Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China, is to be published on August 16. We can expect the mass media to fawn over the new book, adding even more fuel to the New Cold War.

With war raging in Ukraine, the escalating New Cold War against the People’s Republic of China manufactured by the US and its allies raises the risk to peace and raises the likelihood of global war to levels unseen in decades.

The absence of a mass antiwar movement further increases the risk of catastrophe.

Greg Godels
zzsblogml@gmail.com