Harry Targ
"If we stand up to them [the communists] . . . they won't take any next steps. There's no telling what they'll do if we don't put up a fight now."
President Harry Truman at the outbreak of the Korean War, Philadelphia Inquirer, June 20, 2010
On June 25, 1950, communist-backed troops from North Korea invaded a hopelessly overmatched South Korea. American-led U.N. forces quickly came to the aid of South Korea, but the war unexpectedly escalated five months later when China, in support of North Korea, launched a massive attack on U.N. forces near the Yalu River.
Three years of brutal fighting followed as both armies hurled each other up and down the Korean peninsula. More than 54,000 U.S. soldiers died during the war, which technically has never officially ended but has been in a prolonged cease-fire since 1953.
North Korea often states that it is still at war, but the reality is that tenacious fighting by U.S. and U.N. soldiers successfully repelled the invading communist forces and pushed them back across the 38th Parallel border. South Korea remains a free nation, one of the most prosperous in Asia, while North Korea is one of the most repressive.
Chris Gibbons, Philadelphia Inquirer, June 20, 2010
The Annual Fantasy
Americans relive and debate the Vietnam War. Analysts discuss “the Vietnam Syndrome,” the “albatross” that shackled every president, and/or claims about where every candidate for public office was during Vietnam. To the contrary, the Korean War, which in the words of the U.S. government was launched by the aggressive invasion of North Korean armies below the 38th parallel into South Korea 60 years ago on June 25, 1950, is beyond question.
As newspapers often title Korea, “Our Forgotten War,” the story is simple; Communist aggressors (inspired by Moscow) invaded a free nation (South Korea). The Americans mobilized United Nations support and boldly counter-attacked forcing the Communist aggressors back North. Then, the story goes, the US-led army of the free people went North of the 38th parallel to liberate North Korea from its dictatorship. This invasion was foiled by a massive Chinese Communist military response. While a ceasefire was established in 1953, conflict on the peninsula remains between the prosperous and free South Korea and the poor and totalitarian North Korea.
Key Facts
This fantasy, created in 1950, set the stage for a sixty year rationalization for trillions of dollars of military spending, hundreds of thousands of US soldiers killed and wounded, and the deaths of millions of people, largely from the Global South, who were unwilling hosts of wars, interventions, and domestic violence related to the Cold War.
Just a brief examination of the history of the Far East suggests that the fantasy is just that. The Korean Peninsula was colonized by the Japanese before World War I. At the end of World War II, with their defeat, Koreans all across the peninsula believed that they, at last, would be able to establish their own independent government. “Peoples Assemblies” began to meet to plan for a post-war Korean government. However, at the urging of the United States, it and the Soviet Union agreed to divide the peninsula at the 38th parallel until such time as an independent government, desirable to the victorious powers could be established.
The United States government over the next three years brought exiled Korean Syngman Rhee back to the country to establish a government in the US occupied zone. Rhee, an émigré with ties to large landowners, was not popular with South Korean farmers, many of whom rebelled against the new government imposed by Washington. In areas where rebellions were stifled, the United Nations held “elections” for a new government. Rhee and his party were victorious. And in the North, a regime allied with the Soviet Union was established led by Kim Il Sung, long-time Korean Communist party organizer.
In 1948 Soviet troops were withdrawn from the North and in 1949 US troops from the South. Both leaders, Syngman Rhee and Kim Il Sung, declared their commitments to liberate the other half to establish one Korean government. Some US congressmen began to balk at Truman requests to continue to fund the corrupt Rhee government in the South.
In May, 1950 Republican spokesman on foreign policy John Foster Dulles visited South Korea and spoke in support of Syngman Rhee, whose domestic support was faltering, and then Rhee and Dulles flew off to the Tokyo headquarters of General Douglas MacArthur, overseer of post-war Japan. It is important to note that shots had been fired both ways across the 38th parallel for months before these events.
Finally, as the official story suggests, North Korean troops invaded the South on June 25, 1950. South Korean military forces, heavily subsidized and trained by the United States, fled South and within a month much of the country below the 38th parallel was occupied by Northern armies.
Then the US, with UN support, launched a counter-assault in September, 1950, led by General MacArthur, who already had declared his vision of creating a Christian and anti-Communist Asia. North Korean armies were forced back north of the 38th parallel and with the urging of MacArthur and other virulent Cold Warriors in the Truman administration an apocryphal decision was made to take the war to the North. The Chinese, fearful of an invasion of their own land, entered the war on the side of North Korean armies. The Korean War was extended until 1953 and a troubled ceasefire was established that still prevails today.
What the Real History Suggests
First, as historian Robert Simmons wrote: “There were constant and sizeable armed clashes and border incursions between the North and South for over a year before the final crisis…the Seoul regime enjoyed little popular support…it had announced its intention to invade the North and appeared to be preparing to do so…”
Second, the division of Korea in 1945 defied the wishes of the Korean people, Communist and non-Communist alike. In the South, Syngman Rhee was regarded as an outsider and representative of the small land-owning class of Koreans (a character similar to Chiang Kai-Shek in China, and Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam).
Third, the Korean War was in fact a civil war which the Truman administration chose to define as the first great conflagration in the global struggle against worldwide Communism. Many scholars suggest to the contrary that North Korean Kim Il Sung’s decision to invade the South was made by him without approval or support from the Soviet Union. In fact, the Soviet delegate at the United Nations was boycotting the Security Council at the time the Council voted to condemn the invasion of the South. If the Soviet delegate was aware of the planned invasion he probably would have attended the Security Council session to veto the US resolution condemning the North Korean invasion.
Consequences of “Our Forgotten War”
The decision by the Truman administration to enter the war to “save” the Rhee regime in the South signified a permanent commitment to an imperial policy that continues to this day. As political scientist Hans Morgenthau once wrote, after the Korean War started reversing US/Soviet conflicts and the militarization of the world was no longer possible.
The Korean War gave support to those Truman administration advocates for the full militarization of United States foreign policy and US society. National Security Council Document 68 had been circulating inside the administration at that time. It called for a dramatic increase in annual military spending based on the proposition that each president should give the military all it wanted before any other expenditures for government programs were adopted. Specifically it called for an immediate four-fold increase in military spending, a proposal that some fiscal conservatives had opposed. After Korea virtually all restrictions on military spending were lifted.
Additional byproducts of the new US commitment to a Korean War included the following: finalizing the construction of an anti-Communist Japanese economy to balance the new Chinese Communist regime; making permanent the US financial commitment to the French in Indochina (a prelude to the next big war, in Vietnam); circulating the idea of an Asian military alliance to be called the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO); expanding the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO); and stimulating anti-Communist repression domestically.
As we reflect on the limited economic development in the North and the dramatic growth in the South, both products of the Cold War, the impacts of “Our Forgotten War” on the Korean people should be recalled. As Joyce and Gabriel Kolko wrote:
“The United States air force had completely destroyed all usual strategic bombing targets in North Korea within three months time, and by the end of the first year of combat it had dropped 97,000 tons of bombs and 7.8 million gallons of napalm, destroying 125,000 buildings that might ‘shelter’ the enemy. In mid-1952 it turned to the systematic destruction of mines and cement plants…” and the “…Suihu hydroelectric complex on the Yalu.”
They added that Syngman Rhee rounded up 400,000 South Koreans who were put in concentration camps. The authors wrote: “The Korean War, in effect, became a war against an entire nation, civilians and soldiers, Communists and anti-Communists alike. Everything-from villages to military targets-the United States considered a legitimate target for attack.” At least four million Koreans, North and South died, were wounded, or were made homeless (Joyce and Gabriel Kolko, The Limits of Power: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1945-54).
So despite the fact that the Korean War has become “Our Forgotten War,” the decision to enter Korea globalized, militarized, and institutionalized a U.S. policy that rationalized wars on entire populations ever since.
Sunday, June 20, 2010
Friday, June 11, 2010
FOREIGN POLICY AND CLASS STRUGGLE: THE EXAMPLE OF THE PACKINGHOUSE WORKERS AFTER WORLD WAR II
Harry Targ
The Connection Between Class Struggle and Peace
Foreign policy has long been used to divide workers. During the Cold War “anti-Communism” linked an external enemy with so-called domestic enemies in the labor and civil rights movements. The external enemy and its domestic collaborators justified the construction of a permanent war economy, worker sacrifices through taxes, loss of shop floor rights, and the “need” to limit labor organizing. Paradoxically, the weaknesses of the labor movement today have their roots in the mobilization of the American people to respond to the “threat of international communism.” In the post-Cold War international system cheap labor overseas and the threat of international terrorism have been used to manipulate workers and limit their ability to organize. But even during the height of the Cold War, sectors of the labor movement resisted the simplistic claims such as that declared by one CEO that the threat to America came from “the Soviet Union abroad and the labor movement at home.”
The United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA-CIO) successfully organized most of the large meat-packing plants in the United States by 1943 when it was fully chartered as a union in the new Congress of Industrial Organizations. Unfortunately after World War II ended, the CIO slowly but steadily embraced the anti-Communist policies of the day. In 1949 eleven unions were purged from the CIO for their alleged Communist sympathies and affiliations. Even though the UPWA was not one of the eleven it increasingly opposed the militarization of the Cold War, avoided some of the worst internal manifestations of “red-baiting” of union members, and, in 1953 took a stance against the U.S. Cold War record and the Korean War. It published in The Packinghouse Worker, the union newspaper, a condemnation of U.S. Korean War policy in a four-page essay entitled “The Road Ahead.”
McCarthyism, the Korean War, and “The Road Ahead”
The use of the “Communist threat” to generate support for an imperial U.S. foreign policy and repression of union militancy was well advanced by the time Senator Joseph McCarthy gave his February, 1950 speech that made him famous identifying 204 Communists in the State Department. Along with the anti-labor Taft–Hartley Act requiring union leaders to sign affidavits swearing they were not Communists, the Internal Security Act of 1950 required “Communist front” and “Communist action” groups to register with the government. Spy trials, such as those against Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs, Smith Act trials of members of the Communist Party, and investigations by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), had thoroughly poisoned the political atmosphere such that serious debate about United States foreign policy was stifled.
HUAC particularly called public hearings in communities where workers were on strike; ordering union leaders to appear to answer questions about their political affiliations. The issue of “Communism,” which was often defined as opposition to U.S. foreign policy, was divisive in the labor movement even after the eleven progressive unions were purged from the CIO in 1949.
Anti-Communist sentiment found its way into various district organizations of the UPWA. For example, in 1950, one of the ten UPWA districts passed a resolution barring Communists from office in the union. This prompted Vice President Frank Ellis, a former organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World, to declare that “No labor union ever was destroyed by an employer. Unions break only when they quarrel among themselves “(Packinghouse Worker, April 21, 1950).
A more typical resolution was passed by the progressive Chicago-based District One convention. It said: “We reject red-baiting and witch-hunting. We reaffirm our belief that the sole judge and worth of any union member shall be his contribution to the advancement and the interest of the packinghouse workers.” The resolution also opposed those forces which favored “a shooting war,” and urged “active measures for peace,” including United States-Soviet negotiations on resolving the arms race. The connection between foreign policy and labor issues was proposed. “We packinghouse workers have felt the effects of the Cold War policy in terms of heavy layoffs, of speed-up and the piling up of grievances and of sharp attacks on the very existence of our union” (Packinghouse Worker, April, 1950).
At the 1950 UPWA national convention President Ralph Helstein spoke against barring Communists from office. However, guest speaker CIO President Philip Murray attacked the recently ousted eleven unions as “Communist-dominated” and spoke of the “Communist bloc” within the CIO “who continued to vote for Russia, for Communism-against their own unions and their own country. To hell with them” he declared (Packinghouse Worker, June 10, 1950).
Subsequently, after the onset of the Korean War in late June, 1950 Murray wired President Truman declaring: “The CIO stands solidly behind your effort to halt this act of Communist aggression and to restore peace in Asia (Packinghouse Worker, July 14, 1950). In his Labor Day speech in September, Murray warned that workers were being challenged by the threat of world war. “The threat comes from the masters of Communist world strategy. They have already shown their tactics and their objectives in Korea. We support our government’s efforts to halt the vicious aggression provoked by the Communists in Korea”(Packinghouse Worker, September, 1950).
Despite Murray and his supporters in the CIO, the UPWA left-center coalition of the 1940s held together. A theme running throughout statements of left-center forces in the union was that anti-Communism, anti-labor legislation, and a militaristic foreign policy were all connected. Lyle Cooper, UPWA economist, warned that war is being used to create prosperity for the rich. He said that the “biggest danger in all of this is that the powers that be become afraid of peace. Since war orders become the foundation for this phony prosperity, a war psychology must be maintained and spread as wide as possible among our people” (Packinghouse Worker, November, 1950).
Strong opposition to U.S. foreign policy was expressed by resolutions and statements from several UPWA district organizations. One district declared that the Korean War was being used as a “smokescreen” for reactionary attacks on workers’ living standards. District One, which included the Chicago meat packing plants proclaimed that “The Taft-Hartley and McCarran laws have been crammed down the throat of labor and the promises of civil rights and fair employment have been thrown into the waste basket.” They condemned the use of worldwide military forces that were protecting markets and profits overseas. “… it has become increasingly obvious that the war in Korea is being used by giant U.S. corporations as an excuse for piling up billions in profits at the expense of the farmers and working people of our country and their sons who are fighting.” (Packinghouse Worker, May 12, 1951 and July 13, 1951).
All of these expressions of opposition to U.S. foreign policy and domestic repression stimulated two analytical statements from the international union leadership. The first, a front page Packinghouse Worker commentary, was titled “We Shall Speak Up Now!” The article discussed the growing military power over civilian government and that government and military power increasingly served the interests of big business. All of these forces planned for more war and to divide and weaken the labor movement. Fear was used to attack schools, unions, churches, and other institutions. The commentary referred metaphorically to “germ warfare,” a spreading disease that induces massive subservience to the wishes of the military and war profiteers. In response to this milieu of fear and repression, the commentary claimed, unions must speak out (Packinghouse Worker, March, 1953).
The second document was a four-page statement entitled “The Road Ahead,” inserted in the April 1953 issue of the Packinghouse Worker. At the outset it asserted that the drift of the United States and the world toward war and oppression required discussion and a dedication to social change. Particularly “…unless there is a very quick and drastic change in the thinking and action of the labor movement, history will record that in the showdown, labor failed miserably in the performance of the historically progressive function which is properly assigned to organizations of working people.” The document lists such problems as the danger of nuclear war, the Korean War, high taxes for the war machine, and repression of dissent. Big business, it contended, had pursued profits at home and overseas unconcerned by these problems while labor remained silent.
The document discussed the “dictatorship of fear” which had resulted from repression and witch-hunting. Labor, it was argued, must speak out and act to defend liberty from the attacks of those who would stifle dissent. “The Road Ahead” therefore involved freedom, world peace, and prosperity, suggesting that the war-peace issues and the freedom and prosperity issues were interconnected in a fundamental way (Packinghouse Worker, April, 1953). Consequently, the UPWA leadership decided that the labor movement had to extend its horizons beyond collective bargaining; that successes on bread-and-butter issues, better working conditions, and economic security depended on a foreign policy of peace and anti-colonialism.
Class Struggle, Peace, and Justice
Sometimes stories such as that of the UPWA in the 1940s and 1950s capture our attention because they are interesting or inspiring. Also, sometimes these stories provide insights that still bear relevance to political struggles today.
In the case of the UPWA, its effectiveness as a workers’ organization was affected by its willingness to resist the power of big capital. This effectiveness was hindered by the Cold War foreign policy of the 1940s to the 1960s, competition between it and other unions, the mass mobilization of cultural and educational institutions to promote the fear of Communism, state repression, and efforts to incite racism among the membership of the union.
In the face of exploitation, repression, anti-Communism, and racism the union staked out an independent politics in the depths of the Cold War. Central to this politics were two principles: first, that the humanity of all workers is determined by their common struggles and solidarity; and second that the character of the foreign policy of the United States is intimately connected to the well-being of the working class.
(This essay was taken from Harry Targ, “Foreign Policy and Class Struggle in the United Packinghouse Workers of America: 1945-1953,” Nature, Society and Thought, Vol.4, no.1/2 1991).
The Connection Between Class Struggle and Peace
Foreign policy has long been used to divide workers. During the Cold War “anti-Communism” linked an external enemy with so-called domestic enemies in the labor and civil rights movements. The external enemy and its domestic collaborators justified the construction of a permanent war economy, worker sacrifices through taxes, loss of shop floor rights, and the “need” to limit labor organizing. Paradoxically, the weaknesses of the labor movement today have their roots in the mobilization of the American people to respond to the “threat of international communism.” In the post-Cold War international system cheap labor overseas and the threat of international terrorism have been used to manipulate workers and limit their ability to organize. But even during the height of the Cold War, sectors of the labor movement resisted the simplistic claims such as that declared by one CEO that the threat to America came from “the Soviet Union abroad and the labor movement at home.”
The United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA-CIO) successfully organized most of the large meat-packing plants in the United States by 1943 when it was fully chartered as a union in the new Congress of Industrial Organizations. Unfortunately after World War II ended, the CIO slowly but steadily embraced the anti-Communist policies of the day. In 1949 eleven unions were purged from the CIO for their alleged Communist sympathies and affiliations. Even though the UPWA was not one of the eleven it increasingly opposed the militarization of the Cold War, avoided some of the worst internal manifestations of “red-baiting” of union members, and, in 1953 took a stance against the U.S. Cold War record and the Korean War. It published in The Packinghouse Worker, the union newspaper, a condemnation of U.S. Korean War policy in a four-page essay entitled “The Road Ahead.”
McCarthyism, the Korean War, and “The Road Ahead”
The use of the “Communist threat” to generate support for an imperial U.S. foreign policy and repression of union militancy was well advanced by the time Senator Joseph McCarthy gave his February, 1950 speech that made him famous identifying 204 Communists in the State Department. Along with the anti-labor Taft–Hartley Act requiring union leaders to sign affidavits swearing they were not Communists, the Internal Security Act of 1950 required “Communist front” and “Communist action” groups to register with the government. Spy trials, such as those against Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs, Smith Act trials of members of the Communist Party, and investigations by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), had thoroughly poisoned the political atmosphere such that serious debate about United States foreign policy was stifled.
HUAC particularly called public hearings in communities where workers were on strike; ordering union leaders to appear to answer questions about their political affiliations. The issue of “Communism,” which was often defined as opposition to U.S. foreign policy, was divisive in the labor movement even after the eleven progressive unions were purged from the CIO in 1949.
Anti-Communist sentiment found its way into various district organizations of the UPWA. For example, in 1950, one of the ten UPWA districts passed a resolution barring Communists from office in the union. This prompted Vice President Frank Ellis, a former organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World, to declare that “No labor union ever was destroyed by an employer. Unions break only when they quarrel among themselves “(Packinghouse Worker, April 21, 1950).
A more typical resolution was passed by the progressive Chicago-based District One convention. It said: “We reject red-baiting and witch-hunting. We reaffirm our belief that the sole judge and worth of any union member shall be his contribution to the advancement and the interest of the packinghouse workers.” The resolution also opposed those forces which favored “a shooting war,” and urged “active measures for peace,” including United States-Soviet negotiations on resolving the arms race. The connection between foreign policy and labor issues was proposed. “We packinghouse workers have felt the effects of the Cold War policy in terms of heavy layoffs, of speed-up and the piling up of grievances and of sharp attacks on the very existence of our union” (Packinghouse Worker, April, 1950).
At the 1950 UPWA national convention President Ralph Helstein spoke against barring Communists from office. However, guest speaker CIO President Philip Murray attacked the recently ousted eleven unions as “Communist-dominated” and spoke of the “Communist bloc” within the CIO “who continued to vote for Russia, for Communism-against their own unions and their own country. To hell with them” he declared (Packinghouse Worker, June 10, 1950).
Subsequently, after the onset of the Korean War in late June, 1950 Murray wired President Truman declaring: “The CIO stands solidly behind your effort to halt this act of Communist aggression and to restore peace in Asia (Packinghouse Worker, July 14, 1950). In his Labor Day speech in September, Murray warned that workers were being challenged by the threat of world war. “The threat comes from the masters of Communist world strategy. They have already shown their tactics and their objectives in Korea. We support our government’s efforts to halt the vicious aggression provoked by the Communists in Korea”(Packinghouse Worker, September, 1950).
Despite Murray and his supporters in the CIO, the UPWA left-center coalition of the 1940s held together. A theme running throughout statements of left-center forces in the union was that anti-Communism, anti-labor legislation, and a militaristic foreign policy were all connected. Lyle Cooper, UPWA economist, warned that war is being used to create prosperity for the rich. He said that the “biggest danger in all of this is that the powers that be become afraid of peace. Since war orders become the foundation for this phony prosperity, a war psychology must be maintained and spread as wide as possible among our people” (Packinghouse Worker, November, 1950).
Strong opposition to U.S. foreign policy was expressed by resolutions and statements from several UPWA district organizations. One district declared that the Korean War was being used as a “smokescreen” for reactionary attacks on workers’ living standards. District One, which included the Chicago meat packing plants proclaimed that “The Taft-Hartley and McCarran laws have been crammed down the throat of labor and the promises of civil rights and fair employment have been thrown into the waste basket.” They condemned the use of worldwide military forces that were protecting markets and profits overseas. “… it has become increasingly obvious that the war in Korea is being used by giant U.S. corporations as an excuse for piling up billions in profits at the expense of the farmers and working people of our country and their sons who are fighting.” (Packinghouse Worker, May 12, 1951 and July 13, 1951).
All of these expressions of opposition to U.S. foreign policy and domestic repression stimulated two analytical statements from the international union leadership. The first, a front page Packinghouse Worker commentary, was titled “We Shall Speak Up Now!” The article discussed the growing military power over civilian government and that government and military power increasingly served the interests of big business. All of these forces planned for more war and to divide and weaken the labor movement. Fear was used to attack schools, unions, churches, and other institutions. The commentary referred metaphorically to “germ warfare,” a spreading disease that induces massive subservience to the wishes of the military and war profiteers. In response to this milieu of fear and repression, the commentary claimed, unions must speak out (Packinghouse Worker, March, 1953).
The second document was a four-page statement entitled “The Road Ahead,” inserted in the April 1953 issue of the Packinghouse Worker. At the outset it asserted that the drift of the United States and the world toward war and oppression required discussion and a dedication to social change. Particularly “…unless there is a very quick and drastic change in the thinking and action of the labor movement, history will record that in the showdown, labor failed miserably in the performance of the historically progressive function which is properly assigned to organizations of working people.” The document lists such problems as the danger of nuclear war, the Korean War, high taxes for the war machine, and repression of dissent. Big business, it contended, had pursued profits at home and overseas unconcerned by these problems while labor remained silent.
The document discussed the “dictatorship of fear” which had resulted from repression and witch-hunting. Labor, it was argued, must speak out and act to defend liberty from the attacks of those who would stifle dissent. “The Road Ahead” therefore involved freedom, world peace, and prosperity, suggesting that the war-peace issues and the freedom and prosperity issues were interconnected in a fundamental way (Packinghouse Worker, April, 1953). Consequently, the UPWA leadership decided that the labor movement had to extend its horizons beyond collective bargaining; that successes on bread-and-butter issues, better working conditions, and economic security depended on a foreign policy of peace and anti-colonialism.
Class Struggle, Peace, and Justice
Sometimes stories such as that of the UPWA in the 1940s and 1950s capture our attention because they are interesting or inspiring. Also, sometimes these stories provide insights that still bear relevance to political struggles today.
In the case of the UPWA, its effectiveness as a workers’ organization was affected by its willingness to resist the power of big capital. This effectiveness was hindered by the Cold War foreign policy of the 1940s to the 1960s, competition between it and other unions, the mass mobilization of cultural and educational institutions to promote the fear of Communism, state repression, and efforts to incite racism among the membership of the union.
In the face of exploitation, repression, anti-Communism, and racism the union staked out an independent politics in the depths of the Cold War. Central to this politics were two principles: first, that the humanity of all workers is determined by their common struggles and solidarity; and second that the character of the foreign policy of the United States is intimately connected to the well-being of the working class.
(This essay was taken from Harry Targ, “Foreign Policy and Class Struggle in the United Packinghouse Workers of America: 1945-1953,” Nature, Society and Thought, Vol.4, no.1/2 1991).
Saturday, June 5, 2010
CONNECTING THE DOTS: THEORY AND HISTORY
Harry Targ
The Bewildering Array of Crises
The magnitude and variety of crises that people face seem at times overwhelming. Our experiences of the world, mostly vicarious, are shaped by 24/7 news, facebook and twitter messages, stories on the internet about endless climatic and social catastrophes, and images of angry people everywhere.
Progressives who claim to be “political” and who engage in political activity as a vocation or avocation gravitate toward one or another issue or crisis as the latest event demands. We, like those around us who are less active, seem to be reacting to an increasingly befuddling world.
To respond to this political and psychic environment, we need to develop a worldview that includes a theoretical orientation. This orientation must include an explanation of what exists and why, and how the past has become the present and could become a better future. This worldview must show how the various seemingly diverse, incoherent, and random behaviors, events, and structures are in fact connected. Before we can make sense of the world we need to understand it, figure out how it relates to institutions, behavioral dynamics, and practical political activity. In short, we need to “connect the dots.”
These thoughts come to me from time to time, usually as a result of a bewildering array of crises that increasingly impinge on my television and computer screen. Today the crises include the devastating ecological disaster created by corporate oil; the outrageous assault of Israeli troops on a flotilla of ships bringing material aid to the people of Gaza, the expanding U.S. war in Afghanistan, economic disasters from Greece to urban America, and patterns of electoral and polling data about upcoming prospects for elections in the United States and elsewhere.
Fidel Castro’s Historical Vision
On June 3, 2010 I read an essay by Fidel Castro, “The Empire and the War” (http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/reflexiones/2010/ing/f010610i.html) which reminded me of how important it was for my psychic well-being and my political activism to “connect the dots.”
Castro opened by referring to the crisis on the Korean peninsula, China’s behavior in the United Nations, and United States conflict with Iran.
He then referred to President Obama’s famous speech on United States/Muslim relations at the Islamic University of Al-Azhar in Cairo on June 4, 2009.
Castro approvingly referred to aspects of Obama’s speech including the latter’s recognition that colonialism had denied “rights and opportunities” to many Muslims and how Muslims during the Cold War were “often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations.”
Castro declared that it was significant that Obama was an African American who spoke in words that “resonated like the self-evident truths contained in the Declaration of Philadelphia of July 4, 1776.”
Obama then, Castro said, admitted that the United States “played a role in the overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government.” Obama seemed to be aware that the Iranian hostility to the United States ever since, particularly after the Shah of Iran was ousted from power in January, 1979, was intimately connected to the CIA operations against Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953. According to Castro this hostility spread throughout the Middle East as the U.S. gravitated toward uncompromising support for Israel and its brutal policies toward Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.
Castro recalled that Mossadegh was overthrown because his parliament had voted to nationalize Iran’s vital natural resource, its oil, in 1951. Most significantly the target of this effort by the Iranians to gain control of the oil under their ground was the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, the corporation which had controlled this vital fluid of the industrial revolution since the dawn of the twentieth century. Today, that corporation is called British Petroleum or BP.
For me, Fidel Castro’s essay, in a few paragraphs, “connected the dots” in a variety of ways. For example, by referring to President Obama’s speech in Cairo, Castro was acknowledging that the President was purposefully addressing the peoples of the Global South and that Obama recognized that the United States was connected to colonialism and imperialism. Castro was suggesting that Obama’s analysis was largely correct and that the President had carefully selected his words because he knew the audience that heard them agreed with the analysis. Obama’s words, Castro suggested, reflected what the President understands to be true and what words were needed diplomatically to mollify a skeptical audience.
Also, Castro was using Obama’s words to articulate the view that the Global South had been historically marginalized and that many peoples, in this case Muslims, had been used as props and victims of the Cold War struggle with the Soviet Union.
Castro, again using Obama’s analysis as a segue, drew connections between imperialism, control of oil, the overthrow of Mossadegh, the intimate ties between the United States and Israel, the sixty year brutality of Israeli regimes against the Palestinian people, the catastrophic environmental disaster caused by the stepchildren of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company , BP, in the Gulf of Mexico, and the Israeli attack on the Freedom Flotilla, bringing material aid to victims of the global system in Gaza.
In other words, Castro was suggesting to us connections between words, consciousness, and deeds; the past and the present; politics, economics, and war; policy toward Israel, Palestine, Iran; international relations, political economy, and the environment; and imperialism, resistance, and the peace movement.
The Bewildering Array of Crises
The magnitude and variety of crises that people face seem at times overwhelming. Our experiences of the world, mostly vicarious, are shaped by 24/7 news, facebook and twitter messages, stories on the internet about endless climatic and social catastrophes, and images of angry people everywhere.
Progressives who claim to be “political” and who engage in political activity as a vocation or avocation gravitate toward one or another issue or crisis as the latest event demands. We, like those around us who are less active, seem to be reacting to an increasingly befuddling world.
To respond to this political and psychic environment, we need to develop a worldview that includes a theoretical orientation. This orientation must include an explanation of what exists and why, and how the past has become the present and could become a better future. This worldview must show how the various seemingly diverse, incoherent, and random behaviors, events, and structures are in fact connected. Before we can make sense of the world we need to understand it, figure out how it relates to institutions, behavioral dynamics, and practical political activity. In short, we need to “connect the dots.”
These thoughts come to me from time to time, usually as a result of a bewildering array of crises that increasingly impinge on my television and computer screen. Today the crises include the devastating ecological disaster created by corporate oil; the outrageous assault of Israeli troops on a flotilla of ships bringing material aid to the people of Gaza, the expanding U.S. war in Afghanistan, economic disasters from Greece to urban America, and patterns of electoral and polling data about upcoming prospects for elections in the United States and elsewhere.
Fidel Castro’s Historical Vision
On June 3, 2010 I read an essay by Fidel Castro, “The Empire and the War” (http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/reflexiones/2010/ing/f010610i.html) which reminded me of how important it was for my psychic well-being and my political activism to “connect the dots.”
Castro opened by referring to the crisis on the Korean peninsula, China’s behavior in the United Nations, and United States conflict with Iran.
He then referred to President Obama’s famous speech on United States/Muslim relations at the Islamic University of Al-Azhar in Cairo on June 4, 2009.
Castro approvingly referred to aspects of Obama’s speech including the latter’s recognition that colonialism had denied “rights and opportunities” to many Muslims and how Muslims during the Cold War were “often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations.”
Castro declared that it was significant that Obama was an African American who spoke in words that “resonated like the self-evident truths contained in the Declaration of Philadelphia of July 4, 1776.”
Obama then, Castro said, admitted that the United States “played a role in the overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government.” Obama seemed to be aware that the Iranian hostility to the United States ever since, particularly after the Shah of Iran was ousted from power in January, 1979, was intimately connected to the CIA operations against Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953. According to Castro this hostility spread throughout the Middle East as the U.S. gravitated toward uncompromising support for Israel and its brutal policies toward Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.
Castro recalled that Mossadegh was overthrown because his parliament had voted to nationalize Iran’s vital natural resource, its oil, in 1951. Most significantly the target of this effort by the Iranians to gain control of the oil under their ground was the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, the corporation which had controlled this vital fluid of the industrial revolution since the dawn of the twentieth century. Today, that corporation is called British Petroleum or BP.
For me, Fidel Castro’s essay, in a few paragraphs, “connected the dots” in a variety of ways. For example, by referring to President Obama’s speech in Cairo, Castro was acknowledging that the President was purposefully addressing the peoples of the Global South and that Obama recognized that the United States was connected to colonialism and imperialism. Castro was suggesting that Obama’s analysis was largely correct and that the President had carefully selected his words because he knew the audience that heard them agreed with the analysis. Obama’s words, Castro suggested, reflected what the President understands to be true and what words were needed diplomatically to mollify a skeptical audience.
Also, Castro was using Obama’s words to articulate the view that the Global South had been historically marginalized and that many peoples, in this case Muslims, had been used as props and victims of the Cold War struggle with the Soviet Union.
Castro, again using Obama’s analysis as a segue, drew connections between imperialism, control of oil, the overthrow of Mossadegh, the intimate ties between the United States and Israel, the sixty year brutality of Israeli regimes against the Palestinian people, the catastrophic environmental disaster caused by the stepchildren of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company , BP, in the Gulf of Mexico, and the Israeli attack on the Freedom Flotilla, bringing material aid to victims of the global system in Gaza.
In other words, Castro was suggesting to us connections between words, consciousness, and deeds; the past and the present; politics, economics, and war; policy toward Israel, Palestine, Iran; international relations, political economy, and the environment; and imperialism, resistance, and the peace movement.
Monday, May 31, 2010
GLOBALISTS VS. PRAGMATISTS: TWO STYLES OF IMPERIALISM
Harry Targ
The United States has long maintained the option of preemptive actions to counter a sufficient threat to our national security. The greater the threat, the greater is the risk of inaction-and the more compelling the case for taking anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy’s attack. To forestall or prevent such hostile acts by our adversaries, the United States will, if necessary, act preemptively (from The National Security Strategy of the United States, September 20, 2002).
…power, in an interconnected world, is no longer a zero sum game. …we will pursue engagement with hostile nations to test their intentions, give their governments the opportunity to change course, reach out to their people, and mobilize international coalitions….The belief that our own interests are bound to the interests of those beyond our borders will continue to guide our engagement with nations and peoples (from The National Security Strategy, May 2010).
The Globalist and Pragmatist Approaches to United States Foreign Policy
The United States emerged from World War II as the “hegemonic power” in the international system. This meant that international institutions and law, diplomatic practices, and the emergence of a global political economy were largely shaped by United States interests. Of particular relevance to global capitalism was the routinization of “free trade,” open doors to foreign investment, access to cheap labor, and the use of multi-billion dollar programs of economic and military assistance to further the penetration of friendly countries around the world. In our own day capitalist states including the United States have pursued the globalization of financial speculation.
The “golden age” of United States economic and military hegemony began to unravel with the quagmire of Vietnam, the oil shocks of the 1970s, and the rise of capitalist competitors to the United States. And, of course, throughout the period from the end of World War II to the present, popular resistance to capitalist hegemony spread from Southeast Asia, to the African continent, to Central America and the Caribbean, to the Middle East, and the Persian Gulf.
Each United States administration sought to maintain global hegemony in the face of growing challenges from the Global South, from Socialist states, and from capitalist competitors. But administrations adopted different strategies and tactics to achieve their hegemonic goals. No better comparison of the two primary programs of foreign policy action can be identified then examining the key foreign policy statements of the George W. Bush and Obama administrations.
The former represents the “globalist” tradition in United States foreign policy. Globalists, alternatively referred to as “neoconservatives,” believe that the United States, based on its military superiority, can and must impose its institutions and policies on the world. This means acting unilaterally to maintain United States hegemony, whatever the reactions from friend and foe alike. This is no better illustrated than the Bush “doctrine of preemption.” The United States reserves the right to act unilaterally when it believes that an enemy, a nation or a people, may in some undetermined future time, threaten the United States.
Also, the globalist agenda assumes that unilateral military action replaces diplomacy as the primary tool of international relations. This rejection of diplomacy challenges the four hundred year tradition of international relations.
Therefore, globalists declare their hostility to alliances, international institutions and norms, and hundreds of years of international law. In other words, the globalist approach to foreign policy, much like the metaphor of the lone gunslinger of the Wild West, emphasizes unilateral action, force, insistence that others accept U.S. domination, and the “zero-sum” view of the world; that is nations and peoples are with the United States or they are with the enemy. Bush’s 2002 National Security Strategy statement is a powerful reflection of this globalist stance.
In general the pragmatist approach to U.S. foreign policy regards diplomacy as an essential tool of a nation’s foreign policy. In fact, military means are used to achieve goals only when diplomacy fails. Diplomatic tools, dialogue and negotiation, may be effective devices in dealing with enemies as well as friends.
Pragmatists see alliances, international institutions and norms, and the selective obedience to international law as central to the pursuit of national interests.
Finally, the pragmatists are more likely to see international relations as a “non-zero sum” game; that is, through negotiations with adversaries both the United States and the other party or parties may be beneficiaries of negotiation.
National Security Strategy Documents: 2002 and 2010
The 2002 NSS document submitted as required to Congress generated enormous attention. Buried in the familiar language of promoting freedom, markets, and other “universal values,” the Bush administration announced that it reserved the right to attack targets, nations or groups, which were perceived to be possible threats to the United States. The NSS declared that this had always been United States policy; the unilateral declaration of the right to peremptorily attack any target. In other words, Bush declared, foreign policy in his administration had not changed from prior ones.
Progressive analysts agree that the United States has acted peremptorily many times. But they say that for the most part official declarations throughout the period since World War II claim that U.S. policy has been to deter possible aggression rather than to unilaterally launch military strikes on perceived threats (the Reagan administration being the exception rather than the rule). Therefore to the extent that the former policy of deterrence had been replaced by preemption, United States policy had changed significantly. In combination with other elements of strategy, using force not diplomacy, ignoring allies and international institutions, and seeing the world in terms of winning or losing, the 2002 NSS statement seemed dangerously militaristic.
The 2010 NSS document pays homage to freedom, markets, democracy, and American virtue, and identifies terrorism and the spread of weapons of mass destruction as enduring problems. But much of the document suggests a foreign policy shift from the globalist lens on the world to the pragmatist one. The NSS 2010 document opens with a clear commitment to deterring aggression, not initiating it. It states that no single nation, no matter how powerful, can determine the destiny of the world alone. And it proclaims that “America must prepare for the future, while forging cooperative approaches among nations that can yield results.”
The document declares that the United States must work with others to achieve a world free of terrorism, nuclear proliferation, and repression. As to the latter, NSS 2010 even asserts that part of the path to a more secure world involves the United States living up to its own values at home. While tinged with Reagan’s view of the United States as the “city on the hill” the document significantly declares that:
"…the most effective way for the United States of America to
promote our values is to live them. America’s commitment to
democracy, human rights, and the rule of law are essential
sources of our strength and influence in the world. They too
must be cultivated by our rejection of actions like torture
that are not in line with ourvalues, by our commitment to
pursue justice consistent with our Constitution, and by our
steady determination to extend the promise of America to all
of our citizens. America has always been a beacon to the
peoples of the world when we ensure that the light of America’s
example burns bright."
As to relations with the rest of the world, the document declares firmly that it would be a mistake “to walk away” from the international system. It promises to work to strengthen international institutions and to galvanize collective action. “The starting point for that collective action will be our engagement with other countries.” Importantly, NSS 2010 adds that “power, in an interconnected world, is no longer a zero sum game.” And to promote engagement the United States will pursue it “…with hostile nations to test their intentions, give their governments the opportunity to change course, reach out to their people, and mobilize international coalitions.”
Do Words Matter?
NSS 2002 and 2010 reflect the similarities and differences of outlook, strategy, and tactics characteristic of United States foreign policy. For sure, the goals of United States have been in keeping with the needs of capitalism to expand. But different administrations have articulated what U.S. policy would be in different ways and to some degree would act in conformance with their descriptions. Also, some presidents would talk and act like both globalists and pragmatists, as circumstances dictated. For example, President Eisenhower made a powerful speech calling for the diminution of the Cold War with the Soviet Union in 1953. He followed it up with negotiations with the Soviet leadership later in the 1950s and warned before he left office of a rising military/industrial complex. At the same time his administration called for the “liberation’ of Eastern Europe and China from the yoke of Communism, overthrew freely elected governments in Iran and Guatemala, and began the long march toward disaster in Vietnam.
Candidate Obama excited Europeans, citizens of the Middle East, and even radicals in Latin America with his dramatic speeches calling for a new day in United States global relations. At the same time, the United States over the last 16 months has expanded its commitment to Afghanistan, launched a brutal drone war campaign against targets in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and backed away from the condemnation of the coup in Honduras and hoped for improved U.S. relations with Cuba and Honduras.
But the documents do reflect differences in tone and emphasis in United States foreign policy. After eight long years of globalist policy, elements of the NSS 2010 document seem refreshingly different. And while the new document does not and can not, renounce imperialism, it does offer guidelines for those who are working for a progressive foreign policy.
In the end when we march and lobby against wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, demand the end to high-technology drone murder, insist on an end to the blockade of Cuba, and cry out for an end to military and diplomatic support of Israeli brutality against the Palestinian people, we can use the words of NSS 2010 to defend our point of view.
The United States has long maintained the option of preemptive actions to counter a sufficient threat to our national security. The greater the threat, the greater is the risk of inaction-and the more compelling the case for taking anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy’s attack. To forestall or prevent such hostile acts by our adversaries, the United States will, if necessary, act preemptively (from The National Security Strategy of the United States, September 20, 2002).
…power, in an interconnected world, is no longer a zero sum game. …we will pursue engagement with hostile nations to test their intentions, give their governments the opportunity to change course, reach out to their people, and mobilize international coalitions….The belief that our own interests are bound to the interests of those beyond our borders will continue to guide our engagement with nations and peoples (from The National Security Strategy, May 2010).
The Globalist and Pragmatist Approaches to United States Foreign Policy
The United States emerged from World War II as the “hegemonic power” in the international system. This meant that international institutions and law, diplomatic practices, and the emergence of a global political economy were largely shaped by United States interests. Of particular relevance to global capitalism was the routinization of “free trade,” open doors to foreign investment, access to cheap labor, and the use of multi-billion dollar programs of economic and military assistance to further the penetration of friendly countries around the world. In our own day capitalist states including the United States have pursued the globalization of financial speculation.
The “golden age” of United States economic and military hegemony began to unravel with the quagmire of Vietnam, the oil shocks of the 1970s, and the rise of capitalist competitors to the United States. And, of course, throughout the period from the end of World War II to the present, popular resistance to capitalist hegemony spread from Southeast Asia, to the African continent, to Central America and the Caribbean, to the Middle East, and the Persian Gulf.
Each United States administration sought to maintain global hegemony in the face of growing challenges from the Global South, from Socialist states, and from capitalist competitors. But administrations adopted different strategies and tactics to achieve their hegemonic goals. No better comparison of the two primary programs of foreign policy action can be identified then examining the key foreign policy statements of the George W. Bush and Obama administrations.
The former represents the “globalist” tradition in United States foreign policy. Globalists, alternatively referred to as “neoconservatives,” believe that the United States, based on its military superiority, can and must impose its institutions and policies on the world. This means acting unilaterally to maintain United States hegemony, whatever the reactions from friend and foe alike. This is no better illustrated than the Bush “doctrine of preemption.” The United States reserves the right to act unilaterally when it believes that an enemy, a nation or a people, may in some undetermined future time, threaten the United States.
Also, the globalist agenda assumes that unilateral military action replaces diplomacy as the primary tool of international relations. This rejection of diplomacy challenges the four hundred year tradition of international relations.
Therefore, globalists declare their hostility to alliances, international institutions and norms, and hundreds of years of international law. In other words, the globalist approach to foreign policy, much like the metaphor of the lone gunslinger of the Wild West, emphasizes unilateral action, force, insistence that others accept U.S. domination, and the “zero-sum” view of the world; that is nations and peoples are with the United States or they are with the enemy. Bush’s 2002 National Security Strategy statement is a powerful reflection of this globalist stance.
In general the pragmatist approach to U.S. foreign policy regards diplomacy as an essential tool of a nation’s foreign policy. In fact, military means are used to achieve goals only when diplomacy fails. Diplomatic tools, dialogue and negotiation, may be effective devices in dealing with enemies as well as friends.
Pragmatists see alliances, international institutions and norms, and the selective obedience to international law as central to the pursuit of national interests.
Finally, the pragmatists are more likely to see international relations as a “non-zero sum” game; that is, through negotiations with adversaries both the United States and the other party or parties may be beneficiaries of negotiation.
National Security Strategy Documents: 2002 and 2010
The 2002 NSS document submitted as required to Congress generated enormous attention. Buried in the familiar language of promoting freedom, markets, and other “universal values,” the Bush administration announced that it reserved the right to attack targets, nations or groups, which were perceived to be possible threats to the United States. The NSS declared that this had always been United States policy; the unilateral declaration of the right to peremptorily attack any target. In other words, Bush declared, foreign policy in his administration had not changed from prior ones.
Progressive analysts agree that the United States has acted peremptorily many times. But they say that for the most part official declarations throughout the period since World War II claim that U.S. policy has been to deter possible aggression rather than to unilaterally launch military strikes on perceived threats (the Reagan administration being the exception rather than the rule). Therefore to the extent that the former policy of deterrence had been replaced by preemption, United States policy had changed significantly. In combination with other elements of strategy, using force not diplomacy, ignoring allies and international institutions, and seeing the world in terms of winning or losing, the 2002 NSS statement seemed dangerously militaristic.
The 2010 NSS document pays homage to freedom, markets, democracy, and American virtue, and identifies terrorism and the spread of weapons of mass destruction as enduring problems. But much of the document suggests a foreign policy shift from the globalist lens on the world to the pragmatist one. The NSS 2010 document opens with a clear commitment to deterring aggression, not initiating it. It states that no single nation, no matter how powerful, can determine the destiny of the world alone. And it proclaims that “America must prepare for the future, while forging cooperative approaches among nations that can yield results.”
The document declares that the United States must work with others to achieve a world free of terrorism, nuclear proliferation, and repression. As to the latter, NSS 2010 even asserts that part of the path to a more secure world involves the United States living up to its own values at home. While tinged with Reagan’s view of the United States as the “city on the hill” the document significantly declares that:
"…the most effective way for the United States of America to
promote our values is to live them. America’s commitment to
democracy, human rights, and the rule of law are essential
sources of our strength and influence in the world. They too
must be cultivated by our rejection of actions like torture
that are not in line with ourvalues, by our commitment to
pursue justice consistent with our Constitution, and by our
steady determination to extend the promise of America to all
of our citizens. America has always been a beacon to the
peoples of the world when we ensure that the light of America’s
example burns bright."
As to relations with the rest of the world, the document declares firmly that it would be a mistake “to walk away” from the international system. It promises to work to strengthen international institutions and to galvanize collective action. “The starting point for that collective action will be our engagement with other countries.” Importantly, NSS 2010 adds that “power, in an interconnected world, is no longer a zero sum game.” And to promote engagement the United States will pursue it “…with hostile nations to test their intentions, give their governments the opportunity to change course, reach out to their people, and mobilize international coalitions.”
Do Words Matter?
NSS 2002 and 2010 reflect the similarities and differences of outlook, strategy, and tactics characteristic of United States foreign policy. For sure, the goals of United States have been in keeping with the needs of capitalism to expand. But different administrations have articulated what U.S. policy would be in different ways and to some degree would act in conformance with their descriptions. Also, some presidents would talk and act like both globalists and pragmatists, as circumstances dictated. For example, President Eisenhower made a powerful speech calling for the diminution of the Cold War with the Soviet Union in 1953. He followed it up with negotiations with the Soviet leadership later in the 1950s and warned before he left office of a rising military/industrial complex. At the same time his administration called for the “liberation’ of Eastern Europe and China from the yoke of Communism, overthrew freely elected governments in Iran and Guatemala, and began the long march toward disaster in Vietnam.
Candidate Obama excited Europeans, citizens of the Middle East, and even radicals in Latin America with his dramatic speeches calling for a new day in United States global relations. At the same time, the United States over the last 16 months has expanded its commitment to Afghanistan, launched a brutal drone war campaign against targets in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and backed away from the condemnation of the coup in Honduras and hoped for improved U.S. relations with Cuba and Honduras.
But the documents do reflect differences in tone and emphasis in United States foreign policy. After eight long years of globalist policy, elements of the NSS 2010 document seem refreshingly different. And while the new document does not and can not, renounce imperialism, it does offer guidelines for those who are working for a progressive foreign policy.
In the end when we march and lobby against wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, demand the end to high-technology drone murder, insist on an end to the blockade of Cuba, and cry out for an end to military and diplomatic support of Israeli brutality against the Palestinian people, we can use the words of NSS 2010 to defend our point of view.
Sunday, May 16, 2010
WAIST DEEP IN THE BIG MUDDY
Harry Targ
As has been expressed in a variety of ways over the years, the specter of Vietnam weighs as an albatross on the American body politic. President Truman began supporting French colonialism in Indochina in 1950, funding eighty percent of the French war effort as part of the globalization of Cold War policy. After the French were defeated, the Eisenhower administration in the 1950s created a dictatorial, unpopular, and corrupt South Vietnamese government which was aided by military advisers and massive U.S. financial support. President Kennedy pursued a policy of building a “non-communist road to economic development,” with the addition of thousands more troops. Lyndon Johnson launched a massive air war and counterinsurgency campaign leading to 540,000 troops in country by 1968. And the Nixon administration engaged in a brutal bombing campaign hitting targets throughout North and South Vietnam. Each strategy was to be the last. Victory was near. In the end, millions of Vietnamese people died and thousands of Americans.
And all indicators are that the United States is doing it again in Afghanistan. In the 1980s the U.S. committed more than a billion dollars to support religious fundamentalists fighting to overthrow secular Kabul governments it opposed. In the 1990s, the U.S. briefly negotiated with a Taliban government it found abhorrent, but which it felt might become a potential economic ally in the production of oil pipelines running through Afghanistan. Finally the George W. Bush administration made war on dubious grounds on the Taliban government in the twenty-first century. The immediate enemy, Al Qaeda, the alleged perpetrator of the crimes of 9/11, was not delivered to the U.S. by the Afghanistan government as “ordered” by the Bush administration.
Since 9/11 we have been engaged in a nine year quagmire in Afghanistan fighting what is left of a dwindling Al Qaeda and a vast population of people who resent being bombed and occupied by a foreign power. The White House last week hosted Afghan president Hamid Karzai, by numerous accounts corrupt and unpopular. The most troubling information about the encounter between Obama and Karzai was reported by Helene Cooper in The New York Times. According to her, President Obama promised to Karzai that “…the United States would remain in Afghanistan for the long haul, even as he vowed to stick to his timetable to begin withdrawing troops by July 2011.” Cooper surmised that the weeklong visit constituted an effort “… to reassure Mr. Karzai and his government that the United States will not abandon Afghanistan…”
In another New York Times story by Alissa Rubin, the author warns that the hardest fighting is still ahead even though “the biggest challenge lies not on the battlefield but in the governing of Afghanistan itself.” A near future expansion of the counter-insurgency campaign will confront, the “corrosive distrust” of the Karzai government. In areas such as Marja, the population resents influential power brokers such as Karzai’s brother, local police, and other government officials. Rubin quotes an aid to General Stanley McChrystal, architect of the new counter-insurgency strategy in Afghanistan: “People are tired of the Taliban, but they also don’t want cops to shake them down, they don’t want power brokers who are so corrupt they impact their lives and livelihood.”
Gareth Porter in an Inter Press Service article points out that the Obama administration has balked at the Karzai effort to dialogue with sectors of the Taliban despite the obvious possibility that negotiations could lead to the withdrawal of U.S. troops which would advantage the United States and at the same time bring peace to the Pashtun population of Southern Afghanistan. Porter quotes an administrative official: “Obama’s forceful opposition to any political approach to any Taliban leadership until after the counter-insurgency strategy has been tried appears to represent a policy that has been hammered out within the administration at the insistence of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and General McChrystal, the commander of U.S. and coalition forces in Afghanistan.”
Meanwhile, Middle East expert Juan Cole writes that Obama’s master plan for Afghanistan has involved a “massive counter-insurgency effort,” involving tens of thousands of troops and massive combat. Cole estimates that the strategy has about a 10 percent possibility of success.
Forty-six years ago Lyndon Johnson won an enormous presidential electoral victory against conservative Republican Barry Goldwater. LBJ ran as the anti-war candidate. He embarked on a campaign to get Congress to support civil rights legislation that would at last end Jim Crow in the South. He constructed a variety of programs to address poverty in America, activate community participation in the political process, and launched a program to expand access to health care for the elderly. He promised the American people “A Great Society.”
Much of the Great Society agenda was destroyed as the Vietnam War escalated from 120,000 troops in 1965, to over 400,000 by 1967, and 540,000 in January, 1968. By 1967 the United States had dropped more bombs on Vietnamese targets than were dropped on enemy targets during World War II. And President Johnson was forced to withdraw from the 1968 campaign for the presidency.
The Obama/McChrystal counter-insurgency strategy may not yield the magnitude of escalation reached in Vietnam. However, the combination of support for a corrupt regime, placing foreign troops among a hostile population, indiscriminant killing of local civilians, and refusal to negotiate with adversaries, as Juan Cole suggests, surely will yield a Vietnam-style failure in Afghanistan.
Along with the pain and suffering of the Afghan people, the counter-insurgency strategy of this administration will dash the hopes and dreams of all the young people who worked so hard in 2008 to get the candidate committed to progressive social change, Barack Obama, elected president. The parallels with the young who worked to elect the “peace candidate” in 1964 are stark.
As has been expressed in a variety of ways over the years, the specter of Vietnam weighs as an albatross on the American body politic. President Truman began supporting French colonialism in Indochina in 1950, funding eighty percent of the French war effort as part of the globalization of Cold War policy. After the French were defeated, the Eisenhower administration in the 1950s created a dictatorial, unpopular, and corrupt South Vietnamese government which was aided by military advisers and massive U.S. financial support. President Kennedy pursued a policy of building a “non-communist road to economic development,” with the addition of thousands more troops. Lyndon Johnson launched a massive air war and counterinsurgency campaign leading to 540,000 troops in country by 1968. And the Nixon administration engaged in a brutal bombing campaign hitting targets throughout North and South Vietnam. Each strategy was to be the last. Victory was near. In the end, millions of Vietnamese people died and thousands of Americans.
And all indicators are that the United States is doing it again in Afghanistan. In the 1980s the U.S. committed more than a billion dollars to support religious fundamentalists fighting to overthrow secular Kabul governments it opposed. In the 1990s, the U.S. briefly negotiated with a Taliban government it found abhorrent, but which it felt might become a potential economic ally in the production of oil pipelines running through Afghanistan. Finally the George W. Bush administration made war on dubious grounds on the Taliban government in the twenty-first century. The immediate enemy, Al Qaeda, the alleged perpetrator of the crimes of 9/11, was not delivered to the U.S. by the Afghanistan government as “ordered” by the Bush administration.
Since 9/11 we have been engaged in a nine year quagmire in Afghanistan fighting what is left of a dwindling Al Qaeda and a vast population of people who resent being bombed and occupied by a foreign power. The White House last week hosted Afghan president Hamid Karzai, by numerous accounts corrupt and unpopular. The most troubling information about the encounter between Obama and Karzai was reported by Helene Cooper in The New York Times. According to her, President Obama promised to Karzai that “…the United States would remain in Afghanistan for the long haul, even as he vowed to stick to his timetable to begin withdrawing troops by July 2011.” Cooper surmised that the weeklong visit constituted an effort “… to reassure Mr. Karzai and his government that the United States will not abandon Afghanistan…”
In another New York Times story by Alissa Rubin, the author warns that the hardest fighting is still ahead even though “the biggest challenge lies not on the battlefield but in the governing of Afghanistan itself.” A near future expansion of the counter-insurgency campaign will confront, the “corrosive distrust” of the Karzai government. In areas such as Marja, the population resents influential power brokers such as Karzai’s brother, local police, and other government officials. Rubin quotes an aid to General Stanley McChrystal, architect of the new counter-insurgency strategy in Afghanistan: “People are tired of the Taliban, but they also don’t want cops to shake them down, they don’t want power brokers who are so corrupt they impact their lives and livelihood.”
Gareth Porter in an Inter Press Service article points out that the Obama administration has balked at the Karzai effort to dialogue with sectors of the Taliban despite the obvious possibility that negotiations could lead to the withdrawal of U.S. troops which would advantage the United States and at the same time bring peace to the Pashtun population of Southern Afghanistan. Porter quotes an administrative official: “Obama’s forceful opposition to any political approach to any Taliban leadership until after the counter-insurgency strategy has been tried appears to represent a policy that has been hammered out within the administration at the insistence of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and General McChrystal, the commander of U.S. and coalition forces in Afghanistan.”
Meanwhile, Middle East expert Juan Cole writes that Obama’s master plan for Afghanistan has involved a “massive counter-insurgency effort,” involving tens of thousands of troops and massive combat. Cole estimates that the strategy has about a 10 percent possibility of success.
Forty-six years ago Lyndon Johnson won an enormous presidential electoral victory against conservative Republican Barry Goldwater. LBJ ran as the anti-war candidate. He embarked on a campaign to get Congress to support civil rights legislation that would at last end Jim Crow in the South. He constructed a variety of programs to address poverty in America, activate community participation in the political process, and launched a program to expand access to health care for the elderly. He promised the American people “A Great Society.”
Much of the Great Society agenda was destroyed as the Vietnam War escalated from 120,000 troops in 1965, to over 400,000 by 1967, and 540,000 in January, 1968. By 1967 the United States had dropped more bombs on Vietnamese targets than were dropped on enemy targets during World War II. And President Johnson was forced to withdraw from the 1968 campaign for the presidency.
The Obama/McChrystal counter-insurgency strategy may not yield the magnitude of escalation reached in Vietnam. However, the combination of support for a corrupt regime, placing foreign troops among a hostile population, indiscriminant killing of local civilians, and refusal to negotiate with adversaries, as Juan Cole suggests, surely will yield a Vietnam-style failure in Afghanistan.
Along with the pain and suffering of the Afghan people, the counter-insurgency strategy of this administration will dash the hopes and dreams of all the young people who worked so hard in 2008 to get the candidate committed to progressive social change, Barack Obama, elected president. The parallels with the young who worked to elect the “peace candidate” in 1964 are stark.
Sunday, May 9, 2010
WHO SHOULD WE BELIEVE?
“INTELLIGENCE OFFICIALS,” “WESTERN DIPLOMATS,” “A SENIOR INTELLIGENCE OFFICIAL,” “A SENIOR MILITARY OFFICIAL,” OR “THE OFFICIAL WHO WOULD SPEAK OF THE INVESTIGATION ONLY ON CONDITION OF ANONYMITY?”
Harry Targ
I was reading The New York Times accounts, Friday, May 7, of the ongoing investigation of the attempted Times Square bombing by suspect Faisal Shahzad. I was intrigued by a variety of stories that turned speculation by various anonymous informed sources into complex analyses of Shahzad’s international connections, the transformation of the Taliban from a political force in Afghanistan to one also in Pakistan, the emergence of a variety of other Islamic dissident groups in Pakistan and their connections with Taliban and perhaps Al Queda.
The lead in the front page story on May 7 headlined “Pakistani Taliban Are Said to Expand Alliances” stimulated my curiosity: “The Pakistani Taliban, which American investigators suspect were behind the attempt to bomb Times Square, have in recent years combined forces with Al Qaeda and other groups, threatening to extend their reach and ambitions, Western diplomats, intelligence officials and experts say.”
The story indicates that the Pakistani Taliban have reached out to other militant groups, “splinter cells” (which sounds really scary), “foot soldiers,” and guns-for-hire.” The article continues with elaborations of nefarious early connections between the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Al Qaeda, and increasing numbers of Pakistani Punjabi militants. Faisal Shahzad may have received bomb training from one of these groups, a claim reiterated in another article quoting a senior military official who was not authorized to speak in public. The article reported that the leader of the Pakistani Taliban said that “the group had suicide bombers in the United States, who, he said would carry out their mission at an opportune time” while denying complicity in the Times Square bombing attempt.
Reading these stories and viewing a variety of claims about the causes and connections of the failed bombing reminded me of a short essay I wrote for an interesting volume of writings and graphic design images edited by Rebecca Targ titled “Lying,” in Fold: the Reader (http://www.foldthereader.net/ ). I wrote:
Foreign Policy Lies Lead to War
On August 2, 1964, North Vietnamese armed motor boats attacked two U.S. naval vessels off the coast of North Vietnam. The administration of Lyndon Johnson defined the attacks as an unprovoked act of North Vietnamese aggression. Two days later it was announced that another attack on U.S. ships in international waters had occurred and the U.S. responded with air attacks on North Vietnamese targets. President Johnson then took a resolution he had already prepared to the Congress of the United States. The so-called Gulf of Tonkin resolution declared that the Congress authorizes the president to do what he deemed necessary to defend U.S. national security in Southeast Asia. Only two Senators voted “no.” Over the next three years the U.S. sent over 500,000 troops to Vietnam to carry out a massive air and ground war in both the South and North of the country.
Within a year of the so-called Gulf of Tonkin incidents, evidence began to appear indicating that the August 2 attack was provoked. The two U.S. naval vessels were in North Vietnamese coastal waters orchestrating acts of sabotage in the Northern part of Vietnam. More serious, evidence pointed to the inescapable conclusion that the second attack on August 4 never occurred.
President Johnson’s lies to the American people about the Gulf of Tonkin contributed to the devastating decisions to escalate a U.S. war in Vietnam that cost 57,000 U.S. troop deaths and upwards of three million Vietnamese deaths.
Forty years later, George W. Bush and his key aides put together a package of lies about Iraq imports of uranium from Niger, purchases of aluminum rods which supposedly could be used for constructing nuclear weapons, development of biological and chemical weapons, and connections between Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden.
As the Vietnamese and Iraqi cases show, foreign policies built on lies can lead to imperial wars, huge expenditures on the military, economic crises at home, and military casualties abroad.
********************************************************************************
Are there any lessons to learn from the Vietnam and Iraqi cases sited above? I think so.
Two of the most damaging, indeed murderous, foreign policies of the United States were built on lies.
The record indicates that key policy-makers in both the Vietnam and Iraq eras made decisions with almost no knowledge of the political cultures of the two countries. In the Vietnam era not more than a handful of Americans had knowledge of the Vietnamese language or history.
In both cases, foreign policy decisions were shaped by frames of reference, or ideologies, that bore little or no relationship to the political reality in the countries targeted for war. The frame shaping Vietnam was the war on international communism; for Iraq it was the war on terrorism.
In both cases, decisions were made based on recommendations of parties interested in war, from Pentagon officials, to military contractors and arms merchants, to academic and think tank “experts,” to media outlets with stories to create, to journalists seeking to establish their careers, to liberal and conservative politicians seeking issues to shape their own quests for power.
Returning to the Times Square incident, we may never learn the truth. But we can assume with confidence that military, economic, academic, and journalistic interests will promote a scenario of a Pakistani Taliban/Al Queda connection to the failed adventure in New York. And we can expect that all these interests will promote the idea that such attacks, perhaps successful next time, can occur anyplace in the United States. We must live in terror of the terrorists.
Finally, we can be sure that “the cure” for perpetual terrorism will not include economic development, a just and humane U.S. foreign policy, ending drone attacks on Pakistani citizens, and stopping the demonization of peoples of color, in this case, those who embrace the Muslim religion.
Harry Targ
I was reading The New York Times accounts, Friday, May 7, of the ongoing investigation of the attempted Times Square bombing by suspect Faisal Shahzad. I was intrigued by a variety of stories that turned speculation by various anonymous informed sources into complex analyses of Shahzad’s international connections, the transformation of the Taliban from a political force in Afghanistan to one also in Pakistan, the emergence of a variety of other Islamic dissident groups in Pakistan and their connections with Taliban and perhaps Al Queda.
The lead in the front page story on May 7 headlined “Pakistani Taliban Are Said to Expand Alliances” stimulated my curiosity: “The Pakistani Taliban, which American investigators suspect were behind the attempt to bomb Times Square, have in recent years combined forces with Al Qaeda and other groups, threatening to extend their reach and ambitions, Western diplomats, intelligence officials and experts say.”
The story indicates that the Pakistani Taliban have reached out to other militant groups, “splinter cells” (which sounds really scary), “foot soldiers,” and guns-for-hire.” The article continues with elaborations of nefarious early connections between the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Al Qaeda, and increasing numbers of Pakistani Punjabi militants. Faisal Shahzad may have received bomb training from one of these groups, a claim reiterated in another article quoting a senior military official who was not authorized to speak in public. The article reported that the leader of the Pakistani Taliban said that “the group had suicide bombers in the United States, who, he said would carry out their mission at an opportune time” while denying complicity in the Times Square bombing attempt.
Reading these stories and viewing a variety of claims about the causes and connections of the failed bombing reminded me of a short essay I wrote for an interesting volume of writings and graphic design images edited by Rebecca Targ titled “Lying,” in Fold: the Reader (http://www.foldthereader.net/ ). I wrote:
Foreign Policy Lies Lead to War
On August 2, 1964, North Vietnamese armed motor boats attacked two U.S. naval vessels off the coast of North Vietnam. The administration of Lyndon Johnson defined the attacks as an unprovoked act of North Vietnamese aggression. Two days later it was announced that another attack on U.S. ships in international waters had occurred and the U.S. responded with air attacks on North Vietnamese targets. President Johnson then took a resolution he had already prepared to the Congress of the United States. The so-called Gulf of Tonkin resolution declared that the Congress authorizes the president to do what he deemed necessary to defend U.S. national security in Southeast Asia. Only two Senators voted “no.” Over the next three years the U.S. sent over 500,000 troops to Vietnam to carry out a massive air and ground war in both the South and North of the country.
Within a year of the so-called Gulf of Tonkin incidents, evidence began to appear indicating that the August 2 attack was provoked. The two U.S. naval vessels were in North Vietnamese coastal waters orchestrating acts of sabotage in the Northern part of Vietnam. More serious, evidence pointed to the inescapable conclusion that the second attack on August 4 never occurred.
President Johnson’s lies to the American people about the Gulf of Tonkin contributed to the devastating decisions to escalate a U.S. war in Vietnam that cost 57,000 U.S. troop deaths and upwards of three million Vietnamese deaths.
Forty years later, George W. Bush and his key aides put together a package of lies about Iraq imports of uranium from Niger, purchases of aluminum rods which supposedly could be used for constructing nuclear weapons, development of biological and chemical weapons, and connections between Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden.
As the Vietnamese and Iraqi cases show, foreign policies built on lies can lead to imperial wars, huge expenditures on the military, economic crises at home, and military casualties abroad.
********************************************************************************
Are there any lessons to learn from the Vietnam and Iraqi cases sited above? I think so.
Two of the most damaging, indeed murderous, foreign policies of the United States were built on lies.
The record indicates that key policy-makers in both the Vietnam and Iraq eras made decisions with almost no knowledge of the political cultures of the two countries. In the Vietnam era not more than a handful of Americans had knowledge of the Vietnamese language or history.
In both cases, foreign policy decisions were shaped by frames of reference, or ideologies, that bore little or no relationship to the political reality in the countries targeted for war. The frame shaping Vietnam was the war on international communism; for Iraq it was the war on terrorism.
In both cases, decisions were made based on recommendations of parties interested in war, from Pentagon officials, to military contractors and arms merchants, to academic and think tank “experts,” to media outlets with stories to create, to journalists seeking to establish their careers, to liberal and conservative politicians seeking issues to shape their own quests for power.
Returning to the Times Square incident, we may never learn the truth. But we can assume with confidence that military, economic, academic, and journalistic interests will promote a scenario of a Pakistani Taliban/Al Queda connection to the failed adventure in New York. And we can expect that all these interests will promote the idea that such attacks, perhaps successful next time, can occur anyplace in the United States. We must live in terror of the terrorists.
Finally, we can be sure that “the cure” for perpetual terrorism will not include economic development, a just and humane U.S. foreign policy, ending drone attacks on Pakistani citizens, and stopping the demonization of peoples of color, in this case, those who embrace the Muslim religion.
Sunday, May 2, 2010
WORKERS ON THE MOVE
Harry Targ
This was a week of worker militancy. Wednesday, April 28, in large cities and small towns, workers rallied in support of improved health and safety at the workplace. This was the fortieth anniversary of the establishment of the Occupational Health and Safety Administration. In the minds and hearts of these workers were the recent deaths in mines in West Virginia and Kentucky and oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico.
On April 29 masses of workers assembled, thousands in Manhattan, to protest Wall Street’s robbery of the American people, particularly for its creation of an economic crisis that has cost workers all over the globe millions of jobs.
And finally on Saturday, May 1, the international day of workers’ solidarity, inspired by the protests in support of the eight-hour day movement in Chicago in 1886, millions of workers mobilized everywhere; from Hong Kong, Istanbul, Athens, Berlin, Hamburg, Manila, Moscow, Seoul, Tokyo Taiwan, Bangkok, to Havana. In the United States huge throngs marched in support of immigrant rights in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, New York, and many other cities.
I just finished teaching a course called “The Politics of Capital and Labor in the United States.” We read texts that analyzed the development of capitalism as the dominant mode of production. We discussed its various stages from competitive to monopoly capitalism to today’s era of finance capital. I highlighted the post-World War II period in U.S. and world history emphasizing the establishment of a permanent war economy, deindustrialization, financialization, and neo-liberal globalization.
We then concentrated on the changing nature of the circumstances of work and workers over the last 60 years drawing upon the collection from Dollars and Sense magazine called Real World Labor. By way of summary, I prepared a list of the impacts of systemic economic and political changes on workers derived from the various essays in the book. The list, in no particular order, suggests the ways in which the lives of workers have been transformed over the last sixty years and why the mass mobilizations of workers, such as those this week are so desperately needed.
The list only touches the surface. It includes dramatic increases in state and employer mechanisms to obstruct union organizing. Union density in the United States has declined from a peak of 33% in the early 1950s to 15% today (half in the public sector). Employers skillfully use workplace policies to destroy the potential for worker solidarity, from encouraging racism, and inter-ethnic hostilities, to creating two-tier salary schedules.
Work has been increasingly sub-contracted and outsourced shifting manufacturing and service employment from once higher paid industrial capitalist countries to poor countries whose traditional economies have been disrupted to accommodate new factories of outsourced work. Sweatshops, initiated in textile mills in Britain and the United States two hundred years ago, began to be transferred to countries of the Global South in the 1960s and now, with declining real wages in the United States, are returning to domestic venues.
Work has been casualized. Job creation is increasingly characterized by part-time, contingent, and seasonal work, with significant portions of the work force defined as “illegal.”
For those with jobs, whether in manufacturing or service, modern forms of Taylorism are imposed on work processes. Originally Taylorism inspired efforts to control all the physical movements of workers to maximize their productivity at all costs. Now such techniques are applied in the service sector as well, programming what workers say to customers and the appropriate physical space prescribed for interactions with them. Generally, techniques have been created to maximize the productivity (but not wages) with which all work is performed.
Workplace harassment has been rising in recent years, including demeaning treatment of workers, targeting workers with seniority so that they will be forced to retire, and encouraging racism and sexism on the job.
Similarly, the initiating of workplace regulations in the past has been reversed. Taking occupational health and safety as an example, systems of rules, regulations, and inspections led to a significant decline in workplace deaths and injuries during the 1970s. Those changes that benefited workers have been reversed since the 1980s. It is estimated that a shop floor or workplace can be expected to be inspected only once every 83 years. The tragedies in mines and on oil rigs this year remind workers that their jobs have become as dangerous again as they were fifty years ago.
And of course real wages, benefits, and jobs have all declined. Economists still debate what should be the “natural unemployment rate.” Everywhere, from U.S. cities, to most of Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East life-sustaining remunerative activities involve creative street hustling, what economists call “the informal sector.” Good paying secure jobs as a percentage of all the work in the world is declining. In factories and service jobs “wage theft” has become common; that is employers find ways to avoid paying workers what they have earned.
State policies have enforced increasing exploitation of workers. Old fashioned repression, that is using the police and armies to crush union-organizing drives occur from time to time. In the United States, business lobbyists pressure state legislatures to pass “right to work” legislation limiting the ability of workers to form unions. Dilatory procedures for certifying union recognition, impediments to elections, prohibitions on strikes, and administrative decisions to prohibit categories of workers from unionizing have become instruments of state policy. Of course, in every country where organizing campaigns occur, leaders are targeted for dismissal and sometimes death squads.
In addition to this modest list, the transforming global economy has created millions of migrant workers who are forced out of their jobs and from their land to become a pool of reserve workers who desperately seek work in other countries. Masses of Latin Americans come to the United States to find low paying jobs while they are threatened by state repression, most immediately illustrated by the new draconian Arizona law. Mobility also occurs from and to countries of the Global South. A million Bolivians have migrated since 1999 to work in sweatshops in neighborhoods of Buenos Aries, thousands of Nicaraguans pick pineapples in neighboring Costa Rica, and Central Americans work in Mexican factories.
So this week workers everywhere were on the move. Their campaigns and rallies are about worker rights, jobs, benefits, and the capacity to be treated, wherever they live, with human dignity. The annual May Day events suggest that workers’ struggles are truly global. Capitalism in the era of neo-liberal globalization is truly global and in the end organization and resistance must be global.
In one of the essays in the Real World Labor reader Bill Fletcher suggests what is necessary for the U.S. labor movement to participate in the struggle for global justice. The labor movement must “…understand the problem of empire, or if one prefers, imperial ambitions.…the American working class resides in a world where corporate/government connections are strengthening, and with them increased repression of progressive and democratic forces in the face of unfolding globalization.”
Those who proclaimed May Day as the workers’ day over a hundred years ago understood the need for global solidarity to achieve justice. Workers need to build off this week’s dynamism to create a movement of global solidarity.
This was a week of worker militancy. Wednesday, April 28, in large cities and small towns, workers rallied in support of improved health and safety at the workplace. This was the fortieth anniversary of the establishment of the Occupational Health and Safety Administration. In the minds and hearts of these workers were the recent deaths in mines in West Virginia and Kentucky and oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico.
On April 29 masses of workers assembled, thousands in Manhattan, to protest Wall Street’s robbery of the American people, particularly for its creation of an economic crisis that has cost workers all over the globe millions of jobs.
And finally on Saturday, May 1, the international day of workers’ solidarity, inspired by the protests in support of the eight-hour day movement in Chicago in 1886, millions of workers mobilized everywhere; from Hong Kong, Istanbul, Athens, Berlin, Hamburg, Manila, Moscow, Seoul, Tokyo Taiwan, Bangkok, to Havana. In the United States huge throngs marched in support of immigrant rights in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, New York, and many other cities.
I just finished teaching a course called “The Politics of Capital and Labor in the United States.” We read texts that analyzed the development of capitalism as the dominant mode of production. We discussed its various stages from competitive to monopoly capitalism to today’s era of finance capital. I highlighted the post-World War II period in U.S. and world history emphasizing the establishment of a permanent war economy, deindustrialization, financialization, and neo-liberal globalization.
We then concentrated on the changing nature of the circumstances of work and workers over the last 60 years drawing upon the collection from Dollars and Sense magazine called Real World Labor. By way of summary, I prepared a list of the impacts of systemic economic and political changes on workers derived from the various essays in the book. The list, in no particular order, suggests the ways in which the lives of workers have been transformed over the last sixty years and why the mass mobilizations of workers, such as those this week are so desperately needed.
The list only touches the surface. It includes dramatic increases in state and employer mechanisms to obstruct union organizing. Union density in the United States has declined from a peak of 33% in the early 1950s to 15% today (half in the public sector). Employers skillfully use workplace policies to destroy the potential for worker solidarity, from encouraging racism, and inter-ethnic hostilities, to creating two-tier salary schedules.
Work has been increasingly sub-contracted and outsourced shifting manufacturing and service employment from once higher paid industrial capitalist countries to poor countries whose traditional economies have been disrupted to accommodate new factories of outsourced work. Sweatshops, initiated in textile mills in Britain and the United States two hundred years ago, began to be transferred to countries of the Global South in the 1960s and now, with declining real wages in the United States, are returning to domestic venues.
Work has been casualized. Job creation is increasingly characterized by part-time, contingent, and seasonal work, with significant portions of the work force defined as “illegal.”
For those with jobs, whether in manufacturing or service, modern forms of Taylorism are imposed on work processes. Originally Taylorism inspired efforts to control all the physical movements of workers to maximize their productivity at all costs. Now such techniques are applied in the service sector as well, programming what workers say to customers and the appropriate physical space prescribed for interactions with them. Generally, techniques have been created to maximize the productivity (but not wages) with which all work is performed.
Workplace harassment has been rising in recent years, including demeaning treatment of workers, targeting workers with seniority so that they will be forced to retire, and encouraging racism and sexism on the job.
Similarly, the initiating of workplace regulations in the past has been reversed. Taking occupational health and safety as an example, systems of rules, regulations, and inspections led to a significant decline in workplace deaths and injuries during the 1970s. Those changes that benefited workers have been reversed since the 1980s. It is estimated that a shop floor or workplace can be expected to be inspected only once every 83 years. The tragedies in mines and on oil rigs this year remind workers that their jobs have become as dangerous again as they were fifty years ago.
And of course real wages, benefits, and jobs have all declined. Economists still debate what should be the “natural unemployment rate.” Everywhere, from U.S. cities, to most of Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East life-sustaining remunerative activities involve creative street hustling, what economists call “the informal sector.” Good paying secure jobs as a percentage of all the work in the world is declining. In factories and service jobs “wage theft” has become common; that is employers find ways to avoid paying workers what they have earned.
State policies have enforced increasing exploitation of workers. Old fashioned repression, that is using the police and armies to crush union-organizing drives occur from time to time. In the United States, business lobbyists pressure state legislatures to pass “right to work” legislation limiting the ability of workers to form unions. Dilatory procedures for certifying union recognition, impediments to elections, prohibitions on strikes, and administrative decisions to prohibit categories of workers from unionizing have become instruments of state policy. Of course, in every country where organizing campaigns occur, leaders are targeted for dismissal and sometimes death squads.
In addition to this modest list, the transforming global economy has created millions of migrant workers who are forced out of their jobs and from their land to become a pool of reserve workers who desperately seek work in other countries. Masses of Latin Americans come to the United States to find low paying jobs while they are threatened by state repression, most immediately illustrated by the new draconian Arizona law. Mobility also occurs from and to countries of the Global South. A million Bolivians have migrated since 1999 to work in sweatshops in neighborhoods of Buenos Aries, thousands of Nicaraguans pick pineapples in neighboring Costa Rica, and Central Americans work in Mexican factories.
So this week workers everywhere were on the move. Their campaigns and rallies are about worker rights, jobs, benefits, and the capacity to be treated, wherever they live, with human dignity. The annual May Day events suggest that workers’ struggles are truly global. Capitalism in the era of neo-liberal globalization is truly global and in the end organization and resistance must be global.
In one of the essays in the Real World Labor reader Bill Fletcher suggests what is necessary for the U.S. labor movement to participate in the struggle for global justice. The labor movement must “…understand the problem of empire, or if one prefers, imperial ambitions.…the American working class resides in a world where corporate/government connections are strengthening, and with them increased repression of progressive and democratic forces in the face of unfolding globalization.”
Those who proclaimed May Day as the workers’ day over a hundred years ago understood the need for global solidarity to achieve justice. Workers need to build off this week’s dynamism to create a movement of global solidarity.
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