THE PROGRESSIVES CONUNDRUM: THE GIFT THAT KEEPS GIVING

Harry Targ

The presidential candidacy of Donald Trump has mobilized rightwing populists, economic nationalists, racists, anti-Muslims and anti-Semites, sectors of the marginalized and growing precariat, and some Republicans. His stock in trade has been a continuous communication by brief soundbites and tweets lies and innuendos, egregious insults, personal attacks, and slanders. These have exceeded much of the history of political discourse in the United States (with the possible exception of the anti-Communist ravings of the 1950s and the virulently hostile campaigns in the days of Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and Aaron Burr).

It is clear to most well-meaning political activists of the center and the left, that a Trump presidency would cause untold pain and suffering to an already aggrieved population of people of color, workers, women, gays and lesbians, and advocates for the environment. However, Donald Trump, for a year now, has been a candidate who is largely a creation of the mainstream media. Day after day mainstream media reported on the candidate’s every word, his seeming popularity, and his “presumptiveness” as the Republican nominee of his party. CBS executive Leslie Moonves said about the Trump candidacy: “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS” (Campbell Brown, “Why I Blame TV for Trump,” Politico Magazine, May/June 2016). The Trump candidacy has been worth millions more dollars in corporate profit for a news industry that has experienced declining viewership and readership in recent years. 

Once Trump secured almost enough delegates to be nominated the Republican candidate, the media, including liberal and left voices, launched a non-stop effort to discredit his background, his assertions, and his broad array of rightwing supporters. And since candidate Trump continuously articulates his bizarre views he has become the gift that never stops giving. The frame has shifted from Trump the curiosity to Trump the monster. Both tropes, it is hoped, will increase the viewership and advertising as 24/7 coverage shifts to the general election.

The narrow media frame on the Trump phenomenon and his daily statements lead to a portrait of an electoral contest with his Democratic Party opponent that prioritizes personalities and sound bites and not ideas, issues, worldviews, or ideologies. The media frame reaffirms the typical American personality “binary,” that is if not Trump then the presumptive Democratic Party nominee, Hillary Clinton. Although the differences between the two candidates matter, fundamental questions of policy and purpose which should be part of political discourse are frozen out of the political process. The central issue of the election has become Donald Trump.

The Trump candidacy has poisoned and distorted the real political contest of ideas undergirding the issues of the twenty first century. Black Lives Matter, the Occupy, the Fight for 15, Moral Mondays, and the climate change movements are all about the fundamental structural impediments to any semblance of a humane society. Many of the issues articulated by these campaigns have been reflected in Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign. But because of the Trump media frame and the political binary these vital issues do not get discussed.  

Fundamentally, because Trump represents the worst aspects of United States history and politics, political conversations center on him. They do not address the connections between capitalism and poverty, inequality, racism, sexism, homophobia, war, and terrorism. And the mainstream media prefers that such discussions not take place either. In addition, since the Democratic candidate is part of the problem, not the solution, the Trump conundrum limits necessary political discourse.

So progressives have a problem. A Trump victory in November will have enormous negative consequences for the vast majority of the most marginalized sectors of American society, some of whom struggled for almost 100 years to achieve some modicum of social and economic justice. And a Clinton victory ensures the continuation of the institutions that have promoted the global capitalist agenda that has been in place for the last forty years: monopolization and financialization of the global economy and the use of “humanitarian” military interventions to implement the neoliberal order.

Perhaps for the coming period the prioritization of the progressive political agenda should include in this order: say “no” to Trump; say “no” to the revitalization of neoliberal globalization in a Hillary Clinton Administration; and finally say “no” to the American political binary that institutionalizes just two choices, forestalling discussions of fundamental change in the United States.      

The Rise of the Precariat: Reposted from April, 2010

TRANSFORMATIONS IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH AND IMPACTS ON WORKERS

Harry Targ (in collaboration with David Cormier)


Neo-Liberalism Challenges the Non-Aligned Movement
Since the 1970s, poor countries have been increasingly forced to embrace neo-liberal economic policies at home-cutting government programs, privatizing the economy, opening up the economy to foreign penetration, and shifting to an export-orientation-contrary to the agenda of the Non-Aligned Movement. For many countries, neo-liberal policies constituted a radical break from state policies in which government collaboration with or oversight of the economy were common (so-called heterodox policies).

The Non-Aligned Movement of newly independent countries began to meet in the 1950s. Their concern was the polarization of the international system around debates about “communism” and the “free world” or USSR/US conflicts. For them the central issue was economic development. NAM countries became attracted to variants of Socialist or heterodox policies that called for strong state involvement in economic growth.

Because of United States/Soviet competition during the Cold War for the support of NAM, it gained voice in the United Nations system. Leaders of NAM countries began to demand a new international economic order or NIEO that would regulate international capitalism: limit the free reign of transnational corporations (TNCs), reschedule debts, liberalize patent laws, stabilize prices of agricultural commodities and raw materials, and in other ways regulate global capitalism to reduce some of its negative consequences for the Global South.

In Latin America, these policies were referred to as Import-Substitution Industrialization. The thinking behind ISI, initially developed by Economic Commission for Latin America economists and later amended by dependency theorists, was that manufacturing countries gain more from global exchange than export-oriented raw materials producing countries. Consequently Latin American countries needed to shift resources to industrialization. In the process, ISI policies required protections from unbridled foreign, i.e. United States, economic penetration.

The Debt Trap
The ability to further implement the NIEO and ISI was dramatically reversed by two historic world events. First, the Middle East wars led to dramatic increases in the price of oil during the 1970s. Oil poor countries who had embraced industrial development policies based on the importation of cheap oil experienced enormously increased trade deficits. Western banks choked with oil profits needed to find ways to use the glut of petro dollars. As a result, poor countries were forced to borrow huge sums of money from banks and banks encouraged the blossoming debt system.

To illustrate, indebtedness of the non-oil producing Global South debt increased five times between 1973 until 1982 reaching a total of $612 billion (Wayne Ellwood, The No-Nonsense Guide to Globalization, 43). By the new century, the total debt of developing countries had reached nearly $3 trillion, or $400 for each person living in the Global South (Ellwood, 48) In the 1990s, payments flowing from the South to the North in interest on loans exceeded loan funds entering the countries concerned.

In addition to the debt trap, as suggested above, the debt system came with a policy price: requirements that debtor countries reverse commitments to the NIEO vision and ISI policies. In the 1980s, the neo-liberal economic policies, central to the process of globalization, began to spread throughout the global economy. The debt system has been institutionalized ever since such that countries have become trapped in debt and requirements to carry out the policies of the banks.

The nail-in-the-coffin of Socialist or mixed-economy policies resulted from the economic and political disintegration of Socialism in the 1980s. The former Soviet Union sought to match the U.S. side of the arms race (the Reagan military build-up was the biggest in U.S. history). It found itself in expensive military quagmires in places such as Afghanistan. In addition, political legitimacy of the regime in the Soviet Union and across Eastern Europe declined with the inability of Socialist economies to match consumer growth in the West. The end result was the collapse of Socialism at the same time that the debt system was imposing neo-liberal policies everywhere.

Paradoxically, its advocates claimed, the neo-liberal policy agenda would increase the ability of poorer countries to participate in the global economy. Economic reforms at home would entice increased foreign investment. Shifting from tariffs to markets and from production for domestic consumption to production for sale on world markets would increase earnings which could be plowed into domestic economic development (as well as paying back the bankers for interest on loans).

Data on the 1990s indicated that direct foreign investment increased by about 15 times over the decade. However, 75 % of the investment went to just twelve countries, the most industrialized of the countries of the Global South with the largest markets. These countries included Argentina, Brazil, China, Indonesia, Mexico, and South Korea. Also trade data, exports and imports, indicated that the countries of the European Union, the United States, Japan, and Canada accounted for half of all world trade. Similarly a small number of countries accounted for half of the world’s imports. Despite claims by advocates, neo-liberal economic policies did not increase incorporation of most poor countries into the global economy. 

The Transformation of Work
The transformation from Socialist or heterodox policies in the Global South to neo-liberalism, while not stimulating incorporation into the global economy and development, did facilitate changing work patterns. Neo-liberal policies, including privatization and shifting production from domestic consumption to exports, radically transformed rural work in many countries of the Global South.

Governmental pressures undermined traditional patterns of agriculture including land ownership and production processes. Land holdings were consolidated under the control of foreign or wealthy domestic investors. More productive and larger agricultural units began to produce commodities for sale in rich overseas markets. Peasant farmers who in the past produced food stuffs for domestic consumption were replaced by agricultural workers and new technologies to produce winter vegetables and flowers for foreign customers. Countries which had produced enough food for their own people became net importers of food products. In addition, agricultural subsidies characteristic of the United States and countries of the European Union made it all but impossible for poor farmers to compete with the cheap imported food.

As a result of the new agriculture, and farmers forced off their land, migration to urban centers magnified, as more and more rural dwellers sought work. Cities in the Global South doubled or tripled in size, becoming surrounded by make-shift dwellings of people looking for work. Some rural migrants were able to find work in the new export-processing zones or sweat shop industries rising in some countries of the Global South. The pool of cheap labor in the Global South, replenished by the transformation of agriculture, provided an attractive opportunity for textile, electronics, and other manufacturing employment, once basic to the manufacturing economies of the industrialized countries. The globalization of production occurred in tandem with the imposition of neo-liberal economic policies, and the transformation of agriculture.

These changes were reflected in changing employment/unemployment rates and the kind of work that became available in the Global South. From 1950 to 1990, there was a decline by almost 1/3 of those of working age in the world engaged in agriculture. The percentage of the world work force in agriculture in 1990 was down to 49%, from 67% in 1950 (In Latin America and the Caribbean the decline from 1950 to 1990 was from 54% to 25% in agriculture).

In addition, the growth in industrial employment between 1950 and 1990 was modest, not commensurate with the declining agricultural employment. (In Latin America, the decline in agriculture was more dramatic than the world figures while the increase in industrial employment was not greater than the world figures). More recent International Labor Organization (ILO) data suggests that in the world at large “the share of employment in manufacturing declined between 1990 and 2001 in all economies for which data are available…”( ILO, 21 Nov. 2005).

Further, the world data (and the data for Latin America) indicate that the major sectoral growth in employment has been in the service sector. Increases in service sector employment ranged from 8% to 16% among countries in different economic strata. The largest growth in the service sector occurred in the lower-middle income countries.

The Rise of the Informal Sector
Finally, the most significant shift in employment throughout the world, particularly in the Global South, is from the formal economy (agriculture, industry, and service) to the informal economy. Most workers in this growing sector of the work force are driven by a desperate need to provide the rudiments of life. Consequently, they are willing to do virtually anything to earn money. This may involve lucrative small street market sales, or low wage home work (from house cleaning to garment assembly), or prostitution, or drug dealing. Work in the informal economy is not regulated. Workers enjoy no work place health and safety protections. They receive no health or retirement benefits. And, of negative consequence to the national government, they pay no taxes.

In a recent report produced by the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations, “The Inequality Predicament,” a distinction is made between “haves” and “have-nots” in terms of employment. The former are employed in the formal economy. They are more likely “…to earn decent wages, receive job-related benefits, have secure employment contracts and be covered by relevant laws and regulations” (UN, 2005, 29). The informal sector represents the polar opposite in terms of wages, benefits, and rights. The growth of the informal sector worldwide, the report says, is intimately tied to growing global inequality.

The UN report estimates that “informal employment accounts for between one half and three quarters of non-agricultural employment in the majority of developing countries.” They indicate that the percentage of those who work in the informal sector varies across the Global South: 48% in North Africa, 51% in Latin America and the Caribbean, 65 % in Asia and 78% in Sub-Saharan Africa (UN, 30).

In addition, the report refers to studies that suggest that the informal sector accounts for significant shares of the overall income and gross domestic product of individual countries. One study of 110 countries in 2000 found that the 18% of the gross national incomes of OECD countries came from the informal sector, 38% in “transition” countries (formerly Socialist), and 41% in developing countries. The informal economy accounted for 42% of the GNP in Africa, 26% in Asia, and 41% in Latin America (UN, 30-34).

The Precarious Classes

Data shows that unemployment around the world rose over the period from 1993 to 2002 and declined somewhat in 2003. What may be the most significant finding from this data is the fact that the seeming recovery of 2003 only imperceptibly impacted on unemployment rates. Even if sectors of the global economy experience growth, some theorists suggest, recovery given the system of global capitalism is “jobless.”

The economic transformations initiated in the Global South in the 1970s occurred in the context of the concentration and globalization of capital and the declining resistance including the collapse of Socialism. The oil crisis, the rise of a global debt system, global policy shifts from state/market economies to neo-liberalism parallel significant changes in work activity from agriculture and industry to service, to the rise of the informal sector and unemployment. The end product of these transformations has been increasing global inequality in wealth and income and the continuation of massive poverty, powerlessness, and precariousness.

While rates of poverty declined over the last twenty years of the twentieth century still half the world’s population in 2001 lived on less than $2 a day. And the percentage declines in extreme poverty, less than $1 a day, during this period mask the fact that more people in 2001 were in extreme poverty than twenty years earlier. The numbers of people in extreme poverty increased in Latin America and the Caribbean, the Middle East and North Africa, South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and India. The numbers of those in poverty declined in East Asia and the Pacific and China.

Also, it is clear that income inequality has been increasing between richer and poorer regions of the globe. With the OECD countries representing the rich countries, on a per capita income basis, shares of income of peoples in Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean have declined between 1980 and 2001. Weller, Scott, and Hersch (2001) report that in 1980 median income in the richest countries (top ten percent) was 77 times greater than the median income in the poorest countries (the bottom ten percent). By 1999, the gap had expanded to 122 times.

The transformation of employment from agriculture and industry to service and the informal sector-a shift that has been characterized as one from “have” to “have-not” jobs-has been reflected in the continuation of massive poverty around the globe and substantial evidence that the distribution of wealth and income has worsened over the period of neo-liberal policy influence. “The Inequality Predicament” makes it clear as well that income inequality is reproduced in the distribution of access to health care, education, housing, access to water, and sanitation.

Data like these led Samir Amin (2003) to predict that the transformation of the global political economy was precipitating a crisis of poverty and human misery that will transcend the expectations of the most well-meaning humanists. Amin described the emergence of “precarious classes” in both rural and urban areas. Estimating that half the world’s population (3 billion people) live in the country, he predicted that nearly 2.8 billion of them will become economically redundant. That is, given technology, 20 million people could provide the food needs for the planet. In the cities, 1.5 billion of 3 billion people are marginalized workers who experience work temporarily and/or who always live with the insecurity of job and income loss. Over four billion people of the six billion living on the planet, Amin wrote, constitute “the precarious classes,” made redundant because of declining employment and being reduced to perpetual employment insecurity due to the exigencies of the pursuit of profit in an era of neo-liberal globalization. This situation, Amin asserted, constituted a coming global crisis not seen in human history.

 Also appeared in The Rag Blog, April 4, 2010

Review: Jerry Harris, "Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Democracy"

Published on Portside (https://portside.org)

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Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Democracy

http://www.portside.org

Portside Date: 

June 22, 2016

Author: 

Harry Targ

Date of Source: 

Wednesday, June 22, 2016

 

Portside

Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Democracy
By Jerry Harris
Clarity Press
ISBN: 978-0-9860853-2-1

As the Berlin Wall came down and the former Soviet Union collapsed, the dominant mantra of   pundits that portrayed a world of superpower struggle between the “free world” and communism was replaced by one celebrating the “end of history.” To complement history’s end they began to describe a new world order based on “globalization.”  From the 1991 demise of the Socialist Bloc until today, libraries of books on globalization have been published. After a period of excitement about the new world order, “global celebrants” were challenged by analysts more skeptical about the meaning of the changes in international politics and economics.

The more sophisticated theorists correctly argued that the dramatic increase in cross-border economic, political, and cultural interactions was not merely the result of the collapse of the Soviet Union, or the technological revolution, or the happy dawn of worldwide production and investment. For some theorists, including Jerry Harris, globalization was not even just a byproduct of a systematic policy by international economic institutions (although it was that too) but the development of a new stage in the history and direction of capitalism. This new stage in the development of global capitalism is the subject of this book. It provides the most comprehensive analysis to date of how neoliberal globalization shapes politics, the role of the state, and the possibilities for the creation of a new kind of socialism, a twenty-first century socialism.

For Harris, neoliberal globalization is inextricably connected to the decline of democracy. The neoliberal age is based on the proposition that the pursuit of capital accumulation and profits requires the shift in the role of the state from serving the ruling class and the traditional working class, to the redistribution of wealth and power to what Harris calls a transnational capitalist class (TCC). Under the new global conditions of capitalism-a qualitative shift from manufacturing to finance; expanded cross-border manufacturing, investment and trade; and a fundamental reconstitution of the working class from a relatively secure, organized political force to an increasingly marginalized precariat-a new stage of capitalism has emerged.

The qualitative change in the global capitalist system and its class structure, Harris contends, began in the 1970s “with corporations locating more of their assets, production, and employment abroad.” As the global economy was changing and the global class fraction in each nation was gaining greater influence everywhere “the state apparatus was used to restructure laws and regulations over trade and the flow of capital.” (61)

Neoliberal policies introduced by states, international financial institutions, and trade agreements promoted downsizing state services to citizens and the privatization of public institutions. TCC- dominated global institutions demanded that most countries shift their economic profiles from production for domestic consumption to production for export. And, with the opening of doors to international capital and manufacturing, citizens, primarily workers, lost the last vestiges of their sovereign rights to determine their own destiny. By the 1980s, financial speculation was the driver of the new global economy and workers became migrants, part-time employees, and isolated atoms in a new economy devoid of any economic security and autonomy. The several hundred year momentum for building democracy was reversed with the rise of the TCC.

A substantial portion of the Harris book describes in detail the network of economic connections, financial and manufacturing, that have led to the transformation of national capitalist classes to a TCC. National capitalist classes still exist, and fractions of them conflict within national boundaries, but the development of the global economy makes the globalization of a capitalist ruling class the leading force in historical development.

Having analyzed the development of a new stage of capitalism, globalization, and an ideology and set of policies to sustain it, neoliberalism, Harris describes the dialectical development of both in two critical cases: Ukraine and China. In the Ukraine case, a national ruling class is embedded in conflict with sectors of Russian and European ruling classes. However, conflict between national ruling classes are less central to Central European politics than the deep network of economic ties between sectors of the TCC in Russia, Ukraine, the European Union, and to a lesser extent, the United States.

In the Chinese case, a hegemonic Communist Party directs and supports the development of global capitalism, and while China is engaged in global competition with older capitalist powers, it too is becoming part of the network of global capitalism. Many of its key entrepreneurs are connected to the TCC.  The data Harris presents on these connections and the rich analyses of both Ukraine and China are compelling. For those theorists of neoliberal globalization who still see the hegemonic power of the nation-state system, Harris makes a powerful case for a new globalized economic and political order.

Harris then addresses the difficult theoretical and practical questions so relevant to activists: How do we save the planet and move history in a progressive direction? First, the author addresses climate change and the problematic character of the ways representatives of global capitalism seek to forestall it. On this question the fundamental contradiction remains between the processes of capital accumulation at all costs versus the recognition by sectors of the TCC that devastation of the environment has potential negative consequences for the making of profits.

As a result of the TCC concern for both profit and the environment, various movements and organizations promoting “green capitalism” have emerged. Some prominent members of the capitalist class advocate for market solutions to the environmental crisis, using taxing and trade policies to reward economic actors who reduce their misuse of air, water, and other natural resources. More advanced green capitalists argue for a Green New Deal, shifting societal resources to develop the economy in a way more compatible with the environment. They propose massive reallocation of federal dollars in the United States that could rebuild the nation’s infrastructure, emphasizing wind and solar energy, and at the same time, employ millions of marginalized workers.

After a rigorous analysis of neoliberal globalization, the rise of a TCC, and the development of a powerful argument that neoliberal globalization constitutes a qualitative new stage in the historic development of capitalism, Harris addresses the critical question for the left: what next? Drawing upon three core institutions in modern history-markets, the state, and civil society-he discusses the twentieth century shortcomings of “free market” capitalism, state-directed socialism, and anarchist rejections of both the market and the state. For him excessive emphasis on any one of these reduces the probability of creating full democracies.

A twenty-first century socialism, based on the thinking of analysts such as Marta Harnecker, David Schweickart, and Gar Alperovitz, and the concrete experiences of worker cooperatives in Spain and North America, and the effort to build cooperatives in Cuba, Venezuela, and Italy, constitute an alternative to neoliberal globalization. Although each can and should be critiqued,  existing proposals and experiments use markets as ways to distribute goods, encourage and rely on state support for building institutions at the base without creating centralized bureaucratized socialism, and  facilitate and reconstitute civil society while not rejecting the contributions markets and the state can make. A central premise of Harris’ thinking is the value of building alternative institutions today which might serve as a skeletal form of a new society.

Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Democracy is a seminal work which addresses the major questions raised by the vast critical literature on neoliberal globalization. It addresses markets, the state, civil society, the transforming working class, the environment, and the draconian reversal of the historic drive to create real democracy. It accumulates a dense collection of data on financial speculation, investment, and trade to demonstrate the growing network of cross-national ties that bind a new transnational capitalist class.

This volume should be read and used in classrooms and study groups to stimulate a conversation about the new era of neoliberal globalization and the prospects for building twenty-first century socialism. Two prominent elements of the new global order should become part of these conversations, elements that did not receive adequate attention in the Harris book. First, the discussion of the military-industrial complex and its integration into the TCC needs to be expanded. Also, the techniques of empire, mentioned briefly, need to be more rigorously connected to the cross-national economic ties, the forced transformation of the working class, and the rise of protest against neoliberal austerity.

Second, while Harris makes a compelling case for the existence of a TCC, he does not sufficiently address the existence or possibility of the emergence of a transnational working class (TWC). Data-based research and anecdotal evidence suggests a dramatic upsurge in protest activity and progressive political organization all across the globe. One research project, counting protest activities over the last decade, found a dramatic upsurge of public protests in over eighty countries. Half of these protest events were motivated by opposition to austerity policies and/or included demands for democratization. The optic of protestors in Tahrir Square in Cairo sending money to buy pizzas for protestors in Madison, Wisconsin is a powerful metaphor. In the end a Transnational Capitalist Class must be challenged by a Transnational Working Class at the same time as workers everywhere build vibrant alternative economic and political institutions.

Harry Targ teaches foreign policy,US/Latin American relations, international political economy, and topics on labor studies in the Department of Political Science and a program in Peace Studies, at Purdue University. He sees connections between theory/education and political practice. Targ is a member of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS), the Northwest Central Labor Council (AFL-CIO),and the Lafayette Area Peace Coalition (LAPC). His book, Diary of a Heartland Radical, can be ordered here [1]. He can be reached at targ@purdue.edu [2].
[Thanks to the author for sending this to Portside.]

TWO STRANDS OF DEMOCRATIC THEORY: ONE LEADS TO COMMUNITY, THE OTHER TO SELFISHNESS AND TERRORISM

Harry Targ

Many years ago a noted political theorist, George Sabine, wrote about the “two strands of democratic theory” which influenced the writing of the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution. Although much was missing from Sabine’s analysis, discussions of class, race, and gender for example, it did capture perspectives critical to the contradictory cultural reality of the United States then and now.

Communitarianism Versus Individualism

One strand, influenced by French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau and a host of utopian and communitarian thinkers, posited that individuals were inextricably connected to each other. To be human, in fact, was to be part of a community.  This meant that basic survival, human happiness, and the maximization of human potential were tied to larger social units: communities and societies. Individuals were responsible to each other, to the community, to the society and communities and societies were responsible to individuals.

Another strand, influenced by such British theorists as John Locke and Adam Smith, emphasized the atomistic nature of humanity. Humans were engaged in competition for survival, wealth, and power. Society was comprised of millions of individuals seeking to maximize their own interests. One of these, of course, was wealth. In the most extreme expression of this theoretical stance, community and society were hindrances to human wellbeing.  “Government is not the solution, government is the problem,” former President Ronald Reagan suggested.

For the most part, ideas or worldviews, which I call here political cultures, are reflections of the dominant economic and political interests of a society at any given time. But ideas become material forces also such that they serve to justify and legitimate political practices of elites. Sometimes the clash of ideas figures prominently in political argumentation and from time to time one or another of these worldviews gains dominance. 

Two Strands of Democratic Ideas in American History

From the Gilded Age of 1870s until 1929, despite intense class struggle, world war, and imperial expansion, individualism and Social Darwinism dominated popular discourse. Iconic public heroes ranged from Buffalo Bill, to Thomas Edison, to Andrew Carnegie, to Henry Ford. In the 1920s modern consumerism emerged, labor and the left were repressed, and financial speculation grew with virtually no government regulation.

The Great Depression brought an end to the dominance of the individualist political culture of   Locke, Smith, and their conservative descendants. With the mobilization of millions of workers, the rise of the left, a prolific expression of people’s music, photography, painting, and writing, a sense of community and social responsibility became dominant in the political culture. The approximation of the communitarian spirit reflected in the tradition of Rousseau prevailed until the 1970s economic crisis occurred with declining rates of profit and a draconian shift from a manufacturing-based economy to financial speculation.

The Reagan Revolution institutionalized a return to a more crass form of the individualist strand of American political culture. As a character in the movie Wall Street put it “greed is good.” And it is a version of that perspective that has come to dominate the political culture, the popular arts, and the discourse of both political parties ever since.

Consequences of the Demise of the Idea of Community and the Rise of Individualism

In a recent essay in USA Today, conservative pundit George Will praised a speech former Indiana Governor and now President of Purdue University, Mitch Daniels, gave at that institution’s 2016 commencement exercises. Will pointed out that Daniels praised hard work, denied any connection between social support and economic success, and quoted with approval statements by Thomas Edison, Samuel Goldwyn, and an out-of-context Frederick Douglass. Will argued that his friend Daniels could have been responding to an earlier speech by President Obama who made it clear that success also involved luck. Obama was probably referring to what he often has suggested: that no one can succeed alone. In terms of securing education, training, and degrees, it was society that made them possible. Even though hard work and education could not guarantee success because of class, race, and gender impediments, the provision of them by society offered the possibility of personal achievement. No one succeeds without the benefits of community and society.

The Will/Daniels position in opposition to President Obama’s is a reflection of the contradictory character of American political culture. For Will and Daniels, it is individual hard work alone that leads to success. For the President hard work leads to success in the context of commitments by communities and the society at large to provide the opportunity, the venue for success. (Of course, Douglass, who Daniels quoted, was a premier fighter against racism in the nineteenth century. The abolition of slavery was a necessary if not sufficient condition for the achievement of social and economic justice. Hard work existed under slavery but to create a society where all people can thrive, Douglass believed,  a mass movement to overthrow it and the construction a non-racial society was necessary).

The two strands of democratic theory can be examined in the light of contemporary history to see what the consequences of each have been. Since the individualist strand has been predominant since the 1980s, we can conclude that it relates in some way to the following:

1. An enormous increase in income and wealth inequality.

2. Poverty rates, particularly childhood poverty, upwards of 20 percent of the population.

3. Increased crime and rates of incarceration among the most marginalized sectors of society.

4. And monumental increases in police violence, mass killings, and war.

In sum, the strand of democratic theory that has its roots in individualistic and anti-government thinking is one source of America’s twenty-first century political crisis. The loss of community and sense of collective responsibility has left a heavy burden on those who work to create a more just society.

Techniques of Empire; reposted from Diary of a Heartland Radical and The Rag Blog

Sunday, August 29, 2010

TECHNIQUES OF EMPIRE:WHAT IS NEW AND WHAT IS THE SAME OLD STUFF?

Harry Targ

Empires Past

Nations, tribes, armed members of messianic religions from time to time have engaged in conquest of others. Peoples have been slaughtered for their land, their natural resources, their mistaken beliefs. The techniques used to be simple: killing, imprisonment or enslavement, and occupation.

With the rise of capitalism as a global economic system, accumulated resources were used to create modern instruments of war--guns, ships, pollutants, and poisons. As Marx claimed long ago, capitalism was of necessity a global system so nation-states created in the era of economic modernity were compelled to pursue exploitable labor (particularly slaves), natural resources, market opportunities, and investment sites everywhere. Mercenary armies were created to conquer people and land and fight against the mercenary armies of other capitalist countries.

The British empire (“the sun never sets on the British Empire”) was caused by and facilitated the industrial revolution. In the 1880s European imperial powers came together to divide up the African continent. After the first of two world wars in the twentieth century, wars which cost 60 million deaths, the Middle East was divided up among declining powers, Great Britain and France.

The United States joined the imperial fray in the 1890s. It took the Hawaiian Islands, fought Spain to conquer Cuba, occupied other Caribbean Islands, and crushed the independence struggle in the Philippines. Over the next 30 years the United States invaded countries in the Western Hemisphere some 25 times, often leaving US Marines in place for years.

The United States and the Cold War
A variety of imperial techniques became common as the United States fought the Communist enemy during the Cold War. With the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency in 1947, the first of many “intelligence agencies” were launched to interfere with the political life of countries the U.S. regarded as strategic. CIA money was used to shape elections in democracies such as France and Italy. Money flowed to Christian Democratic Parties created to oppose Socialist campaigns. Also money found its way into anti-Communist trade union federations. This pattern of interference was replicated in Latin America as well and later in Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

The United States engaged in visible campaigns to create and support military coups; the most critical being in Guatemala and Iran in the 1950s, Brazil and Indonesia in the 1960s, and Chile in the 1970s. And of course U.S. policymakers launched long and brutal wars in Korea and Vietnam leading to four million Asian deaths and 100,000 American soldiers killed.

The pursuit of U.S. empire included some modern strategies as well as conquest and subversion. President Truman, through the Marshall Plan, instituted an expensive campaign of economic and military assistance which would become a staple of U.S. Cold War policy. From the initiation of the Marshall Plan in 1948 with a modest $14 billion aid program to anti-Communist regimes in Europe through the Carter years, $235 billion was provided to selected and strategic imperial partners: first in Europe, then Asia and the Middle East.

President Kennedy contributed to the imperial tool kit; the provision of military advisors, funding for local militaries in countries threatened by revolution (such as in Central America), and training programs for military officers such as in the old School of the Americas. Economic assistance came with strings, the promotion of market-based economies, and opposition to indigenous and Communist political forces, at least as much as local political contexts would allow.

President Reagan was an imperial innovator as well. Constrained by the “Vietnam Syndrome,” public opposition to further Vietnam-style military quagmires, he established policies based upon “low intensity conflict.” Creating and funding local counter-revolutionary armies in places as varied as Nicaragua, Angola, Ethiopia, Cambodia, and Afghanistan, the U.S. role in conflicts could be kept off the front pages of newspapers. Civil war violence stimulated by U.S. resources would not be “low intensity” in countries where it occurred but it might be considered so in the U.S. Citizens would not learn of the critical U.S. support given to Islamic fundamentalist rebels, including Osama Bin Laden, fighting a pro-Soviet regime in Afghanistan in the 1980s until quite recently.

To insure the limited visibility of U.S. global operations, and to reward political allies with government contracts, the Reagan administration dramatically expanded programs privatizing U.S. military operations. Support for the Contra war against the Nicaraguan people involved transferring public funds to private armies and using key foreign policy advisers, such as Colonel Oliver North, as conduits and organizers of networks of private sources of funding for war. Thus began public programs to encourage and stimulate the creation of private companies that would fight America’s wars. The American people had little way of knowing how deeply involved they were in violence around the world and the danger of sinking into new Vietnams.

21st Century Techniques of Empire
The world has come a long way from the days of Roman Legions slogging across land pillaging and killing. The days of nineteenth century colonial rule--clumsy and arrogant with foreign occupants of land lording over exploited local workers--has changed. However, it is important to reflect on the new or more developed techniques of empire, while never forgetting that there are centuries long continuities of techniques of imperial rule.

For starters, Marc Pilisuk reports in Who Benefits From Global Violence and War: Uncovering a Destructive System that the character of war has changed over the years and centuries. Wars today are not usually between nations. Casualties of wars are overwhelmingly civilians rather than soldiers. The weapons used in wars today are more likely than in the past to temporarily or permanently damage the natural habitat as well as kill people. Wars in recent years have been likely to be fought over natural resources. Nations and groups now are more likely to be supplied with weapons produced by a handful of corporations that specialize in the production of military supplies. These weapons are provided by a small number of nations. Finally, wars fought in modern times, the last 100 years, have caused more deaths than any other comparable period of human history.

Pilisuk reports that since World War II 250 wars have occurred causing 50 million deaths and millions homeless. (The United States participated significantly in 75 military interventions).

Recently a number of journalistic and scholarly accounts have added to our understanding of newer techniques of empire, particularly U.S. empire.

Global Presence. Pilisuk, Chalmers Johnson (The Sorrows of Empire) and others have estimated that the United States has over 700, perhaps 800 U.S. military installations in more than 40 countries. Some years ago the Pentagon determined that huge Cold War era military bases needed to be replaced with smaller, strategically located bases for rapid mobilization to attend to “trouble-spots” in the Global South. While forward basing in South Asia and in nations formerly part of the Soviet Union has received some attention seven new U.S. bases being established in Colombia (within striking distance of hostile Venezuela) and increased naval operations in the Caribbean have not. In addition, there are some 6,000 domestic military bases, many that anchor the economies of small towns.

Privatization of the U.S. Military. David Isenberg (“Private Military Contractors and U.S. Grand Strategy,” PRIO, Oslo, 2009) refers to “…the U.S. government’s huge and growing reliance on private contractors” which “…constitutes an attempt to circumvent or evade public skepticism about the United States’ self-appointed role as global policemen.” While PMCs provide many services, such as combat, consulting, training armies, and military support, their combat presence in the two major wars of the 21st century, Afghanistan and Iraq, has generated the most, if limited, public attention. Isenberg says that between 1950 and 1989 PMCs participated in 15 conflicts in other countries and from 1990 to 2000 another 80. PMCs were employed in civil wars such as in Angola, Sierre Leone, and the Balkans.

A recent Washington Post investigation compiled a data base, “Top Secret America,” “that found 1,931 intelligence contracting firms” doing top secret work “for 1,271 government organizations at over 10,000 sites.” TSA indicates that 90 percent of the intelligence work is done by 110 contractors. Defense department spokespersons and legislators claim that the United States needs to continue allocating billions of dollars to private contractors to maintain military performance levels that are minimally acceptable.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. Nick Turse, The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives describes the introduction of unmanned aerial weapons in the 1990s and their current weaponry of choice for the White House and others who prefer antiseptic and bloodless (on our side) technologies to eliminate enemies. New predator drones can be programmed to fly over distant lands and target enemies for unstoppable air strikes. Drones have been increasingly popular as weapons in fighting enemies in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen.

Connecting drone strikes to assassination teams and other war-making techniques, Shane, Mazzetti, and Worth, (“Secret Assault on Terrorism Widens on Two Continents,” The New York Times, August 16) refer to shadow wars against terrorist targets. “In roughly a dozen countries--from the deserts of North Africa, to the mountains of Pakistan, to former Soviet republics crippled by ethnic and religious strife--the United States has significantly increased military and intelligence operations, pursuing the enemy using robotic drones and commando teams, paying contractors to spy and training local operatives to chase terrorists.”

Assassinations. The United States has initiated campaigns to identify and assassinate presumed enemies. CIA operatives and private contractors join teams of army specialists under the Joint Special Operations Command (13,000 assassination commandoes around the world) to kill foreigners alleged to be affiliated with terrorists groups. These targets can include U.S. citizens living abroad who have been deemed to be terrorist collaborators. In the Western Hemisphere, the United States, through Latin American military personnel trained at the School of the Americas, has long supported assassination programs that now seem to be “globalized,” that is administered everywhere.

Fred Branfman (Alternet, August 24, 2010) starkly describes the assassination policy: “The truth that many Americans find hard to take is that mass U.S. assassination on a scale unequaled in world history lies at the heart of America’s military strategy in the Muslim world, a policy both illegal and never seriously debated by Congress or the American people.”

Missionary Humanitarian Interventions. While most techniques of empire involve the direct use of violence, public and private organizations expand the presence of empire through so-called “humanitarian assistance.” While the work of the missionary has often followed the flag, never has such activism impacted so heavily on global politics as today.

For example, The New York Times (July 6, 2010) reported that Christian evangelical groups have transferred substantial amounts of funds to Jewish settlements in occupied territories of the West Bank. Furthermore, fund raising for settlements that stand in the way of the creation of a Palestinian state receive tax exemptions. The newspaper reports on “…at least 40 American groups that have collected more than $200 million in tax-deductible gifts for Jewish settlement in the West Bank and East Jerusalem over the last decade.”

The newspaper correctly points out that so-called “humanitarian” and tax deductible donations to entities in other countries tied to U.S. foreign policy are not new. But, the article suggests that donations to the settler movement are special “because of the centrality of the settlement issue in the current talks and the fact that Washington has consistently refused to allow Israel to spend American government aid in the settlements. Tax breaks for the donations remain largely unchallenged, and unexamined by the American government.”

What is New About Imperial Policies
While the general character of imperial policies remains the same, whether the empire is Rome, Japan, Germany, France, Great Britain, or the United States, changes in technology, the state system, ideology, and tactical thinking have had their effects.

First, imperial rule has become truly global. From bases in far-off places, to unmanned drones flying over literally millions of targets everywhere, empires operate with no constraints based on geography.

Second, the military has become big business. Private corporations assume a greater share of Department of Defense budgets. Private companies now clean up and cook for the troops, train foreign soldiers, assassinate assumed terrorist enemies, and fight small wars with almost no visibility to publics.
Third, the United States is moving toward fighting wars without soldiers on the ground. Enemies can be identified by computer and military technologists can then push the right buttons to kill the unfortunate targets. Killing has become antiseptic. Killers can say goodbye to the kids in the morning, drive to work, push some buttons, drive home and spend the evening with the family. Meanwhile thousands of miles away there are mourners crying over those just assassinated.

Fourth, empires, at least the U.S. empire, can kill with impunity. Targets labeled terrorist can be eliminated by unmanned space weapons, specially trained assassination teams, or average foot soldiers.

Finally, empires can expand and change the destiny of peoples through so-called “humanitarian assistance.” Local goals, good or bad, are furthered by the large financial resources that special interests can bring to other countries.

Empires have had a long and ugly history. Because of technology, economics, and ideology new techniques of empire have been added to the old. The struggle against all empires must continue.

The Rag Blog, August 31, 2010

CHALLENGING OLD IDEAS THIS MEMORIAL DAY: A repost from January 2, 2015

 

Harry Targ

Karl Marx in The German Ideology argued in the 1840s that the ideas of the ruling class are the ruling ideas. Almost one hundred years later theorists from the Frankfort School elaborated on Marx’s idea by developing the theory of the “cultural apparatus.” German sociologist Max Horkheimer wrote:

One function of the entire cultural apparatus at any given period has been to internalize in men [and women] of subordinate position the idea of a necessary domination of some men over others, as determined by the course of history down to the present time. As a result and as a continually renewed condition of this cultural apparatus, the belief in authority is one of the driving forces, sometimes, productive, sometimes obstructive, of human history (quoted in John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney, “The Cultural Apparatus of Monopoly Capital,” Monthly Review, July/August, 2013).

Ideas do not spring from the air nor do they arrive untarnished by social reality from Gods and religion. No, as suggested by Marx, Horkheimer, Foster, McChesney, and other theorists, ideas are weapons in the continuous struggle for economic and political domination. Herbert Marcuse added that the “necessary domination” over people comes from pleasure and enticements in addition to threats of force. If the image of pleasure does not mollify the people, then threats  of impending pain can be transmitted from parts of the “cultural apparatus” (education systems, mass media, the internet, patterns of child rearing, religious institutions), thus legitimizing the application of force.

As we prepare for a new year with hope for positive social change, it is worth reflecting on three central concepts communicated through and justified by the “cultural apparatus:” markets, police, and the war system.  Markets offer the image of growing pleasure. Economists and politicians reiterate over and over again that economic development and political stability require the free flow of markets-- buyers and sellers, investors and speculators, workers and bosses, and the commodification of everything. The idea of markets permeates political discussion and is presented to publics as intimately connected to democracy, freedom, and cultural advance. Markets may serve as one mechanism among many to distribute goods and services but are not, as the ideologues suggest, the fundamental way of organizing society. But we hear over and over the promise that markets will bring to all humanity. And market fundamentalists add that government programs, visions of the public good, and community constitute a threat to markets and ultimately human betterment. On television, the internet, in schools, and everywhere in the cultural apparatus people are encouraged to consume, enjoy, think primarily of themselves, and remain obedient to the ongoing order. 

According to the cultural apparatus not all people, because of their own shortcomings, will be beneficiaries of the pleasures of the market. Consequently societies require the construction of police forces to maintain order. In societies where the threat of violence exists, police are necessary to protect the citizenry from the violent, the crazed, and the hateful who see race or exploitation behind their misery. The cultural apparatus communicates images of violence and mayhem in society such that people are convinced that police and prisons are the only institutions that save us from a brutal “state of nature,” based on killing, rape, and robbery. General sentiment, reinforced by the criminal justice system, suggests that for majorities of the US population police should be free to act as they choose. 

Finally, politicians, pundits, security analysts, and many scholars point out that human nature is flawed and as a result there will always be wars. During the brief periods when the United States is not actively engaged in war, policy makers ruminate on how the United States must be prepared for the “next” war. Visions of a peaceful world are beyond the scope of the economic and political system because there are aggressive, greedy, and crazed nations and terrorists in the larger world.

In sum, markets, the police, and the war system constitute key concepts embedded in the cultural apparatus and are central to the interests of the ruling class. The formulation of these key concepts is left purposefully vague here as is the description of the cultural apparatus because every aware participant in the political process can fill in detailed examples. Whether one “consumes” film, videos, computer games, music, television, or print media, examples of the messages about the legitimacy of markets, police, and the war system are readily available. The same self-reflection can be made about the level of centralized control of the cultural institutions that shape peoples’ consciousness.

Therefore, while global corporations, banks, police forces, and militaries constitute material sources of power and control, they are maintained also by core ideas about markets, police, and the war system. In short, ideas matter. Transforming society therefore is about changing ideas and who distributes them as well as the economic and military institutions themselves.