REAFFIRMING THE PROGRESSIVE PROJECT IN 2023

Harry Targ

These are indeed hard times for the vast majority of humankind. And the times are troubling for a number of reasons.

First, communities, nations, and the planet face the possibility of extinction of all life forms. Warning signs are seen everywhere: drought, fires, heat, cold, and the prospect of large swaths of land being flooded by global warming. And as has been the case for hundreds of years, the greatest threats and immediate suffering is impacting particularly on the peoples and lands of the Global South.

Second, despite years of wise counsel, mass movements, campaigns, and demands, the danger of nuclear war continues. Indeed, many experts and peace activists believe the danger of nuclear war is as serious now as at any time since 1945. Ironically, leaders of the G7 countries meeting in Hiroshima now are discussing what amounts to further fueling the war in Ukraine.

Third, along with these two life-threatening issues, every country and people have experienced poverty, inequality, anomic violence, and weakening educational and health care institutions, Pundits from the Global North report on food, health care, and educational deserts. But because a small number of conglomerates control more and more of what we know, what might be called media deserts reduce the possibility of people having knowledge about the crises facing them, their communities, and the planet. The metaphor of the “desert” speaks to the scarcity of peoples’ access to information about the viability of human life.

Fourth, and to some extent “the good news,” masses of people are rising up angry within the United States and around the world. Workers, students, people of color, women, and other oppressed groups are making their voices heard. And in some places movements have been impactful. In the United States elections have mattered: some for good, others for evil. And, in general, if the planet survives, so-called minorities will be majorities by 2050 (the rightwing fears this referring to what it calls “replacement theory”).

Fifth, one manifestation of people rising up angry is a new emerging sensibility and organizations coming from “the Global South.” The Global South, an imprecise construct, consists of all those peoples, territories, and nations that have been victimized by capitalism for hundreds of years. Today leaders of governments of various ideologies from the Global South have organized around trading zones, dedollarization and new military security arrangements, and the construction of new international organizations. They have revitalized demands for a New International Economic Order and a New World Information Order.

But sixth, while people are rising up angry all across the globe (and in  the belly of the beast the United States), they are doing so in an array of competing organizations characterized by a multiplicity of ideologies, issue priorities, and even multiple interpretations of the historical past and the present. As so often happens, many of these organizations claim that they are prepared to lead to a new world order. Organizational interest and individual egos get in the way of the broader project; that is saving humanity.

And this is part of the context of “Left” organizing in the United States today. It leads to raising again questions of our history, tactics and strategy, elections, street heat, and education.

 

Therefore, a number of issues of strategy, tactics, and thought need to be reexamined.

 First, sectors of progressive movements use a catch-all term, “fascism,” to describe those political forces that are reactionary in vision and policy. The word  “fascism” provides a kind of release for sincere frustrations but is counter-productive for a variety of reasons. The term is usually not defined. The user and the target of the label logically think of Germany and Italy before World War II, but it is unclear that a comparison of the US political context today with the European countries in the interwar years is apt. Further, the concept usually suggests an inextricable connection between corporate control of the economy, an autocratic state, an armed mass movement and a racist ideology. While elements of these unfortunately exist in the US today the economic and political context is much more pluralistic than was the case in the 1930s in Europe.

Most importantly, the fascist label is resented and opposed by the targets of such a label. If the goal is to organize masses of people, particularly those who have become economically and politically marginalized by the system, such labeling creates enemies not friends. And polling data has shown repeatedly that majorities of Americans support progressive social and economic policies and even to some degree racial justice.

From the pre-civil war period until today approximately 20-25 percent of Americans have held and hold reactionary and white supremacist perspectives. Recent data suggests that some 45 percent of voters identify as Democrats, a few percentage points less Republicans, and about ten percent independents. Those who identify as independents have been less likely to vote. While reports of political surveys vary, the point is that the electorate and those who hold political views are varied and contradictory. And we should always keep in mind that the corporate media communicates, portrays, and sometimes exaggerates violence as the norm.

Second, much research suggests that there does exist a “politics of resentment” across the country, a resentment of alienation, powerlessness, and recognition that wealth and power are grotesquely unequal in its distribution. Often this resentment leads people to find solace in demagogues or more often to choose to not participate in what they regard as an unfair system.

The politics of resentment in this country led the Roosevelt Administration and the Democratic Party to begin to address real sources of economic pain and suffering in the 1930s. The Democratic party of the New Deal, The Fair Deal, and the Great Society was built around addressing some of the economic and political needs of the people. And as a result, on the national level, the Democratic Party became the majority party.

But in the 1970s, the Democratic Party tilted toward neoliberalism, primarily policies of austerity and deregulation of the corporate sector, a neoliberalism that was fully institutionalized in the 1980s Reagan Revolution. And it is important to note that the Reagan Revolution was sanctified by the Clinton/centrist wing of the Democratic Party which has become the dominant faction of that party ever since.

In short, there has been an inextricable connection between the rightwing thrust of national and state politics in the United States and the shift of the Democratic Party away from the New Deal tradition. For today and tomorrow, demanding a return to the reforms of the New Deal/Great Society period provides the only way to defeat the Right.

Labeling extremists as fascists, ridiculing Trump and MAGA, and rewriting narratives of US history will not defeat reaction. Only a progressive agenda will. And those progressives in the Democratic Party, in the labor movement, and among the sectors of the Left must demand that their candidates uncompromisingly stand for economic and social justice. For sure, there exist vital and popular movements around healthcare for all, women’s rights, the right to form unions, climate change, increased voting rights, support for public institutions such as schools, libraries, and transportation systems, immigration reform, and underlying each an end to the long, painful, and immoral history of racism in the United States.

Finally, and this is critical, a careful review of twentieth century US history shows that domestic and foreign policies are connected. In critical periods, US foreign policies have been used to crush progressive politics at home. As historians such as Joyce and Gabriel Kolko, William Appleman Williams, Gar Alperovitz and others have shown there was no Soviet threat to US national security when President Truman warned of the “international communist threat”  in his famous Truman Doctrine speech of March, 1947. But there was a threat at home. That threat was a strong, militant labor movement that sought co-equal input in the making of public policy.

In addition, from 1947 until 1991 the “communist threat” was the device used by policymakers to weaken or destroy a progressive and pro-labor agenda at home, and with decolonization around the world from the 1950s through the 1970s, socialist militancy all around the Global South.

Most importantly United States foreign policy became the rationale for trillions of dollars being spent on the military, creating images of diabolical enemies in education and popular culture, and normalizing the idea of war.

All this suggests that a progressive agenda in the years ahead requires:

1.A systematic progressive economic and political program that prioritizes the fulfillment of human needs.

2.A unified political movement that organizes around this program or at least building an alliance of Left groups that share this common vision even as they work on particular issues.

3.A grassroots organizing strategy that in word and deed does not prematurely identify critics with pejorative labels. Certain sectors of the population already embrace a progressive agenda, others are not yet decided, and a smaller percentage have embraced rightwing fascism. The task of the left should include mobilizing those who agree, convincing the unconvinced, and finally respectfully seeking to change the minds and actions of the minority who are reactionary (including those who believe only violence will protect them).

4.A progressive movement that reaches out to, participates with, and learns from the literally millions of people that are rising up all across the globe. At this stage in human history the campaigns of people of color and various nationalities in the Global South matter. And these movements parallel those of the poor and oppressed in the United States as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkMgqg_wFuM&t=5s

5.Finally prioritizing in this progressive project an anti-militarist, anti-war agenda. It is clear that the “permanent war economy” constructed after World War II robbed the world’s citizens of resources and hopes for a better future. A just world is a disarmed world, a world of peace.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

REMEMBERING DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, THE LETTER FROM A BIRMINGHAM JAIL, AND HIS VISION OF A JUST SOCIETY

Harry Targ

Remarks prepared for participation in a panel discussion of The Letter  From a Birmingham Jail

Diversity Roundtable Summit

April 29, 2023

Lafayette, Indiana

 

Barbara Ransby wrote in a recent Nation article about the election of Brandon Johnson to serve as the new mayor of Chicago. Johnson, is an African American, a teacher, and a longtime Chicago Teachers Union activist  She reported  that “Johnson described his victory as the coming together of the civil rights and labor movements, much as Martin Luther King always envisioned.”

Reflecting on the corpus of Dr. King’s writings, speeches and activism suggests a continuity of his worldview and politics over a decade before the dramatic Letter From a Birmingham Jail was written, the seeds of which were planted when Dr. King was a graduate student. Given this approach, it can be argued, that the Letter From a Birmingham Jail represents a piece in the puzzle of King’s work, not the initiation or conclusion of it.

Race and History, Economics, Politics, Culture, and Interpersonal Relations

To clarify we can identify racism as a multidimensional process, with causes that can be understood historically, economically, politically, culturally, and in social psychological terms. Using what may be called a “levels of analysis” approach we can identify the multiple causes and impacts of racism in the United States.

If we begin with the historical and political economy “level”, we see that racism emerges with the introduction of the globalization of capitalism in the fifteenth century. The countries of Northwest Europe, Portugal, Spain, Great Britain, France, Belgium began to traverse the seas, establishing colonies where they could by military conquest. The purpose of such expansion was the acquisition of land, people, and resources. In North and South America, indigenous people were killed and land and resources were appropriated for processing and transport back to the home country and then the world.

Along with technological advances, shipping and guns, and the occupation of land and resources, the colonial powers needed inexpensive labor to grow the crops and extract the gold, silver, and rubber. Thus, with the globalization of capitalism came conquest and the enslavement of peoples, mostly from Africa. In this sense,  modern racism begins with colonialism and slavery. Without slaves kidnapped from their homes and brought to the Western Hemisphere, there would have not been the appropriation and growth of cotton, sugar, coffee, and the extraction of other commodities such as silver and gold. Without land, resources, and slave labor there may not have been the industrial revolution.

Along with global economic realities, the slave system was institutionalized in new constitutions and the creation of military and police forces to control the slave populations. Scholar of white supremacy Theodore Allen noted that when indentured servants, Black and whites, rose up in opposition to the exploitation by large plantation owners in the seventeenth century, these owners “invented” the white race and the Black race. Race was a  social/political creation designed to divide the exploited workers who produced the agricultural commodities and natural resources central to the economic system. Race forever more was used to split the exploited so that they would not join together to overthrow an oppressive system. Again, political institutions were established to ensure the divisions between Blacks and whites. Slaves were defined as three-fifths of a person in the United States constitution, for example. Furthermore, African Americans could not vote, Slave rebellions were crushed, and after the US civil war the system of Jim Crow was established.

In addition, economic and political order was rationalized over and over again by culture. What was written in history books about economic and political institutions, about history, and cultural stereotypes in literature, the stage, radio, television and in virtually every transmission of ideas served to justify the economic and political systems based on race. Racist narratives found their way into science, religion, and educational curricula. And finally, the institutionalization of racism historically, economically, politically, and culturally was reproduced every day in interpersonal contacts. Here is where the word “discrimination” fits.

It is important to add that while each of these levels of racism reinforce each other to create a powerful system of white supremacy, they all are affected, shaped, and challenged by resistance. All of these forces, economic, political, cultural, and interpersonal are not omniscient. And Dr King articulated and organized against these forces his entire life. And his Letter from a Birmingham Jail argues particularly for an ethical and political resistance against racism at all levels.

The Letter therefore is located in a community struggle, a political culture of racism, a regional institution of segregation, and the need for resistance. Also it was implicitly about the history of slavery, systems of oppression based on “haves” and “have nots” and the common struggles of people of color all over the world.

The Importance of Class Struggle for Dr. King’s Project of Resistance

Dr. King’s thinking about the need for an alliance between the civil rights and labor movements was expressed many times. As far back as 1957 at a convention of the United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA) he asserted that “organized labor can be one of the most powerful instruments in putting an end to discrimination and segregation.” During an organizing effort of the Hospital Workers Local 1199 in the fall of 1964, King was a featured speaker at a fundraising rally, He said of the 1199 struggle;

“Your great organizing crusade to win union and human rights for New Jersey hospital workers is part and parcel of the struggle we are conducting in the Deep South. I want to congratulate your union for charting a road for all labor to follow-dedication to the cause of the underpaid and exploited workers in our nation.”

Upon his return from Norway in 1964 after receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, King returned to the picket line, this time in support of Black women workers of the Chemical Workers union at the Scripto Pen Plant in Atlanta. He said there: “Along with the struggle to desegregate, we must engage in the struggle for better jobs. The same system that exploits the Negro exploits the poor white…”

Dr. King recognized in the Letter that the Birmingham struggle paralleled the struggles of Black and Brown people going on all around the world to liberate themselves from the historical patterns of colonialization then just ending. Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever, he wrote. “The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself, and that is what has happened to the American Negro….Consciously or unconsciously, he has been caught up by the Zeitgeist, and with his black brothers of Africa and his brown and yellow brothers of Asia, South /America and the Caribbean, the United States Negro is moving with a sense of great urgency toward the promised land of racial justice.”

And finally the Dr. King of Birmingham connected the race and class issues at home with US imperial war in Vietnam in his famous Riverside Church speech of 1967: “Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken,” He spoke defiantly of the need for a “radical revolution of values,”  an unremitting commitment to “go out into a sometimes hostile world, declaring eternal opposition to poverty, racism, and militarism.”

The Relevance of Dr, Martin Luther King for Today

This Diversity Round Table Summit demonstrated the continued relevance of Dr. Martin Luther King’s work, protests, writings, speeches, for today. The material above reminds us that Dr. King was fully aware of the history, economics, politics, culture, and interpersonal relations of racism in his day. He was also cognizant of the connections of  domestic political life and international relations. The struggles for social and economic justice, for King, were truly global.

Therefore we can conclude these brief remarks with the following conclusions about the relevance of Dr. King, and his writings, such as The Letter From a Birmingham Jail.

This relevance for today includes the facts that:

--he articulated what is today a global struggle against violence and war

--he articulated what we see today as the enormity of economic inequalities within countries as well as between them

--he emphasized that combatting racism, white supremacy, and neo-colonialism require alliances between the poor, the oppressed including women, and workers

--he correctly argued that a just society, local and global, a beloved community is one in which people's needs are met, cooperation supersedes competition, and every member of these communities is an active and equal participant in their development.

Today visionaries in the King tradition include Vijay Prashad, Medea Benjamin and members of Code Pink. And particularly Reverent William Barber and the New Poor People’s Campaign, and the thousands of young people, workers, who are struggling to acquire the right to form unions, and Black Lives Matter activists, are pursuing the King legacy.

 

Suggested reading: Michael K. Honey, To the Promised Land: Martin Luther King and the Fight for Economic Justice,W.W. Norton, 2018.

 

 

Webinar on the Transformation of Higher Education May 22, 9 pm Eastern

 Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS)

Socialist Education Project

4th Monday Webinar

 May 22, 2023

 9 pm Eastern Daylight Time

 

A Conversation About the Transformation of Higher Education: Shifting from a Wholistic Education to STEM, Branding and Privatizing Educational Services, and Militarization

 

https://www.lulu.com/shop/harry-targ-and-daniel-morris/from-upton-sinclairs-goose-step-to-the-neoliberal-university/paperback/product-vzdwyk.html?q=harry+targ&page=1&pageSize=4

 

The authors, Dan Morris and Harry Targ, two Purdue University professors,  use their institution as a case study to examine the changing nature of the American 'multiversity.' They take a book from an earlier time, Upton Sinclair's 'The Goose-Step A Study of American Education” from 1926, which exposed the capitalist corruption of the ivory tower, and bring it up to date with descriptions of far-reaching changes in higher education today.

 

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It is Time to Examine Alternatives to The Deficit Myth

Harry Targ

During the last several years, newer generations of economists have begun to question the proposition that the federal debt constitutes a fundamental threat to the survival of the US economy and polity. For example, Stephanie Kelton, a Professor of Economics at the University of Stonybrook, builds on the emerging tradition of “modern monetary theory” (MMT). (The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People’s Economy, Public Affairs, 2020).

Professor Kelton discusses four key elements of MMT. First, using the household budget as a metaphor for governmental budgeting is inappropriate. Family debt can be incurred but over time must be repaid. In the twenty-first century many households and individuals can charge goods and services they purchase but the expenditures have to be paid for in a relatively short order. Politicians of both parties then argue by analogy that government expenditures have to be repaid. Therefore, short-term deficits should be avoided or repaid in subsequent national budgets. Of course, these strictures are not adhered to even by the most fiscally conservative politicians. They give blank checks to the military, and they support pork barrel legislation advantageous to their favorite lobbyists and districts. And, of course, these same politicians who oppose deficit spending are the first to endorse massive tax cuts for the rich.

Second, Professor Kelton argues, however, that while some spending might be irresponsible, sovereign governments are not analogous to household or individual spenders. This raises the issue of sovereignty. Max Weber pointed out over one hundred years ago that states hold a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. Modern Monetary Theorists argue that nation-states also have a monopoly on the issuing of money. States can print as much money as is needed by the economy. Contrary to individuals and families, who are not sovereign, governments do not have to repay themselves.

Third, therefore, sovereign governments can use their capacity to print money to support projects that promote the general health and welfare of the society. They do not have to accept the myth that the debt will somehow punish future generations, create chaos, and destroy the normal course of social and political interactions.

Fourth, the deficit hawks warn that the printing of money could have negative consequences, the most often discussed is uncontrollable inflation. That is, with the printing of more and more money, the price of goods and services could skyrocket. Professor Kelton and others have referred to historical examples of unbridled inflation that destabilized economies and societies, what former Indiana governor Mitch Daniels called “the failed regimes of history.” Although Kelton argues that inflationary spirals can occur, and have historically occurred, it has been because too much money chased too few goods and services. In other words, if citizens/consumers acquire more money while the production of goods and services stagnate, the price of those commodities can rise to dangerous levels. What this suggests to MMT is that the printing of money should be proportional to societal needs, the availability of goods and services, and the employment of workers.

In sum, MMT suggests that the printing of money can be calibrated to the fulfillment of short and long-term needs.  Money could and should be provided for health care for all, support for education (K through university), structural renovation, transitioning away from fossil fuels, the creation of jobs for all and universal basic income programs, and support for a Green New Deal. These programs were vitally needed before the pandemic and are even more essential since its onset. Of course, cutting military spending, pork-barrel legislation, and creating a progressive tax system helps. But the human needs articulated by progressives should be defended. And doing so requires a realistic assessment of the causes and consequences of national debt. History has shown that the idea of “the debt” has been an ideological tool used to challenge the creation of a just society. 

MAY DAY BRINGS THOUGHTS OF SOCIALIST ALTERNATIVES

 Harry Targ

(Originally posted on Friday, May 1, 2009)

 

Posted on United for Peace and Justice Website

Sketching Today’s Global Political Economy

During the latest phase of monopoly and finance capital (1945- to the present) enormous changes occurred in the global political economy. First, the United States emerged as a superpower and in an effort to crush the threat of socialism around the world committed itself to constructing a “permanent war economy.” This permanent war economy would create the military capacity to destroy alternatives to global capitalism, stimulate and maintain a high growth manufacturing economy, justify an anti-communist crusade to crush the left in the United States, and co-opt and/or repress working class demands for change. In addition, the permanent war economy would occasion the perpetuation of racism and patriarchy in public and private life.

As the years passed corporate rates of profit began to decline as a result of rising competition among capitalist states, over-production and under-consumption, an increasing fiscal crisis of the capitalist state, and rising prices of core natural resources (particularly oil). With a growing crisis, global corporate and finance capital shifted from investments in production of goods and services to financial speculation. Thus capitalist investment steadily shifted to financialization, or the investment in paper-stocks, bonds, private equity and hedge funds and other forms of speculative investment. Financial speculation was encouraged by state tax policies, “free trade” agreements, an expanded international system of indebtedness, and increased reliance on consumer debt.

Multinational corporations which continued to produce goods and services sought to overcome declining profit rates. This, they concluded, could only be achieved by reducing the costs of labor. To overcome the demand for higher real wages, health and other benefits, and worker rights, manufacturing facilities were moved from core capitalist states to poor countries where lower wages were paid. Thus, in wealthier countries millions of relatively high paying jobs were lost while production of goods increasingly moved to sweatshops in poor countries. Wealthy capitalist states experienced deindustrialization.

Finally, assisted by technological advances, from computers to new forms of shipping, financial speculation and deindustrialization fueled the full flowering of globalization, or the radically increased patterns of cross border interactions-economic, political, and cultural. Globalization began to transform the world into one integrated global political economy.

In short, we may speak of a four-fold set of parallel political and economic developments that have occurred since the end of World War II, in which the United States has played a leading role:  

1.creating a permanent war economy 

2.financialization 

3.deindustrialization

4.globalization. 

(Complicating this narrative of 15 years ago is the rise of China as a significant economic and technological competitor of the United States. Europe and Japan, and the emergence of greater collaboration economically and politically of many of the countries of the Global South).

Should We Be Thinking About Socialism Today?

A rich and vital set of images of a socialist future comes down to us from the utopians, anarchists, and Marxists, the martyrs of the first May Day, and the variety of experiments with socialism attempted in Asia, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean. Extracting from the multiple reasons why individuals and movements chose socialism one reason stands out; that is, that capitalism historically is and has been a cruel and inhumane system, a system borne and fueled by slavery, genocide, super exploitation of workers, tactics of division based on race and gender, and an almost total disregard for the natural environment that sustains life. Building a permanent war economy, financialization, deindustrialization, and globalization are merely extensions of the cruel and heartless pursuit of profit which has been the fundamental driving force of the capitalist mode of production.

Drawing on the history and the images of a better future coupled with the brutality of the capitalist era, we might conceive of a 21st century socialist future that has four main dimensions.

First, we need to create institutions that are created and staffed by the working classes and serve the interests of the working classes. While scholars and activists may disagree about what “class” means in today’s complicated world, it is clear that the vast majority of humankind do not own or control the means of production, nor do they usually have an instrumental place in political institutions. Therefore, socialism involves, in the Marxist sense, the creation of a workers’ state and since most of us are workers (more than 90 percent of the US population for example), a state must be established that represents and serves the interests of the many, not the few.

Second, our vision of socialism is a society in which the working classes fully participate in the institutions that shape their lives and in the creation of the policies that these institutions develop to serve the needs of all the people.

Third, socialism also implies the creation of public policies that sustain life. Socialism in this sense is about good jobs, incomes that provide for human needs, access to health care for all, adequate housing and transportation, a livable environment, and an end to discrimination and war.

Fourth, socialism is also about the creation of institutions and policies that maximize human potential. A socialist society provides the intellectual tools to stimulate creativity, celebrate diversity, and facilitate writing poetry, singing and dancing, basking in nature’s glow, and living, working, and loving with others in humanly sustainable communities.

Continuing Political Struggles

Today we remain terribly far from any of these dimensions of socialism. But paradoxically, humankind at this point in time has the technological tools to build a mass movement to create a socialist future. We can communicate instantaneously with peoples all over the world. We can access information about the world that challenges the narrow ruling class media frames about the human condition. We have in the face of brutal war, environmental devastation, enduring racism, super exploitation of workers everywhere mass movements of workers, women, people of color, indigenous people, and youth who are demanding changes. Increasingly public discourse is based upon the realization that our future will bring either extinction or survival. Socialism, although it is not labeled as such, represents human survival.

Where do we who believe that socialism offers the best hope for survival stand at this critical juncture? We are weak. Many of us are older. Some of us have remained mired in old formulas about change. Nevertheless, we can make a contribution to building a socialist future. In fact we have a critical role to play.

We must articulate systematic understandings of the global political economy and where it came from: permanent war, financialization, deindustrialization, and globalization. We need to articulate what impacts these processes have had on class, race, gender, and the environment. In other words, we need to convince activists that almost all things wrong with the world are connected and are intimately tied to the development of capitalism as the dominant mode of production.

We need to take our place in political struggles that demand an expanded role for workers in political institutions. We need to insist that the working classes participate in all political decisions.

We need to wage campaigns that could sustain life: jobs, living wages, single payer health care, climate change, ending militarism and war, etc. Our contribution can include making connections between the variety of single issues, insisting that participants in mass movements take cognizance of and work on the other single issues that constitute the mosaic of problems that require transformation. We must remember that in the end the basic policies that sustain life require building socialism. Most struggles, such as those to achieve living wages or a single payer health care system for example, plant the seeds for building a broader socialist society. We can incorporate our socialist vision in our debates about single issues: if we demand a living wage, why not talk about equality for example?

We need to rearticulate our belief that human beings have a vast potential for good, for creativity, and given a just society, we all could move away from classism, racism, and sexism. We could pursue our talents and interests in the context of a sharing and cooperative society.

By working for institutional incorporation (empowerment) and life-sustaining and enhancing policies we will be planting the seeds for a socialist society.

“In our hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold,
Greater than the might of armies, magnified a thousand-fold.
We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old.
For the union makes us strong”

From “Solidarity Forever,” Ralph Chaplin lyrics, 1915.

https://youtu.be/9g1IArAW5Dk

 

The Military/Industrial/Academic Complex

Raytheon Comes to Purdue University

Harry Targ

From “While Its Humanities Programs Suffer From Budget Cuts, Purdue University Increases Focus on Military”, Covert Action, June 15, 2022)

https://covertactionmagazine.com/2022/06/15/while-its-humanities-programs-suffer-from-budget-cuts-purdue-university-increases-its-focus-on-the-military/

The Raytheon Technologies Corporation reported that “Raytheon Technologies is working with the University of Arizona, Texas A&M University, Purdue University, the U.S. Air Force Academy and other academic institutions on hypersonic research and testing, to include the use of wind tunnels to emulate flight conditions and accelerate development.”

Raytheon, one of the five largest defense contractors in the world, sold more than $64 billion in military hardware in 2021. Raytheon profits will be higher in 2022 because of the war in Eastern Europe. Recently, Gregory Hayes, the CEO of Raytheon and a Purdue University graduate who was given an honorary doctorate by Purdue’s Krannert School of Management, predicted that the war in Ukraine will be good for his company’s business.

[Source: twitter.com]

As researchers William Hartung and Julia Gledhill put it: “The war in Ukraine will indeed be a bonanza for the likes of Raytheon and Lockheed Martin. First of all, there will be the contracts to resupply weapons like Raytheon’s Stinger anti-aircraft missile and the Raytheon/Lockheed Martin–produced Javelin anti-tank missile that Washington has already provided to Ukraine by the thousands. The bigger stream of profits, however, will come from assured post-conflict increases in national-security spending here and in Europe justified, at least in part, by the Russian invasion and the disaster that’s followed.”

 

The Grass is Greener-2023-04-19-A chat with the legendary Seymour Hersh (and later Harry Targ)

Stream the Grass is Greener, 4/19/23: a chat with Seymour Hersh on WXRW Riverwest Radio 104.1 for  30 minutes followed by a conversation with Harry Targ

https://on.soundcloud.com/DDwrS

"We snagged a 30-minute interview with legendary journalist Seymour Hersh regarding his latest piece on the Ukraine war. We chat it up, then we fill the hour with our old friend, Professor Harry Targ, discussing the Hersh article. It's a pretty good show!"