THE NORTH-SOUTH STRUGGLE IS A CLASS STRUGGLE: VENEZUELA IS THE LATEST EXAMPLE

Harry Targ

All History is the History of Class Struggle

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles,” Marx and Engels proclaimed in The Communist Manifesto. All of their work was designed to elaborate on the meaning of this one sentence. Under capitalism, one class, the capitalists, own and/or control the means of production and the other class, the workers, produce goods and services that maintain the conditions for human survival. What workers produce becomes commodities for sale in the marketplace. And the capitalists then appropriate the lion’s share of the value produced by workers. The more the capitalists expropriate the value of what is produced by workers, the more profits they acquire and the greater the human misery workers experience. In contemporary societies and in the global economy this process is clearly seen as the gaps between rich and poor grow exponentially only to be mitigated from time to time when workers rise up to challenge the capitalist class, and sometimes the capitalist system itself.

Usually this narrative is discussed about exploitation and struggle within states. But one can apply the basic insights of Marx and Engels to relations between states and societies. For example, the modern nation-state system emerged in the seventeenth century, primarily in Europe, to facilitate the expansion of capitalism on the world stage. With technology, shipping and armaments, capitalism spread across the globe. Capitalist imperialism and globalization emerged together.

The Global North Versus the Global South as Class Struggle
Looking at the history of what is called international relations, the world has experienced various stages of development (or underdevelopment). First, in the era of primitive accumulation, as Marx described, rising military powers in Europe traversed the globe. They occupied land inhabited by various peoples and kidnapped laborers from one part of the world and transported them to another as forced laborers. They developed trade, invested in profitable overseas production, and expropriated vital natural resources to facilitate their own economic development. Killing the occupants of the land and kidnapping Africans to become slaves in the Western Hemisphere, Marx said, signaled the dawn of “civilization.” Thus, we can speak of class struggle whether the topic for discussion is land grabbing, enslavement, extracting resources, or transforming local economies to fit the needs of the colonial powers. Andre Gunter Frank suggests that looking back at the birth of capitalism as a world system, we see the seeds planted for “the development of underdevelopment.” The economic circumstance of what would become the Global North is growing riches and for the Global South deepening poverty and immiseration.

But what dependency theorists, scholar/activists such as Walter Rodney and Frantz Fanon, and Marxists from Latin America add to the narrative is the fact that capitalist imperialism periodically generates resistance and rebellion, sometimes  class struggle, on a global basis. Contemporary theorist, Vijay Prashad (The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World, New Press, 2008) reminds us that the globalization of capitalism from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries generated resistance, rebellion, and revolution. Haiti, for example, represented a paradigmatic revolution to overthrow French colonial control. And during the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century anti-colonial campaigns spread throughout the world. In 1945 there were 51 nations in the new United Nations organization and by 1970 there were 170. People had liberated themselves from the formal bonds of colonialism. Along the way anti-colonial campaigns gained support and solidarity from people of color within colonial countries and national liberation movements across state boundaries in the struggle for independence. In addition, revolutionaries overthrew colonial and/or neo-colonial powers in Cuba, Vietnam, Angola, Mozambique, and Nicaragua.

Once independence was achieved, “new” nations began to collaborate around an anti-colonial, anti-neo-colonial agenda. Many met in Bandung, Indonesia in 1955 and formed a Non-Aligned movement in 1961, expanding its membership and loyalties to 120 countries today. Its motivation was to break the traditional bonds of colonial control, to reduce the continuing relationships between the former colonial powers and “their” colonies, and to rectify historic forms of exploitation and expropriation of value. This, dependency theorists suggest, included challenging indigenous ruling classes in poor countries who owed their allegiance to collaboration with the former colonial powers. The bottom line for newly independent countries was to rectify the grotesque economic inequalities that were the legacy of colonialism and to achieve national sovereignty.

Along with the creation of a non-aligned movement, leaders of the Third World in the 1960s and 1970s campaigned for global adoption of a New International Economic Order (NIEO). This program was introduced in the United Nations. It called for the creation of rules and regulations that would regulate global capitalism so that it was not so disadvantageous to countries of the Global South. Proposals involved facilitating technology transfer from the Global North to the Global South, reducing onerous rules about “intellectual property rights,” hiring corporate executives from the host country, and establishing requirements that minimal amounts of profits derived from foreign investments stay in the host countries where production occurred. These and other proposals were designed to “reform” global capitalism such that the growing economic inequalities between rich and poor would decline. And to cap off the demands for global reform, spokespersons from the Global South introduced a plan for a New World Information Order (NWIO). This plan was designed to increase the amount of input citizens of the Global South could have in the production and dissemination of information about their own countries. This was needed because monopoly media organizations from the Global North controlled and framed most of the information about the world, including the Global South.

The response of western imperial powers to the NIEO and the NWIO was to inalterably oppose virtually every proposal made. They objected to any restraints on the complete autonomy of international corporate and financial capitalists operating in the Global South. In addition, they resisted the right of countries of the Global South to have any control over the production of narratives about their countries. And in response to growing mobilizations of countries and peoples of the Global South, financier David Rockefeller from the then Chase Manhattan Bank, called together 200 bankers, corporate CEOs, a few trade union leaders and politicians from Europe and North America to establish The Trilateral Commission in 1973. The founding documents warned of the greater dangers to global capitalism from unrest in the Global South then from the Soviet Bloc. They hired Zbigniew Brzezinski to administer the new organization and they commissioned scholars such as distinguished US political scientist Samuel Huntington to draft position papers for the organization. In one paper Huntington warned of the “excess of democracy.” In other words, the increased activism within societies and between societies constituted a threat to stability and the global status quo.

By the 1980s, the Soviet Bloc weakened, collapsing in 1989. The countries of the Global South became entrapped in a debt system that required them to adopt new austerity policies that worsened the conditions of life of their citizens. The policies, known as “neoliberalism,” spread across the globe. Many leaders of formerly anti-colonial regimes, including some independence leaders, began to collaborate with the international overseers at the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Economic inequality on the world stage grew. At various times 10-20 percent of the world’s population lived in abject poverty and another 20-30 percent at living standards below a livable income. As the living conditions for the world’s citizens worsened, the globalization of production increased and smaller numbers of huge banks began to control more and more of the world’s economic life.

Twenty-first Century Resistance to Neo-liberal Globalization Grows

An upsurge of resistance to the worsening plight of much of the Global South began to occur in the 1990s. The day the new North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went in effect in January, 1994, Sub-Commander Marcos of the Zapatista Movement (EZLN) in Mexico announced a new campaign against neoliberalism. In addition, the formation of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995 and the spread of neoliberal policies spurred growing resistance to globalization as citizens demanded their countries reject IMF imposed austerity programs. The anti-globalization campaign, based on grassroots movements from the North and South, gained worldwide attention during the founding meeting of the WTO in Seattle, Washington in December, 1999. The “Battle of Seattle,” signaled a global recognition that neoliberal globalization was bringing together activists from everywhere to challenge the globalization of capitalism. A World Social Forum assembled in Porte Allegre, Brazil, in 2001 with thousands of people from women’s, labor, indigenous peoples and other organizations. Their rallying cry was “Another World is Possible.”

In 2011, Arab Spring signaled another form of grassroots opposition to the further exacerbation of capitalism both within and between countries. Over the next several years, protests were initiated by various sectors of the working class, such as the precariat and “yellow vests,” indigenous peoples, women, people of color, gays and lesbians. These campaigns often generated expressions of international solidarity.

And it is in this emerging global class struggle that the Bolivarian Revolution emerged. Army officer Hugo Chavez was elected President of Venezuela in 1998. Subsequently he initiated changes and responded to demands for change from Venezuelan workers to build grassroots political institutions, form workers cooperatives, and to redistribute some of Venezuela’s oil wealth. Venezuelan policies significantly reduced the number of citizens living in poverty, increased access to health care and education, and encouraged the building of grassroots political organizations.  The Bolivarian Revolution, as it was called, borrowed from nineteenth century Latin American leader Simon Bolivar who struggled to achieve national sovereign control for the peoples of the region. The twenty-first century variant, led by Chavez, included initiating a regional Latin American bank, expanding trade agreements, and inspiring grassroots mobilizations in countries in Latin American and the Caribbean. Some variants of economic populism and grassroots political institution-building occurred in Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Honduras, and El Salvador, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay. In addition, some Latin American countries began to collaborate worldwide to challenge the power and prerogatives of global capitalism. The BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), for a time, discussed ways to challenge the economic and political hegemony of the traditional great powers. Much of the Bolivarian Revolution was inspired by the Cuban revolutionary model of economic distribution, health care and education programs, and international solidarity.

The Global North Launches a Counter-Offensive

The United States and its allies in the capitalist world have based their foreign policies on resistance to reformist and revolutionary ferment in the Global South. Efforts to forestall dramatic historical change have sometimes been based on efforts to accommodate or channel ferment from the Global South in directions that were less threatening to global capitalism. For example, President Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress program, a $20 billion economic assistance program announced in 1961, promised US support for economic development and social change in Latin America. An alternative and more common approach, military force, is illustrated by President Johnson’s sending 24,000 marines to the Dominican Republic in 1965 to forestall a nationalist, Juan Bosch, from returning to power in his country.

Between 1965 and today, the United States has used the carrot and the stick to challenge resistance from the Global South, particularly in the Western Hemisphere: using military invasion and covert operations; identifying and working with economic and military elites in “enemy” countries, enacting economic sanctions, and even poisoning crops in countries defined as the enemy.

Today, the United States is seeking to crush the Venezuelan experiment and to destroy all vestiges of the Bolivarian Revolution in the Hemisphere. The project includes securing complete control of Venezuela’s oil resources. But, in addition, the United States is committed to turning back history; decades of resistance from the Global South. Following the inspiration of the Cuban Revolution, the Bolivarian Revolution has constituted the most sustained threat to US global hegemony in the Western Hemisphere, and hence the international system. History has shown that John Bolton’s “troika of tyranny” is just the latest conceptualization coming from the Global North; a conceptualization that Professor Huntington warned of in 1976, as the “crisis of democracy;” that is, there was too much of it.

In sum, human history in the capitalist era is about the drive for power and profit on the one hand and resistance and rebellion on the other. The outcome of this struggle is still to be determined.

(For a parallel historical analysis see Vijay Prashad, “12-Step American Method for Regime Change, Alternet, February 9, 2019  and “Blood for Oil in Venezuela?” an interview on The Real News, February 10, 2019 https://therealnews.com/series/venezuela-coverage-and-analysis )

SEIZE THE MOMENT: BUILDING THE PROGRESSVE MAJORITY (Let us discuss the analysis and not debate the candidates): a repost

Originally posted on Saturday, February 6, 2016

Harry Targ

The multiracial working class in alliance with trade unions, women, African Americans, Latinos and other people of color, youth, and progressive sectors of business now form the promising components of the progressive majority. The profound challenge before the working class and its allies is to organize this majority into a coherent force capable of responding to the various issues it confronts. (“Goals and Principles,” Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, adopted at ts 6^th National Convention, July, 2009, www.cc-ds.org).

Protest Movements in the United States

            In addition to anecdotal evidence, aggregate data confirms the continuation and expansion of activist groups and protest activities all across the face of the globe. For example in the United States, Mark Solomon in an important essay “Whither the Socialist Left? Thinking the ‘Unthinkable’” (March 6, 2013, www.portside.org)  discusses the long history of socialism in the United States, the brutal repression against it, damaging sectarian battles on the left, the miniscule size of socialist organizations today and yet paradoxically the growing sympathy for the idea of socialism among Americans, particularly young people. He calls for “the convergence of socialist organizations committed to non-sectarian democratic struggle, engagement with mass movements, and open debate in search of effective responses to present crises and to projecting a socialist future.”  The Solomon article does not conceptualize “left unity” and “building the progressive majority” as separate and distinct projects but as fundamentally interconnected. For him, and many others, the role of the left in the labor movement and other mass movements gave shape, direction, and theoretical cohesion to the battles that won worker rights in the 1930s.

            Solomon’s call has stimulated debate among activists around the idea of “left unity.” The appeal for left unity is made more powerful by socialism’s appeal, the current global crises of capitalism, rising mobilizations around the world, and living experiments with small-scale socialism such as the construction of a variety of workers’ cooperatives.

            Effective campaigns around “left unity” in recent years have prioritized “revolutionary education,” drawing upon the tools of the internet to construct an accessible body of theory and debate about strategy and tactics that could solidify left forces and move the progressive majority into a socialist direction. The emerging Online University of the Left (OUL), an electronic source for classical and modern theoretical literature about Marxism, contemporary debates about strategy and tactics, videos, reading lists, and course syllabi, constitute one example of left unity. The OUL serves as one of many resources for study groups, formal coursework, and discussions among socialists and progressives. Those who advocate for “left unity” or left “convergence” celebrate these many developments, from workers cooperatives to popular education, as they advocate for the construction of a unified socialist left.

            A second manifestation of political activism, the Occupy Movement, first surfacing in the media in September, 2011, initiated and renewed traditions of organized and spontaneous mass movements around issues that affect peoples’ immediate lives such as housing foreclosure, debt, jobs, wages, the environment, and the negative role of money in U.S. politics. Perhaps the four most significant contributions of the Occupy Movement have been:

            1.Introducing grassroots processes of decision-making.

            2.Conceptualizing modern battles for social and economic justice as between the one percent (the holders of most wealth and power in society) versus the 99 percent (weak, economically marginalized, and dispossessed, including the “precariat”). 

            3.Insisting that struggles for radical change be spontaneous, often eschewing traditional political processes.

            4.Linking struggles locally, nationally, and globally.

            During the height of its visibility some 500 cities and towns experienced Occupy mobilizations around social justice issues. While less frequent, Occupy campaigns still exist, particularly in cities where larger progressive communities reside. Calls for left unity correctly ground their claims in a long and rich history of organized struggle while “occupiers” and other activists today have been inspired by the bottom-up and spontaneous uprisings of 2011 (both international and within the United States).

            A third, and not opposed, approach to political change at this time has been labeled “building a progressive majority.” This approach assumes that large segments of the U.S. population agree on a variety of issues. Some are activists in electoral politics, others in trade unions, and more in single issue groups. In addition, many who share common views of worker rights, the environment, health care, undue influence of money in politics, immigrant rights etc. are not active politically. The progressive majority perspective argues that the project for the short-term is to mobilize the millions of people who share common views on the need for significant if not fundamental change in economics and politics. 

            Often organizers conceptualize the progressive majority as the broad mass of people who share views on politics and economics that are ‘centrist” or “left.” Consequently, over the long run, “left” participants see their task as three-fold. First, they must work on the issues that concern majorities of those at the local and national level. Second, they struggle to convince their political associates that the problems most people face have common causes (particularly capitalism). Third, “left” participants see the need to link issues so that class, race, gender, and the environment, for example, are understood as part of the common problem that people face.

            A 2005-2007 data set called “Start” (startguide.org) showed that there were some “500 leading organizations in the United States working for progressive change on a national level.” START divided these 500 organizations into twelve categories based on their main activities. These included progressive electoral, peace and foreign policy, economic justice, civil liberties, health advocacy, labor, women’s and environmental organizations.  Of course, their membership, geographic presence, financial resources, and strategic and tactical vision varied widely. And, many of the variety of progressive organizations at the national level were reproduced at the local and state levels as well.

            In sum, when looking at contemporary social change in the United States at least three tendencies have been articulated: left unity, the Occupy Movement, and building a progressive majority. Each highlights its own priorities as to vision, strategy, tactics, and political contexts. In addition, the relative appeal of each may be affected by age, class, gender, race, and issue prioritization as well. However, these approaches need not be seen as contradictory. Rather the activism borne of each approach may parallel the others. (the discussion of the three tendencies of activism appeared in Harry Targ, “The Fusion Politics Response to 21^st Century Imperialism From Arab Spring to Moral Mondays,” ouleft.org, and was presented at the “Moving Beyond Capitalism” Conference, Center for Global Justice, San Miguel de Allende Mexico, July 29-August 5, 2014). 

Building the Progressive Majority in 2016

          The statement above from CCDS was published in 2009 and the description of the three political tendencies in the United States was presented in 2014. Since then, the Moral Mondays Movement in North Carolina captured national attention and stimulated a growing campaign around Reverend William Barber’s narrative of United States history referring to the “three reconstructions” and the articulation of his theory of “fusion politics.”

         The egregious police violence against African Americans, particularly young men and women of color, has sparked a vibrant Black Lives Matter campaign that has caused a renewed interest in understanding the functions the police serve, the role of white supremacy, rightwing populism, and Michelle Alexander’s “New Jim Crow” in America.

         Militant workers in growing sectors of the economy are rising up. Fast food workers are organizing around the “Fight for 15.” Health and home care, and other service sector workers are demanding the right to have their unions recognized. And teachers, transportation workers, and state employees have hit the streets and legislative assemblies to demand worker rights.

        The peace movement has begun to resuscitate itself challenging a new cold war with Russia, boots on the ground and drones in the air to fight ISIS, and the unbridled growth of the military/industrial complex.

        Finally, environmentalists have made a convincing case that the connection between neoliberal global capitalism and environmental catastrophe “changes everything.”

        The three tendencies presented above—left unity, the Occupy Movement,  and building a progressive majority—continue to be reflected in different kinds of organizing around the country based on the issues, levels of organization, predominant ideological manifestations, local political cultures, and the composition of movements in different places based upon class, race, gender, sexual identity, religious affiliation and issue orientation. And all these tendencies are worthy of attention and support, particularly in the 21^st century “time of chaos.”

       But a new campaign (potentially a movement) has emerged since the summer, 2015. Bernie Sanders, an aging left-oriented Senator from Vermont began his long uphill march to secure the Democratic Party nomination for the presidency. A sixties activist on civil rights and peace, a populist mayor of Burlington, Vermont, a Congressman and Senator from that state, Sanders, since his early days of political activism,  has articulated an anti-Wall Street, anti-finance capital mantra that has its roots in various progressive currents in United States history, These include the populist campaigns of the 1890s,  the militant workers struggles of the  Wobblies during the Progressive era, the popular electoral campaigns of five-time Socialist Party candidate for President, Eugene V. Debs from 1900 to 1920; the industrial union movement of  the 1930s which built the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and support for the New Deal legislation that provided some measure of economic security to many workers; to the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s and beyond.

       Sanders has proceeded to excoriate finance capital and to link the enormous accumulation of wealth and income at one pole of American society and the maintenance and growth of the misery of the masses on the other. He has advanced his narrative by linking class, to race, to gender issues, and has begun to incorporate the apocalyptic possibilities of a future without addressing climate change. In a word, he has articulated a program that the CCDS program defined as the vision of “the progressive majority.”

      The vision of a progressive majority is one that emphasizes the systematic articulation of the causes of human misery and what needs to be done to overcome them and the belief that the vision already exists among the majority of the American people. So far, the popularity of the Sanders campaign, the particular enthusiasm it is generating at the grassroots, including from youth, labor, feminist, anti-racist, and environmental organizations, and the demographics reflected in the Iowa caucus turnout and polling data, suggest that activists from the three tendencies identified above should direct their energies to supporting the Sanders presidential run. Most importantly, the Sanders campaign has inspired the possibility of building a long-standing progressive movement that will survive and grow until the November, 2016 election and beyond.

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