SPEAKING TRUTH ABOUT VIOLENCE

Harry Targ

Establishing causal connections between “variables” and violence is a form of mystification. The reality of this world is that of grotesque inequalities in wealth, power, respect for humankind and the environment, a world awash in instrumentalities of death, and a global culture that celebrates it. Recent reports from the World Bank and the World Economic Forum (of all places) document the continuing and growing inequalities in wealth and income on a worldwide basis. Could it be a surprise that seemingly indiscriminate acts of violence occur all across the globe? Only a humane global movement for fundamental change can radically transform the world we live in but movements of protest can make constructive changes along the way (Harry Targ, Facebook, April 23, 2013).

Each violent tragedy in the United States brings an outpouring of wrenching and “expert” analyses of what was behind the acts that led to so much pain and suffering. Most of the soul-searching about tragedies from Arizona, to Colorado, to Connecticut, to Boston is about domestic events (the repeated killings of Iraqis, Afghan peoples, Pakistanis, Yemenis and others generate much less empathy). Explanations usually involve deranged “others,” usually poor “others,” “others” of color, and “others with fundamentalist religious beliefs.” Their crimes are described as perpetrated against victims who are the “normal” people. Make no mistake about it, violence against any individuals, communities, and nations must be opposed, even among those, who in the end are the root cause of it. But we need to be clear about the economic, social, political, cultural and military/police context in which violence occurs. And, in no small measure, violence itself is celebrated in the societies where it is most prevalent.

Peace researchers have written about “direct,” “cultural,” and “structural” violence for years. While each of these is seen as having its own characteristics and causes for the most part analysts regard the three as inextricably interconnected. Direct violence refers to physical assault, shooting, bombing, gassing, and torture. It is about killing people.  Cultural violence refers to dominant cultures whose apparatuses, such as the media and laws,  portray their own institutions and values as superior to others and rituals that seek to honor the violence engaged in by one’s own country or group while demeaning other countries or groups. What is most vicious about cultural violence is its effort to make the victimized groups hate themselves.

Structural violence occurs when economic, political, cultural and military institutions create relationships in which some human beings gain disproportionately from the labor, the talents, and the pain and suffering of others. Structural violence is institutionalized violence most often organized around class exploitation, racism, and patterns of gendered forms of domination and subordination.  The key concepts that shape efforts to understand the causes and effects of structural violence are class, race, and gender.

Ironically reports issued this year, between the Newtown and Boston massacres, by the World Bank and the World Economic Forum tell us much about the fundamentals of structural violence on a worldwide basis. These reports clearly describe why we do not live in a better world, why people do not treat each other with more respect, and why vast majorities of humanity and their natural habitats are in danger of extinction. And they imply that violence engendered by the rich and powerful and responses from the poor and powerless are embedded in the system of structural violence.

The World Bank Report

The World Bank issued a press release on April 17, 2013 summarizing “The State of the Poor: Where are the Poor and Where are the Poorest?” It reported that the number of the world’s citizens living on less than $1.25 a day has declined markedly between 1981 and 2010 from half the world’s population to 21 percent. But still, they say, 1.2 billion people live in extreme poverty (below $1.25 per day). Sub-Saharan Africa accounts for more than one-third of those who live in such poverty worldwide. A World Bank spokesperson noted that “We have made strides in cutting down poverty, but with nearly one-fifth of the world population still below the poverty line, not enough.” (This particular World Bank report does not include data on those living just above the poverty line. For example, another twenty percent live on $2 per day).

Oxfam Reports on the World Economic Forum’s “Global Risk Report”

In an Oxfam Media Briefing (January 18, 2013), the authors site a recent World Economic Forum warning that rising global inequality constitutes one of the top “global risks of 2013.” Oxfam points out that lifting masses of people out of absolute poverty has been the goal of economic elites over the last decade but “inequality and the extreme wealth that contributes to it were seen as either not relevant, or a prerequisite for the growth that would also help the poorest, as the wealth created trickled down to the benefit of everyone.” 

The Oxfam Media Briefing suggests reasons why the WEF might correctly regard growing global inequality as a “risk.” They highlight the following:

Extreme wealth and inequality are reaching levels never before seen in history and are getting worse. Inequality is growing in the industrial developed countries such as the United States and Great Britain, rapidly developing economies such as China and South Africa, and many of the poorest countries in the world. The incomes of the top 1 percent have increased by 60 percent over the last twenty years. The top 100 billionaires added $240 billion to their wealth in 2012. “The IMF has said that inequality is dangerous and divisive and could lead to civil unrest.”

Extreme Wealth and Inequality is Politically Corrosive. Oxfam makes the obvious but important point that growing inequality in wealth and income relate to growing inequality in political power. They quote economist Joseph Stiglitz who contends that financial deregulation in the largest capitalist countries led to greater economic inequality and further consolidation of political power by financial elites.

Extreme Wealth and Inequality is Socially Divisive. For Oxfam, the consolidation of wealth and power reduce the life chances and even human sustainability of the vast majority of populations. People work harder for less and suffer more. “If rich elites use their money to buy services, whether it is private schooling or private healthcare, they have less interest in public services or paying taxes to support them.” And, as Oxfam reminds us, inequality is linked to growing alienation, mental disorders, crime, anomic violence, and shear desperation.

Extreme Wealth and Inequality is Environmentally Destructive. Oxfam reiterates the fact that rising inequality increases demands by the rich for access to and consumption of scarce resources that the earth can no longer provide. “Those in the 1 percent have been estimated to use as much as 10,000 times more carbon than the average US citizen.” 

So if you grow up in urban American or rural Africa, the Middle East or almost anywhere else and you are young, intelligent, and experience the world through the globalization of a racist, sexist, violent media, does your view of the world look bright? No job, no respect, hungry, alienated and imbued with the cultural values about violence and racism that are used to define you, you may act in the same ways the rich and powerful act against you and your people. 

The conversation that should come out of Newtown, Boston, and West, Texas or Baghdad,  Kabul, and Gaza or almost anyplace else is how to change the structural violence that gave rise to direct and cultural violence. This discussion should lead to the mobilization of progressives to create a just society, one in which people will not want to kill each other.

THE EMPIRE IN DISARRAY: GLOBAL CHALLENGES TO THE INTERNATIONAL ORDER

Harry Targ

A whole generation of activists has “grown up” conversant with the central place of empire in human history. Children of the Cold War and the “Sixties” generation  realized that the United States was the latest of a multiplicity of imperial powers which sought to dominate and control human beings, physical space, natural resources, and human labor power. We learned from the Marxist tradition, radical historians, scholar/activists with historical roots in Africa, and revolutionaries from the Philippines and Vietnam to Southern Africa, to Latin America. But we often concluded that imperialism was hegemonic; that is it was all powerful, beyond challenge.

A “theory of imperialism” for the 21^st century should include four interconnected variables that explain empire building and as well as responses to it. First, as an original motivation for empire, economic interests are primary. The most recent imperial power, the United States needed to secure customers for its products, outlets for manufacturing investment opportunities, an open door for financial speculation, and vital natural resources such as oil.

Second, the pursuit of military control parallels and supports the pursuit of economic domination. The United States, beginning in the 1890s, built a two-ocean navy to become a Pacific power, as well as institutionalizing its control of the Western Hemisphere. It crushed revolutionary ferment in the Philippines during the Spanish, Cuban, American War  and began a program of  military intervention in Central American and the Caribbean. The “Asian pivot” of the 21^st century and continued opposition to the Cuban and Bolivarian revolutions reflect the one hundred year extension of the convergence of economics and militarism in U.S. foreign policy.

Third, as imperial nations flex their muscles on the world stage they need to rationalize exploitation and military brutality to convince others and their own citizens of the humanistic goals they wish to achieve. In short, ideology matters. In the U.S. case “manifest destiny” and the “city on the hill,” that is the dogma that the United States has a special mission as a beacon of hope for the world, have been embedded in the dominant national narrative of the country for 150 years.

However, what has often been missing from the leftwing theoretical calculus is an understanding of resistance. Latin American and African dependency theorists and “bottom-up” historians have argued for a long time that resistance must be part of the understanding of any theory of imperialism. In fact, the imperial system is directly related to the level of resistance the imperial power encounters. 

Resistance generates more attempts at economic hegemony, political subversion, the application of military power, and patterns of “humanitarian interventionism” and diplomatic techniques, called “soft power,” to defuse it. But as recent events suggest resistance of various kinds is spreading throughout global society.  

The impetus for adding resistance to any understanding of imperialism has many sources including Howard Zinn’s seminal history of popular movements in the United States, “The People’s History of the United States.” Zinn argued convincingly that in each period of American history ruling classes were challenged, shaped, weakened, and in a few cases defeated because of movements of indigenous people, workers, women, people of color, middle class progressives and others who stood up to challenge the status quo.

More recently, Vijay Prashad, author of “The Darker Nations,” compiled a narrative of post-World War II international relations that privileged the resistance from the Global South. World history was as much shaped by anti-colonial movements, the construction of the non-aligned movement, conferences and programs supporting liberation struggles and women’s rights, as it was by big power contestation. The Prashad book was subtitled “A People’s History of the Third World.”

The 21^st century has witnessed a variety of forms of resistance to global hegemony and the perpetuation of neo-liberal globalization all across the face of the globe. First, various forms of systemic resistance have emerged. These often emphasize the reconfiguration of nation-states and their relationships that have long been ignored. The two largest economies in the world, China and India, have experienced economic growth rates well in excess of the industrial capitalist countries. China has developed a global export and investment program in Latin America and Africa that exceeds that of the United States and Europe.

In addition, the rising economic powers have begun a process of global institution building to rework the international economic institutions and rules of decision-making on the world stage. On March 26-27, 2013, the BRICS met in Durban, South Africa. While critical of BRICS shortcomings Patrick Bond, Senior Professor of Development Studies and Director of the University of KwaZulu-Natal Centre for Civil Society, in a collection of readings on the subject introduces BRICS with an emphasis on its potential:

In Durban, five heads of state meet to assure the rest of Africa that their countries’ corporations are better investors in infrastructure, mining, oil and agriculture than the traditional European and US multinationals. The Brazil-Russia-India-China-SA summit also includes 16 heads of state from Africa, including notorious tyrants. A new ‘BRICS bank’ will probably be launched. There will be more talk about monetary alternatives to the US dollar.

On the Latin American continent, most residents of the region are mourning the death of Hugo Chavez, the leader of the Bolivarian Revolution. Under Chavez’s leadership, inspiration, and support from oil revenues, Venezuela launched the latest round of state resistance to the colossus of the north, the United States. 

Along with the world’s third largest trade bloc MERCOSUR (Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, Venezuela and associate memberships including  Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru), Latin Americans have participated in the construction of financial institutions and economic assistance programs to challenge the traditional hegemony of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization. 

The Bolivarian Revolution also has stimulated political change based on various degrees of grassroots democratization, the construction of workers’ cooperatives, and a shift from neo-liberal economic policy to economic populism. With a growing web of participants, Bolivia, Ecuador, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and, of course, Cuba, the tragic loss of Chavez will not mean the end to the Bolivarian Revolution. It might lead to its deepening.

But the story of 21^st century resistance is not just about countries, alliances, new economic institutions that mimic the old. Grassroots social movements have been spreading like wild fire all across the face of the globe. The story can begin in many places and at various times: the new social movements of the 1980s; the Zapatistas of the 1990s; the anti-globalization/anti-IMF campaigns going back to the 1960s and continuing off and on until the new century; or repeated mass mobilizations against a Free Trade Agreement for the Americas.

Since 2011, the world has been inspired by Arab Spring, workers’ mobilizations all across the industrial heartland of the United States, student strikes in Quebec, the state of California, and in Santiago, Chile. Beginning in 2001 mass organizations from around the world began to assemble in Porto Alegre, Brazil billing their meeting of some 10,000 strong, the World Social Forum. They did not wish to create a common political program. They wished to launch a global social movement where ideas are shared, issues and demands from the base of societies could be raised, and in general the neo-liberal global agenda reinforced at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland could be challenged. 

The World Social Forum has been meeting annually ever since in Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the United States. Most recently, the last week in March, 2013, 50,000 people from 5,000 organizations in 127 countries from five continents met in Tunis, the site of the protest that sparked Arab Spring two years ago. Planners wanted to bring mass movements from the Middle East and North Africa into the collective narrative of this global mobilization.

Medea Benjamin, founder of Code Pink, reported that a Tunisian student, when asked whether the Social Forum movement should continue, answered in the affirmative. The student paid homage to the Tunisian street vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, who committed suicide and launched Arab Spring. He declared that “for all those who have died struggling for justice, we must continue to learn from each other how to build a world that does not respond to the greed of dictators, bankers or corporations, but to the needs of simple people like Mohamed Bouazizi.”

 

 
  

ON THE ROAD TO DESTROYING PUBLIC INSTITUTIONS ONE BY ONE

Harry Targ

I've traveled round this country
From shore to shining shore
It really made me wonder
The things I heard and saw

I saw the weary farmer
Plowing sod and loam
l heard the auction hammer
A knocking down his home

l saw the seaman standing
Idly by the shore
l heard the bosses saying
Got no work for you no more

I saw the weary miner
Scrubbing coal dust from his back
I heard his children crying
Got no coal to heat the shack

But the banks are made of marble
With a guard at every door
And the vaults are stuffed with silver
That the miner sweated for

I've seen my brothers working
Throughout this mighty land
l prayed we'd get together
And together make a stand

 (from “The Banks are Made of Marble,” written by Les Rice and sung by Pete Seeger and the Weavers)

Mike Pence, Indiana’s recently elected governor, published an editorial in the Lafayette Indiana Journal and Courier (March 22, 2013) proposing a 10 percent “across the board” cut in state income taxes. He claimed that this tax cut would put money back into households that can better spend it than government. State financial reserves remain flush, he said, because of the wise management of public funds of the prior governor, and now Purdue University president, Mitch Daniels and the state legislature.

Pence defends his tax cut proposal with the old tired mantra of making the Indiana economy more competitive even though he does admit that “Indiana’s economy is still struggling…with unemployment… stubbornly above 8 percent.” Apparently, the downsizing of government, building a budget surplus, privatizing schools and highways, and giving tax breaks to the wealthier sectors of the Hoosier population have not worked so far.

Even though the thirty year campaign (since Reaganomics) to cut taxes, reduce the size of government, and privatize public services has clearly reduced rates of economic growth, increased unemployment, cut real wages, and made access to health care and education less affordable for more Americans, the Daniels/Pence-type economic programs are being expanded in virtually all the “red” states and most of the “blue” ones. The pressure to impose economic austerity has profoundly affected conflicts over federal policies as well.

The gridlock over economic policy at the national level and states where control of the government is shared by the two parties is driven by debates between so-called Keynesians, who support “mixed” state/ market policies versus Hayek/Friedman supporters who believe, as former President Reagan declared, “government is not the solution, government is the problem.” 

However, beyond the debate about economic theory is a sustained, well-funded campaign by the Koch Brothers, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), conservative and even liberal think tanks, and most politicians to destroy public institutions that masses of working people have struggled to construct since the industrial revolution. These include libraries, public schools, parks, roads, mail service and other forms of communication, social safety nets for the needy, and the guarantee through public institutional scrutiny basic rights-to vote, to form trade unions, to have safe work places, to be secure in one’s home and on the streets. Governments even were assigned the tasks of research and development to promote the common good and improve the physical and social quality of life. 

All of these services were demanded by the vast majority of Americans because they knew that such tasks could not be done individually. All of these benefits provided by public institutions are in danger of being destroyed by the tax cutters, the privatizers, and the deregulators such as reflected over the last decade in policies instituted by governors and legislatures in states like Indiana.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) issued a report last week on the devastating consequences of these policy shifts on one public sector, higher education (“Recent Deep State Higher Education Cuts May Harm Students and the Economy for Years To Come”). One example has been the 28 percent cut per student in state expenditures on higher education over the last five years in all fifty states. Eleven states cut their support for higher education by more than one-third. In Governor Daniels’ Indiana higher education funding declined by 17.2 percent between fiscal year 2008 and 2013 ($1,240 per student). http://www.cbpp.org/files/3-19-13sfp.pdf

CBPP pointed out that these cuts in public support for higher education have  dramatic negative consequences. “States (and to a lesser extent localities) provide 53 percent of the revenue that can be used to support instruction at these schools. When this funding is cut, colleges and universities generally must either reduce spending, raise tuition to cover the gap, or both.”

In response to declining state support for higher education tuition increases since 2007-2008 have exceeded 27 percent nationally. (In Indiana tuition has risen by 15.1 percent or $1,142 per student). Many colleges and universities have cut teaching staff, increased class size, reduced course and program offerings, shut down computer and library facilities, and eliminated branch campuses.

Debates abound in state legislatures about the impacts of recession on public financing of higher education. Legitimate arguments are raised about the pattern of bloated and unnecessary administrative expansion in colleges and universities and administrative salaries that are extraordinarily out-of-line with the norms of public service. 

But there is a deeper meaning to the CBPP report, the Pence proposed tax cuts, and the downsizing of support for public-supported higher education. That is, powerful economic and political actors, representing what the Occupy Movement called the one percent and their allies among traditional conservatives and right-wing populists, are on a campaign to destroy public institutions which for the most part serve the interests of the vast majority of the population of the United States.

In the dystopian society the rich and powerful wish to create there will be education, health care, physical security, and a sustainable and fulfilling quality of life for those who can pay for it but for the rest of us, the 99 percent, life will become harsh and painful. More and more it is becoming clear that politics must be  about saving those public institutions that workers, women, people of color, marginalized peoples of all kinds struggled for a long time to secure and are now in danger of losing.

     

WE NEED TO EXPAND THE IRAQ WAR SYNDROME

Harry Targ

In a November/December 2005 Foreign Affairs article, “The Iraq Syndrome,” …. I argued that there would likely be growing skepticism about the notions that “the United States should take unilateral military action to correct situations or overthrow regimes it considers reprehensible but that present no immediate threat to it, that it can and should forcibly bring democracy to other nations not now so blessed, that it has the duty to rid the world of evil, that having by far the largest defense budget in the world is necessary and broadly beneficial, that international cooperation is of only very limited value, and that Europeans and other well-meaning foreigners are naive and decadent wimps.” Most radically, I went on to suggest that the United States might “become more inclined to seek international cooperation, sometimes even showing signs of humility.” John Mueller, “The Iraq Syndrome Revisited,” Foreign Affairs, March 28, 2011: http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/67681/john-mueller/the-iraq-syndrome-revisited

David Halberstam reported in his important book, “The Best and the Brightest,” that President Roosevelt directed his State Department to develop a position on what United States foreign policy toward Indochina should be after the World War in Asia was ended. Two choices were possible in 1945: support the Vietnamese national liberation movement that bore the brunt of struggle against Japanese occupation of Indochina or support the French plan to reoccupy the Indochinese states of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.

 

As the Cold War escalated the United States rejected Ho Chi Minh’s plea for support for independence and began funding the French in their effort to reestablish colonialism in Indochina. When the French were defeated by the Viet Minh forces in 1954, the United States stepped in and fought a murderous war until the collapse of the US South Vietnamese puppet regime in 1975.

 

Paralleling the struggle for power in Indochina, competing political forces emerged after the World War on the Korean Peninsula.  With the Soviet Union and China supporting the North Koreans and the United States supporting a regime created by it in the South a shooting war, a civil war, between Koreans ensued in 1950 which continued until an armistice was established in 1953. That armistice, not peace, continues to this day as a war of words and periodic provocations.

Political scientist John Mueller analyzed polling data concerning the support for U.S. military action in Korea and Vietnam, discovering that in both wars there was a steady and parallel decline in support for them. Working class Americans were the most opposed to both wars at every data point. Why? Because working class men and women were most likely to be drafted to fight and their loved ones the most likely to suffer the pain of soldiers coming home dead, scarred, or disabled.

Polling data from the period since the onset of the Iraq war followed the pattern Mueller found in reference to Korea and Vietnam. In all three cases levels of support for U.S. war making declined as the length of the wars increased and casualties rose. The American people typically gave the Presidents some flexibility when the wars started and the rally round the flag phenomena prevailed. But then resistance grew.

Throughout the period from the end of the Vietnam War until the 1990s, each presidential administration was faced with what foreign policy elites called “the Vietnam Syndrome.” This was a pejorative term these elites used to scornfully describe what they correctly believed would be the resistance to foreign military interventions that they periodically wished to initiate.

President Reagan wanted to invade El Salvador to save its dictatorship and to overthrow the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. He would have preferred to send troops to Angola to defend the anti-communist forces of Jonas Savimbi of UNITA. To overcome the resistance to launching what could become another Vietnam quagmire, policymakers had to engage in “low intensity conflict,” convert operations that would minimize what the American people could learn about what their government was doing and who it was supporting. Reagan did expand globally and sent troops to tiny Granada, but even Reagan’s globalism, militarism, and interventionism was somewhat constrained by the fear of public outrage.

President George Herbert Walker Bush launched a six-month campaign to convince the American people that military action was needed to force Iraqi troops out of Kuwait. Despite a weak endorsement of such action by the Congress, the American people supported Gulf War 1 because casualties were small and the war lasted only a month. During a press conference announcing the Gulf War’s end in February, 1991, Bush proclaimed that “at last we licked the Vietnam Syndrome.”

Clinton knew better. He limited direct US military action to supporting NATO bombing in the former Yugoslavia in 1995, bombed targets in Iraq in so-called “no-fly zones in 1998,” , bombed Serbia in a defense of Kosovo in 1999 and used economic embargoes to weaken so-called “rogue states” throughout his eight years in office.

It was President George Walker Bush who launched long and devastating wars in Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. The Bush administration used the sorrow and anger of the American people after the 9/11 terrorist acts to lie, deceive, aggress, and qualitatively increase the development of a warfare state. As Mueller has suggested an “Iraq Syndrome” had surfaced by 2005 as the lies about that war became public, the war costs were headed toward trillions of dollars in expenditures, and troop deaths and disabilities escalated. And of course an historically repressive society, Iraq, was so destroyed that U.S. troops left it in shambles with hundreds of thousands dead, disabled, and in abject poverty.

As we reflect on the ten-year anniversary of the launching of the Iraq War in March, 2003, the madmen inside the beltway are talking about increasing U.S. military involvement in Syria, not “taking any options off the table” in Iran, and threatening North Korea. Meanwhile the United States is beefing up its military presence in the Pacific to “challenge” rising Chinese power, establishing AFRICOM to respond to “terrorism” on the African continent, and speaking with scorn about the leadership in Latin America of recently deceased Hugo Chavez.

The American people must escalate commitment to its “syndromes” demanding in no uncertain terms an end to United States militarism. Mueller’s call for a U.S. foreign policy that emphasizes cooperation over conflict motivated by humility over arrogance is the least the country can do to begin the process of repairing the damage it has done to global society. 

 

 

 

 

TWO TRILLION DOLLARS AND THOUSANDS OF LIVES LATER

 

Published on Thursday, July 10, 2003 by USA Today

End U.S. Occupation Now

by Harry Targ

The great folksinger Pete Seeger sang in 1967 of the U.S. sinking deeper and deeper into "the Big Muddy" that was Vietnam, while "the big fool," President Lyndon Johnson, said, "Push on." For those of us who remember Vietnam, Iraq seems more and more like "the Big Muddy," as U.S. troops are targeted for assassination and Iraqis are killed indiscriminately in retaliation.  It is not that the circumstances involving the two U.S. military interventions are the same. In the Vietnam case, the U.S. engaged in a long and escalating neocolonial intervention from 1950 until the war was finally lost in 1975. In Iraq, the intervention that began with the Gulf War in 1991 did not involve growing troop commitments until the quick and brutal strikes by land and air against Iraqi targets this past March.  What is similar, however, is the colossal ideologically driven miscalculation that the growing guerrilla opposition today is the result primarily of malcontents from the Baath Party, who lost power and wealth with the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, and extremist Iraqis who relish engaging in acts of terrorism against U.S. and British troops. As in Vietnam, the explanation for growing violent opposition to U.S. military occupation is that a tiny and malevolent minority supported by foreign enemies is bent on undermining the "democratization" of Iraq. U.S. leaders just never seem to get it. When the U.S. engages in brutal economic strangulation, sends covert operatives to terrorize populations and launches air and land war on targeted populations, the victims of these actions do not regard the aggressors as liberators. The interests of the Iraqi people and the increasingly vulnerable young men and women of the U.S. military occupation would best be served if the United States negotiates the complete withdrawal of coalition troops and allows them to be replaced with a true international peace force under the aegis of the United Nations. Nothing less will stop the bloodshed. Harry Targ teaches U.S. foreign policy and international relations at Purdue University. He is the author of 11 books and 50 articles on these subjects. © Copyright 2003 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc. ###

HOW DO WE SUSTAIN HUMAN LIFE? THE JOBS/INCOME PROBLEM

Harry Targ

In one way or another progressives are addressing fundamental questions basic to human sustainability. And as Pete Seeger has said: "Participation: that’s what’s going to save the human race."

First, more and more activists are raising concerns about the survivability of the natural environment in which we live: the land mass, the water systems, the productivity of the land, and the capacity of humans to continue to live on the land. Most visible to the naked eye are consequences of global climate change, including hurricanes, tsunamis, floods, storms, and blistering heat.

Second, there is a growing discussion of problems of access to the rudimentary resources for the maintenance of human life: food, water, and air. Because of the devastations of the environment to distorted and inadequate systems of production and distribution, people are living in poverty, are malnourished, and remain exposed to toxic air and water.

Third, Samir Amin estimates that one-half to two-thirds of the global population lives in conditions of “precariousness”. That is people lack access to secure jobs and income in global and national economies that systematically are able to produce more goods and services with fewer and fewer workers. However, global capitalism is based on a system of remuneration linking income to jobs. The need for fewer workers leads to fewer jobs and a downward spiral of wages and income.

Fourth, because of environmental devastation; declining access to food and clean air and water; and lack of the capacity to acquire monetary resources to sustain life, little time is left for discussions of what a better life and a better society might look like. 

In this blog I will address the access to remuneration, reducing “precariousness,” and having the resources in a money economy to sustain life. Recently, discussion of that dimension of human sustainability has been stimulated by President Obama’s call for raising the minimum wage and the jobs/income crisis faced by workers as a result of the sequester crisis. The data is familiar to most people.

Wages and Income

-Economic Policy Institute analyses show clearly that worker productivity has increased over the last 40 years and wages have stagnated or declined with the exception of a bump in real wages during the late 1990s. For economist Lawrence Mishel, in terms of wages, the last decade has been “the lost decade.”

-Wage stagnation has affected all sectors of the working population, including those with college degrees.

-Wage and income inequality has increased dramatically over the last 40 years. As Mishel’s wrote: “This divergence has been demonstrated anew in the current recovery over 2009-2011 as real wages fell for the bottom ninety percent of the wage distribution but rose for the top five percent.”

-African Americans and Latinos have experienced wage and job stagnation at rates at least a third higher than whites.

-“The declining value of the minimum wage has played a key role in these trends….” (Mishel, February 21, 2013, Economic Policy Institute.)

Using the Indiana Story to Relate Wages, Jobs, and Poverty:

-Indiana’s job loss between 2008 and 2012 was 231,500.

-Indiana is among 17 states that have continued to experience absolute declines in its labor force since the recession began.

-Median family income fell by 29.6 percent in the past decade from $78,599 to $55,368. Only Michigan, among all states, has experienced a larger percentage decrease.

-Since 2000, Indiana has seen a 52 percent increase in poverty. In 2010, 15.3 percent of Hoosiers were living in poverty, nearly one million people. Childhood poverty rates have increased by the same amount. (“Status of Working Families in Indiana, 2011, Indiana Institute for Working Families, April, 2012).

One Response: Living Wage Campaigns

From the 1990s to 2004 living wage campaigns all across the United States grew, drawing together coalitions of community activists, led by labor, faith communities, and grassroots organizations such as ACORN. Ralph Nader in a recent essay (Common Dreams, February 16, 2013) referred to an apt definition of a living wage proposed by Theodore Roosevelt at the 1912 Progressive Party convention:

“We stand for a living wage…enough to secure the elements of a normal standard of living-a standard high enough to make morality possible, to provide for education and recreation, to care for immature members of the family, to maintain the family during periods of sickness, and to permit a reasonable saving for our old age.”

The first major living wage victory occurred in the Baltimore campaign of 1994. A local coalition consisting of AFSCME and a group of 50 churches called BUILD, Baltimorean’s United in Leadership Development won a very modest ordinance requiring that companies with city service contracts pay workers a base wage of $6.10 increasing to $7.70 over five years.

While modest, the Baltimore campaign inspired coalitions and demands all across the country. Between 1995 and 1999, 37 additional ordinances passed sometimes including benefits with wage increases. In 2000-2001 mobilizations led to an additional 57 ordinances. By 2002, three quarters of these ordinances required health care benefits and wage rates from $9.77 to $11.10 without health care. An additional 70 campaigns were launched in small towns and big cities around the country, including New Orleans, Santa Monica, and San Francisco (S. Laurel Weldon and Harry Targ, “From Living Wages to Family Wages?” New Political Science , March 2004).

Stephanie Luce, Professor of Labor Studies, Murphy Institute, CUNY, updated the living wage story in 2012. She said that since Baltimore much has been accomplished “…winning more than 125 living wage ordinances in cities and counties, three city minimum wages, and state and federal minimum wage increases. Eight states have indexed their minimum wage to inflation because of activist pressure, and campaigns to raise and index state minimums are underway in 10 more states.”

Luce also described problems with living wage campaigns. They tended to target small sectors of the working class (usually public employees). They often did not include part-time workers. Restrictive provisions were included in ordinances which excluded certain corporate investors from the wage and benefit requirements. Also campaigns have been long and difficult, with growing opposition from ‘big box” and other huge corporations.

On the other hand, she suggested that the value of such campaigns included the impetus living wage coalitions provided for building community coalitions. Often these coalitions supported union organizing drives. They brought together African American, faith, and labor communities. They generated pressure for other campaigns such as for a minimum wage, prevailing wage, and worker rights.

For example, Luce reported: “After activists won a living wage in Tucson, Arizona, city workers contacted the Communications Workers and organized their own union….The San Francisco living wage coalition helped win card check from the airport commission, resulting in several thousand workers joining a handful of unions....The NEA has launched a national effort to use living wage campaigns as contract campaigns, to raise wages for school support staff.”  (http://www.labornotes.org, February 27, 2012).

Luce concluded that: “Many living wage campaigns were launched not because they were the best policy available but because they could use leverage where activists were most likely to have it: at the local level.”

Are Living Wage Campaigns Still Relevant Today

Although some living wage campaigns continue, often expanding their projects to include support for minimum wages, union organizing, and other local campaigns, 9/11, two wars, and the 2008-2012 recession reshaped the agenda of progressive groups. Assaults on worker rights throughout the heartland required mobilizing to save jobs, oppose Right-to-Work Laws, protect the right of public employees to form unions, and resist the privatization of every conceivable public institution.

However, given the vision that animates the progressive majority and the need to build broad coalitions, rebuilding living wage campaigns could be an important part of its organizing future.

Living wage campaigns address one of the issues of sustaining humankind mentioned above; jobs, income and remuneration.

They would resonate with workers who survive on wages just above existing minimum wage laws.

They could work in conjunction with and parallel to mobilizations around minimum wage and jobs campaigns.

And, if the history of such campaigns is a good predictor, living wage campaigns would bring together broad coalitions of workers, faith-based activists, activists from African American and Latino communities, and activists for reproductive health.

Finally, living wage campaigns, whether committed to federal or local legislation in the past, have been grassroots movements shaped by local conditions and the particularities of organizing possibilities at the local level. Building a progressive majority requires parallel and interconnected organizing at the grassroots level and the national level. Each is informed by the other. And ultimately sustaining human life is both a global and a local project.

CELEBRATE THE "HISTORICAL REVISIONISTS:" Part 2

Harry Targ

The writings of 1960s historians who became known as the “revisionists,” challenged traditional interpretations of the interests, goals, and ideology underpinning United States foreign policy. Historians such as William Appleman Williams, Joyce and Gabriel Kolko, Gar Alperowitz, Lloyd Gardner, Thomas Paterson  and others who were  discussed in a prior essay, http://theragblog.blogspot.com/2013/02/harry-targ-celebrate-historical.html,  offered a compelling explanation for sixties activists and those that followed them about why United States foreign policy was as it was.

First, the revisionists saw fundamental connections between economics and politics. Whether the theoretical starting point was Adam Smith or Karl Marx, these historians looked to the underlying dynamics, needs, and goals of the economic system as sources of policy. And, these writers began with the assumption that economic interest infused political systems and international relations. Revisionists argued that while security, ideologies, personalities of elites, and even human nature had some role to play in shaping policy, all of these forces were influenced in the end by economics. And economic interest shaped how political power was used.

Second, the behavior of dominant nation-states, from the seventeenth through the twentieth century, was propelled by trade, investment, financial speculation, the pursuit of slave or cheap labor, and access to vital natural resources. Economic gain, in the end, drove the system of international relations. Sometimes economic gain required cooperation; other times it necessitated war.

Third, since the use of the word “capitalism,” in the depth of the Cold War, signified that the user was some kind of Marxist, the reality that capitalism had been the dominant economic system from the fifteenth century on was ignored by most scholars. As more and more historians and social scientists employed the political economy point of view developed by the revisionists, it became apparent that as the economic system of capitalism changed over time international relations also changed. Capitalist enterprises and their supporting states accumulated more and more wealth, expanded at breakneck speed, consolidated both economic and political power, and from time to time built armies to facilitate further colonization and control on a global basis.

Analysts, borrowing from Marx, wrote about the evolution of capitalism using analyzes about the accumulation of capital and newer forms of the organization of labor. Some theorists wrote about the rise of capitalism out of feudalism highlighting how primitive accumulation was based on the enslavement of peoples, the conquest of territories, and the primacy of the use of brute force.

The slave system led to increased production and the rise of a global economy based on trade. Capitalists traversed the globe to sell the products produced by slave and wage labor. This era of commercial capitalism was followed by the emergence of industrial capitalism. New production techniques, particularly a factory system that brought workers together under one roof for mass production, increased pressure to promote the sale of products in domestic and global markets.

By the 1870s, in a number of capitalist countries the accumulation of capital, in products and profit created enormous surpluses. These required new outlets for sale, additional ways to put money capital to work, and ever expanding concentrations of capital in manufacturing and financial institutions.

Late-twentieth century theorists wrote about a new era of monopoly capitalism. Inspired by Lenin’s famous essay on imperialism, Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, argued that a global economic system had developed in which most economic activities were controlled by small numbers of actors, multinational corporations and banks. Subsequently some theorists made a compelling case for the view that the new capitalism of the twenty-first century had become truly global, leading to the declining salience of the nation-state system from which it was launched.

It was the research contributions of the historical revisionists of the 1960s which overcame the historical amnesia about the connections between economic interests and international relations. In addition to analyses of economic and political trends they uncovered concrete cases of links between economics and politics. These included the influence of huge U.S. and British oil companies on the U.S. managed overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran in 1953 and the coup in Guatemala in 1954 after President Arbenz threatened to nationalize lands owned by the U.S. based United Fruit Company. The revisionists found long term patterns of economic domination and foreign policy. They also uncovered the aforementioned specific cases where particular economic elites influenced foreign policy such as to Iran and Guatemala. And revisionists saw that the globalization of capitalism was threatened by the spread of nationalism and forms of socialism as a world force.  

Fourth, the political economy approach regarded class structure as central to the understanding of the foreign policy of any nation. Since every society has class divisions, some classes dominate the political system at the expense of others. In capitalist societies, those who own or control the means of production dominate the political life of the country. Therefore, while conventional analysts prioritize states as the most important actors in world affairs, political economists saw states and classes as inextricably connected. Most international relations scholars saw states as important to world affairs but it was political economists/historical revisionists who demonstrated the connection between states and classes.

Finally, revisionist historians who wrote from the lens of classes controlling the foreign policy process tended to take a “hegemonic” view of that control. Their analysis of the concentration of economic and political power was a critical contribution to theory and practice. However, they often did not factor resistance into their theoretical frame. The end result was a perspective implied by many that the United States was omniscient, all powerful, unbeatable, and unchangeable in its conduct. After the Cuban Revolution and the Vietnam War some analysts began to write particularly about the challenges that the hegemonic power the United States faced in the world, even from the Global South. But, in the main the historical revisionists developed a way of understanding international relations that was top down.

Many theorists and activists, therefore, remained intellectually ill-equipped to identify forces that resisted and constrained the drive for economic, political, and military hegemony throughout modern history. Lacking the more nuanced view of the drives for dominance and the resistance to it, activism sometimes shifted from radical enthusiasm to despair.

But in the end, contemporary analysts and activists owe a special debt of gratitude to those “historical revisionists” who offered a political economy explanation of why the United States role in the world (and before it other imperial powers) has been the way it was. Those of us who analyze the United States and the international system should add to the important theoretical contribution of the revisionists recognition of  patterns of resistance as they occur on a global basis and constitute an integral component of the way international relations works.