LABOR RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTS (The Rag Blog, September 7, 2020)

Harry Targ

The massive atrocities of World War II led nations to commit themselves permanently to the protection of basic rights for all human beings. Eleanor Roosevelt, the widow of the wartime President, Franklin Roosevelt, worked diligently with leaders from around the world to develop a document, to articulate a set of principles, which would bind humankind to never carry out acts of mass murder again. In addition, the document also committed nations to work to end most forms of pain and suffering.

Over 70 years ago, on December 10, 1948, delegates from the United Nations General Assembly signed the document which they called “The Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” It consisted of a preamble proclaiming that all signatories recognize "the inherent dignity" and "equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family" as the "foundation of freedom, justice, and peace in the world." The preamble declared the commitment of the signatories to the creation of a world “…in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want…”

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights consisted of thirty articles, with varying degrees of elaboration. The first 21 articles refer primarily to civil and political rights. They prohibit discrimination, persecution for the holding of various political beliefs, slavery, torture, and arbitrary arrest and detention. Persons have the right to speak their mind, travel, reside anywhere, a fair trial if charged with crimes, own property, form a family, and in the main to hold the rights of citizenship including universal and equal suffrage in his or her country.

The remaining nine articles address what may be called social and economic rights. These include rights to basic social security in accordance with the resources of the state in which the persons reside; rights to adequate leisure and holidays with pay; an adequate standard of living so that individuals and families have sufficient food, clothing, shelter, and medical care; and education, free at least at the primary levels. In addition, these nine articles guarantee a vibrant cultural life in the community, the right to enjoy and participate in the arts, and to benefit from scientific achievements.

While each article in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights provides a rich and vivid portrait of what must be achieved for all humankind, no article speaks to our time more than Article 23. It is one of the longer articles, identifying four basic principles:

*Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favorable conditions of work, and to protection against unemployment.

*Everyone, without discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work.

*Everyone who works has the right to just and favorable remuneration ensuring for himself (or herself) and his (her) family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary by other means of social protection.

*Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his (her) interests.

Using the language of our day, the principles embedded in Article 23 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights constitute a bedrock vision inspiring the global 99 percent to rise up against their exploiters from Cairo to Madison, to Wall Street, to cities and towns all over the world. But the global political economy is broken. The dominant mode of production, capitalism, increasingly cannot provide work, fair remuneration, and rights of workers to speak their mind and organize their own associations. In addition the economic system cannot provide a comfortable way of life because the value of what workers produce is expropriated by the top one percent of global society.

Right to Work laws, for example, which can be found in over twenty states allow workers to gain the benefits of union representation on the shop floor without joining unions or paying for union services which are provided to all workers. The basic goal of RTW laws is to bankrupt the labor movement. The end result, as data suggests in every state, is to reduce rights, benefits, and working conditions for all workers. The National Right to Work Committee, the American Legislative Exchange Council, and other rightwing groups funded and organized by the one percent, want to eliminate hard-fought worker rights which will reduce the costs of labor, wages, working conditions, and the standard of living of all workers, unionized or not.

Data about the world and data about the United States make it clear that there has been a forty year trajectory in the direction opposite to the rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Global inequality is growing. The rights and abilities of workers to form unions are shrinking. Standards of living of most of humankind are declining. The ability of most workers to acquire secure jobs is declining. Globally there has been a quantum shift from agricultural, manufacturing, and service employment to the informal sector, oftentimes “street hustling.” And in 2020, the global pandemic has afforded the capitalist class the opportunity to increase exploitation and immiseration.

In the end, anti-worker politics in the United States, like anti-worker politics virtually everywhere around the globe, violate the fundamental principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, especially its precious Article 23. On this Labor Day progressives must recommit to the fundamental proposition that the workers’ agenda is fundamentally the human rights agenda.

 

 

In the Spirit of Dr. Martin Luther King: Essays on Economic and Social Justice: reposted

 https://drive.google.com/file/d/1d22FHguacsrxo7Skwo4UBu0LtsfkW7A8/view

THOUGHTS ON IMPERIALISM

Part of an interview on imperialism on March 23, 2017 from the American Herald Tribune:

Mohsen Abdelmoumen: Your book "International Relations in a World of Imperialism and Class Struggle" is for me relevant and especially visionary. In your opinion, what are the most effective tools to fight against the ultra-liberalism and imperialism?

Prof. Harry Targ: That book was written to challenge the dominant discourse among those of us who study international relations. Reigning paradigms—realism, liberalism, and behavioral science—did not address imperialism, dominance, and dependency. The book was written in the early 1980s and reflected my growing engagement with theories of imperialism, particularly Lenin, and dependency, primarily scholar/activists from the Global South such as Walter Rodney, Samir Amin, Andre Gunter Frank, Fernando Cardoso and others. I wanted researchers and teachers of international relations in North America to incorporate these theories into how we looked at the world. Most importantly, I wanted our students to be confronted with ideas about imperialism and dependency, particularly the predominant imperial power of the United States.

From a historical and theoretical point of view much has changed since then, but yet the main lines of the theoretical argument remain the same. With the collapse of the Socialist Bloc and the dramatic shift at the apex of capitalism from manufacturing to finance, coupled with new technologies, we have seen the coming of the age of neoliberal globalization. And despite the collapse of the Soviet Union, US global hegemony has been increasingly challenged by China, India, various formations in the Global South, and massive uprisings everywhere motivated by opposition to austerity policies, ie. neoliberalism.

We are at a very difficult juncture in the world. Mass movements are springing up everywhere, some of which are rightwing, nationalist, neo-fascist, and others progressive. The US has countered its weakening economic position with an expansion of its military presence: over 700 military bases, private contract armies, new technologies such as drones, and collaborations with some of the world’s most reactionary regimes such as Saudi Arabia.

How to respond? This is the most difficult question. I would argue that the peace movement in the United States needs to connect with the other movements in the country, explaining how war/peace and anti-imperialism are connected to the struggles against racism, sexism, climate disaster and other issues. The peace movement also needs to network more effectively with movements around the world who are struggling for peace and justice; the way Arab Spring, Occupy, revolt in Madison, Wisconsin drew people, particularly the young into solidarity. And, in addition, we in the university need to reintroduce those radical ideas about imperialism and dependency and the interconnections between domestic and international issues into our curricula.  It is important in our educational and social movement work to introduce the vision and possibility of creating a twenty-first century socialism. This will take a long time.

Whether it is in your "Constructing Alternative World Futures: Reordering the Planet" or "The Global Political Economy in the 1980s," I note that you have gone beyond your time and that your analyzes have been verified. How did you come to these conclusions especially before some systemic crises of capitalism like the stock market crash of 1987?

Constructing Alternative World Futures was a book a friend and I wrote in the early 1970s. We wanted to make the case that social movements needed to be guided by, even proceeded by, alternative visions of a better future. My part of the book was to survey the visions of a better society proclaimed and experimented with over the centuries. I looked at global visions, regional ones, and local utopian communities. I was particularly impressed with the idea of participatory democracy (ideas from the early New Left in the United States) and the experiments in utopian communities. Ironically much of the thinking about a twenty-first century socialism emphasizes workplace control, cooperatives, establishing real direct democracy, and privileging grassroots movements for change. The vision of community that so animated thinking in the late twentieth century is back. Some of it even has its roots in the early Marx. Today the Cubans are trying to build a new economic system based on worker cooperatives, without negating the supportive role of the state, and with limits, markets.

The expectations about the crises of capitalism, 1987 or 2009, come from my reading of the Marx and Neo-Marxist literature. Data makes it clear that over the last forty years capital accumulation has created an emerging global economic system based on monopolies, grotesque expansion of the gaps between rich and poor, and fundamental contradictions between the qualitative increase in productivity and the inability of workers to buy the goods they produce. Add to the contradictions of capitalism in general, we need to consider the environmental crisis. Most of us were insensitive to the environment forty years ago.

https://ahtribune.com/in-depth/1568-prof-harry-targ.html

 

BUILDING A SOCIALIST FUTURE

This essay was written at the outset of Trumpism and the brazen rise of white supremacist movements. Also it was written at a time when social movements, including the Bernie Sanders campaign, had captured the imagination of many young people, people of Color, immigrant activists and others. Most recently George Floyd was murdered by police and  the Covid 19 pandemic exposed to all the failures of our economic and political system. While changes are occurring at breakneck speed the analysis of capitalism and the envisioning of socialism described below seem still relevant, even as we approach the November, 2020 elections.

 

These issues will be among those discussed at the National Convention of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS) to be held on Saturday and Sunday August 22,23, 2020. See the link below. Register and attend as we discuss further the crises of capitalism and the prospects of building a better, more humane,world..

 

https://www.cc-ds.org/2020-convention/

 

THE MATERIAL REASONS FOR THE CURRENT INTEREST IN SOCIALISM  ( a repost from July 28, 2017)

 

Harry Targ

 

Introduction

 

The twenty-first century economic reality has created a new class society with a dominant class of concentrated wealth at one extreme and a growing class of economically insecure in the other.  More and more of those in the latter have become political activists, particularly among the young. This new class society in the United States parallels similar economic changes in both rich and poor countries. As a result of the changes in global and domestic economies social movements have arisen everywhere. From Cairo, Egypt to Madison, Wisconsin, from Greece to Chile, from Syriza and Podemos to the Sanders campaign, the cry for change, often a demand for socialism, is spreading. The outcome of this new activism is unclear but for the first time in a long time, the prospects for positive social and political change look promising.

The New Class Society

In 1999, Robert Perrucci and Earl Wysong published the first of four editions of a perceptive sociological analysis that identified what the authors identified as “the new class society.” They employed a Marxist and Weberian analysis of class that combined workers’ relationships to the means of production with their organizational position.

Using data reflecting their synthetic definition of class, these authors concluded that the popular portrait of a U.S. class system consisting of a small ruling class, a large “middle class,” and a small percentage of economically and politically marginalized people was, by the 1970s, no longer an accurate way to describe society. The class system of the days of relative prosperity from the 1940s until the late 1960s, which looked like a diamond with a broad middle, had become a class system looking like a “double diamond.”



In the new class society, the first diamond, the top one, consists of the “privileged class” composed of a “super-class,” “credentialed class managers,” and “professionals.” All together these representatives of privilege constitute about 20 percent of the population. All the others constitute a “new working class,” some living in relative comfort but most engaged in wage labor with the constant threat of job loss and wage stagnation, some modestly self-employed, and a large part-time labor force. This is the second diamond representing 80 percent of the population.

In short, the political economy that emerged nearly fifty years ago is one in which a shrinking ruling class that owns or controls capital has accumulated enormous wealth and dominates today’s economy. At the other end an increasingly insecure working class in terms of jobs and income has grown exponentially.

Peter Temin, an MIT economist, confirms the earlier sociological work in his new book “The Vanishing Middle Class.” This book also identifies an emerging two-class society with wealth and power concentrated at the top and poverty and powerlessness at the bottom. In what Temin calls the “dual economy,” the ruling class consists of the finance, technology, and electronics sectors (FTE), representing the top twenty percent as opposed to “the low wage sector;” clerks, assemblers, laborers, and service workers who provide the comforts and profits for the top twenty percent.

In summary, both volumes suggest that in terms of wealth and power conflicts of interest have to be seen not between the one percent and everyone else but between the twenty percent who own/control/ or administer the capitalist system and the eighty percent who constitute increasingly marginalized labor serving the interests of the wealthy and powerful.

The Precariat

Guy Standing, a British economist, has written about the “precariat,” a growing portion of the worldwide work force, Temin’s “ low wage sector,” who live in economic insecurity. The term, precariat, refers to a synthesis of the idea of the proletariat, workers who sell their ability to provide labor to a capitalist for a wage, and precarity, or economic existence that is unpredictable, marginal, and insecure. Job scarcity and wage stagnation increasingly is experienced by workers with professional skills and credentials as well as the traditional working class.

Standing argues that all across the globe workers, particularly young workers, live in situations of economic insecurity and unpredictability, irrespective of credentials, that in the past guaranteed jobs and living wages. Of course, the precariat do not have any of the guarantees of union membership and their skills leave them often working on a part-time contract basis and in isolation from fellow workers. In addition the precariat include workers in the “informal sector.” These are workers who often will do anything to survive from day to day: for example, day labor, street vending, drug dealing, petty crime, or prostitution.

Accumulation by Dispossession

David Harvey, a Marxist geographer, revisited Marx’s description of primitive accumulation in his book, “The Seventeen Contradictions of Capitalism.”  Capitalism was created on the backs of slaves, the slaughter of indigenous people, and the expropriation of already occupied land. In other words, through kidnapping, forced labor, slaughter, and occupation, capitalism was born. The expropriation of resources, people, and land led to the accumulation of wealth that spurred development and growth.

Harvey then argues that the primitive accumulation of the fifteenth century is similar in outcome to the “accumulation by dispossession,” of the twenty-first century. Today workers lose their property and their personal income in a debt system that sucks their scarce earnings and property. Examples include defaults on mortgage loans and bank repossessions and governmental decisions to confiscate property for purposes of urban redevelopment. Accumulation by dispossession, while not as violent as in the era of primitive accumulation, has the same outcome: expropriating the value of the work of the many for the riches of the few.

Growing Economic Inequality and Urban Decay and Gentrification

Virtually every study of the distribution of wealth and income in the United States demonstrates a dramatic increase in inequality. Also studies sponsored by international organizations report that despite declines in worldwide absolute poverty, the trajectory of growing inequality in wealth and income is a central feature of the global economy. In addition, declining inequality between countries, such as that between China and the countries of the European Union, have occurred while inequalities within these countries have widened. In the United States income and wealth inequality which declined from the 1930s until the 1960s has returned to levels not seen since the 1920s.

The patterns of inequality are visible in geographic spaces as well. As more and more people are forced to migrate to cities, what Mike Davis calls “global slums,”  demarcations of areas of opulence and poverty become visible. Members of the top twenty percent are consumers of expensive living spaces, elite schools, and vibrant recreational facilities. They also lobby for public funds to create recreational attractions that entice tourists to bolster local economies. Gentrified city spaces are protected by fences and police.

On the other hand, the bottom eighty percent live in varying degrees of poverty. Housing stocks crumble, neighborhoods are overcrowded, public services are increasingly underfunded, and populations are left to lead lives of quiet desperation and intra-community violence. In the new class society different sectors of the population live in isolation from each other, except when political conflict and violence spread across communities.

Also in the new class society youth become pessimistic about their futures. Despite the fact that media and academic studies claim that upward mobility is tied to scholastic achievement, the schools they attend are underfunded. And the cost of higher education, the main source of credentialing the young, has become prohibitively expensive. For those who accumulate massive student debt the experience feels like a modern-day variant of indentured servitude. Jobs for those who do not attend college are scarce and reside primarily in the low-wage service sector. And so-called STEM jobs (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) are not as plentiful as college promotional brochures suggest. Along with the precarity of the traditional working class is a rising precarity of a new working class of highly educated but unemployable young people.

Racism

Manning Marable published a perceptive essay in 2006 entitled “Globalization and Racialization.” In it he adapted, based upon the twenty-first century global political economy, the prophetic statement by W. E. B. Du Bois that the problem of the twentieth century was the color line. Marable suggested that the new global political economy was based upon capital flight, as well-paid manufacturing jobs left the United States for sweatshops in the Global South. Unemployment  increased in the United States. Downward pressures on wages and benefits paid workers in poor countries reduced the economic conditions of US workers. The decline of organized labor in the United States and the Global South weakened the bargaining position of workers everywhere.

Marable suggested that the people most vulnerable to the massive changes in the global economy were the already marginalized people of color. Unemployment rates in poor and Black communities skyrocketed, particularly among youth. The new gentrification and shift in politics from welfare state capitalism to austerity led to declining public services in poor communities. This has had particularly devastating impacts on educational institutions.

With declining economic opportunities, a growing sense of hopelessness, draconian government policies such as the wars on drugs and crime, literally millions of African Americans, and other people of color, have become victims of mass incarceration, what Michelle Alexander calls “The New Jim Crow.” Finally, many states have laws that prevent former felons from voting. The Marable framework, which he refers to as “global apartheid” and “the New Racial Domain,” thus links globalization of production to racism; particularly growing unemployment and urban decay, criminalization, mass incarceration, and voter disenfranchisement.

Neoliberalism: the Latest Stage of Capitalism

The so-called “golden age of the US economy,” 1945 to 1968, may have been an anomaly in American history. The United States emerged from World War Two as the economic and military hegemonic power. The war led to a fourfold increase in United States trade compared with the late 1930s. In 1945 it produced about 2/3 of all the industrial goods manufactured in the world and US investments constituted about ¾ of all the world’s investments. With fears of stagnation accompanying the war’s end, the Truman Administration launched a massive program of military investment to forestall declining demand for US goods and services.

In terms of international relations, the United States played an instrumental role in establishing powerful international economic institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. It helped rebuild an anti-communist Europe through a massive financial aid system. It later established foreign assistance programs for newly “independent” countries requiring their commitment to the maintenance of a global capitalist system.

At home a United States economy was created that stimulated high mass consumption. People were socialized to believe that their self-worth was determined by the quantity and quality of goods and services they consumed. The new communication medium, television, educated viewers as to the products that were available (as well as the enemies overseas who were the threat to the domestic consumer society).

However, by the late 1960s, markets were glutted and demand for goods lessened even though wages and benefits for some workers increased. Federal and state governments had been increasing services such as education, health care, and transportation. Both profit rates and consumer demand declined. Growing political protest against the Vietnam war and racism across the country added to emerging economic stagnation.

By the 1970s, the squeeze on profits and reduced demand, was exacerbated by Middle East wars and large increases in the price of oil, which made some corporations and banks richer while economic stagnation, including both high inflation and unemployment, ensued. At this point, the United States economy began a shift to what David Harvey calls “financialization.” A small number of banks and corporations, mostly US but also European and Japanese, began to shift from encouraging manufacturing growth to financial speculation. A “new” debt system was encouraged, one in which oil-poor countries borrowed more and more money from bankers to pay for continued oil imports. In exchange debtor nations would promise to carry out new economic policies at home: cut government spending, privatize public institutions, deregulate domestic economies, and shift economic activities from production for domestic use to production for sale in the world market.

Thus, the new era of “neoliberal globalization” was initiated. The new system was driven by financial speculators, declining autonomy of nation-states, and the downsizing of wages and benefits everywhere. At the same time rates of profit for speculators increased and smaller numbers of banks and other financial institutions increasingly dominated the global economy. This system was initiated in the Global South, spread to Western Europe and after the fall of the Soviet Union and its allies to Eastern Europe. In the 1980s neoliberalism was embraced by Prime Minister Thatcher in Great Britain and President Ronald Reagan in the United States. The best way to characterize policy in the age of neoliberal globalization is “austerity,” reducing the economic opportunities of the many for the benefit of the few.

Neoliberal globalization is the systemic source of the new class society (or the dual economy), the rise of the precariat, accumulation by dispossession, growing inequality and urban gentrification, and the expansion of racism.

A Revitalized Interest in Socialism in the Twenty-First Century  

As history has shown, the accumulation of wealth and power by ruling elites, or dominant classes, never goes unchecked. The drive for domination breeds resistance. And resistance takes many forms: traditional revolutionary practices, building alternative economic and political institutions, non-violent refusal to obey the institutions that support economic misery and political repression, and where practical, participation in electoral processes. Social change is many-sided and several strategies together are most likely to bring positive results.

History shows also that struggles for change are broadly political, require organization, mass mobilization, and education. Change requires analyses of the causes of the problems needing solution and a vision of what a better future might look like. And there is an inextricable connection between the causes of the problems, the tactics needed to change the situation, and a vision of a better society.

The analyses above highlight the changing character of the global political economy, emerging class structures, and the growing vulnerabilities of literally millions of people: young and old: Black, Brown, and White; female and male; gay and straight; and at all levels of education and training. At the root of the problem is the capitalist system, a system whose reason for being is the maximization of profit. People today are talking about a new society, a socialist society. Socialism implies a political economy in which people contribute their talents, their labors, for the public good and share equitably in the product of their labor. And socialism presumes democratic participation in work places, the political system, and the community.  

References

Robert A. Perrucci and Earl Wysong. The New Class Society, Rowman and Littlefield, 1999 (the first of four editions).

Peter Temin, The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy, MIT Press, 2017.

Victor Tan Chen, “The Dual Economy,” Working Class Perspectives, https://workingclassstudies.wordpress.com/2017/07/24/the-dual-economy/

Guy Standing, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class, Bloomsbury Academic, 2014.

David Harvey, Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism,  Oxford University Press, 2015.

Mike Davis, Planet of Slums, Verso, 2017.

Harry Targ, Challenging Late Capitalism, Neoliberal Globalization and Militarism, Lulu.com, 2006.

Manning Marable, “Globalization and Racialization,” ZNET, zcom.org, March 2, 2009.

 

Various articles on political economy, social movements, peace and justice in Harry Targ, Diary of a Heartland Radical, www.heartlandradical.blogspot.com

 

 

END THE BLOCKADE: CELEBRATE THE CUBAN REVOLUTION

Saturday, August 13, 2016

Fidel Castro at 90: US/CUBAN RELATIONS, THE ROAD AHEAD

Harry Targ

And yet Americans are more ignorant of the nature of the Cuban Revolution and U.S.-Cuban relations than are the people of almost any other country in the world. Except for those few Americans with access to a handful of liberal and radical publications the people of this country have been subjected to an unrelieved campaign of distortion, or outright slander of Fidel Castro and the revolution he leads. The determined hostility of American leaders to the Cuban Revolution, the implementation of a system of economic harassment, and the threat of military intervention, not only endanger the Cuban Revolution, but increase the tempo of the cold war at home and abroad (Editors, “The Cuban Revolution: The New Crisis in Cold War Ideology,” Studies on the Left, Volume 1, Number, 1960, 1).

This statement was published in the summer of 1960! Fifty-six years later the same assessment of the Cuban revolution is still widely believed in the United States, even by those who support the ending of United States hostility to the island nation.

The story of the Cuban revolution needs to be retold as we move ahead to establish a new United States/Cuban relationship.

Cuba was a colony of the Spanish for 400 years, an economic vassal of the British and the United States for more than 100 years, and a slave state from the fifteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century.

The domination of the island by foreigners, juxtaposed with a culture enriched by African roots (the indigenous people were largely obliterated by the Spanish), led to repeated efforts to resist colonialism before 1898 and neo-colonialism after that. Slaves, Afro/Cubans, and Spanish born landowners seeking freedom from the Spanish crown often rose up to overthrow the yoke of imperialism.

Cuban Revolutionaries, inspired by visionary poet Jose Marti, were on the verge of defeating Spanish colonialism in the 1890s. The United States sent armies to the island to defeat the Spanish and establish a puppet government to insure its economic and political control.  To secure support for the war at home the American media and popular music were filled with images of Cuba as the “damsel in distress” and bungling Afro/Cuban revolutionaries. The dominant ideology of the United States, manifest destiny and white Christian duty, drove the argument for war on Spain.

After the 1898 war, the United States military, with the support of small numbers of compliant Cubans, created a government that would open the door completely for United States investments, commercial penetration, an externally-controlled tourist sector, and North American gangsters. The U.S. neo-colonial regime on the island stimulated pockets of economic development in a sea of human misery. Responding to grotesque economic suffering in the 1950s a band of revolutionaries (led by Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Camilo Cienfuegos, Celia Sanchez, and Haydee Santamaria) defeated the U.S. backed military regime of Fulgencio Batista.

The Cuban Revolution of 1959 began in the nineteenth century and was driven by 400 years of nationalism, a vision of democracy, and a passion for economic justice. This vision was articulated in Fidel Castro’s famous “History Will Absolve Me” speech presented before being sentenced to prison after a failed military action against Batista in 1953. He spoke of five goals of his revolution: returning power to the people; giving land to the people who work it; providing workers a significant share of profits from corporations; granting sugar planters a quota of the value of the crop they produce; and confiscating lands acquired through fraud. Then he said, the Revolution would carry out agrarian reform, nationalize key sectors of the economy, institute educational reforms, and provide a decent livelihood for manual and intellectual labor.

The problem of the land, the problem of industrialization, the problem of housing, the problem of unemployment, the problem of education and the problem of the people’s health: these are the six problems we would take immediate steps to solve, along with restoration of civil liberties and political democracy (Fidel Castro, “ History Will Absolve Me,” Castro Internet Archive, www.marxists.org/history/cuba/archive/castro/1953).

Almost immediately the revolutionaries who had seized power in January, 1959 began to implement the program envisioned by the Castro speech. Over the next fifty years, with heated debates inside Cuba, experiments--some successful, some failed--were carried out. Despite international pressures and the changing global political economy, much of the program has been institutionalized to the benefit of most Cubans. 

Education and health care are free to all Cubans. Basic, but modest, nutritional needs have been met. Cubans have participated in significant political discussion about public policy. And Cuban society has been a laboratory for experimentation. In the 1960s Cubans discussed whether there was a need for monetary incentives to motivate work or whether revolutionary enthusiasm was sufficient to maintain production. Debates occurred over the years also about whether a state-directed economy, a mixed one, or some combination would best promote development; how to engage in international solidarity; and whether there was a need to affiliate with super powers such as the former Soviet Union. Central to the Cuban model is the proposition that when policies work they get institutionalized; when they fail they get changed.

The United States reaction to the Cuban Revolution has been as the Studies on the Left article warned in 1960. U.S. policy has included military invasions, sabotage, assassination attempts on the life of Fidel Castro, an economic blockade, subversion including beaming propaganda radio and television broadcasts to the island, efforts to isolate Cuba from the international system, restrictions on United States travelers to the island, listing Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism, and in the long-run most importantly portraying in government statements and the mass media the image of Cuba as a totalitarian state that oppresses its people.

On December 17, 2014 President Raul Castro and Barack Obama announced that the U.S./Cuban relationship would change.  The United States and Cuba, President Obama said, would begin negotiations to reestablish diplomatic relations, open embassies, and move to eliminate the U.S. economic blockade and restrictions on American travel to the island. This announcement was broadly celebrated by nations everywhere, the Pope who had lobbied Washington for the policy change, and Americans and Cubans alike. Of course, in both countries there were skeptics and the strong and vocal Cuban-American lobby immediately condemned the announced policy changes. 

Since December, 2014 the United States and Cuba have been negotiating the announced normalization of relations and several steps have been taken by both countries including:

 -freeing the last three of the Cuban Five by the United States and the release by Cuba of U.S. agents Roland Sarraff Trujillo and Alan Gross from Cuban prisons

-easing restrictions on remittances from Cuban/American families to relatives on the island

-using executive action in the United States to loosen restrictions on American travel to Cuba and reestablishing the capacity for banking connections with the island

-authorizing flights from the United States to Cuba by multiple airlines

-giving authority to some companies to invest in small businesses in Cuba and the increase in trade of selected U.S. commodities, primarily agricultural products and building materials

-taking Cuba off the State Department list of sponsors of terrorism

And President Obama deliberated with President Raul Castro at the April, 2015 meeting of the Summit of the Americas in Panama, communicating the image of the return to normal diplomatic relations.

Finally, Presidents Obama and Raul Castro reestablished formal diplomatic relations in the spring, 2016.

However, much needs to be done to complete the normalization of diplomatic relations.  The U.S. economic embargo has not been lifted. The Helms-Burton Act, which prohibits foreign companies from having commercial relations with the island and then the United States, has not been repealed. And in 2015 the House of Representatives passed a resolution that challenges President Obama’s executive authority to expand the categories of U.S. citizens who can travel to Cuba without applying for a license from the Treasury Department. In addition, many issues of relevance to the two countries such as those involving immigration, control of drug trafficking, and cooperation on disaster relief are yet to be resolved.

Most Americans, including Cuban/Americans, support the full normalization of relations. But a small number of politicians from both political parties who oppose normalization of relations are using their legislative and public political leverage to reverse the will of the American and Cuban people. One example is the misrepresentation of the case of Assata Shakur, who has lived in Cuba for over thirty years. Shakur, a former member of the Black Panther Party was tried and convicted on dubious grounds of murdering a police officer in New Jersey and who fled to Cuba in 1984, is being used by anti-Cuban activists to resist the normalization of relations, claiming that Cuba is harboring “terrorists.”

The dramatic gestures by Presidents Obama and Castro have set the stage for the normalization of diplomatic relations, but more work needs to be done.

First, activists must continue to pressure their legislators to repeal the Helms-Burton Act and oppose any efforts by their peers to re-impose legislation that will stop the process of change. Lobbying should be complemented by rallies and marches. Support should be given to those organizations which have been in the front lines of Cuba Solidarity for years such as Pastors for Peace. In addition, people to people exchanges, community to community outreach, and high school and university study abroad programs should be encouraged.

Second, those in solidarity with the Cuban Revolution should support economic reforms being introduced on the island that reflect the best principles of the Cuban Revolution: independence, democracy, and human well-being. The clearest manifestation of these principles is reflected in the development of work place cooperatives in both cities and the countryside. Cubans are being encouraged to engage in work that produces goods and services for their communities in ways that empower workers and decentralize production and decision-making. Educating the American public to the fact that Cuba is embarking on new economic arrangements that encourage work place democracy contradict the media image that the people are embracing entrepreneurial capitalism.

Third, the solidarity movement should continue the process of public education about Cuba, explaining the realities of Cuban history, celebrating Cuban accomplishments in health care and education, and recognizing the richness and diversity of Cuban culture. Ironically, despite the long and often painful relationship the Cuban people have had with the United States, the diversity of the two nation’s cultures are inextricably connected. That shared experience should be celebrated.

Finally, solidarity with the Cuban people provides an opportunity to educate Americans to the reality that the United States is not “the indispensable nation,” but one among many with virtues and flaws. Cubans have celebrated their own history and culture but have done so without disrespecting the experiences of other nations and peoples. We in the United States could learn from that perspective.

(Revised from a June 19, 2015 essay to celebrate the 90^th birthday of Fidel Castro).

ATOMIC DIPLOMACY: THE DECISION TO USE THE BOMB AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 1945 to 2020

ATOMIC DIPLOMACY: THE DECISION TO USE THE BOMB AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 1945 to 2020

By Harry R Targ

WE HAVE HANDED OUT AUTHORITY "TO MEN WHO WERE INSANE"

Harry Targ

Lyrics from “Presidential Rag,” Arlo Guthrie, 1974

Nobody elected your family,
and we didn't elect your friends,
no one voted for your advisors,
and nobody wants amends,
You're the one we voted for, so you must take the blame,
For handing out authority to men who were insane…

Mothers still are weeping for their boys that went to war

Fathers still are asking what the whole damn thing was for   

And People still are hungry and people still are poor,

And an honest week of work these days don't feed the kids no more,
Schools are still like prisons,
cuz we don't learn how to live,
and everybody wants to take, nobody wants to give

Yes you will be remembered, be remembered very well,
and if I live a long life, all the stories I could tell,
A many who are in in poverty of sickness and of grief,
hell yes, you will be remembered, be remembered very well…

August 6, 2020 is 75 years after the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, incinerating 80,000 people. The accumulated research tells us that the Japanese were near surrender, much of the country had already been bombed into submission, Truman insiders knew this new weapon would transform the world for ever, and military and scientific advisors had advised against using this horrific new weapon. Yet President Truman, with the support of some key advisors, ordered the bombings (Hiroshima and Nagasaki). Best estimates are that the Truman decision was made, not because it was required to end the war, but rather because the United States wanted to send a signal to the Soviet Union that it possessed a powerful new weapon. The United States, this perspective suggests, now had the power to establish a new economic and political  world order.

 In addition, August 6, 2020 occurs in a year in which the United States and the world is experiencing a pandemic of historic proportions. It has required governments everywhere to shut down their usual activities: commerce, production, education, entertainment, and public sociability. The best estimates are that people everywhere need to wear masks, not congregate in crowds, practice social distancing, and when necessary get tested for the corona virus. It seems clear from the example of countries that have adopted these policies to prevent the spread of the virus that they are the only way to diminish this public health disaster. But in the United States the President, some governors, many Senators, some members of Congress, and university and school administrators have been advocating and implementing policies that could spread the pandemic further.

For example, a number of universities and public schools are reopening around the country. Indiana Senator Mike Braun praised the former governor and President of Purdue University for reopening that university. “Thank goodness we have a guy like Mitch Daniels, who never looked at the status quo or the conventional of being the way to do it.”  Educational institutions planning in-person education are trying “in a mitigated way, to get back to where you’re most effective; teaching kids, whether it’s in elementary school, secondary or post-secondary.” Braun’s advice to educational leaders around the country was to “take a little risk.” (Dave Bangert, “Sen. Braun to Schools Amid COVID-19: ‘Take A Little Risk,’ Journal and Courier, August 6, 2020).

In Indiana’s Fourth Congressional District, incumbent Jim Baird, in addition to supporting STEM education, bills himself as a “pro-life champion,” supporter of “our law enforcement,” and particularly getting “tough on China.” His campaign literature said that “the Chinese Communist Party has proven time and time again they are a bad actor on the world stage.” To combat China, Baird recommends creating “a national research investment strategy” in quantum computing and artificial intelligence; developing incentive programs to encourage the semiconducting industry to shift all manufacturing to the United States from China; and passing legislation “to end U.S. purchases of pharmaceutical ingredients  or prescriptions manufactured in China” (all this from a campaign mailing).

Are there any common threads that run from 1945 to 2020? Looking at the decision to drop the horrific bombs in 1945, several points can be made. First, a small number of politicians, elected and appointed, made decisions of monumental importance to the victims of the bombing and the subsequent danger of nuclear war.

Second, the decisions were made in the face of overwhelming evidence that the use of these horrific bombs was not needed to end the war in Asia.

Third, Truman and his aides made their decisions in contradiction to warnings of the dangers of atomic war for civilization. Opposition came from significant sectors of the scientific community, including some scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project, which developed the bomb.

Fourth, the decision to use atomic weapons was profoundly political. Demonstrating that the United States had this powerful new weapon sent a message to the Soviet Union. In addition, key decisionmakers including General Leslie Groves, Director of the Manhattan Project; James Forrestal who would become the first Secretary of Defense; and James Byrnes, Secretary of State, were virulently anti-communist. Also, the decision to drop the bomb, whether a motivation or not, communicated to the American people that President Truman, not seen as particularly qualified for the job, was tough and potentially a great leader. He, like some historians and former advisors, continued to defend the decision for years to follow.

So if we fast-forward to today we see crises of different sorts. Again, decisions are being made by small numbers of individuals, not necessarily representative of the population, or of workers who are affected. Decisions are being made to open educational institutions despite the fact that there is overwhelming evidence that doing so may be detrimental to public health. Experiences of other countries and statements from the scientific community indicate that opening up the society while the pandemic is still spreading might create a public health disaster. And, most important, critical decisions are being made that are motivated by elections, how to maintain the economy, and/or how to respond to challenges to United States dominance in the world.

To quote another musical voice, Pete Seeger, “Oh when will we ever learn.”