HOW DO WE MAKE CLASS ANALYSIS RELEVANT TO OUR ORGANIZING? Looking Back A Decade

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON FEBRUARY 9, 2010 

Harry Targ

 I am using a text by Robert Perrucci and Earl Wysong called The New Class Society: Goodbye American Dream? (Rowman and Littlefield, 2008) in a course called “The Politics of Capital and Labor.” The authors review and synthesize a variety of definitions of class from political theory and sociology. Their answer to the question of what is class draws upon Marxian notions of relations of production, Max Weber’s ideas about persons in various organizational positions, and the more conventional view of class as relating to the distribution of income, wealth, and power. Using data reflecting their synthetic definition of class, the authors conclude that the 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 is no longer an accurate way to describe society (a broadly accepted myth which may not have been ever true). 

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, has become like a class system looking like a “double diamond.” In this 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 twenty percent of the population. All the others constitute a “new working class,” some living in relative comfort but most engaged in wage labor, modest self-employment, or part-time work. This is the second diamond representing eighty percent of the population. 

Students in my course have been debating some of the formulations but certain elements of the text have been uniformly accepted by them as correct. Everyone seems to accept the double-diamond metaphor as a way of conceptualizing the distribution of wealth, income, and power. Those in the top diamond representing privilege are relatively assured that their sources of income and wealth are permanent. Their sustenance and family stability are assured while the other eighty percent, the model suggests, live economically marginal existences and in conditions of precariousness. My students raise no objections about the accuracy of what Perrucci and Wysong regard as broadly accepted features of this new class system. 

First, since the 1970s, there has been increasing class polarization. Gaps in distributions of wealth and income have grown. Real wages of workers have stagnated since the 1970s. In addition, workplace benefits have declined, including pensions. Permanent jobs have been replaced by contingent labor. The percentage of unionization of the work force has declined by two-thirds. The authors cite a recent study that estimates that only one-fourth of jobs today are “good jobs”, paying at least $16 an hour. And, on the other hand, the share of income and wealth accumulated by the top one-percent or ten percent or twenty percent, the entire privileged class, has risen. The rich have gotten richer while the poor poorer. 

Second, since the 1980s, workers and their families have experienced downward mobility, that is their social and economic position has declined. This has occurred because stable, well paying jobs have disappeared due to outsourcing, capital flight, and deindustrialization. By any number of measures, the “American Dream” of helping one’s children to move up the status ladder has been reversed. 

Third, the increasing accumulation of wealth and power through tax cuts, deregulation of financialization, and declining government support for public services have encouraged the privileged to embark on class secession. Increasingly, the authors suggest, the privileged class withdraws its support for public institutions as it funds its own private schools, libraries, recreational facilities, and additional social services. The rich build gated communities, electrify their fences, hire private guards to protect themselves and create private institutions to replace public ones. The authors refer to Robert Reich’s “secession of the successful” which they say “combines traditional forms of physical and social separation and increasing numbers of privately provided services with the ideology of neoliberalism, an idea system of free market fundamentalism that encourages and legitimates hostility to public institutions.” They conclude that “class secession today involves both a separatist social identity and a conscious secessionistic mentality.”

The findings reported in The New Class Society about class in America are profound. Long-term trends in the United States since the 1970s have led to growing wealth and power at one pole and increasing immiseration at the other pole. The idea of a broad middle class is further away from reality than ever. 

For the vast majority of Americans economic security is declining. And, most importantly, the privileged class, which has built its wealth and power on the growing immiseration of the new working class is physically, financially, and ideologically seceding from the system that historically claimed to provide at least some institutional support for enrichment of the citizenry at large. The authors also present data to show how the brutality of the new class society particularly impacts on people of color, women, immigrants, and other traditionally marginalized people. 

While the task of my course was to study the underlying fundamental features of American society, particularly those bearing on political economy, the implications of this analysis for practical political work seem obvious. First, progressives need to “make class analysis relevant to our organizing.” This includes educating ourselves and those we work with about the ways in which society is divided into classes based upon how people are related to the workplace, the status and power of workers in different organizational positions, the distribution of wealth and income in society and the history of class in America. Our educational work must show how class relates to race, gender and the environment. In the end we must construct a compelling vision for the abolition of our class divided society. 

 Second, progressives must articulate in every political setting those experiences of class that vast majorities of the people share. Years ago Harry Braverman, in Labor and Monopoly Capital demonstrated that work was being transformed by the capitalist system; that patterns of control of the minds and actions of workers were being increasingly controlled by a deepening division of labor, and that the work process, whether white collar or blue collar, service or manufacturing, was being homogenized. He and others called this process of work transformation, “proletarianization.” This historic development argues for a political strategy that prioritizes education about the growing commonality of work experience of those in the bottom eighty percent of the work force. 

Third, progressives must articulate programs of education and action that seek to deepen understanding of barriers to solidarity resulting from race, gender, and even political ideology. Progressives must be more mindful of the different experiences of class in America, such as the historic role of slavery and immigrant labor, super-exploitation of African Americans and women, and ethnic discrimination. The articulation of the different experiences of class through race and gender should be used to broaden understanding of how those differences were used to increase class exploitation of all those in the majority. 

Fourth, progressives should began to analyze the ways in which many of the new right wing “tea party” activists share a common experience of class. Education and advocacy must more clearly be based upon an understanding of the common interests privileged class Republicans and Democrats share and the reality of interests shared by the new working class majority. In the end there is no substitute for building what activists used to call “class consciousness.” The realities of class exploitation, as Perrucci and Wysong suggest, seem more obvious than ever. They just need to become a central element of our political discourse.

HARD BALL PRESS EDUCATES, AGITATES, AND ENTERTAINS

Harry Targ

If you are an activist or just like to read a good story you might find the list of books at Hard Ball Press (www.hardballpress.com) to your liking. The most recent fictional offering of the press is Eric Lotke’s Union Made, a novel that combines labor activism, stresses and strains of workers’ lives, the machinations of corporations and investment bankers, and romance (the Press also has a list of non-fiction books about workers, guides for labor organizing and progressive children’s books).

Union Made tells the story of a union staffer, Catherine Campbell, who is working on a union organizing drive at a large retail chain with stores in Richmond, Virginia. Wages are low and manager sympathies for family/ work schedule needs are non-existent. Large numbers of Pac-Shoppe workers are passionate in their commitment to create a union. They see workers’ power, and particularly the ability to demand a livable wage, tied to union certification. But, as in so many labor struggles, organization and protest bring sacrifices. Some workers lose their jobs. Others get their schedules changed to make child care more difficult. And, on the picket line, some even experience accidental injury or mass arrests.

We learn from Campbell that union staffers must be respectful of the sacrifices workers make when they commit to a union drive. And we learn from her that staffers need to defer to the workers who must decide on strategy and speak for themselves. Staffers from the outside can assist and facilitate campaigns but can never replace the wisdom of the workers themselves. Campbell also is sensitive to the multi-racial, diverse ages, families, and immigrant statuses of low wage workers in huge corporations.

But Union Made tells another side of the story, that of Nathaniel Hawley, an accountant. Hawley works for an accounting firm which was bought out by a larger financial conglomerate. All of a sudden his accountancy shifts to analyzing the books of large corporations, including the books of Pac-Shoppe. Nathaniel is only sketchily aware of the Pac-Shoppe labor campaign going on in his town and only marginally feels concerns for workers’ needs, briefly portrayed in local media. His self-concept is tied to his job: being a good accountant, scanning financial records, and being a skilled mathematician.

However, Nathaniel’s life becomes complicated in two ways. First, he notices on television that a union staffer who has come to town to help the PAC-Shoppe workers organize is Catherine Campbell, a woman he had a crush on in high school. And second, his once obscure accounting firm, now an affiliate of a large corporation, has bought a large block of stock in Pac-Shoppe, because of the declining value of the stock during the labor dispute. Nathaniel’s dilemma is whether to side with the workers (and the woman he had a crush on) or maintain loyalty to his firm and job security as a well-placed accountant.

The dilemmas of union organizing, class struggle, and romance are described compellingly and in clear and entertaining prose in Union Made. Reading this novel also stimulates thinking about the role of the arts--fiction, theater, painting, photography, music, dance, and design--as vehicles for education and agitation. Some cultural critics and academics judge artistic creations that disengage from real life circumstances as superior. Often works of art are dismissed as ”merely political.” Eric Lotke’s Union Made and most of the offerings of Hard Ball Press take the view that artistic creations can both educate and entertain. With the growth of social movements in the United States,  there is a renewed recognition that life and art are inextricably connected and that art can help to inform and contribute to organizing.

Erik Lotke’s, Union Made, the latest Hard Ball Press publication, is in this tradition.

Hard Ball Press and its individual novelists and documentary writers and  growing list of authors should be supported.  For more on the press see the following:

https://www.wnylabortoday.com/news/2020/06/23/new-york-state-labor-news/the-power-of-working-class-stories-tim-sheard-s-hard-ball-press-helps-workers-publish-their-stories-which-helps-build-rank-file-solidarity-union-power-as-well-as-strengthening-the-fight-for-social-justice/

 

 

 

 

 

 

OVERCOMING TRUMPISM AND THE THREAT OF FASCISM: ORGANIZE THE PROGRESSIVE MAJORITY IN THE INSTITUTIONS, STREETS, AND VOTING BOOTHS

  Harry Targ and Paul Krehbiel

  

(This article discusses the historic decades-long changes that took place in the United States that laid the groundwork for the election of Donald Trump in 2016, and his defeat in 2020.  It also addresses the victory of two Democratic Party Senatorial candidates in a special election in Georgia: Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff. One day after their victory Trumpism raised its ugly head with thousands of Trump supporters engaging in an attempted coup at the US Capitol building.  The analysis below includes discussions of life-altering changes in our capitalist economy that have negatively impacted on millions of people and made changes in politics – including in both the Republican and Democratic Parties.  Finally, this article discusses the critically important development and actions by progressive social justice organizations and movements.)    

 

Our major task in 2020 was to defeat Donald Trump. That task was completed by the mobilization and democratic will of the voters.  The victory was reaffirmed by the election of two Georgian Democrats, Reverend Raphael Warnock, an African-American, and Jon Ossoff, a Jew, to Senate seats in a January 5, 2021 special election.  Trump tried to hold onto power after his electoral defeat through unsubstantiated lies of voter fraud and subterfuge until the inauguration Joe Biden and Kamala Harris  (and beyond). 

Yet, Trump and his followers aren’t going away.  A growing concern is the Trump instigated rise of a violent extremist right-wing movement, that among other violent assaults, invaded the Capitol on January 6 in an act of insurrection that left five people dead. Out of the Oval Office, Trump continues to promote the lies and rally his fascist base, seeking to build an American-style fascist movement to overturn the will of the majority, and impose a dictatorship under his authority.

Progressive and democratic political forces must unify and intensify the fight against Trump and his followers, through impeachment, arrests and prosecutions to the fullest extent of the law, and other measures to isolate and defeat the right.  At the same time, we must step up the fight to build a more progressive and humane society at home, while pursuing a peace and solidarity agenda internationally. Advances on one front will help make advances on the others.  We must also be vigilant, and oppose all roadblocks to this agenda, even if they come from the new administration.  

Planning and action continue to revolve around assessments of the recent elections; an analyses of voters and voting blocs, victories and defeats; and organizing experiences. Conversations involve economic circumstances which have shaped voting behavior; such as massive and growing economic inequality, declining real wages, evictions, medical bills, and the traditions of white supremacy and racism..  There have been debates about tactics, particularly how to advance our grassroots organizing (grassroots groups in Georgia and other states have broken new ground here), new advances in internet organizing, conducting safe mass canvassing, doing deep canvassing, and organizing massive phone calling and texting blitzes. And debates abound about which policies need to be promoted: health care for all, stopping climate change, ending racism and police violence, creating jobs, ending the pandemic, and opposing military spending and imperial ventures.  As we move ahead a top priority must be how best to connect with and organize our base: young people, people of color, women, immigrants, the LGBTQ community, the peace movement, union members and the broad working-class into a winning coalition.

Organizing our base must be at the center of our work.  But we must also give attention to our opposition.  We win in society and at the ballot box by educating and organizing our supporters, and by weakening and splitting our opposition.  And one question that needs more attention is why 74 million voters who, after the unaddressed pandemic, economic crisis, racism, sexism, xenophobia and spreading environmental calamity, still voted for Trump?  This was eleven million more than in 2016?  If we don’t expand our base, and connect with some reachable sectors of Trump voters and peel them away from the right, that failure will haunt us in the 2022 and 2024 elections.  And puzzling historical questions need to be answered. How did the country move from Democratic Party majorities in national and state elections to minority status in many states and some national elections since the 1930s?  And more fundamentally, how has the capitalist economic system affected these political changes? 

The 1970s: Transformations in American Politics

The 1970’s was a pivotal decade.  It began with much promise.  In May,1970 the student and anti-war movements reached new heights. Four million students went on strike at colleges and universities across the country. The spark that lit the explosion was the killing of students at Kent State and Jackson State, after President Nixon invaded Cambodia expanding the war in Southeast Asia.   This mass movement of young people was the result of 10-15 years of organizing the civil rights movement and civil rights laws, and a revolutionary Black liberation movement. Also, there was a decade’s long organizing of anti-war and student movements which helped build Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the broader new left. The mass mobilization of young people occurred despite the prior history of the decimation of the left of the 1930’s and early 1940’s by the post-World War Two anti-communist McCarthy period. The state repression of the Cold War era up to Vietnam destroyed the largest and most influential organization on the left, the Communist Party USA, and its influence in unions, among people of color communities, academia, Hollywood, public institutions even the Democratic Party, and political culture in general.

 

In the early 1970s, there also emerged a progressive grass-roots movement in labor. In 1970-71 the largest number of workers strikes occurred since the big strike wave after World War II in 1946. These strike waves led to winning improvements in wages and benefits for millions of workers, advancing social programs for the larger society, and strengthening the labor movement in society and politics, especially inside the Democratic Party. The women’s movement also exploded across the country in the 1970’s, and Marxist and socialist organizations grew.

 

Around the globe, many national liberation movements in Asia, Africa, and Latin America had won independence from former colonial control. Numerous “new” independent nations had formed the Non-Aligned Movement to shift the global political economy to meet the needs of their countries in the Global South. And, the prestige of the Soviet Union and Communist Parties everywhere was growing, especially in France and Italy where Communists were elected to many local and regional public offices and contended for power nationally. In addition, the United States increasingly faced competition from other capitalist countries which had recovered from the ravages of world war. All of this resulted in a decline in the relative economic power of the United States in the global economy. 

 

The rise of competing sources of political and economic power around the world led US capitalists and their politicians to pursue multiple strategies to reverse their setbacks, and rebuff the economic and political threats to US hegemony. In addition, ruling elites saw the necessity of breaking the backs of militant workers and youth in the United States. With increasing economic competition from overseas and labor militancy at home, capitalists  moved production overseas to low wage havens. Manufacturing facilities were shut down and massive numbers of good paying union jobs in the US were lost. Working-class communities were devastated. The labor movement shrunk.  Simultaneously, the globalization of production further marginalized workers abroad who experienced lower wages, horrific working conditions, and efforts by state apparatuses to crush labor organizing.

 

Politically, these policies in the United States weakened the influence of labor and liberals in the Democratic Party, allowing the more conservative anti-labor corporate Democrats to increase their control and freeze out organized labor by embracing the “new” ideology of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism included the rolling back of regulations and taxes on capital and shifting the economic shortfall to the working-class in the form of cuts in social services.  Meanwhile, the Republican Party, historically dominated by the major capitalists, was becoming a more right-wing party under the leadership of Richard Nixon in the 1970’s, and Ronald Reagan in the 1980’s. And the assault on labor was coupled by a revitalization of the traditions of white supremacy which was deeply embedded in US history. 

 

With the liberals and labor greatly weakened in the Democratic Party little or nothing was done to help millions of formerly unionized industrial workers who had lost their jobs, income and identity. The working class was particularly impacted in what became “rust belt” cities and regions, especially in the former industrial states bordering the Great Lakes, including Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan.  Left leaderless, many former union industrial workers from these states fell prey to the simple but reactionary and hollow solutions of the right, laying the groundwork for charlatans like Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump.  All of this, including the increasing crisis of US capital domestically and globally, expanded the influence of the rightwing in the Republican Party. 

 

Paradoxically, despite a massive defeat of rightwing candidate for president Barry Goldwater in 1964, the descendants of Barry Goldwater, led by mass marketers Richard Viguerie and Paul Weyrich, rebounded and pushed so-called “wedge” issues. These issues played on backward ideas, tending to divide people over guns, god, and gays. The Republican Party moved further to the right. Politicians such as Ronald Reagan in the late 1970s and Donald Trump in 2016 simply came along at the right times to seize control of a huge block of hurting, confused, angry and frustrated working-class voters, and many economically insecure small business people and white collar employees. Many Trump voters included those who had voted for Democrat and African American Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012.  The Trump phenomena was an outcome of decades of economic insecurity, the floating of simplistic interpretations of reality, and a resuscitation of the racist past. Examining 2016 voter data shows that Trump voters came more solidly from the middle class – small and mid-sized business owners and some professionals, and upper class corporate and financial interests, as well as a significant number of workers, a multi-class reactionary “historic bloc.”

 

That is not to discount the racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, and anti-working-class ideas that have existed from the earliest days of our country. They are a part of the fabric of our country, promoted daily by nearly every institution of society.  Marx wrote, “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.”  These ideas were ramped up by Trump and his GOP sycophants.   These ideas are very serious problems and must be addressed and ameliorated. They are the central impediments to progress.  Therefore, to build a progressive future, one goal must be to connect with and peel away sectors of Trump voters, especially working-class voters, from his reactionary and racist program and movement, and onto a better path. 

 

Historic Changes in the Democratic Party

What seems missing from discussions of election outcomes is an analysis that links changes in history and political economy to the changes that have occurred in the Democratic Party over a long period of time. These changes span an era from Keynesianism and the capital/labor compromise of the late 1940s to neoliberalism, reflected in the sector of the Democratic Party that gained dominance in the 1980s, sometimes referred to as “The Third Way.” 

Looking at the twentieth century, Franklin Roosevelt’s presidential victory in 1932 and three subsequent victories presaged both a transformation of the Democratic Party and public policy from laissez faire to state-directed policies. These policies were designed to address social needs (creating jobs, supporting unions, supporting farmers, investing in public works and the public good, and funding the arts - theater, murals, music, historical writing for example). It was assumed that fiscal stimuli, putting money in workers’ hands would jump start the economy. Fiscal stimuli were paralleled by increased government regulations of banking, labor/management relations, and wages and hours. And it must be emphasized that these New Deal programs would not have occurred if millions of working-class men and women had not hit the streets and striking picket-lines to demand them.  Mass action by millions of workers was central to achieving worker gains.

But, it must be remembered that as much as the New Deal programs helped large sectors of the working class, workers of color were disgracefully excluded from many of them. This exclusion was driven by the racist Dixiecrats in the former southern slave states that comprised a significant sector of the Democratic Party and whose votes were needed in Congress to pass the New Deal legislation. Nevertheless, the thrust of public policy, mostly advocated by Democrats, was for government to help working persons, or at least a portion of them.  The Democratic Party institutionalized the New Deal, the Fair Deal in the Truman years, and, in the 1960s, the Great Society. 

Most white workers and increasingly Black workers, after some of these benefits were extended to them, embraced these programs and saw the Democratic Party as their home. From the 1930s until the 1980s, voter studies showed majorities of voters identified with the Democratic Party. And even mainstream Republicans, such as Dwight Eisenhower, accepted the partial truce that labor and capital arrived at after the tumultuous workers strikes of the 1930’s.  He didn’t try to dismantle the social welfare programs of the New Deal, and signed into law an extension of Social Security in the 1950s.

However, the Democratic Party began its long decline in 1968 when candidate Richard Nixon reached out to conservative Democratic voters with his appeal to “the silent majority” and his embrace of the racist “southern strategy,” and the Democratic Party had no effective counterstrategy.   Nixon also played the “law and order” card to appeal to moderate to conservative voters who were confused about the war in Vietnam and didn’t understand nor like the anti-war demonstrators, nor the struggle to win equal rights for Blacks and other people of color.  This political atmosphere allowed reactionary politician George Wallace to become a popular racist third-party candidate for president. 

The last gasp of the New Deal/Fair Deal/Great Society tradition was reflected in the overwhelming defeat of progressive populist anti-war Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern in 1972. Nixon shamelessly but falsely blamed McGovern during the campaign for violence in street demonstrations, and proclaimed himself the “law and order” candidate.  Two years later, because of an illegal break-in by Nixon operatives in the Democratic Party offices at the Watergate Hotel, President Nixon was forced out of office and his successor Gerald Ford lost the 1976 presidential election to moderate Democrat Jimmy Carter. 

In sum, these political eruptions occurred in a decade, the 1970s, when the United States was experiencing declining relative power in the world, both politically and economically. In addition, the contours of American politics were dramatically affected by the oil crises of the early 1970s and the rise of economic power of the OPEC countries who sought more control over the production and profits from their oil. Threatened with declining global hegemony, declining profit rates, and a “fiscal crisis of the state,” federal and state governments cut back on social supports that workers had come to expect. And both Republicans and Democrats began to support neoliberal policies at the expense of working people. Both political parties responded to the dramatic changes in the political economy of capitalism with austerity policies that were increasingly defended by dividing the working class by race.

The Democratic Party and “The Third Way”

Jimmy Carter planted the seeds for the shift in the Democratic Party from New Deal liberalism to neoliberalism and the Party’s “Third Way.”  Michael Jordan Smith succinctly summarizes a central point of a recent book “Reaganland,” in which the author, Rick Perlstein, documents that the Democrats abandoned “economic fairness in favor of balanced budgets, deregulation, and fiscal conservatism,” in the service of a faltering capitalism.   Smith continues his description of the Perlstein analysis: “Carter led and presided over this transition, over the objections of traditional liberals including Ted Kennedy and Tip O’Neill. But Carter joined with a revitalized business lobby, which gradually succeeded in persuading Democratic politicians that neoliberalism was the only way forward. To this day, the Democratic Party hasn’t fully recovered.” (Michael Jordan Smith, “When Conservatism Triumphed,” The Progressive, August 17, 2020) 

President Reagan’s 1980 false polemic, which resonated with a work force that was experiencing capitalist-fueled seven percent unemployment and double-digit inflation, was that “government is not the solution. Government is the problem.” Armed with theories from conservative capitalist economists, Reagan expanded dramatically the policies initiated by President Carter. These policies included deregulation of the economy, lobbying for the privatization of public institutions, downsizing programs of welfare and safety nets. All of this was an attempt to shore up a US capitalist system that was besieged by growing competition from other capitalist countries, and a growing socialist bloc of countries around the globe.  To secure support for programs of austerity at home, Reagan blamed the so-called “greedy” unions and stepped-up the process of destroying the power of a labor movement already reeling from closures of unionized mass production industries. Reagan, in 1981, fired 12,000 union air traffic controllers, members of PATCO, after they went on strike over issues of safety on the job and in the air. That mass firing destroyed their union.  It also sent a signal to all capitalists that it was open war on organized labor. While there was some resistance and fightback by labor, it was reeling from too many attacks and loses. 

This assault on labor was then coupled with an intensified war on the Black community and other communities of color, by criminalizing and jailing them.  The ruling elite shifted the discourse from poverty’s connection to the economic failure of capitalism to blaming the victims of poverty for their misfortunes. And, in the main, the Democratic Party–with the corporate Democrats now in total control, either only weakly opposed the Reagan austerity agenda or cautiously supported it. What would later be called the “neoliberal agenda” became the dominant ideological framework of discourse of conventional politics, namely unleashing capitalism, by both the Republican and Democratic parties. (It is important to remember that both Republican and Democratic parties have been controlled by capitalists since their founding, but in both parties, especially the Democratic Party, there has been a class struggle between the capitalists, on the one hand, and a large sector of the multi-racial working class and progressive allies, on the other hand).

Along with attacks on labor and people of color at home, the strategy of sectors of the US ruling capitalist class was to expand US global hegemony. The main target was the Soviet Union. The  Reagan Administration organized and carried out an intense eight-year campaign of economic sabotage, military threats and action, and an arms race that busted the budget of the Soviet Union. This was coupled with similar attacks on the Eastern European socialist countries whose economies were integrated with the economy of the Soviet Union. In addition, the Reagan Administration launched wars against revolutionary forces in Central America. The Democratic Party not only did not oppose this overthrow of the Soviet Union, but aided the Republican Party and together applauded its success.  When the overthrow was completed in 1991, a major economic alternative and threat to US capitalism was gone.  Furthermore, since the Soviet Union had been the major global supporter of socialist-oriented national liberation movements around the world, new areas in Africa, Asia, and Latin America were now opened up for US capitalist investments, control, and exploitation, again supported by both the Republican and Democratic parties.  (See Peter Schweizer, Victory: The Reagan Administration’s Secret Strategy That Hastened the Collapse of the Soviet Union, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1996).

In 1985, Washington D. C. Democrats formed the corporate-led Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). The Council articulated the view that the Democratic Party was losing its grip on public support because it was “too liberal.” In reality, it was because the Democratic Party was viewed by many as a “Republican lite” party.  The DLC developed a “Third Way” agenda that was less committed to working people, was more hostile to people of color, shifted policy advocacy from providing social safety nets to expanding law enforcement, and was less vigorously supportive of government regulation. When Democrat Bill Clinton was elected president, he enshrined the neoliberal agenda in the program of the Democratic Party. Third Way Democrats no longer even pretended to represent the interests of working people in policy, but instead emphasized mostly in words, empathy for “all” people.  

One stark optic of this was reflected in a Frontline documentary on globalization which showed Democratic Party candidate Bill Clinton meeting steelworkers at a plant gate during a 1992 campaign stop. He promised them that he would serve their interests, particularly by opposing the then controversial North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). In the next scene in the documentary Clinton is meeting with Wall Street financier Robert Rubin, getting schooled on the “realities” of the modern capitalist economy (PBS, Commanding Heights). Despite labor opposition to NAFTA in the US, joined by progressives in the labor movements of Mexico and Canada, Clinton leaned on Democrats in the House of Representatives to support it. Clinton’s aggressive support of NAFTA was seen as metaphorically analogous to President Reagan’s firing of the PATCO workers in 1981 after they endorsed his candidacy for president.

Trump’s Base of Support: From 2016  to 2020

Trump’s core constituency all along has been sectors of finance capital, insurance, real estate, the military/industrial complex, and drug companies whose profits have come from domestic investments or sales and speculation overseas. It also has included portions of small and medium sized businesses whose viabilities have been threatened, not by big government, but by the further monopolization of the economy.

In addition, some workers displaced by the underside of neoliberal capitalism, including plant closings, capital flight, automation, and anti-worker trade deals, supported Trump because they saw no positive economic future in a Hillary Clinton presidency in 2016. (In 1980 many of these voters were called “Reagan Democrats”). Finally, the Trump constituency has included a significant percentage of voters who are ideological legatees of white supremacy, and other reactionary and right-wing ideas.   

 

Therefore, the Trump coalition from 2016 to today has consisted of fractions of capital who gain from a more muscular and economically nationalist policy agenda, marginalized portions of the so-called “middle class,” sectors of the working class, and portions of all of these whose political learning has centered on the history and consciousness of white supremacy (“make America great again”), as well as those who look to authoritarianism and even fascism as a savior.

 

In contradiction, Trump’s major adversaries among the elite have come from a core sector of the ruling class that has dominated the policy process at least since the 1980s, the neoliberal globalists, as well as the broad but loose coalition of some liberal and progressive members of the working-class and middle class. In short, every administration from Carter to Trump has engaged in deregulation of economic life, reduced government programs that once helped the poor and working classes, weakened the rights of workers and their unions, and advocated the privatization of public institutions. The Republicans have led the assault, advocating the privatization of Social Security, the postal service, and other programs. Both Democratic and Republican administrations have pursued agendas that have negatively impacted the vast majority of workers, including new generations of service employees, gig workers, and a growing precariat of insecure employees.

A significant portion of this qualitative change in the way capitalism works has involved increased financial speculation (as a proportion of the total gross domestic product), dramatic increases in domestic and global inequality in wealth and income, and increasing economic marginalization of workers, particularly women, people of color and immigrants. And globally, capitalist elites from every continent began to develop common approaches to national policy promoted by such international public institutions as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and informal organizations such as the Trilateral Commission, meetings of the G7 countries, and the annual World Economic Forum.

In 2016, Candidate Donald Trump, a capitalist who has nothing but contempt for the working-class and the general good, orchestrated a campaign against other capitalists, the neoliberal globalists who dominated the political process in the United States since the 1980s. Trump’s vision was for US capitalists to be beholden to him and his reactionary program to rule the world, shunning former partners and allies.  While Trump epitomized finance capital, albeit domestic as well as foreign, representing less than the one percent of the elite who rule the world, he presented himself as a spokesperson for the economically marginalized. He attacked a portion of the capitalist class of which he is a member and also attacked and undermined democratic rules and institutions that have been broadly accepted by both political parties and bourgeois democratic capitalists for years. And to further divide the working-class and broad sectors of the population, he blamed the economic suffering and alienation of the much of the working-class on some of their own; people of color, women, and immigrants.  All these characteristics are the building blocks of fascism.

Resistance to Trump, 2017 to 2020

Since the November 2016 election, masses of people mobilized in a variety of ways against the Trump agenda. The women’s marches and rallies of January 21, 2017 and International Women’s Day on March 8 were historic in size and global reach. Since then, there have been huge mobilizations to reduce the use of fossil fuels and prevent climate disaster, to support immigrant rights, to provide basic health care, protect workers’ rights, and most recently to protest police killings with impunity, especially of young Black men and women. Many of these manifestations of outrage were planned, but also from the beginning of Trump’s term many were spontaneous acts of resistance.  The protests were broad and varied, from Congressional town hall meetings to demonstrations at airports challenging his directives to refuse Muslims entry into the United States, to workers’ organizing and strikes.

A multiplicity of groups formed or increased in size since January, 2017:  for example Bernie Sanders supporters; anti-racists mobilizations particularly against police violence; those calling for sanctuary cities and defending the human rights of immigrants; progressive Democratic organizations; and women’s mobilizations. Traditional left organizations, such as the Democratic Socialists of America, benefiting from the Sanders campaign, multiplied its membership by ten times from 2016 to 2020, now totaling 80,000 members. And organizations such as The American Civil Liberties Union and Planned Parenthood reported large increases in financial contributions. Since the 2016 election the mobilization of millions of people bolstered the spirits of progressives everywhere. They have felt that at this point in history a new progressivism was about to be born. But the story has been complicated by the composition of Trumpism and the opposition to it.

Oppositions to Trumpism: Neoliberal and Progressive

 

Paradoxically, while the last four years has been “a teachable moment” as well as a movement building moment, progressive forces are struggling to get better organized. In and around the Democratic Party there is a conflict over the vision and the politics it ought to embrace at this time and in the coming period. The Sanders supporters, inside and outside the Democratic Party, and progressive Congress persons such as the “Squad” have marshalled much support for a progressive agenda: single-payer health care, a green jobs agenda, protecting the environment, tax reform, supporting not destroying unions, immigrant rights, defending women’s rights, and cutting military spending. With the brutal policies advocated and already instituted by the Trump administration, progressive Democrats and their allies on the left have struggled mightily to articulate a program and create some organizational unity to challenge Trumpism. And that struggle remains relevant since the 2020 election, particularly given the fact that candidate Trump received in excess of 74 million votes for reelection.

The dilemma for progressives is that opposition to Trumpism and all it stands for has been and must be a key component of reigniting a Progressive Majority in the immediate future.  But if it does not address the fundamental failures of the neoliberal agenda, including challenging neoliberal globalization, the current phase of capitalism, Trump’s grassroots support will continue, even after he reluctantly left the White House. Working people who ordinarily would vote for more liberal candidates for public office need to believe that future candidates are prepared to address their issues, often economic, that concern them the most.

 

Therefore, the fundamental project for progressives today includes mobilizing against Trumpism while articulating an alternative political and economic analysis of the current state of capitalist development. In concrete terms, this approach means challenging the legitimacy of the legacy of the Trump administration and its allies in Congress while articulating the perspective that corporate, the neoliberal globalists, are part of the problem, not the solution.  President Biden’s recently articulated stimulus program represents many features of a progressive agenda, particularly in its efforts to defeat the pandemic.

Moving Beyond 2020

Concretely, the solution is for the broad left, including the labor movement, to push President-elect Joe Biden to promote a bold New Deal type program immediately, like FDR did in 1933. A first goal should be winning at least one big improvement for millions of workers that they strongly need, so they are encouraged to support more.

 

A second project of left/progressive/labor forces should include a conscious effort to peel away some Trump/rightwing voters. A New Deal win would be a big help. But progressives need to couple policy victories with a clear commitment to protect values and institutions that millions of workers cherish, as long as these values and institutions do not harm others. These include listening to grievances of members of working-class communities and respecting workers’ lives, their love of their families, religious beliefs, social clubs, sporting activities, and traditions. The left-led CIO unions reached into communities of workers in the 1930s and 1940s and won their support by doing all of this, not just union members, but their families and loved ones as well. All of this helped dramatically weaken the right-wing fascist threats that had significant appeal in the 1920’s and early 1930’s, until the first prò-worker New Deal programs came into effect. 

 

Finally, a national movement must emerge that unites the left, labor and broad progressive movements, and pushes support for a program which can help everyone; especially our multi-racial working class. A massive infrastructure building program to put millions of people to work at good paying union jobs for many years would be a huge step forward, coupled with a massive jobs program producing green products – a Green New Deal. This would employ many building trades and manufacturing workers which were a significant portion of Trump’s working-class voters. Shifting away from oil and fracking to mass production of solar energy products, wind turbines, electric vehicles and other green products, could turn today’s Trump/GOP voters away from the Republican Party and toward the Democratic Party, including toward a Bernie Sanders inspired bold and humanitarian democratic socialist program in 2022 and 2024.  If the Democrats don’t launch a comprehensive program to help the working-class, we run a big risk of losing in 2024, to Trump again, or someone worse.

This alternative analysis requires a bold challenge and vision, both inside the electoral arena and in the streets. It calls for big progressive reforms that meet the needs of the general public,  and weakens the power and abuses of capitalism. The alternative could be worse than the insurrection that occurred on January 6, 2021. The tasks are challenging, but another world is possible.

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Harry Targ is Professor Emeritus in political science at Purdue University in Indiana, and a member of the American Association of University Professors.  He blogs at www.heartlandradical.blogspot.com. 

 

Paul Krehbiel is a former union auto worker from Buffalo, a former Teamster, and retired member of Service Employees International Union.  He was the coordinator of Los Angeles Labor for Bernie. Both Targ and Krehbiel are co-chairs of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism.

 

 

 

CRISES IN THE PEACE MOVEMENT? THE NEED TO MAKE OUR VOICES HEARD: A 2021 Revision of an Older Analysis

Harry Targ

 The Peace Movement Today

 The history of the peace movement is complicated, with successes and failures. First, the history of peace movement solidarity has been intimately connected to anti-racist, pro-labor, women’s, and environmental struggles for decades. When Dr. King and Mohammed Ali connected the evils of Vietnam with racism and poverty at home proponents of peace and social and economic justice gained in strength.

 Second, the relative strength in number, message, and organization of the peace movement has varied significantly over time. Since the onset of the Cold War peace and solidarity activities have been most vibrant during the Vietnam War, the wars against Central America, Gulf War One, the bombing of Serbia, the Iraq War, Israeli bombing of targets in Gaza, and threats of bombing Syria in 2013.

 Today the movement is dormant because of peace activist energies being targeted against threats  to whatever remains of democracy by the Trump administration. Paradoxically, with the continuation of war and terrorism on the world stage, the systematic use of hybrid war techniques to starve populations in states defined as enemies, to the spread of new high technology instruments of slaughter, the danger of the return to big power conflict, and continuing increases in military spending, the voices of the peace movement have been dispersed and hence weakened. This is a dilemma not only for peace but for economic justice, saving the environment, and ending racism and sexism. 

During this disturbing period in world history the end of the Trump Administration and its replacement by the new President Biden with foreign policy influentials long associated with prior Democratic and Republican administrations, it is useful to step back and analyze “the time of day” on a worldwide basis: as to global class forces and their ideologies; contemporary techniques of empire and their consequences for the lives of billions; individual global crises; and where President Biden stands on issues of war and peace and foreign policy in general. Much of the material below was assembled in the summer, 2016 in anticipation of an electoral victory by Hillary Rodham Clinton.  While that prediction was incorrect, the issues involving the United States in the world remain remarkably (and sadly) the same today, 2021, as 2016.

 The Ruling Class Agenda for the United States Role in the World

 From a Washington Post editorial, May 21, 2016:

HARDLY A day goes by without evidence that the liberal international order of the past seven decades is being eroded. China and Russia are attempting to fashion a world in their own illiberal image…This poses an enormous trial for the next U.S. president. We say trial because no matter who takes the Oval Office, it will demand courage and difficult decisions to save the liberal international order. As a new report from the Center for a New American Security points out, this order is worth saving, and it is worth reminding ourselves why: It generated unprecedented global prosperity, lifting billions of people out of poverty; democratic government, once rare, spread to more than 100 nations; and for seven decades there has been no cataclysmic war among the great powers. No wonder U.S. engagement with the world enjoyed a bipartisan consensus.

 The Washington Post editorial quoted above clearly articulates the dominant view envisioned by US foreign policy elites for the years ahead: about global political economy, militarism, and ideology. (And there is not much evidence that this vision is different in 2021 from 2016). It in effect constitutes a synthesis of the "neocon" and the "liberal interventionist" wings of the ruling class. First, it is inspired by the necessity of 21^st century capitalism to defend neoliberal globalization: government for the rich, austerity for the many, and deregulation of trade, investment, and speculation.

 Second, the Post vision of a New World Order is built upon a reconstituted United States military and economic hegemony that has been a central feature of policymaking at least since the end of World War II even though time after time it has suffered setbacks: from defeat in Vietnam, to radical decolonization across the Global South, and to the rise of competing poles of power in Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and even Europe. In addition, despite recent setbacks, grassroots mass mobilizations against neoliberal globalization and austerity policies have risen everywhere, even in the United States. The Washington Post speaks to efforts to reassemble the same constellation of political forces, military resources, and concentrated wealth, that, if anything, is greater than at any time since the establishment of the US “permanent war economy” after the last World War.

 Historian, Michael Stanley, in an essay entitled “‘We are Not Denmark’: Hillary Clinton and Liberal American Exceptionalism,” (Common Dreams, February 26, 2016) points to the ideological glue that is used by foreign policy elites, liberal and conservative, to justify the pursuit of neoliberal globalization and militarism; that is the reintroduction of the old idea of American Exceptionalism, which in various forms has been used by elites since the foundation of the Republic. 

 The modern version, borne in the context of continental and global expansion, serves to justify an imperial US role in the world. Along with posturing that the United States is somehow special and has much to offer the world, American Exceptionalism presumes the world has little to offer the United States. The only difference between Democrats and Republicans on foreign policy is whether the exceptionalism still exists and must be maintained or has dissipated requiring the need to “make America great again.” Leaders of both parties, however, support the national security state, high military expenditures, and a global presence—military, economic, political, and cultural. With the election of Joe Biden, the corporate media in the main has reiterated the idea that the United States remains the “indispensable nation” in the international system, despite temporary setbacks resulting from Trump foreign policies.

 Techniques of Empire Today  

 Although the imperial agenda, and the ideological precepts justifying it, has remained the same for two hundred years the techniques of empire have changed as growing resistance at home and abroad and new technologies dictate. Changes in warfare, other violence, and imperial expansion articulated in 2016 and still relevant today include the following:

 -Wars are internal much more than international and casualties are overwhelmingly civilian rather than military.

-The global presence of some form of the United States military is ubiquitous-between 700-and 1,000 military bases, in anywhere from 40 to 120 countries

- US military operations have been privatized. A 2010 Washington Post report found 1,911 intelligence contracting firms doing top secret work for 1,271 government organizations at over 10,000 sites. Ninety percent of such work is being done by 110 contractors.

-More “Unmanned Aerial Vehicles” have been used to kill alleged enemies over the last eight years as the entire prior period of US military operations. Drones have come home as their use by the Dallas police recently showed.

-US agencies, such as the CIA, have been engaged in the increased use of assassinations and efforts to undermine governments. One report indicated that there are 13,000 assassination commandoes operating around the world.

-So-called “humanitarian assistance” is used to support United States policies in the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. For example, a New York Times story reported that at least 40 American groups received $200 million in tax-deductible gifts for Jewish settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem over the last decade.

-The United States increasingly has used economic tools—economic blockades, trade sanctions, covert financing of pro-US politicians in other countries, and condemnations by some international organizations to undermine, starve, and ultimately, it is hoped, to entice people to overthrow their governments. These techniques, often labeled “hybrid war,” are being used against Venezuela, Cuba, and some thirty other countries.

 Some generalizations we can draw from the new techniques of war are the following:

-Imperial rule has become global.

-The Military/industrial complex has expanded beyond President Eisenhower’s wildest nightmares. Large sectors of military operations—from cooking and cleaning to killing—have been privatized.

-Military operations continue and expand without “boots on the ground.” Empires can kill with impunity.

 Nick Turse and colleagues reported  on data indicating that the United States has been engaged in secret military training of personnel in many countries, what they called ‘a shadowy network of U.S. programs that every year provides instruction and assistance to approximately 200,000 foreign soldiers, police, and other personnel.”  (Douglas Gillison, Nick Turse, Moiz Syed, “How the U.S. Trains Killers Worldwide,” Portside, July 13, 2016).

Their report is worth further quoting:

 “The data show training at no fewer than 471 locations in 120 countries….involving on the U.S. side, 150 defense agencies, civilian agencies, armed forces colleges, defense training centers, military units, private companies, and NGOs, as well as the National Guard forces of five states.” Perhaps most important for the peace movement is the following: Despite the fact that the Department of Defense alone has poured some $122 billion into such programs since 9/11, the breadth and content of this training network remain virtually unknown to most Americans.”

 Impacts of 21^st Century Imperialism

 By any measure the pain and suffering brought by 21^st century imperialism is staggering. US Labor Against the War reported that sources estimate 1.3 million people, mostly in the Middle East and South Asia, have died due to the war on terrorism initiated in 2001. They quote a research report that estimates that one million Iraqis have died since 2003 and an additional 220,000 citizens of Afghanistan and 80,000 from Pakistan. Other sources claim these figures are too conservative and remind us of the untold thousands upon thousands who have died directly from war and violence in Libya, Syria, Yemen, Bahrain, and elsewhere in the Middle East, South Asia, and North Africa.

 These figures, of course, address deaths directly attributed to war and terrorism but do not include economic sanctions, massive flight of peoples from war zones, persecution by authoritarian regimes, environmental devastation and drone strikes and assassinations. Large areas of the globe centered in the Middle East and North Africa are ungovernable with foreign intervention and anomic domestic violence on the rise. In a troubling essay by Patrick Cockburn the author asserts that:

 “We live in an age of disintegration. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Greater Middle East and Africa. Across the vast swath of territory between Pakistan and Nigeria, there are at least seven ongoing wars-in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, and South Sudan. These conflicts are extraordinarily destructive. They are tearing apart the countries in which they are taking place in ways that make it doubtful they will ever recover.” (Patrick Cockburn, “The Age of Disintegration: Neoliberalism, Interventionism, the Resource Curse, and a Fragmenting World,” The Unz Review: Mobile, June 28, 2016).

 Cockburn suggests that this fragmentation has core features: no winners and losers, deconstruction of states, massive population upheavals and migrations, religious fundamentalism   replacing socialist and/or nationalist politics, and outside interventions. The Global South project Vijay Prashad described so well in The Darker Nations has been superseded by competing fundamentalist projects.

 Specific Cases

 NATO/Ukraine/New Cold War

 In 2016 leaders of the 28 NATO countries met in summit in Poland to reaffirm their commitment to the military alliance that was established in 1949 for the sole purpose of protecting the European continent from any possible Soviet military intervention. With the collapse of the former Soviet Union, rather than dissolving, NATO took on the task of policing the world for neoliberal globalization and the states ‘victorious” in the Cold War. NATO was the official operational arm of military operations in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s and the military force that would destroy the Gaddafi regime in Libya. 

 After the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, NATO incorporated the states in Eastern Europe that had been affiliated with it. Now Poland, Hungary, and the Baltic States remain the frontline in the ongoing hostilities with Russia. They and western financiers from Ukraine, with substantial assistance from the United States, engineered the coup that ousted a corrupt but elected President in Ukraine. This set off an ongoing civil war between those in the population who wanted to continue ties to Russia and others who wanted Ukraine to join the European Union and NATO. The instability in Kiev was orchestrated by high US state department officials who advocated a New Cold War with Russia. Some US diplomats involved in the Ukraine story may return to the Biden diplomatic team,

 At the NATO summit of 2016 it was agreed to establish four battalion-sized “battle groups” in Poland and the Baltic states. To use the language of the Cold War, this small force could serve as a “trip wire” that could precipitate an “incident” and a major war with Russia. NATO agreed to bolster the Ukraine military. The alliance would commit to establishing a controversial missile defense system in Eastern Europe.  And NATO countries promised to spend two percent of their budgets on the military. The continued commitment of the United States was affirmed by President Obama. After the Trump period of reduced commitment to NATO, President Biden wishes to resuscitate the alliance.

 The Asian Pivot

 In 2011, US spokespersons announced that the country would shift resources and attention to Asia from the Middle East, an area with demanding security and economic interests. Although US/Chinese dialogue continues the United States has criticized China’s repositioning of what it regards as its possessions in the South China Sea. The United States has expanded military relations with Vietnam, reestablished military bases in the Philippines, and has generally avoided criticizing efforts by ruling Japanese politicians to revise their constitution to allow for a full-scale remilitarization. The United States has threatened North Korea over their military maneuvers and has bolstered the South Korean military. While Trump did reach out to North Korea, tension reduction on the peninsula was short-lived. On the economic front the United States was instrumental in building support for the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) to challenge Chinese economic hegemony in the region. While Trump rescinded the TPP approach, he launched a trade war against China and engaged in attacks on Chinese corporations operating in the West. Both Trump and Biden spokespersons have made it clear that a New Cold War against China is ramping up. Corporations engaged in military production and research universities have used the China threat as a justification for increased military spending, research and development, cyber-security and a whole panoply of tools to fight twenty-first century wars.

 The Middle East

 Most American politicians express their belief that the US must maintain a special relationship with the state of Israel. One of the few active mobilizations for peace today is the worldwide campaign to demand governments, corporations, and other institutions boycott, and divest holdings in what is regarded as an apartheid state, Israel, which oppresses its Arab population and those living in the Occupied Territories. The campaign is so effective that along with national politicians, governors and state legislatures have taken stands against the BDS campaign. Israel continues to expand its occupation of Palestinian land, repress Palestinians within Israel, and is currently not distributing the covid-19 vaccine to Palestinian people, while other Israel citizens are inoculated.

Next to the historic US ties to Israel, most analysts see the deconstruction of the Middle East that Cockburn wrote about as a direct result of the Iraq war initiated in 2003. Over the next decade, Syria, Libya, Yemen and other countries have been torn apart by civil war fueled by western, primarily US, intervention, continuing US support of Saudi Arabian militarism, and the fractionalization of states in the region. The Trump administration increased the threat of  war  with Iran. President Biden might be open to returning to the Nuclear Treaty with Iran from which Trump withdrew.

 This ten year war on the Middle East has created a growing terrorist response directed at western targets and an ideological campaign, including calls to violence, against all the traditional imperial powers who dominated the region for one hundred years. With this as a backdrop, the United States response to violence has been stepped up high-tech killing justified by a public campaign that demonizes Muslim people in the United States and everywhere in the world.

 AFRICOM

 Nick Turse described the growing US military presence on the African continent. A special command structure, AFRICOM, was established in 2008 to oversee US security interests on the continent. Initially, Turse reported, the Pentagon claimed that it had one larger base, Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti. But enterprising researchers discovered that the US military had a dense network of “cooperative security outposts,” bases and other sites of military presence, at least 60 across the continent, in 34 countries. The US has defense attaches in 38 countries. 

 An Oxford researcher was quoted by Turse on the new oversite of the African continent.

 “AFRICOM, as a new command, is basically a laboratory for a different kind of warfare and a different way of posturing forces…Apart from Djibouti, there’s no significant stockpiling of troops, equipment, or even aircraft. There are a myriad of ‘lily pads’ or small forward operating bases…so you can spread out even a small number of forces over a very large area and concentrate those forces quite quickly when necessary” (Nick Turse, “America’s Empire of African Bases,” TomDispatch.com, November 17, 2015).

 Latin America

 United States foreign policy toward Latin America has taken a variety of forms since the onset of the 21^st century. The United States, in the older mold, encouraged and assisted in the failed military coup against Hugo Chavez in 2002 and gave at least quiescent support to the military overthrow of Honduran President Zelaya in 2009. At the same time the United States has curried the favor of upper class opponents of the regimes transformed by the Bolivarian Revolution: Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Paraguay, and Uruguay. Two larger countries Argentina and Brazil have experienced domestic political turmoil in recent years, to some extent driven by internecine politics and corruption. The United States, in all these cases has networked with opposition political forces, sometimes encouraging wealthy citizens of countries such as Brazil and Venezuela to launch votes of no confidence or impeachment proceedings against their governments that have stood against the US neoliberal economic agenda. Some have referred to the new US strategy in the region as one of creating “silent coups.”

 The influence of the United States has weakened since the onset of the Bolivarian Revolution and the distain Latin Americans hold toward the United States because of its long-standing efforts to isolate Cuba. President Obama in collaboration with President Castro announced a new opening of relations between the two countries in December, 2014 and until 2017 US economic constraints on travel, trade, and investment were reduced (although the blockade remains) until Trump reinstated new draconian sanctions. Whether in the Obama Administration or during the Trump presidency, what remained similar to past US policy toward Cuba, however, was the stated aims of United States policy: the promotion of democracy and markets. It was no mere coincidence that President Obama visited Cuba in March, 2016 and then flew to Argentina to negotiate with the newly elected neoliberal President Macri of Argentina.  The Trump Administration reversed the Obama “soft power” approach to Cuba, returned to sanctions and tightened them further than they had been for years. In addition, Trump escalated “soft coup” attempts and economic sanctions against Venezuela, Bolivia, and Cuba. Biden spokespersons have spoken in favor of “more effective” sanctions against Venezuela. It is unclear whether Biden will pursue the “soft power” diplomacy with Cuba that Obama initiated. Meanwhile most of the countries of the world have called for an end to the US blockade of Cuba.

  The Idea of the National Security State

 The contradiction that still needs an explanation is the fact that for the most part the American people oppose wars and intervention. This is particularly so in the twenty-first century when so much pain and suffering has been caused by wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2008 Americans elected Barack Obama, in part because he had opposed the war in Iraq and had called for a new American foreign policy based on respect for other nations and peoples. He promised to use diplomacy not war as the primary tool of international relations and in some instances has tried to do that. He probably wanted to end the two awful wars and show some respect for others, even while promoting a neoliberal global agenda in a world of diverse centers of power and wealth. But why have Obama’s cautious efforts to promote United States economic and political interests been contradicted by the patterns of interventionism and the rhetoric of military globalization so common over the last few years?

The answer can be found in a variety of explanations of United States imperialism including what Mike Lofgren has called the “deep state.” Lofgren defined the “deep state” as  “… a hybrid association of elements of government and parts of top-level finance and industry that is effectively able to govern the United States without reference to the consent of the governed as expressed through the formal political process.”  (Mike Lofgren, “Anatomy of the ‘Deep State’: Hiding in Plain Sight,” Online University of the Left, February 23, 2014).   Others have examined invisible power structures, including class, that rule America (from C. W. Mills’ classic The Power Elite, Oxford University Press, 2000 to Robert Perrucci, Earl Wysong, and David Wright, The New Class Society: Goodbye American Dream? Rowman and Littlefield, 2013).  

 The roots of analyses like those above are that power to make critical decisions reside not in the superstructure of the political process; the place were competitive games are played for all to see, but in powerful institutions embedded in society that can make decisions without requiring popular approval. Over and over again, the “deep state” apparatus  of the national security state has led the American people into war or covert interventions that destroyed the rights of people in other countries to solve their own problems. In the end these nstitutions have involved the United States in death and destruction all across the globe. And ironically as majorities of Americans feared that President Trump might stage a domestic coup to stay in office or make war on Iran to regain his popularity they hoped that sectors of the national security state would reject presidential orders to carry out such egregious acts.

And Military Spending Continues

("The spending on contractors continues today at the same rapid clip, accounting for more than half of average Pentagon spending each year. And with Congress poised to approve a $778 billion one-year spending package (that would be around $7.8 trillion over ten years, even without further increases) for the military, the contractors stand to gain again. Democrats are slashing the Build Back Better bill from $3.5 trillion to $1.75 trillion over ten years. Meanwhile, Pentagon contractors have received $3.4 trillion over the past decade." (Lindsay Koshgarian, "U.S. Military Contracts Totaled $3.4 Trillion Over 10 Years,” Institute for Policy Studies, October 28, 2021)

 So Where Does the Peace Movement Go From Here?

 Analyses of what is wrong are easier to develop than thinking through ways to respond. This essay opened with a dilemma; a broken peace movement locally and nationally. It then argued that the foreign policy elites have had a hegemonic vision of the role of the United States in the world yesterday,  today, and tomorrow. And these elites and institutions of the national security state have at their disposal 21^st century military technologies to maintain their power in the world. The consequences of force and intervention have been horrific for billions of people. 

 Having outlined the scope of the problem, we have briefly described current US foreign policy “trouble-spots:” Russia and Eastern Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America.

Phyllis Bennis wrote in 2016 that: “An anti-war position, in the broadest sense of reducing military budgets, calling for diplomacy over war, condemning the ‘inevitable’ civilian casualties, calling out how military assaults create rather than destroy terrorism…these are enormously unifying principles among progressives….movements matter.” (Phyllis Bennis, “What the Democratic Party Platform Tells Us About Where We Are on War,” Portside, July 8, 2016).

 Approaches the peace movement can take in the near term include the following:

 1.Develop a theory, a conceptual scheme about the multiplicity of connected issues that affect peoples lives linking economics, politics, militarism, and culture. Think about a diamond shaped figure. At the base is an economic system, at this point in time finance capitalism. Above the base at the two side points are militarism on one side and racism and sexism on the other. At the top add destruction of nature. Conceptualizing the war problem in this way we begin to see the connections between the 21^st century state of capitalism as a global system and war, racism, sexism, and environmental destruction.

 2.Use the theory or schema to develop an educational program that begins with efforts to understand the fundamentals of the war system (direct and structural violence as peace researchers put it). Use the schema as programs on specific issues are prepared. Always relate the specific issue at hand: Israel/Palestine, Ukraine, undermining regimes in Latin America for example, to the diamond.

 3.Participate in grassroots organizing in solidarity with others, always linking issues to the war/peace paradigm. One error participants in the various Moral Mondays campaigns have made is to accede to the idea that Moral Mondays should only be about state legislative issues, not national or international ones. And work to network with peace groups all across the nation to rebuild the national peace movement that so effectively fought against war and imperialism in the past.

 4.Engage in global solidarity. The analysis above has emphasized the forces of global hegemony, or imperialism. It is critical to be aware of and support the grassroots ferment that is occurring all across the globe; from Arab Spring; to the Bolivarian Revolution; to anti-austerity campaigns in Greece, Spain, Quebec, and elsewhere, and the broadening climate change movement that encompasses the globe.

 The tasks of a 21^st century peace movement are not different from those of the past. They involve education, organization, and agitation. With the growth of worldwide resistance to neoliberal globalization, austerity, racism, sexism, and destruction of nature, it seems natural to incorporate concerns for peace and the right to national and personal self-determination to the budding radical movements of our day.