Notes on Trump (Bromma Dec. 2016)

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1. The normality of white supremacy

Since Trump’s election, I keep hearing that we shouldn’t “normalize” him or his agenda. I believe that’s looking through the wrong end of the telescope. There’s nothing as “normal” in the U.S. as white supremacy. Sometimes it’s disguised by tokenism and obscured by “multiculturalism.” But in this country, white supremacy has always shown its true naked face at times of stress and transition.

Because white supremacy isn’t just a bunch of bad ideas inherited from ignorant elders. It’s a deeply-rooted institution through which the U.S. rules over many oppressed peoples. It’s the glue that keeps hundred of millions loyal to that very same program. It’s the central ideological, political and physical system set up by white capital to rule the land and dominate its internal and external colonies. And therefore white supremacy underpins all the wealth and power this country’s ruling class possesses. Without it, the U.S. falls.

2. Contradictions within white capitalism

White supremacy is constant, but it keeps changing form. For instance, African Americans have endured a variety of modes of white supremacy: slavery, Jim Crow, gentrification, and more. White capitalism welcomed Mexicans and Chinese as semi-slave laborers, then attacked and deported them when conditions changed. Native peoples faced extermination campaigns, phony treaties, forced assimilation and confinement on reservations at various times. White supremacy isn’t a singular strategy by white society towards people of color. The form can change, as long as whiteness is always valued; as long as white people are always on top.

U.S. white supremacy was modified in response to world anti-colonial struggles and, after the Cold War, to globalization. Together these developments generated significant contradictions for traditional forms of white supremacy. By the late 1970s, old-style white military colonialism had lost much of its power, beaten back by a phalanx of national liberation struggles. So imperialism rebooted, searching out colonial partners and new forms of financial blackmail to replace or supplement military occupation. And, in the 1990s, U.S. capitalism entered a period of intense cooperation with other capitalists around the world, aiming to make the global economy increasingly “borderless.” Open, blatant racism wasn’t helpful in this changed environment.

So the U.S. ruling class adapted white surpremacy to the new conditions and gave it a new look. In the revised, neocolonial order, some people of color were accepted into positions of wealth and authority. Racist violence and discrimination continued inside and outside the country. But at the same time, U.S. high culture increasingly professed to celebrate the diversity of people of all nationalities and races (and genders too). This helped present U.S. capitalism to the world with a friendlier face. White supremacy continued, masked by capitalist multiculturalism.

Some white people embraced the concept of multiculturalism, sincerely hoping it could be the basis for a genuine progressive culture. But most white amerikans felt that this new incarnation of capitalism was a demotion. They didn’t like having people of color as their bosses. They didn’t like seeing “good jobs” and social bribery spread around the world, instead of being reserved for them. And they hated the “political correctness” of having to hide their racism. U.S. capitalism’s perceived “disloyalty” to its white home base during the rise of globalization fueled the current upsurge of right wing populism, including eventually the campaign of Donald Trump.

But for quite a while the ruling class turned a deaf ear to its disgruntled white masses. The capitalists had global interests to tend to; global profits to bank. And frankly, a willing Asian dictator or Latina judge or African American president was worth more to them than a thousand whining white people. The militia movement was repressed when it became militant; the Tea Party was mocked by the global sophisticates. (Neither was destroyed, though; they remained as a possibility, a fallback.)

As globalization continued to advance in the last few decades, white amerika was gradually forced and cajoled to accept modest changes in the hierarchy of imperial privilege. It seemed possible that monopoly capital, pushing white people to fall in line with multiculturalism, might continue forever along that path, backed and cheered by cohorts of optimistic and idealistic artists and intellectuals.

To a large extent, this is where the plaintive cry not to “normalize” Trump comes from. Cosmopolitan liberals, now accustomed to living under globalized capitalism, can’t believe that U.S. society is going to be allowed to go backward; can’t believe that a rich country could ever be permitted to trash multiculturalism; to turn back the clock on women’s rights and environmentalism and so much more. They have a hard time accepting that their bright dream of a blended world culture, a dream that had previously been tolerated and even encouraged by monopoly capital, might be betrayed, and end in a surge of old-fashioned racist violence. Their disbelief echoes the disbelief among the liberal intelligentsia in England after Brexit, and in other countries where globalization is giving ground.

3. Timing is everything

It’s important to understand that populist opposition to globalization in the West is making breakthroughs not as globalization rises, but as it falters. In fact, the rise of these political movements is probably more a reflection of globalization’s decline than the cause of that decline. What’s coming into view, semi-hidden underneath the frenzied soap opera of reactionary populism, is that the tide of globalization has crested and started to recede. It wasn’t permanent after all.

It should be stipulated, right off the bat, that globalization has unleashed immense changes, many of which are irreversible. For example, the peasantry, once the largest class of all, isn’t coming back. Globalization broke it; sent it streaming out of the countryside by the hundreds of millions. Out of that broken peasantry, a giant new woman-centered proletariat and a sprawling lumpen-proletariat are still being formed around the world.

Yet globalization as a financially-integrated, transnational form of capitalism can’t advance without constant expansion, constant profit growth. Since no global state exists to mediate among the world’s capitalists, shared growth is the only thing that restrains them from cut-throat competition. Growth is also what allows capitalists to at least partly mollify the displaced masses back home with cheap commodities and whatever jobs a rising world economy has to offer. But now, instead of growing, the world economy is slowing. In fact globalized capitalism, having bulked up on steroidal injections of speculation and unsustainable, leveraged debt, is teetering on the edge of disaster.

From the U.S. to China, from the Eurozone to Brazil, danger signs are flashing; massive globalized industries are shifting into reverse. International trade and investment are flat or falling. Capital that was formerly used for investment in “emerging economies” is now flowing backward into safe haven investments in the metropolis. Automation, renewable energy and other new technologies are starting to shorten supply chains, reducing the demand for imports from far away. Intractable economic and political crises, like those in the Middle East and Greece and Ukraine, are eroding cooperation and sapping confidence in already-weak globalist institutions. The internet, a key factor in globalization, is gradually becoming segmented, as governments and corporations privatize, censor and manipulate parts of it. And underneath everything, the increased inequality caused by globalization itself is throttling the demand for commodities.

Multinational corporations aren’t abandoning world markets by any means. But leading monopoly capitalists are hedging against trade wars and reducing their reliance on complex, interdependent trade and finance. Facing what he calls a “protectionist global environment,” GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt is shifting his company’s production from a globalized to a “localized” model. “We used to have one site to make locomotives; now we have multiple global sites that give us market access. A localization strategy can’t be shut down by protectionist policies.” This is a defensive posture, harkening back to an earlier form of imperialism.

Once it seemed that transnational integration had an unstoppable momentum. But now a retreat into the once-familiar zones of old-fashioned nation-based imperialism seems to be on the capitalist menu.

4. A previous wave of globalization

If the ongoing shift away from from transnationalism and towards harsh national rivalry continues, it won’t be the first instance of “de-globalization” in modern history. It’s happened before.

From 1870 to 1913, fueled by the industrial revolution and the explosive rise of U.S. capitalism, there was a massive spike in international trade and market integration. It was centered in Western Europe and the U.S., but extended further into Latin America and other parts of the world. Borders were opened, tariffs were lowered, and there was a rapid increase in exports and financial interdependence. The world capitalist economy boomed. Just as during the current wave of globalization, this earlier period was marked by major innovations in transport and communications, as well as an unprecedented upsurge in transnational migration. (Including tens of millions of workers who migrated from Europe to the U.S.) Economists refer to this as the “first wave” of modern globalization.

But capitalism is at best an unstable and contradictory system, periodically riven by economic crisis. And a globalized form of capitalism appears to be particularly vulnerable to those crises.

The globalization of 1870-1913 collapsed like a house of cards. Growing economic imbalances and stalled growth led many imperialist countries to impose tariffs and take other protectionist measures, vainly striving to boost their own home economy at the expense of others. Inevitably, there was retaliation in kind. This cannibalistic inter-imperial competition only aggravated the already deteriorating economic conditions. Trade and global commodities became more and more expensive. There was a rapid downward spiral of economic depression and reactionary nationalism.

There was no pretense of multiculturalism in the U.S. back then, of course. Massive vio-lence against people of color was already common during the boom years of globalization. So it’s hard to say if racism became worse during the period of de-globalization. But in 1913, segregation was officially initiated in all federal offices, including lunchrooms and bathrooms. In the following decades there were dozens of vicious race riots against Black enclaves in cities North and South, causing many hundreds of deaths and thousands of people driven from their homes. Having been pushed down previously, the Klan was revived in 1915. Its peak was in the 1920’s, with some 4 million members.

Finally, the first wave of globalization imploded in a frenzy of national hatred and two brutal world wars, fought without quarter among the capitalist powers. Something we should keep in mind as we confront the current situation.

5. De-globalization

Today’s capitalist globalization isn’t failing because of political blows landed by Western anti-globalization movements, although those have had a real effect. Rather, the populist movements are reaching for real power just as chunks of the ruling class globalist consensus are themselves breaking away and seeking alternate, nationalistic strategies.

Former globalizers are floating back toward the anchors of their old home economies and shifting the blame for economic crisis onto “foreigners” and social minorities. They’re muting their former advocacy of free trade while backing away from trade agreements. They’re rediscovering protectionism. They’re experimenting with cyber-attacks on other countries, building up their militaries, increasing their involvement in proxy wars, and manipulating their currencies to gain temporary advantage over trading partners. And as a natural part of this shift, they’re unleashing their most rabid “patriotic” social bases to sell their new/old program, control the streets, and, potentially, to serve as cannon fodder down the road.

In every quarter of the globe, nationalistic xenophobia is on the rise, strangling the remaining globalists’ fading dreams about world government and a borderless economy. Right wing populism is being released, and it’s rising out of its reservoirs, flowing like water filling dry river beds. In country after country, old social prejudices are being revived and intensified; former globalist capitalists are reaching out and mending fences with their most trusted national social bases.

That’s how it is here in the U.S., too. A return to the old white amerika is becoming a more and more practical program for U.S. capitalists—not just for the white masses. It offers the only natural form of capitalist regroupment as globalization wanes. An option as amerikan as apple pie.

A wiser comrade once warned me, during the rise of globalization, that the ruling class would someday “give amerika back to white people.” That’s what seems to be happening with Trump. (Whether or not the capitalists can control the populists they are unleashing remains, as always, an open question.)

6. Capitalists shift gears

The recent wave of accelerated globalization that started in the 1990’s was led by a bloc of Western capital, along with Japan and other close allies in Asia. There were two key geopolitical factors in its take-off. One was the formation of the EU, which consolidated European capital, including parts of the old Soviet empire. The EU also provided a model for what a globalized borderless world might look like, complete with transnational institutions and regulations.

The second factor was a tacit agreement between Western capital and China to collaborate on capitalist development. China supplied a low-wage labor force to produce cheap commodities, enabling enormous profits for investors. In return, the Chinese state and Party skimmed off some of those profits, retained significant control over investment decisions, and accumulated advanced technology. This “win-win” capitalist model, involving high-level financial integration and lowered trade barriers, was eventually applied to other countries, including India.

Both of these key factors of globalization appear to be disintegrating. When times were good in Europe, national jealousies were kept in check. But with economic slowdown, and now with the refugee crisis originating in the Middle East, centrifugal forces are rising inside the EU. Brexit is only one example. As for the deal with China, that was always a marriage of convenience. The West never planned to let China become a serious rival. While on the other hand, Chinese capitalists planned from the very beginning to use globalization as a springboard to empire.

Globalization has always had opposition among capitalists. In many cases, that opposition comes from businesses based in a single country, who resent having to compete with a flood of cheap imports from abroad. It also comes from the more rabid proponents of imperial power. They think military force and economic blackmail can be more profitable than friendly internationalism. When globalization starts to show signs of deterioration, these opponents fight hard to shift the capitalist consensus.

For some time, a group of Republican lawmakers have been chomping at the bit to take China and Russia down a notch militarily. And a group of Democrats, egged on by the unions, wanted more tariffs and other protections. Each represented a piece of the anti-globalist agenda. Neither cared for Trump because he was an outsider and a wild cannon, but he’s putting the pieces together. There was significant ruling class support for his campaign from the beginning – including Kenneth Langone of Home Depot, Peter Thiel of PayPal, David Green of Hobby Lobby and plenty more. Now Republican politicians, manufacturers, tech billionaires, oil company executives and Goldman Sachs bankers are lining up to apply for cabinet jobs and to “consult” with Trump, the anti-globalizer.

Although most British capitalists opposed the Brexit campaign, many also funded and supported it. They saw it as an opportunity to “deregulate” and privatize the economy and to make trade deals specifically favoring England. In China, a country that was once the poster child for globalization, the ruling class has made the conscious decision to become less dependent on exports to the West. They want to build up their home market. Meanwhile, they are responding to a weakening economy by fomenting xenophobia and populist narratives of imperial glory to come. In Russia, patriotic fervor and expansionist dreams are the only thing keeping Putin’s currupt authoritarian regime afloat. This trend of rising capitalist anti-globalization is general; worldwide.

As the U.S. starts to hunker down–starts to game-out possible trade wars and military conflicts with China and Russia; starts to think about closing borders and opening detention camps—white supremacy naturally comes fully back out into the open. That’s the default mode—always—for a country built on genocide, slavery, annexation, colonialism and every form of parasitism on people of color. If inter-imperialist rivalry is to be the order of the day, the U.S. ruling class will need the militant loyalty of racist white people. Without that, the imperial center will not hold. The U.S. will be unable to wage cold wars, trade wars or physical wars against its hungry rivals.

And so, it’s back to “normal” in amerika. We shouldn’t waste our energy wishing it wasn’t so. We should invest that energy in destroying any remaining illusions about a political system built from day one on oppressing non-white peoples and nations, here and all over the world. A system that must be uprooted, not reformed.

7. “Normalizing” Obama

And in the meantime, how about not “normalizing” Obama? Are the war crimes, assassinations, amnesty for torturers, mass incarceration, orwellian spy networks, out-of-control gangster cops, attacks on journalists and whistleblowers and vastly increased inequality that happened during his regime supposed to be some sort of baseline? Should we forget that he set a record for deportations? Are we going accept the bizarre narrative that Obama is really a well-meaning progressive “community organizer,” who was frustrated and stymied by Republicans?

Notice that while we are girding ourselves to fight Trump, Obama is not. Do we see him boldly attacking Trump’s racist, mysogynist plans, his corrupt appointments, his corruption, his militarism? Nope. He’s making nice with The Donald. His attention has already turned to more important things, like his exciting plans for an opulent presidential library to praise his “legacy.” Funded, of course, by the capitalists he has served so well.

We can project onto Obama that he’s a tortured soul, wishing he could have done more to help people. But actually he’s had a hugely successful career, and he’s solidly loyal to monopoly capitalism. When multiculturalism served that cause, he was multiculturalism’s very incarnation. Now, smart man that he is, he understands that his new job is to help manage a smooth transition from globalist multiculturalism to a system where open white supremacist nationalism can be mainstream again. And like a true professional, he’s putting his personal feelings aside and taking care of business.

Much is made of the fact that, as he leaves office, Obama has commuted a few thousand particularly harsh sentences inflicted on people jailed for non-violent drug “crimes.” With their sentences commuted, those people still have a criminal record; still face a hard road of injustice. And he only commuted a small percentage of low-level drug sentences. But it’s something, right?

Consider this: a president’s constitutional power to pardon people is practically unlimited. Pardon, not commute. As in, wipe the record clear. There are millions of victims of unjust and racist mass incarceration who could be pardoned with a stroke of Obama’s pen. And there’s nothing Trump could do to reverse it. Obama could pardon Leonard Peltier and Chelsea Manning and other political prisoners too.

Why stop there? There are millions of immigrants who are directly threatened with deportation by the incoming regime. Trump has said he would begin the expulsion process by deporting 3-4 million immigrants who are “criminals.” Actually, the only “crime” committed by most immigrants is that they crossed the border illegally or overstayed their visa. Obama could pardon all of those people, too, before Trump takes office.

Obama, as of this writing, has actually pardoned fewer people than any president in history. (Except for James Garfield, who was assassinated three months into his term.) As a matter of fact, when a few Democratic congresspeople actually had the nerve to ask Obama to pardon the 750,000 vulnerable young immigrant “Dreamers” to protect them from Trump, he turned them down flat.

Obama isn’t Trump’s enemy, or his friend. He’s simply an operative working for a fundamentally reactionary, white supremacist system. As popular resistance to Trump builds, we have to struggle to turn it into a deeper mass understanding of that system instead of normalizing Obama or his sponsors. And we must find and unite with those who, based on that deeper understanding, are moving toward revolution; towards actually overthrowing white supremacy and capitalism entirely.

Bromma, 12-16

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Stein Lillevolden Reviews Det Globale Perspektiv

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A book review of
Torkil Lauesen
380 pages
Nemo Publishing, Copenhagen 2016

by Stein Lillevolden (social worker)

First posted at: http://ift.tt/2fzOIQQ

Also published in the Danish newsletter Demos

In the late 1970s, I studied political science at Oslo University, by all evidence pretty half-heartedly. With half a heart — mostly because it was a deeply reactionary subject with a unilateral Western perspective on the world, though fortunately the activist students at that time were still able to squeeze into the syllabus theories about unequal exchange between the center and periphery of the imperialist system.

Theorists like Arghiri Emmanuel, Samir Amin, and Andre Gunder Frank saved my graduation (and continued student loans). They also gave compelling and inspirational insights into how poor developing countries were exploited in the world economy through unequal exchange, and provided a surprisingly revolutionary perspective on how such countries could liberate themselves from Western economic domination; this in a course where Henry Kissinger was seen as a credible statesman rather than a war criminal.

Activist Political Scientist

When I googled “unequal exchange” to see if it still has a place in the Norwegian Institute for Political Sciences curriculum, the first link was on the importance of changing hair shampoo based on different kinds of activity (jogging, partying, work, etc.), which might say something about Norway’s position in anti-imperialist discourse, given that the corresponding searches in Danish and English gave far more relevant results. Fortunately, there are still some activist and leftist political scientists outside of Norway. One of the most important is Torkil Lauesen, in Denmark, and his new book Det Globale Perspektiv, besides being a compelling survey of imperialist history, also provided a lovely reunion with my theoretical rescuers from poli-sci.

In this new book, Torkil Lauesen explains how global neoliberalism, with increased movement of goods, capital, and labor, simultaneously enhances a global racial hierarchy — a global system of apartheid. At the same time, the current economic and political crisis in this structure opens up opportunities for the progressive forces around the world to organize basic systemic changes through global analysis and cooperation, making resistance against imperialism as international as capitalism.

Struggle against Capitalism

Torkil Lauesen has spent more than 40 years politically active in very different forms of struggle against capitalism, and he does not hide the different strengths and weaknesses of these different forms of struggle.

Lauesen has a somewhat unconventional educational background. He completed his degree in political science while serving a 10-year sentence in a high security prison in the outskirts of Copenhagen. The sentence was handed down for participation in the so-called Blekingegade Group’s robberies to obtain money for liberation movements such as the PFLP in Palestine. After journalist Peter Øvig Knudsen’s highly dramatized and tendentious books on the “Blekingegade Gang” and the subsequent films and television productions, it comes as a relief to read Lauesen’s sober description of the theoretical background, political development, and illegal practice of the Blekingegade Group, all without any hint of glorifying their actions.

When Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri wrote Empire, another of today’s major books on imperialism, there were strenuous attempts to marginalize Negri because of his 30-year prison sentence, “reduced” to 13 years, for “promoting terrorism and insurrection against the state”. There have been similar attempts to marginalize Torkil Lauesen, following his release, in particular by the venerable and respectable section of the left. So his book will not be part of the curriculum at the Institute of Political Science, but that will not prevent it from becoming part of activists’ revolutionary curriculum.

Unequal Exchange

Lauesen tells about his background in assorted “alphabet-organizations” like KAK and M-KA; the latter, the Manifest Communist Working Group, would later become famous as the “Blekingegade Gang”. The group´s worldview was inspired by Lenin´s so-called parasite-state theory, where the material wealth in our part of the world is built on imperialist exploitation of the Third World. From this theory, they drew the conclusion that the Western working class is a labor aristocracy without revolutionary potential. This was also rooted in Lenin’s theory of imperialism, where a portion of the superprofits Western capitalists acquire through exploiting the rest of the world are used to buy off and pacify the Western working class, making it into to an aristocracy of consumers who have no interest in ending the imperialist exploitation of the Third World.

Following this logic, the group concluded that their revolutionary practice had to be to support the liberation movements in the Third World, instead of the traditional left-wing practice in trade unions and left-wing parties in the North. To put it mildly, this is not my favorite theory, as it is demobilizing and strongly discourages any attempt to counter power and resist the conditions of life in our part of the world. That said, it’s much more interesting with the theories of imperialism that Lauesen derives from here on in, and there’s no reason for me to get into a big fight over the “correct line”, when his analysis of imperialism is so good. The book contains a few such attempts at “line battles” against long-extinct dinosaurs, but fortunately, the main analysis of the current situation is far more convincing than the theoretical and practical issues of the 1970s.

Easy to Read

The biggest strength of Torkil Lauesen’s new book is that he succeeds in writing about theory and imperialist history in a language that doesn’t require readers to have earned a black belt in Marxist theory. I can assure everyone with traumatic experiences from trying to follow the debates between Maoists, anti-imperialists, and Kapital interpreters during the 1970s — or, for that matter, from the 1980s and ‘90s autonomist mumbo-jumbo I myself partook in — that Lauesen’s book reads really well and is practically free of any dogmatic rhetoric. Considering the author’s political background, this is a feat unto itself.

It was also a minor stroke of genius that Lauesen left the discussion of Marx’s theory of value to a separate appendix in the back of the book. A “major nightmare” for everyone who ever participated in a study circle, which caused people to run away screaming after an endless review of the Marxist theory of value, before they ever got to the interesting philosophical, historical, economic, and political analyses, was redeemed here by the author in a sensible, elegant, and educational way. In addition, even his appendix on the theory of value is good and easy to comprehend, and is completely free of dogmatism tainting the historical and political analysis.

Globalized capitalism

The core of Lauesen’s political and economic analysis consists of his rethinking of the theory of the unequal exchange, though still with clear references to the dependency theories of Arghiri Emmanuel and Samir Amin.

It is also a strength of the book that it combines theory with the art of putting concrete numbers on the size of unequal exchange and the global apartheid system in which international capitalism is organized. The annoyingly slow Dell notebook computer I write reports on when at work, is assembled by East Asian or South Asian workers who might earn only a few per cent of what I earn when I use it, and this is not just because I’m highly paid by Danish standards. The production of computers is globalized in transnational production chains, where each sub-process is located where production costs, infrastructure, taxes, wages, etc. are best for capital.

Moreover, the iPad I am so happy with and with which I am presently sitting in the sun and writing this article on, was produced under equally outrageous conditions. According to Lauesen, Apple management refers to the Foxconn factories in China, which produce their iPads, as “Mordor” – the name of the hell where the prince of darkness rules in Lord of the Rings. This insight does not stop Apple from taking out at least 45 percent of the sale price of an iPad in pure profit, while the wages of the person who assembles it can be measured in thousandths of the sale price.

Apple does not own a single factory, but gets everything produced by subcontractors in the South who brutally exploit labor. The same goes for many brand products that are part of our everyday lives, whether we’re talking about clothing, shoes, automobiles, furniture or electronics. The subcomponents in my beloved iPad are manufactured by companies such as Toshiba and Samsung. All the subcomponents are then transported to Shenzhen in China, where the company Foxconn has its huge assembly plants. Here iPhones, iPads, MacBooks, and other brand PCs are assembled by 400,000 Chinese workers who produce 12 hours each day, 6 days a week, sleeping and eating in the factory dormitory and receiving a salary which in 2009 was the legal minimum in Shenzhen, namely 83 cents an hour.

A Totally Changed World

We are part of an increasingly unequal world, where the working class in the South is exploited in ways that have not been since the early industrialization of Europe. Technological advances in the productive forces have led to an industrialization of the former periphery, which the dependency theorists never thought possible, as they believed the South would remain suppliers of raw materials. However, today 80 percent of the world’s industrial workers are located in the South, while the North has de-industrialized.

This has meant a totally changed world, with China being the most obvious example. Yet my daily wages are still equivalent to at least a week’s salary in China, so I can buy cheap goods from the South, which in turn allows me a far greater material consumption than what would be possible if everything was produced on a Danish wage level. This is a recipe for ecological disaster, in addition to the sweatshops, child labor, and appalling working conditions with which the international working class is exploited to the utmost. The consumer aristocracy in the North takes daily “advantage” of this disastrous course, when we with our salaries can buy cheap products created through the exploitation of humans and corresponding exploitation of nature via the consumption of undervalued raw materials.

In the theory of imperialism of the 1970s, political economists explained how the development of the periphery in the South depended on capitalism in the center. Today we in the “center” are dependent on the production of the “periphery”. Lauesen argues that today, the “producer economies” and “consumer economies” are closely connected through global production chains, and that unequal exchange within this system has altered relations in the global system from the 1970s model of center and periphery. Lauesen predicts this economic development will create revolutionary situations in the South, which it is our responsibility to ally with and support.

The Global Resistance

At a time when there is a tabloid consensus that it is no use trying get people to read more than tweets of at most 140 characters at a time, or else just enjoy the selfies on Facebook, it is obviously risky to recommend a 380-page Danish volume on imperialism. However, the fact is that people are reading theoretical and analytical political works to a surprising extent, and that it is more the subsequent organizational effort that is lagging behind.

For example, Negri and Hardt’s Empire and Pikettys Capital are sold in huge numbers, and they are read. Therefore, my recommendation of Lauesen’s book has to do with continuing these earlier debates. His book has caused me to jump up from my chair, to yell and scream in rage about globalized capitalism, and has set the rusty gears in my brain and my dormant anarchic attitudes in motion.

In many ways, Lauesen is starting where Piketty leaves off, and although Piketty is empirically impressive, unlike Lauesen he provides no figures about globalized capitalism. Whereas Negri and Hardt’s analysis leads us to a universal Imperium with neither center nor periphery, it is Lauesen’s great strength that he ends his book by sketching a theory of action for the coming revolutionary struggle. He draws on the lessons learned from the Zapatistas and other revolutions of the 20th century where people tried to build transnational alliances with like-minded movements.

Lauesen emphasizes that the struggle against globalized capitalism also provides opportunities to undo the distinction between “us” and “them” that characterizes the politics of nation-states and the West, whether in relation to refugees, racism or economic exploitation, and from there move in the direction of global awareness, concrete solidarity, and common struggle. Confronting worldwide unequal exchange will have consequences for our way of life, but is indispensable if we do not want predatory capitalism to wipe out all human existence. Torkil Lauesen´s book Det Globale Perspektiv is a good place to start studying in the increasingly necessary revolutionary curriculum.

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In the 1970s and 80s, Torkil Lauesen was a member of a clandestine communist cell which carried out a series of robberies in Denmark, netting very large sums which were then sent on to various national liberation movements in the Third World. Following their capture in 1989, Torkil would spend six years in prison. In 2016, Torkil’s book Det Globale Perspektiv was released in Denmark. In it, he explains how he sees the world political situation today, and his thoughts about the future. This story of Torkil and his comrades’ activities that led to their arrest is recounted in fascinating detail in the book Turning Money into Rebellion: The Unlikely Story of Denmark’s Revolutionary Bank Robbers (edited and translated by Gabriel Kuhn, published by Kersplebedeb & PM Press in 2014) currently on sale at leftwingbooks.net. There is currently an Indiegogo fundraiser to be able to have Det Globale Perspectiv translated into English and published by Kersplebedeb in 2018. Please consider donating here.

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Losing My Religion (by André Moncourt)

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Recently one of those issues that arises constantly to tangle up leftists and liberals reared its head in my little world.  Some folks (all of European decent) in a band I know were in the studio and someone proposed using an aburukuwa, a Ghanian drum, I am told, to get just the right sound.  One of the young men in the band objected that that was “cultural appropriation.”

Although people who use this term rarely take time to define it, I presume that the issue with cultural appropriation is the apparent commodification of an oppressed culture’s artefacts to the advantage of an oppressor culture, or in layman’s terms:  ripping off other people’s shit – and maybe killing them in the process – for fun and profit. I personally consider the question of cultural appropriation to raise issues that are much messier and more complex than the young feller’s simple (perhaps simplistic) statement suggests.  I sort of think of it as the next-door neighbour of political correctness:  not quite as pointlessly guilt-ridden and paralyzing, but not as straight forward as its proponents suggest.

We’re talking about rock music here, so let’s just pause for a moment to think.  Let’s start with Elvis, who definitely didn’t create rock ‘n’ roll, but who, nonetheless, is the single figure most likely to leap to mind when one thinks about the genre – which has to do with media propensity for oversimplification, but I digress.  Chuck Berry is fond of being pissed off about not getting his dues (in the form of cash) as the fountainhead of rock ‘n’ roll.  Bo Diddley probably has an argument on his side as well, and he’s also got that real cool box-shaped guitar.  Me, personally I think the first rock ‘n’ roll song was Hot Tamales (They’re Red Hot) by Robert Johnson – and if we’re going to talk about appropriation and not getting your dues, I mean really, the man pretty much invented a genre that everyone and his/her dog has appropriated.

Anyway, back to Elvis.  Everyone knows Elvis stole black music.  Then, I think, well, what about the Sun Sessions? I mean, yeah, you can hear the impact of R&B, but you can also hear the impact of hillbilly music – some people might actually think that the idea of synthesizing those two styles and then spicing it with some this and that was actually pretty ingenious – apparently both Sammy Davis Jr. and James Brown thought the man rocked (as it were).¹  Fucking sellouts – who’s black and proud now?

Of course, I also find myself wondering:  Would it have been a better world if Elvis had just stayed with the hillbilly music, rather than playing a role in creating a form of music that was one of the sparks for the youth revolt that became the mass uprising of the sixties?²  Let’s see what John Trudell, former national chairman of the American Indian Movement, has to say about it in a song entitled Baby Boom Ché, (he sings in a form distinctly integrating aspects of white rock music and white beat poetry with traditional Native drumming):

The first wave rebelled,
I mean, we danced even if we didn’t know how,
I mean Elvis made us move.
Instead of standing mute he raised our voice
And when we heard ourselves something was changing,
You know, like for the first time we made a collective decision
About choices.³

Fucking sellout!

Anyway, we all know how that ends:  Vegas gets Elvis, and a bunch of guys (mostly white) grow their hair long and learn how to make guitars feedback (I will ultimately lose a good deal of hearing listening to them do their various party tricks).  Rock is born in little shitholes in London and New York City and Hamburg and San Francisco … well, basically anywhere where there was a high concentration of European and Euro-American youth.  Now, we all know that these guys stole the blues – I mean the Rolling Stones (definitely the robber barons of the genre, as it were) named themselves after a Muddy Waters song.  My friend Phil says he advised them to adopt the name, but that’s another story – and undoubtedly a lie.

This round of appropriation all gets a bit confusing.  For example, Hendrix was routinely criticized for playing “white man’s music.”  So, was Hendrix appropriating white man’s music that had been appropriated from black folks – mostly men, actually – or was he re-appropriating black man’s music?  Fucking sellout … maybe … I can’t tell … I’m getting confused here …  What is the issue exactly?  Should everyone just make sure to never play anything that wasn’t played by dead people of their own pigmentation?  That would be boring – not to mention the fact (which I’m clearly about to mention), that culture has always grown by cross-pollination. I mean, arguably the major restaurant option in London is Indian food – which is often actually Pakistani food, but let’s keep things simple for the honkies.  Often, said Indian restaurants will curry up some local foodstuff that one wouldn’t find in India – are we appropriating them, or are they appropriating us? (Editorial comment:  This raises an interesting question – Why is there a hierarchy in emphasis around these issues which parallels the hierarchy of senses as it were – visual art gets the most heavy critiques for appropriation, music and poetry next in line, food never gets criticized for it. Like who would ever want to give up all the spices and comfort flavours they like, based on some political checklist?)  Right you are – that is an interesting question.

Enough of Indian food – I find it too heavy for summer, in any case – and back to rock music.  Fatigued of the 317-minute guitar solo played at the speed of light with $82,000 worth of technological distortion and manipulation – here come the punks (a goodly number of them being bored middle class kids who appropriated “white trash” sensibilities as a political statement of sorts).  Now, you couldn’t get a whiter music – well, not for the first year or so, in any event – then the Clash and the Slits and the Ruts… appropriated reggae music with the help of Adrian Sherwood.  Lo and behold, a genuine Jamaican Rastafarian named Mikey Dread soon gets involved – Did we appropriate him?  When Prince Far I, Mikey Dread and Bim Sherman – all Jamaicans – work with Adrian Sherwood, a white man, are they being appropriated?  I keep trying to find that fucking line.

Let’s move onto hip hop, the music that improbably took over the world – what a clusterfuck.  From that point on it’s an appropriation free for all.  Hip hop starts sampling white pop and rock hooks, white kids start rapping, rap metal is born, then trip hop … I mean, country stars like Brad Paisley are doing duets with people like LL Cool J – who’s appropriating who?  They don’t seem to care, so I guess I won’t either.

Am I saying that appropriation from other cultures and peoples is a non-issue?  Not at all.  I live in Montréal, ergo I live on unceded (i.e., appropriated – and pretty fucking violently so) Mohawk land.  That in effect means that every moment of every day of my life is part of an ongoing act of criminal and genocidal appropriation.  That seems to me to be the kind of appropriation that should get people’s panties in a bunch.  It is a source of a lot more human pain and suffering than beating on any drum could ever be – you can’t just shy away like you saw the ghost of George Custer eating Tašú?ke Witkó’s⁴ brain, you have to do something.

Back to cultural appropriation:  slowly I’m getting to my point – trust me (or don’t, I don’t really care).  Like the land we appropriated, what it is we ultimately appropriate is far more important than some drum most Europeans and Euro-Americans (oh, and those white folks down under) have never even heard of being played by a band they don’t know.  What we routinely and as a matter of course appropriate is the surplus labour of the people of the Third World or the Global South or the Three Continents (whatever ideological formulation works for you – in the end they’re all names for the same areas and the same process). Let me explain what I mean here.  Look down at your feet.  Those Nikes or Adidas or knockoffs you’re wearing were assembled in a Third World sweatshop by people making a few dollars a sixteen-hour day, maybe in one of those factories with the nets around it to keep people from committing suicide to escape their jobs.  In short, we in the First World spend all day walking around on the appropriated sweat and blood or super-exploited people.  Now that there’s some “killer” appropriation.

Now go to the mirror – that really rad t-shirt might have been produced in one of those factories where the doors are locked to prevent the slowly suffocating workers from escaping the 45° C heat.  It might even be one of the ones where the workers were immolated because they couldn’t get out when the substandard factory burst into flames.  Come to think of it, my air conditioner probably comes from a factory like that too.

You can see where I’m going here, right?  Your food – the appropriated labour of disenfranchised peasants forced to slave away in dangerously polluted conditions on agribusiness plantations so we can buy avocados and raspberries and kiwis… all year round (and bitch about how fruit and vegetables don’t taste like anything anymore – go figure!).  The dishes you’re eating that food off of – why do you think Dollarama’s so cheap?  (First clue:  the top 1% of the population is getting richer – and the top 0.1% even more so – and the rest of us are getting poorer.)  Then, there’s all those technological gewgaws that have replaced human relationships in your life – assembled by people who could probably not afford them in conditions that will cut many of their lives short.  When they break, which they usually do pretty quickly, or when they become “pseudo-obsolete” (who wants an iPhone 5 when the iPhone 6 is on the market?), they will be turned into toxic garbage mountains where the children of workers just like the ones who assembled this crap play. What’s our major reaction to all of this?  We’re pissed when we have trouble communicating with that egregiously underpaid woman in Lahore who answers our tech support call when one of the aforementioned gewgaws isn’t cooperating.  I mean, really, how thoughtless of her to have an accent we have difficulty with when she speaks a language the British imposed upon her and her country, a country where she has to take a crappy phone job or starve.

All of this has me thinking that what these folks might well like would be for us to stop appropriating their lifeforce and converting it into our vacuous lifestyle, and I rather doubt they give a fuck if we’re playing an aburukuwa when we do that.  In one sentence:  Not playing the aburukuwa is not enough – it’s not even really a start.

1. http://ift.tt/1JRsGo2
2. All of that, of course, raises and interesting question.  I’ve been in the Appalachian area, I’ve been in Harlem, I’ve been in Newfoundland, and the fact of the matter is that Harlem shares far more cultural points of reference, music included, with the poor Irish Catholic neighbourhood I grew up in than either Appalachia or Newfoundland.  So, does that mean that if I play music from Harlem, it’s cultural appropriation, but if I play bluegrass or traditional Newfoundland music, it’s not cultural appropriation because we’re all white?  (Anyone who doesn’t think that there is any exploitation and oppression of whites that could possibly parallel that suffered by non-whites in North America really ought to go to Appalachia.)
3. http://ift.tt/1D2SohF
4. We stripped this man of his name and decided we’d call him Crazy Horse, effectively claiming the right to rename this man with a name that’s easier for us to pronounce – sort of like calling Beethoven “beet patch.”

on the main Kersplebedeb website: http://ift.tt/1D2SoxS

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Justice for Jennifer Laude

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on the main Kersplebedeb website: http://ift.tt/1sRiLW7

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Progress and Poverty: a response to Krul, Post and Hamerquist from Noel Ignatiev

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i often disagree with Noel Ignatiev - and the following essay is certainly no exception in that regard - however his reasoning is often provocative, which though a bit maddening is also not a bad thing. As such, it should not be assumed that the views in the following guest contribution are those of yours truly. However, it is worth reading in the context of the ongoing discussion of Zak Cope's book Divided World Divided Class. The other essays referenced here are by Charlie Post, Matthijs Krul, and Don Hamerquist. (Note that Krul also posted a further response to Hamerquist on his blog here.)


Progress and Poverty: a response to Krul, Post and Hamerquist (by Noel Ignatiev)
I enter into this discussion out of a sense of duty but also with hesitancy owing to my relative lack of knowledge about global investments, labor migration, transfer of values and other elements that some participants in the discussion seem familiar with and apparently consider essential. Refusing to be prejudiced by facts, and believing that the formulation of a question is its solution, I offer the following contribution.

Cope (like Don, I have not read him), Krul and Hamerquist share certain assumptions, although they differ among themselves on the political conclusions to be drawn from them. These assumptions are:

• The comparatively high standard of living of workers in the West is to some degree the result of their sharing in the loot extracted from the Third World. (I am foregoing the ironic quotation marks, hoping that people will bear in mind that West, Third World and standard of living are all ideological, as are our, their, wealth, poverty, center, periphery, relative privilege and other terms employed in the discussion.)
• Workers in the West are in general less revolutionary than the masses of poor in the Third World.
• There is a causal relation between 1) and 2), although – Don Hamerquist stresses this – it is not as determinant as some have claimed.

If either 1) or 2) is false, then 3) necessarily falls. In my opinion, both are false.

On 1): In 1890 a loaf of bread made from wheat grown in Minnesota cost less in Berlin than a loaf of bread made from wheat grown a hundred miles to the east. The difference was due to the mechanization of agriculture, storage and transport in the U.S., including trans-Atlantic shipping, compared to the techniques then used in Poland. The result was the ruination of agriculture in Poland (and much of Eastern Europe). Did the “shoals of roast beef and apple pie” in the U.S. (to which Werner Sombart in 1904 attributed the failure of Socialism there) depend on the destruction of Polish agriculture? Of course not. They depended on the accumulation of capital in the U.S. (at first based on the expropriation of the natives and the enslavement of Africans, and later on foreign investment in rails and canals) that made possible the cheap coal, timber, steel, tractors, railroads and steamships and ultimately the cheap food, houses, clothes, automobiles and appliances that constituted the famous American standard of living.

I remember reading an article around 1968 in Peking Review about how Chinese workers, using what the editors called the method of “ants nibbling at the bone,” that is, relying on hand tools, had built a stamping press. The editors, and apparently many Chinese, were proud of the accomplishment, as well they should have been. A few years later I worked in a medium-sized machine-tool factory in Chicago that had a couple of dozen presses equal in size to the one they had just built in China. There must have been five hundred factories like it in the U.S. (I make no pretense at numerical accuracy; what matters is the scale.) Didn’t the abundance of those presses in the U.S. explain more about the possession of refrigerators, washing machines, etc. by U.S. workers than the looting of China? Another example, again from China: at that time China, with six hundred million people on the land, was barely able, for the first time in modern history, to feed its population. The U.S., with three million people working in agriculture, was exporting food. Were the “shoals of roast beef and apple pie” consumed by U.S. workers taken out of the mouths of Chinese toilers? I don’t think so.

Cope, Krul and Hamerquist, following Emmanuel, point to unequal exchange as the mechanism underlying the transfer of value from Third to First World. (Emmanuel was the first to attempt to explain how the transfer took place. Lenin and others after him evidently regarded it as too obvious to require explanation. Charlie Post, who disagrees with them and with Emmanuel, gets it wrong: he has Emmanuel relying on transfers of value from industries with low organic composition to industries with high organic composition. Emmanuel actually adopted Marx’s formulation about transfers from low o.c to high o.c. industries and extended it to transfers from low-wage to high-wage regions.) A problem with Emmanuel’s argument and the arguments of his followers is that even if they are right about the process, until recently the output of the Third World was nowhere near great enough to account for the gap in living conditions. For most of the period the Third-Worldists are considering, the greatest portion – as high as eighty-five percent -- of U.S. investments were in a handful of developed countries, and the same is true for Britain, Germany, Japan, etc. If the Third-Worldists are right that U.S. relative privilege depended on low wages in the Third World, then wouldn’t it follow that as investment in the Third World increased the relative privilege would expand? Yet the opposite is true: nearly everything sold at Walmart is produced by low-wage (often prison) labor in China, yet the gap between U.S. and Chinese conditions has not grown but diminished.

I think I have shown that the poverty of the masses in the Third World cannot be the cause of the comparative wealth of workers in the First. But may not the reverse be true – that is, may not development in the First World account for its absence, and the misery that accompanies it, in the Third World? The reduction of the cost of producing wheat in North America and shipping it to Europe led to the ruination of Polish agriculture and the immiseration of the Polish peasants who, driven off the land, made their way to Chicago and Pennsylvania where they took up jobs in the industries that had destroyed their previous way of life. We are seeing similar phenomena today: the Rockefeller-sponsored Green Revolution has emptied the countryside of Asia, Africa and America, and sent millions of former peasants fleeing to swollen cities in those areas and to North America and Europe, but it has done nothing to elevate living standards in New York, London or Paris. On the contrary – it has increased competition for jobs in those places, with predictable results.

That is not the only way in which development in the First World retards and distorts development in the Third. In chapter 13 of volume 3 of Capital, Marx introduces the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, which he says is of great importance to capitalist production and which has been a mystery whose solution has been the goal of all political economy since Adam Smith. The law posits a relentless downward pressure on profits. The point of the law for this discussion is that it demands ever-increasing quantities of investment in constant capital in order simply to maintain profits, quantities that are beyond the reach of all but the largest capitalists and which therefore lead to the concentration of capital in ever-fewer hands and the elimination of the smaller and weaker among them. According to Wikipedia, “There were over 1,800 automobile manufacturers in the United States from 1896 to 1930. Very few survived and only a few new ones were started after that period.” If Studebaker, Nash and Kaiser, which were fairly big and employed many people, did not have sufficient capital to compete with General Motors in the world market, how could Nigeria and Mexico, let alone Haiti, develop an automobile industry, except through foreign investment? And if those countries could not develop an automobile industry and the steel, rubber, glass and other industries that go along with it, how could they expand their domestic markets and create the American way of life?

In sum, the relationship between conditions in the First and Third Worlds is the direct opposite of what the Third-Worldists argue. The Third-Worldist view is a perfect example of the mixing-up of appearance and essence that Marx attempted to counter through his concept of the fetish. That many workers in the developed countries mistake appearance for essence is a political problem; so is it when revolutionaries do the same.

2) Are the masses of the poor in the Third World more revolutionary than workers in the U.S. and other countries of the center? The answer depends on what is meant by revolutionary. If by revolutionary one means engaging in armed struggle for explicitly political ends, then the Third World wins hands down: from Chiapas to Palestine to Naxalbari and in a hundred other places people in Third World countries have taken up guns in defense of land tenure, water rights, local autonomy and other causes great and small. I see no evidence that any of the struggles are motivated by a vision of communism (except maybe Chiapas, and it is significant that the EZLN has not fired a shot in anger in over ten years). By and large those movements are fighting to realize the promises of the bourgeois, French, Revolution of 1789. That does not make them any less worthy of support, but it does say something about how they should be measured against struggles elsewhere. Moreover, the widespread presence of bands of Kalashnikoff-bearing pre-adolescents pillaging and raping in the interest of one or another warlord ought to warn us against any easy identification of armed struggle and revolution, and give us cause to respect the reluctance of workers in Europe and North America, treasuring past victories in the reform struggle (often won through violence and sacrifice), to embark on a path from which it is difficult to turn back.

Or perhaps the criterion of revolution is the commitment to explicit anti-capitalist programs. By this criterion, too, the Third World is ahead: in contrast to the virtual collapse of Socialist and Communist Parties in Europe and the absence in the U.S. of a Socialist Party with a mass following (and the widespread tendency to denounce Obama’s healthcare plan as “socialist”) even the movement headed by Chavez declares its goal to be “twenty-first-century socialism.” Once again, a word of caution: “twenty-first-century socialism“ is not socialism, and the 80 million members of the Chinese Communist Party, whose leading role is written into the Constitution, bear no greater connection to communism (and perhaps less) than do the 60 million Americans who voted Democratic in 2012 to democracy.

Let me advance two criteria for measuring what is revolutionary. The first is the extent to which the preconditions for communism have been established, and especially the degree to which they are taken for granted by the general population. The communist society is characterized by, among other things, the elimination of the distinctions between urban and rural life and between intellectual and manual labor, by the rejection of class distinctions, and by the overcoming of patriarchy. I submit that in no other country have these conditions been fulfilled as in the U.S. and that in general they are more fully realized in the First than in the Third World. Automobiles, televisions, computers and cell towers have made sure that residents of the remotest village in the Ozarks are familiar with daily life in New York. The millions enrolled in post-secondary schools, including the various technical institutes advertised on late-night TV, testify to the overcoming of the distinction between intellectual and manual labor. (I recently had a conversation with a man who was shining shoes at the airport; he had a stack of books on his stand, and informed me that he was studying for the exam to get his realtor’s license; show me another country where that happens.). Even the naïve insistence by Americans that they are “middle-class” points to their refusal to accept class distinctions as permanent. As for the patriarchy, in no other country are the access of women to higher education, well-paying jobs and careers, political office, and the right to drive cars, rent apartments, control their own bodies and choose their associates as freely as men so well established and so widely accepted as in the U.S. Or consider race: The very bitterness of relations between blacks and whites is evidence of the mutual, if often grudging, respect that exists between them – no quarrel so bitter as a family quarrel -- and stands in contrast to prevailing attitudes in Latin America and Asia, where the upper classes do not hate the lower classes so much as look down on them as members of another species. John Bracey recounts the time CLR James was watching a football game on TV and called to him from the other room. “Look at this,” said James. “Black people beating up white people on TV. Capitalism is doomed.” Of course none of these tendencies can be fully realized so long as capitalist relations prevail, but the new society exists within the shell of the old. The U.S. is more ready for communism than any other country in the world.

My second criterion for judging who is revolutionary is the degree to which working-class activity has transformed the world. The Vietnamese people won what was arguably the greatest military victory in history over the world’s greatest power. And what changed as a result? On a world scale, not much. Global corporations are now reaping greater profits from Vietnam than they did before the fall of Saigon. Meanwhile, the massive resistance by U.S. workers to capitalist work discipline, which reached a peak in the 1970s, was an important factor compelling capital to introduce new methods of production that did away with workers, and shift industry from the First to the Third World (and contributed to the U.S. defeat in Vietnam). The struggles of the working class are the chief motor transforming society. Even before it overthrows capital, the working class compels it to new stages in its development. Looking back at U.S. history, the resistance of the craftsmen compelled capital to develop methods of mass production; the workers responded to mass production by organizing the CIO, an attempt to impose their control on the rhythms of production; capital retaliated by incorporating the union into its administrative apparatus; the workers answered with the wildcat strike and a whole set of shop-floor relations outside of the union; capital responded to this activity by moving the industries out of the country in search of a more pliant working class, and introducing computerized production to eliminate workers altogether. The working class has responded to the threat of permanent separation from the means of obtaining life with squatting, rebellion, and food riots. And so forth; this is a continuous process, and it moves the society forward ¾ ending, as Marx said, in the revolutionary reconstitution of society or the common ruin of the contending classes.

Over a century and a half ago Marx wrote:

It is not a question of what this or that proletarian, or even the whole proletariat, at the moment regards as its aim. It is a question of what the proletariat is, and what, in accordance with this being, it will historically be compelled to do. Its aim and historical action is visibly and irrevocably foreshadowed in its own life situation as well as in the whole organization of bourgeois society today. There is no need to explain here that a large part of the English and French proletariat is already conscious of its historic task and is constantly working to develop that consciousness into complete clarity.

Of course, Marx’s last sentence is not without interest.

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Comments on a Divided World, from Don Hamerquist

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In the text that follows, Don Hamerquist addresses the current salience of imperialism, territory, and revolutionary organizing in the First World. This essay is prompted by the review of Zak Cope's Divided World Divided Class by Matthijs Krul, which was reposted to Sketchy Thoughts a few weeks ago. Don explains that "For Krul citations I am using generated page numbers from a print out of the version of the review and its single page of introduction that was on Sketchy Thoughts. These provide a rough guide to the relative locations of the citations, but may not translate accurately to other posted versions of the review. I considered not providing page citations, but I cite the document a lot and expect this will raise questions about interpretation, so this seemed like a better approach."

Here are Don's comments:
          
It’s not usually wise to comment on a review of a book that one hasn’t read, and I haven’t read the Cope book, Divided World Divided Class, although I hope to shortly. On the other hand, the time I’ve spent functioning politically with, and at times within, variations of radical Third Worldist anti-imperialism provides some insight into Cope’s arguments and some measure of agreement with his political conclusions.  However, just so I can be corrected on any possible misunderstandings, I’ll begin by sketching out my understanding of that position as it relates to some points I’d like to make about Krul’s review.

When Arghiri Emmanuel’s book, Unequal Exchange, was distributed in English in the early 70s, it was received as both a supplement and a correction to Lenin’s theory of imperialism - a theory that was showing some wear as its political context, the crisis of the more or less organized left at the outbreak of WWI, receded further into the past. Lenin’s theory didn’t adequately foresee subsequent decades of perpetuation and expansion of inequalities within and between diverging national forms of capitalist ‘development’. It didn’t explain how distinctively different social and class relations in the capitalist center and the capitalist periphery would be reproduced for decades after the onset of the “general (read final) crisis” of the “highest (also read final) stage” of capitalism.    

Emmanuel provided an approach to national oppression resting on a conception of unequal international exchange that in turn was based on Marx’s theory of prices of production in Volume 3 of Capital. He argued that, under certain assumptions, the economic relationship between low wage countries and high wage countries resulted in a transfer of value from the former to the latter. This process worked largely through exchange, through ‘trade’, and, while not excluding the element of extra-economic imperial coercion that is central to Lenin’s conception, it was not dependent on it. From Krul’s review and some other things that I have read, I understand the Cope book to be an attempt to expand the base of empirical support for the position that Emmanuel and others outlined in more general theoretical form. If I’m wrong about that, I can only hope, it doesn’t make the rest of what I say completely without value.

Emmanuel’s theory clearly pointed towards an accelerated weakening of the potential for internationalism and revolution among a growing, objectively privileged, stratum of the working classes in the capitalist center. While not necessarily replacing the processes that Lenin described as a basis for a labor aristocracy, this argument went well beyond the - essentially temporary - “crumbs” of superprofits that Lenin stressed, and pointed towards a massive long-term enlargement of the base of common interest between workers and capitalists in the imperial center. Then as now, this argument was politically unpalatable to large sections of the metropolitan left and it was widely challenged on both theoretical and practical grounds. Emmanuel’s book ends with extensive appendices where he debates these issues with Charles Bettleheim, a preeminent Maoist theoretician at the time. (Parenthetically I would say that Bettleheim made virtually all of Charley Post’s arguments in the early 70s –in substantially greater detail, with more coherence, and without the benefit of knowing certain things that we all should have picked up from the four decades of subsequent history.)

Just as Emmanuel’s positions were anathema to the mainstream metropolitan left, they have a continuing popularity with various critiques of Eurocentric radicalism and with an array of approaches to revolution on the periphery, including versions of prolonged people’s war. They also play a role in many Global South vs. Global North, “Bandung Conference”, perspectives that promote a radical third world socialism; e.g. Amin, Gunder Frank, and Wallerstein. (I would argue that this last category is essentially either utopian or reformist – or both – although many disagree.)

As Kersplebedeb notes in the introduction to Krul’s review, one of the advantage of the theory and politics of unequal exchange is that: “it strikes many of us as ‘obvious’ on a gut level.” (Review, p. 1) It appears to explain what is undeniable: the growing inequalities between center and periphery; the secular trend towards social passivity in the global North and West; and the continuing turmoil and rebelliousness in the global South and East. And it does this by assuming that these phenomena are interconnected and interdependent – mutually reinforcing - a point which also seems to some of us to be “obvious”.  Whenever the other side of the debate doesn’t simply ignore and evade this reality, it generally asserts that these processes are essentially independent of each other and the residue of unexplained issues is poorly explained through an unpersuasive combination of productivism and workerism.

Before getting to Krul’s review of Cope, I want to consider some of Emmanuel’s theoretical assumptions and raise some possible impacts of the changes in the global context since the late sixties when he actually wrote his book. I hope this will indicate the need for an expanded and modified framework of explanation to support the political conclusions of Third Worldist analysis that should be supported.

Emmanuel assumes a tendency towards profit equalization over a territorial area with an unlimited mobility of capital, but with no mobility of labor. Beyond this, he implicitly, and the like-thinking early Samir Amin explicitly, assume the existence or the real potential for a socialist territorial alternative to the capitalist world market. This ‘socialist camp’ is central to the state-centric oppositional politics that both of them suggest.

There are problems with both of these assumptions. International labor flows, specifically including labor mobility between periphery and center, are a major feature of contemporary capitalism. Any perspective that disregards them or diminishes their importance will encounter major problems. Just as clearly, the disintegration of  actually existing socialism into the capitalist world market makes it improbable, if not impossible, that any hypothetical national liberation state, New Democracy, or similar territorially-based transitional stage to ‘socialism’ will exercise substantive self-determination over basic economic processes for a meaningful period of time. Both of these problems raise doubt about the continuing relevance of the territorial state-centric national liberation framework used by Emmanuel and most Third Worldist radicalism – probably including Cope, and certainly Krul, who speaks of the importance of; “…vast transfers of value from the developing countries (my emphasis) to the developed ones…”. (Review, p. 6)

However, whether or not the Third Worldist framework provides an adequate explanation for it, the “gut level” feeling about global inequalities still is grounded in a significant reality. Inequality within and between segments of the working classes and poor are issues of overriding significance for any viable revolutionary strategy. These inequalities provide much of the content of the competitions among the oppressed and exploited on which the minority power of capital rests, and they constitute a more important element of the rule of capital than the always challenged, “monopoly of legitimate force” enjoyed by its state formations. Confronting the entire gamut of inequality must be the substance of internationalism and emancipatory politics.

Since my opinion of Negri’s current politics and much of his theoretical position is quite low, I’m reluctant to raise his views as a positive alternative to the Third Worldist perspective, although he explicitly presents them that way (see Empire, p. 333, for an example). Nevertheless, I think Negri and Hardt’s Empire provides a superior framework for dealing with the issues of equality and oppression that are based in the current relationship between capitalist center and capitalist periphery. This framework doesn’t exclude unequal exchange, but it emphasizes other aspects of growing inequality and oppression, while pointing out significant areas of tension and stress where these can be better confronted on a class rather than a national basis. These brief excerpts from Empire will give some sense of this point and will hopefully provide a context in which some of the issues with Krul’s review can be clarified.

“… the spatial divisions of the three Worlds (First, Second, and Third) have been scrambled so that we continually find the First World in the Third, the Third in the First, and the Second almost nowhere at all.” (Empire, p. xiii)

“Workers who flee the Third World to go to the First for work or wealth contribute to undermining the boundaries between the two worlds. The Third World does not really disappear in the process of unification of the world market but enters into the First, establishes itself at the heart as ghetto, shantytown, favela, always again produced and reproduced. In turn the First World is transferred to the Third in the form of stock exchanges and banks, transnational corporations and icy skyscrapers of money and command. Economic geography and political geography both are destabilized in such a way that the boundaries among the various zones are themselves fluid and mobile.” (Empire, p. 253-254)

“Empire is characterized by the close proximity of extremely unequal populations which creates a situation of permanent social danger.” (Empire, p. 336-337).

“From India to Algeria and Cuba to Vietnam, the state is the poisoned gift of national liberation.” (Empire, p.134, Negri’s emphasis)

Let me raise two processes, one based in the periphery and one in the center, that illustrate how this framework has the potential to illuminate current social conditions that tend to elude the Third Worldist analysis:

Negri’s conception of the “First World” becoming established in the “Third World” points towards new types of distorted and unequal social relations in the capitalist periphery. These emerge in contradictory relationships between new and growing ruling groupings, that are closely tied to the capitalist global system, and rapidly urbanizing working masses that are losing their ties to land, common areas, and collective resources. These processes can be partially explained in terms of national oppression, but in such a framework important elements of the extension to the periphery of what Marx terms “real subsumption” will not get adequate attention.

After the products and resources of the periphery are forcibly integrated into unequal capitalist relations of global distribution, the most valuable resource of these societies, their productive working populations, are also forcibly integrated into capitalist labor forces. A simple emphasis on the transfer of value from periphery to center tends to treat labor on the periphery as an undifferentiated oppressed unity confined within national social formations. In actuality the element of differentiation, particularly in terms of gender, is of primary importance and the effects of this differentiation cut across territorial boundaries and political jurisdictions in the capitalist periphery.

These are complex processes of expanded and continuing primitive accumulation with consequences that go beyond the separation of those who work from the tools and resources necessary for their minimal self-sufficiency. They cause involuntary and disruptive population movements in general, but more specifically they contribute to gender defined labor forces on a transnational level where a rapidly increasing proportion of women workers are employed at wages that challenge the reproduction of their labor power, while an expanding segment of working age men are permanently marginalized from the ‘legal’ economy. These processes are expedited, and at times resisted, by an array of quasi-state and civil society formations that indirectly and directly enforce labor discipline and control insurgent potentials - in large part through perpetuating male supremacy by overt force, not infrequently, military force. The fact that this occurs in areas that are increasingly characterized by hollow or failed governmental structures gives the results a de facto legitimacy despite all noise about rights and humanitarian interventions.

When it comes to the treatment of the capitalist center, the Third Worldist perspective is prone to make outside of time characterizations of the labor aristocracy. The general argument is that an expanded transfer of surplus value to the center equates to an expanded basis for a social democratic class collaboration that, in turn, equates to greater political stability for capitalism. The capitalist aristocracy of labor enjoys economic and social privileges that may entail some short run deductions from capitalist profit, but these costs are strategically justified by its centrality to the social order needed to maintain and expand capitalist profits over the longer run. This leads Krul to an endorsement of what is apparently one of Cope’s political conclusions:

“…the Western working class currently is not revolutionary, and in fact cannot (Krul’s emphasis)be revolutionary without majorly violating the expectations of Marx and Engels’ theory of historical materialism.” (Review, p.6. I’ll return to this point often.)

One feature of any aristocracy worth the name is that it is essentially hereditary. A capitalist labor aristocracy will only serve its function for capital, if it is a relatively stable network of privileges passed down through generations. So it is certainly a relevant issue for Third Worldist perspectives if, on the balance, processes in the capitalist center are undermining and fracturing this historic base of political support for the hegemony of capital – or if they are not. Negri’s conception of the Third World invading the First World and establishing itself at its heart – an image with deep Third Worldist roots extending back to Martin Nicolaus’s debate with Ernest Mandel in the sixties, points towards “…a situation of permanent social danger”. This “danger” relates to possibilities for major disruptions of the equilibrium provided by the social democratic labor aristocracy. In my opinion, any political perspectives that assume a continuation of current levels of metropolitan stability conflicts with a lot of contradictory evidence – including some that is introduced in the concluding sections of Krul’s review.

Just to be clear, this doesn’t mean that relatively affluent, typically white male, metropolitan workers are on the cusp of becoming militant revolutionaries or that their narrow sectoral demands have a newly acquired radical significance. It does mean that they are increasingly disaffected from what many of them had previously thought was ‘their’ country, ‘their’ government, ‘their’ system – and that there is an increased likelihood that they will eventually begin to act out this disaffection. Unfortunately, without some major changes that don’t appear to be on the horizon, the bulk of any militance and radicalism is likely to be right wing in character, but, nevertheless, this does not bode well for the stability of metropolitan capitalism.

Beyond this there are many other destabilizing elements in the capitalist center that don’t depend exclusively on what this relatively privileged working class fraction does or does not do - including a number of situations marked by that “social danger” from the “close proximity of extremely unequal populations” that Negri mentions. However, at this time I am only arguing that unless the Third Worldists only intend to explain a past that is being superceded, they must either challenge the accuracy of this estimate of current trends toward destabilization and possibilities of social ruptures, or they must adjust their “cannot be revolutionary” estimate of the political impact of unequal exchange value transfers on the Western working classes.

This brings me more directly to the Krul review of the Cope book. I’d like to approach it somewhat in reverse, beginning from some of its conclusions before looking more carefully at the content of the argumentation. I think that these conclusions, and specifically some of them with which I have considerable agreement, don’t fit the major themes of the argument, giving the complete product a certain schizoid character.

Krul presents his conclusions quite casually at the end of the review. Consider the following:

“In the current period, the capitalist classes of the First World seem inclined to go more and more against the historic compromise of social-democracy, and the social-democracy is therefore declining in historical vigour proportionally to the shift of capitalist production from the First to the Third World in search of lower wages and higher profits.” (Review, p. 9)

I agree that this is a partial description of the actual tendency of metropolitan capital, although I might quibble about whether it involves a ruling class ‘inclination’ rather than a circumstances imposed compulsion. However, Krul doesn’t seem to appreciate the implications of this passage for the political positions that earlier sections of his review have substantially endorsed.  He has advanced a conception of global capitalism in which value transfers from the periphery become, “an almost total compensation for the domestic exploitation of the First World working class” (Review, p. 6), providing the economic basis for a much broadened social democratic consensus that involves, “…a wider and wider section of the working class of the center.” (Review, p. 6). If that is the case, what are the new calculations and/or new pressures that are inclining the “capitalist classes of the First World” towards a course that will certainly disrupt a relatively functional element of capitalist stability in the center, the arrangement that has provided important support for its capacity to exercise power in the rest of the world – specifically, what Krul terms the “historic compromise of social-democracy”?

Perhaps Krul is pointing to some new and greater threat that demands additional resources; e.g.; the political emergence of the toilers of the East that the later Lenin named as the ultimate guarantee of the working class revolution everywhere. But if there was once a period when it was possible to believe that the movement for national liberation in the oppressed ‘countryside’ was successfully encircling the urbanized center of world capitalism, that period is decades over – and has left behind its own list of unanswered, but still very pressing, questions. 

The concluding sentences of Krul’s review raise the issue more starkly, but still without providing any clear direction:

“This world monopoly is now that of the ‘West’ so-called, and every day it is more broken while every day the Western working class fights to maintain it. What will we do?” (Review p. 10)

Who or what is breaking the, “world monopoly…of the West”, if it actually is becoming… “more broken” every day? Since according to Krul, the, “…Western working class fights to maintain it”, what has changed, if anything, with respect to who they will be fighting with, and who against? What social forces do these changes allies and opponents represent – and how will this “fight”  be conducted?

There is an entire line of analysis that attempts to deal with a portion of these issues on a global level. I’m thinking about Wallerstein and, more specifically, Giovanni Arrighi (The Long Twentieth Century). Their positions emphasize contradictions in global capitalist processes and, at least recently, have moved away from the focus on revolutionary processes in specific national social formations on the periphery that is associated with modern Maoism and its nationally specific notions of prolonged people’s war. I don’t see any necessary conflict between this ‘world system’s’ view and Negri’s conception of empire – at least not on the issues that are of concern here.

Arrighi maintains that successive cycles of global capitalist expansion have been associated with the emergence of a distinctive world hegemonic state, and that there is always some tension between the capitalist hegemon, that functions in part according to a “territorialist logic of power”, and capitalist production that functions according to a universal logic of accumulation. This leads to “…recurrent contradiction between an ‘endless’ accumulation of capital and a comparatively stable organization of political space”. (see Arrighi, p. 27-34 for the general argument)

According to Arrighi, writing in the last years of the twentieth century, this “recurrent contradiction” is currently exacerbated by the decline of the U.S. as world hegemon, with - after he discounts first Japan and then China - no viable successor in view. He sees the contemporary content of the contradiction as follows:

“The uncontainability of violence in the contemporary world is closely associated with the withering away of the modern system of territorial states as the primary locus of world power…Combined with the internationalization of world scale processes of production and exchange within the organizational domains of transnational corporations and with the resurgence of suprastatal world financial markets, these unprecedented restrictions and expectations have translated into strong pressure to relocate the authority of nation-states both upward and downward.” (Arrighi, p. 331)

I have some agreement with these views, but I’m not sure if Krul or others sympathetic to more traditional Third Worldist national liberation politics do as well. However, even if Krul’s conclusion does point to the disruptions and dislocations associated with the decline of the U.S. as the last in a series of Western world hegemonic states, it is still questionable to treat the U.S. as equivalent to the “West”. But the “world monopoly” that Krul describes as broken, but still defended by its working classes, has been presented as the hegemony of the “West”, and not that of the U.S.

In any case, I agree with Krul on two points. First; the working out of the contradictions between profit maximization and political stability in the core territories of the global capitalist system, does leave traditional social arrangements …“more broken every day”. Second; to the extent that the working class in the center confines its resistance to rearguard actions that defend increasingly eroded structures of relative privilege, the best outcome is to bind itself more tightly within its strategic subordination to capital, while the worst is to expand the social base for fascism.

However, I think that Krul goes substantially beyond these points when he appears to argue that the metropolitan working class’s acceptance of the role of junior partner in a failing enterprise is fixed in concrete and beyond effective political challenge from the left. This subordination is presented as a necessary political outcome from the overwhelming capacity of the, “…ruling classes of the center to buy off the exploited working class of the center with the proceeds of this imperialist rent” (an imperialist rent which through social democracy is then) “…shared with a wider and wider section of the working class of the center.” (Review, p. 4). This then expands the sectors of the metropolitan working class that, as Krul has said and as I will regularly repeat, “cannot be revolutionary”.

I do like this conception of the way that social democracy has functioned to broaden and generalize the base of class collaboration, however at this time I’m concentrating on problems with this overall approach. First, in my experience politics that are grounded in conceptions of objective material privilege, as is the case with the Third Worldist analysis, generally tend towards overly deterministic conclusions about the linkage between these relative material advantages and the ideas and actions of those that objectively benefit from them. Krul hints at a criticism of one possible form of this reductionist mistake when noting that Cope; “does not wholly avoid the common notion among Third Worldist Marxist writers that the economic analysis as such necessarily generates a set of strategic political concerns…(and – d.h.)…one simply cannot make the leap from historical and political economic analysis to strategy…” (Review, p. 8).  However, it would seem appropriate to ask Krul whether it is not true that his statement, “…the Western working class… cannot be revolutionary”, is exactly such a leap from “analysis to strategy”?

While there certainly are problems if a particular analysis is applied in such a doctrinaire way that it submerges other significant elements of politics, the criticism that Krul implies only deals with a secondary aspect of a larger issue. More important problems emerge when the economic and political reality that is the object of the analysis is presented as the necessary and sufficient cause of the ideas and behaviors of specific social groups. This is a big problem even when the material analysis of conditions is essentially valid. It is a larger problem when this analysis is flawed. It is not possible to adequately explain social action as a mere effect of social circumstances. The essential premise for the possibility of revolution always rests on the potential for enlightened social action to modify and even transform circumstances. Forgive me for an illegitimate argument, but without such a dialectical potential, what graduate student, privileged by definition, might become a revolutionary – and we do see many of them around.

At various points, Krul implies that he – and not only Cope or other Third Worldist theorists that he is reviewing – regards an expanded base for social democracy as equivalent to an expanded social democracy and from this point concludes that the metropolitan working classes (or at least major parts of them) are necessarily non revolutionary. I’d like to respond to this view with a deeper consideration of the implications of two passages from Krul, beginning with a restatement of the full version of the one that I’ve been citing ad nauseum:

“…the Western working class currently is not revolutionary and in fact cannot (Krul’s emphasis) be revolutionary without majorly violating the expectations of Marx and Engels’ theory of historical materialism.” (Review, p. 6).

“This labor aristocracy, so formed, then no longer fulfills the one special role the working class has in Marx and Engels’ theory of historical materialism: namely, to be unable to emancipate itself without overthrowing the conditions it itself reproduces with its labour.” (Review, p. 4).

The first citation combines an accurate description of Western working classes in a first clause, with a second clause that is, at best, an eminently debatable assertion about Marxism. The low regard that Marx and Engel’s had for the English working class in the last half of the nineteenth century, particularly with respect to its attitudes towards Ireland, was based on their estimates of its response to relative privileges. In this case, and in similar ones, substantial “revolutionary…expectations” for a working class segment that is heavily privileged, knows that it is privileged, knows that its privileges are the consequence of the oppression of other workers, and is set on retaining its privileges, certainly are a matter of self-delusion. However, even for a completely determinist view, logic requires that, if privileges are being eroded rather than expanded, any identification with ‘their’ capitalism will be shaken and revolutionary possibilities can be expected to emerge. This is even more likely, if, as is typically the case, the erstwhile privileged sectors have no real understanding that their relative affluence is related in any way to other worker’s impoverishment, and instead have regarded their advantages, assuming that they even recognize them as advantages, as a deserved reward for past struggles and present productivity, rather than as ‘privileges’.

More important, this implied conception of the revolutionary process, at least insofar as such a process is both anti-capitalist and liberatory, leaves out a crucial element. Revolution involves a break with capitalist patterns of competitive consumption; it projects needs that capitalism cannot satisfy and demands that capital cannot completely co-opt. These necessary ruptures with capitalist normalcy are possible, “be their wages high or low”, as someone has said. The issues of material privilege certainly impact the essential struggle for real equality and are thus always relevant to revolution - but they are not all that is important to the process.

This leads to the second cited passage, and its treatment of the, “one special role the working class has in Marx and Engel’s theory of historical materialism.” Laying aside the ambiguity surrounding the theory of historical materialism and the massive debates about its ‘correct’ interpretation; and laying aside as well, the real possibility that Marx and Engel might not provide the final word on the issues that confront us a century and a quarter after the end of their productive collaboration, I’d question both the point being made here and the manner in which it is being made.

We can begin by agreeing that working class revolution must emancipate all social groups in the process of eliminating capitalist production relations and the classes that constitute these relations Then the first question being posed is: can the sections of the working class in the capitalist center that have gained ‘more’ under capitalism commit to anti-capitalism; while the second question, assuming that such relative advantages haven’t completely ruled out this possibility, under what conditions and through what processes will more advantaged sections of the working class commit to anti-capitalism.

I answer the first question in the affirmative. Some of what Krul says implies that he might disagree, but I’m inclined to doubt it. A literal application of that position would treat struggles for improvements in material conditions and expansions of formal democracy in the capitalist center as entirely negative for revolutionary prospects – at least to the degree that they achieve some partial successes. It’s one thing to argue against incremental reformist notions that see revolution as the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow path of sectoral improvements in working and living circumstances. It’s quite another to see the reform struggle as only an inevitable process of corruption of some initially pure revolutionary impulse.

This is an impossible position to translate into any effective practical revolutionary politics in the capitalist center. And for those Third Worldists that might be inclined to discount any revolutionary possibilities in the capitalist center, it’s important to recognize that the same type of critique would also apply to partial struggles in the capitalist periphery – although in a distinctive manner. In the center, the reformist distortion is more likely to take the form of limiting struggles because there is ‘too much to lose’ by challenging capitalism. In the periphery, the reformist distortion can take the form of limiting struggles because there is ‘too much left to win’ within capitalism.

Leaving any implications with respect to peripheral capitalism for examination in a different context, let’s assume that the possibility for some relatively privileged sectors in the center becoming revolutionary is not completely ruled out. Krul might recognize a relatively limited revolutionary possibility in the working classes of the center, although one that is commonly approached in a reformist and opportunistic fashion. Recognizing that the magnitude of this potential and the political approaches required to materialize it will still be potential differences, I could agree with such an estimate. However, some clarifications are still needed to move this past a formal level.

What ‘more’ do the social democratic segments of the working classes of the West have that is ‘too much more’? Can this ‘too much more’ be quantified - with a recognizable break point between where it is determinant and where it isn’t? Is the crucial characteristic primarily a matter of higher wages – real or nominal, and, if so, how much higher? Does the counter revolutionary side of ‘too much more’ relate to the length of the working day, or to the breadth of the franchise, or to the stability of the social security net? Do segments of the metropolitan working class that are not white and male, but that also do have relatively more, also have ‘too much more’?

When these matters are worked through, I very much doubt that Krul’s conclusions about the metropolitan working class – “…unable to emancipate itself without overthrowing the conditions it itself reproduces with its labour” – will mark out any significant distinction between the working classes of the center and those of the periphery. Both areas require a rupture with existing patterns of struggle and accommodation. Although the specific form and content of the rupture will certainly vary, the one essential element that will be involved in both areas is the frontal challenge to all of the forms of inequality that are embedded within oppression and exploitation.

I’d like to conclude this comment by briefly noting some other interesting points that Krul makes in his review. These may or may not be integral to the questions about the existence and the impact of the labor aristocracy in the West. I think that they are, others may not, but at the very least they are important matters in their own right. I’d mention three such topics that Krul’s review raises: the question of the ‘socialism’ of the ‘actually existing socialism’ variant; the conception of social democracy; and the conception of fascism.

In a larger statement on the continuing relative weakness of revolutionary movements in the West, Krul says; “…in being more serious about supporting the so-called ‘really existing socialisms’ elsewhere in the world, the Moscow line parties and ‘Eurocommunists” were arguably still more useful than the current leading groups.” (Review, p. 6). This seems to mean that “serious” support for the socialist camp so-called was, and presumably still is, good politics. This is a common theme among certain Maoist tendencies that are looking to separate what was positive from what was negative in our history. While it’s hard to disagree with the disparagement of, “…the current leading groups”, assuming I properly understand the reference, none of this ‘really existing socialism’ was socialism in the only meaningful sense of that term, as a transition to communism. This was a ‘socialist camp’ that made communism appear undesirable and confirmed prejudices that it was not possible. Its failures and crimes bear more responsibility for the mass rejection of revolutionary communism as an objective, than any of the actions or the ideologies of capitalism. There’s nothing good here and – although there are important things to be learned, that has nothing to do with sifting through the wreckage for some trinkets that might still work.

This is the first time that I have seen the combination of an endorsement of the Comintern 3rd Period conception of “social fascism” with an endorsement of the post-Dimitrov WWII popular front. In my view they fit together and gain an essential similarity as successive massive errors. I think that Krul’s position, insofar as I understand it from this review, involves a mistaken conception of both social democracy and fascism. I think that a radically different conception of each of these is a vital core for an adequate revolutionary strategy, and a more complete understanding of the relevant history wouldn’t hurt either. This is already embarrassingly long-winded for what it set out to be, so I’ll leave it there for the moment, but I am intrigued by the issues and prepared to follow them out in more depth. However, not to repeat some of the problems with this piece, I’d first want to read some of the additional material that Krul indicates he has written.


Don 2/17

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