Lame and predictable

Looks like the union-backed drive to recall Republican politicians in Wisconsin and replace them with Democrats has failed. It was a predictable result, but even success for the Dems wouldn't have changed the fundamental issues at stake.

As soon as the energy and activism of the Wisconsin protests was diverted into harmless electoral channels, this movement stopped being about anything but the Democrats' political interests. When the workers of Wisconsin were leading the protests, there was a genuine Egypt-like quality to it, of the people getting pissed off enough to take their destiny into their own hands. The logical next step should have been a general strike.

Unfortunately, no matter how many times the Democrats piss on the interests of the rank-and-file union members (and the working class in general), the corrupt union leadership is only too willing to make recalling Republicans and electing Democrats the entire focus of the movement - as if that would make any difference whatsoever to the push for austerity and the attack on collective bargaining rights.

I've said that the American political system won't really change until progressives, the left and the working class unshackle themselves from the anchor of a corrupt, corporatized Democratic Party. But one of the biggest problems is that the leaders of the union are still perfectly cozy with the current arrangement. Ultimately, it doesn't really matter to the union bureaucrats if the Dems break all their promises and spit on unions by neglecting things like the Employee Free Choice Act; all that matters is that THEY get to retain their privileges and hefty salaries. It's the predictable outcome of bureaucracy in all its forms - bureaucrats that raise themselves above the rank-and-file forget who they represent and become consumed only with preserving their own interests and perks.

The working class needs to fight against the Democratic Party as much as against the Republican Party, but there's one massive obstacle that unions (the most organized workers) need to get past - the corrupt leadership that continues to tie them to the Democrats.

In Defence of Marxism

From a recent exchange on Facebook.

A Facebook-friend of a friend made the following remark during a discussion about the Greek debt crisis:

Marxist theory is hopelessly shallow in its perception of how people see themselves. Very few identify as "working class" or "bourgeois" but many would escribe themselves as "Canadian" or "humanist" or "young," "Muslim" or "father." Class identity is important but not all-important.

My response:

Marxists explained a long time ago that there is no final crisis of capitalism - the bourgeoisie will always find a way out until the working class takes power into its own hands.

Please excuse the Marxian terminology (you might say jargon), but it's the most accurate way for describing the broad movements of the economy in terms of who actually produces the wealth (workers). Marxism is actually much more complex than the simple dichotomy of "bourgeoisie/proletariat". It allows for the petty bourgeoisie (small business owners and professionals), lumpen-proletariat (swindlers, criminals, beggars, those on the margins of society), peasants if there are any. And that's just in recent history - in earlier times there were different classes - freeman/slave, lord/serf, etc. As a way of sketching out the broad class formations in social relations, Marxist theory is indispensable.

But Marxism doesn't JUST talk about class. That's an understandable misconception. Like any good method of analysis, it takes into account as much information and facts as possible, including gender, race, nationality, and so on. At the same time, it realizes that class is ultimately the determining factor when it comes to actual change of the social order. What we think of as "the middle class" is actually the working class that is enjoying the benefits of past struggles - for the 8-hour work day, overtime pay, pensions, collective bargaining rights. All these are now being taken away from us. Why? Because capitalism is in crisis worldwide.

It's only a Greek problem? Wrong. (Just ask the Wall Street Journal.) When Greece defaults - and it will, no matter what austerity measures are put in place - we'll get defaults in Ireland and Portugal, followed by a financial crisis in Spain, dragging the whole of Europe and the United States into it. French and German banks have the most to lose from a Greek default, which is why their governments are pushing for bailouts of the debtor nation.

The problem is, these kinds of periodic crises are endemic to the capitalist system, and even its most ardent defenders will admit that. Duh - boom and bust, right? Everybody knows a capitalist economy will have recessions and depressions. BUT: It's only the people who win under capitalism that are cushioned from the effects. The working majority always lose out.

Why is there massive unemployment that just seems to get worse all the time? Why are people with jobs being forced to work longer hours for less pay and benefits? Why are governments cutting social services everywhere? I live in Toronto and our mayor wants to cut the budget of all departments by 10%, including the fire department. Why is all this happening? Because this kind of thing always happens when the capitalist party ends and the working class gets the hangover ("Wall Street got drunk" - George W. Bush). Bankers blew a hole in the global economy. They, along with other corporations and the wealthy, control our governments (the Golden Rule - "he who has the gold makes the rules"), and now they want to make the working class pay for a crisis they caused.

The media constantly chirp about a recovery. In truth, the long postwar economic boom has been pushed far past its shelf life through increased debt. A little fast history: capitalism was effectively pulled out of the Great Depression by World War II, which served as an artificial stimulus to a massive armaments boom. The technologies that emerged from the war and the new markets opened up to the United States led to a long economic boom that started to plateau in the late 60s and stagnated in the 70s. As a reaction, the deregulation of the 80s and development of ever more exotic financial securities led to the ever-increasing financialization of the economy and to a large extent de-coupled financial markets from the "real" economy. (Stocks numbers are great right now, employment figures not so much.)

Over the last 30 years of reaction, workers' wages stagnated while the bosses' have skyrocketed (this was partly masked by greater consumer debt). Income inequality is worse than ever, and there seems to be no real recovery in sight. This is not a matter of me reading a Marxist book and thinking about rrrrrevolution! It's about being sick of a system that's left our world a stinking impoverished mess. I'm sick of the wars, inequality, the hunger, the environmental degradation, the national rivalries and racism - and the system of private profit at the root of it all.

People react strangely to the term "dictatorship of the proletariat", because they associate the first word with individual tyrants. In fact, it just means power, and it makes a lot more sense if you consider that right now we live under the "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie". Ever get the feeling that your vote doesn't matter? In some ways, it doesn't - not when the game is rigged and the same people are pulling the strings no matter who gets elected to office. If you want to describe who those people are, bourgeoisie is as good a term as any.

One last point I want to make, and I congratulate anyone who's made it this far. I used to think that the idea of two classes, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, duking it out was an antiquated 19th century notion. I hope I've absolved you of any confusion there. When Marxists talks about the "working class", people tend to think about workers in factories. But it's really about producing surplus value (i.e. goods and services), and the tools and machines you use to make those (if any) don't really make a difference. So that includes service jobs, like working at Wal-Mart or being a waitress. It includes white collar office jobs and blue collar industrial jobs. Basically, it's anybody who earns a wage for a living.

Marxists don't back the working class because of some romantic idea of what it means to be a worker or because we think they're great people. We support them because they are the only class capable of transforming society - in the first place, by shutting it down.

If Richard Branson or Bill Gates goes on strike for a year...who cares? But if there's a general strike for just one day, everything stops. Nothing can get done, nothing can be produced. You'll notice that in Egypt, it was only when the Egyptian working class mobilized - when we saw strikes in factories, among unionized workers of all kinds - that Muburak was finally pressured to step down. Essentially, if you're sick of the world we live in right now, there's only one group in society that can change that: the international working class. Workers in Egypt have more in common with workers in Canada than either of us have with our elected national "leaders".

On Clarity

The worse things get, the clearer the solution becomes.

I can't remember the last time I read the news and did not become actively pissed off at what I was hearing. Regardless of whether I learn something on corporate news networks or a Marxist blog, the facts themselves are almost always enraging. Despite the brief rays of hope we saw during the Arab Spring, and the events around the world inspired by the heroic struggles of the Middle East (e.g. Wisconsin), the powers-that-be are still to strong to allow events to spiral out of their control for too long. When the Arabs finally rose up in revolt against the brutal Western-backed dictators that had held them down for decades, the corporate elite was taken totally by surprise. Yet they clawed their way back to relevance through the most blunt expression of their power: brute military force.

NATO's Libya adventure has now lasted for months and is probably the most visible expression of the increasing lawlessness of the Western bourgeoisie. Barack Obama's autocratic decision to commit the United States to another Middle Eastern war was helped along by a Congress seemingly more eager than ever to demonstrate its own irrelevance. The Obamabots - those Democratic loyalists who will cheer whatever Obama does, despite criticizing the same conduct when Bush did it - fell for the ruse of a "humanitarian war" hook, line and sinker. The accompanying propaganda has been excruciating, as another designated official enemy - in this case, Libyan strongman Col. Qaddafi - becomes the latest Hitler.

Most mornings on the way to work, I read the free newspaper Metro that they hand out at the TTC train stations. It contains recut articles from the Associated Press and so you get the most blandly uninformative, "objective" (i.e. corporate-friendly) account of the news possible. Ever since the Libya war began, Western reporters have dutifully fallen in line, accepting any and all propaganda their governments feed them while playing the part of adversarial, hardcore journalists when it comes to reporting on the Libyan side. There's plenty of reason to doubt the allegations of Qaddafi equipping his troops with Viagra and condoms and ordering them to engage in mass rapes, but our "free press" are the best stenographers around when it comes to swallowing government claims wholesale.

Oh, today Obama dramatically escalated his other undeclared illegal war in Yemen, giving the CIA carte blanche to intensify its drone strikes. During all of this, of course, the overriding concern of the crusading journalists in the U.S. media was Anthony Wiener's wiener - naturally overlooking the fact that nothing illegal happened and this was a purely personal matter between the Representative and his wife. It makes me sick to see them question a humiliated, powerless figure like Wiener (despite the fact that I'm no fan of his slavish pandering to Israel and AIPAC) and pretend that they're the heroic checks on power they apparently still think they are. As always, Glenn Greenwald said it best.

Why do I mention all these disparate subjects? I guess because they illustrate the rapid decline of our media, politics, and socio-economic system over the last few decades, but especially the American one. All the way up to a few years ago, I would read blogs like Crooks and Liars to hear the latest inanities uttered by some Republican politician and get annoyed that anybody could be stupid enough to believe their lies. Now, of course, things are so exponentially worse that I don't even notice things like that anymore. I almost have more respect for the deluded Republican base than the Obamabots, because at least they're opposed to Obama, despite it being for completely fictitious and nonsensical reasons cooked up at False News and right-wing talk radio. I certainly have more "respect" (not the right word, but the best I could think of) for Republicans than Democrats, because at least they're basically honest about screwing working people and fellating the rich, while the Democrats lie their asses off pretending to care about ordinary people.

With the total bankruptcy of the two-party system - and that includes both Democrats/Republicans in the U.S. and the Liberals/Conservatives in Canada - the necessity for a socialist alternative has never been greater. In Canada the NDP is coming off strong from the recent federal election, when it finally became the Official Opposition. Down south, the need for a Labor Party is increasingly obvious even to the reformists; witness AFL-CIO head Richard Trumka finally getting the message and beginning the process of jettisoning labour from the Democratic Party. Most people in North America are far from having any kind of socialist ideology, but I've learned so much in the past several months from Fightback and the International Marxist Tendency that I have a far better grasp of theory than ever. The class struggle is an objective reality and most workers are beginning to realize that.

That's why the struggle in the years ahead, despite its difficulties, paints a clear picture of objective class relations that will become more and more obvious to everyone the worse the global economy gets and the more they push these austerity policies on us. I started writing again today because I've been reading for so long and it's time for me to start speaking out once more using the power of the pen. The Canadian Union of Postal Workers and Air Canada employees have both begun strike actions recently, which will set the tone for the years of struggle to come. It's time to get down to business - meaning it's time to fight business.

Toronto: Fred Weston speaks on the Syrian uprising

Originally published at Fightback.

Fresh from his appearance at Fightback’s 2011 national conference, In Defence of Marxism editor Fred Weston spoke at the University of Toronto’s OISE building on May 24 to discuss the Arab Revolution and specifically its effects on Syria.

While the fate of the Assad regime remains uncertain, the widespread revolts that have shaken the country to its foundations are only the beginning of a long process, which Fred put in the context of the wider Arab Revolution.

The bourgeoisie had been completely taken aback by the mass revolts in Tunisia and Egypt. Prior to the eruption of popular anger, the Economist had described revolution in Tunisia as unlikely, given that the country was more “Westernized”. By contrast, once Ben Ali was deposed, the BBC stressed the unlikelihood of revolution spreading to Egypt on the conceit that that country was so unlike the West. This racist portrayal of a passive and sedate Arab population, combined with a belief that revolution was purely a phenomenon of the past, gave the bourgeois a sense of false confidence.

The sudden mobilization of the Tunisian and Egyptian proletariat revealed the true balance of power. As Fred outlined, the global working class has actually never been stronger than it is today – both numerically and as a percentage of the population. Many of the Arab countries currently roiled by revolution were actually experiencing China-level economic growth at the time. Yet the distribution of wealth was skewed towards the capitalists and the workers saw no improvement in their standard of living – a worldwide phenomenon. The anger of the working class was already evident in the explosive protests across Europe during the fall of 2010 – the strikes in Spain and Portugal, riots in Greece, and the largest student protest ever in Britain.

This revolutionary turmoil came not as a bolt of lightning from a clear blue sky, but was the culmination of decades of economic policy. The past 30 years saw extensive privatization and ruthless cuts to welfare and social services. Bourgeois economists’ worship of the “free market” and supposed contempt for government was utterly discredited in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, when the bankers were bailed out to the tune of billions by capitalist governments. In the Arab world, the move to privatization accelerated in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse, when the state’s role in the economy began to shrink.

The revolutions in Africa and the Middle East, Fred argued, confirmed the Marxist theory of the state. In the 1970s, many leftist groups advocated terrorist methods while genuine Marxists said this would only strengthen the state (e.g. Palestinian use of terrorist methods only strengthened the Zionist state). Under the pressure of a mass movement, the state apparatus can break down. We saw this in Tunisia when a soldier first saluted a coffin, and in Egypt (with its 1.5 million armed men), when the determination of the masses swayed ordinary soldiers.

Bahrain and Libya

Fred briefly touched on the events in Bahrain and Libya. He exposed the hypocrisy of imperialist claims to be “protecting civilians” in Libya with bombing raids, while the United States quietly backed Saudi Arabia’s invasion of Bahrain to quash non-violent protesters. With the U.S. fleet based in Bahrain, much-ballyhooed concerns for “democracy” and “human rights” did not apply.

Quite simply, it was in the imperialists’ interests to intervene in Libya but not in Bahrain, with its more reliable authoritarian regime. On a more strategic level, Libya gave the bourgeoisie the opportunity to intervene militarily in the Arab Revolution, which had caught it completely off-guard.

Where Egypt had led to the idea that all you needed to overthrow an authoritarian government was to go on Facebook and Twiter and gather enough people together in a square, Libya illustrated that it wasn’t so simple. In Libya, regime figures defected early out of a belief that they could channel the revolution towards their own ends. Right from the start, there was a conflict between the revolutionary youth and the interim government, which saw the events in terms of a military struggle.

There is no real difference between the economic policies of Qaddafi and the “rebel” leaders, who would promptly hand over control of Libya’s resources to the imperialists. While the dictators are now gone in Tunisia and Egypt, the regimes they headed are still largely intact. Those in power shuffle the chairs on the deck, but the same powerful economic interests always prevail.

Syria

Following the coup that established the Assad regime in the 1970s, Syria pursued the Soviet model of development, which provided some genuine benefits to the population. Syria experienced phenomenal growth rates in its early decades of well over 50%. By the 1980s, this had slowed to 33% growth per annum. Today, it is an anaemic 1%. The masses supported the Syrian government in the 1960s and 70s, when it provided real material benefits and the country’s oil money was partly used to fund social services.

Syria’s economic decline paralleled the stagnation of the USSR. Emphasizing that real socialism requires workers’ democracy in addition to a nationalized planned economy, Fred noted that the privileged Syrian bureaucracy became increasingly resented as the country’s economy stalled. Following the Soviet collapse, the Syrian government began taking tentative steps towards a market economy, beginning with private banking in 1991 and later progressing to foreign investment and a stock market.

Assad’s government privatized and passed on the fruits of the country’s wealth to its own cronies. In essence, the Syrian elites strove to emulate the Chinese model, transferring the means of production from public to private ownership. Identical terms were even used – e.g. “social market economy”. Having lost most of its claims to legitimacy, the Syrian regime as it stands today is one of the world’s most brutal. Legions of police are tasked specifically with monitoring the internet for any signs of dissent.

Like the Tunisian Revolution, which began when a young men harassed by the police set himself on fire, the Syrian revolt began with a small event on February 17, when hundreds of bystanders intervened after watching the police harass two motorists. Protests soon swelled to over 1500 and one of the government’s ministers was forced to intervene. Throughout February and March, the movement gradually gained in strength, with the most affected layers being the youth (who constitute 60% of the population) and the poor.

In addition to its use of brute force to repress the protests, the Assad regime has also sought to exploit certain “moderate” dissidents to dampen the revolutionary fervour. The Syrian working class pushes ahead, but the threat posed by reformist elements reflects those of leftists around the world. The task in Syria remains the same as elsewhere: building a mass revolutionary party to provide a programme and leadership for the workers’ movement.

Special brigades have been deployed to put down the Uprising, but the government does not have enough forces to repress the entire country at once. Thus far the protests have largely been confined to individual cities, allowing the security forces to move wherever trouble appears. The lesson is obvious: a truly national movement is necessary to exploit the state’s weakness.

What comes next? Fred theorized that, should the Syrian workers succeed in overthrowing Assad, the resulting government would likely follow the pattern set out by Tunisia and Egypt – probably some form of bourgeois democracy. Yet democracy is only a means to an end, and bourgeois democracy cannot solve the problems faced by Syrians today. Even in the advanced capitalist countries, the system is incapable of alleviating severe unemployment – why would it be any different in Syria?

In order to progress, the protest movements require a solid programme and revolutionary leadership. The means of production must be nationalized under the control of the workers themselves, and a genuine proletarian democracy established. The task of the Marxists is helping youth in the Arab world reach these conclusions and fight for an Arab socialist federation.

Q & A

During the question and answer period, a member of the Worker-Communist Party of Iraq asked about the absence of socialist or communist groups in the February protests. While frontline organizers were individual working class activists, mainstream socialist parties seemed closer to the state – a dangerous development when the Iraqi government recently announced its own privatization programme.

Fred responded that when examining a jar, one should not merely read the label, but rather examine the contents inside. The leaders of so-called working class, “socialist” and “communist” parties worldwide are not up to the tasks facing humanity. There is a huge gap between the leadership and the rank-and-file. Reformist leaders came of age at a time when capitalism seemed to be able to offer reforms such as free health care and public education.

Regarding the self-proclaimed socialist/communist parties, Fred reminded his audience of the Stalinist “two-stage theory”, which these corrupted figures used to derail revolutionary situations. By claiming the need to first have a “democratic” revolution before attempting socialism later, and therefore arguing that the working class should ally itself with the “progressive” bourgeoisie now, the Stalinists abort revolutions before they begin.

In order to solve this problem, the working class must change the leadership of its mass organizations. When Fightback supporter Arash Azizi asked what the task of real socialists in Syria should be, Fred called for strikes in all industries, for Syrian youth and workers to occupy the schools and the factories, and for election of workers’ representatives to create an economic programme that will allow the working class to take total control of the country. The pressing need is for a mass revolutionary leadership.

Scapegoats

Spreading the meme, via Leo Lincourt:

Remember when teachers, public employees, planned parenthood, and PBS crashed the stock market, wiped out half of our 401Ks, took trillions in TARP money, spilled oil in the Gulf of Mexico, gave themselves billions in bonuses, and paid no taxes? Yeah, me neither. Re-post if you can't remember either.

Death Agony of Capitalism

U.N. Security Council just voted 10-0 to establish a no-fly zone over Libya. Why all the urgency of military action in Libya compared to, say, Egypt? Clearly, the former country's vast oil reserves played more than a supporting role in the full-scale mobilization of the American media to finally "deal with Qaddafi", who they never really trusted. The aging dictator's future is even more uncertain than before now, with a multinational (read: U.S.-dominated) bombing raid set to begin within a few hours.

At the same time the Japanese earthquake has laid bare the short-sighted thinking of the country's elites who placed dozens of nuclear power plants near the planet's biggest fault line. The ongoing destruction of the planet, the shocking realization that the apocalyptic Gulf oil spill of 2010 seems long forgotten, the crisis of capitalism squeezing working people everywhere...

I could go on. Things are bad. Mass revolutionary parties in every country are an urgent necessity.

Talking Heads

Just saw Paul Wolfowitz and John Negroponte (first U.S. ambassador to Iraq, post-invasion) on CNN analyzing the Egyptian situation after Mubarak refused to step down today. Shook my head at the fact that they're still on television spouting their hypocritical blather, and furthermore treated as experts after the utter failure of the Bush administration's Middle Eastern policy. Corporate power looks after its own.

The BBC's caption, on the other hand, summed up the real situation nicely: "Stunned protesters shout 'Leave, leave.' "

Tucson Aftermath, or: Nothing New Under the Sun

I've been paying minimal attention to the fallout of the Tucson shootings, because the whole thing is frankly too depressing. First and foremost is the heinous nature of the act itself - another lunatic with a grudge decides to lash out against the world with a violent shooting rampage that kills many innocents, including a 9-year-old girl. Obviously the crime and the victims should be our main focus. But the reaction of the American media, political hacks and assorted interest groups has been as predictable as you might think - all but ensuring that a similar massacre happens again a few years down the road.

Immediately after the shooting we witnessed an orgy of reflexive ass-covering by pundits and politicians, all of whom vehemently denied the idea that the increasingly violent imagery of right-wing American political culture - suffused as it is with talk of "Second Amendment solutions", or Sarah Palin's admonishment, "don't retreat - RELOAD!" (coupled with a map featuring gun crosshairs over Democratic congressional districts), or the shot Democratic Congresswoman's opponent staging an M16 shooting event in January 2010 to "help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office" - could have anything whatsoever to do with the shooting. Ridiculous, I know.

Essentially, the most depressing thing about this whole affair, other than the tragic deaths of Jared Lee Loughner's victims, is the steadfast refusal of the entire media-political establishment to learn anything from it. The bomb-throwers of the right-wing noise machine blamed liberals, as they always do and must do if they're going to follow their established business model. President Obama, typically, gave an intellectually bankrupt speech absolving the right of any responsibility for the massacre and taking pot shots at the left for "pointing fingers and assigning blame". The NRA and its minions in Congress maintained that the tragedy would in no way alter its refusal to consider even the most minimal gun control legislation. In short, everyone in any position of power or influence acted exactly as they always do, as they're paid to do - and as a result, nothing will change. Sooner or later, another massacre will occur and the same process will repeat itself all over again. The only way to stop gun violence, according to the right, is to make sure more people have access to guns.

Fun fact: had Congress not allowed the Clinton-era ban on assault weapons to expire in 2004, Loughner would only have been able to carry a 10-round clip. Instead, he was able to rattle off at least 20 rounds from a 30-round clip before someone managed to stop him, thereby killing more people than he otherwise might have. As always, political cowardice within the halls of power costs real human lives outside.