Liberal Capitalism is Dead
BY BEN DEBNEY- WILDCAT OCULAR
NOVEMBER 8, 2020 COUNTERPUNCH


From its beginnings out of the European Enlightenment, liberal capitalism was based on a promise of progress through justice predicated on equality before the law. In light of the fact that the Enlightenment ran alongside the European Witch Hunts, the ideological foundations of liberal capitalism have always been something of a thought experiment, since the political democracy of liberal capitalism has tended to turn a blind eye to the class war characteristic of the Witch Hunts. This is doubly true of the class war of societies dominated by class hierarchies, such as every society that a liberal democracy has ever operated within. The fact that the Enlightenment did take place alongside the Witch Hunts might perhaps be considered indicative of a pronounced cognitive dissonance; the failure amongst liberal capitalists to perceive any could likewise be considered telling.

As the radical historian Rudolf Rocker noted in the years prior to WWII, the promise of equality before the law under liberal democracy was shipwrecked on the rocks of class society, a fact that has only become truer in the post-war period, as the United States acted as midwife for the rise to power of a transnational corporate empire in the midst of its own rise to global dominance as geopolitical hegemon. With the rise of transnational corporate capitalism, the limitations of liberal capitalism are becoming too conspicuous to safely sweep under the rug. Politicians are bought and paid for before they even reach office thanks to corporate campaign donations, as are the national committees of two-party duopolies, and this is only the beginning.

On shipwrecks

In digging deeper, we find that the revolving door between transnational corporations and the state builds and sustains old boy networks and creates institutional linkages with private, unaccountable power; private security outnumbers state armed forces in most countries these days, private prisons create demand for draconian sentencing laws, and Amazon aids both the CIA and NSA by storing their copious surveillance data on its cloud servers. Public choice theorists sponsored by the Koch brothers propagandise jurists and policymakers behind the scenes to protect corporate power from democracy by conflating individual freedom and extreme class privilege. This and various other forms of totalitarian mischief are enabled by the legal fiction of corporate personhood—one that stands, not because of any clear judicial ruling that can be pointed to as a cogent argument as to why corporations should have the same rights as human beings, but as a series of fait accomplis perpetrated in the closing decades of the 19th century, beginning with Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Co. in 1886.

The result of this long process of corporate capture is the hollowing out of liberal capitalist democracy; the corporate power arising out of the inherently monopolistic tendencies of the class-based system appropriates the forms of its victim, articulating corporatist and fascist value systems and priorities using the language of democratic freedom. Where Huey Long once said that, ‘when fascism comes to America, it will come draped in the flag and carrying a bible’, we might now add to that, ‘and stealing the language of the democratic freedoms upon which it preys.’ Billionaire Warren Buffet tells no lies to the New York Times when he says, ‘’There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.’ Liberal democracy becomes a colony of transnational corporate power in much the same style as the allegedly ‘postcolonial’ second and third worlds. As ideologically-induced amnesia sets in, so too does much of the populace, hypnotised by consumerism. In the face of the corporate Leviathan, we settle for throwing an endless torrent of consumer durables into the bottomless pit of our alienation. We live out our lives as capture-bonded debt mules for rent-seeking finance capital, in lieu of exercising meaningful control over the conditions of our daily lives and our work, as free individuals under conditions of economic as well as political democracy.

It is obvious enough to most of those who aren’t part of the big party for the rich (Rest in Power George Carlin) that the way the world operates in fact is not quite the same as the version sold in the glossy brochures. The democracy Big Mac looks like the real deal in the studio shots for you to look at when ordering, but not much like the one you’re served by a teenager earning minimum wage (and you’re hungry again 20 minutes later anyway). In contradistinction to the paranoid fairy tales of the public choice theorists, governments are less a two-party duopoly of rent-seekers for the poor than a two-party duopoly of rent-seekers for the rich—their capture by the corporate interests represented by public choice theory and its various libertarian cousins and offshoots being the decisive fact on this count. Liberal democrats having thus been routed, the working classes and otherwise poor and dispossessed huddled masses of the world suffer and die under the class despotism of transnational finance capital rent-seekers.

What do with a drunken sailor

With this more or less as the prevailing state of affairs, those who still hold to liberal capitalist democracy are faced with a dilemma. One option for liberals who aim for a more progressive capitalism is to recognise they have been routed by resurgent corporate neoaristocrats seeking to reverse the democratic gains of the 18th and 19th centuries. In making this recognition, they need to accept, with the rebellious students of May ’68, that ‘those who make half a revolution dig their own graves’—that, in other words, political democracy is doomed to fail if constructed atop divisions of economic class. One might as well build a skyscraper on sand, a fact recognised by the mainstays of the French Revolution who understood very well that political freedom was impossible without economic equality, as monied elites would use their economic power to secure political power and turn the laws to their own advantage (economist Michael Hudson exposes this phenomenon as a long historical tendency with devastating precision in his masterful work Killing the Host).

Another option for liberals, which seems to be the one that many of them take, is to try to unring the bell of corporate capture, seeking amendments and reforms within frameworks of national governments now so subject to the whims of transnational capital that they resemble little more than wholly owned subsidiaries. Without any hope of achieving meaningful reforms within a system lurching conspicuously into police state surveillance and corporate-driven totalitarianism predicated on the neoliberal ideology of capitalist supremacism, movements for reform, at best, take on a performative aspect, one of keeping up appearances. If transnational corporate capitalism attempts to maintain the fiction of a pulse within liberal democracy for its own cynical purposes, then it is aided and abetted by performative liberals, captive to their own false pride. Both keep the corpse walking and waving, Weekend at Bernies-style, and both for reasons that much prefer not to be stated openly.

We find various attempts within liberal academia then to close the barn doors after the horse has bolted. Such reflect in one form or another commentary from political theorist Karl Polanyi around the idea of ‘re-embedding capitalism,’ of re-associating capitalist markets with the social and community environments they operate within and to re-anchor them in the needs and rights of the individual. Just as we might do what’s right rather than what we’re told instead of doing what we’re told rather than what’s right, so too might economies serve individuals, rather than individuals be made to serve economies, while being told to do what they’re told rather than what’s right. For his part, Polanyi died in 1966 and did not live to see the growth of transnational corporations and globalisation carried out under neoliberal conditions. No less significantly, Polanyi died only four years after the publication of Rachel Carson’s The Silent Spring, the work largely credited with launching the ecological movement.

Future attempts from liberal capitalists to greenwash Polanyi notwithstanding, ‘re-embedding capitalism’ neglects then to account for the development of ecological insights into the ‘metabolic rift’ at the core of the present ecological crisis—the tendency of capitalist social relations to undermine the natural metabolism of Earth’s ecology in the process of reducing our planetary home (along with everything and everyone on it) into an object of resource extraction and profiteering. As against proposals from ecological thought for such strategies as degrowth economics, municipalism and recommoning in the increasingly pervasive areas where neoliberal capitalism fails to deliver, re-embedding capitalism as a strategy at best represents a tragic failure of imagination. At worst, and as a by now wildly obsolete idea, it functions to extend the life of transnational capitalism and all of its inherent abuses in the name of combatting them, by dignifying capitalist social relations as such.

Making a home in the wreckage

Under these circumstances, liberal attempts to reform transnational corporate capitalism take on the aspect of a political version of trickle-down economics. ‘Re-embedding markets’ is promised to deliver results later—though efforts to actually follow up and find out whether any real difference is being made appear spartan, as though no one really wants to know what the answer is for sure. Where putting band-aids on the cancers of corporate capture, transnational globalisation and metabolic rift and hoping for the best is concerned, intuition gets us close enough.

Thus echo chambers die hard, especially apparently in academia, even despite the frontal assaults of neoliberalism on higher education. Bodies of work and careers are built up around argument and perspectives rendered obsolete by the quickening spiral of neoliberal capitalism into the ecological, economic and societal inferno; the defence of liberal reforms takes on a conservatising and authoritarian aspect as ranks close against the intrusion of inconvenient realities and unwelcome moral challenges. Liberals embrace voluntary grievance mechanisms where policy is already set as a sop to the otherwise voiceless and powerless victims. The corpse appears to smile and wave while the protagonists, with one arm up the back of its shirt and their shoelaces tied to its, mutter at each other through clenched teeth so as to not give the game away.

In taking on an authoritarian and conservative aspect, liberal capitalism then comes to reflect basic realities of capitalist social relations as it becomes itself a colony. It might be said that the money power built on those relations has the psychology of a vampire, insofar as it views all life around it merely as extensions of its own will and objects to be exploited—indeed, ofttimes destroyed—to keep it alive. Vampires are nothing if not narcissistic junkies, and if their grabby-hands accumulation of capital is anything to go by, as a class the global capitalist class are collectively narcissistic junkies.

The consequences are well known in the statistics on world poverty and income inequality—emblematic in the fact that 25,000 people a day die from hunger while a third of all food produced globally every year goes to waste because starving people are too poor to buy it. Meanwhile, the rapaciousness that creates this horrorshow is feeds a systemic overaccumulation crisis at the other end of global capitalism, where the transnational corporate aristocracy can’t put their money to work anymore because they’re the only ones who still have any. In their tyrannical insistence on ideological conformity to the idea that freedom and class privilege are the same thing as the root enabler of these conditions, the transnational corporate elite do a good impression of the Borg from Star Trek, except also vampiric, narcissistic takers of life and its material conditions just to sweeten the deal even further.

With this being the case, the power built with and through the psychology of vampiric global capitalist world hegemony appears then to permeate down through the entire system, defining the social relations that characterise it at each step, as capital dominates and tyrannises over all life. It figures then that a world social order so vampiric and exploitative as to reduce the world and everyone in it as objects fit only for exploitation for profit also demands total obedience to class hierarchy. The history of class warfare within capitalist modernity and the struggle of the capitalist class for supremacist dominance—a war it will be winning until it overaccumulates to breaking point, or cooks the planet, or both—appears to support this point. So too does the vampiric money power demands wilful blindness from all concerned; the king might have no clothes, but even liberal capitalists must insist that he does, in lieu of having to acknowledge their routing by transnational corporatism.

In looking to rehabilitate capitalist social relations through strategies such as ‘re-embedding capitalism,’ and otherwise by dignifying voluntary redress mechanisms within neoliberal jurisprudence, liberal capitalists become as complicit as those they claim to oppose in normalising the vampirism characteristic of the predatory gaze of transnational corporate capitalism. They become as complicit, ultimately, in normalising cultlike submission to the ideological priorities and value systems associated with capitalist social relations as such; this would appear to go some way towards accounting for the fact that a liberal capitalist who will even name capitalist social relations as a fact of everyday life is so rare as to be non-existent. To even name capitalist social relations, even as they affect every aspect of our lives, is to do offense to the fog of cultish normalisation of economic autocracy, and so too also to the routed logic of political democracy constructed atop societies divided into have-yachts and have-nots.

We must, however, name capitalist social relations if we are concerned with social justice, and the kind of baseline sane and orderly, classless society that can guarantee it. As the socialist feminist Combahee River Collective (CRC) pointed out, ‘work must be organised for the collective benefit of those who do the work, not for the profit of the bosses.’ The fact is that social relations in the economic sphere under capitalism are as autocratic as those in the political under a monarchy (and abolished as intolerable for a society concerned with civilised norms of individual freedom and dignity by democratic revolutions in Europe and North America hundreds of years ago). Nevertheless, and again as the CRC pointed out, a comparable democratic revolution in the economic sphere that was not also a feminist and anti-racist revolution, would hardly secure the freedom of anyone not male or white. Thus a ‘radical subjectivity’ inclusive of identities based on various forms of structural oppression, argued the CRC, was necessary to combat the class reductionism that was as blind to the structural role played by misogyny and racism in propping up autocratic economic social relations as it was the suffering of those subject to it.

Recuperating the siren’s call

For the reactionary neoaristocrats perpetrating corporate capture and capital-supremacist totalitarianism, the level of offense to cultish norms in even discussing capitalist social relations was as good as trying to subvert society—as if subverting society isn’t inherent to feeding off of it as rent-seeking finance capitalist do the point of overaccumulation crisis. By contrast, liberal capitalists seek to deal with the messy business of capitalist social relations by replacing the stick from the right with the carrot.

Production of the carrot as means of enticing loyalty to class hierarchy starts by stripping the identity-politics-as-radical-subjectivity articulated by the Combahee River Collective of its class analysis—inclusive of its revolutionary goals in overturning racism and misogyny as systemically necessary mechanisms of victim-blaming, along with the system that produces them. Freed of having to acknowledge the consequences of class within liberal capitalist democracy, their own routing being not the least of which, liberal capitalists enlist anti-sexism and anti-racism struggles in the recruitment of more diverse talent to feed into the machinery of capitalism, and all it entails in the extraction of surplus value and appropriation of unpaid care labour (again taboo).

In addition to glossing over the institutional function of misogyny and racism by giving capitalism the appearance of racial diversity, this also of course ensures that misogyny and racism continues; for all the tireless efforts of liberal capitalists to make capitalism more diverse, somehow misogyny and racism strangely never seem to go really away. This does not however prompt a general questioning of the reduction of identity politics to single issue struggles. It does, on the other hand, prompt the reduction of nominally progressive politics to a sexy shopping list of worthy causes to be strung together minus any intersectional analysis to understand how various forms of oppression function often in concert at the systemic level.

This bastardisation of anti-sexist and anti-racist struggles in the service of capital accumulation also offers liberal capitalists a mechanism for silencing criticism of capitalism from the left. While the fascists of the capitalist right bolster their capitalist supremacism with the identity politics of white supremacism, the liberals of the capitalist left bolster their capitalist supremacism with what we might call ‘identity reductionism’—the reduction of social actors, whose status as members of (typically) underprivileged groups, sectors and classes within class hierarchies affects their living conditions, to atomised individuals, whose rights are conceptualised in terms of a legal plaintiff (Judith Butler).

Where the white supremacists of the capitalist far-right use identity politics to rationalise their class privilege by conflating challenges to it with attacks on their freedom and victim-blaming, the identity reductionists of the capitalist left use identity politics to rationalise their class privilege by conflating challenges to it with attempts to assert and reimpose social privilege. Both attitudes exist to defend capitalist privilege from challenge; both reflect the same underlying ‘projecting’ dynamic based on identity, even if the pretexts vary between reactionary/hateful, and progressive/benign. As Asad Haider argues,

When rights are granted to ‘empty,’ abstract individuals, they ignore the real, social forms of inequality and oppression that appear to be outside the political sphere. … In other words, when the liberal language of rights is used to defend a concrete identity group from injury … that group ends up defined by its victimhood.

Instead of addressing the material causes of physical or verbal injury, liberal identity politics ends up ‘reduced to a reaction,’ as Haider puts it, and “emancipatory content disappears.’ As Stalin’s persecution of dissent in the Soviet Union as threats to the revolutionary freedom of the working class demonstrated, it is just as possible to perpetrate reaction and otherwise exercise authoritarian rule on progressive pretexts as it is reactionary ones.

Back in the capitalist west, academia as the traditional bastion of liberal capitalism (propaganda mythologies from the Murdoch press notwithstanding) presents a notable forum for the use of identity reductionism by liberal capitalists as a useful tool of reaction—as a means, in other words, of shutting down challenges to capitalist social relations (much less to say the co-option of anti-sexist and anti-racist struggles to the service of capital accumulation). The logic of ‘if you challenge liberal capitalism, the racists and misogynists win’ functions just as well as ‘if you think for yourself, the communists and terrorists win’ in shutting down debate and enforcing ideological conformity. As academia is captured and colonised by neoliberalism, so too are many within it—all the more so as funding cuts and austerity create fear of rocking the boat and increased willingness to submit to the value systems and ideological priorities of the all-coveting eye of predatory transnational capital.

This is hardly a contentious point. Upton Sinclair once wrote, ‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.’ The pressure to conform ideologically to the cult of private accumulation that bristles even at the naming of capitalist social relations is made easier at the outset by internalising the logic of the transnational overlord. For those whose salaries depend on upholding the routed and shipwrecked liberal capitalism, the conflict between the moral challenges reality presents to their conscience and the demands of collecting a salary can be resolved easily enough if we abandon or simply neglect the parts of our individuality that notice or care about the misery and suffering of others. We don’t feel the suffering of members of our own class if we allow ourselves to forget that classes exist or that they matter (or even that we share common interests, classist pretences to the contrary notwithstanding).

Abandoning individuality and internalising the value system of the corporate overlord for easier ascension into the rapidly diminishing middle classes also makes the performativity of routed liberal democracy easier—along with abandoning the politics of class, and the working class along with it. One can collect a paycheck and feel perfectly at ease, especially if one works at surrounding oneself only with other liberal capitalists and shutting out anyone who insists on harping on taboo topics like capitalist social relations. The long-term political effects were not hard to predict. As Richard Rorty wrote in 1998:

Members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers—themselves desperately afraid of being downsized—are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else . . . At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for—someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots . . One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past 40 years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion . . . All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.

In the conditions of 2020, the salience of this observation is impossible to miss. Liberal capitalists, living in blissful bubbles free of taboos like class, are now confronted with a working class who know they’ve been abandoned, and who know being poor and working class is the one identity that identity-reductionist capitalists have zero interest in knowing anything about. The disinterestedness of identity reductionists in poor and working class life is again reflected in the preoccupation with ‘re-embedding capital’ while respecting cultish taboos against mere acknowledgement of capitalist social relations. Capitalism as a fait accompli of colonial and imperial violence historically is to be made more serviceable (as a lost cause and keeping-face performance in the face of transnational corporate capture of governments worldwide), rather than addressing the needs and desires of human beings and finding ways to service those (again, though such strategies as promotion of degrowth economics, municipalism, recommoning, community defence organisations, and/or radical union organising).

The uneducated working class certainly are not the most articulate in confronting the classist elitism of liberal capitalists; objecting to being labelled a misogynist or racist for rejecting classism can easily be read as taking the crumbs of token privilege thrown out to the white working class and white make workers in particular, to ensure their loyalty within class hierarchies. Just because someone does not reject classism in an articulate manner does not, however, actually make them a reactionary—any more than it means middle class liberals who are woke about every identity except being working class and poor are not well out of touch, which it would seem they are. Not only are they out of touch but militantly so, a fact made starkly apparent by Hilary Clinton’s infamous denunciation of working class Trump supporters as a ‘basket of deplorables’ in 2016, comments the latter inevitably took up as a badge of honour and proof that their man was fighting the cause of the common people.

A basket of shipwrecks

Ironically enough, the insistence of identity reductionists on tinkering around the edges of the capitalist social relations they demonstrate scant awareness of at best leaves the door open for every far right demagogue to then come piling in—which they do in droves. It does not appear to have been for nothing that the final campaign video from Donald Trump prior to the 2016 presidential elections addressed the decline of the manufacturing industry in the United States—something on which the allegedly more progressive Democratic Party was conspicuously silent. Indeed, as Chomsky points out,

The Democrats long ago gave up on the working class, that’s not part of their constituency[, which these days is] an elite, professional constituency. They focus on—to the extent that they’re issues—mostly identity politics, which is okay, but it’s not class-based. It’s not going to appeal to the needs of most of the population. Other Republicans have just taken over the vacuum.

As have opportunists even further to the right, exploiting the vacuum of interest in the immiseration of the working class under neoliberalism from nominal progressives to feed them scapegoats and paranoid, totalitarian conspiratorial poison. In the face of these developments, identity reductionist liberal capitalists continue to turn a blind eye to the oppressiveness and injustice of class hierarchies per se, with all that follows in willing blindness to the consequences. Leaving the door open for every far right demagogue to come piling in (which they do), liberal capitalists still have the gall to act surprised when the working class doesn’t support them at the ballot box. They should perhaps not. As the experience of the Republicans under Trump and the far right his administration has emboldened suggests, the abandonment by liberal capitalists of class politics, and the working class along with it, is the seed of the rot of fascism.

Amidst the fear of rising fascism, it is all too easy to take any attempt to critique identity politics in the hands of neoliberal capitalists as a RWNJ talking point. The fact remains, however, that criticising liberal capitalists from the left and attacking them are not the same thing. Stripping the class-based politics of revolutionary subjectivity as articulated by groups like the Combahee River Collective of their substance, and co-opting them as a service to enhanced capital accumulation is a valid criticism, as is tinkering around the edges of neoliberal capitalism while leaving root causes intact. As noted, such not only leaves racism and misogyny safe from identification as a systemic feature of capitalism, liberal or otherwise, but does nothing to address the effects of class society as such—not least of which being the ever-deepening immiseration of just about everyone but the transnational corporate aristocracy (including, ironically enough, classist liberals).

Averting the rocks

It has long been apparent that liberal capitalists, in neglecting or abandoning the working class, sow the seeds of fascism, digging their own graves as noted by making half a revolution and then turning a blind eye to the consequences while trying to have their cake and eat it too. In noting this tendency, Gilles Dauvé also pointed out long ago in his excellent pamphlet When Insurrections Die that it leads liberals to oppose (or at least try to manage or thwart) resistance to fascism that encompasses anti-capitalist and antihegemonic critiques. Even with fascism knocking on their door, liberals historically have still tried to salvage capitalism—and their own class privileges along with them—somewhat predictably tending to end up losing both. As the degeneration of the Republican Party into oligarchical fascism tends to suggest, supporting the analysis from Dauvé, the far right will hardly hesitate to sacrifice liberals along with the working class to their class privileges during periods of crisis.

Dealing with critiques of identity reductionism and working class opposition to liberal capitalism by handwaving them away and accusing critics of being right wing has, by now, been more than done enough to become a cliché—as much of one as associating political dissent with enabling terrorism. The fact is that the working class swung hard left after WWII; the combination of Red Scare, ‘if you think for yourself, the communists win’-type class war, Cold War liberalism and neoliberalism killed off most working class militancy. With the rise of neoliberalism and capitalist supremacism, liberal capitalists capitulated once again, just as they did throughout the Cold War, and abandoned the working class and left them to rot while withdrawing into enclaves of ideological purity. Within these enclaves, the most advanced ways of attempting to deal with systemic issues appear to involve the work of a theorist who died before much anyone knew of such things as global warming or neoliberalism. Otherwise, we find a milieu where the power of victimhood takes priority over building positive bridges and unity based on mutual understanding and class solidarity, nd becomes the basis for carving out performative, toxic fiefdoms of authority and influence, bereft of emancipatory content.

Under these conditions, resistance is reduced to alienated roles of permanent protest—the goal of the nominal left is to rise to the top of the toxic shitheap, such that they might be the ones to lead. The toxic influence of identity reductionism further infects radical left ghettos, becoming the basis for a competition to be winners of the Oppression Olympics—a certain parallel to the top dog competition on the right to be winners of the Tough Cunt Olympics. The self-appointed apostles and gurus of leftism fashion themselves saviours of the working class, and work to undermine anyone who questions their judgement too much by making them out to be wreckers and saboteurs, to associate them with reactionism. The informal hierarchies that arise are defended, paradoxically enough, in the name of protecting the emancipatory project from petit-bourgeois and reactionary elements—for which deference to liberal identity reductionism as a last resort against acknowledging failures of strategy on the left provides ample ammunition.

All told this would appear to help to account for the inability of the left to build on historical levels of working class dissatisfaction with the status quo of global capitalism. Without meaningful and constructive ways to address alienation and immiseration, fascist conspiracism recognises the opportunity and fills the void with ideologically-driven negativity and paranoia. The forces of progress are losing because we seem to imagine we can fend off the rising far right without a sizeable chunk of the proletariat—because we choose perfect enemies over imperfect allies. This of course begs the question as to where these attitudes come from—the idea perhaps that ignorance is an inherent quality of the working class, poor and lumpenproletariat, rather than the result of the neglect of their education by neoliberal governments of all shades, an effect of mass education in ‘imposing ignorance’ as per Chomsky, or even part of the colonialist project of disenfranchisement. Either the ‘redneck,’ ‘chav’ or ‘bogan’ is inherently reactionary, or they just somehow didn’t make it to finishing school. Suffice it to say that one of these views reflects an appalling classism.

To reiterate, the other side of the coin is that the growth of corporate power has, over the course of the last century or so, subverted political democracy via regulatory capture enabled by neoliberal ideology, subverted evangelicals with prosperity gospel, and fed the feedback loop with tax cuts to and deregulation of the ultra-wealthy, itself enabled by the coup by stealth on the part of public choice theory and corporatist libertarianism. Amidst this sordid state of affairs middle class liberals and laborites, and those aspiring to join them, did not even have to be offered anything—they just sold out, and then invented identity reductionism as a blunt instrument to stifle dissent, making assumptions and moving goalposts along the way as necessity dictates. As the chickens of world capitalism come home to roost in ever-deepening ecological and overaccumulation crises, the fascism that arises to save class privilege from political democracy is what results. The Brenton Tarrants and Rowan Baxters of the world are emboldened because the working class is too weak to challenge their cultural figureheads; needless to say, once they are legion all the hard fought for social reforms those of us who can only imagine democracy in political terms cherish will all vanish.

As Barabara Smith argues, ‘If the left ultimately wants to make a real difference, as opposed to settling for handouts, it must consider creating a multi-issue revolutionary agenda. This is not about political correctness, it’s about winning.’ Class consciousness and class solidarity is as equally important as revolutionary subjectivity; class reductionism does just justify identity reductionism. Solidarity with all oppressed people and classes is more important than single issue narrow range activism. Praxis is more important than smugness. Illusions to the contrary at this point are killing us; those who continue to entertain them can barely even hide your contempt for the poor—it fairly drips from them. Meanwhile the deplorables amongst the popular classes are being sucked into conspiracy land Qanon fascism, and the apostles of identity politics stripped of their class foundation have nothing to offer them, having fallen into the same collectively narcissistic, in-group exclusionary toxic cesspit as the right. As the inventors of identity reductionism, the far right have taken the ball and thrown it back in the faces of the arrogant wealthy liberals mocking the silly fascists in the cabarets. We don’t need a PhD in history to know what comes next.

The issue of linking various forms of hierarchical oppression to class hierarchy and acting on the basis of class solidarity against all forms of oppression shouldn’t be that hard to understand; ditto critical analysis of forms of nominal leftism that fail to make such linkages. If unreconstructed leftists want to fly off the handle over attempts at constructive self-criticism that is of course their choice, but it does beg the question as to whether their priorities are greater understanding, or reinforcing liberal orthodoxy against any intrusion of intersectional class politics. It is no one else fault but their own if they refuse to make a distinction between being criticised and being attacked, and invoke precisely the kind of single-issue politics being criticised on the basis of an ‘if you question my judgement the enemies of social equality win’-type logic to silence further discussion of the topic. The irony there is not hard to discern. The left in general has a strong tendency to confuse rejection of its principles and ideals, and rejection of its often hideous praxis—which often seems to involve behaviour approximating everything it alleges to oppose in the right on the basis of an ‘ends justifies the means’ kind of mentality. Of course means have to be consistent with ends, since the one determines the other—not the other way around.

If we want a left that is united enough to actually present effective resistance to the onslaught of far right reaction, which is becoming an ever more dire danger by the day, we have to deal with the reasons why the working class abandon progressive politics. If we want to lead instead of just reacting ourselves, maybe acknowledging the abandonment of the working class by nominal leftists who care about every form of hierarchical oppression except those rooted in class hierarchy might not be a bad place to start. Those who do give a rats about class oppression might do well to ask themselves how it comes to pass that we have a nominally left politics that fails to consider the synergy between forms of othering such as misogyny and racism and capitalism, and the systemic role of various forms of bigotry in blaming the victims of autocratic social relations rooted in class. If we fail to make these causal connections and act on that systemic critique through a politics of class solidarity, on what grounds can we then complain that the working class have been seduced by far right demagogues who take advantage of the void thus created? We can’t.

We need to be better than this.


Ben Debney is a PhD candidate in history at Western Sydney University, Bankstown. He is the author of The Oldest Trick in the Book: Panic-Driven Scapegoating in History and Recurring Patterns of Persecution (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). Wildcat Ocular lives and works in Melbourne, Australia.

Apart From Defeating Trump, Why Did The Democrats Have Such a Bad Election Day?

BY RALPH NADER
NOVEMBER 9, 2020
COUNTERPUNCH

Photograph Source: Phil Roeder – CC BY 2.0

Apart from barely squeezing through the swing states to defeat corrupt, incompetent, lying, corporatist Donald Trump, the Democratic Party had a bad election.

Loaded with nearly twice as much money as the Republican Party, the Democratic Party showed that weak candidates with no robust agendas for people where they live, work, and raise their families, is a losing formula. And lose they did against the worst, cruelest, ignorant, lawbreaking, reality-denying GOP in its 166-year history.

The Democrats failed to win the Senate, despite nearly having twice the number of Senators up for re-election than the Republicans. In addition, the Democratic Party lost seats in the House of Representatives. The Democrats did not flip a single Republican state legislature, leaving the GOP to again gerrymander Congressional and state legislative districts for the next decade!

Will all this lead to serious introspection by the Democratic Party? Don’t bet on it. The GOP tried to learn from their losses in 2012, which led to their big rebound. Already, the Democratic Party is looking for scapegoats, like third party candidates.

Will the leaders of these inexcusable defeats – Senator Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi – explain how this happened? Will they take some responsibility and tell the American people why they let their profiteering media consultants spend so much money on tepid, low-impact TV ads at the expense of a massive ground game to give voters personal reasons to get themselves out to vote, beyond Trump? A third of all eligible voters stayed home. Could part of the problem be the 15% commission the consultants receive from TV ad revenues as compared to zero commissions from ground game expenditures?

Can the corporate Democratic leaders respond to inquiries by progressives and the sidelined primary voters of Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren? Can they respond to why the living wage, the corporate crime wave, and the GOP blocked stimulus/relief package passed by the Democrats in May (including a $600 a week extension for tens of millions of desperate workers and critical aid to local agencies overwhelmed by the Covid-19 pandemic) were not prominently front and center? Also, why did the Democrats refuse to campaign for full Medicare for All, supported by 70 percent of the American people? The Democrats, as pointed out by political media specialist, Bill Hillsman, did not speak directly to white, blue-collar workers who deserted Hillary Clinton for Donald Trump in 2016.

Moreover, the Democratic Party has a long-standing problem with authenticity. Rhetoric for a large infrastructure jobs program paid for by repealing corporate tax cuts and loopholes is seen as a throwaway line by many voters. Democrats should have explained, at the local level, how determination and integrity could shape the upgrading of our schools, clinics, roads, mass transit systems, waterworks, and other public services, with good-paying jobs.

Meanwhile, the Trumpsters showed their ferocious energy for wannabe, ego-obsessed, dictatorial Donald with more rallies, signs, and door-to-door contacts. The Democrats misread the faulty polls again thinking that the projected huge turnouts were primarily their voters and not also the Trump voters who turned out in greater numbers as well.

Too many Democratic operatives treat Trump with derision and mockery, instead of stressing how his daily lawlessness and serial violations of the Constitution have dismantled the protections for the people and turned the government over to big business to do and grab whatever they want.

Trump openly commits federal crimes (e.g. The Hatch Act, the Anti-Deficiency Act) using federal property, including the White House, for his campaign, spending money illegally, while brazenly defying over a hundred investigative subpoenas from the House of Representatives.

Yet, neither Biden and Obama nor the Democratic Party made these corrupt forms of obstruction of justice, front and center issues. They even ignored Trump’s past criminal assaults of women, whom he has repeatedly degraded.

These many missed, obvious opportunities have consequences. Don’t Trump voters and their families also suffer from frozen minimum wages, from the absence of adequate or any health insurance, from those sky-high drug prices that Trump failed to reduce? He put more toxins in the air and water and allowed more dangerous workplaces. Trump calls endangering people and the planet “deregulation” but what he was really doing is rewarding his corporate paymasters.

Trump just pushes many more buttons than do the Democrats. Why don’t the Democrats promote more unions, more consumer cooperatives, more campaign finance reforms, and more known ways to empower the people directly?

Of course, the Democrats would never argue that the American people, not corporations, should CONTROL what they already OWN such as the public lands, the public airwaves, and the shareholding mutual and pension funds investing their money. The Democrats never even think to demand that U.S. taxpayers get a direct return for trillions of dollars of government research and development that have subsidized the growth of modern industries (from aerospace to computers to agribusiness, biotech, pharma, and more).

While Trump incites street violence and then cries loudly for “law and order,” the Democrats don’t throwback “law and order” for violent, polluting corporate crooks who cheat and harm children, consumers, workers, and communities, as well as rip off government programs like Medicare. Trump has gotten away with defunding the federal corporate crime police big time. Never will the Democrats go after Trump for the bloated, runaway, unaudited military budget and its Empire that are devouring necessities here at home.

The House Democrats refused to keep multiple impeachment pressure (apart from the Ukraine matter) on the Republicans. A national TV audience of the Senate dealing with a dozen of Trump’s impeachable offenses would give even the most ardent Trump supporters pause. (See December 18, 2019, Congressional Record, H-12197).

The Democrats let Trump and his lawless Attorney General William Barr get away with all his corrupt, criminal, and unconstitutional actions, which have turned the White House into an ongoing crime scene. And, despite this “rap sheet” Trump came close to winning the Electoral College for a second term!

Next time, the rulers of the Democratic Party should listen to civic groups and advocates and not be so smug and incommunicado. As an example, I’ll refer you to my Eleven Suggestions for turning out the vote, with popular mandates, available to everyone in whole and in part for weeks (See also my latest op-ed in the Louisville Courier-Journal, October 27, 2020).

Now let’s see how many rollbacks and repeals Biden will quickly institute to stop Trump’s devastations and usher in a truly progressive, majoritarian set of long-overdue policies.


Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer and author of Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!

How Could 70 Million Still Have Voted for Trump?

BY JACK RASMUS
NOVEMBER 10, 2020 COUNTERPUNCH

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Media pundits and others have been deeply perplexed as to why so many Americans in this election–70 million in fact– nonetheless voted for Trump.

But it’s not all that difficult to understand. There are 3 major explanations: One economic. One health. And the third, and most important, a matter of culture and racism manipulated by clever politicians for the past quarter century at least.

The first explanation—economics—is that the red states (Trump’s base) did not ‘suffer’ as much economically from the recession as have (and are) the blue states and big urban areas. The red states shut down only in part and for just a couple weeks then quickly reopened as early as May. A few hot spots in New Orleans and Florida were quickly contained. By reopening quickly they economically minimized the negative effects of the shutdowns and quarantines. They would eventually pay the price in health terms for early reopening, but they clearly chose to trade off later health problems for early economic gains. At the same time they quickly reopened, the red pro-Trump states still received the economic benefits of the March-April Cares Act bailout that pumped more than a $trillion into the economy benefitting households directly–i.e. this was the $670 billion in small business PPP grants, the $350 billion in extra unemployment benefits, the $1,200 checks, and other direct spending on hospitals and health providers. The Trump states got their full share of the bailout, even if they didn’t need it as much after having reopened early. Finally, if Trump supporters lived in the farm belt sector of Red State America, they additionally got $70B more in direct subsidies and payments from Trump that was designed to placate the farm belt during Trump’s disastrous China trade war. That’s 3 main sources of added income the red states as a general rule received that the blue states, coasts, big cities elsewhere did not get. In short the economic impact of this recession was therefore far less severe in the geographic areas of the greatest concentration of Trump’s political support.

Second, Covid did not negatively impact the red states as much as it did the blue states and major urban areas of America—at least not until late in Sept-Oct after which much voting had already begun and political positions had hardened. And then when Covid did hit the red states late, it impacted relatively more the larger cities and not as much initially in the small towns and rural areas of Trump’s red states. Covid’s impact economically was therefore relatively worse in big urban areas, especially in the coasts.

But even more important than these relative economic and health effects, the continued support that exists for Trump in his base of red states—i.e. in the small town, rural, small business, and religious right areas—is grounded in the ‘ethnic’ composition of his mostly White European heritage followers who are fearful ‘their’ white culture is being overwhelmed by the growing numbers and diversity of people of color in America.

This fear is the foundation of his—and their—white nationalism which is really a form of racism. So too is their anti-immigration. It is anti-immigration directed against people of color–whether latinos, blacks, muslims or whomever. White European heritage, small town, rural, evangelical, small business ‘heartland’ of the south & midwest America sees ‘their America’ disappearing or at least having to share more equally with people of color America. The latter are now almost equal in population to White Europeans but are not equal politically or economically. They are knocking on the door and want in. They want their equal share.

But clever politicians have convinced White European America that it’s a zero sum game: what people of color America may get will be only at their expense! Sharing is not possible. Trump and others, who are manipulating this fear and discontent for their own political careers, have convinced them that it’s an ‘Us vs. Them’ zero sum game. That way those with wealth and real power redirect discontent from their four decades of obscene wealth accumulation at the expense of everyone else, white or non-white Americans. Whipping up and redirecting discontent into identity and racial identity themes means the super well off won’t have to share with either White European or non-White European people of color.

Pit the one against the other, while they–those of wealth and power–continue to ‘pick the pockets’ of both. That was, and remains, Trump’s strategy in a nutshell. It’s also the strategy of his wealthy backers. It’s the age old American ruling class racism ‘shell game’. Just now in the form of ‘old wine in new bottles’, as they saying goes. ‘America First’ means in effect White America of his political base comes first. Trump and financial backers and power brokers–like the Adelsons, Mercers, Singers and their allies–have convinced White European America in the heartland to be fearful and oppose equality for Americans of color elsewhere. That’s why Trump sounds very much like a ‘White Nationalist’, and even at times as pro-fascist because that’s the message of the far right as well. His theme of ‘Make America Great Again’ is really, when translated, make White European America safe again and stop the hoards of people of color taking ‘their America’ from them.

Here’s why they fundamentally support him: Trump has become their ‘bulwark’ against this demographic change which they fear above all else. That’s why Trump could do or say whatever he wanted and move increasingly to further extremes, and they’d still support him. They would support him even in dismantling what remains of truncated Democracy in America, if it were necessary in their view. And they still will continue to support him. Neither Trump nor Trumpism is going away. It has taken deep root in the 70 million, waiting for a resurrection in 2024 or even 2022.

All this is not unlike what happened in the USA in the 1850s decade. The USA is about at 1854 in terms of historical times and events. The 2024 election may therefore be even more ‘contentious’, should Biden and the Democrats fail to aggressively resolve the economic and health dual crises deepening this winter in America. Should Biden adopt a minimalist program and solution–in the name of a renewed ‘bipartisanship’ strategy aimed at placating Mitch McConnell’s Republican Senate–then ‘Bidenomics’ is doomed. It will result in a midterm 2022 election sweep return of Trump forces, maybe under the leadership of Trump, or maybe a Ted Cruz, or maybe a Marco Rubio. Or maybe some clever new face. A minimalist Biden program will suffer the fate of Obama’s minimalist economic stimulus program of January 2009, which resulted in a massive loss of electoral support for Democrats in the midterm elections of 2010 and in turn led to the loss of the US House of Representatives Democrat majority and then the Senate soon after. The economic consequences of that particular gridlock following that are all well known. There is a great risk of the same occurring in 2021-22.

The 2020 election looked in some fundamental ways a lot like 2016, with the differences today being the working and middle classes in the swing states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania flipped back to Democrats in 2020 after having voted for Trump in 2016. It was a 3 state flip. That flip was because Trump simply did not deliver on his 2016 promises to bring good paying industrial jobs back to those states after 20 years of free trade, offshoring, and the de-industrialization of the region. A good example of Trump’s failed promises was the Asian Foxconn Corp., maker of Apple iphone parts. Trump and Foxconn promised to bring 5000 jobs to the US upper midwest. It never happened. Foxconn’s operation in the US today is limited to only 250 jobs in a warehouse. So the upper midwest again slipped back by narrow margins to the Democrats. But if the Democrats now can’t deliver jobs either, they’ll just as easily slip back again in 2022 and 2024.

The other difference in 2020 from 2016 is the emergence of real grass roots movements in Georgia and in the southwest in Arizona-Nevada; Black folks and their allies in Georgia and Latinos and Native Americans in the southwest. Also new organizing and mobilizing of people of color and workers in places like Philadelphia, Detroit, Erie, Pittsburg, and elsewhere.

These new growing grass roots movements are the real political forces that determined Biden’s win, along with the working class and middle classes disenchantment with Trump’s failed promises. Biden’s win had therefore less to do with Nancy Pelosi’s strategy of targeting suburban white women, vets, professionals and independents. That strategy failed to produce any ‘blue wave’ whatsoever. In fact, it resulted in Democrat loss of seats in the House of Representatives, while wasting tens of millions of dollars on futile Senate races like that in Kentucky against Mitch McConnell. Just think if that money was spent in Georgia. If it was, there might not be the need to have runoff elections there this coming January for the state’s two Senate seats.

No, the Democrat leadership grand strategy was a definite failure; the strategy of mobilizing the grass roots in Georgia and the southwest, a strategy not supported much financially by the Democrat party leadership, is what has put Biden in the White House.

What remains to be seen is whether Pelosi, Schumer and the moneybag corporate donors of their party will understand what has really happened this election cycle and really why Biden won (and the House and Senate campaigns largely failed). If the leaders of the party now go the route of a minimalist program in 2020, as did Obama in 2009, they will no doubt come 2022 suffer a similar fate as Obama and they did in 2010. Then we will all be back to ‘square one’ with a resurgence of Trump and Trumpism once again.

The Democrats are at an historical crossroads. They can either understand the real forces behind the 70 million supporters who voted for Trump, or they can ignore history in the making and repeat history of the past of 2009-10 and subsequently suffer the same consequences in 2022 and certainly 2024. But don’t expect the media pundits to understand any of this, any more than they can even now comprehend why Trump’s followers number in the tens of millions despite his loss. They and Trump are not defeated yet. They have been merely ‘checked’ for a while.




Jack Rasmus is author of ’The Scourge of Neoliberalism: US Economic Policy from Reagan to Trump, Clarity Press, January 2020. He blogs at jackrasmus.com and hosts the weekly radio show, Alternative Visions on the Progressive Radio Network on Fridays at 2pm est. His twitter handle is @drjackrasmus.







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Robert Fisk. (UCTV).

In this interview, International Scholar Richard Falk provides his personal recollections of Robert Fisk. Falk explains how Fisk provided the world with well- informed perspectives that offered critical thinking and grim realities of the acute struggles stirring throughout the Middle East region. Falk comments on Fisk’s “unsparing exposure of Israeli abusive policies and practices toward the Palestinian people” indicating that his “departure from the region left a journalistic gap that has not been filled.”

Falk also discusses how the study, coverage and understanding of the Palestinian cause has shifted over the years from one of “exposing the hypocrisy and greed of the powerful” to more political and activist-centered solution based forms, within geo-political coverage. Despite this, Falk praises Fisk for “his commitments to peace, self-determination, and neutrality.”

Daniel Falcone: I can recall being amazed by Robert Fisk’s researching capabilities and stamina. In order to read both Pity the Nation and The Great War for Civilization it requires the reader to get through over 1,700 pages. Can you comment on Fisk’s reporting over the years in general as a Middle East correspondent?

Richard Falk: Fisk was a vivid writer with a startling ability to observe, comment, and interpret. In this sense, unlike the others I have mentioned with the partial exception of Gloria Emerson, Fisk could be read for literary satisfaction as well as for a kind of episodic journalistic autobiography that brought together his experience of contemporary wars and strife. What his published books establish is the extent of Fisk’s illuminating understanding of turmoil in the world, and the degree to which the blood being spilled can be traced back to European colonialism and forward to American imperial ambition in both Asia and the Middle East.

Daniel Falcone: Can you explain how in your view Robert Fisk’s reporting and writings shaped understandings and perceptions of the Middle East? Do you recall any professional and personal interactions with him over the years? How do you categorize his journalistic reputation and writing style?

Richard Falk: Robert Fisk was one of the few journalists in the world relied upon to give first-hand reports from the fields of strife on the conflicts occurring throughout the Middle East. His reportage seemed guided by an overriding commitment to truthfulness as to facts, brashness and vividness of reporting style, and an interpretative understanding that got it right from perspectives of human consequences.

He was given the most dangerous combat assignments in several of the most challenging hot spots in the world, including Northern Ireland during The Troubles, Lebanon (declaring Beirut as his home) during its decade-long civil war, and Afghanistan during the period when the West was arming Afghan extremists to oppose the Russian presence. In the latter role, he was badly beaten by Afghans enraged by the Western interventions and yet Fisk explained to the world while still bloody that he empathized with Afghan anger as their villages and homes were being devastated by U.S. air attacks and a combat role that escalated the violence.

Specifically, in the Middle East, Fisk gave the world a truly independent, informed, and critical understanding of the struggles occurring throughout the region, including an unsparing exposure of Israeli abusive policies and practices toward the Palestinian people. Fisk’s departure from the region left a journalistic gap that has not been filled. It is important to appreciate that there are few war correspondents in the world that combine Fisk’s reporting fearlessness with his interpretative depth, engaging writing style, and candid exposures of the foibles of the high and mighty.

Fisk never sought refuge by hiding behind curtains of political correctness. On the contrary, he prided himself on a commitment to what might be called ‘judgmental journalism’ in his professional demeanor, which is best understood as portraying reality as he saw and experienced it, which in Middle East contexts meant stripping away the geopolitical delusions peddled by powerful government to hide their true motives. He was particularly controversial in recent years by depicting the U.S. anti-Damascus combat role in Syria as not really about the future of Syria or even counterterrorism, as Washington claimed, but was mainly motivated, with prodding from Tel Aviv and Riyadh, by anti-Iran, anti-Shi’ia containment and destabilization goals.

This assessment was confirmed by my two personal interactions with Fisk that illustrated his approach to truth-telling in two very different contexts. The first occurred a bit over 20 years ago. I was interviewed by a Libyan film crew who were surprised by finding Princeton police at my house at the same time due to some death threats I received after supporting Palestinian grievances during an appearance on the BBC program ‘Panorama.’

The young Libyan filmmakers were making a documentary on the evolution of Israel/Palestine relations. After finishing with me they left for Beirut to interview Fisk, conveying to him that my house was guarded as I was living under threat. This exaggerated the reality of my situation, and prompted Fisk to write a column for The Independent without ever contacting me describing my situation as emblematic of Zionist efforts to intimidate critics of Israel by threats of violence.

As a sign of his worldwide impact, I received more than 100 messages of solidarity, many of which said that they were praying for my safety. The drama past, but I cannot imagine another prominent journalist willing to go out on a limb to show concern for someone in my circumstances. At the same time, I cannot imagine writing such a piece without checking the facts with the person in question.

This latter point goes to the one widespread criticism of Fisk’s flamboyant approach, which took note of his impatience with details, and willing to craft his articles around truths he firmly accepted as descriptive of reality. In my case, he didn’t really care if the Libyans were reliably reporting as it was a helpful anecdote for making the underlying argument that he correctly believed to be descriptive of reality—namely, Zionist tactics of intimidation to quiet or even silence voices of criticism. This is an interesting issue raising questions about the distinction between core and peripheral reliability.

Whereas the journeymen journalists are wary of going against the prevailing consensus on core issues (for instance, they slant reality in pro-Israeli direction, and would have described me as an extreme critic of Israel or even someone accused of being ‘anti-Semitic), the Fisks of this world embellish peripheral matters to engage their readers while being reliable forthright on core matters even when offensive to the societal majority. Although Fisk did this in a progressive vein, others take similar factual liberties to feed the conspiratorial and reactionary appetites of their right-wing followers.

My other equally illuminating contact with Fisk was during a West Coast visit a decade ago, when he came to California to give a university lecture. I was approached by the organizers to act as his chauffer during the visit, which I was thrilled to do. It gave me the opportunity to confirm Fisk’s reputation as highly individualistic, irreverent, and provocative self that was on display whether he was reporting from a war zone or talking to students on a college campus. The large turnout and enthusiastic audience reception made clear that Fisk’s influence spreads far beyond readers of his columns in The Independent.

He was recognized throughout the world as a colorful celebrity journalist whose words mattered. There are almost none who have his mixture of bravado, insight, and commitment, and still manage affiliations with mainstream news outlets. In my mind Fisk is a positive example of a celebrity journalist, which for me contrasts negatively with the sort of liberal punditry that issues from the celebrity pen of Thomas Friedman. Whereas Fisk is comfortable in his role of talking truth to power, Friedman relishes his role as the self-proclaimed sage observer who tenders advice to the rich and powerful as to how to realize their goals, combining an arrogance of style with faithful adherence to the pillars of Western orthodoxy (predatory capitalism, global militarism, special relationship with Israel).

Daniel Falcone: What special qualities did Robert Fisk possess that made him so influential and memorable, and perhaps the most distinguished journalist of our time? What did Fisk think of the other styles of journalism that perhaps differed from his own?

Richard Falk: For perspective, I recall my contact, and in these instances, friendship with three other exceptional war correspondents whose traits somewhat resemble the qualities that have made Fisk’s death an irreplaceable loss: Eric Rouleau of Le Monde, Gloria Emerson of the NY Times, and Peter Arnett of Associated Press. Each of them shared a flair for adventure, a pride in their stand-alone journalistic style, a fearlessness in the face of extreme danger that endeared them to combatants, and a sensibility that hovered between the sadness of loneliness and a love of solitude.

These qualities were accompanied in each instance by fiercely independent personalities that gave their home office minders both pride in their stellar reporting and anxious fits as they breached the red lines of establishment thinking. By their nature, such individuals were mavericks who eluded managerial control. They also each shared contempt for what Fisk described as ‘hotel journalism,’ that is, the practice of leading journalists hiring locals to give them stories from the front lines of confrontation while spending most of their days sipping martinis at the hotel bar.

I never observed Fisk at work, but feel confident that his working style resembled that of these others. I did have the opportunity to be with Eric Rouleau in Tehran during the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution, heard accounts of Gloria Emerson’s comradery with American soldiers in combat situations, and was with Peter Arnett in Hanoi while engaged in accompanying three released American POWs back to the United States in the last stage of the Vietnam War.

Although distinct and different in personality and interests, each shared this sense of wanting to get to the bottom of what was happening in the field while listening to the views of leaders, however controversial, in one-on-one. Both Fisk and Arnett were among the few Western journalists who interviewed Osama Bin Laden in the late 1990s. It is reported that Bin Laden was so impressed by Fisk’s approach that he invited him to become a Muslim since he already displayed his devotion to truth.

Fisk’s famously reacted at the end of 2001 to being beaten nearly to death by a mob of angry Afghan refugees living in a Pakistani border village who recognized him as a Westerner when his car broke down, and vented their anger by a brutal attack that was halted by a local Muslim leader. Fisk’s words, which included disapproval of such violence, were also atypical for most, but characteristic for him: Of the attacker he said “There is every reason to be angry. I’ve been an outspoken critic of the US actions myself. If I had been them, I would have attacked me.”

Daniel Falcone: How did Fisk cover the Palestinians? What is his legacy on the coverage of the conflict? Are there any journalistic outfits, think-tanks, organizations or academics that you consider to cover the plight of the Palestinian people well while providing context the way Robert Fisk did?

Richard Falk: Fisk took for granted his support for the Palestinian struggle, his disgust at the tactics of control relied upon by Israel, while condemning America’s use of its geopolitical muscle contributed to the prolonged struggle of the Palestinians for breathing space in their own homeland. This should not be understood as Fisk adopting a blind eye toward Palestinian wrongdoing and diplomatic clumsiness. He was almost alone among influential journalists in voicing skepticism from the outset of the Oslo peace process initiated on the White House Lawn in 1993. Fisk, above all, blended his passion for core truths with an undisguised judgmental approach toward wrongful conduct, regardless of the eminence of the target.

There are many initiatives that try to present the Palestinian ordeal in a realistic way, and I have dealt from time to time with many of them. I would mention, first of all, Jewish Voice for Peace, which has done its best to express views that acknowledge the violations of Palestinian basic rights, including imposition of an apartheid regime that oppresses, fragments, and victimizes the Palestinians as a people whether through occupation, dispossession, ethnic cleansing, and denial of elemental rights of return. Palestine Legal has been courageous and highly competent, providing expert guidance and involvement in legal cases and controversies involving issues bearing on Palestinian rights.

In journalistic and academic circles there are a few bright spots in the United States. As online sources of information, insight, and reportage sympathetic to the Palestinians I would mention Mondoweiss, Middle East Eye, and the Electronic Intifada, each well edited, online publishers of quality material. Among individuals who have been outspoken and influential I would mention Marwan Bishara, Phyllis Bennis, Norman Finkelstein, Noam Chomsky, Ilan Pappe, Noura Erakat, Lawrence Davidson, and Virginia Tilley.

Over the years, I have had little patience with the tortured reasoning and moral pretentiousness of ‘liberal Zionists’ who jump at any partisan olive branch so long as it leaves Israel as a Jewish state with Jerusalem as its capital and doesn’t require giving up most of the unlawful settlements in the West Bank. However, the recent abandonment of such a posture by the most eminent of liberal Zionists, Peter Beinart, is both a refreshing realization that Zionism is not reconcilable with a sustainable peace and a signal to American Jews to rethink the format for a political compromise that shifts away from the two-state mantra.

In Israel and Occupied Palestine there have been perceptive and brave NGOs that have been outspoken in their criticism of Israeli tactics. In Israel I would mention B’Tselem on violations of human rights, Badil on questions bearing on the treatment of Palestinian refugees and residents of Israel, and Israel Committee Against House Demolitions. Several Israeli journalists have been outspoken critics of Israel behavior toward Palestine, and I would express particular admiration for Gideon Levy and Amira Hass.

Among intellectually inclined progressive activists, Jeff Halper shines, writing several important books, including War Against People: Israel, Palestinians, and Global Pacification (2015). He has an outstanding forthcoming book, an exceptional example of ‘advocacy journalism’ insisting that one democratic state with equality for both peoples is the only path to a just and sustainable peace. If it is to be achieved it must include accepting certain views: the reality of Israel as a settler colonial state, the non-viability of the Zionist project to establish and maintain an exclusivist Jewish state, and the dependence on a grassroots collaborative political process of Jews and Palestinians seeking a just peace through democratization and basic rights.

In Occupied Palestine, Mohammed Omer acted as a brave war correspondent under the most difficult conditions, and endured harsh physical abuse by Israeli security forces. In relation to human rights, Raji Sourani an outstanding lawyer, has for many, many years documented abusive Israeli behavior in Gaza, including identifying its criminal character, while serving as Director of the Palestine Centre of Human Rights in Gaza. He has been imprisoned several times by Israel and arrested on at least one occasion by the Palestinian Authority.

I have had the opportunity to know and work with almost all of these individuals and groups, and have admired their courage, perseverance, and dedication to justice. Their ethic has had an advocacy, solutions-oriented character that never seemed an integral part of Fisk’s contributions that were more focused on exposing the hypocrisy and greed of the powerful, than finding solutions for bloody conflict beyond the anti-imperialist advocacy of withdrawal and peacemaking, although he never made a secret of his commitments to peace, self-determination, and neutrality.

Fur Trades and Pandemics: Coronavirus and Denmark’s Great Mink Massacre

BY BINOY KAMPMARK
NOVEMBER 9, 2020

“The worst case scenario is a new pandemic, starting all over again out of Denmark,” came the words of a grave Kåre Mølbak, director of the Danish health authorities, the State Serum Institute. According to the Institute, COVID-19 infections were registered on 216 mink farms on November 6. Not only had such infections been registered; new variants, five different clusters in all, were also found. Mink variants were also detected in 214 people among 5,102 samples, of whom 200 live in the North Jutland Region.

A noticeable tremor of fear passed through the public health community. It was already known that mink are susceptible to SARS-CoV-2. On April 23 and 25, outbreaks linked with mink farms were reported at farms in the Netherlands holding 12,000 and 7,500 animals respectively. The mink had been infected by a farm worker with COVID-19 and, like humans, proved to be either asymptomatic, or evidently ill with symptoms such as intestinal pneumonia. In time 12 of the 130 Dutch mink farms were struck. What interested researchers was the level of virulence in the transmission of the virus through the population. “Although SARS-CoV-2 is undergoing plenty of mutations as it spreads through mink,” writes Martin Enserik for Science, “its virulence shows no signs of increasing.”

The Danish discoveries, however, fuelled another concern: the possibility that the virus from cluster 5, as identified by the Institute, was more resistant to antibodies from humans infected with SARS-CoV-2 when compared to other non-mutated SARS-CoV-2 viruses. Potential vaccines, in other words, could be threatened with obsolescence. “This hits all the scary buttons,” claimed evolutionary biologist Carl Bergstrom.

In her November 6 briefing, Tyra Grove Krause, head of the department of infectious disease epidemiology and prevention at the SSI, did not wish to strike the doomsday register. But she was none the less abundantly cautious. “We definitely need to do more studies on this specific variant and its possible effect on future vaccines, but it takes a long time to do these kinds of studies.” But she was in no mood to wait to “get all the evidence” given the possible risks. “You need to act in time to stop transmission.”

The World Health Organization is attempting to provide some reassurance, and while this is welcome, that body’s public image has been often unjustly frayed by its initial approach to the novel coronavirus. In a statement to National Geographic, the WHO admitted concern “when a virus has gone from humans to animals, and back to humans. Each time this happens, it can change more.” But Soumya Swaminathan, the WHO’s chief scientist, refrained from drawing any conclusions from the current crop of revelations from Denmark. “We need to wait and see what the implications are but I don’t think we should come to any conclusions about whether this particular mutation is going to impact vaccine efficiency.”

Francois Balloux, director of University College London’s Genetics Institute, is also making his own infectious disease wager, thrilled by this “fantastically interesting” scenario. “I don’t believe that a strain which gets adapted to mink poses a higher risk to humans.” This comes with qualification, of course. “We can never rule out anything, but in principle it shouldn’t. It should definitely not increase transmission. I don’t see any good reason why it should make the virus more severe.”

In Denmark, no scientific chances are being taken on either the issue of virulence or the matter of vaccine effectiveness. The entire mink herd of 17 million is being culled. The Danish Prime Minister, Mette Frederiksen, attempted to see the problems of her country and its mink industry in humanitarian terms. “We have a great responsibility toward our population,” she explained on Wednesday, “but with the mutation that has now been found we have an even greater responsibility for the rest of the world as well.” Residents in seven areas in North Jutland have also been told “to stay in their area to prevent the spread of infection …. We are asking you in North Jutland to do something completely extraordinary. The eyes of the world are upon us.”

Despite the immediate and effective destruction of an industry, Mogens Jensen, Minister for Food and Fisheries, stated that this would be “the right thing to do in a situation where the vaccine, which is currently the light at the end of a very dark tunnel, is in danger.” Magnus Heunicke, the Minister for Health, also reiterated the point that “mink farming during the ongoing COVID-19 epidemic entails a possible risk to the public health – and for possibilities to combat COVID-19 with vaccines.”

The inevitably callous and brutal measure means that both the animals concerned and an industry, are being confined to history. Animal welfare advocates see mixed promise in the measure: cruelty in the culling, but hope in the eradication of a trade. “The right decision,” according to Animal Protection Denmark, “would be to end mink farming entirely and help farmers into [another] occupation that does not jeopardize public health and animal welfare.”

Joanna Swabe, the senior director of public affairs for Humane Society International/Europe, did express some pleasure at what was otherwise a grim end to Denmark’s mink population. As one of the largest fur producers in the global market, the “total shutdown of all Danish mink fur farms amid spiralling COVID-19 infections is a significant development.” She even went so far as to congratulate the Danish prime minister for the “decision to take such an essential and science-led step to protect Danish citizens from the deadly coronavirus.”

Fur lobbyists and traders, while accepting of the health risks, have had reservations at the absolute nature of the Danish response. Magnus Ljung, CEO of Saga Furs, noted how control of COVID-19 infections in mink populations was achieved in the Netherlands and Spain without a need to resort to mass culling. Mick Madsen of the Brussels-based industry group Fur Europe accepted that “public safety must come first” but urged Danish authorities to “release their research for scrutiny amongst international scientists.”

In the United States, mass culling is yet to take off. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention remains cool to any drastic measures, despite cases of contracted coronavirus at mink farms in Utah, Wisconsin and Michigan. Transmission to humans had yet to be documented, though spokesperson Jasmine Reed noted “ongoing” investigations.

Some scrutiny from international sources regarding Denmark’s decision has been forthcoming, though it is more in the order of modest scepticism. Marion Koopmans of the Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam, recalling the research into mink outbreaks in Dutch mink populations, considered the claim on a resistant mutation a bold one. “That is a very big statement. A single mutation, I would not expect to have that dramatic an effect.” Emma Hodcroft, a molecular epidemiologist based at the Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine in Bern, Switzerland, was also doubtful. “It’s almost never the case that it’s such a simple story of one mutation and all your vaccines stop working.”

After the great Danish mink massacre, it may well transpire that Prime Minister Frederiksen’s decision might have been less “science-led” as was presupposed. This does not dishearten Hodcroft, who warmly embraces the Danish approach to “take a step too far rather than a step too little”. Pity about the mink, then.


Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com