San Franciscans Vote Overwhelmingly to Rein in Overpaid CEOs

BY SARAH ANDERSON
NOVEMBER 9, 2020
COUNTERPUNCH


CEOs did not cause the pandemic. But they deserve a good deal of the blame for a model that shoveled profits up the corporate ladder, leaving lower-level employees financially insecure. When Covid-19 struck, it didn’t take much to push millions of vulnerable workers over the edge.

If we want to not only survive the pandemic but emerge as a nation more resilient to future crises, we need to reverse these obscenely unfair pay practices.

San Francisco voters have just taken a significant step in that direction.

By a margin of 65-35, they voted to approve a ballot measure, Proposition L, to increase taxes on corporations with extreme gaps between CEO and worker pay. The measure required only a simple majority to pass.

Specifically, the proposal will increase tax rates on local business revenue, ranging from an additional 0.1 percent on corporations that pay their CEO more than 100 times their typical San Francisco worker pay to 0.6 percent for companies with pay ratios of 600 to 1 or more.

To get a sense of the potential impact on specific companies, consider McDonald’s. Last year, CEO Stephen Easterbrook made $17.4 million before stepping down in November. That’s about 522 times as much as one of the fast food giant’s crew members would make earning San Francisco’s $16.07 minimum wage on an annual, full-time basis.

Unless McDonald’s makes big changes to its pay practices, these numbers suggest the company will owe a tax increase on the higher end of the proposed range, as a percentage of sales from their 16 or so San Francisco restaurants.

The benefits of the ballot measure are twofold. It will encourage corporations to narrow their pay gaps while generating revenue for programs to reduce poverty and inequality. City officials estimate the tax will raise $140 million per year.

San Francisco will be the second city in the nation to adopt a tax on large CEO-worker pay gaps. The first was Portland, Oregon.

For the tax design nerds out there, let me point out some differences between the San Francisco proposal and the Portland tax:

* The Portland measure uses CEO-worker pay ratio data large publicly held corporations already have to report to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Under the San Francisco model, companies will need to make some additional calculations.

* Under the SEC regulation, companies base their median worker pay figure on their global workforce and they may not convert the compensation going to part-time employees to full-time equivalents.

* Under the San Francisco plan, median worker pay is based on employees working in the city of San Francisco and the companies can convert part-time wages into full-time equivalents. (This will narrow the pay ratios at companies that rely heavily on part-time employees)

* Because Portland uses SEC data, the tax applies only to publicly held corporations, whereas the San Francisco reform covers all companies (except small businesses with less than $1 million in sales), regardless of their ownership structure.

* Due to differences in local business tax structures, the base of the two cities’ tax differs. In Portland, the surcharge is on a local business profits tax. For most companies in San Francisco, the increase will apply to the city’s existing gross receipts tax. The exception is for operations that are mostly engaged in administrative or management services and thus don’t have significant local sales. If these companies have more than 1,000 employees and more than $1 billion in annual sales nationwide, they would be subject to a tax increase based on the size of their local payroll.

All these technicalities aside, both models advance the movement to reverse inequality in ways that should give a strong boost to other efforts. Lawmakers have introduced similar bills in at least eight state legislatures, including California, as well as in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives.

In the midst of the pandemic crisis, the argument for such taxes is even stronger.

“We believe that big corporations that can afford to pay their executives million-dollar salaries every year can afford to pay their fair share in taxes to help us recover,” wrote San Francisco Supervisor Matt Haney in a statement supporting Proposition L.

Of course Proposition L also had its detractors. Republican Richie Greenberg, who ran an unsuccessful race for San Francisco mayor in 2018, issued a statement before the vote claiming the tax would serve no purpose because “Employees’ salaries are based on experience and value to a company.”

That tired argument should’ve been dead after the 2008 financial crisis, when financial executives chasing massive bonuses drove our economy off a cliff.

It should be even deader now, as CEOs continue to pocket fat paychecks in a recession while essential frontlines workers show us every day just how undervalued they’ve long been.

After the election, Supervisor Haney tweeted that the revenue from the tax will be used to “support our health and public health systems, which are deeply strained from the consequences of inequality. We will hire nurses, social workers and emergency responders, and expand access and treatment.”

Pointing out that the measure won in nearly every precinct, Haney added that “Voters are demanding we take action on inequality.”


Sarah Anderson directs the Global Economy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies.

Progressives Made Trump’s Defeat Possible. Now It’s Time to Challenge Biden and Other Corporate Democrats

BY NORMAN SOLOMON
NOVEMBER 9, 2020

COUNTERPUNCH

The evident defeat of Donald Trump would not have been possible without the grassroots activism and hard work of countless progressives. Now, on vital issues — climate, healthcare, income inequality, militarism, the prison-industrial complex, corporate power and so much more — it’s time to engage with the battle that must happen inside the Democratic Party.

The realpolitik rationales for the left to make nice with the incoming Democratic president are bogus. All too many progressives gave the benefit of doubts to Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, making it easier for them to service corporate America while leaving working-class Americans in the lurch. Two years later, in 1994 and 2010, Republicans came roaring back and took control of Congress.

From the outset, progressive organizations and individuals (whether they consider themselves to be “activists” or not) should confront Biden and other elected Democrats about profound matters. Officeholders are supposed to work for the public interest. And if they’re serving Wall Street instead of Main Street, we should show that we’re ready, willing and able to “primary” them.

Progressives would be wise to quickly follow up on Biden’s victory with a combative approach toward corporate Democrats. Powerful party leaders have already signaled their intentions to aggressively marginalize progressives.

“Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her top lieutenants,” Politico reports, “had a stark warning for Democrats on Thursday: Swing too far left and they’re all but certain to blow their chances in the Georgia runoff that will determine which party controls the Senate.”

Also on the conference call with congressional Democrats was House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, who reportedly declared that if “we are going to run on Medicare for All, defund the police, socialized medicine, we’re not going to win.”

Such admonitions were predictable and odd, coming from House Democratic leaders who just saw shrinkage of members of their party due to the loss of “moderate” incumbents as well as the losses of avowedly “moderate” and widely heralded Democratic senatorial candidates in Maine, Kentucky, Iowa and elsewhere.

At the core of such conflicts, whether simmering or exploding, is class war. When Pelosi & Co. try to stamp out the genuinely progressive upsurge in congressional ranks that is fueled from the grassroots, they’re “dancing with those who brung them” — corporate elites. It’s an extremely lucrative approach for those who feed out of the troughs of the Democratic National Committee, the Senate and House party campaign committees, the House Majority PAC and many other fat-cat political campaign entities. Consultant contracts and lobbying deals keep flowing, even after Democrats lose quite winnable elections.

Biden almost lost this election. And while the Biden campaign poured in vast financial resources and vague flowery messaging that pandered to white suburban voters, relatively little was focused on those who most made it possible to overcome Trump’s election-night lead — people of color and the young. Constrained by his decades-long political mentality and record, Biden did not energize working-class voters as he lip-sunk populist tunes in unconvincing performances.

That’s the kind of neoliberal approach that Bernie Sanders and so many of his supporters were warning about in 2016 and again this year. Both times there was a huge failure of the Democratic nominee to make a convincing case as an advocate for working people against the forces of wealthy avarice and corporate greed.

In fact, Clinton and Biden reeked of coziness with economic elites throughout their political careers. To many people, Clinton came off as a fake when she tried to sound populist, claiming to represent the little people against corporate giants. And to those who actually knew much about Biden’s political record, his similar claims also were apt to seem phony.

It’s clear from polling that Biden gained a large proportion of his votes due to animosity toward his opponent rather than enthusiasm for Biden. He hasn’t inspired the Democratic base, and his appeal had much more to do with opposing the evils of Trumpism than embracing his own political approach.

More than ever, merely being anti-Trump or anti-Republican isn’t going to move Democrats and the country in the vital directions we need. Without a strong progressive program as a rudder, the Biden presidency will be awash in much the same old rhetorical froth and status-quo positions that have so often caused Democratic incumbents to founder, bringing on GOP electoral triumphs.

In recent months, Biden showed that he knew how to hum the refrains of economic populism when that seemed tactically useful, but he scarcely knew the words and could hardly belt out the melody. His media image as “Lunch Bucket Joe” was a helpful mirage in corporate medialand, but that kind of puffery only went so far. Meanwhile, the Biden strategists decided to coast on the issue of the pandemic, spotlighting Trump’s lethally narcissistic insanity.

But when it came to healthcare — obviously a central concern in people’s lives, especially amid the coronavirus — Biden largely fell back on Obamacare rather than advocating for a genuine guarantee of healthcare as a human right. Likewise, Biden talked a bit about easing the economic burdens on small businesses and families, but it was pretty pallid stuff compared to what’s desperately needed. To a large extent, he surrendered the economic playing field to Trump’s pseudo-populist blather.

Looking ahead, we need vigorous successors to the New Deal of the 1930s and the Great Society programs of the mid-1960s that were asphyxiated, politically and budgetarily, by the Vietnam War. Set aside the phrase if you want to, but we need some type of “democratic socialism” (as Martin Luther King Jr. asserted in the last years of his life).

The ravages of market-based “solutions” are all around us; the public sector has been decimated, and it needs to be revitalized with massive federal spending that goes way beyond occasional “stimulus” packages. The potential exists to create millions of good jobs while seriously addressing the climate catastrophe. If we’re going to get real about ending systemic and massive income inequality, we’re going to have to fight for — and achieve — massive long-term public investments, financed by genuinely progressive taxation and major cuts in the military budget.

With enormous grassroots outreach that only they could credibly accomplish, progressive activists were a crucial part of the de facto united front to defeat Trump. Now it’s time to get on with grassroots organizing to challenge corporate Democrats.


Norman Solomon is executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, where he coordinates ExposeFacts. Solomon is a co-founder of RootsAction.org.

U.S. Foreign Policy is a Failure, Whoever’s President

BY EVE OTTENBERG

NOVEMBER 6, 2020
COUNTERPUNCH

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

The world recognizes what U.S. elites don’t: the utter, total American failure to contain Covid-19 has damaged U.S. standing and will do so until the virus is controlled. Meanwhile, regional powers, China and Russia, cooperate and share resources, particularly vaccines. Cuba provides treatments, but the U.S. turns up its nose at Cuban medicine, even if it means more American covid patients die – this, though Cuba’s pharmacopeia for this plague appears superior. China sends doctors and medicines across the globe. Russia opts for sane herd immunity – through vaccination. These countries act like adults. Not a good look for the U.S.

The Obama regime’s deplorable trade and military “pivot to China,” along with its sanctions against high-ranking Russians and Russian energy, financial and defense firms and the Trump regime’s provocations, sanctions and insults aimed at both countries have now born fruit: There is talk of a military alliance between China and Russia. Both countries deny that such is in the offing, but the fact that it is even discussed reveals how effectively U.S. foreign policy has created enemies and united them. Even if they would have drawn closer anyway, China and Russia cannot ignore the advantage of teaming up in the face of U.S. hostility. A more idiotic approach than this hostility is scarcely imaginable. Remember, not too long ago the U.S. had little problem with its chief trading partner, China, and there were even reports some years back of actual military cooperation in Syria between the U.S. and Russia. All that is gone now, dissolved in a fog of deliberate ill-will.

So what are some of the absurd U.S. policies that have reaped this potential whirlwind? An utterly unnecessary trade war with China, with tariffs that were paid, not by China, but by importers and then passed on to American consumers. There is the Trump regime’s assault on China’s technology sector and its attempt to lockout Huawei from the 5G bonanza. Then there are the attacks on Russian business, like its deal to sell natural gas to Germany, attacks in which the U.S. insists Germany buy the much more expensive U.S. product to avoid becoming beholden to Russia. And of course, there are the constant mega-deals involving sales of U.S. weapons to anyone who might oppose China, Russia, North Korea or Iran.

Aggravating these economic assaults, the U.S. navy aggressively patrols the South China Sea, the Black Sea and more and more the Arctic Ocean, where Russia has already been since forever. Russia has a lengthy Siberian coast, making U.S. talk of Russia’s so-called aggressive posture there just plain ludicrous. And now a NATO ally, Turkey, stirs the pot by egging on Azerbaijan in its war against Armenia, which has a defense treaty with Russia. Azerbaijan is famous for the oil fields of Baku.

Never has it been clearer that the U.S. deploys its military might to advance its corporations’ interests, international law be damned. As General Smedley Butler wrote of his military service way back in the early 20th century, he was “a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico…safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank Boys to collect revenues in,” and on and on. Nothing has changed since them. It’s only gotten worse. Indeed now we’re in a position where it is Russia that abides by international law, while the U.S. flouts it, instead following something bogus it calls the “rules of the liberal international order.”

The biggest and most consequential U.S. foreign policy failure involves nuclear weapons. Here the Trump regime has outdone all its predecessors. It withdrew the U.S. from the Intermediate Range Nuclear treaty, which banned land-based ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and certain missile launchers and which it first signed in 1987. It withdrew from the Open Skies Treaty, inked in 1992. That agreement allowed aircraft to fly over the signatories’ territory to monitor missile installations.

Trump has also made clear he intends to deep-six the 2010 New Start Treaty with Russia, which limits nuclear warheads, nuclear armed bombers, intercontinental ballistic missiles and missile launchers. The Trump regime has made the ridiculous, treaty-killing demand that China participate in START talks. Why should it? China has 300 nuclear missiles, on a par with countries like the U.K. The U. S. and Russian have 6000 apiece. China’s response? Sure we’ll join START, as soon as the U.S. cuts its arsenal to 300. Naturally that went over like a lead balloon in Washington.

And now, lastly, the white house has urged nations that signed the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons – which just recently received formal UN ratification – to withdraw their approval. The U.S. spouted doubletalk about the TPNW’s dangers, in order to head off international law banning nuclear weapons, just as it has banned – and thus stigmatized – chemical weapons, cluster bombs and germ warfare. Doubtless the Trump regime’s panic over the TPNW derives from its desire to “keep all options on the table” militarily, including the nuclear one.

What is the point here? To make the unthinkable thinkable, to make nuclear war easier to happen. The Pentagon appears delighted. Periodically military bigwigs are quoted praising new smaller nuclear missiles, developed not for deterrence, but for use. Indeed, scrapping deterrence policy – which has, insofar as it posits no first use, arguably been the only thing keeping humanity alive and the planet habitable since the dangerous dawn of the atomic era – has long been the dream of Pentagon promoters of “small, smart nuclear weapons” for “limited” nuclear wars. How these geniuses would control such a move from escalating into a wider nuclear war and planetary holocaust is never mentioned.

Before he assumed office, Trump reportedly shocked his advisors by asking, if we have nuclear weapons, why can’t we use them? Only someone dangerously ignorant or profoundly lacking in basic human morality could ask such a question. Only someone eager to ditch the human-species-saving policy of no-first-strike nuclear deterrence but willing to risk nuclear extinction could flirt with such madness. Later in his presidency, Trump asserted that he could end the war in Afghanistan easily if he wanted, hinting that he meant nukes, but that he did not incline toward murdering 10 million people. Well, thank God for this shred of humanity.

Some assume a Biden presidency would chart a different course, but they may be counting their chickens before they’re hatched. Biden has made very hostile noises about Russia, China and North Korea and has surrounded himself with neo-con hawks. He has so far made no promise to return to the nuclear negotiating table for anything other than START. Would he try to resuscitate the INF and Open Skies treaties? Would he end Trump regime blather aimed at scotching TPNW? Maybe. Or he may have imbibed so much anti-Russia and anti-China poison that he, like Trump, sees the absence of treaties as a green light for nuclear aggression.

Biden’s official Foreign Policy Plan says that he regards the purpose of nuclear weapons as deterrence, thus endorsing this at best very flawed compromise for survival. That he, apparently unlike Trump, abjures a nuclear first strike is a huge relief, but how long will it last? The Pentagon has been very persuasive over many decades of center-right rule and there is no reason to assume that it will suddenly adopt a hands-off policy with Biden just because he favors nuclear deterrence. Some military-industrial-complex sachems regard the no-first-use principle as a mistake. Also, remember, Obama okayed a trillion-dollar nuclear arms upgrade. Biden was his vp. What about that? This is no minor, petty concern. Russia is armed to the teeth with supersonic nuclear weapons and China has concluded from U.S. belligerence that it better arm up too. We are in dangerous waters here. Let’s hope they don’t become radioactive.


Eve Ottenberg is a novelist and journalist. Her latest book is Birdbrain. She can be reached at her website.

Why Capitalism Was Destined to Come Out on Top in the 2020 Election

BY RICHARD D. WOLFF
COUNTERPUNCH


Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

No matter who “won” the U.S. election, what will not change is the capitalist organization of the country’s economy.

The great majority of enterprises will continue to be owned and operated by a small minority of Americans. They will continue to use their positions atop the capitalist system to expand their wealth, “economize their labor costs,” and thereby deepen the United States’ inequalities of wealth and income.

The employer class will continue to use its wealth to buy, control, and shape the nation’s politics to prevent the employee class from challenging their ownership and operation of the economic system. Indeed, for a very long time, they have made sure that (1) only two political parties dominate the government and (2) both enthusiastically commit to preserving and supporting the capitalist system. For capitalism, the question of which party wins matters only to how capitalism will be supported, not whether that support will be a top governmental priority.

No matter who won, the private sector and the government will continue their shared failure to overcome capitalism’s socially destructive instability. Economic crashes (“downturns,” “busts,” “recessions,” and “depressions”) will continue to occur on average every four to seven years, disrupting our economy and society. Already in this young century, we have endured, across Republicans and Democrats, three crashes (2000, 2008, and 2020) in 20 years: true to the historic average. Nothing capitalism tried in the past ever stopped or overcame its instability. Nothing either party now proposes offers the slightest chance of doing that in the future.

No matter who won, the historic undoing of the New Deal after 1945 will continue. The GOP and Democrats will both keep reversing the 1930s’ reduction of U.S. wealth and income inequalities (forced from below by the Congress of Industrial Organizations [CIO], socialists, and communists). As usual, the GOP reverses these gains for Americans further and faster than Democrats, but both parties have condoned and managed the upward redistribution of wealth and income since 1945.

The GOP will likely celebrate explicitly the wealthy they serve so slavishly. The Democrats will likely moan occasionally about inequality while serving the wealthy quietly or implicitly. The GOP will “economize on government costs” by cutting social programs for average people and the poor. The Democrats will expand those programs while carefully avoiding any questioning, let alone challenging, of capitalism.

No matter who won, what U.S. politics lacks is real choice. Both major parties function as cheerleaders for capitalism under all circumstances, even when a killer pandemic coincides with a major capitalist crash. Real political choice would require a party that criticizes capitalism and offers a path toward social transition beyond capitalism. Countless polls prove that millions of U.S. citizens want to consider socialist criticisms of capitalism and socialist alternatives to it. The mass of voters for Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and other socialists provided yet more evidence. However, the system allowed and enabled a near-fascistic right wing to take over the GOP and the presidency. At the same time, it aided and abetted the Democrats in excluding a socialist from even running for that presidency. Trump and Biden are long-standing, well-known cheerleaders for capitalism. Sanders was, in contrast, a critic.

A new political party that offered systemic criticisms of capitalism and advocated for a transition to a worker-coop based economic system would bring real choice into U.S. politics. It would place before the electorate a basic question of vital importance: what mix of capitalist and worker-coop organized enterprises do you wish to work for, buy from, and live with in the United States? Voters could thereby genuinely participate in deciding the range of job descriptions from which each of us will become able to choose. Will we mostly have to accept positions as employees whose jobs are designed exclusively by and for employers? Or will all job descriptions include at least two basic tasks: a specific function within an enterprise’s division of labor plus an equal share (alongside all other enterprise workers) of the powers to design and direct the enterprise as a whole?

Any community that wishes to call itself a “democracy” for more than rhetorical, self-promotional reasons should welcome a one-person, one-vote decision-making process governing how work is organized.

Most adults spend most of their lives at work. How that work is organized shapes how their lives are lived and what skills, aptitudes, appetites, and relationships they develop. Their work influences their other social roles as friends, lovers, spouses, and parents. In capitalism, the work experience of the vast majority (employees) is shaped and controlled by a small minority (employers) to secure the latter’s profit, wealth accumulation, and reproduction as the socially dominant minority. In a real democracy, the economy would have to be democratically reorganized. Workplace decisions would be made on the basis of one person, one vote inside each enterprise. Parallel, similarly democratic decision-making would govern residential communities surrounding and interacting with workplaces. Workplace and residential democracies would have significant influences over one another’s decisions. In short, genuine economic democracy would be the necessary partner to political democracy.

Many “capitalist” societies today include significant sites of enterprises organized as worker cooperatives. What they need but lack are allied political parties to secure the legislation, legal precedents, and administrative decisions to protect worker coops and facilitate their growth. Early capitalist enterprises and enclaves within feudalism likewise had to find or build political parties for the same reasons. Anti-feudal and pro-capitalist parties contested with feudal lords and their monarchs first to protect capitalist enterprises’ existence and then to facilitate their growth. Eventually, pro-capitalist parties undertook revolutions to displace feudalism and monarchies in favor of parliaments in which those capitalist parties could and did dominate.

Today, pro-capitalist parties publicly deny but privately fear that their political dominance is threatened. Mass disaffection from capitalism is growing. One reason is the relocation of capitalism’s growth from its old centers (Western Europe, North America, and Japan) to new centers (China, India, and Brazil). Globalization—the polite but confused term for that relocation—generates economic declines in the old centers that destabilize communities unable to admit let alone prepare for them. There, vanishing job opportunities, incomes, and social services provoke increasing questions and challenges confronting capitalism. These are now leading to broad and growing disaffection from the capitalist system. Polls and other signs of that disaffection abound. In the United States, on the one hand, the Republican Party lurched to the right. Trump-type quasi-fascism wants to impose a nationalist turn to “save” U.S. capitalism. On the other hand, the old, pro-capitalist establishment running the Democratic Party blocked Bernie Sanders and other socialists from any real power or voice. Saving capitalism was and also remains that establishment’s goal.

Capitalism eventually defeated and displaced feudalism by combining micro-level construction and expansion of capitalist enterprises with macro-focused political parties finding ways to protect those enterprises and facilitate their growth. Capitalists’ profits funded their parties’ activities. Socialism will defeat and displace capitalism by a parallel combination of expanding worker coops and a political party using government to protect them and facilitate their growth. The worker coops’ net revenues will finance their parties’ activities.

The emergence of politically significant socialist parties is well underway in the United States. Besides the small remainders of past socialist parties, Occupy Wall Street, the recent growth and prominence of the Democratic Socialists of America, the two Sanders campaigns, and the rise of other socialist politicians such as Ocasio-Cortez are all signs of socialist renewal. But those signs also reveal a huge remaining problem: disorganization on the left. The social movements, labor unions, and the new socialist initiatives need to coalesce into a broad, new socialist party. If that party could also become the political voice of a growing worker-coop sector of the economy, many key conditions for a transition beyond capitalism will have been achieved.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.


Richard Wolff is the author of Capitalism Hits the Fan and Capitalism’s Crisis Deepens. He is founder of Democracy at Work.

Afterword to Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program

BY PETER LINEBAUGH
NOV 11,2020 COUNTERPUNCH 

Photograph Source: david__jones – CC BY 2.0

To the memory of Noel Ignatiev.

Dixi et salvavi animam meam. With these Latin words Karl Marx concludes his Critique of the Gotha Program (1875) – “I have spoken and saved my soul.” One is unaccustomed to religious expression from the great communist, unless it be sarcastic, yet here he uses it to conclude a devastating analysis of the program of German workers party. What is Marx’s soul? How did he save it? And what about ours?[1]

These Latin words from two and a half millennia previous were distilled from a ‘brazen and stubborn’ prophet, Ezekiel, who with bizarre, way-out visions of animals, jewels, and wheels within wheels heard these words whispered from the heavenly vault.[2]

If I pronounce sentence of death on a wicked person and you have not warned him or spoken out to dissuade him from his wicked ways and so save his life, that person will die because of his sin, but I shall hold you answerable for his death. But if you have warned him and he persists in his wicked ways, he will die because of his sin, but you will have discharged your duty.

Perhaps Marx learned this in childhood. The oracular voice and the prophetic role came easily to him. Dixi et salvavi was used by Engels too writing thirty years earlier in The Condition of the Working Class in England (1844) when it expressed bourgeois contempt. The phrase from Ezekiel became part of pompous boss-talk as the boss clears his conscience and walks away. And for a moment Marx and Engels considered walking away from the nascent German socialist party, but hung on in there, despite his criticisms. Marx, however, at this moment of obligation refers to capitalism and its wicked ways.

Salvation depends on speaking; it is the moral imperative. Black Lives Matter speaks truth to power; Extinction Rebellion’s slogan is “to tell the truth;” and women in north America form “speak outs” in recovering from male violence. Indispensable to the revolutionary project is calling out the wicked ways. Black Lives Matter (BLM) has pointed to the murderous effects of white supremacy. #MeToo has pointed to the violent degradations inherent to patriarchy. Extinction Rebellion (XR) has taken direct action against the political and economic causes of planetary warming. At Standing Rock indigenous people attempt to prevent pollution of the waters. Racism, patriarchy, settler colonialism, and destruction of the planetary earth system are the “wicked ways.” These are four destructive structures of capitalism. With them in mind we look back to select what is useful from Marx’s Critique bearing in mind, so to speak, that Marx also looks to us!

Engels published (and revealed) the Condition of the English Working Class in 1844. That year too found Marx publishing an earlier “critique,” not of a political program but of a political philosophy. A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, in which he described religion as “the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.” “Criticism has plucked,” he writes, “the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower.” To unmask self-estrangement he must turn to the criticism of actualities, and turn to history “to establish the truth of this world.” The two revolutionaries, Marx and Engels, one a critical philosopher and the other an empirical investigator, formed a partnership as revolutionary communists.

A year or so later they write, “Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.”[3] And that real movement in dissolving the world market abolishes alien property relations and restores mutual human relations. It is for us to see that real movement.” He makes the point again in The Critique of the Gotha Program: “Every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programs.”

The goal is the commons, the means is the proletariat. What did these words – commons, proletariat – actually mean to him or to us? How are they part of the “real movement which abolishes the present state of things”?

Instead of proletariat he will write of producers or labor power. He’ll refer to serfs, to slaves; he’ll include employed and unemployed (the active army, the reserve army); he’ll refer to peasants, to artisans, to small manufacturers. All people who have lost their organic connections to nature, that is, to land, its creatures, its grains; to the waters and pastures; as well as to the geological resources lying beneath the land. All people who have been expropriated from the means of life, the means of production, the means of subsistence, this is what he means. It only remains to organize! “It is altogether self-evident that to be able to fight at all the working class must organize itself at home as a class…,” he states in this Critique. Yet this ‘class’ is constantly changing in its composition.

By the 1860s as the worker’s movement revived after the defeats that followed 1848, socialist parties were formed in Germany, and Marx helped to organize in 1864 the International Workingman’s Association, or the First International. It culminates with the Paris Commune of 1871, two months of self-rule by the French working-class, the first proletarian revolution.

The Gotha program says that labor is the source of all wealth. No, it’s not, says Marx. Nature is just as much a source of material wealth as labor. The single negation, right at the beginning with the little word “no” is the key that opens the door, for us in the twenty-first century, to planetary warming and the sixth extinction. We walk right in with the eco-socialism of Joel Kovel, Michael Löwy, and John Bellamy Foster .[4] We are present at the edge of the abyss staring into the “ecological rift.” Marx wrote of the “irreparable break” between nature and society. Or, he’d call the nature-humanity relation “metabolism.” The mass slaughter of the bison, the deforestation of the Great Lakes, the depletion of nutrients from the soil were some of the underlying phenomena of “the metabolic rift” in his day. The concept from Das Kapital of “the organic composition of capital” expresses in terms of economic quantities this rupture or rift.

Looking back to 1875 we see hints of Nature becoming self-conscious (as Elisée Reclus might say). About the time Marx was composing this critique the first “Arbor Day” (22 April 1875) celebrated by planting trees was announced in the USA and John Muir was walking in the Rockies and asking “How Shall We Preserve Our Trees.” While these were only “flea-hops” as Marx might say (see below) they were signs of what lay ahead.

Nature is the beginning both of life and of capitalism. “The bourgeois have very good grounds for falsely ascribing supernatural creative power to labor since it follows precisely from the fact that labor depends on nature that the human being who possesses no other property than his labor power must, in all conditions of society and culture, be the slave of other human beings who have made themselves the owners of the material conditions of labor. He can only work by their permission, hence live only with their permission.” In Das Kapital this will be called expropriation and exploitation. In the young Marx it will be called alienation. Marx lifts the veil. To our world, to nature, to the biosphere, to creation, to the commons. Only the working class, he writes in the Gotha critique, can “lift this historical curse.”

Between the two critiques, 1844-1875, lay thirty years of class struggle, revolution, war, empire, and massive constructions of iron and steel, and Marx indeed threw away the imaginary flower to pluck the living flower. After the failures of the revolutions of 1848 he turned his attention to the demolition of the bourgeois divisions of politics from economics in perhaps the greatest critique ever made in the Grundrisse (1857) and Das Kapital (1867). These outlined the “wicked ways” of capital and established “the truth of this world.” They provide the means of plucking the living flower.

Could this critique become the soul, the heart, the sigh of the oppressed? It is no longer a philosophical or spiritual question; it is a political question.

One of his principle forms of critique is to describe the arguments of his opponent as “words” or “phrases” denying to them any substance in reason or factual evidence. He does this repeatedly in the Critique of the Gotha Program.(a sentence “limps,” “hollow phrases,” “bungled in style,” “mere phrases,” “obsolete verbal rubbish,” “false Lassallean formulation,” “a newspaper scribbler’s phrase”). Yet the critique contains two signature phrases of the Marxist outlook. One of them is both a profound summary of the fundamental opposition to capitalism and a fighting slogan for the banners of revolution, “From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.”[5] This is the seed of the living flower.

The physician, Luke, describes these early Christians who “had all things common” (Acts 4: 32) “and distribution was made unto every man according as he had need” (Acts 4:35). When threatened with famine during the reign of Claudius relief was obtained from “every man according to his ability.” (Acts 11:29).

What is it that abilities are creating? What is it that needs are accepting? Are we to interpret these two processes as production and consumption? In capitalist society production and consumption form a whole, the economy, regulated by the market, whose unit is the commodity, and whose lingo is money. This is “the historical curse.”

If you think about it, there seems to be some mysterious agent who measures out those abilities (senior management? HR?) or who doles out according to needs (Amazon? retail?). It is this mystery which can only be described in the future, “after the revolution.” Is it traditional institutions of civil society – family, work, government? Is it revolutionary assemblies – the congregation, the city the square, the soviet, some new version of the tribe? Is it some other social organization? Elinor Ostrom formulated it as ‘the governance of the commons.’[6] Marx relies neither on Providence nor on Progress for the realization of the future. The mystical former relies on divine agency and the abstract latter depends on Victorian technological and utilitarian belief. It does not happen automatically or inevitably. Earlier in the Grundrisse (p. 325) he had written “of the rich individuality which is as all-sided in its production as in its consumption, and whose labour also therefore appears no longer as labour, but as the full development of activity itself”.

He refers to the “the common satisfaction of needs such as schools, health services, &c.” He refers to “the common stock.” The French revolutionary socialist, Jean Jaurès, said “Just as all citizens exercise political power in a democratic manner in common, so they must exercise economic power in common as well.”[7] Communist society, Marx writes, “emerges from capitalist society which is thus in every respect economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges.”

What is the relationship between the statement of principles and the enumerated points of the program? In The Communist Manifesto (1848) the relationship was mediated by the history of class struggle. In the Critique of the Gotha Program the relationship depends on that critique of political economy found in Capital (1867) and the Grundrisse (1857).

In analyzing Marx’s thought we remind ourselves that thought is in motion. His ideas at any one time are not fixed in an eternity of truth. On the contrary they are very much of his times. So in understanding the problems of 1875 in the Gotha program, we can both think back to earlier phases of his thinking and forward to their subsequent development. We go back to the ‘young Marx’ and forwards to the ‘old Marx.’[8]

The ‘young Marx’ is all about alienation; he gives us both a spiritual and philosophical lens. The ‘old Marx’ is all about the commons; he gives us a lens in revolutionary anthropology and immersion in the so-called “backward” countries where indeed the air is better. Together the ideas of the young and the old Marx provide us with a way to read The Critique of the Gotha Program. We are no longer confined to the realm of political economy. We can approach both the meaning of communism and the anti-capitalist transition to it in ways that might be helpful in the twenty-first century.

The ‘mature Marx’ remains central which is to say that the critical analysis of the capitalist mode of production and the critique of political economy are what he is all about as he disentangles the hopeless web of error and bad politics found in the Gotha Program. Its guiding author, Ferdinand Lassalle, was formerly a follower of Marx who however allied with the Junkers, the German landlord class. Yet, the lords of the land turned nature into a commodity, a means of constant capital, and thus an instrument of extraction and exploitation. Such are the wicked ways.

The preface (1867) to Das Kapital, volume one, boldly proclaims, “Just as in the eighteenth century the American War of Independence sounded the tocsin for the European middle class, so in the nineteenth century the American Civil War did the same for the European working class.”[9] The American Civil War sounded the death knell of slavery with the horn of the jubilee. That tocsin will ring to the European working class with the Paris Commune (1871) and reverberate with the working classes of the world on going.

In the Paris Commune the abolition of the death penalty and the burning of the guillotine, the destruction of the Vendôme column to the Napoleonic empire, and the formation of the Women’s Union provide during the seventy-two days of its life an idea of working-class self-government, or the political imaginary of commune.[10] Said Marx, “The great social measure of the Commune was its own working existence.”[11] As a result of the Commune Marx revised The Communist Manifesto to include the sentence, “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for their own purpose.”

In the summer of 1871 Peter Kropotkin (“mutual aid”) was in Finland, William Morris (“fellowship”) was in Iceland, and Karl Marx in London was studying the Russian language and reading Chernyshevsky’s Essays on the Communal Ownership of Land. His guide was the young Russian exile and Communard, Elisabeth Dmitrieff who besides leading Marx to the study of the peasant commune in Russia (the obshchina), was also the organizer of the seamstresses, laundresses, and dressmakers of Paris into the Women’s Union for the Defense of Paris and Aid to the Wounded. In Geneva discussions took place among veterans and exiles during the 1870s that produced the idea of “anarchist communism,” or the dissolution of State, Nation, and Capital.

The Commune was at the center of world-wide revolt. The writing of The Critique of the Gotha Program coincided with the hanging of nineteen coal miners (the “Molly Maguires”), with the police riot at Tompkins Square in New York, with the internment of the Navajo nation, the expropriation of the Comanches, the cultural war (‘kill the Indian, save the man’), Geronimo (“I was born where there were no enclosures”) escaping the San Carlos Reservation, and the African American military mobilization as ‘buffalo soldiers’ to annihilate the bison who had provided subsistence for the indigenous people of the plains. Thus did capital create and then utilize our divisions. The path was cleared for the global seizures and massacres in Africa, Asia, and Wounded Knee.[12]

The Kabylie revolt in Algeria against French conquest and confiscation of the common lands occurred at the same time as the Paris Commune. 250 tribes rose up, village assemblies providing the base along the coast, up the mountains, to the desert. It was led by Cheikh Mokrani. The infamous law of 1873 expropriated communal lands in Algeria, “tearing away the Arabs from their nature bond to the soil….”[13] At the end of his life in 1882 Marx spent two months in Algeria hoping that the commons of air in north Africa would heal the damage done to his lungs by capitalist externalities, i.e. London smog. Marx expressed his admiration of the Algerian Muslims for “the absolute equality of their social intercourse.”

Likewise, the defeat of the European working class (the two month Commune concluded with the bloody massacre of 20,000 – 30,000 communards) signaled the advent of Jim Crow, the end of Reconstruction, the KKK, the Colfax massacre, and the betrayals of 1875 Hayes-Tilden presidential election the year following. Virulent counter-revolution and violent suppression of textile workers of the north and railway workers of the west. “A new slavery arose,” wrote W.E.B. DuBois.[14] “The system of wage labor is a system of slavery,” wrote Marx in his Gotha Critique.

In a letter to Bebel in March 1875 Engels proposed replacing “state” everywhere by “Gemeinwesen, a good old German word which can very well convey the meaning of the French word “commune.” The Paris Commune four years earlier was, they said, “the glorious harbinger of a new society.” The mixture of commune, commons, and communism was a heady semantic mix concealing a revolutionary riddle not yet solved.

“The question then arises, what transformation will the body politic undergo in communist society? In other words what social functions analogous to present state functions will remain at that juncture. The question can only be answered scientifically, and one does not get a flea-hop nearer to the problem by a thousand-fold combination of the word people with the word state [as Lassalle did in the Gotha program]. Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.” We can say that this is, at least, a flea-hop.

The second key phrase in The Critique of the Gotha Program is “the dictatorship of the proletariat.” In 2020 Mike Stout, the Pittsburgh steel-worker and singer-song writer, gave one explanation: “the only ‘dictatorship’ I envision is one that doesn’t let the greedy 1% and their class drive us into indebted servitude, while squandering and hoarding our wealth and natural resources, and stops them from destroying the whole planet.”[15] Frederick Engels gave a similar explanation. In the same year that Engels published Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program (1891), he asked, “Do you want to know what the dictatorship of the proletariat looks like?” and answered, “Look at the Paris Commune. That was the dictatorship of the proletariat.”

Marx had used the phrase once before in a letter (5 March 1852) to Joseph Weydemeyer (1818-1866). “My own contribution,” wrote Marx, “was (1) to show that the existence of classes is merely bound up with certain historical phases in the development of production; (2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat; [and] (3) that this dictatorship, itself, constitutes no more than a transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society.”

Weydemeyer went to America and became a lieutenant colonel in the Union Army. He surveyed Central Park, and he designed the defenses of St. Louis while distributing copies of Marx’s Inaugural Address to the International. Marx’s address addressed the ditch diggers and hod carriers of these earthen works, pointing to the day “like slave labour, like serf labour, hired labour is but a transitory and inferior form, destined to disappear before associated labour plying its toil with a willing hand, a ready mind, and a joyous heart”!

“To conquer political power has therefore become the great duty of the working classes,” he wrote just as Black Reconstruction was beginning. Success depended not on numbers alone but upon knowledge particularly of solidarity, and that led to the formation in 1864 of the International. Emancipation of the working classes entailed “the abolition of all class rule.”[16]

We are familiar with the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie: the democratic Levellers of the 1640s were followed by the dictator Cromwell, the insurgent Jacobins of the1790s were followed by the emperor Napoleon, the Russian Bolsheviks of the 1920s were followed by Stalin. Marx had learned from the Paris Commune that the proletariat cannot simply take over the state and use it for its own purposes. It must smash the state.

W.E.B. DuBois intended to call his chapter on Black reconstruction in South Carolina, “The Dictatorship of the Black Proletariat in South Carolina” but changed it simply to “The Black Proletariat in South Carolina.” He made this change after it was brought to his attention that “since universal suffrage does not lead to a real dictatorship until workers use their votes consciously to rid themselves of the dominion of private capital. There were signs of such an object among South Carolina Negroes, but it was always coupled with the idea of that day, that the only real escape for a laborer was himself to own capital.” Dictatorship is a “stopgap pending the work of universal education, equitable income, and strong character.” He writes of the “dictatorship of capital” in the North, a plutocracy. When DuBois chose not to use the phrase “dictatorship of the proletariat” it was because the suffrage was used to promote individual rather than collective ownership.

We now write ‘history from below.’ The expression includes histories of the oppressed whether that is labor history or women’s history or indigenous people’s history or African American history or even (to use an old term) natural history. In every example the ‘below’ implies an ‘above.’ It implies a contrast or an unspoken opposite, namely ruling class history which is reified as economic history, then history of the state, then history of war. These are aspects of what the Zapatistas call the war of oblivion. Indeed, deliberate forgetting is one of capital’s wicked ways.

The anarchist, Mikhail Bakunin, asked, “Will perhaps the proletariat as a whole head the government?” Marx answers, “There will in fact be no below then.” History from below comes to an end just as class rule comes to an end.[17] Class rule over the resisting strata continues “until the economic basis that makes the existence of classes possible has been destroyed.”

The view that Marx and Engels “rigidly refused to paint pictures of future communist society,” as Eric Hobsbawm says, is only a half-truth. Marx did not paint pictures with brush and oil; he took photographs. That is to say, he sought the commune in the real movement. This is the significance of Chernyshevsky, of Henry Lewis Morgan, of his stay in Algeria, of his letters to Zasulich. Hobsbawm says that Marx was provoked “into a theoretical statement which, if probably not new, had at any rate not been publicly formulated by him before.”[18] It wasn’t a question of “new” or not. To Marx theory generated the project of revolutionary investigation.

The Ethnological Notebooks are one of the major works of the ‘late Marx.’ They contain, among other things, close study from Lewis Henry Morgan of the five nations of the Iroquois, or the Haudenosaunee. The Notebooks delighted the Chicago surrealist, Franklin Rosemont, who took joy in Marx’s multiple references by the Iroquois and Muscokees to the species of ‘Turtle Island’ – elk, raccoon, buffalo, turtle, eagle, wolf. Marx insists on the importance of imagination to the elevation of human beings. It and the poetic spirit, the spiritual as such, lead us to the real movement.

Marx took note of the Iroquois whose “democratic assembly where every adult male and female member had a voice upon all questions brought before it.” “The women were the great power among the clans,” he copies into his notebook.[19] The same text inspired Engels to refer in The Origin of the Family to “the world-historic defeat of the female sex.”

In February 1881 Vera Zasulich initiated a correspondence with Marx on whether the rural commune, the obshchina, could “develop in a socialist direction or whether it was destined to perish as an archaism. Marx wrote several draft replies including a lengthy consideration of common property in history, as a constitutive form (assembly, kinship, clan), and in various ecologies of forest, pasture, meadow. He concluded “that the commune is the fulcrum for social regeneration in Russia.”[20]

“The rebuilding, whether it comes now or a century later, will and must go back to the basic principles of Reconstruction in the United States during 1867-1876 – Land, Light, and Leading for slaves black, brown, yellow and white, under a dictatorship of the proletariat”[21] It is not quite synonymous with ‘proletarian hegemony.’ The values of the material institutions of society have to change to become the ground of government. Hence, the decisive importance of the northern “schoolmarms” or the women who went south during Reconstruction to arm former slaves with the tools of reading, writing, and criticism.

Marx did not publish his Critique of the Gotha Program. But five years after he wrote it the French socialist, Jules Guesde, visited him in London in May 1880 and asked him to write the preamble to the program of the French Parti Ouvrier or Worker’s Party. Marx did so in a dense sentence with many thoughts: the productive class will emancipate all human beings without distinction of sex or race. They can be free only by possessing the means of production collectively. This must be accomplished by revolutionary action which may include universal suffrage as an instrument of emancipation rather than deception. The aim is “the political and economic expropriation of the capitalist class and the return to community of all the means of production….”

Here is the commons, here is democracy and universal suffrage, here the phrase “return to the community” implies something lost or expropriated. The term community refers to the collective, cooperative social forms which Marx was studying at the time (the Iroquois, the obshchina, Algeria) or what we might call the commons. It is not the state, the market, or the nation. The door is always open for the “real movement.”

Labor is organized by capital to work. When labor, employed or unemployed, organizes for itself it becomes a class and thus able to save its soul. So, the four structures of capitalism and their wicked ways – white supremacy, patriarchy, settler colonialism, and privatization – have caused risings among black and brown people, women, indigenous peoples, and the rebels against extinctions. The immanent possibility arises of these insurgencies becoming components of “the real movement which abolishes the present state of things….” This is not just an electoral or economic process. We can pluck the living flower to recreate the commons.

Ann Arbor, Turtle Island 2020.

This essay forms the “afterword” to PM Press’s forthcoming edition and new translation of Marx’s “Critique of the Gotha Program.”

Notes.

1) I thank Wendy Goldman, Geoff Eley, and John Garvey for help with bibliography, Riley Linebaugh for suggestions, and Monty Neill for editing. ↑

2) Ezekiel 3:18-19 or 33:7-11 ↑

3) Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology (Lawrence and Wishart: London 1965), p. 48. ↑

4) Joel Kovel, The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World (London: Zed, 2002), John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (New York: Monthly Review, 2000), Michael Löwy, An Eco-Socialist Manifesto (2001) ↑

5) The phrase is not original to Marx. Louis Blanc had employed it in the 1848 Revolution, it was the epigraph to Saint-Simon’s journal, L’Organisateur, and Étienne Cabet used it in his utopian fiction, Voyage en Icarie (1845). ↑

6) Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutios for Collective Action (London: Cambridge University Press, 1990). ↑

7) Quoted by Geoff Eley, Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850-2000 (Oxford Univrsity Press, 2002), p. 21. ↑

8) E.P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory, refers to Marx’s “increasing preoccupation in his last years with anthropology, was resuming the projects of his Paris youth.” ↑

9) Capital, translated by Ben Fowkes (Penquin; London, 1976), p. 91 ↑

10) Kristin Ross, Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune (Verso, London, 2015). ↑

11) Karl Marx, The Civil War in France, (1871) ↑

12) Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York: Harper, 1980), and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (Boston: Beacon, 2014). ↑

13) John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Hannah Holleman, “Marx and the Indigenous,” Monthly Review (February 2020) ↑

14) W.E.B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880 (1935) ↑

15) Mike Stout, Homestead Steel Mill The Final Ten Years (Oakland: PM Press, 2020), p. 8. ↑

16) Karl Marx, The First International and After: Political Writings, volume 3, David Fernbach (ed.) (Penguin: London, 1974), p.73-84 ↑

17) Karl Marx, “The Conspectus of Bakunin’s Book State and Anarchy,” ↑

18) E.J. Hobsbawm, How To Change the World: Reflections on Marx and Marxism (New Haven: Yale U.P., 2011), pp.47 and 58. ↑

19) Composed in 1880-1882 and published in English for the first time in 1974, see Lawrence Krader (ed.) The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx (Assen, Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1974). Frankilin Rosemont, “Karl Marx & the Iroquois,” Arsenal: Surrealist Subversion, 4 (1989), and republished as Environmental Action Series 5 by the Red Balloon Collective (199?). ↑

20) Teodor Shanin, Late Marx and the Russian Road: Marx and the Peripheries of Capitalism (Routledge, 1983). ↑

21) DuBois, op.cit., p. 635. ↑


Peter Linebaugh is the author of The London Hanged, The Many-Headed Hydra: the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (with Marcus Rediker) and Magna Carta Manifesto. Linebaugh’s latest book is Red Round Globe Hot Burning. He can be reached at: plineba@gmail.com

The Legacy of Donald Trump in One Photo

BY MIKE HASTIE
NOVEMBER 9, 2020

COUNTERPUNCH



Last night I drove to Salem, Oregon to help a friend do projections on the Oregon Capital Building. There were many Trump supporters there who were protesting the election. There were also Biden supporters involved in a march through the city celebrating Biden’s win. The Salem police were there to separate the two groups, because several of the Trump people as usual brought their AR-15 rifles. I took a picture of one of those Trump supporters with one of those guns. I wrote something on the picture that is so indicative of what we have all experienced these past four years.


Mike Hastie served as an Army Medic in Vietnam.

Everything Will Fundamentally Change

BY DAVID SWANSON 
NOVEMBER 11, 2020

COUNTERPUNCH

In June 2019, Joe Biden promised wealthy so-called donors that nothing would fundamentally change. At this moment hundreds of millions of people — from those shooting off fireworks to those ranting as though they will soon shoot up public places in their MAGA hats — seem convinced that everything will fundamentally change. Biden was wrong. Everybody else is right. Either everything will change for the better or one or both of the twin dangers of environmental and nuclear apocalypse will change everything for the worse.

What should someone who cares about ending war think? How can we get from the euphoria of electing a warmonger to mobilizing people to end war? How should we talk with the people who are celebrating? And how with the people who are outraged?

With those who are celebrating, I see no reason to oppose their joy and happiness. I happen to love joy and happiness, as long as people can work hard while celebrating. The trick is that working hard implies that a holy and infallible emperor has not been enthroned, that something more is needed. The trouble is that lesser evilists upon selecting a lesser evil candidate often adopt the position that their candidate is actually great and glorious, that in fact it’s part of their duty to learn only good bits of information about their chosen one. One thing we could try is reminding people of the wisdom of their lesser evil election choice in a manner that restores to their consciousness exactly how evil was that lesser evil choice, or — even better — exactly how evil is the society that only allows us such choices.

It may help to tamp down the offensiveness of our truth-telling about Biden to speak of representative government, of the goal — if not often the reality — of elected officials moving their positions in response to public demand. It’s our job to move Biden not because he is Biden but because he is president-elect. It would have been our job to move Bernie too.

Before we can talk about any of that, we have to be granted standing, we have to qualify to speak. That requires that we explain to people at some length our awareness of how evil Trump is and how delighted we will be to be rid of him. One reason for this is the common perception that there are two types of being in the universe, Biden backers and Trump backers. Uttering a discouraging word about Biden will instantly transform you into a maskless, mouth-breathing, minion of the Moronic One, unless you’ve prefaced it with numerous basic facts about Trump and your feelings about him. Another reason is that corporate media has sometimes painted Trump as a peacemaker, and peace as a threat to all that is good including, rather strangely, to peace. This logic has made enemies of Trump into fans of NATO, the CIA, foreign bases, and a cold war with Russia, so we have extra motivation to unravel it.

If your record is anything like mine, you should be able to succeed in gaining standing. I worked for Trump’s impeachment for numerous clear-cut offenses since before his inauguration. I’m now pushing to see him prosecuted for those political offenses that have also been criminal, which appear to include incitement of violence, violation of immigration laws, election fraud, tax fraud, obstruction of justice, refusal to comply with subpoenas, proliferation of nuclear technology, illegal departure from the INF treaty, and of course various wars, coups, and murders by missile. Trump spent four years creating (along with Congress) record military spending, record drone killings, escalation of numerous wars, major base construction, major nuclear weapons construction (and threats to use them), unprecedented shredding of disarmament treaties, heightened hostility with Russia, more weapons in Europe, more weapons on Russia’s border, larger war rehearsals in Europe than seen in decades, record weapons dealing around the globe, greater military spending and investment in NATO by its members, and — of course — no end to the war on Afghanistan that Trump promised to end 4 years ago, or to any other war.

The media-induced specter of Trump withdrawing all troops from Europe and disbanding NATO and ending the war on Afghanistan was a fantasy we should all have supported if real. Trump the peacemaker and Biden the socialist were the best candidates in the recent election, but they were 95% fictional. Still, the lack of any major new war in the past 4 years is huge, unprecedented, and a trend we desperately need to continue — which might be easier if we are aware of it.

So, hip hip hurray, the witch is dead, the prize is won. Why would we now want to stomp on people’s joy? Do wars and wildfires and floods and lack of basic resources not stomp on people’s joy a hell of a lot more than honest assessments of what needs doing? Can we not apply a little lesser evilism to that choice? Aren’t we allowed to speak, having qualified ourselves as anti-MAGA-ites?

But what can we say to our MAGA-hatted brothers and sisters? I think we can stand on our record if it’s a fair one. When Trump stopped threatening to nuke North Korea and proposed to speak with its leader, but Democrats freaked out and worked to forbid any U.S. troop ever leaving South Korea, some of us denounced the Democrats for that. Same on troops in Germany. If we can show that we’ve been for peace regardless of party or politician, and for peaceful actions regardless of insane rhetoric and motivations, we may get farther. Most importantly, we should remain respectful and open to collaboration, but not imagine that we need to win over 100% of the public. Winning over a majority for peace is not hard at all. Mobilizing a good fraction of that majority to engage in the necessary activism to make it happen — that’s the trick. Biden Republicans seem to be little more real than unicorns. Trump won more of the Republicans in 2020 than in 2016. And if Biden Republicans existed, they probably wouldn’t be leading peace activism.

A basic fact that we need to figure out how to turn to our advantage is that all questions of foreign policy, federal budget, weapons, bases, wars, treaties, and international law are virtually absent from most elections. The country has not just suffered through a bitter years-long disagreement over war and peace, but rather one over the other 40% of the federal discretionary budget that pays for everything else, and more than that over cultural differences that only marginally impact on policy. Like most Democrats running for public office, Biden had a website with lots of issue statements but no foreign policy. He formed several policy task forces, but none on foreign policy. To my knowledge, no candidate in history for president or Congress, with the exception (so I’m told though nobody has produced proof) of Jesse Jackson Sr., has every proposed even an approximate federal budget. So, people didn’t vote against or for Trump principally because of his foreign policy. And people certainly didn’t vote for or against Biden because of his.

Beyond Biden’s absent foreign policy there’s his record. He was the most important Congressional backer of the war on Iraq. The Democrats controlled the Senate. He controlled the hearings. He pushed every lie. He defended those lies long afterwards. He now lies about all that. He’s been an advocate for war for decades. The weapons dealers put more money into him than into Trump, and now publicly proclaim they have nothing to worry about. Based on past behavior and recent statements, we can expect Biden, if left to his own devices, to reclaim the military spending record from Trump or come close to it, to end no wars, to close no bases, to continue to increase the use of murderous drones, to continue to increase the use of secret agencies and special forces, and to continue the increased sales of weapons to horrible governments all over the world.

Some of these things require Congress. Some of them it would only take one chamber of Congress to prevent. If the House alone refused to pass a military budget that wasn’t reduced by 50 or 10 or 1 percent, then such a budget wouldn’t be passed.

Importantly, when two candidates for an office are both pretty bad, they aren’t actually identical in every way. Where Biden has said anything positive, even if he’s tried to hedge on it, we need to hold him at his word. This means that we need to do the following:

We need to demand that Biden come through on restoring better relations with Cuba and move beyond that to ending the brutal blockade of that island.

We need to demand that Biden come through on ending U.S. participation in the war on Yemen — something already passed by Congress but vetoed by Trump. We need to build on that to a repeal of the AUMF, a restoration of the power of war to Congress, and beyond that the effective incorporation into U.S. politics of the criminality of war — which denies the power of war to anybody, including Congress.

This will mean dropping all vindictive measures against officials of the International Criminal Court, supporting the ICC’s investigation of the war on Afghanistan, and encouraging that court to end its practice of prosecuting only Africans.

We need to demand that Biden come through on ending weapons sales to Saudi Arabia, something already passed by Congress but vetoed by Trump. Then we need to extend that model to an end in weapons sales and gifts to oppressive governments the world over, including Ukraine (which could boost Biden’s anti-corruption credentials and be labeled the restoration of the Obama-era policy). In general, the decades-long bipartisan practice of arming the world and both sides of most wars should be something we can tackle without any partisan rancor. It should lead into a program of economic conversion, and — for that matter — a Green New Deal with actual funding in it.

We need to demand that Biden come through on ending the war on Afghanistan. Both candidates promised this. One of them was promising it for the second time. The media could hardly have cared less, few took it seriously, and both candidates hedged and fudged and wobbled. But we need to hold Biden to it. We can remind him how much love Obama got just for pretending to do it.

We need to celebrate bringing troops home from places like Afghanistan — and if possible Syria, Iraq, Somalia, Libya, etc. And we need to raise the question of keeping troops in South Korea against the will of South Korea (not to mention the bipartisan bill in Congress that would finally end the Korean War), keeping troops in Iraq against the will of Iraq, and so on around the world. With all the spirit of even-a-stopped-clock-is-right-twice-a-day, we need to pick up Trump’s proposal to pull some troops out of Germany, drop the insane notion that to do so is to punish Germany, end the warmongering policy of finding somewhere else to send them, and try asking what the people of Germany and the world and the United States want and need.

We need to hold Biden to re-joining the Iran agreement, and demand U.S. compliance with it, demand an end to murderous sanctions, demand a halt to all the hostility, celebrate not an era of “holding Iran accountable,” but one of ceasing to threaten Iran with war.

We need to insist on an era of re-joining treaties that Trump claimed to shred, most importantly disarmament treaties with Russia. New Start expires on February 5th.

Decreasing the risk of nuclear apocalypse needs to replace increasing it as the proper good humanitarian position, putting the insanity of Russiagate behind us. Globally we need to be working toward the day that all nations join the new treaty on the prohibition of nukes. Locally we can do this through divestment and education.

We need to hold Biden to re-joining the Paris agreement and immediately push beyond that for a serious green new deal as well as a serious pandemic response as well as a serious jobs program, all of which work together very well, and hardly work at all separately or separate from taxing the rich, and certainly not separate from moving funding out of the military.

The Green New Deal is the greatest opportunity to move money out of militarism. Moving money out of militarism is the greatest opportunity for a successful Green New Deal.

But shouldn’t everyone get a day or a week or a month to celebrate and bask? Sure. Ya ’bout done now? The corporate lobbyists are lining up the new cabinet as we speak or fail to. The newspapers are running stories on how confident the weapons dealers are in their rising fortunes — and no stories on what proponents of peace think of anything. Yet it’s our side that’s supposed to pause and have a drink or three? We just dumped perhaps $14 billion into elections. I think we got three new clearly antiwar Congress members, bringing the total to 15 or so, out of 535. In a few weeks, on Giving Tuesday, people will donate perhaps $60 million to good (and not so good) causes. These priorities are upside down!

It is activism that changes the world — and the elections. It was BLM activism — not electoral tokenism — that pushed racism back another step, and registered huge numbers of new voters. Now elections in Georgia are going to continue to suck out all energy and resources.

The Senate excuse matters, no doubt. Whether you’re convinced that Biden actually wants the Senate excuse (as a basis for failing on all things progressive) or longs to remove it, it matters. But it also matters that the course the Democrats are on will cost them more seats in two years and likely install another Trump in four or eight. If anything, this is a moment in which we should all publicly commit to conditions on future lesser evilism. Two, four, six, and eight years hence, we will only support candidates who are dedicated to taxing the rich and the corporations, demilitarizing, investing in a major Green New Deal, establishing Medicare for All, making college public, and ending mass incarceration. If you want our support, you’ve got until your election to evolve. If you don’t, forget it. We have no time left to waste before insisting on the greater good.


David Swanson is an author, activist, journalist, and radio host. He is executive director of WorldBeyondWar.org and campaign coordinator for RootsAction.org. Swanson‘s books include War Is A Lie. He blogs at DavidSwanson.org and WarIsACrime.org. He hosts Talk Nation Radio. He is a Nobel Peace Prize nominee, and was awarded the 2018 Peace Prize by the U.S. Peace Memorial Foundation. Longer bio and photos and videos here. Follow him on Twitter: @davidcnswanson and FaceBook, and sign up for:

UK 

Job concerns mounting among hospitality's frontline workers

06 November 2020 by Katherine Price

Three-quarters of people working in hospitality are concerned about their job security, with 72% either very concerned (39%) or slightly concerned (33%).

A snap survey of hospitality professionals by CGA and CPL Learning found that anxiety has been heightened by the enforced four-week closure of hospitality venues in England from Thursday (5 November), which follows a ‘firebreak' lockdown in Wales and a swathe of closures in Scotland.

Two in five (42%) people in the industry are also very concerned about long-term job security – double the figure (22%) in CGA's Hospitality Professionals survey towards the end of the first national lockdown in June.

With no end to trading restrictions in sight, staff are also downbeat about general prospects for the industry. Less than a fifth (18%) of the panel were optimistic about the prospects of the sector over the next six months – down 25 percentage points from June. Only half (49%) say they are confident that their employer will survive the Covid-19 pandemic – again, substantially down from June's figure (71%).

Chloe Sheerin, consumer research executive at CGA, said: "This survey illustrates how lockdowns and a steady stream of new trading restrictions have created widespread anxiety for hospitality professionals. Frontline teams have worked very hard to bolster consumers' confidence and support the sector's recovery over the last few months, but November will now be a stressful month for many of them.

"By and large employers responded well to the challenge of keeping staff supported and valued earlier this year – but amid so much concern about jobs, they will need to double down on those efforts in November. If they can do so, frontline teams will be well motivated to help their businesses bounce back once this latest lockdown is over."

UK Government launches consultation on ban of online advertising for 'unhealthy' foods
10 November 2020 by Katherine Price



A consultation has been launched on proposals to ban online adverts for foods high in fat, sugar and salt in the UK.

The consultation, which will run for six weeks, will gather views from the public and industry stakeholders to understand the impact and challenges of introducing a total ban on the advertising of these products online.

The consultation closes on 22 December.

Health and social care secretary Matt Hancock said: "I am determined to help parents, children and families in the UK make healthier choices about what they eat. We know as children spend more time online, parents want to be reassured they are not being exposed to adverts promoting unhealthy foods, which can affect eating habits for life.

"This will be a world-leading measure to tackle the obesity challenges we face now but it will also address a problem that will only become more prominent in the future."

Public health minister Jo Churchill said: "It's vital we build on the world-leading obesity measures announced in July to ensure our efforts to tackle childhood obesity have the greatest impact… This is part of a package of measures to help families. We want to support people of all ages to make healthier choices."

In 2019 the government consulted on restricting advertising for TV and online, and in July 2020 confirmed its intention to introduce a 9pm watershed on TV.

NASA may want to send bacteria to the Moon and Mars after all

A shot of the lunar surface. Image source: NASA

By Mike Wehner November 10th, 2020 

Research from the International Space Station reveals the benefits of using bacteria to extract minerals from material found on the Moon and Mars.

One specific bacteria is capable of extracting rare earth elements from volcanic rock under multiple gravity conditions.

NASA has historically avoided contaminating its mission with bacteria, but it turns out they may be helpful.

NASA has always done its best to ensure that its missions are as sterile as possible. Sending bacteria from Earth into space is a bad idea for a number of reasons, but new research suggests that certain bacteria may be useful. The research, which was published in Nature Communications, reveals that Earthly bacteria could help extract minerals from the material that covers the surfaces of the Moon and Mars.

The research, which is based on experiments performed on the International Space Station, revealed that one specific bacteria called Sphingomonas desiccabilis is particularly good at extracting rare earth elements from basalt, a type of volcanic rock that was used as an analog for what might be found on the Moon and Mars.

The bacteria were able to perform their little trick in standard Earth gravity, microgravity, and gravity that mimics that of Mars. That’s important news for researchers, and it could signal a partnership between humans and bacteria during future explorations of space.

Typically, NASA and other space agencies do whatever they can to prevent bacteria from making it to space. The idea is that we don’t want to accidentally seed another world with life, as it could cause problems later on. If we eventually send crewed missions or more advanced rovers to a place like Mars and then discover bacteria there, we might mistake Earthly bacteria that we brought our selves for genuine Martian life. That would be a pretty embarrassing mix-up, and it’s something that scientists would like to avoid.

However, bacteria are capable of some pretty incredible things, and we’ve already seen discussion of using bacteria either as a food source or in the production of food for future long-haul missions to places like Mars. Now, it seems, bacteria may help us make the most of the material we find on those planets as well.

“Our experiments lend support to the scientific and technical feasibility of biologically enhanced elemental mining across the Solar System,” Charles Cockell, lead author of the work, said in a statement. “For example, our results suggest that the construction of robotic and human-tended mines in the Oceanus Procellarum region of the Moon, which has rocks with enriched concentrations of rare earth elements, could be one fruitful direction of human scientific and economic development beyond Earth.”

NASA’s Artemis missions to the Moon are coming up shortly, and with crewed missions included in that program, humans will have plenty of time to toy around with the material covering the Moon’s surface. At that point, we may learn a great deal more about how bacteria could pave the way to a sustainable existence in space.