A Declaration…for Life

BY COMANDANTE DON PABLO CONTRERAS – SUBCOMANDANTE INSURGENTE MOISÉS

 JANUARY 29, 2021

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TO THE PEOPLES OF THE WORLD:

TO PEOPLE FIGHTING IN EUROPE:

BROTHERS, SISTERS AND COMPAÑERAS:

During these previous months, we have established contact between us by various means. We are women, lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transgender, transvestites, transsexuals, intersex, queer and more, men, groups, collectives, associations, organizations, social movements, indigenous peoples, neighbourhood associations, communities and a long etcetera that gives us identity.

We are differentiated and separated by lands, skies, mountains, valleys, steppes, jungles, deserts, oceans, lakes, rivers, streams, lagoons, races, cultures, languages, histories, ages, geographies, sexual and non-sexual identities, roots, borders, forms of organization, social classes, purchasing power, social prestige, fame, popularity, followers, likes, coins, educational level, ways of being, tasks, virtues, defects, pros, cons, buts, howevers, rivalries, enmities, conceptions, arguments, counterarguments, debates, disputes, complaints, accusations, contempts, phobias, philias, praises, repudiations, boos, applauses, divinities, demons, dogmas, heresies, likes, dislikes, ways, and a long etcetera that makes us different and, not infrequently, opposites.

Only very few things unite us:

That we make the pains of the earth our own: violence against women; persecution and contempt of those who are different in their affective, emotional, and sexual identity; annihilation of childhood; genocide against the native peoples; racism; militarism; exploitation; dispossession; the destruction of nature.

The understanding that a system is responsible for these pains. The executioner is an exploitative, patriarchal, pyramidal, racist, thievish and criminal system: capitalism.

The knowledge that it is not possible to reform this system, to educate it, to attenuate it, to soften it, to domesticate it, to humanize it.

The commitment to fight, everywhere and at all times – each and everyone on their own terrain – against this system until we destroy it completely. The survival of humanity depends on the destruction of capitalism. We do not surrender, we do not sell out, and we do not give up.

The certainty that the fight for humanity is global. Just as the ongoing destruction does not recognize borders, nationalities, flags, languages, cultures, races; so the fight for humanity is everywhere, all the time.

The conviction that there are many worlds that live and fight within the world. And that any pretence of homogeneity and hegemony threatens the essence of the human being: freedom. The equality of humanity lies in the respect for difference. In its diversity resides its likeness.

The understanding that what allows us to move forward is not the intention to impose our gaze, our steps, companies, paths and destinations. What allows us to move forward is the listening to and the observation of the Other that, distinct and different, has the same vocation of freedom and justice.

Due to these commonalities, and without abandoning our convictions or ceasing to be who we are, we have agreed:

First.- To carry out meetings, dialogues, exchanges of ideas, experiences, analyses and evaluations among those of us who are committed, from different conceptions and from different areas, to the struggle for life. Afterwards, each one will go their own way, or not. Looking and listening to the Other may or may not help us in our steps. But knowing what is different is also part of our struggle and our endeavour, of our humanity.

Second.- That these meetings and activities take place on the five continents. That,  regarding the European continent, they take place in the months of July, August, September and October of the year 2021, with the direct participation of a Mexican delegation integrated by the CNI-CIG, the Frente de Pueblos en Defensa del Agua y de la Tierra de Morelos, Puebla y Tlaxcala, and the EZLN. And, at later dates to be specified, we will support according to our possibilities the encounters to be carried out in Asia, Africa, Oceania and America.

Third.- To invite those who share the same concerns and similar struggles, all honest people and all those belows that rebel and resist in the many corners of the world, to join, contribute, support and participate in these meetings and activities; and to sign and make this statement FOR LIFE their own.

From the bridge of dignity that connects the Europe from Below and on the Left with the mountains of the Mexican Southeast.

We.

Planet Earth.

January 1, 2021. Desde las montañas del Sureste Mexicano. Por las mujeres, hombres, otroas, niñas y ancianas delEjército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional:

Comandante Don Pablo Contreras y Subcomandante Insurgente Moisés.
México.

Anyone who supports this vision and wishes to sign onto this statement should send their name, organization, and geographical place to:  firmasporlavida@ezln.org.mx.

Hundreds of 2021 Insurrectionists May Get Off While 700 Pentagon Protesters Got Arrested and Jailed in 1967

BY DAVE LINDORFF

 JANUARY 29, 2021
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As I wrote in a letter to the Philadelphia Inquirer published today under the headline:  “Punish All Rioters”:

An article in the Sunday Inquirer said that federal prosecutors are discussing not prosecuting all who participated in the fatal US Capitol insurrectional assault on Jan. 6. The reason: Fears of “overloading” the courts.

Balderdash. During the 1967 MOBE march and demonstration by several hundred thousand antiwar activists on the Pentagon to protest the Vietnam War, the feds didn’t hesitate about arresting, charging, and then busing me and 700 other activists to federal prison in Occoquan, Va. There we were held and arraigned over the next few days with most, like me, released with minor penalties like my five-day suspended misdemeanor trespass sentence and $25 fine.

Surely today’s justice system can handle these far more serious 800 Capitol insurrectionist cases. While not all violent, all suspects clearly illegally entered or broke into the nation’s Capitol, disrupting Congress. Charge them appropriately, let them plead, and take it from there. The courts won’t be “overloaded.”

Take a look at the lower photo above showing the image the Inquirer ran with my letter of the 2006 Capitol building attackers, girded for violence and swarming the Capitol Police (who are showing amazing restraint) and consider how most of those wannabe insurrections may now perhaps escape any prosecution as federal prosecutors express concern about “congesting” the court system.

Now take a close look at top image above showing the peacefully seated protesters “occupying” the front mall entrance to the Pentagon in ’67. You can clearly see the confrontational federal troops threatening the protesters with their rifles, and also a white-helmeted federal marshal gratuitously and violently beating protesters’ about their heads and shoulders with his wooden baton  as they just sit calmly in place.  Some 700 or more of us peaceful protesters were eventually yanked away by those marshals and were beaten as we were dragged to vans and buses to be hauled off to a federal prison in Occoquan, Virginia. All those of us who were snatched away were charged with various offenses, often grossly inflated. Many of those I shared a dormitory cell with were injured during their arrests, some seriously, and I only saw perhaps at most 100 of those arrested at the time. (For a contemporaneous account of my experience being busted and jailed at the ’67 Pentagon demonstration, click here.)

Meanwhile, while a Capitol Police cop was beaten and killed in the 2021 Capitol insurrection attempt, and one insurrectionist was shot by Capitol Police as she was trying to break into the Hall of the Senate, and while three others died in the melee, no troops guarding the Pentagon, as far as I know, were injured or killed by the peaceful 1967 protesters.

Clearly it’s a case of different strokes for different folks. Peaceful leftists were and still are considered far more serious and deserving of punishment when they protest than are violent and even murderous rightist fascists and wannabe insurrectionists.

Dave Lindorff is a founding member of ThisCantBeHappening!, an online newspaper collective, and is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press).

Waiting for E.T.: the Cosmic Communism of J. Posadas

BY CHARLES PIERSON

JANUARY 29, 2021
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J. Posadas may be history’s oddest revolutionary. Born Homero Cristalli into a poor family in Argentina in 1912, Posadas is the subject of a new book by journalist A. M. Gittlitz, I Want to Believe: Posadism, UFOs, and Apocalypse Communism.

Gittlitz acknowledges that his subject is one which “many regard as marginal, cultish, weird, and silly (UFOs and Trotskyism).” Still, as The Nation noted in its review: “During the middle of the 20th century, [J. Posadas] was one of the most prominent Trotskyists in the Western Hemisphere.”

Posadas was active in the Fourth International, founded in 1938 by the exiled Leon Trotsky and his supporters as a foil to Stalinism. In the 1950s, Posadas rose to head the Fourth International’s Latin American Bureau. Posadas & Co. broke from the Fourth International in 1962 to form their own Posadist International. The Posadist International continues to exist, along with a handful of tiny Posadist sects hanging on to life in Latin America. There are Posadist groups on Facebook, most prominently the “Intergalactic Workers’ League—Posadists.”

Waiting for E.T.

Two features distinguish Posadism from more conventional strains of Trotskyism. They are Posadas’ belief in benevolent extraterrestrial beings and Posadas’ sunny view of nuclear war.

Posadas’ seminal writing on extraterrestrials is the 1968 essay “Flying Saucers.” In this essay, Posadas piles one unwarranted assumption on top of another. He assumes that any civilization scientifically advanced enough for space travel must be both peaceful and socialist. This is because aliens’ advanced technology will create economies of abundance, thus ending conflicts over resources. Posadas also claims that human encounters with aliens confirm the aliens’ peaceful nature. Capitalists paint aliens as hostile so that downtrodden Earth people will not look to the aliens for help.

This is all so silly that I won’t bother parsing it all. I will just point out that it’s a huge leap to assume that technical advancement necessarily breeds peaceableness. The Nazis were technically advanced, but were anything but peaceable. The late Stephen Hawking warned that if humans do receive a verifiable signal from another world, we should be “wary of answering.” “Meeting an advanced civilization could be like Native Americans encountering Columbus — that didn’t turn out so well.”

Posadas and Nuclear War

Posadas’ beliefs about UFOs can be dismissed, but his ideas about nuclear war are both insane and uncomfortably close to US nuclear doctrine. Posadas believed that the struggle between capitalists and workers would culminate in nuclear Armageddon. Far from dreading this, we should welcome nuclear war because it will sweep away both capitalism and Stalinism and usher in true socialism.^[1] Posadas even argued that the Soviet Union should launch a preemptive nuclear strike on the West (p. 81). Posadas admitted that nuclear war would kill millions of people, but since there were more workers than capitalists, workers would inherit the earth.

This was lunacy, but Posadas was not the only one thinking along these lines. Mao Zedong once said that “China has a population of 600 million, even if half of them are killed, there are still 300 million people left.” Mao, however, was not speaking of a first strike, but was indicating that the Chinese would survive a nuclear war even if millions of them died.

Similarly, Che Guevara once remarked that “[W]e must follow the road of liberation even though it may cost millions of nuclear war victims” (p. 98). During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Che and Castro appealed to Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev to resort to nuclear weapons if the Americans did not lift their naval blockade of Cuba (p. 92). Fortunately, Khrushchev ignored them.

The US, however, is the only nation which has used nuclear weapons. President Harry Truman claimed that he was forced to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki—both civilian population centers—in order to spare American lives and shorten the war in the Pacific. In actuality, the Japanese had already put out peace feelers and would have surrendered had the US promised they could keep their Emperor.

President Dwight Eisenhower remarked years later that “Where these things [nuclear weapons] can be used on strictly military targets and for strictly military purposes, I see no reason why they shouldn’t be used just exactly as you would use a bullet or anything else.”

The US has considered first use of nuclear weapons on several occasions, including during the 1961 Berlin Crisis and in Korea and Vietnam. Throughout the Cold War, military planners assumed that only nuclear weapons could halt a Soviet invasion of Western Europe, given the Warsaw Pact’s vast advantage in troops over NATO.

More recently, an August 8, 2017 tweet from former President Donald Trump (how good it feels to write “former”) threatened “fire and fury” against North Korea. Dr. Sheila Smith, a Far East expert, said on NPR that “The president didn’t say nuclear, but it sounds nuclear.”

Posadas’ upbeat take on nuclear war shocks us, and rightly so, but we should not forget that the US has always regarded nuclear weapons use as an option and has never ruled out first use.

Posadas the Man

What sort of person was Posadas? A pretty nasty one. Posadas replaced Leninist “democratic centralism” which permitted free discussion with what he called “monolithism,” meaning only Posadas’ opinions mattered (p. 67). Dissenters found themselves denounced as police spies and expelled (p. 61).

His harsh demands on his followers strengthened Posadas’ resemblance to a cult leader. Posadas imposed a strict moral regimen, frowning upon sex even between husbands and wives. Homosexuality was grounds for immediate expulsion. Posadas disliked jokes, but liked to sing.

Posadas was insulting and paranoid. He believed imperialists were plotting against him. Without any grounds, Posadas accused his wife and mistress of infidelity and exiled his wife to Germany.

Overoptimistic to the point of self-delusion, Posadas treated even obvious calamities, such as the 1973 overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile, as evidence that revolution was just around the corner.

Posadas’ attention deficit disorder kept him from writing (p. 69). Once Posadas acquired a tape recorder, however, his thoughts took wing. Posadas’ talks were published as articles, each one ending with a jaunty “Viva Posadas!” (p. 86). It sounded like Posadas was high fiving himself, but the words were inserted by the Posadists who transcribed the master’s teachings.

Posadas’ “writings” became wilder and wilder, taking a decidedly New Age turn. In the last year of his life, Posadas pronounced that dolphins possessed telepathic powers and would in time be kept as household pets (p. 150).

How should we assess Posadas’ place in Trotskyism? Revolutionary ideology should provide a guide to action in order to be worth anything. Posadas’ ideas give revolutionists nothing to act on. Socialist space gods may or may not exist. If they do, there’s no telling when they will show up. As for nuclear war, Posadas suggests we must destroy the world in order to save it. We should all be grateful that Posadas had no nuclear weapons. Posadas had gifts as an organizer and activist. As a theorist, he was a bust.

Notes.

1. This view is hard to square with Posadas’ exhortation in “Flying Saucers”: “We must suppress the force currently in the hands of the capitalist system: nuclear weapons. Destroy all nuclear weapons.” ↑

 

Charles Pierson is a lawyer and a member of the Pittsburgh Anti-Drone Warfare Coalition. E-mail him at Chapierson@yahoo.com.

SEE 

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Trotskyist Cults (plawiuk.blogspot.com)

Kerala Communists Serve the People, Look to Youth and Women

BY W. T. WHITNEY

 JANUARY 29, 2021
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Kerala, a state in India, is a bizarre anomaly among developing nations … Kerala has a population as big as California’s and a per capita annual income of less than $300. But its infant mortality rate is very low, its literacy rate among the highest on Earth … Though mostly a land of paddy-covered plains, statistically Kerala stands out as the Mount Everest of social development.

– Bill McKibben, environmentalist and author

At 21 years of age, Arya Rajendran is barely eligible to vote. Nevertheless, she is now the mayor of Kerala’s capital city Thiruvananthapuram, population 2,585,000. She is a second-year student at All Saints College. She concentrates in math.

Rajendran told a reporter that,

“From the time I remember my childhood, I was going to Balasangham. … I am now the State President for Balasingham. I am also the Students Federation of India state committee member. My parents are branch committee members of CPI(M). And we firmly believe in what the party stands for.” Balasingham is the youth organization of the Communist Party of India, Marxist – the CPI(M).

In early December, Arya Rajendran was the candidate of Left Democratic Front (LDF) as voting took place in Mudavanmughal ward for the city council. She won 2,872 votes, 549 more than the candidate for the United Democratic Front (UDF), a coalition led by India’s National Congress political party. The CPI(M) is by far the largest force in the LDF, which also includes the Communist Party of India (CPI) and smaller leftist parties.

In city-wide voting, LDF candidates won 51 of the city council’s 100 seats. The council chooses the city’s mayor, and the CPI (M) district committee named Arya Rajendran as the LDF candidate for that office. Gaining the votes of 54 councilpersons on December 28, Rajendra became India’s youngest mayor.

The LDF government in Kerala in 2009 determined that women shall make up at least 50% of elected officials at every level of government. The CPI(M) in Kerala recently took steps to encourage young people to run for political office. One women, 22 years old and a candidate in the in the local elections, stated that, “In Thiruvananthapuram, 66 per cent of CPI(M)’s candidates are women. Five of them are below 25 years of age. This is a party with a difference.”

The CPI(M) – led government in Kerala is riding on a wave of good will following success in organizing life-saving relief after massive floods in 2018 and dealing with outbreaks of the lethal Nipah virus in 2018 and 2019 and the Covid-19 pandemic recently.

Communist – led governments have held power intermittently in Kerala since 1957. That year the CPI gained political control through electoral victory – one of the world’s first socialist political parties to do so – and was immediately removed by India’s central government because of turbulence associated with land reform efforts.

Even so, the CPI retained a strong presence in Kerala during the 1960s. From then on, however, the new CPI(M) has regularly won state elections as the dominant partner in the LDF coalition. Leadership of the state has alternated between the CPI(M) and India’s National Congress Party, leader of the UDF coalition. The current LDF government, in office since 2016, will gain a new term if the LDF is victorious in state-assembly elections set for May, 2021.

CPI dissidents formed the CPI(M) in 1964. They were protesting both CPI collaboration with the Congress Party, viewed as serving business interests, and CPI affinity with the Soviet Union. In concert with Chinese Communists, the CPI(M) objected to the Soviet Union’s turn to “peaceful coexistence” with capitalist powers.

The CPI(M) held power in West Bengal state from 1977 until 2011 and in the small state of Tripura intermittently from 1978 until 2018. The Party claimed a national membership of 10,000,520 in 2018.

Kerala governments headed by the CPI(M) instituted social and economic reforms starting with equitable use of land and continuing with improved access to healthcare and education and programs of social rescue. Reforms introduced by LDF governments stayed mostly intact during periods of the opposition coalition being in power

Communist reformers in Kerala had the advantage of rudimentary social reforms already in place prior to national independence in 1947. The principalities of Travancore and Cochin, converted into Kerala state in 1956, had avoided some of the depredations of British colonialism, and officials there had collaborated with missionaries and eventually with international aid agencies.

The new Kerala government quickly integrated illness and preventative care into a single health services agency. It prioritized planning capabilities, attended to urgent healthcare needs in rural areas, and gradually built a system of primary health care that’s been crucial to Kerala’s healthcare achievements.

Kerala’s Centre for Development Studies, established in 1970 and assisted by the United Nations, has guided efforts of government planners, politicians, healthcare providers, and educators. Teachers and researchers there did much to shape what’s known as the “Kerala model” of development, which implies: high “material quality of life” despite low per-capita income, “wealth and redistribution programs,” and “High levels of political participation and activism among ordinary people.”

Kerala’s government in the mid-1990s decentralized planning and policy-making for healthcare and education; many responsibilities were transferred to local political authorities. According to a report released in 2014, “In 2011, Kerala attained the highest Human Development Index of all Indian states.” Markers included:

+ Infant mortality rate of 12 per 1,000 live births in Kerala vs. 40 per 1,000 live births in India

+ Maternal mortality ratio of 66 per 100,000 live births in Kerala vs. 178 per 100,000 live births in India

+ Male literacy – 96% in Kerala vs. 82% in India; female literacy – 92% in Kerala vs. 65% in India

U.S. Communist, author, and veteran trade unionist Beatrice Lumpkin, was a math teacher. She recently extolled the performance of K. K. Shailaja, Kerala’s Minister of Health and Social Welfare, as she took on the Covid-19 Pandemic. The minister is a member of the Central Committee of the CPI(M) and formerly a physics teacher.

Ms. Lumpkin recalls that she “was invited to attend the conference of mathematics teachers in Kerala,” adding that, “To reach Kerala, I overnighted in Mumbai to change planes. In Mumbai, I saw many families living on the sidewalk, with at most a lean-to over their heads. It was a school day, but school-age children were on the sidewalk, with their families … In my two weeks in Kerala, I walked and rode all around the streets of the Kerala capital city of Thiruvananthapuram and never saw anyone living on the streets. In answer to my question my hosts said, ‘You don’t see any homeless because we had a land reform in Kerala. Everybody owns a piece of land, no matter how small.’”

This article first appeared on MR Online.

W.T. Whitney Jr. is a retired pediatrician and political journalist living in Maine.

Essential Workers Take the Risk, CEO’s Reap the Rewards

BY SAM PIZZIGATI

 JANUARY 29, 2021

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Every week, millions of us walk into a Walgreens drugstore without giving it a second thought.

Maybe we should. Walgreens perfectly encapsulates the long-term economic trends of the Trump years: top corporate executives pocketing immense paychecks at the expense of their workers.

At Walgreens, workers start at just $10 an hour. No chain store empire employing essential workers pays less.

And no retail giant in the United States has given its workers less of a pandemic hazard pay bump — just 18 cents an hour, according to Brookings analysts Molly Kinder and Laura Stateler.

These paltry numbers look even worse when we turn our attention to the power suits who run Walgreens, who face no pandemic hazard. Walgreens CEO Stefano Pessina took home $17 million last year. Altogether, the five top Walgreens execs averaged $11 million for the year, a 9 percent hike over the previous year’s annual average.

Meanwhile, the typical Walgreens employee pulled down a mere $33,396. Pessina’s take-home outpaced that meager reward by 524 times. In effect, Pessina made more in a single weekday morning than his company’s typical worker made for an entire year.

Kinder and Stateler found similar levels of greed at other U.S. retail giants, especially Amazon and Walmart. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and the heirs to the Walmart fortune, they note, “have grown $116 billion richer during the pandemic — 35 times the total hazard pay given to more than 2.5 million Amazon and Walmart workers.”

Amazon and Walmart, they add, “could have quadrupled the extra COVID-19 compensation they gave to their workers” and still earned more profit than the previous year.

Not every major corporate player has treated the pandemic as just another easy greed-grab. Workers at Costco — who start at $15 an hour, $5 an hour more than workers at Walgreens — got an extra $2 an hour in hazard pay.

Costco’s top executive team, interestingly, last year collected less than half the pay that went to their counterparts at Walgreens. Costco’s most typical workers took home $47,312 for the year. At 169 to one, that’s less than one-third the pay gap between Walgreen’s chief exec and his company’s most typical workers.

As a society, which corporations should we be rewarding — those whose executives enrich themselves at worker expense, or those that value the contributions all their employees are making?

In moments of past national crises, like World War II, lawmakers took action to prevent corporate profiteering. They put in place stiff excess profits taxes. We could act in that same spirit today. We could, for instance, raise the tax rate on companies that pay their top execs unconscionably more than their workers.

We could also start linking government contracts to corporate pay scales: no tax dollars to any corporations that pay their CEOs over a certain multiple of what their workers take home.

Efforts to link taxes and contracts to corporate pay ratios have already begun.

Voters in San Francisco this past November opted to levy a tax penalty on corporations with top executives making over 100 times typical San Francisco worker pay. Portland, Oregon took a similar step in 2018. At the national level, progressive lawmakers have introduced comparable legislation.

Donald Trump may be gone, but the executives who did so well throughout his tenure remain in place. We need to change the rules that flatter their fortunes.

Sam Pizzigati writes on inequality for the Institute for Policy Studies. His latest book: The Case for a Maximum Wage (Polity). Among his other books on maldistributed income and wealth: The Rich Don’t Always Win: The Forgotten Triumph over Plutocracy that Created the American Middle Class, 1900-1970  (Seven Stories Press). 

The U.S. Economy Excels at One Thing: 

Producing Massive Inequality

BY RICHARD D. WOLFF

JANUARY 29, 2021

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

To grasp the sheer magnitude of U.S. economic inequality in recent years, consider its two major stock market indices: the Standard and Poor (S&P) 500 and Nasdaq. Over the last 10 years, the values of shares listed on them grew spectacularly. The S&P 500 went from roughly 1,300 points to over 3,800 points, almost tripling. The Nasdaq index over the same period went from 2,800 points to 13,000 points, more than quadrupling. Times were good for the 10 percent of Americans who own 80 percent of stocks and bonds. In contrast, the real median weekly wage rose barely over 10 percent across the same 10-year period. The real federal minimum wage fell as inflation diminished its nominal $7.25 per hour, officially fixed and kept at that rate since 2009.

All the other relevant metrics likewise show that economic inequality in the United States kept worsening across the last half-century. This happened despite “concerns” about inequality expressed publicly across the years by many establishment politicians (including some in the new Biden administration), journalists, and academics. Inequality worsened through the capitalist downturns after 1970 and likewise through the three capitalist crashes of this century (2000, 2008, and 2020). Nor did the deadly pandemic provoke soul-searching or policies adequate to stop, let alone reverse, the ongoing redistribution of income and wealth upward.

No advanced economics is required to grasp that divisions, bitterness, resentment, and anger flow from such a persistently widening gap between haves and have-nots. Among millions who search for explanations, many become prey for those mobilizing against scapegoats. White supremacists blame Black and Brown people. Nativists (calling themselves “patriots” or “nationalists”) point to immigrants and foreign trade partners. Fundamentalists blame those less zealous and especially the non-religious. Fascists try to combine those movements with economically threatened small-business owners, jobless workers, and alienated social outcasts to form a powerful political coalition. The fascists made good use of Trump to assist their efforts.

U.S. history adds a special sharpness to the search for explanations. The dominant argument for capitalism in the 20th century after the 1930s Great Depression was that it “produced a great middle class.” Real U.S. wages had risen even during the Depression. They were generally higher than elsewhere across the globe, and especially in comparison with those in the USSR. High wages showed the superiority of U.S. capitalism according to the system’s apologists in politics, journalism, and academia. Demolition of that middle class at the end of the 20th and into the new century pained especially those who had bought the apologies.

And indeed, the Great Depression and its aftermath had lessened inequality significantly, enabling such a defense of capitalism to have some semblance of validity. However, for that defense to be persuasive required two key facts to be forgotten or hidden. The first is that the U.S. working class fought harder for major economic gains in the 1930s than at any other time in U.S. history. The Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) then organized millions into labor unions utilizing militants from two socialist parties and a communist party. Those parties were then achieving their largest-ever numerical strengths and social influences. That is how and why together the unions and the parties won the establishment of Social Security, federal unemployment compensation, a minimum wage, and a huge federal jobs program: all firsts in U.S. history. The second fact is that capitalists in the 1930s and afterward fought harder than ever against each and every working-class advance. The “middle-class” status achieved by a large portion of the working class (by no means all and especially not minorities) happened despite not because of capitalism and capitalists. But it was certainly clever propaganda for capitalism to claim credit for working-class gains that capitalists tried but failed to block.

The reduction of U.S. economic inequality accomplished then proved temporary. It was undone after 1945. Particularly after 1970, capitalism’s normal trajectory of deepening economic inequality resumed through to the present moment. Simply put, capitalism’s basic structure of production—how it organizes its enterprises—positioned capitalists to reverse the New Deal’s reduction of economic inequality. Much of the temporary U.S. middle class is now gone; the rest is fading fast. Over the last half-century, U.S. capitalism brought inequality to the extremes surrounding us now. No wonder a population once persuaded to support capitalism because it fostered a middle class now finds reasons to question it.

In capitalist enterprises, tiny minorities of the persons involved occupy positions of leadership, command, and control. The owner, the owner’s family, the board of directors, or the major shareholders comprise such minorities: the class of employers. Opposite them are the vast majorities: the class of employees. The employer class determines, exclusively, what the enterprise produces, what technology it uses, where production occurs, and what is done with its net revenue. The employee class must live with the consequences of employers’ decisions from which it is excluded. The employer class uses its position atop the enterprise to distribute its profits partly to enrich itself (via dividends and top executive pay packages). It uses some of its profits to buy and control politics. The goal there is to prevent universal suffrage from moving the economic system beyond capitalism and the economic inequality it reproduces.

Deepening U.S. inequality flows directly from this capitalist organization of production—its class system. Occasionally, under exceptional circumstances, rebellious social movements win reversals of that inequality. However, if such movements do not change the capitalist organization of production, capitalists will render such reversals temporary. To solve the extreme inequality of U.S. capitalism requires systemic change, an end to capitalism’s specific class structure pitting employers against employees. If production were organized instead in enterprises (factories, offices, stores) that were democratized—one worker, one vote—as worker cooperatives, economic inequality could and would be drastically reduced. Democratic decisions over the distribution of individual incomes across all the participants in an enterprise would far less likely give a small minority vast wealth at the expense of the vast majority. The same logic that dispensed with kings in politics applies to employers in capitalism’s enterprises.

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.