Could high-tech farming be the future of food?


Robots, blockchain, and high-tech plankton might soon be producing food for British Columbians.

The B.C. government last week announced $7.5 million in funding to support 21 agritech companies in the province. Agritech — a suite of technologies that includes robotics, artificial intelligence, and vertical farms — is a fast-growing sector, with analysts expecting it to reach about US$18 billion globally by 2022.

The province’s so-called “concierge” program will help connect these businesses to investment capital, navigate government funding programs, and find land — including protected agricultural land.

“The pandemic has reinforced the importance of food security and the role of the B.C. agricultural sector,” said B.C.'s Jobs, Economic Recovery, and Innovation Minister Ravi Kahlon. “The food system was feeling extreme pressure, and for us as a government, we want to ensure we’re pandemic-proof (and) able to produce the food we need to shorten the supply chain, so we don’t need to feel that pressure again.”

The recent announcement follows a controversial January 2020 report written by a provincial food security task force that argued B.C.’s future food security lies in agritech. Food advocates and academics in the province were unconvinced: By March 2020, they had issued a rebuttal noting social, economic, and sustainability issues with the approach.

Many B.C. farmers already struggle to make ends meet, in part because of the high costs of farmland. Few farmers have affordable access to arable land, and the rebuttal’s authors noted that allowing labs, manufacturing facilities, or other agritech infrastructure on the province’s limited and legally protected farmland could further push up these prices, making farmland primarily accessible to companies or wealthy individuals.

Beyond the farmland issue, the authors said that prioritizing expensive, energy-intensive agritech projects without offering equivalent supports for farmers using less tech-heavy sustainable farming techniques like agroecology would do little for B.C. food security or sustainability.

It’s a debate that goes beyond B.C.

Food is responsible for between 21 per cent and 37 per cent of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and is driving biodiversity loss. With the global population expected to exceed 10 billion by 2100, change is needed; whether agritech, agroecology — or a combination of both — is the solution remains unclear.

“There are places we can … create more sustainable agriculture and food systems using new technologies. We just want to approach them with caution and not assume they are solutions in and of themselves,” said Michael Bomford, professor of sustainable agriculture and food systems at Kwantlen Polytechnic University and co-author on the March 2020 rebuttal.

“I would far rather identify the problems and look at the best way to solve those problems then critically evaluate our success … I think it’s a mistake to identify a particular (agritech) solution and then get excited about that rather than figuring out what’s the best way to solve that problem. It might be new tech, it might be old tech, it might be ancient knowledge.”

For instance, some farming practices can boost carbon sequestration and biodiversity, he noted, while new research suggests smaller farms with a diversity of crops have higher yields per acre than industrial agriculture. Technology that can bolster these approaches — instead of inventing new ones — would have more benefits for less cost, he said.

“As we start to explore growing things in shipping containers, or in vertical farms — situations that a lot of people seem to get very excited about — (we need to) look at the full cost of supporting those systems,” he said.

“It’s important that we consider the entire picture of all the inputs going into a system rather than allowing ourselves to be blinded by what appears to be a massive increase in one type of efficiency.”

Others doubt a lower-tech approach can work.

“The technologies we’re developing will be able to drastically cut climate change (and) the impact on the sector … I think the future is going to be high-tech, fairly local, and plant-based, (and) I have no doubt agritech is the future,” said Lenore Newman, director of the Food and Agriculture Institute at the University of the Fraser Valley and one of the authors of the January 2020 report in support of agritech.

While she acknowledged many of the technological leaps in agriculture that define our industrialized food system — artificial fertilizers and pesticides, or monocropping, for instance — have driven GHG emissions and biodiversity loss, developing new technologies isn’t the issue. Until recently, new agricultural technologies hadn’t been evaluated for their overall environmental impacts — but that is changing, she said.

“You have to look at what technologies make sense when you put sustainability into the mix … I think there’s a fear (of technology) from people who have never done hard labour (and) who romanticize a past that never existed,” where people had long-lasting and healthy lives on farms. That wasn’t the case, she said, with farm labour often brutal on people’s bodies.

“Any future that says a great portion of the population must go back on the farm, I’m not down for that.”

The rapid technological developments in agriculture over the past 50 years that have greatly contributed to the sector’s sustainability issues were created by bad policy, she said. Not bad technology.

“Looking at (agritech) as someone who studies futures, technology always wins,” she said. “The question then is we must … build sustainability in at every stage, because that’s what we did wrong over the last 50 years. It wasn’t the technology — it’s the lack of policies to guide outcomes.”

Still, Bomford remains unconvinced that policy safeguards to ensure new technologies reduce their environmental harm will do much. They may help to safely implement technological approaches to specific problems, but the agritech approach isn’t a “silver bullet” to our food system woes, he said.

“It’s (a question of) approaching problems with a variety of possible solutions as opposed to simply targeting new and exciting agritech,” he said.

Marc Fawcett-Atkinson / Local Journalism Initiative / Canada's National Observer

UV VS NUDE SUNBATHING

Sunlight Inactivates Coronavirus 8 Times Faster Than Predicted. We Need to Know Why

Tessa Koumoundouros 

4/1/2021

A team of scientists is calling for greater research into how sunlight inactivates SARS-CoV-2 after realizing there's a glaring discrepancy between the most recent theory and experimental results.

© S&B Vonlanthen/Unsplash

UC Santa Barbara mechanical engineer Paolo Luzzatto-Fegiz and colleagues noticed the virus was inactivated as much as eight times faster in experiments than the most recent theoretical model predicted.

"The theory assumes that inactivation works by having UVB hit the RNA of the virus, damaging it," explained Luzzatto-Fegiz.

But the discrepancy suggests there's something more going on than that, and figuring out what this is may be helpful for managing the virus.

UV light, or the ultraviolet part of the spectrum, is easily absorbed by certain nucleic acid bases in DNA and RNA, which can cause them to bond in ways that are hard to fix.

But not all UV light is the same. Longer UV waves, called UVA, don't have quite enough energy to cause problems. It's the mid-range UVB waves in sunlight that are primarily responsible for killing microbes and putting our own cells at risk of Sun damage.

Short-wave UVC radiation has been shown to be effective against viruses such as SARS-CoV-2, even while it's still safely enveloped in human fluids.

But this type of UV doesn't usually come into contact with Earth's surface, thanks to the ozone layer.

"UVC is great for hospitals," said co-author and Oregon State University toxicologist Julie McMurry. "But in other environments – for instance, kitchens or subways – UVC would interact with the particulates to produce harmful ozone."

In July 2020, an experimental study tested the effects of UV light on SARS-CoV-2 in simulated saliva. They recorded the virus was inactivated when exposed to simulated sunlight for between 10-20 minutes.

"Natural sunlight may be effective as a disinfectant for contaminated nonporous materials," Wood and colleagues concluded in the paper.

Luzzatto-Feigiz and team compared those results with a theory about how sunlight achieved this, which was published just a month later, and saw the math didn't add up.

This study found the SARS-CoV-2 virus was three times more sensitive to the UV in sunlight than influenza A, with 90 percent of the coronavirus's particles being inactivated after just half an hour of exposure to midday sunlight in summer.

By comparison, in winter light infectious particles could remain intact for days.

Environmental calculations made by a separate team of researchers concluded the virus's RNA molecules are being photochemically damaged directly by light rays.

This is more powerfully achieved by shorter wavelengths of light, like UVC and UVB. As UVC doesn't reach Earth's surface, they based their environmental light exposure calculations on the medium-wave UVB part of the UV spectrum.

"The experimentally observed inactivation in simulated saliva is over eight times faster than would have been expected from the theory," wrote Luzzatto-Feigiz and colleagues.

"So, scientists don't yet know what's going on," Luzzatto-Fegiz said.

The researchers suspect it's possible that instead of affecting the RNA directly, long-wave UVA may be interacting with molecules in the testing medium (simulated saliva) in a way that hastens the inactivation of the virus.

Something similar is seen in wastewater treatment – where UVA reacts with other substances to create molecules that damage viruses.

If UVA can be harnessed to combat SARS-CoV-2, cheap and energy-efficient wavelength-specific light sources might be useful in augmenting air filtration systems at relatively low risk for human health.

"Our analysis points to the need for additional experiments to separately test the effects of specific light wavelengths and medium composition," Luzzatto-Fegiz concludes.

With the ability of this virus to remain suspended in the air for extended periods of time, the safest means to avoid it in countries where it's running rampant is still social distancing and wearing masks where distancing isn't possible. But it's nice to know that sunlight may be helping us out during the warmer months.

Their analysis was published in The Journal of Infectious Diseases.

Uses and Abuses of the Paris Commune: the Extraordinary Story of Adrien Lejeune, the Last Communard

March 11, 2021

Length:3258 words

Summary: On the 150th anniversary of the Paris Commune, David Black reviews Gavin Bowd’s book on Adrien Lejeune, the Last Communard – Editors.

The Last Communard: Adrien Lejeune, the Unexpected Life of a Revolutionary 

by Gavin Bowd. (Verso, ISBN 9781784782856).

Adrien Lejeune’s life story begins with his birth in the Paris of Louis Philippe’s ‘July Monarchy’ in 1847 and ends with his death in Soviet Siberia in 1942. He was, successively, a fighter in the Paris Commune, a socialist and Moscow-line communist. Gavin Bowd, having excavated the historical records, says that ‘the way his life and story have been appropriated, sold and retold is as important as the action he took on the streets in 1871.’

Lejeune was born on 3 June 1847, to a barrel-maker and a seamstress in Bagnolet, a leafy hamlet just beyond the city walls of Paris. By the age of twenty Lejeune had gained employment as a herbalist in a pharmacy on the Paris boulevards. Having joined the Republican Association of Freethinkers, Lejeune soon became notorious in the eyes of his neighbours in Bagnolet, which at the time was a bastion of conservatism. Under Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte’s regime, which was supported by a reactionary Catholic Church, all protest marches and meetings of socialists were forbidden. The Freethinkers were restricted to organising mutual aid, especially for funerals. But funerals for freethinkers often turned into popular demonstrations against the Empire, culminating in cries of ‘Vive la République démocratique et sociale!’

Between 1850 and 1870 the population of Paris doubled to two million, with nearly half a million proletarians employed mostly in small and medium-sized workshops. 30,000 were organised by Workers’ Societies linked to the First International co-founded by Karl Marx.

Louis Bonaparte doomed his empire when, in July 1870, he declared war on Prussia. Two months later he was taken prisoner by the Prussians at the Battle of Sedan. After a bloodless popular uprising in Paris, a provisional Government of National Defence was formed. Headed by the constitutional monarchist, Adolphe Thiers, it was essentially a ‘republic without republicans’.

The new government formed a 200,000-strong National Guard as a defence of the city against the German siege. Adrien Lejuene joined the National Guard, 2nd Company, 28th Battalion and rose to the rank of sergeant. The siege dragged on through the freezing winter of 1870-71. As food supplies ran out, poorer Parisians were reduced to eating rats and the city’s zoo animals. While the French army suffered defeat after defeat in the countryside, German artillery bombarded Paris.

In January 1871, the new government capitulated and sued for peace. Under the terms of an armistice, Thiers agreed to cede the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine to the new German Empire, promised to pay a 5 billion francs war indemnity and granted the German army a victory parade on the streets of Paris on 17 February. As this latter spectacle induced a silent rage amongst the Parisians, some 200,000 of the city’s better-off residents began an exodus to the countryside in fear of what was to come next.

As the rank and file of the National Guard became increasing radicalised, the provisional government ordered that its cannons be seized and transferred to Versailles. On the morning of 18 March 1871, Versaillais troops arrived at the Butte de Montmartre, a strategic hill overlooking the city, to remove the cannons. The alarm was raised by the Parisian milkmaids, and National Guardsmen – Adrien Lejeune among them – rushed to the scene to protect the cannons. As hostile crowds agitated by the Blanquist Left mobilised, mutinous troops refused to fire on them. The generals Lecomte and Clement-Thomas were captured and summarily executed by their own men. The Paris Commune was proclaimed the same day. On 26 March, representatives of the Commune were elected by the citizens of Paris. Thiers’ government decamped from Paris to the relative safety of the palace of Versailles, 17 kilometres from the city.

In the nine weeks of the Commune’s existence, the standing army was abolished along with conscription; control of the schools by the Catholic clergy was replaced by a new system of free compulsory, secular education for all children, including girls; and far-reaching reforms enacted what workers had long demanded, such as the establishment of workers’ cooperatives and restriction of hours.

Adrien Lejeune divided his time between his home in Bagnolet and his National Guard base at the mairie (town hall) of the 20th arrondissement. In what was now a civil war, rural France was now ‘enemy-held territory’. Military efforts to break out of Paris foundered as Thiers, with help from German Chancellor Bismarck, shored up the Versaillais army.

On 21 May 1871, General MacMahon’s Versaillais army entered the city and what became known as the Bloody Week began. During the fighting, the Communards killed or wounded thousands of the invading Versaillais soldiers and torched a number of buildings including the Tuileries Palace and the Hotel de Ville. The pétroleuses (female incendiaries) were blamed for many of burnings by the bourgeois press, but the instances were exaggerated to detract from the achievements of feminists and working-class women communards. In conquering the city the Versaillais army massacred at least 10,000 Communards, including those taken prisoner. 40,000 people were arrested, Lejeune among them.

Gavin Bowd’s research into the fate of Lejeune following his arrest by the Versaillais at the end of the ‘Bloody Week’ on 28 May makes it clear ‘that the reality of Communard Lejeune lends itself with difficulty to the typical Communist hagiography’. In later accounts given by Lejeune and relayed through Communist presses, when the Versaillais assaulted the last bastions of the Commune Lejuene was among those who fought ‘barricade by barricade’ until the final defeat. This however, does not quite square with the defence he offered at his trial in February 1872. Lejeune in fact tried to save himself from incarceration and possible execution by claiming that his daily trips from Bagnolet to the 20th arrondissement had nothing to do with his known extremist politics or armed service for the Commune. He further claimed that his enrolment in the National Guard in the days of the Thiers government did not involve remaining in it to fight for the Commune. The prosecution couldn’t find any witnesses to Lejeune’s alleged military actions, but as numerous local Bagnolet croquants were called to testify that he was an extremist and an infidel, his defence wouldn’t wash with the court and he was sentenced to five years imprisonment. Here again Bowd finds it necessary to challenge later Communist myth-making. For contrary to various accounts Lejeune was not transported to New Caledonia along with the Communard leaders who were spared the death sentence. Rather, Lejeune was put on a prison ship, then transferred to a prison-fortress off the coast of Brittany. Lejeune showed none of the defiance in court of, for example, Louise Michel, who declared to the 6th Conseil de Guerre:


I don’t want to defend myself, I don’t want to be defended; I belong entirely to the social revolution and I declare I accept responsibility for all my acts. I accept it entirely and without restrictions.

Michel was proud that she had offered to assassinate Thiers and burn down parts of Paris. Probably because she was a woman she was not executed, but deported to New Caledonia. Théophile Ferré, as head of the revolutionary police, had sent Georges Darboy, the archbishop of Paris and five other clerics to the firing squad in retaliation for executions by the Versaillais army of Communard prisoners. Ferré declared before his judges:


A member of the Paris Commune, I am in the hands of those who defeated it; if they want my head, let them take it! Never will I save my life through cowardice. Free I have lived, and free I will die! I entrust to the future my memory and my vengeance.

Ferré was executed by firing squad.

It is certain the Adrien Lejeune did fight for the Commune, but his role was not as heroic as told in the legend later promoted by the Communists. During the German siege he was a member of the National Guard, but after the armistice with Germany he handed in his rifle. When the Commune was proclaimed, his role seems to have been restricted to working in the food supply service at the mairie (town hall) of the 20th arrondissement. He did this work until the start of the Bloody Week, when he decided to get out of Paris. He was then arrested at the gates of Paris by the National Guard, who proposed that he resume his service, otherwise he would stay in prison and might be considered a traitor. Lejuene re-joined the Guard, and it seems he fought bravely until 28 May, as he himself testified.

According to Bowd, ‘The records of Lejeune’s revolutionary acts are as mixed as the rest of his life, combining idealism, myth-making and all-too-human frailty. Despite his very modest contribution, the legacy of the Paris Commune would dictate his next seventy years.’

Very little is known about Lejeune’s life in the decades following his release in 1876. In 1871, the Commune’s representative for the 20th Arrondissement had been Edouard Vaillant, a Blanquist who later became a leader of the Unified Socialist Party (SFIO) along with Jean Jaurès and Jules Guesde. Lejeune joined the SFIO in 1905. In 1917, according to a commemorative article in the Communist daily L’Humanité in 1971, he ‘greeted with enthusiasm the socialist October Revolution which meant the triumph of the Commune’s ideas in one sixth of the globe’. In 1922, now aged seventy-five, Lejeune joined the newly-established Communist Party of France (PCF).

In 1928, the Central Committee of the PCF asked the Comintern’s Red Aid International if it could take care of old Communards who were living in France in ‘a very bad situation’. In 1930, Lejeune, whose wife had died a few years earlier, decided to emigrate to Russia and donate his savings. He handed 4,626 francs of annuity to L’Humanité, on condition that the paper ensured him an annual income corresponding to that yielded by his securities. He also donated to the Red Aid organisation.

The octogenarian Lejeune took up residence in Moscow at the Home for Old Revolutionaries. L’Humanité endeavoured to keep him supplied with hampers of wine, chocolate and coffee. Lejeune enjoyed his stay at the home, because other old comrades spoke French and the food was good. But, after 1936, as Lejeune’s health declined, he found himself thrown from one institution to another and neglected by Red Aid. Fortunately for Lejeune, he came under the protection of André Marty, secretary of the Comintern in France and political commissar of the International Brigades in Spain. Marty, in correspondence with Comintern leaders, complained that those responsible for the welfare of the man who was now the last surviving fighter of the Paris Commune were behaving as if they were doing him a favour, rather than the other way round.

According to Marty, when on 15 May 1940 Lejeune learned that the Germans had once again defeated the French at Sedan, he commented:


Sedan, so it’s starting all over again? So they still have their Bazaines and MacMahons? Yes, if MacMahon holed up at Sedan, it was because he was afraid of us, because he was afraid of Paris, because he was afraid of answering to the people of France, much more than of the Prussians.

When Lejeune learned that the Germans had just entered Paris, he sat up in bed, despite his ninety-four years, and exclaimed:


It can’t be true. Paris, I must see Paris freed from the brutes and bandits who are sullying it! To see Paris again, our beautiful Paris cleansed forever of fascists and traitors!

Marty noted angrily that an official of Red Aid, after visiting Lejeune, wrote ‘a schematic, lifeless text, full of clichés plus a quotation from Marx’, and signed it Adrien Lejeune. ‘Not a single French militant will believe it to be by Lejeune’, he added. Marty proposed instead an interview under the title ‘The Communard Who Saw Three Wars’, containing ‘only Lejeune’s opinions, tidied up, of course, but very lively and very relevant to today’.

In July 1941, the Stalin-Hitler Pact was abruptly terminated by Hitler. As the Nazis approached Moscow, Lejeune was evacuated to Peredelkino, a village of dachas, south-west of Moscow. Here, he had as company disabled Spanish Civil War veterans, and a French-speaking Bulgarian exile, Adela Nikolova, who had been assigned by the NKVD as Lejeune’s carer. Nikolova complained to Marty:


I cannot remain silent about our arrival the day before yesterday. Our reception was rather difficult. From the very first minute I felt a very wounding atmosphere for us. To receive us like that is incomprehensible. We were greeted like beggars asking for charity, and this state of affairs continues. I hope, dear comrade, that the matter will be sorted out and that I will be able to organise our comrade’s life properly. Our collective has been outraged by the administration’s way of doing things. From my letter you will appreciate how angry I am.

Again, Marty intervened on Lejeune’s behalf, which resulted in an improvement of the exiles’ conditions at the Peredelkino hospital. In October 1941 as the Nazi threat to Moscow worsened and a state of siege was declared, Lejeune, Nikolova and other exiles were evacuated to Novosibirsk in Siberia, 2,000 miles east. For the 94-year old Lejeune the journey was arduous and life-threatening. In the middle of the freezing Siberian winter, Lejeune’s health worsened despite the care of the ever-loyal Nikolova. In the second week of January 1942, Adrien Lejeune died. He was buried in Novosibirsk. The guard of honour was made up of militants of the Party, the Communist Youth, commanders and commissars of the Red Army, and delegations of Stakhanovites from the factories.

Bowd points out that in the Second World War, the vision of the Commune changed significantly among the French Communists. The image of the Commune, as a proletarian revolution, gave way to one of patriotic resistance to the German occupiers and their collaborators. Bowd writes:

In May 1942, the underground L’Humanité declared, with more than a soupçon of “frenzied chauvinism”: “French patriots, unite and take action against the Boches and their lackeys…” For the Nazis, there was nothing more fearsome than “patriotic resistance to their oppression, to the traitors of Vichy, Pétain, Laval, Darlan and Co…” The Paris Commune was the revolt of the People against the traitors; the people of Paris betrayed and sold; Paris handed over to the Prussians; the Prussians in Paris; Bismarck and Thiers united against the Commune; collaborators of yesterday and today.

What was not stressed by the Communists was that they had long held to the position that the defeat of the working class in the Commune had come about because the French working class lacked a nationally organised Communist Party capable of co-ordination, directing and indeed dominating the movement. They had milked the writings on the Commune of Marx and Engels as well as Lenin’s writings on Marx on the Commune. But they had then added a deadly Stalinist twist. Under Stalin the ‘Leninist’ position of ‘democratic centralism’ was adapted to employ centralised bureaucratic terror against anyone who questioned his policies, and the vision of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ was perverted into the reality of dictatorship over the proletariat.

The actual Paris Commune was no one-party state. Its version of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat included a wide range of republican tendencies, including Proudhonists, Blanquists, anarchists, feminists, freemasons and Marxists. Marx was certainly aware of the Commune leaders’ shortcomings, such as the failure to seize the money in the Bank of Paris and march on Versailles. Privately Marx criticised the Commune leadership for ruling out any attempt to negotiate a compromise with the bourgeoisie in order to have a democratic republic in which class struggle could take place without violence.

The uses and abuses of the Lejeune legend and the legacy of the Commune carried on through the post-World War Two period. In China in early 1967 worker unrest led briefly to the replacement of the party-run administration by the Shanghai People’s Commune which – to the alarm of Mao Zedong – looked back to the dictatorship of the proletariat as exercised by the Paris Commune.

In France itself, for the Situationists, who played an important catalyst role in the May/June revolt of 1968, the Commune, in Bowd’s words ‘anticipated a new form of society that would be ‘realised art’. For Guy Debord and the Situationists:

…they practised a “revolutionary urbanism,” attacking on the ground the petrified signs of the dominant organisation of daily life, recognising social space in political terms, refusing to accept that a monument such as the column on the Place Vendôme – a symbol of Napoleonic militarism – could be neutral or innocent.

In 1971, the centenary year of the Commune, the PCF, in an effort to restore good relations with the CPSU (which had been stretched by the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968) arranged for Lejeune’s ashes to be brought from Siberia and buried at the Mur des Fédérés in Père-Lachaise cemetery, next to the mass graves of murdered Communards. The PCF event drew tens of thousands, but the centenary also saw large rallies by Trotskyists, and by Maoists who saw the PCF’s initiatives as opportunist and class collaborationist. The French anarchists, for their part, insisted that the Communard most worthy of celebration had been Louise Michel, whose politics were quite at odds with later ‘Leninisms’.

On 10 November 1989, the day after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Gavin Bowd, member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, went for a walk in Paris. He writes:

I tried to clear my head of the cataclysmic news of the previous day and repaired to one of my favourite places for solitary contemplation in Paris, the cemetery of Père-Lachaise. Here I wandered among dead leaves and neglected tombs, until I arrived at the corner in the south-east of the cemetery called Le Mur des Fédérés.

Bowd discovered that day the tomb of Adrien Lejeune, which led to him writing this book. What he found most interesting about Lejeune was:

…his real and imagined life, with its convictions, friendships, moments of cowardice, half-truths, lies, shady corners and banalities, a story of property and theft at every level; the manipulation of memory and the (largely consensual) instrumentalisation of an individual who became a ‘relic’ of a cause; the randomness, the pathos and the cruelty of History. It seems that, much more than any novel, the documents and testimonies, swarming with contradictions and silences, constitute in themselves a historical drama and answer at least a few of the questions that a little black marble grave had raised in my mind on the morning of 10 November 1989.

For Marxisant orthodoxy in the 20th century the Paris Commune, lacking centralised unity and strategy, was history’s ‘rehearsal’ for the Russian Revolution. But if the ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’ has any meaning for today then the legacy of the Communards rises in many respects above that of ‘Bolshevik Leninism’. The Situationists’ Theses on the Paris Commune, written in 1962, whilst recognising the Commune’s obvious lack of a ‘coherent organizational structure’ pointed out that the problem of political structures had turned out to be ‘far more complex to us today than the would-be heirs of the Bolshevik-type structure claim it to be’. Rather than labelling the Commune just as ‘an outmoded example of revolutionary primitivism’, revolutionaries should examine it ‘as a positive experiment whose whole truth has yet to be rediscovered and fulfilled’. They still should.

[Discussion Article] 

Why Anarchists Should Read Raya Dunayevskaya

Summary: How Raya Dunayevskaya’s Intersectional Marxism on Race, Class, Gender, and the Dialectics of Liberation relates to Anarcho-Libertarian positions — Editors.

March 12, 2021Length:844 words

I’ve read the three books in Dunayevskaya’s ‘trilogy of revolution’ and more by Marxist-Humanists. And I’ve always got a lot out of it.

It’s fascinating to see Marxist-Humanists reach very similar conclusions to anarchist communists but coming from a different intellectual and political tradition. In fact, they came out of Trotskyism and even after Dunayevskaya’s break with Trotsky – she served as his Russian-language secretary in Mexico for a couple of years in the 1930s – Lenin’s thinking remained important for some time. There are parallels there with operaismo in Italy, and of course with C.L.R. James, who worked with Dunayevskaya in the Johnson-Forest Tendency.

I totally get why Dunayevskaya’s writings might be off-putting to some people. She delves deep into Hegelian philosophy in her project of renewing marxism and humanism. Paul Mattick thought her first book, Marxism and Freedom (1958), was a ‘Marxian oddity’ and full of ‘incomprehensible philosophical gibberish’. I think Mattick’s dismissal of her work was understandable but wrong and blocked a potential dialogue between two anti-authoritarian marxisms in the US. But, whatever we think about Hegelian dialectics – which for me is very useful because it can help us think about nuance, process and change – it’s true that it gets complicated and that has implications for communicating to people, and has the danger of creating a group of expert interpreters.

But Dunayevskaya also completely refused to accept Mattick’s anti-Leninist critique. Looking back over Dunayevskaya’s Marxism and Freedom, the treatment of the Russian revolution turned counter-revolution is incredibly problematic. There’s still a defence of the early stages of the workers’ state and Lenin’s leadership. A hundred years after Kronstadt, Dunayevskaya’s very occasional references to the mutiny – and any other example of resistance to Bolshevism – are terrible. (The only contributor in this new book who really confronts this contradiction for me is the old Italian socialist humanist Rodolfo Mondolfo, writing way back in 1963!)

Over time, Dunayevskaya became more critical of Lenin and his political practice. Marxist-Humanists explicitly advocate the self-emancipation of the working class, highly democratic forms of decision-making, and ‘establishing a new non-state form of governance’ etc. But, I’ve seen very little re-reading of Bolshevism by Marxist-Humanists, of earlier ideas of the ‘workers’ state’ or much in the way of a theory of the state.

Dunayevskaya created a completely new liberatory way of thinking about Marx and humanism. But because she seemed to want nothing to do with – or was highly critical of – currents of socialism outside of Marxism, most importantly anarchism, she basically ignores a significant amount of theory and mass movements around the world historically and in the future – especially theorists who, whatever their limitations, were concerned with exactly the same questions and with thinking about the ‘what comes after the revolution’. She thus closes off some of the ‘new forces and passions of history’ that the Marxist-Humanist tendency is meant to be grounded on.

One small example from near the start of Marxism and Freedom, where Dunayevskaya is discussing past currents of class struggle. She writes:

Despite the mountain of books on the French Revolution, there is not, to this day, a full account of the depth and breadth of the activity of the French masses. It is only recently that Daniel Guérin has written a truly pioneering work, The Class Struggles in the First French Republic [1947] […] (p. 28)

I think Guérin wrote this before he became an anarchist and libertarian communist, attempting to unite the best between marxism and anarchism. But, he himself later acknowledged the contribution Kropotkin made in The Great French Revolution 1789–93, published in 1893. Dunayevskaya seems not to have known of this or cared!

So why do I still like Raya Dunayevskaya so much?

She came to the States as an illiterate Jewish immigrant from Russia, UKRAINE

educating herself through the communist/socialist movement in Chicago and developing an understanding of Marx’s critique of political economy and Hegelian philosophy difficult to find in anyone else in the world! She never separated theory and thinking from an active participation in struggles, all struggles against capitalism, racism, and gender oppression. And from the beginning she centred the thoughts and practice of Black Americans, women, women of colour and other oppressed groups.

In the post-World War Two era she was one of the few thinkers who, in rejecting the USSR, Western capitalism and social democracy, began again to develop an anti-capitalist politics relevant to the new struggles and conditions that emerged and continue to emerge. In terms of the ambition of her theoretical/practical project I can only think of Murray Bookchin and Daniel Guérin himself in the ‘anarchist’ scene as doing anything similar (maybe you can think of others).

The articles in this new book continue this open-ended, emancipatory politics for own times, drawing on the best of Marx and trying to understand and link current struggles around the world. Intersectionality was one of the great concepts I learned about from being in the Anarchist Federation. This book approaches it in an interesting and inspirational way.

So aye, anarchists should read Raya Dunayevskaya and other Marxist-Humanists!
 

Luxemburg 150

Summary: On the anniversary of Rosa Luxemburg’s birth, economist Michael Roberts discusses aspects of her legacy on economic theory, and fruitful critique.

 First appeared here: https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2021/03/06/luxemburg-150/

 – Editors.

March 6, 2021

Yesterday, 5 March 2021, was the 150th anniversary of the birth of Rosa Luxemburg, the great revolutionary socialist of the Polish-German labour movement. Luxemburg’s contribution to socialist ideas and to the struggle to replace capitalism is too manifold for a short blog post to do her justice. So I won’t attempt to do a proper job here. Instead, I shall offer a few comments on her contribution to Marxist political economy along with some suggestions for some very useful critiques of her work.

Since the 1970s there has been a Collected Works in German. But more recently, there is a new Complete Works in English, edited by Peter Hudis, in fourteen volumes. As Hudis explained in an article in Solidarity 356 (11/3/15: bit.ly/hudis-rl), “given the amount of time, care, and attention that she gave to developing her major economic works, it makes sense to begin the Complete Works with her contributions to the field of Marxian economics and those fill the 1200 or so pages of the first two volumes.”

Luxemburg’s four actual books (three published, and a larger one never completed) were all about economic theory: The Industrial Development of Poland, The Accumulation of Capital, the Anti-Critique, and the Introduction to Political Economy. She was a formidable economist by all standards, and one who reckoned that economics was “her field”. Her most famous work was The Accumulation of Capital in which she set out to refute the reformist views of Bernstein and Kautsky, the German Social Democrat leaders, that capitalism would not ‘collapse’; and the theory of Rudolf Hilferding, the Austrian Marxist that monopoly and finance capitalism would provide a degree of stability for capitalist accumulation.

As is well known among Marxist circles, Luxemburg attempted to refute these views in her book by arguing that there was an inherent tendency for capitalist accumulation to overreach the market for buying the goods and services being produced. In her view, that showed that capitalism could and would get into crises; and moreover, it also explained imperialist expansion. To avoid crises of overproduction at home, capitalism was forced to search for new markets overseas and find buyers for its goods in the non-capitalist sectors of the world.

She argued that Marx’s analysis of crises fell short here. Marx had failed to see in his reproduction schemas in Volume Two of Capital that this was the ultimate cause of crises: namely the overproduction of capital goods relative to demand (both from capitalists and workers in the imperialist countries), forcing capitalism to find that demand from the colonial non-capitalist peasants.

She was not afraid to take on Marx as well as other leading theorists. As she concluded in her Anti-Critique: “Marxism does not consist of a dozen persons who have granted each other the right to be the ‘experts’, before whom the masses are supposed to prostrate themselves in blind obedience, like loyal followers of the true faith of Islam. Marxism is a revolutionary outlook on the world that must always strive toward new knowledge and new discoveries… Its living force is best preserved in the intellectual clash of self-criticism and in the midst of history’s thunder and lightning”.

There are many effective critiques of Luxemburg’s thesis. I can list a few papers here that go into those critiques in much more detail than this short post.

https://imhojournal.org/articles/henryk-grossmann-vs-rosa-luxemburg-causes-meaning-economic-crises-not-just-history-karel-ludenhoff/

https://thenextrecession.files.wordpress.com/2017/07/henryk_grossman_on_imperialism.pdf

https://www.workersliberty.org/story/2019-01-16/luxemburg-economics-crises-and-national-question

https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2016/06/29/modern-imperialism-and-the-working-class/

I think the most effective critique of Luxemburg’s crisis theory came from Henryk Grossman. Grossman acknowledged Luxemburg’s work. He agreed with her that the expansion of imperialism was due to the capitalist system’s proneness to economic crises. But he differed from Luxemburg in regarding imperialism as a factor which offset the tendency for the rate of profit to fall, not as the need for capitalism to find markets for over-production. Imperialism was a counteracting factor to the key underlying cause of crises and ‘breakdown’ in capitalist production, namely the tendency for the rate of profit on capital to fall over time.

Lenin was also critical of Luxemburg’s explanation of imperialism. In his famous book on Imperialism, he argues that imperialism is the result of capitalism’s need to export capital which arises “from the fact that in a few countries capitalism has become ‘overripe’ and (owing to the backward state of agriculture and the poverty of the masses)” and “capital cannot find a field for ‘profitable’ investment.” Grossman went further than Lenin: “[W]hy,” then, “are profitable investments not to be found at home?…The fact of capital export is as old as modern capitalism itself. The scientific task consists in explaining this fact, hence in demonstrating the role it plays in the mechanism of capitalist production.”

Luxemburg knew from reading Marx’s Capital about the law of profitability, although Marx’s notes on Capital, Grundrisse, were not available to her. But she dismissed the law as irrelevant to capitalist crises. For her, the law was a long-term thing. Indeed, it was so long-term, as she famously put in Anti-Critique, when answering criticisms of her Accumulation book, that “There is still some time to pass before capitalism collapses because of the falling rate of profit, roughly until the sun burns out.”

But Marx did not see the law of profitability as something in geological time but very relevant to human time. “When Adam Smith explains the fall in the rate of profit from an over-abundance of capital, an accumulation of capital, he is speaking of a permanent effect and this is wrong. As against this, the transitory over-abundance of capital, over-production and crises are something different. Permanent crises do not exist.” (Theories of Surplus Value).

Peter Hudis has added an interesting anecdote to Luxemburg’s rejection of Marx’s ‘most important law in political economy’. He wrote to me in an email: “what is less well known, is the person she is responding to” in dismissing the relevance of the law of profitability in crises. “He was an anonymous reviewer of ‘The Accumulation of Capital’ in ‘Dresdener Volkszeitung’ of January 1913. Several years ago, when I was editing ‘The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg’, I managed to track down that the author was Miran Isaakovich Nakhimson. Born in 1880, he joined the Bundists in 1898 and became known as one of its most prominent political economists. Although virtually forgotten today, he was a considerable presence at the time.”

Hudis goes on: “It’s fairly clear from Luxemburg’s correspondence that she was particularly irritated by Nakhimson’s critique–which is interesting, since he was virtually alone among her critics in going after her for neglecting Marx’s law of the rate of profit. In a letter to Franz Mehring in February, 1913, she writes, “Too bad that Nackhimson has a slap in the face coming to him, but perhaps in the end this would be too great an honor to give this scoundrel and expert at confusion.” A little harsh, it seems, on the Bundist economist.

Rosa Luxemburg was murdered by the Freikorp troops under the control of the Social Democratic government during the 1919 uprising. Nakhimson was murdered by Stalin’s NKVD in 1938. Both economists were revolutionary fighters for socialism and suffered a similar fate, if by different hands.

#UNIONYES

Religious Groups Support Worker-Protecting PRO Act

"The PRO Act is essential in strengthening workers' basic right to organize: as such it is a covenant, a sacred trust among workers to improve their lives and working conditions. It deserves the support of all people of faith."

by

Fran Quigley

 Published on Friday, April 02, 2021 

by

Common Dreams

While two of every three Americans support unions and half of them would join a union

 if they had a chance, only 15% of American workers were union members in 2020. (Photo: Shutterstock)

Multiple religious groups from different faith traditions last month co-authored a letter to members of Congress urging swift passage of the PRO (Protecting the Right to Organize) Act, which would ensure workers' rights to organize into unions and collectively bargain for fair pay and working conditions.

One of those religious groups, NETWORK Lobby for Catholic Social Justice, said, "Catholic Social Justice teaches us that we must invest in the value of human labor, which helps maintain the fabric of our society. With the current labor system structured to favor big businesses and corporations over worker-led unions, the PRO Act levels the playing field by making union organizing less difficult."

Rabbi Michael Feinberg, executive director of the Greater New York Labor-Religion Coalition and an activist in the DSA Religion and Socialism Working Group who was recently the subject of a profile in Commonweal magazine, agrees that supporting the PRO Act is a moral imperative. "The right to form a union is not only a basic democratic right, it is one enshrined in religious ethics and law, certainly one found in Jewish rabbinic tradition," he says. "It is the recognition that in unionizing workers can gain collective power to level the field with employers and owners--this is critical in a time of such obscene wealth inequality."

The PRO Act addresses that inequality by breaking down some of the legal barriers that have blocked working people from coming together to demand fair wages and treatment. Before the Covid pandemic, U.S. unemployment rates were low and workers very much in demand, especially in globalization-proof roles like home health care and food service. Workers overall were also far more productive and better-educated than at any time in history. Yet wages were not keeping pace, with over 40% of U.S. workers struggling in low wage jobs.

This weakness of the current U.S. labor movement is no accident: our nation's labor laws give near-carte blanche to corporations trying to sabotage workers' efforts to come together in a union.

Why didn't increasing demand and more productivity lead to higher wages? Because unions have lost their power to increase the pay of their members and raise the wage floor for other workers, say experts like Professor Colin Gordon, a University of Iowa history professor. "Shared prosperity, including the expectation of wage gains in the long recovery from the Great Recession, rests on policies and institutions that sustain the bargaining power of workers," he wrote in Dissent magazine. Gordon says unions serve as a "countervailing force" to corporate and political resistance to raise wages.

But corporate-friendly U.S. law has been blocking unions from assuming that role. Since the National Labor Relations Act was adopted in 1935, its impact has been steadily eroded by amendments and practices that undercut workers' rights to form unions. The results are easy to quantify: while two of every three Americans support unions and half of them would join a union if they had a chance, only 15% of American workers were union members in 2020.

"Keep Firing Until the Union Organizing Stops"

This weakness of the current U.S. labor movement is no accident: our nation's labor laws give near-carte blanche to corporations trying to sabotage workers' efforts to come together in a union. For example, if an employer violates the law, workers can file an unfair labor practice charge with the National Labor Relations Board. But, remarkably, the NLRB is not empowered to assess any penalties.  The stiffest sanction an employer risks is having to reinstate a fired worker and reimburse for back pay, and/or post some informational signage about labor rights.

"It just like if I were to break into your house and take your TV, and the worst thing that could happen to me is that I would have to put the TV back—after I used it for awhile," says Gordon Lafer, a University of Oregon economist.  So it is no surprise that there is a  documented, widespread record of companies breaking the law to block union organizing, including firing workers who support a union.

Labor lawyer Thomas Geoghegan assesses the state of the current law this way: "Union busting now is almost a science. And the science is a pretty simple one: you go out and fire people. And keep firing until the organizing stops," Geoghan says. "An employer who didn't break the law would have to be what economists call an 'irrational firm.'" Not only does current labor law allow corporations to crush union campaigns, it provides no protection at all for the increasing number of workers in the "gig economy" who are classified as independent contractors, nor to undocumented immigrant workers.

The PRO Act, which passed the U.S. House of Representatives and has the support of President Biden, would go a long way toward fixing this. It would institute fines for companies violating labor rights of its workers, expand the rights of contractors and immigrant workers, and force more honest bargaining by employers. In a critical boon to worker solidarity, the PRO Act would also allow workers to support their sisters and brothers in different companies and sectors who are struggling for fair treatment. So-called "secondary boycotts" are prohibited under current law, but they are a powerful tool that should be available to build worker power. "You take away the prohibition on secondary boycotts, and I'll organize 30,000 hotel workers in a year," one union organizer says.

Beyond simply increasing the number of unionized workers, religious groups insist that the PRO Act changes are necessary to respect workers' most fundamental human rights. The Catholic Labor Network's statement in support of the PRO Act quotes several Papal encyclicals on the importance of unions, including Pope Francis' call for worker solidarity. "America's labor laws are arguably the weakest in the developed world, and this constitutes an open wound to social solidarity. It's time to begin fixing that, starting with passage of the PRO Act."

Rabbi Feinberg agrees. "The PRO Act is essential in strengthening workers' basic right to organize: as such it is a covenant, a sacred trust among workers to improve their lives and working conditions. It deserves the support of all people of faith."

This article originally appeared at Religious Socialism.

Fran Quigley directs the Health and Human Rights Clinic at Indiana University McKinney School of Law.

 

Fossil Fuel Companies Got $8.2 Billion in Tax Bailouts—Then Fired Over 58,000 Workers

"It's time to stop subsidizing them and start facing the climate crisis," 

says a BailoutWatch analyst.

by

Jessica Corbett, staff writer

Published on

Friday, April 02, 2021

by

Common Dreams

Flares burning off gas at Belridge Oil Field and hydraulic fracking site which is the fourth largest oil field in California. (Photo: Citizens of the Planet/Education Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

Bolstering arguments against providing further public benefits to the fossil fuel industry, a BailoutWatch analysis published Friday reveals that 77 companies got a collective $8.24 billion tax bailout last year, then laid off tens of thousands of employees.

The tax benefits for major polluters resulted from two provisions of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, signed by then-President Donald Trump in March 2020. The CARES Act changed corporate tax cuts from legislation that passed under Trump in late 2017, which critics often refer to as the Trump-GOP "tax scam."

"The impact of the change was highly concentrated, enabling each of the 77 firms to collect an average of $107 million in benefits," the nonprofit's new report explains. "Among the top beneficiaries, the contrast between the millions—even billions—they received and the number of workers they sacked is staggering."

Perhaps we can now agree that giving $ to the fossil fuel industry to save jobs was never a good idea? @bailoutwatchorg finds that under the 2020 Covid bill, $8.2B was sent to 77 fossil fuel companies, all of whom then proceeded to lay off their workers. https://t.co/4PbDF6ilUX

— John Kostyack (@Kostyack) April 2, 2021

According to BailoutWatch's review of fossil fuel firms' Securities and Exchange Commission filings, "Payrolls were cut by a net 58,030 jobs at the 74 of these companies that reported employee headcounts for the end of 2019 and 2020."

"The 62 companies that laid off workers collected $7.65 billion through the tax bailout—about $131,000 for each of the 58,488 people they left jobless," the report says. "Five companies filed for bankruptcy protection after receiving $308.7 million in tax bailouts and laying off a total of 5,683 workers."

The report discloses that three companies reported no employment changes last year while nine others—which together got $406 million of tax benefits—added a total of 416 jobs. Those 12 companies accounted for $556.6 million of the analyzed benefits.

BailoutWatch highlights four companies that got tax windfalls but still fired workers:

• Marathon Petroleum received $2.1 billion in tax benefits and laid off 1,920 people, about 9% of its workforce;
• Devon Energy received $143 million and laid 22% of its workers;
• National Oilwell Varcoalso received $591 million and cut payrolls by 22%; and
• Occidental Petroleum received $195 million and cut 2,600 jobs, 18% of its 2019 workforce.

Occidental spokesperson Eric P. Moses told Inside Climate News that the cuts were associated with its 2019 acquisition of Anadarko Petroleum "and completed prior to the Covid pandemic and Congress' passage of the CARES Act."

The outlet also reported:

Marathon disputed the figure, saying that less than 30% of its $2.1 billion tax benefit was due to the CARES Act provisions. However, its annual securities filing said that based on the carryback "as provided by the CARES Act, we recorded an income tax receivable of $2.1 billion" to reflect the company's estimate of the refund it expected to receive in its 2020 tax return.

Marathon spokesman Jamal T. Kheiry said some of the layoffs were associated with the idling of refineries, and added that the company was generous with employees who lost their jobs. "To help affected employees transition, we provided severance, bonus payments, extended healthcare benefits at employee rates, job placement assistance, counseling and other provisions," he said.

Though the tax benefits didn't require companies to keep staff, BailoutWatch researcher Chris Kuveke still criticized the firings. He told The Guardian, "I'm not surprised that these companies took advantage of these tax benefits, but I'm horrified by the layoffs after they got this money."

"Last year's stimulus was about keeping the economy going, but these companies didn't use these resources to retain their workers," Kuveke added. "These are companies that are polluting the environment, increasing the deadliness of the pandemic, and letting go of their workers."

The researcher further noted that fossil fuel companies "had no problem paying their executives for good performance when they didn't perform well."

"There is no problem with working Americans retaining their jobs but I don't believe we should subsidize an industry that has been supported by the government for the past 100 years," said Kuveke. "It's time to stop subsidizing them and start facing the climate crisis."

The fossil fuel industry has NEVER been good towards working people - only its CEOs. It’s time to stop subsidizing fossil fuel companies & start facing the climate crisis! https://t.co/84Pxt9K1h4

— Our Revolution (@OurRevolution) April 2, 2021

As the BailoutWatch report notes:

Some companies' coronavirus bailouts were not limited to the tax benefits. At least seven took a collective $37.7 million from the Small Business Administration's Paycheck Protection Program—money designed to keep people employed. Yet six of them laid off a total of 335 workers, averaging one layoff for every $247,000 they received from the two tax programs.

And seven companies received the implicit endorsement of the Federal Reserve when it included their bonds in its Secondary Market Corporate Credit Facility (SMCCF) portfolio, signaling to investors that it was ready to shore up their bad bets on the companies. Fed support helped oil and gas companies borrow nearly $100 billion from private markets.

The analysis comes after BailoutWatch estimated in November that fossil fuel companies had received $5.5 billion in tax benefits, as part of up to $15.2 billion in all benefits tied to the CARES Act. In contrast with his predecessor, President Joe Biden is taking aim at benefits for the industry.

Although the $2 trillion infrastructure plan Biden unveiled this week has been criticized by some for falling "woefully short" on the climate crisis, the White House did make clear that he wants to "eliminate tax preferences for fossil fuels and make sure polluting industries pay for environmental clean up."

"The current tax code includes billions of dollars in subsidies, loopholes, and special foreign tax credits for the fossil fuel industry," says a White House fact sheet for the plan. "As part of the president's commitment to put the country on a path to net-zero emissions by 2050, his tax reform proposal will eliminate all these special preferences. The president is also proposing to restore payments from polluters into the Superfund Trust Fund so that polluting industries help fairly cover the cost of cleanups."

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