Tuesday, February 27, 2024

‘Emergent’ AI Behavior and Human Destiny

Reprinted from TomDispatch:

Make no mistake, artificial Intelligence (AI) has already gone into battle in a big-time way. The Israeli military is using it in Gaza on a scale previously unknown in wartime. They’ve reportedly been employing an AI target-selection platform called (all too unnervingly) “the Gospel” to choose many of their bombing sites. According to a December report in the Guardian, the Gospel “has significantly accelerated a lethal production line of targets that officials have compared to a ‘factory.’” The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) claim that it “produces precise attacks on infrastructure associated with Hamas while inflicting great damage to the enemy and minimal harm to noncombatants.” Significantly enough, using that system, the IDF attacked 15,000 targets in Gaza in just the first 35 days of the war. And given the staggering damage done and the devastating death toll there, the Gospel could, according to the Guardian, be thought of as an AI-driven “mass assassination factory.”

Meanwhile, of course, in the Ukraine War, both the Russians and the Ukrainians have been hustling to develop, produce, and unleash AI-driven drones with deadly capabilities. Only recently, in fact, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky created a new branch of his country’s armed services specifically focused on drone warfare and is planning to produce more than one million drones this year. According to the Independent, “Ukrainian forces are expected to create special staff positions for drone operations, special units, and build effective training. There will also be a scaling-up of production for drone operations, and inclusion of the best ideas and top specialists in the unmanned aerial vehicles domain, [Ukrainian] officials have said.”

And all of this is just the beginning when it comes to war, AI-style, which is going to include the creation of “killer robots” of every imaginable sort. But as the U.S., Russia, China, and other countries rush to introduce AI-driven battlefields, let TomDispatch regular Michael Klare, who has long been focused on what it means for the globe’s major powers to militarize AI, take you into a future in which (god save us all!) robots could be running (yes, actually running!) the show. ~ Tom Engelhardt

“Emergent” AI Behavior and Human Destiny

What Happens When Killer Robots Start Communicating with Each Other?

by Michael Klare

Yes, it’s already time to be worried — very worried. As the wars in Ukraine and Gaza have shown, the earliest drone equivalents of “killer robots” have made it onto the battlefield and proved to be devastating weapons. But at least they remain largely under human control. Imagine, for a moment, a world of war in which those aerial drones (or their ground and sea equivalents) controlled us, rather than vice-versa. Then we would be on a destructively different planet in a fashion that might seem almost unimaginable today. Sadly, though, it’s anything but unimaginable, given the work on artificial intelligence (AI) and robot weaponry that the major powers have already begun. Now, let me take you into that arcane world and try to envision what the future of warfare might mean for the rest of us.

By combining AI with advanced robotics, the U.S. military and those of other advanced powers are already hard at work creating an array of self-guided “autonomous” weapons systems — combat drones that can employ lethal force independently of any human officers meant to command them. Called “killer robots” by critics, such devices include a variety of uncrewed or “unmanned” planes, tanks, ships, and submarines capable of autonomous operation. The U.S. Air Force, for example, is developing its “collaborative combat aircraft,” an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) intended to join piloted aircraft on high-risk missions. The Army is similarly testing a variety of autonomous unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs), while the Navy is experimenting with both unmanned surface vessels (USVs) and unmanned undersea vessels (UUVs, or drone submarines). China, Russia, Australia, and Israel are also working on such weaponry for the battlefields of the future.

The imminent appearance of those killing machines has generated concern and controversy globally, with some countries already seeking a total ban on them and others, including the U.S., planning to authorize their use only under human-supervised conditions. In Geneva, a group of states has even sought to prohibit the deployment and use of fully autonomous weapons, citing a 1980 U.N. treaty, the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, that aims to curb or outlaw non-nuclear munitions believed to be especially harmful to civilians. Meanwhile, in New York, the U.N. General Assembly held its first discussion of autonomous weapons last October and is planning a full-scale review of the topic this coming fall.

For the most part, debate over the battlefield use of such devices hinges on whether they will be empowered to take human lives without human oversight. Many religious and civil society organizations argue that such systems will be unable to distinguish between combatants and civilians on the battlefield and so should be banned in order to protect noncombatants from death or injury, as is required by international humanitarian law. American officials, on the other hand, contend that such weaponry can be designed to operate perfectly well within legal constraints.

However, neither side in this debate has addressed the most potentially unnerving aspect of using them in battle: the likelihood that, sooner or later, they’ll be able to communicate with each other without human intervention and, being “intelligent,” will be able to come up with their own unscripted tactics for defeating an enemy — or something else entirely. Such computer-driven groupthink, labeled “emergent behavior” by computer scientists, opens up a host of dangers not yet being considered by officials in Geneva, Washington, or at the U.N.

For the time being, most of the autonomous weaponry being developed by the American military will be unmanned (or, as they sometimes say, “uninhabited”) versions of existing combat platforms and will be designed to operate in conjunction with their crewed counterparts. While they might also have some capacity to communicate with each other, they’ll be part of a “networked” combat team whose mission will be dictated and overseen by human commanders. The Collaborative Combat Aircraft, for instance, is expected to serve as a “loyal wingman” for the manned F-35 stealth fighter, while conducting high-risk missions in contested airspace. The Army and Navy have largely followed a similar trajectory in their approach to the development of autonomous weaponry.

The Appeal of Robot “Swarms”

However, some American strategists have championed an alternative approach to the use of autonomous weapons on future battlefields in which they would serve not as junior colleagues in human-led teams but as coequal members of self-directed robot swarms. Such formations would consist of scores or even hundreds of AI-enabled UAVs, USVs, or UGVs — all able to communicate with one another, share data on changing battlefield conditions, and collectively alter their combat tactics as the group-mind deems necessary.

“Emerging robotic technologies will allow tomorrow’s forces to fight as a swarm, with greater mass, coordination, intelligence and speed than today’s networked forces,” predicted Paul Scharre, an early enthusiast of the concept, in a 2014 report for the Center for a New American Security (CNAS). “Networked, cooperative autonomous systems,” he wrote then, “will be capable of true swarming — cooperative behavior among distributed elements that gives rise to a coherent, intelligent whole.”

As Scharre made clear in his prophetic report, any full realization of the swarm concept would require the development of advanced algorithms that would enable autonomous combat systems to communicate with each other and “vote” on preferred modes of attack. This, he noted, would involve creating software capable of mimicking ants, bees, wolves, and other creatures that exhibit “swarm” behavior in nature. As Scharre put it, “Just like wolves in a pack present their enemy with an ever-shifting blur of threats from all directions, uninhabited vehicles that can coordinate maneuver and attack could be significantly more effective than uncoordinated systems operating en masse.”

In 2014, however, the technology needed to make such machine behavior possible was still in its infancy. To address that critical deficiency, the Department of Defense proceeded to fund research in the AI and robotics field, even as it also acquired such technology from private firms like Google and Microsoft. A key figure in that drive was Robert Work, a former colleague of Paul Scharre’s at CNAS and an early enthusiast of swarm warfare. Work served from 2014 to 2017 as deputy secretary of defense, a position that enabled him to steer ever-increasing sums of money to the development of high-tech weaponry, especially unmanned and autonomous systems.

From Mosaic to Replicator

Much of this effort was delegated to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Pentagon’s in-house high-tech research organization. As part of a drive to develop AI for such collaborative swarm operations, DARPA initiated its “Mosaic” program, a series of projects intended to perfect the algorithms and other technologies needed to coordinate the activities of manned and unmanned combat systems in future high-intensity combat with Russia and/or China.

“Applying the great flexibility of the mosaic concept to warfare,” explained Dan Patt, deputy director of DARPA’s Strategic Technology Office, “lower-cost, less complex systems may be linked together in a vast number of ways to create desired, interwoven effects tailored to any scenario. The individual parts of a mosaic are attritable [dispensable], but together are invaluable for how they contribute to the whole.”

This concept of warfare apparently undergirds the new “Replicator” strategy announced by Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks just last summer. “Replicator is meant to help us overcome [China’s] biggest advantage, which is mass. More ships. More missiles. More people,” she told arms industry officials last August. By deploying thousands of autonomous UAVs, USVs, UUVs, and UGVs, she suggested, the U.S. military would be able to outwit, outmaneuver, and overpower China’s military, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). “To stay ahead, we’re going to create a new state of the art… We’ll counter the PLA’s mass with mass of our own, but ours will be harder to plan for, harder to hit, harder to beat.”

To obtain both the hardware and software needed to implement such an ambitious program, the Department of Defense is now seeking proposals from traditional defense contractors like Boeing and Raytheon as well as AI startups like Anduril and Shield AI. While large-scale devices like the Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft and the Navy’s Orca Extra-Large UUV may be included in this drive, the emphasis is on the rapid production of smaller, less complex systems like AeroVironment’s Switchblade attack drone, now used by Ukrainian troops to take out Russian tanks and armored vehicles behind enemy lines.

At the same time, the Pentagon is already calling on tech startups to develop the necessary software to facilitate communication and coordination among such disparate robotic units and their associated manned platforms. To facilitate this, the Air Force asked Congress for $50 million in its fiscal year 2024 budget to underwrite what it ominously enough calls Project VENOM, or “Viper Experimentation and Next-generation Operations Model.” Under VENOM, the Air Force will convert existing fighter aircraft into AI-governed UAVs and use them to test advanced autonomous software in multi-drone operations. The Army and Navy are testing similar systems.

When Swarms Choose Their Own Path

In other words, it’s only a matter of time before the U.S. military (and presumably China’s, Russia’s, and perhaps those of a few other powers) will be able to deploy swarms of autonomous weapons systems equipped with algorithms that allow them to communicate with each other and jointly choose novel, unpredictable combat maneuvers while in motion. Any participating robotic member of such swarms would be given a mission objective (“seek out and destroy all enemy radars and anti-aircraft missile batteries located within these [specified] geographical coordinates”) but not be given precise instructions on how to do so. That would allow them to select their own battle tactics in consultation with one another. If the limited test data we have is anything to go by, this could mean employing highly unconventional tactics never conceived for (and impossible to replicate by) human pilots and commanders.

The propensity for such interconnected AI systems to engage in novel, unplanned outcomes is what computer experts call “emergent behavior.” As ScienceDirect, a digest of scientific journals, explains it, “An emergent behavior can be described as a process whereby larger patterns arise through interactions among smaller or simpler entities that themselves do not exhibit such properties.” In military terms, this means that a swarm of autonomous weapons might jointly elect to adopt combat tactics none of the individual devices were programmed to perform — possibly achieving astounding results on the battlefield, but also conceivably engaging in escalatory acts unintended and unforeseen by their human commanders, including the destruction of critical civilian infrastructure or communications facilities used for nuclear as well as conventional operations.

At this point, of course, it’s almost impossible to predict what an alien group-mind might choose to do if armed with multiple weapons and cut off from human oversight. Supposedly, such systems would be outfitted with failsafe mechanisms requiring that they return to base if communications with their human supervisors were lost, whether due to enemy jamming or for any other reason. Who knows, however, how such thinking machines would function in demanding real-world conditions or if, in fact, the group-mind would prove capable of overriding such directives and striking out on its own.

What then? Might they choose to keep fighting beyond their preprogrammed limits, provoking unintended escalation — even, conceivably, of a nuclear kind? Or would they choose to stop their attacks on enemy forces and instead interfere with the operations of friendly ones, perhaps firing on and devastating them (as Skynet does in the classic science fiction Terminator movie series)? Or might they engage in behaviors that, for better or infinitely worse, are entirely beyond our imagination?

Top U.S. military and diplomatic officials insist that AI can indeed be used without incurring such future risks and that this country will only employ devices that incorporate thoroughly adequate safeguards against any future dangerous misbehavior. That is, in fact, the essential point made in the “Political Declaration on Responsible Military Use of Artificial Intelligence and Autonomy” issued by the State Department in February 2023. Many prominent security and technology officials are, however, all too aware of the potential risks of emergent behavior in future robotic weaponry and continue to issue warnings against the rapid utilization of AI in warfare.

Of particular note is the final report that the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence issued in February 2021. Co-chaired by Robert Work (back at CNAS after his stint at the Pentagon) and Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, the commission recommended the rapid utilization of AI by the U.S. military to ensure victory in any future conflict with China and/or Russia. However, it also voiced concern about the potential dangers of robot-saturated battlefields.

“The unchecked global use of such systems potentially risks unintended conflict escalation and crisis instability,” the report noted. This could occur for a number of reasons, including “because of challenging and untested complexities of interaction between AI-enabled and autonomous weapon systems [that is, emergent behaviors] on the battlefield.” Given that danger, it concluded, “countries must take actions which focus on reducing risks associated with AI-enabled and autonomous weapon systems.”

When the leading advocates of autonomous weaponry tell us to be concerned about the unintended dangers posed by their use in battle, the rest of us should be worried indeed. Even if we lack the mathematical skills to understand emergent behavior in AI, it should be obvious that humanity could face a significant risk to its existence, should killing machines acquire the ability to think on their own. Perhaps they would surprise everyone and decide to take on the role of international peacekeepers, but given that they’re being designed to fight and kill, it’s far more probable that they might simply choose to carry out those instructions in an independent and extreme fashion.

If so, there could be no one around to put an R.I.P. on humanity’s gravestone.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands (the final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, and Ann Jones’s They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America’s Wars: The Untold Story.

Michael T. Klare, a TomDispatch regular, is the five-college professor emeritus of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and a senior visiting fellow at the Arms Control Association. He is the author of 15 books, the latest of which is All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon’s Perspective on Climate Change.

Putin Explains Why Russia Doesn’t Pose a Threat to Europe

Tucker Carlson began his interview of President Vladimir Putin with the words, “On February 24, 2022, you addressed your country in your nationwide address when the conflict in Ukraine started….” Clearly the war in Ukraine was the motivation and central topic for the interview. But precisely what Mr. Putin had to say about the Ukraine war and its bearing on the future has been lost amidst frantic cries that Carlson is a “traitor” or “useful idiot” for so much as speaking with the Russian President.

Putin Declares Russia Not a Threat to the EU

The interview comes at a time when near apocalyptic warnings are being issued by the foreign policy establishment. Should Putin prevail in Ukraine, we are warned, he will next occupy nearby nations like Poland and the Baltics. Then, the story goes, he will march across the European continent in a frenzy of conquest, requiring the US to send US troops to fight in Europe. The message is, “Be very afraid – and pony up the tax money for mission Ukraine.”

Is this all too familiar call to fund a war in a far-away place with no clear importance for the US reasonable? Tucker raised this crucial question in a simple and pointed way, and Putin’s reply was unambiguous and unequivocal. Here is the relevant exchange from the transcript (Italics jw):

“Vladimir Putin: …… They (NATO) are trying to fuel the Russian threat.

“Tucker Carlson: The threat I think you were referring to is Russian invasion of Poland, Latvia – expansionist behaviour. Can you imagine a scenario where you send Russian troops to Poland?

“Vladimir Putin: Only in one case: if Poland attacks Russia. Why? Because we have no interest in Poland, Latvia or anywhere else. Why would we do that? We simply don’t have any interest. It’s just threat mongering.

“Tucker Carlson: Well, the argument, I know you know this, is that, well, he invaded Ukraine – he has territorial aims across the continent. And you are saying unequivocally, you don’t?

“Vladimir Putin: It is absolutely out of the question. You just don’t have to be any kind of analyst, it goes against common sense to get involved in some kind of global war. And a global war will bring all of humanity to the brink of destruction. It’s obvious.”

Putin Cites Bismarck’s Opinion on “Potentials” of a Nation

Are we to believe what Putin says? There are many reasons why we should. But perhaps the most powerful of them comes in another segment of the interview which at first glance is unrelated to Ukraine. In that segment Putin cites Bismarck in reply to an assertion of Carlson’s about China. This reply provides us a look into how Putin thinks about international relations. Here it is:

“Tucker Carlson: ….And many in America thought that relations between Russia and the United States would be fine after the collapse of the Soviet Union, at the core. But the opposite happened. But you have never explained why you think that happened, except to say that the West fears a strong Russia. But we have a strong China that the West doesn’t seem to be very afraid of. What about Russia, what do you think convinced the policymakers to take it down?

“Vladimir Putin: The West is afraid of a strong China more than it fears a strong Russia because Russia has 150 million people, and China has a 1.5 billion population, and its economy is growing by leaps and bounds – over five percent a year, it used to be even more. But that’s enough for China. As Bismark once put it, potentials are most important. China’s potential is enormous – it is the biggest economy in the world today in terms of purchasing power parity and the size of the economy. It has already overtaken the United States, quite a long time ago, and it is growing at a fast clip.” (In 2023 the US economy grew at a rate of 2.5%; China’s grew at 5.2% of a larger economy. JW)

Putin cites Bismarck approvingly for identifying the “potentials” of nations as the “most important” factor. And Putin uses two parameters to assess “potential”: the size of the economy and the size of the population. These are the two pillars on which a country’s military might rests.

What are the potentials of the EU or NATO versus Russia

Let’s apply this thinking to the outcome of a conflict between Russia and the other European nations, using the same criteria Putin does. It is quite simple. Russia has a population of ~150 million as Putin says; that of the EU+UK is over 500 million. The PPP-GDP of Russia is ~$5 trillion; that of the EU+ UK is ~$30 trillion. These numbers put Russia in a most unenviable position.

A comparison with the whole of NATO leaves Russia in an even worse position. The population of NATO is 960 million; over six times larger than Russia. NATO’s PPP-GDP is a bit over $50 trillion, 10 times that of Russia. Moreover, NATO has a total of 3.4 million military personnel; Russia has 1.15 million with a plan to expand to 1.5 million by 2026.

Based on these numbers Russia would be insane to get into a war with the EU nations or with NATO. And whatever one may think of Putin, he is not insane. Watch the interview and you will see a very intelligent man, quite measured in his responses. (Unless you are a history buff, you might want to skip Putin’s history lesson at the beginning and begin at the 25 minute mark.)

These numbers defining the military “potential” not only show that Russia is no threat to the rest of Europe. Quite the contrary. The EU countries alone or in concert with the US as NATO are grave threats to Russia. And the record shows that the threat is real. The US has pushed NATO eastward; the fake Russian “threat” has been hyped endlessly in the Western press and by most Western politicians. From the Balkans to Afghanistan to Libya and beyond, NATO has shown that, far from being a defensive organization, it is an aggressor. And now as in the days of the old colonialism, NATO also has cast its eye on East Asia and an “Indo-Pacific NATO.”

Far from being a “threat,” Russia has every reason to feel threatened. Backed into a corner with NATO on its doorstep, it is no surprise that Russia acted to prevent Ukraine from becoming a platform for invasion from the West as it was twice in the 20th Century and as it could be again as a member of NATO.

Author: John V. Walsh

John V. Walsh writes about issues of war, peace, empire, and health care for Antiwar.com, Consortium News, DissidentVoice.org, The Unz Review, and other outlets. Now living in the East Bay, he was until recently Professor of Physiology and Cellular Neuroscience at a Massachusetts Medical School. John V. Walsh can be reached at john.endwar@gmail.com View all posts by John V. Walsh

The War on Gaza: Public Relations vs. Reality

For its victims, war is . . . yes, hell. For the rest of us – the onlooking and supportive patriots – war is an abstraction embedded in ignorance, a.k.a., public relations, served up for public consumption.

At least that’s the way it’s supposed to be. The reality of war should never directly confront the official PR of those waging it. If it does, God help the war industry!

But that’s what’s happening now, as public support for U.S. complicity in Israel’s devastation of Gaza diminishes, indeed, starts turning to outrage. Official spokesmen for the Biden administration, such as John Kirby, strategic communications coordinator for the National Security Council, are forced to start mixing apologetic language in with their unwavering support for the bombing and murder of civilians… excuse me, Israel’s right to defend itself.

“Civilian deaths are happening, and happening at a rate that obviously we’re not comfortable with,” Kirby said in a New Yorker interview. “But,” he quickly added, “it doesn’t mean that they are intentionally trying to wipe the people of Gaza off the map the same way that Hamas wants to wipe the Israeli people off the map.”

Wow, Israel’s actions and official declarations of intent to obliterate Palestine are making the U.S. government uncomfortable. (But Hamas is still the only bad guy.) Oh, if only fragments of actual truth about the war could penetrate such an interview. For instance:

“And it was mostly – I mean, the majority of the patients that I treated were children, anywhere from the age of 2 to 17. I mean, I saw horrific eye and facial injuries that I’ve never seen before, eyes shattered in two 6-year-old children with shrapnel that I had to take out, eyes with shrapnel stuck inside, facial injuries. I saw orthopedic injuries where – you know, limbs just cut off and dangling. I saw abdominal injuries that were just horrific. And it was just mass chaos. There were children on the floor, unattended to, with head trauma, people suturing patients without anesthesia on the ground. It was just mass chaos and really horrific, horrific scenes.”

The speaker is Dr. Yasser Khan, a Canadian ophthalmologist recently back from a humanitarian mission at the European Hospital in Khan Younis, in southern Gaza, near Rafah. He was interviewed by Democracy Now! I wish John Kirby could have been there. The hospital, he said, was

“about 300, 400 percent over capacity. There was patients and bodies lying all over the hospital floor, inside and outside. They had orthopedic devices coming from their legs or their arms. They were getting infected, they were in pain, because they were on the floor, so the conditions weren’t very sterile. And if they survived amputation the first time, the infection would get them..”

His words go on and on. OK, you (I mean Kirby) might say, this is war. People get hurt. But Israel has to “defend itself.”

This is self-defense?

“They have killed over 300 or 400 healthcare workers, doctors, nurses, paramedics. Ambulances have been bombed. This has all been a systematic sort of – you know, by destroying the healthcare system, you’re contributing to the genocide.”

Khan also notes:

“They’ve attacked the sewage system, the water system, so the sewage mixes with the drinking water. And you get diarrheal diseases, bacterial diseases. You know, cholera, typhoid is not far away. Hepatitis A is epidemic there now. They’re living in cramped spaces.”

And it gets even more insane:

“What’s going on is now there’s 10,000 to 15,000 bodies that are decomposing. So, it’s raining season right now in Gaza. So all the rainwater mixes with the decomposing bodies, and that bacteria mixes with the drinking water supply, and you get further disease.”

Israel has the right to defend itself. But come on, guys, be a little bit more careful. Kill fewer children. Try not to poison the water. You might say this is public relations with a limp. Meanwhile, the International Court of Justice has ordered Israel to “refrain” from taking action that could be considered genocidal and, good God, “take measures to improve the humanitarian situation for Palestinian civilians in the enclave,” as Reuters reports.

But it’s war itself – regardless of “intent” – that is causing this hell. The act of war, the weapons of war, the political-economic structure of the globe that is based on endless war and domination, seems never to face serious condemnation, at least not in any official sense. But if we feed war, we feed hell.

Perhaps there’s one bit of recent news about a challenge to the global war industry, and its public relations perpetrators, that isn’t simply a scream from the political margins or cries from the victims. It’s the Transatlantic Civil Servants’ Statement on Gaza, a statement, released on Feb. 2, signed by more than 800 civil servants from the United States, the European Union and about a dozen European countries, declaring: “It Is Our Duty To Speak Out When Our Governments’ Policies Are Wrong.”

The statement declares the Gaza pummeling “one of the worst human catastrophes of this century.” And it calls on its countries to halt all military support to Israel and use their leverage “to secure a lasting ceasefire and full humanitarian access in Gaza and a safe release of all hostages” and “develop a strategy for lasting peace.”

A strategy for lasting peace? That’s another way of calling for an end to war. It’s about time.

Robert Koehler (koehlercw@gmail.com), syndicated by PeaceVoice, is a Chicago award-winning journalist and editor. He is the author of Courage Grows Strong at the Wound, and his newly released album of recorded poetry and art work, Soul Fragments.

INDIA
Farmers in Over 400 Districts Observe 'Quit WTO Day' Against Inclusion of Agri Sector in WTO Pact

Newsclick Report | 27 Feb 2024

The SKM called for 'Quit WTO Day' on Monday, February 26, in the backdrop of the 13th WTO Ministerial in Abu Dhabi.

Farmers, under the banner of the Samyukta Kisan Morcha (SKM), protested on the streets of Haryana and Punjab against the inclusion of the agriculture sector in the World Trade Organisation (WTO) agreement.

The SKM had called for 'Quit WTO Day' on Monday, February 26, demanding the removal of the agriculture sector from the WTO agreement. Farmers observed the protest by parking their tractors on highways in Haryana and Punjab.

The images of tractor rallies with farmers burning the effigies of Union Home Minister Amit Shah, Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar and State Home Minister Anil Vij started pouring in from the morning. The farmers tied the flags of their organisations on their vehicle bonnets and raised slogans like ‘Give MSP now, Boycott WTO, Inquilab Zindabad.’

Apart from SKM, SKM (non-political) and Kisan Mazdoor Morcha (KMM) also observed the protests by burning effigies of WTO at Khanauri and Shambhu borders. These organisations are leading the 'Dilli Chalo' march.

The 'Quit WTO Day' protest came "against the backdrop of the 13th Ministerial Conference of WTO which started on Monday in Abu Dhabi (UAE) and will continue till February 29."

"We demand that agriculture should be taken out of the WTO agreement. It is high time the government understands the concerns of farmers," said Sukhmandar Singh, president of BKU (Rajewal).

Darshan Pal, member of the national coordination committee of SKM, said, "Farmers have realised the threats to the agriculture sector due to the agreements of India with WTO. It is high time the consumers also understand them."

Balbir Thakan, president, All India Kisan Sabha Bhiwani, said anger of farmers could be gauged from the fact that more than 2600 farmers took 1,400 tractors on 10 major state and national highways in the district alone.

Talking to NewsClick over the phone, he said, “Farmers are also understanding that if mustard is being dumped in the Indian market, our prices will crash. We as organisation leaders make common farmers aware about these developments. However, farmers are very much enraged about treatment meted out to common farmers at the borders. We are also gearing up for our huge national meeting of farmers in Ramlila Maidan on March 14.”

According to an Indian Express report, farmers parked their tractors at several locations in the Hoshiarpur district of Punjab, including the Jalandhar-Jammu National Highway. The protesters in Punjab also called for legal guarantees on minimum support price (MSP), pensions for farmers, implementation of Swaminathan Commission recommendations and debt waivers.

Similar protests where farmers parked their tractors on national highways from 12 noon to 3 pm were observed in Haryana's Hisar and Ajnala, Jandiala Guru, Beas and Rayya regions of Punjab.

Meanwhile, there has been no movement in the deadlock between the 'Dilli Chalo' farmer unions and the Punjab government even five days after the death of a young farmer from Punjab.

Jagjit Singh Dallewal, coordinator of SKM (non-political), urged the Punjab Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann to speak to the farmers and register an FIR against the Haryana police officers who allegedly opened fire at the protest site.

"This dharna will continue till our demands are met. Even after the model code of conduct comes into force owing to the upcoming parliamentary elections, this protest will continue. The government may not take any action on the pretext of the election model code of conduct, but we have nothing to do with the elections," said Sarwan Singh Pandher, KMM Coordinator.

Farmers organisations have been maintaining that India’s food security and price support programmes are subjects of repeated disputes at WTO. The major agricultural exporting countries, has proposed a 50% cut in the global level of WTO members’ entitlements to support agriculture by the end of 2034.

In a press statement SKM said,”The issue of public stock-holding is most critical for India especially in view of the ongoing struggles of farmers and workers for the MSP to be fixed at C2+50% level and for a statutory guarantee of the MSP to all farmers. In fact in India, 90% of the farmers are out of the purview of the present system of MSP based on A2+Fl+50% and facing acute agrarian crisis and indebtedness.”

It added: “The resultant intensifying unemployment, poverty and rural to urban distress migration have created precarious situations in the countryside during the least ten years of Modi rule. The Government of India must firmly defend the rights of the country to protect its farmers and ensure national food security. No international institutions or agreements can be allowed to come in the way of these [guarantees].”

The SKM maintained that the Indian government was given a lease in 2014, as an exception for five years, allowing it not to implement conversion of PDS (public distribution system) into cash transfer. “India's food stocking program for PDS is exempted from challenge by WTO members under the temporary peace clause. That is likely to be upturned and if so, India needs to Quit WTO to prevent WTO regulations from interfering in its food security programs and agriculture production,” it said.

Meanwhile, the joint platform of central trade unions too extended its solidarity to the rally and said, “It is most deplorable that these forces violated federal structure and respect to sovereign rights of state governments and used these oppressive measures in the territory of Punjab, not only with water cannons and plastic pellets but metal pellets were also used. Use of drones on the food producer Annadata seeking for their genuine demands was most barbaric. Not only that, the forces went inside Punjab boundary and damaged more than 50 tractors and vehicles of farmers, they continued picking up people at random.”

“We demand judicial enquiry to investigate the killing of the young farmer, to fix responsibility and registration of a case under Sec. 302 of IPC for stringent punishment to the culprit and compensate the farmers for the huge damage done to their tractors and vehicles. The CTUs extend their unequivocal solidarity to the programme called by the SKM for a Mahapanchayat on March 14 at Ramlila ground, Delhi on their demands,” the statement read.

INDIA

Report: 668 Incidents of Hate Speech in 2023; BJP Major Player

Sabrang India | 27 Feb 2024

A report by Washington D.C. based research group, Information Hate Lab (IHL), has released a new report shedding light on hate speech, disinformation, and conspiracy theories that target religious minorities in India.

The report has revealed harrowing figures of hate speech on the rise in India. The data by the group features BJP, India’s ruling party, as a significant player in the functioning of hate speeches.

The report stated that 498 out of 668 instances of hate speech took place in areas which had a BJP-led government. About 255 of the total number of incidents took place in the 1st half, while 413 took place in the second 2nd half when elections for several states were going to happen. What is further astonishing is that 20% of the instances recorded of hate mentioned the ongoing Gaza siege.

About 6 out of the top 8 states with the highest number of hate speech events were under BJP rule throughout the year. The remaining 2 states, which underwent legislative elections in 2023, were also governed by the BJP for a substantial part of the year prior to elections.

Interestingly, in October 2023, the report notes, there was a peak in hate speech events across 18 states and 3 union territories with 91 incidents. This peak had happened during ‘election season’ with state assembly elections taking place in states like Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan, Telangana, Madhya Pradesh, and Mizoram, which reveals that hate speech events are being used to mobilise crowds for electoral gains.

Maharashtra topped the pan-India list with 118 reported anti-Muslim hate speech event taking place in 2023. After Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh comes as a close second with 104 incidents, and Madhya Pradesh in central India with 65 instances.

These states together contributed to 43% of the total hate speech events documented in 2023. The report further details that Haryana and Uttarakhand, both of which have seen multiple kinds of communal unrest this year in 2023, have also experienced consistent hate speech events, with Haryana contributing to 7.2 % of the total number of incidents, and Uttarakhand coming close at 6 %. The report also notes that instances of hate speech also coincide with communal unrest or violence in the place it occurred. An example of this could be Uttarakhand which has witnessed multiple instances of unrest against Muslims, from unsubstantiated accusations of ‘love-jihad’ against Muslims, to the cases of demolition of Muslims properties and religious places.

The report further details that of the hate speech incidents documented, approximately 32%, which comes down to 216 events, were organised by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Bajrang Dal. As a whole, 46 % of the hate speech events, it details, were organised by groups that are ‘directly associated’ with the RSS and its affiliates, such as the VHP, BJP, the Sakal Hindu Samaj, and the Hindu Jagran Vedike which were behind 307 such events, coming down to about 46% all hate speech incidents in the year. The report furthermore details that there is a concerning rise in newer groups that chime in to these hate speech such as groups that are dedicated to cow vigilantism, such as the Gau Raksha Dal which reportedly held around 13 of such events, mostly concentrated in Haryana. Some of the slogans they used include this, “Jab Mulle kate jayenge, Ram Ram Chilayenge,” with the word ‘Mulle’ being used as a slur.

The research group has stated that the standards used by it are those deployed by the United Nations in defining hate speech which includes discriminatory speech, or language that is against a group or individual that is based on religion, ethnicity, nationality, race or gender.

The IHL’s website was reportedly rendered inaccessible by viewers in India in January 2024.

Courtesy: sabrang India

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The Post-Gazette Has Stonewalled a Strike for 16 Months

When Pittsburgh Post-Gazette staff walked off the job over a year ago, they had been working without a contract since 2017 and hadn’t gotten an across-the-board raise in 16 years. Sixteen months later, they’re still on strike.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette workers march on September 4, 2023.

(Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh / X)

BY FINLEY WILLIAMS

JACOBIN

02.26.2024

Bob Batz Jr thought it would end quickly.

“It’s kind of cute now, that we thought getting into last December [2022] and January was a long time,” Batz said. “Little did we know. [We said] ‘Oh, it’s Christmas and we’re still on strike. We can’t believe it.’”

Batz is one of thirty-one Newspaper Guild workers striking the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, owned by the family company Block Communications, Inc.

Journalists at the Post-Gazette have been on strike since October 2022 — making this strike the longest media strike of the digital age — along with four other units: mailers, advertising workers, and Teamster truck drivers and pressmen.
Chipping Away at a Block

The Post-Gazette is the largest newspaper serving that metropolitan area and the surrounding Pennsylvania counties.

Journalists have tried a litany of tactics to sway the Block family, which owns the Post-Gazette as a holding of Block Communications, Inc.

They’ve picketed the wedding of the publisher, John Block. They’ve placed pro-union yard signs in the neighborhood — and even the yard — of the executive editor. They’ve asked C-SPAN to remove owner Allan Block from its board.

“It’s like chipping away at a rock and you don’t know what chip is going to actually break it in two until you hit that one,” Batz said of the tactics.

But the Post-Gazette shows no willingness to negotiate.

Post-Gazette Keeps Printing

Forty-five journalists joined the picket line at the beginning of the strike, while thirty-eight continued to work. According to Ed Blazina, vice president of the union and a transportation writer, the paper hired about thirty replacement journalists after the strike began. Three of the initial strikers crossed the picket line and returned to work; a handful of others have sought employment elsewhere.

So the Post-Gazette is still able to produce its paper, printed twice weekly and read primarily online.

Still, “all these little actions, tiny behind the scenes, public and bigger, publishing the strike paper — we just try to do everything we can,” Batz said. “We don’t look like we’re very effective, in terms of still being on strike, but it’s not really like that. We’re still in the game.”
Solidarity From Struggle

The strike has brought difficult times. Talented young reporters left to pursue employment elsewhere. Workers have suffered reduced health care and wage losses. And they’ve sat through endless bargaining sessions where management refuses to move.

But in these long months, workers have also forged a sense of solidarity and community. Blazina got to know his coworkers on the strike line. He said that he would “easily stand in front of a bus for” coworkers he’s had the pleasure of meeting over the course of the strike.

Workers have been surviving on $400 a week in strike pay from the international union, as well as a strike relief fund fed by donations from individuals and other unions. They’ve also helped each other search for freelance jobs.

One colleague, who turned out to be a dedicated Ohio State fan (“I’ll forgive him for that,” Blazina said) provided tailgating equipment for a barbecue to raise strikers’ morale. The young daughter of another striker drew a picture featured in their strike paper, the Pittsburgh Union Progress, to celebrate the New Year.

According to Batz, there has also been solidarity from beyond the newsroom. The mayor of Pittsburgh, along with two Pennsylvania congressmembers, refuse to talk to reporters from the Post-Gazette.

In Sympathy

While the production units struck first on October 6, primarily over health care coverage — which they lost when the Post-Gazette refused to pay an additional per employee/per week fee to maintain existing coverage — the journalists had a longer list of grievances.

They had been operating without a contract since 2017 and had not received an across-the-board raise in sixteen years. And in June 2020, the Post-Gazette had declared an impasse in contract negotiations — later found illegal by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) — and imposed terms on the workers that cut their vacation time and wages, reduced their health insurance coverage, and charged them more for it. Newsroom workers joined the strike on October 18, twelve days after the production units walked off.

The journalists’ strike was partly in sympathy with the other units. NewsGuild president Jon Schleuss told Pittsburgh NPR station WESA that that international union’s executive board had ordered the Pittsburgh guild to join its sibling unions on the picket line, regardless of whether workers voted for or against the strike. Indeed, the journalists favored the strike by a slim margin of two votes.

The Post-Gazette has created conditions that have made it quite difficult for the journalists to secure a deal. Before this bargaining began in 2017, journalists and production units operated a Unity Council and bargained jointly on economic issues.

“In 2017, the company said, ‘We’re not dealing with you collectively,’” separating bargaining by the units, said Zack Tanner, an interactive designer at the Post-Gazette who has been the Pittsburgh Newspaper Guild president since 2022. “That is just a full-on union busting tactic to prolong things and make things harder for the workers to get to an agreement.”

The Post-Gazette has also refused to accept even the journalists’ most flexible concessions on jurisdiction, job security, and health care.

“They didn’t have any counter to [the proposal we offered] other than the same proposal that they had given us back in June 2020,” Tanner said. “So if we want to talk about why things have stalled, that’s why. We and the other groups have made major concessions in those areas and the company has not bought that.”

Post-Gazette executive editor Stan Wischnowski has also declined to speak to union representatives, and pressed trespassing charges against Blazina for placing a sign in his yard. (Blazina was found not guilty.)

Batz said the 2022 NLRB ruling, which mandated that the Post-Gazette bargain in good faith, offered a glimmer of hope. The company has appealed it.

“The movie ending is that someone gets a call from NLRB and it’s going to go to a court, and a judge is going to decide this,” Batz said, “but we’re not giving up until then.”

Working With Passion

Shortly after the strike began, journalists founded an independent paper: the Pittsburgh Union Progress. Without pay, they publish news related to the strike and the greater Pittsburgh area, operating from a downtown office provided free of charge by the Steelworkers union.

Writing for the paper has been a welcome solace.

“It’s the one bit of normalcy to the day,” Blazina said. “It helps me forget about the other crap that’s going on. And what we need right now as much as anything, is some normalcy.”

The paper has also worked as a mobilization tool, as the reporters observed and reported on bargaining sessions.

“The brilliant part about that is that anyone from our union could show up for the bargaining sessions, and they couldn’t be kicked out — and that included a reporter for the strike paper,” Batz said. “They’re meant not to be reported on. We reported on every single one because we figured that was one of our missions. . . . Who better to tell our story than us, and who else was going to tell it?”

Republished from Labor Notes.

Finley Williams is a student at Cornell University and a Labor Notes writing fellow.

Why Are So Many Democrats Ready to Nuke Canada?

New York governor Kathy Hochul recently invoked US annihilation of Canada as an analogy for Israel’s brutal war on Gaza. Her comments may have been outlandish, but they exemplify Democratic Party leaders’ use of absurd justifications for slaughter.

New York governor Kathy Hochul speaks at the state governor’s office, January 2, 2024. (Lev Radin / Pacific Press / LightRocket via Getty Images)

BYTAYLOR C. NOAKES
02.22.2024

JACOBIN

New York’s Democratic governor Kathy Hochul recently invoked the War of 1812 to rationalize her party’s steadfast support of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s slaughter of Palestinians.

As first reported on social media by Jacob N. Kornbluh of the Forward, Governor Hochul stated to an audience of the United Jewish Appeal-Federation of New York that “If Canada someday ever attacked Buffalo, I’m sorry my friends, there would be no Canada the next day.” The statement was made on Thursday, February 15, and went viral the following day.

Hochul, who hails from Buffalo, New York, added that she “loved Canada, but we did have the War of 1812 and they did burn Buffalo.” She further elaborated, “But think about that. That’s a natural reaction. You have a right to defend yourself and to make sure it never happens again.”

Shortly after Kornbluh’s post, Hochul apologized, expressing regret that she used “an inappropriate analogy that I now realize could be hurtful to members of our community,” though she did not specify which community she was referring to. She also said she regretted her “poor choice of words,” but did not directly apologize to the Palestinian community of New York State, nor to anyone in Canada, for suggesting that the complete annihilation of a people is a “natural reaction” to a terrorist attack.

Echoes of Biden’s Past in Hochul’s Words

Hochul’s poorly chosen words are remarkably similar to those made over forty years ago by then senator Joe Biden, as reported by Ben Burgis in Jacobin. During a 1982 meeting with then Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin in Washington, DC, Biden reportedly said, “If attacks were launched from Canada into the United States, everyone here would have said, ‘Attack all the cities of Canada, and we don’t care if all the civilians get killed.’”

This episode indicates a concerning pattern among Democratic Party leaders advocating for disproportionate retaliation and a lack of concern for civilian casualties, as well as a surprisingly cavalier attitude toward potential collateral damage in dear old Canada, staunch ally of the United States. It also speaks to an unfortunate consistency among Israeli leaders to disregard their own intelligence in pursuit of genocidal campaigns against Palestinians.

At the time of Begin’s meeting with Biden in 1982, Israel had invaded and occupied southern Lebanon, ostensibly in retribution for an assassination attempt against an Israeli ambassador. Israeli intelligence knew the attempted assassination was planned by the Abu Nidal Organization, and not Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Although Arafat and Nidal himself had once been close associates, by 1982 the two men had been bitter enemies for nearly a decade.

Vicious Cycles

As recounted by Israeli journalists Ze’ev Schiff and Ehud Ya’ari in Israel’s Lebanon War, Begin dismissed a counterterrorism adviser’s attempts to relay military intelligence that the PLO was not responsible for the assassination attempt. With a substantial PLO presence in southern Lebanon, Begin used the assassination attempt to justify Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, resulting in the expulsion of the PLO leadership to Libya.

Begin hoped Israel’s support and installation of a far-right, anti-communist, Maronite Christian government would secure “forty years of peace” in Lebanon. However, the 1982 war had the effect of prolonging the Lebanese Civil War, and created a power vacuum after the dispersal of the PLO that permitted the growth of radicalized and far more militant groups, such as Hezbollah.

In addition, Lebanese Christian death squads, with the full support of the Israeli military, perpetrated the Sabra and Shatila Massacre, killing Palestinian refugees (many of whom were victims of the Nakba) and Shia Muslim Lebanese civilians. The consequences of the calamitous and unnecessary 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon are still being felt to this day.

There’s an additional layer of unintended irony to Hochul’s statement as well, one that further underlines the governor’s tenuous grasp on the historical record. In her undiplomatic comparison, Canada is unmistakably Hamas, and the United States is a supposedly innocent Israel.

While it is concerning that the governor of New York evidently equates the people of Gaza with a terrorist organization — and is happy to entertain fanciful war-game musings on Canadian terrorism — it’s worth considering that it was in fact the United States that instigated the War of 1812 by declaring war on Great Britain.

When Aggression Masquerades as Strategy

Far from being merely poorly worded, Hochul’s analogy was historically illiterate. If she had a better grasp on her hometown’s history, she would know just how misguided and ill-considered her advocacy of retribution truly is. The Battle of Buffalo to which she referred was actually a response to an earlier American attack on the Canadian community of Newark (today’s Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario). This attack by American aggressors allowed innocent residents precious little time to escape with their lives. Had it occurred today, it wouldn’t look that different from Israel’s scorched-earth campaign in Gaza: looting abounded, then as now.

The key takeaway from the War of 1812, particularly in the context of current conflicts in the Middle East, should be that the United States largely abandoned its ambitions to invade and occupy Canada by the mid-twentieth century, and that the two nations have since resolved their differences diplomatically.

Sworn enemies can become the best of friends if the use of force is taken off the table. The reluctance of prominent Democratic Party figures to embrace this lesson suggests a troubling aspect of American foreign policy. However much Hochul wishes to walk back her poorly worded statements, there is an undeniable pattern — both in rhetoric as much as action — of total annihilation as an acceptable policy either for the United States or for some of its allies. That this is the case is clear enough from American conduct post-9/11, in which the United States too disregarded the expert opinion of its own intelligence community in blind pursuit of revenge.

That this bellicosity is so deeply engrained in the upper echelons of the Democratic Party — and has been for decades — is not what’s surprising here. Rather, it is that there are still arguments made for supporting the Democrats based on their foreign-policy positions

CONTRIBUTORS
Taylor C. Noakes is an independent journalist and public historian.

Canadian Bacon Movie CLIP - Anti-Canada Propaganda (1995) HD

Long Waves Are Key to the Development of Capitalism

Belgian Marxist Ernest Mandel explained long waves as a key factor in capitalism's development. Mandel’s theory is one of the most sophisticated attempts to show why capitalism goes through extended periods of expansion and stagnation.

Ernest Mandel participates in debate on March 29, 1982. (Wikimedia Commons)

BYMANUEL KELLNER

02.25.2024

From Carlota Perez to Paul Mason and Cédric Durand, many analysts of contemporary capitalism have embraced the concept of long waves that the Russian economist Nikolai Kondratiev first put forward. But if capitalism develops through long waves, with upswings and downswings in its trajectory, what is the logic underpinning such waves?

The Belgian Marxist Ernest Mandel offered one of the most detailed explanations in his book Long Waves of Capitalist Development, based on a series of lectures given by the author at the University of Cambridge in 1978. For Mandel, the existence of these “long waves” is an empirically established fact. Its Marxist explanation is essentially based on the long-term fluctuations of the profit rate, which, in turn, ultimately determine the pace of capital accumulation (i.e., economic growth and expansion in the world market).

Mandel cites two crucial indicators that empirically confirm the existence of “long waves,” namely industrial production and the growth of exports as a whole. The data indicates the following time periods with an ascending or a stagnating-depressive tendency: 1826–47 (stagnating-depressive); 1848–73 (expansive); 1874–93 (stagnating-depressive); 1894–1913 (expansive); 1914–39 (stagnating-depressive); 1940–67 (expansive); and from 1968 on, again a long wave with a stagnating-depressive tendency.

Explaining Long Waves

From a Marxist point of view, long-term industrial growth under capitalism is unthinkable under conditions of a falling rate of profit. Insofar as, again from a Marxist perspective, the long-term tendency of the rate of profit to decline is claimed to hold true for the overall development of capitalism, there obviously arises the problem of explaining prolonged phases of growth. From this emerges the need not only to examine the fluctuations of the rate of profit in the context of the business cycle and its secular tendency, but also to introduce a third time frame, namely “long waves.”In general, expansive long waves occur when the factors that counteract the fall in the rate of profit have a strong and synchronous effect.

The sudden rise in the average rate of profit over a prolonged period could be explained with reference to a number of factors. Mandel cites a sudden rise in the rate of surplus value as the first. A sudden slowdown in the growth of the organic composition of capital, a sudden increase in the rate of capital turnover, or a combination of these factors are also possible. Mandel cites other potential causes, such as a sharp increase in the surplus value mass and a strong flow of capital to countries with a significantly lower organic composition of capital than in metropolitan areas.

In general, expansive long waves occur when the factors that counteract the fall in the rate of profit have a strong and synchronous effect. However, we must also try to explain why the counteracting tendencies do not prevail within the individual long wave. According to Mandel, the fluctuations of the “reserve army,” i.e., the relative weight of unemployment, play an important role there.

One of Mandel’s main theses is that in contrast to the normal capitalist business cycles, where transitions to depression and to recovery both correspond to internal laws of the capitalist economy, the transition to a long wave with an expansive basic tendency must be explained by noneconomic (“exogenous”) factors. This is precisely why Mandel, unlike Nikolai Kondratiev, does not speak of “long cycles,” but of “long waves.”

In his opinion, the “long wave” with a depressive basic tendency does not contain in itself, in purely economic terms, the conditions for changing over to a “long wave” with an expansive basic tendency. Conversely, a “long wave” with an expansive basic tendency contains in itself the conditions for turning over to a “long wave” with a stagnating-depressive tendency.

Exogenous Factors

To explain the sudden and permanent increases in the average rate of profit after 1848, 1893, and 1940 (or 1948 in Europe), Mandel identifies specific noneconomic factors for each of these periods. The year 1848 was characterized by revolutions, conquests, and the discovery of the Californian gold fields. These three factors brought about a qualitative expansion of the capitalist world market.A ‘long wave’ with an expansive basic tendency contains in itself the conditions for turning over to a ‘long wave’ with a stagnating-depressive tendency.

Industrialization and the technological revolution associated with it were massively advanced. This process was marked above all by the transition from steam engine to steam motor, and by the transition from the artisanal to the industrial production of fixed capital. This allowed for a spectacular increase in labor productivity and, due to the increase in relative surplus value, also in the rate of surplus value.

In addition, the use of steamships, telegraphs, and railways brought about a revolution in transport and telecommunications technology, accelerating the speed of capital turnover. This was augmented by the spread of joint-stock companies and the emergence of large department stores, which boosted the realization of surplus value. According to Mandel, all this combined led to a permanent growth in the rate of profit.

The analogous explanatory features for the onset of an expansive long wave after 1893 coincide with the main features of incipient “imperialism” in Vladimir Lenin’s sense of the term: the division of the world between the developed capitalist industrial countries, an increase in capital exports to the poor, backward, and dependent countries, and a fall in relative commodity prices. The growth rate of the organic composition of capital declined, and the technological revolution brought about by general electrification in the rich industrialized countries in turn enabled increased production of relative surplus value.

For the expansive long wave after 1940 (in the United States) and 1948 (in general), Mandel cites “historical defeats of the international working class” as the main explanatory factor. Fascism and Nazism were responsible for the destruction of the labor movement in the affected countries. World War II, the subsequent Cold War, and the McCarthy era in the United States were further huge setbacks for the organized labor movement and its ability to effectively defend the interests of wage earners.

All these factors together allowed for sensational increases in the surplus value rate, in some cases up to 300 per cent. Once again, the growth of the organic composition of capital slowed down, this time due to cheaper access to Middle Eastern oil, a further drop in raw material prices, and a price drop for elements of fixed capital.

A renewed revolution in telecommunications and lending, the emergence of a real international money market, and the proliferation of multinational corporations were all factors in the new situation. For Mandel, the expansion of arms production with state-guaranteed profits plays a very important but not decisive role in this context.

Technological Revolutions

Mandel argues that, while “exogenous factors” ought to be viewed as “triggers” in the respective instances, they unleashed a dynamic process that was self-perpetuating for decades, which in turn can be explained with the aid of the traditional Marxist categories of the critique of capitalist economy. What role do the technological revolutions play in Mandel’s explanatory model if he does not believe that they can trigger periods with an expansive basic tendency?

In the period of long waves with a stagnant-depressive basic tendency, a “reserve” of technological innovations develops, but they are not introduced into the production process on a massive scale. The same is true for money reserves. Only a change in the economic climate and accordingly higher profit expectations prompt massive investment with the purpose of using these innovations in production.

During an expansive wave, the average labor productivity in the technologically more advanced companies determines value. Companies that use more advanced technology for production realize extra profits. This is where value is determined by the new industrial sectors that drive the technological revolution and have the highest production costs. Hence, they not only generate surplus value at the expense of less productive companies, but also drive up the average rate of profit.During an expansive wave, the average labor productivity in the technologically more advanced companies determines value.

At the beginning of an expansive long wave, the working class still suffers from the consequences of the previous era and is therefore not in a position to stop the decline in wages relative to profits at once. Real wages begin to rise in the subsequent period, but only very gradually — notably more slowly than productivity is increasing in “department II” (the production of articles of consumption). A greater rate of immigration also counteracts the increase in real wages.

For this reason, the surplus value rate may continue to grow for quite some time, despite the rise in real wages. Expansive waves typically contain business cycles with longer and more pronounced phases of boom and shorter and less pronounced crises, milder forms of which are perceived as “recessions.” During a stagnating-depressive wave, the opposite is true, although even during such long waves there are, of course, periods of economic boom.

Further aspects that Mandel adds to his explanation are long-term trends in competition between the leading capitalist nation states and fluctuations in gold production. The first two expansive long waves coincide with British hegemony, the third with the hegemony of the United States as the leading imperialist power.

In Mandel’s view, the significance of the hegemonic country’s power to manage global crises is obvious — therefore, the relative decline of US dominance makes it more difficult to counter a generalized crisis-like development. In general, drastic changes in the political balance of power in the world arena are important (noneconomic) factors that shape the general economic climate of the era.

The Golden Rule?

Mandel mentions that many economic historians have been “fascinated” by the thesis, based on the work of Gustav Cassel, that long waves are determined by the long-term fluctuations in gold production. However, he considers this thesis untenable from a Marxist point of view. Its flaw is that the average value of commodities, and therefore the general trend of prices, is not determined by the quantity of gold but by its value.

In the nineteenth century, factors of “chance,” such as the discovery of rich new gold fields, played an important role, since they radically pushed down the value of gold, thus helping to boost the rate of profit through general price rises. In the twentieth century, in contrast, gold mining itself became a capitalist industry, and therefore subject to the logic of capitalist production, since the discovery of South African gold mines.For Mandel, there is an interplay between technological revolutions, advances in science, and the internal logic of capitalist development.

For Mandel, there is an interplay between technological revolutions, advances in science, and the internal logic of capitalist development. He argues that it is a fundamental tendency of capitalism to transform scientific labor into a specific form of wage labor. This tendency has only been comprehensively realized in late capitalism.

It was preceded by two phases. In the first, the experimentation of craftsmen was the direct basis for most advances in manufacturing. In the second, the observations of engineers made this process more systematic. In this way, a synthesis of “abstract science” and “concrete technological inventions” appeared: “applied science.”

According to Mandel, the tendency to subsume scientific labor into the production process stems from capital’s “unrelenting thirst for more . . . surplus value” and is interconnected with the rhythmic movement of capital accumulation. Of course, there will be some investment in research in the course of a long wave with a stagnating-depressive undertone, but the main objective will be technological breakthroughs aimed at radical cost reductions.

Investment expenditure aimed at the massive introduction of new technologies into the production process generally begins about ten years after the beginning of an expansive long wave. While the basic correlation is clear, Mandel warns that we must not interpret it too mechanically. The same is true, according to him, for the correlation between a particular, fundamentally new technology and specific types of labor organization.

However, the following four machine systems broadly correspond to four different types of labor organization: craftworker-operated and craftworker-produced machines driven by the steam engine; machinist-operated and industrially produced machines driven by steam motors; assembly-line combined machines tended by semiskilled machine operators and driven by electric motors; continuous-flow production machines integrated into semiautomatic systems controlled by electronics.

The introduction of each of these successive radically different types of technology historically involved strong resistance from wage laborers. The reason for the introduction of new systems of labor organization was in each case an attempt by capital to break down growing obstacles to further increases in the rate of surplus value. The rhythmic long-term movement of capital accumulation is thus connected to capital’s greater or lesser push toward radical changes in labor organization.

This interest is less urgent for most of the duration of a long wave with expansionary undertone, where the need to reduce social tensions and mitigate the causes of resistance and rebellion predominates. Conversely, when an expansionist wave ends and a wave with stagnating-depressive undertone begins, capital’s interest in radical changes in labor organization will increase despite the risk of growing social tensions, which cannot be avoided anyway.

Long Waves and Class Struggle

Mandel also tried to establish a correlation with “class-struggle cycles,” i.e., with the ups and downs of working-class mobilization in defense of class interests, or indeed with the surging and declining intensity of struggles between labor and capital. Taylorism (assembly-line labor) and semiautomation (electronics) were each introduced for the first time, or experimentally, near the end of a long wave with an expansionist undertone, but were not generally applied until the subsequent long wave with a stagnant-depressive undertone.Major historical events and the outcomes of major historical conflicts cannot simply be deduced from the laws of capitalist movement.

According to Mandel, these findings confirm the following correlation with “long waves.” Initially, new technologies have an “innovative character” and push up the average rate of profit. Then, in the long periods during which the take the form of generalization, they push down and hold down the average rate of profit. Furthermore, any revolutionary innovation in labor organization grows out of attempts to break down working-class resistance to further increase the rate of surplus value, i.e., the rate of exploitation.

The first technological revolution was therefore also a response to the working-class struggle for a shorter workday. The second one was closely related to the resistance against stricter and more direct control by management over the work process. Finally, the third technological revolution was a response to the growth of trade union organization and the efforts of workers and their unions to weaken the power of control of management over conveyor belt production.

The interplay of “subjective factors” (the strength, confidence, and class consciousness of the proletariat) is decisive for the capacity of reversing a long-term trend in the rate of surplus value and therefore also in the rate of profit. Thus, the consequences of the class struggle of a whole historical period appear to Mandel as “exogenous factors” determining the turning points. This is the dialectic between objective and subjective factors, in which the latter are characterized by “relative autonomy.”

Mandel assumes a cycle of class struggle that is interwoven with “long waves,” although it does not simply run parallel with them. According to Mandel, major historical events and the outcomes of major historical conflicts cannot simply be deduced from the laws of capitalist movement. That would be crude “economism.” Nevertheless, major trends have objective economic roots.

This is an extract from Against Capitalism and Bureaucracy: Ernest Mandel’s Theoretical Contributions by Manuel Kellner, available in paperback this April from Haymarket Books.

Manuel Kellner is the author of Against Capitalism and Bureaucracy: Ernest Mandel’s Theoretical Contributions.